Posts by doublelayer

The Novell NetWare box keeps rebooting over and over again yet no one has touched it? We're going on a stakeout

Re: Not a high bar.

I'm sure Dan knows that. Haven't all of us at some time worked for someone who isn't known for their IT prowess, doing IT? I have (note to employer, I'm not doing so now). All we can do in that situation is try not to make the reputation of the IT prowess worse; dreaming of improving it is often a wasted effort. Still, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's our fault. Put the wrong person in charge, have them ignore the people below, and you can take skilled techs and still make a mess.

Backers of Planet Computers' Astro Slide 5G phone furious after shock specs downgrade

Re: "Anyone wanna buy this bridge?"

To some extent, it comes from a desire for a product that nobody else makes and trust in a company that has successfully accomplished a product release before. In this case, for example, I would have had little doubt that Planet could make the product because they've already made two products which still exist. Not that I'd have necessarily liked the product if they'd made it, or that it would be identical in every detail, but I wouldn't fear losing my money in a scam. With a different company though, that would be a stronger worry.

You might as well ask though why anyone would invest in a risky venture. If you have money, why put it into a business which might fail, or invest it in a stock or bond which won't help much if the company goes bankrupt. In each case, someone is willing to risk that their investment may decrease in value for the chance that they'll get something better than their investment after waiting, whether that be a larger amount of money or a product they want.

Re: Peak Planet

They don't have to release new Android versions, but if the 2018 figure means security updates, that doesn't take so much effort. They can use a lot of the same code that gets made available because it doesn't do anything to their keyboard or custom hardware. After all, custom ROMs seem to be able to do that without much difficulty, and they usually don't get paid to do so. A manufacturer which doesn't do that gets sent down my list of trustable ones. One who advertises to tech-literate people and still doesn't do it gets themselves a nice hypocrisy debit as well.

Re: My friend backed this

I disagree entirely, though I didn't back this phone. The reason is that this was supposed to eventually also have Linux on it. A processor can be quite important if it's running a desktop OS and potentially intensive software on it. Unfortunately, Android can also be CPU-hungry, especially if they don't have Lineage OS or a similarly trimmed version.

Meanwhile, 6 GB of memory is, in my experience, fine for a lot of phone tasks since it doesn't need to multitask as much as other machines. Opinions will vary, but many have devices with 3-4 GB and rarely use that much. Also, backers knew they would have 6 and presumably were fine with that since they chose to back at that level. Other improvements, such as a better camera, are meaningless to me; if it has a camera, it's probably fine for the few times I will use it in its lifetime.

I would be unhappy with this change in specifications if I had backed it.

Re: They need to clarify...

But the question is why a U.S. tariff and mainland Chinese retaliation should change the negotiations between a Taiwanese company and a British one. If China put a tariff on Mediatek to punish Taiwan for having companies which got restricted by the U.S., it wouldn't really make much sense because a lot of Chinese phone manufacturers use Mediatek SOCs heavily. Also, I think we'd have heard of the tariff. But even if they did that, the restriction would likely be on Chinese purchase of the chips. Or, if Mediatek agreed to make things harder for American manufacturers so China wouldn't do that, there'd be problems between Mediatek and American clients. Planet is British. Why would either Mediatek or China want to do anything to the British to retaliate against American tariffs? If they did want to, they'd be able to make it happen, but it doesn't make sense given the current state of relations between Taiwan and the UK.

We didn't collude with Twitter to throw Parler off our servers, says AWS in court filing

Re: What about places that hinders me to enter if I don't abide to their rules?

"So if Facebook, for example, decided to only one side of any story/news item so as to direct the narrative you're ok with that? Can't have it both ways."

I think I can. I view that as their right to do, as it's the right of any terribly biased media source to do. I am not happy about it though. I'll complain. If I have the ability, I'll try to convince them to change their policy. Then again, I'm already unhappy about their data collection, and I've complained, and I've refused to set up an account, and that's not had any effect on their policy. Still, I'd try.

Re: What about places that hinders me to enter if I don't abide to their rules?

Leaving the rest of your comment aside. I only want to respond to this chunk:

"Surely you agree that all competitors in the social media market should follow the same rules on free speech?"

