Posts by doublelayer

Hacking is not a crime – and the media should stop using 'hacker' as a pejorative

Re: Proofread?

In addition to that inconsistency, it might be better to post both sides together and maybe even have the two writers ask each other questions. That way, there would be an actual debate more than what we're doing here.

The big book of what "hacker" means

There have been far too many definitions of hack and hacker. Here's an inexhaustive list, just to show how completely pointless any effort to force a single meaning would be.

1. Someone who breaks into computer systems. "The criminal hacked the database and dumped the password hashes on the internet."

2. Someone who builds things ignoring the conventional way. As seen in the article.

3. Someone who builds things in a quick and ugly way. As seen in the comment I replied to.

4. Someone who builds things in any way. "We need some hackers to get this app idea off the ground."

5. Someone who tries to improve on the accepted way. "Here are some suggested hacks which can speed up your work."

6. Someone who enjoys playing with computer systems. "I hacked this locked-down firmware so it supports more modern networks."

7. Someone who enjoys building computer systems. "I hacked together a bunch of components I cannibalized from some stuff being thrown away and built this cool proof of concept."

8. Someone who doesn't enjoy playing with or building computer systems but does so anyway because people are willing to pay them to do it.

9. Someone who uses an axe or other sharp tool to damage or destroy a physical object. "I hacked through the wall because the door was too strong to break through."

10. Someone who cuts a large object into smaller pieces. "I hacked apart this big chunk of chocolate so I could more easily melt it."

11. Someone who does not put effort into their work. "The writer is clearly a hack who doesn't understand how to do consistent characterization."

It's a losing battle. If we want a nice sympathetic term for something in this list, we'd better find a new word and start using that.

Re: Too late

Sure, give can mean to provide something unwanted or the like, but it's also perfectly acceptable for the definition you've provided for gift. I give people presents which I hope will be useful and certainly don't charge for. So in that sense, give works just fine to describe the action. Not only that, but most of the times gift is used as a verb it is by something that doesn't necessarily meet your definition. I've seen it used in legal contracts for a thing which was given but wasn't requested or in marketing to describe a new offering which isn't free or permanent. So, as usage goes, they do look a little interchangeable. At least give is completely suitable as a drop-in replacement for gift when they're verbs.

Flagship Chinese chipmaker collapses before it makes a single chip or opens a factory

Re: More to this than meets the eye

Biological chemicals and chemicals used in semiconductor manufacturing are very different. I'll admit now that I know little about either, but it's not surprising that China, which has a large pharmaceutical industry, has a better supply chain for biological chemicals than they do for those needed for semiconductors, since they don't have such a thriving industry in that. Japan and the U.S. both do have a long history of making semiconductors, and the other countries that make a lot of them are Taiwan and South Korea who both have pretty good relations with those countries.

Re: @Ken Hagan - More to this than meets the eye

The problem remains. What, exactly, was or is the terrible thing the west has to deal with because Russian programmers are good? The hacking? No, that can't be it. Any country that puts a lot of effort into getting hacking capabilities can get there. North Korea has had almost no history of computer education and used to have really bad malware, but they're now quite good at it because they invested. Maybe Russia is so good at coding that they'll dominate us economically. They don't. What's the terrible consequence hanging over us?

The only result of this vaunted Russian efficiency that I can see is that there are Russian programmers who are good at their jobs, whether in Russia or out of it. I know several Russian programmers who are usually pretty good, but I also know programmers who are pretty good and came from countries on all inhabited continents. Also, there are some programs written by Russians which are nice. Nginx and 7zip come immediately to mind, and there are certainly more. That's if anything a benefit to us given how probably a bunch of us use those. As an argument, it doesn't make much of a point in support of anything else.

Re: Are you shilling for the Communist Party of China?

This is mostly incorrect.

"China does not "hold US Debt". Rather it has a lot of US Dollars in interest-bearing accounts in the United States, called "Treasuries"."

Treasuries are bonds issued by the U.S. government, specifically the federal reserve, in order to borrow money to pay for government spending. That is otherwise known as debt. Also, it's not U.S. accounts, it's accounts anywhere, mostly China, holding U.S.-issued bonds.

"The only thing it can do with that money is spend it in the United States."

That's wrong on a few levels. First, it's not money in there, it's bonds. Eventually, the bonds mature and they have money they need to reinvest, but the accounts concerned contain bonds that haven't matured. So they can't spend it because it's not money. What they can do is sell them.

"If it decides to withdraw that money from those accounts, then it would have a lot of USD sitting in NON-interest bearing accounts, and why would it do that?"

As stated, it would "withdraw money" by selling the bonds it currently has and also stop buying new ones. It doesn't do that now because U.S. bonds are generally seen as safe and it wants money more than it wants to annoy the U.S. If it did, the bonds would sell at their face value at least, meaning that China would get the interest they already earned and also push up the supply of U.S. debt on the market. Supply goes up, the price goes down, so now the U.S. has to pay a higher interest rate on new debt they issue. That might not be a problem if other countries and investors see U.S. debt as still safe, but if they don't, then it could be a bigger problem. Investors do that all the time. They decide they want to invest in something that will pay better than their bonds, so they sell their bonds. China might even do that without wanting to hurt the U.S. if they decide there's a better place to invest the money.