No, I don't. Social media companies, like other companies, are private entities. They should have the ability, should they choose to use it, to decide how they want their system used. If that means no discussions or pictures of cats because that's so last decade, then they can make it the no-feline-content zone. If that annoys the users, then that's a commercial failure; they probably won't be mourned. In terms of monopolistic behavior, I want to limit social media's influence in such a way that they can't prevent the creation of alternatives. So if Twitter started to buy the internet so I had to abide by their rules everywhere, I'd have a problem. If the only place I have to abide by Twitter's rules is Twitter, I view that as their right. If I don't want to abide by Twitter's rules, I find or create an alternative and go with it.

The same rights apply to any other company which makes something that I use but doesn't sell that thing to me, only allowing me to use it under a contract. A rental property may tell me that I'm not allowed to make loud noises at night. A rented car may come with a contract telling me that I must not drive it too far away from the place I'm going to return it to. A cloud server company may specify that I'm not allowed to mine cryptocurrency on a shared CPU. None of those things are required because they're against the law. They're required because the company owns the resource and I don't and they have specific conditions under which they're willing to let me use their thing.

Under that pile of spare keys and obsolete cables is an IoT device: Samsung pushes useful retirement project for older phones

Re: An option to turn them into security cameras would make this really popular

There are already ways to make a phone relay its camera to something else, so you could already configure that. It would involve some work on the system which takes the video from the phone and makes it useful, but that's the same problem you get with any other camera. The problem with a phone used for this purpose is that they're usually not so designed to be taped up outdoors. Even the ones sealed for water resistance aren't expecting long-term exposure. Anything on the outside of the building is likely to be exposed to sunlight, solar heating, cold not often seen indoors, and precipitation. The hardware may not enjoy those conditions, and at least two of them have been known to create battery problems.

How I found a bug in YouTube that let me watch private videos I wasn't allowed to, says compsci student

The black market may add that premium, but it's a lot easier to sell something to the black or gray markets than it is to sell a knife to a murderer, and if you're prone to rationalizing, there are people who might use an exploit purchased on the black market for purposes you don't consider evil. For example, there are people who will pay a lot for IOS exploits. Some of these are creepy companies or governments who want to break into citizens' equipment, but another category is people who want to jailbreak. So Apple probably has to offer quite a bit of money to compete not only with malicious people willing to spend a lot of money, but also people who aren't as unsympathetic. Another reason it's different is that selling an exploit isn't illegal unless you know or have a strong enough suspicion that it will be used for illegal purposes. Using the same example, it's not illegal to jailbreak a phone, so it's not illegal to sell an exploit to people who will use it to jailbreak a phone. A lot of ethical researchers will never consider selling exploits, but there are many researchers who might not mind so much. Companies who don't want to see others with the exploits would be well-advised to consider price competitiveness.

Linux developers get ready to wield the secateurs against elderly microprocessors

Re: People still make these older CPUs last I checked...

"doing 32 bit stuff is always faster then doing 64 bit stuff on the same computer, simply because you are moving half the data."

Er ... no. Not at all. Everything's the same size, so you don't move any more data. Only for pointers do you need to move more data, and it's a load using a single register, so it's not really any different there either. Crucially, your strings, byte arrays, integers, and floats are the same size. And, as I pointed out, some of those things can be processed by a single 64-bit operation when they couldn't be processed by a single 32-bit one. Fewer instructions to do the same thing speeds you up unless someone's been fiddling with the microcode.

Re: People still make these older CPUs last I checked...

The 286 was discontinued in 1991, and even if "early 90's" means 1995, that's only a four-year gap. I can buy a processor that's four years old and do much better than a 486. A lot are ARM-based, but I could use MIPS boards, Intel Atoms, even some newer RISC-V options. Or I might canibalize someone's old computer they asked me to recycle for them. I'm not even sure where I'd get a 486 today, and no clue why I would want something with that performance-to-power level.

Re: People still make these older CPUs last I checked...

That's true, but before you go to the conclusion that that's generally applicable, let's discuss what that was. Pointers are twice as long. So a program that uses pointers (all of them) needs more memory to store them. However, most programs don't hold most of their important data in pointers, so that's not a large increase. One program does store most of its data in pointers: the operating system. In order for process-specific memory to work, the OS needs a big table of real pointers and virtual pointers. The OS has a lot of other tables containing pointers too, but the memory tables are among the largest. So it can be generally assumed that a 64-bit operating system is going to use a lot more memory than a 32-bit one, but a 64-bit user-level program probably won't have a similarly-sized increase in memory usage. When operating on a memory-restricted system, the increased usage may mean that the performance hit of a 32-bit OS is necessary.