"As economist Warren Mosler put it, 'All we owe China is a bank statement.'"

And he's correct, but it's not the kind of bank statement which can be erased quickly if the U.S. decides to delete China's money. It's not a killswitch on the American economy, but it is something they can manipulate for leverage if they want to.

"The US Federal Government never borrows money. It doesn't need to."

They don't need to, but they do borrow. They have the systems to make as much money out of thin air as they want, but they don't use them to simply increase their account balance when they want to spend more money than they have. They issue bonds, paying interest to people who lend them money now, in order not to print as much new money. I don't understand how you're missing the point that, when they accept money now and promise to return it with interest later, they're borrowing money.

That's a bit harsh: Lenovo adds 2 new toughened boxen to ThinkEdge edge computing line

It's between those views. It's not the way we've been doing things for the past 50 years because 50 years ago was 1971 where everything happened in the data center. But it is what we've done for a lot of the past two decades and a lot of the article's text is weird.

"Edge computing is a paradigm that sees complex computational tasks [...] performed as close to the “user” as possible."

Nothing wrong there. The most complex tasks have long been done at the data center. Searching a big database or things like that usually happened there. What are the things they're discussing?

"like data analysis or cloud gaming"

This though is a little funny. Data analysis can be done in a DC if it's intense enough, but it's not unusual to perform the analysis on a typical computer. Cloud gaming, while done on cloud machines now, is what happened after gaming on user's computers because the cloud couldn't handle things fast enough to return the frames to the user before they became obsolete. That is nothing new.

If we want something even funnier, check this:

"The 5G network spec has been touted as a major driver behind this, particularly in the spaces of industrial and agricultural IoT, thanks to its lower latencies when compared to previous generation mobile standards."

This is so far off the mark. 5G is faster, meaning there is less time (assuming you have 5G and it's working) to get your data from the collection point to the server. That means the latency problem of waiting for the cloud is lowered. 5G is actually reducing the likelihood of edge computing since it doesn't take as long to wait. Edge computing is useful when you don't want to wait, so you collect the data here and process it here too.

Since the 90s, we've had the ability to take a computer out to places where data was collected. Not only that, but through much of that time, the ability to send that data from the point of collection to a larger computer was a weak point. Mobile connections were not as widespread and much slower. So a lot of the use cases for that collection either waited a long time for slow uploads to a data center or processed the data locally. Only as networks improved did we start doing more of that on remote servers. Edge is not a new concept. It's a new name for "the computer is in the collector box".

President Biden weighs in on Amazon unionization efforts, warns giant to steer clear of threats, coercion

Re: Ah, Amazon

And I don't really have a problem with using machines to improve the efficiency of something, even if it means there aren't people working there anymore. If that's all they wanted to do, I could be right behind them. It's when they treat people like they would machines, without regard to their humanity, that I have a problem.

UK government may force online retailers to pick up e-waste from consumers

Re: A lot of kit is "designed" to be thrown away

You've still got it wrong. The points other than 2 are not about how much the mineral costs. It is about how much we pay for others to sell that to us. Point 1, for example, is the tax we pay to bury this stuff, even if it's not ours. It's not built into the price of the product. The manufacturer didn't pay it. The purchaser didn't even pay it. You and I pay it. Point 3 is an environmental point, just like point 2. We're mining rare earths somewhere, for example. That somewhere is China and it's not pretty. You can get rare earths from a few other places with better conditions, but most of them are coming from China and lead to terrible pollution there which can leak into oceans and become even worse. It doesn't change the price of that mineral. Your rebuttal was "If the mineral is expensive enough then recycling is already economically viable so it doesn't need to be buried", but the price they are paying is less only because they're pushing all those external costs on us. If we include those, the price difference would be very different, but we can't easily just make them pay more to mine it in China unless we change the laws in China. I don't live in China let alone control their ruling party so that's going to be a nonstarter. These things are important costs and you don't see them in the price of random things. You can make laws so the prices are more obvious if you need to, but that just delays the process of doing anything for a few years. It doesn't change the relevance of those additional factors.

Re: A lot of kit is "designed" to be thrown away

You remember your Smith, don't you? How about you also remember your Sidgwick and Pigou? Know what they did?

What they did and you're not taking into account is the concept of externalities. In the field of waste recycling, there are several negative externalities. They include the following:

1. Disposal by burial is expensive. We usually end up paying for a lot of it from our taxes, even if we're not the ones burying stuff there. That's just the financial cost. There are others. Let's see them.

2. Burial means there is potentially dangerous stuff in our ground which causes risks to groundwater, which means a more expensive effort needed to protect that, and limits how else we can use the land. Not everything can be done on top of garbage. Now we have less land available for other uses.

3. If we have a demand for a certain amount of the mineral and we're not getting any from recycling, then we're going to mine that amount. We now add all the externalities related to that mining. Some of these minerals are not easy to mine or are mined in countries without environmental regulations which don't bother keeping pollutants in check. That's a large one in itself and there are others we won't list here because we have to stop sometime.

4. Costs of shipping this stuff. You're likely using lithium mined in South America. It's shipped from there to China, made into batteries, and shipped to wherever you are. By recycling lithium in China, you can cut off the South America round trip. If places near you make batteries, you can cut out both trips. If you recycle near you and ship to China, you can ship a lot more lithium since you're not shipping the other stuff, meaning a more efficient ship. That means several things. You pay less for batteries because the shipping is cheaper, and there is less shipping and thus less emitions from those. More externalities reduced.

This is real economics. The invisible hand is fine and all but Smith didn't say that you can do anything you like and it would fix everything. He was quite clear that it did not and that there would be inefficiencies that could not be resolved with market forces alone. He was right.

Rookie's code couldn't have been so terrible that it made a supermarket spontaneously combust... right?

Re: "almost an hour into the grilling"

They certainly did. It's not unreasonable for them to ask the coder about changes that might have taken down the server, but they definitely needed to call the store if only to get someone to restart the server. With it offline either due to the code crashing it or something else, it wasn't doing anything useful. The first step should have been to call the store, reboot the server, and roll back the software running on it. Then they could determine whether the code was at fault or not, although in this situation they would have found their problem at "call the store".

Re: Just imagine if...

"I think someone else would just look over the program code even before the second attempt..."

What's the point of that? In reality, the chances of code starting a building on fire are next to nil. Code running an industrial machine, sure. Code running on a power management device, maybe. Code running on a server, no. Even if the server was the initiating factor, it's not due to the code on it. More likely due to the hardware and the stuff next to the hardware which could carry on the fire. Also, for a store to burn down, it's incredibly unlikely to have started in a room that's probably relatively isolated from the rest of the building. In a situation like that, ruthlessly searching code to see if it's the culprit is like checking every vegetable supplier to see if any of them supplied a different type of vegetable which might have explosive properties, A complete waste of time.

Zuck chucks Myanmar military out of Facebook and Instagram

Re: Woah there

From a morality discussion, you could argue that every person and company has an obligation not to be instrumental in crimes against others. Facebook clearly doesn't care about that, but you could argue it. Still, none of the comments above are talking about Facebook because they owe us something. Most complaints are simpler. Facebook said they cared about something and then completely failed to do anything about it until it was too late, then jumped to close the stable door when it didn't matter at all. The comments are pointing out hypocrisy.

By the way, we can make Facebook owe us something. In democracies, we set the laws. If we want to make it that companies must take responsibility for actions, we can make that legally binding. We have done that with several types of actions a company could do. So, when you say that no company owes anyone something, it's also incorrect. For example, Facebook owes people privacy as long as they live in GDPR-using countries. They're not living up to that requirement, but it is a requirement.

Re: Big Tech, Big Ego

Don't count on that. We have decentralized communication. It's called the internet. A lot of the users don't use it as a decentralized system and post all their data on a few large nodes while all the decentralized stuff gets used by smaller groups. Expecting people to suddenly recognize the dangers and start spinning up decentralized systems is optimistic to the point of delusion. A lot of the public still don't understand why Facebook tracking is a problem.

As for blockchain, not a chance. Nobody wants a blockchain public forum taking the place of a Facebook-scale thing. Massive storage of everyone's data, massive efforts to mine it for useful personal data, no protection of modifications because few are going to host the blockchain and nobody's going to verify it, people juggling keys to keep access to their accounts. Not happening. It'd be like Facebook but worse for privacy (if that's possible) and much less workable.

Apple, forced to rate product repair potential in France, gives itself modest marks

"Ifixit seem to think it is their right to get Apple service manuals for free, I'm not sure that's how copyright works (the market seems to get these by stealing copies from Apple)."

If Apple has a program where it sells copies of the repair manual to anyone who wants to repair, then we can talk. If that happened, most of the talk would be me saying they should give them away with a purchase, but you'd actually have a counterargument. They don't do that. They rope them into a complex contract where they need to take lots of steps to be Apple-certified repair people who only buy parts directly from Apple and who can be cut off at any time if they displease them.

"Also, I saw they were complaining about not being able to buy spare fingerprint sensors. But given that fingerprint sensors are presumably protected/encrypted"

But they're not. The secure enclave behind them runs that. The sensor is a dumb input device. Now of course you could have a nefarious one, but you could have a nefarious version of most components. You could theoretically have a screen that logs every image displayed and tap, thus becoming a keylogger. You don't have that in reality because it's hard to build and not very useful to an attacker, but you could. That's not a good reason to hide the parts away. The main reason is exactly what you say next.

"I do not expect this to extend to battery/cable/displays, especially when many YouTubers are showing 2-minute cable fixes for common faults that Apple stores want £1000-1500 to fix."

And yet it does extend to those things. Because Apple doesn't mind the high prices and doesn't want you doing quick fixes. For things that look secure, they'll use a security argument even if, as I pointed out, it doesn't apply. For things that don't look secure, they'll use a safety argument, like "If you put these non-Apple batteries in, they might explode. Sure, they probably won't, but it's possible". For things that don't really have convincing security or safety arguments, they'll not justify their actions but just try to prevent it working by engineering them to fail.