Re: People still make these older CPUs last I checked...

"But it's worth pointing out that, on platforms that can use both 32-bit and 64-bit [most x86 and ARM64], the 32-bit code is probably going to be a little bit faster, and a little bit smaller, due to 64-bits vs 32-bits for memory addresses."

No. It's worth pointing out the "little smaller" part, but the "little faster" part is almost always dead wrong. If you write something and compile it to a 32-bit instruction set, anything you use that's larger than 32 bits must be chopped up to fit into 32-bit only operations on the CPU. Some may have 64-bit registers, but if the major operations can only handle 32 bits of that at a time, you have to do some more math to put the pieces back together. In 64-bit instruction sets, you can use values that are double the length. Some instruction sets implementing 64-bit operations also have some ability to natively handle 128-bit values. A lot of programs use things that can't fit into 32-bit registers. Long integers, double-precision floating points, etc. Even more use things that can't fit into 64-bit registers either, so they still need chopping, but they need half as much chopping as when they have to be used in 32-bit ones. If a single operation can do what four were needed for before, the processing is faster. If the operation can use two registers when it would have needed three, the program doesn't have to do as many cache and memory requests. Recompiling standard code for 64-bit is likely to make it faster, at the minor cost of increased binary size.

SpaceX wins UK regulator Ofcom's approval for its Starlink mobile broadband base stations

Re: Optional

The "for free" is because people keep assuming it's going to be used to connect very much underdeveloped areas. And no, that doesn't include the United States, even in a disaster. It includes places where people have little access to electricity, let alone communications. No wires to carry the signal, so satellite would be the fastest way to get connection there. That's what people always say is the main reason I should accept this system; it's a humanitarian dream, connecting all the world together to lift everyone from ignorance, bringing education to those who can't afford what I have, yada yada. That dream is great. If they did it, I'd be very happy and I'd give them all sorts of licenses so they could get it done. I might even buy the more expensive service to make it easier for them to give the hardware to people who can't afford it.

They aren't doing that. They haven't even started to talk about any of the gnarly issues involved in doing that. Some nice chunks of speeches have mentioned it, and bunches of people online parrot back the arguments. I would like those who do so to realize that I don't believe they're going to actually realize any of those dreams, and I'll need proof. Until I get it, I can't give them any credit for humanitarianism and consider it only as a commercial product. As a commercial product, it has negative externalities that make it harder to swallow. The balancing positives need to be proven to me and likely to others before we would stop our objections.

Right. For a price significantly higher than every other connection option. I'm sure they'll be providing them for free to any village without a cable any day now. I've seen this argument trotted out so many times; maybe we should actually see it done before we give them the credit for their humanitarian action? No? Maybe you can at least show me the documents where they've been getting them approved for developing countries where internet access is sparse?

Apologies for the wait, we're overwhelmed. Yes, this is the hospital. You need to what?! Do a software licence audit?

Re: Really??

Nobody says they should get the software without payment. They say the audit to make sure they didn't steal it should be postponed. Keep in mind that the hospitals are already paying for a bunch of licenses, so the companies are already getting quite a bit of money. I trust hospitals enough to pay any additional license fees, and I also trust them to have already done so in most cases. The audits are the difficult bit, and now is a really bad time to make people do that when those people are also saving lives.

As I see it, the companies have a couple of likely options. They could voluntarily relax their auditing requirements now and get a nice press release about it. Or they can not do that, get a bunch of stories like this printed in papers with a higher readership, and take the risk that people hate them. Or keep doing it after that and take the risk that a law is passed forcing them to relax their audit requirements, but no nice press release. Only one final option works out better for them, which is to hope that nobody else cares enough to write about the problem. Doesn't strike me as likely, but people ignore a lot of problems, so it might work.

Somehow, I think the hospitals will probably be trustworthy enough to state the number of licenses they used later. That's always assuming the license system allows them to increase their usage without asking for payment anyway, and if the licensing model says they have to pay per computer, the software will likely enforce that. More importantly, the audit itself is going to cause a lot of problems for the hospital, while the theoretical delay in payment will probably be a drop in a bucket for a big software company who already gets paid for existing licenses. If they want to fight in the court of public opinion, it will end badly for them.