Apple's latest macOS Big Sur update stops cheapo USB-C hubs bricking your machine

Re: We’ve come a long way from the old USB hubs...

And likely it's the cheap chargers that are doing it wrong. I just want to know how. Lots of cheap chargers could be built so wrong that they're going to catch fire or overpower the device at the other end, but if it can be fixed in software, that can't be it. They could refuse to get power from anything untrusted, but that wouldn't help if the device is already sending too much power when it was asked. The intersection of sends the wrong power and complies when asked not to is probably quite small.

Re: We’ve come a long way from the old USB hubs...

That is an excellent point. There are any number of terrible power devices out there, but all the typical ways you could mess up a USB PD system should result in nothing happening or a fried component on the board. If, for example, it didn't properly recognize what voltage to use, it could stay low and not charge it or theoretically supply too much and break something. If Apple can make it work in software, one has to wonder what exactly the supplies in question were doing. It can't have been destructive to the hardware since it will work now, so why did it ever make the computer brick itself?

Ever felt that a few big tech companies are following you around the internet? That's because ... they are

That's not how that works.

"If you use any cloud provider, all that is needed to push you out of business is for that provider to cancel you as a customer."

If you are afraid they will do that, then you can take steps to insulate yourself from it. Have two cloud accounts which are redundant. If one cloud closes your account, the other one can take the traffic. If you're afraid that multiple cloud providers will simultaneously reject you, maybe you should be hosting yourself but you can have some self-hosting while still using the cloud so you have stuff to fall back on if they deny you service.

"Just like Amazon did to Parler. And apparently there is no law that prevents them to do it any time they want."

Correct, there is no law saying people can break the terms of service and the company has to keep giving them the service. Good idea to read those before you start using a service since they are binding on you.

Re: Not quite true

"You can have your site hosted on Azure, sure. You'll probably be using your own domain name as well, so nothing need be loaded from any Microsoft domain, certainly not any other than the azure domain(s)."

First, I'm not sure whether they also check IP addresses to block anything coming from MS or AWS subnets. Let's assume they don't. There are many reasons one might have an Azure or AWS domain in their HTML. Here's one reason: they're using the CDN functions. I've seen lots of sites which host themselves on local hardware or a smaller cloud provider but use AWS to host big files. Their site will be loaded from elsewhere, but when people click the download link, it will go to s3.amazonaws.com. Now there is an Amazon-controlled link in the source, so the site gets flagged.

The site could of course specify a CNAME so their domain is seen in the source, but the plugin should be checking where that resolves because trackers do the same as reported yesterday. Once again, Amazon's pulling the strings. Except they're not. They're just providing servers to store the big files. Someone from Amazon could point this out. Someone from Google will point out that people use YouTube as essentially the same thing for videos they've made so they don't have to write a video player or host the big file. They will show what happens when their sites are removed, namely that the page with download links looks the same and the page with a video looks the same except for the video box. Those arguments could convince people that the plugin's report on trackers or control is simply a lie, and thereby destroy its purpose.

Not really. A lot of sites don't use those providers, and some others use multiple providers. It's true that the big three are quite large, but if they all went down simultaneously, which is unlikely, there'd still be a lot of stuff online. In order to take down large chunks of the internet, you need to take down cloud providers, at least AWS and Azure, but you also need to take CDNs like Cloudflare and Akamai out of the equation. Even without those, lots of large institutions host their own services and small cloud providers would still run. My website, for example, would be fine. So would El Reg once they routed around the downed Cloudflare.

The structure of the internet is indeed fragile, but not in the way you think. It's not fragile in the sense that one big hit will take it down. One big hit will cause some grumbling while people repair the damage, but a lot of things will work fine. It's fragile because each individual part of it can be disrupted with some ease. Still, while things are strong, those breaks will be repaired, undoing your destructive work.

Re: vulnerable? Who, us?

It would be really hard to interrupt the routing to all four. Each has a bunch of places where they can reroute traffic, so you can't attack a physical place to interrupt their service. Meanwhile, if you tried something like a BGP hijack, you'd have trouble getting all the networks to go through you and those which did would quickly realize their mistake when everything breaks. Also, if you did interrupt service, a lot of the world would be annoyed but many things wouldn't break. Take El Reg. There are Google and Facebook URLs in their pages, so they'd get blocked by this plugin. However, if Google and Facebook go down, their site still works. It's not hosted on AWS or Azure either, so you could cut all four and the only thing that would change is that there wouldn't be so many ads and the Facebook share button would go away. I've emulated that on my network on purpose anyway.

1Password has none, KeePass has none... So why are there seven embedded trackers in the LastPass Android app?

Re: Just justified the reason to leave.

If you're in the EU, report them to the local data protection authority before you leave. This pressure could do something about that.

'We're finding bugs way faster than we can fix them': Google sponsors 2 full-time devs to improve Linux security

Re: They don't trust the binaries so they compile themselves

Probably. Once they have a large enough project, it becomes very important that they can rebuild it even if something external goes down. If the compiler breaks something (there are projects which only work with very specific versions of certain compilers), they'll need to have a copy of that compiler which they can use again. The easiest way to have that is to have a copy of the source at all the versions they use and the ability to compile them. Doing otherwise on critical projects can lead to wasted time.

Re: 2 engineers?

That's not it. They pay $100000 in donations annually, but now they're also subsidizing the work of these people. Still less than a platinum membership, but more than they used to be doing. Still, I have to wonder if that's all Linux is worth to them. Amazon is perhaps the most galling; they run a bunch of Linux servers for their cloud which earns them a bunch of money and on which their store runs, and they're only silver members?

'Meritless': Exam software maker under fire for suing teacher who tweeted links to biz's unlisted YouTube vids

There are some cases where the student shouldn't have a bunch of notes or external access, but usually the downside of having them can be mitigated by a time limit or a keen grader. For example, having a student in programming copy answers off Stack Overflow would be a problem, and similarly making sure an interviewee isn't going to take that approach can be important. There are also jobs where someone really needs the ability to memorize information and use it without access to reference materials, either because those materials aren't available or because there isn't sufficient time. Barring those, however, most tests don't really need to be that restricted.

I'm sure that's what they say, just like the police facial recognition systems probably say the same, but they'll be used in the same way. This program says the activity is suspicious and at best someone will look at the video and go "Hey. They did move their gaze. How should I know if they're looking at the window or at a screen behind this one. I'll trust it." and the student will get questioned or disciplined. I can see lots of possible eye movements during a test, from a bored student looking at the wall while thinking to someone unsure of an answer having involuntary reactions to their anxiety about their answer. Whatever the documentation may say, I think it's so unreliable as to be unacceptable to use it.

The bank of Bitcoin: MicroStrategy's share price rides high on the back of cryptocurrency investment

Re: Taxes

"at minimum they can seize your wallet even if they can't open it."

No, they can't do that. Either they get the private key from you, in which case they can open it and transfer all of it away, or they don't, in which case they can't do much. If they can't get you to divulge the private key, then you still maintain control and can exchange the Bitcoin with someone else. Whether you can find someone else that wants to transact without turning you in may be another problem, but the government isn't seizing anything in that scenario. In the case where they seized Bitcoin from corrupt officials, they arrested them and indicated that their sentences would be a lot longer if they didn't give up the ill-gotten crypto.

Re: Investment? Speculation!

Bitcoin = A mathematical construct which can't really be used as currency very often because it takes a long time and a large fee to spend any of it and is deflationary so people often choose not to. And also it takes some technical knowledge to use properly or trusting a company to hold all your resources to use dangerously, so few people go to the effort.

Dollar (or Pound) = an imaginary made-up currency which is used by a bunch of real people to make real transactions, is held by people and financial entities in large amounts so it's not that easy to devalue quickly, and is easily converted into goods, other currencies, or other commodities.

Unlike some here, I want to see a cryptocurrency that can be used as currency and think it's possible to create one. However, Bitcoin has failed in all the necessary steps to be that. It is not feasible to transact in it. It's hideously inefficient. It does not offer the kind of privacy that is necessary. It's just a random commodity for people to gamble on now, the dreams of enthusiasts broken.

Alexa, swap out this code that Amazon approved for malware... Installed Skills can double-cross their users

Re: Talk to a computer? why would I do that?

It can be a little handy depending on how its done. For example, I use the voice interface on my phone on occasion, almost always to do one of three things. Those are faster to do by voice than by touch. Compare these:

Set a timer:

By voice: Press button, hear tone, say "Set a timer for 25 minutes", done.

By touch: Retrieve phone, type unlock pin, find the clock app, select the timer page, spin the little dial to select 25 minutes, press start, lock phone, done.

Call a contact:

By voice: Press button, hear tone, say "Call name", hold phone to ear.

By touch: Retrieve phone, type unlock pin, find the phone app, press the contacts button, scroll to find the person, press the call button, put phone to ear.

A lot of other things though don't get the speed advantage, and are only useful when you can't use the touch or visual interfaces. A well-done car voice interface would be useful, but I've not seen one. The best cars at least let you use the, usually much better, phone voice interfaces rather than make you use theirs.

Microsoft unveils swappable SSDs for Surface Pro 7+ but 'strongly discourages' users from upping their capacity

I agree that it's not fraud, but most of your suggested reasons for the statement are invalid.

"Messing about with your primary SSD can be a recipe for disaster, reinstalling can be a 'bit of a pain', all they're saying is 'good luck with that... we won't support you if you do'"

This is a replacement, and the machine is designed for business customers who are almost certainly applying an image to any device. Reinstalling is what these people do all the time. What do they think people buying the disks are doing with them? They're reinstalling Windows onto the new disk to replace the one which failed or got destroyed. They support that, but they'll not support someone doing the same thing with one of different size?

"I once thought I'd been right clever migrating Windows 10 to a larger SSD, converting to UEFI boot from an old style bios boot."

Yes, that's dangerous and tricky on basically any OS. Just because you can make your software break isn't sufficient reason for them to change their support system. After all, I can break Windows in a variety of ways but none of that would cancel my warranty with the hardware manufacturer.

"Misalign your partition accidentally on resize/move, or go to a device with a different logical block size and you'll get 'reduced performance'."

Then reinstall and move the files over. It's what everyone is going to do anyway. They could even say "Don't migrate. You don't know what you're doing and you'll just make a mess".

"Go to a bigger capacity but SATA bridged M.2 will give you 'reduced performance'. (Assuming here they have full speed M.2 in?)"

I don't know, but whatever interface they're using for their 128 GB drive is the same one they're using for their 256 GB drive. They go in the same machines and have the same reported speeds. Thus that's not going to intrinsically change the speed. Only if they've built the firmware in such a way that it can't handle other sizes will speed change. If they've done it, it's either malicious tampering to break upgrades or really lazy.

Re: Strongly discouraged

They might discourage you from buying a larger one in the hopes that you instead buy a new Surface with a larger disk. Or to make you concerned about getting a third-party one when they eventually become available. They could be hoping that people think "You can't even replace the disk with one of a different size. No way this one from another manufacturer will work." and then you'd buy from them. I don't think it will really help much, but they could be thinking that.

Your PlayStation comparison is possible, but I doubt it. Before I say too much and look stupid, I am not a gamer and know relatively little about the device, but I read this description of the SSD. Based on that, it looks like they've designed a drive for really fast reads so they can load large game data quickly. That's not the kind of drive you find in a tablet-laptop. Among other things, it looks like the fast speeds from Sony's drive come with a higher power requirement, which isn't ideal in a battery-powered device. Even if MS does have unusually fast drives, Windows can run on spinning drives today, so it clearly doesn't need it. They probably would be more successful at selling these replacement drives if they said "Other drives will work, but these ones are really fast so you'll like them better". I don't think that's the case.

Re: Windows and Storage space

I can't speak for the HP Stream, and you seem to have had success with it. The one I saw ran an old Atom part and really did not want to boot to external media. It had a micro SD card slot, but wouldn't see that in UEFI. It had a USB port connected via a dock, and wouldn't see that either. The only external port it would see was an OTG micro USB port. Even then, it wouldn't work well if you tried to boot off a drive connected to that. The internet told me it needed a custom 32-bit firmware patch, although the processor was supposedly X64-capable, but I tried repeatedly to put that patch on a Linux disk with no luck. I had some success deleting everything off the internal disk, performing a Windows reset, updating, reset again, and then it was updated again, but there's no way I was doing that multiple times.

Re: Strongly discouraged

My guess is one of these happened:

Option 1:

Manager: Let's prevent people upgrading their drives so they have to buy a new product when they run out.

Engineer: That sounds fun. I can think of several ingenious ways to make them break weirdly by messing with the firmware.

Option 2:

Manager 1: Let's prevent people upgrading their drives so they have to buy a new product when they run out.

Manager 2: Good idea, but having an engineer mess with the firmware would be expensive. Let's just say things that make it sound like we did.

Manager 1: What if people try and it works fine?

Manager 2: The paranoia of expecting that an engineer will have messed with the firmware so it will break later will get to them soon enough.

I'd also like to know whether these are any different from normal hardware. The article notes that the ones for the Surface Pro X are a little different, but doesn't comment on these, perhaps because IFixit hasn't gotten any of them yet. I really hope they haven't taken a standard part and forced it into a slightly different package just to lock people in.

What's CNAME of your game? This DNS-based tracking defies your browser privacy defenses

I didn't vote either way, and this is supposition, but I'm wondering if the downvotes are because people sometimes treat NoScript like a perfect firewall. It's not. It can help, but if people think they can just install it and everything will be fine, they're wrong several times. It helps in the case of running JS from a site like this, but most of the time, a site will just pull in a script from the source in the HTML. So in the case of this attack, it's not all that likely to produce different results on a site using this and a site using classic attacks. Therefore, though it's useful, it isn't really a good solution for the problem as described. Maybe some are expressing that view in their votes.

SpaceX small print on Starlink insists no Earth government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities

Re: Remember...

"I'm sure there are nation states that would be happy to give access to their airspace if the USA don't want to play."

There are, but how happy will they be taking the risks? If the big and experienced countries agree not to help a random company, the random company has to choose among the small countries with no history of supporting a launch. They can't choose a country so small that their rocket will end up in a neighbor's airspace unless they can get support from multiple countries, so now they have to choose a large country or one next to the ocean in the direction of their launch. Then they'll need to build the launch system which the country doesn't have, and the country probably isn't paying for that. Even then, the country is taking the risk of rocket explosions or similar happening overhead, and do they really think a company which has officially disclaimed their responsibilities to the treaty is going to honor the environmental regulations for the cleanup process? Also, if the big countries care enough about not letting the launch happen, they can provide some incentive to the selected country not to provide the assistance and make the company bounce around wasting their time and money trying to find new places to launch.

Re: It's all about the forces involved

That heavily depends on the desires of other countries to mess with the situation. If say, someone in the U.S. establishes a colony somewhere and refuses to obey the treaty, and the U.S. wants to defend the treaty, all they have to do is prevent any supply launches until things change. Companies trying to launch from elsewhere will have trouble getting access to the launch capacity since existing launches would be going somewhere else and it's not easy to get emergency access to a launch facility with your own rocket. Only if existing governments wanted to provide that emergency access in order to annoy the U.S. would that change.

Once there is a lot more development where the colony is, that situation will be different. At that point though, there will be authority of some sort established there.

Re: Remember 1776 ......

I think the analogy still stands. Spacex is a shipwright. Current governments are like the colonizers. Neither has a right to decide unilaterally what the law for those who live there should be. If one has more right, it is the governments because that's where the people are now. Spacex though ... it just builds ships. It should stop trying to assume authority it doesn't deserve.

Re: Remember 1776 ......

They built it here on Earth, where they have a legal requirement to put on the radiation warning marks. I'm sure some chips inside it still have serial numbers that are readable too, but they didn't keep those for people exploring Mars in decades to come.

"How do you distinguish that situation from the Australian satellite bumping into the French one?"

Which one moved last? If the Australian satellite is on a steady course, then the French operators knew it was there. There are big databases of where satellites and other orbiting objects are to prevent exactly that. If the French satellite launches into the orbit of the Australian satellite and they therefore collide, it's the fault of the operators of the French satellite. Those operators are under France's jurisdiction and come under any French and EU space regulations.

Re: Remember 1776 ......

"After all a relatively small handful of frontiersmen (people for the PC) beat (or at least drew with) one of the foremost military powers."

No, that's not what happened. For starters, it was more than a handful. About 250000 American troops served during the course of the war, with 60000-90000 at once. That's small by modern wars, but not very small. Especially as they did not beat the British. They drove the British away, but they didn't conquer Britain or cause it to collapse. They couldn't even take Canada from them despite trying. The reason for their win was that they had resources where the British by and large lacked them. The Americans could operate using local troops and resources, whereas the British had to ferry all their troops over the Atlantic and buy or take resources from Americans who already had them. And let's not forget that French assistance was required to complete the victory.

In comparison, a Mars trip has all of these reversed. If countries on Earth wish to impose their will on Martian societies, they won't have to do it by sending troops over. The easiest way is to stop sending stuff over. It's much easier for someone on their own to survive on Earth than on Mars, and stuff breaks.

But let's say this is correct. How does it change how a Martian constitution should work? I find the concept annoying not because I think Mars shouldn't have one, but I think that, if they're going to have one, it should be written by people who established a society and wish to remain on Mars. Not by some random company which builds vehicles. It's like saying that the U.S. Constitution should have been written by shipwrights in Europe who would eventually bring people over, for the moment ignoring the native population of the Americas because everyone at the time did. They have no right to assert sovereignty.

SD card slot, HDMI port could return to the MacBook Pro this year, says Apple analyst

"USB-A may be nice to have a single port for whatever, but really it's time things moved to USB-C. USB-C to A adapters cost next to nothing. For those legacy devices, you can buy one for each device and leave it permanently attached."

Perhaps, but most devices, including those sold nowadays, still use USB-A. I needed some flash drives recently. I bought USB-A ones. There were some USB-C only ones, which weren't going to work on anything older, and some with an A on one end and C on the other which were about five times as expensive. The same is going to be true of virtually every USB peripheral. Those that stay in one place can have dongles attached to them, but for a flash drive, the dongle will make the thing a lot longer and more prone to damage. Also, you just know it's the thing you will lose right before you need it.

I have no objection to USB-C as the universal client port that we should put on every device using USB to charge or receive data. I don't really mind if we eventually get USB-C as the universal host port, although we're going to have to find some way of indicating which direction we want the power and connection to go. Until we actually get that though, we're going to need USB-A ports, and more than one.

Microsoft sides with media groups, together they urge Europe to follow Australia's lead, make Google, Facebook pay for news article links

Re: missing the point?

These are perfectly good concerns. The problem as I see it is that these laws aren't likely to help with that. Just because Google gives some money to some publishers in order to link to their content doesn't mean those publishers are going to do good things with it. Also, they're likely to only make such connections with the very big news organizations. Smaller journalists won't get paid, but could still file complaints, and Google will probably deal with that by deprioritizing them in search results.

We need to identify what the true problem is and take steps which directly fixes the problem.

If the problem is overquoting which means people don't click through, fine. We can solve that problem. Quoting of more than one sentence is now a copyright violation. You can link, but the only text you can show is a headline or one sentence of the content. That should fix the quoting problem. If quoting is not the problem, then what is? Because the law as it exists now doesn't restrict quoting. In fact, it either allows tech companies to continue quoting for a token payment or restricts everything, from linking to quoting, if there's no payment. That's fragile at best, but more likely completely ineffective.

Re: "... pay publishers for linking to news content on their platforms"

They already complied with the law by not showing any news, but that got the Australian government very angry. How dare they decide not to do the thing that the law was created to prevent them from doing? It seems as if the point of these laws is to take money from tech and give it to publishers, not to fix tech's abuses. I'm not even sure they can really explain what those abuses are, although they clearly exist. The way the law is formulated seems tailor-made not to actually change anything.

Facebook and Apple are toying with us, and it's scarcely believable

Re: Point

"Bitcoin is a great example. Government & banks have been trying to kill it for over a decade."

Not really. Some governments don't like it because criminals use it, but few have tried to make it illegal and none have really taken efforts to prevent its use. An actual cryptocurrency would likely get the ire of banks, but Bitcoin isn't good for exchanging value or storing it. As a investment to speculate on, banks hold a lot of it.

"It simply cannot be killed. There is no plug to pull, no company to fine/break up/shut down."

If they wanted to, they could do a lot. They know where mining happens. They know where exchanges are. They could act to disrupt it in such a way that it collapses in on itself. They don't because that's expensive for basically no purpose. Why spend millions destroying something unless you really hate it? They don't as stated above, so they don't try to kill it.

Re: Uh huh

That is not in itself a rebuttal to that argument. Samsung has said they will update for four years. First, we will need to see that. They have failed to update for very long before, and we haven't actually seen them do what they've said. Meanwhile, Apple does continue updating, we have seen it, and for longer than four years. The comparison between the two indicates Apple to be better at long-term support. It is easier for them perhaps, but still, the comparison will get made and the facts point one way for now.

I think I made myself quite clear. I agree with you on the first point, with the reservation that people often buy iPhones to run third-party apps. I disagree with you on the second point, and think the article is broadly correct when it claims that developers can't sell their apps outside the App Store. Despite some theoretical workarounds, it remains infeasible. I notice your second reply focuses only on the point on which we partially agree.

My point in arguing this is to illustrate that your defense of Apple is ill-founded. Despite your comments, the article did attack Apple on the basis of their monopoly of distribution. The statement about not being able to sell "anything" without going through the App Store is just such an attack. Your defense of it as inaccurate is in my mind incorrect. Not that there aren't arguments in favor of such a monopoly, but I don't think that is a good one.

I'll grant the first inaccurate statement is worth some consideration, but only some. A smartphone which can run apps is most frequently used by people who will install at least some apps on it above those default Apple ones. But it's true, an iPhone with no account set up can still do various PDA-style tasks, and that may be enough for some.

The second one though... No, I can't really accept that as a reason the App Store isn't a monopoly over distribution. In order to sideload a file like that, you need to find an ID number which isn't easy to find (there are a bunch of numbers in the about section and that one is not there), send it to a developer who has to provide a custom version specifically keyed to your device, and accept the risk that the developer will suddenly stop doing that when Apple sends the strongly worded email about not adhering to the store terms. When compared to Android (settings, security, allow apps from unknown sources, open the APK), it's a very different experience.

Neither statement is correct if you're pedantic, but it's clear what was meant. Are you contesting these points because you actually think that technicality changes the situation, or just to point out the inaccuracies of language?

"With Apple, you can't use an iPhone if you don't use the App Store,": Well, you can use it as a phone with a mail client and browser, but if you want any of the apps that it is perfectly capable of running, you'll need to use the App Store.

"and you don't get to sell anything to iPhone users if you don't go through the App Store.": You can sell them lunch, so technically not true. If you want to sell them software that runs on their devices, which is what's relevant, then you do have to go through the App Store.

Before someone brings up jailbreaking, A) Apple forbids jailbreaking in their terms of service, making it a grey area although recent laws have made it clearer, B) in order to patch security holes, Apple frequently prevents jailbreaking from happening, and C) only a very small subset of Apple's users even knows you can jailbreak let alone how.

Huawei loses attempt to rescue CFO Meng from US clutches despite using 140-year-old law in High Court

Re: Allegation

That's not as unusual as you describe it. As a parallel, consider how GDPR works. EU member states enacted GDPR, which operates on any company that operates in the EU, whether that's based in the EU or not. If they don't want to obey that law, they have the freedom not to operate there. If they do, they come under the regulation and can be fined on global turnover. The same logic applies here. HSBC uses U.S. money from U.S. clients. That means the U.S. can require them to follow U.S. law.

Australian government fights Facebook news ban by threatening 0.01% of Zuck's ad revenue

Re: Just goes to show how out of touch our politicians are

"But it is not as simple as that if they forbid indexing it is for everyone not just Facebook (or Google). It is not possible to forbid indexing to Facebook without it being forbidden to others, that means every other search engine."

Actually, that's not correct. Robots.txt supports requesting no indexing patterns affecting specific user agents and specific paths. It would be entirely possible to do this:

UserAgent: Googlebot

Disallow: /news

UserAgent: Facebookbot

Disallow: /news

UserAgent: Duckduckgobot

Allow: /

You'd have to do a bit of searching to find the relevant user agents, but if Google and Facebook respect robots.txt, you can set it up to ignore just them. If it's individual people choosing to post the links, you have a larger problem, but if you can get your outcome by blocking bots, then you can have finer control of it.