Re: In the peak of an epidemic

I was assuming that the people doing the audit were doing so remotely by sending lots of communications to the staff and demanding information about the network and machines running the software. If they did show up, there are all sorts of unpleasant things that could befall someone willing to endanger others when it's not necessary. I'd especially enjoy mistaking them for a cleaner and sending them to the least pleasant section, having previously informed all the staff in that area to be very busy if they have the miracle of not already being so and never acknowledge the questions of the new cleaner except to prevent them from leaving and occasionally reprimand them for not cleaning. Maybe it's a good thing I don't work for a hospital.

Parler games: Social network for internet rejects sues Amazon Web Services for pulling plug on hosting

Do the anti-shutdown-Parler contingent not know what free speech is?

Here's a hint. It means the government doesn't get to prevent you from talking (limits apply). It doesn't mean that I have to give or sell you any resources to use while making your speech. So long as the government doesn't name you and say you can't speak, or name you and ban me from selling stuff to help you speak if I want to do so, the government hasn't breached free speech laws. If I independently decide that I'd rather you not speak, and I'm going to refuse to help you speak, that's my right as well.

So, given this definition, let's review who did anything against Parler's speech. It's Amazon, Apple, and Google. These are not the government. They're not doing it because the government said so. There's a reason the lawsuit is trying to make an antitrust claim; free speech doesn't apply to cloud services vendors. You want to make a point about that, go ahead. Rabbiting on about free speech when the government hasn't restricted speech only proves that you're missing the point.

Better battery, LTE and a removable SSD in Microsoft's Surface Pro 7+

Re: Swappable SSD, but standard?

I thought the same thing when reading it, possibly because I'm currently considering whether to buy the custom SSD to repair an Apple laptop or just put it aside for later. I really hope they haven't done that, and I've misread things like this before, but hopefully there will be extra details about it somewhere. I looked around for someone who bothered to ask this question when they got the press release, but all the news articles I find just say "replaceable" with no more detail.

Lenovo reveals smart specs that let you eyeball five virtual displays, with strings attached

Re: But will it be cheaper?

Almost certainly not. That's not a problem as I see it. Even if you have the space, power, and the massive desk needed to support five screens, they'll be very large and difficult to move around as you like them. These glasses could be used in much less space and you could also move them with you to have that much screen real estate wherever you work. It depends how you want to use them, but there could be several advantages to having all your screens in a portable unit.

America says banks can now transact using so-called stable crypto-coins. What does that actually mean?

Re: Backing

There may be people who don't believe PayPal is a good method of storing value. Since a PayPal account doesn't have any external guarantee that it will retain its value, people who store money in PayPal because they think it will continue to hold its value are doing so only because they trust PayPal. One of the primary benefits of cryptocurrency is that you don't have to trust various participants in the system. If a structure for a cryptocurrency expects the users to accept that it's useful because they trust a backing organization, it's no better than any other company who will hold value in a database and promise to give it back some time; that's not necessarily a problem, but we already have those. Cryptocurrencies which don't have such a backing system may be more volatile, but none of them expect me to blindly trust that someone somewhere will keep a bunch of valuable stuff around so my money will hold its value.

Re: Backing

The person you are replying to is expressing skepticism, not that it's possible, but that it would be done. Whatever resource is used, how do you know the backing organization has the resource in the necessary quantity? Even if you can prove that they had it at one point, how can you prove that they still have it? If a backing organization had a bunch of cash in an account to back their coins, how would you detect it if someone decided to take a bit out to spend on something else on the theory that not enough people will use the backing that they'll need it all? Or used it as a resource for something else putting the coin investors lower in the debt cycle should the backing organization go bankrupt?

Essentially, the question is why should a backing system be trusted, because otherwise it's similar to any unstable investment which has the possibility to crash without warning with little recompense. The usual argument is that these coins will replace cash, but even under hyperinflation, cash can't become worthless in five minutes.

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

Re: Screwed up

I always do it. Yes, I'm sure it won't help, because I've done it at least four times before I called them. I still do it. I'll mention, while I'm waiting for it to reboot, that I've done it before, but I'll do it.

The reason? I hate it when someone tells me they've already done something, I believe them, they're lying, and it could have saved me time. That happens very frequently, so I know why they don't trust that I've done it. Now if I can make them not ask for it by providing them a lot of information in the initial request, I'll happily do that, but if they're giving me instructions I've already tried, there's always the possibility that it will turn out to be just slightly different from what I did and will actually help. It hasn't happened yet, but it might. I have to give them the same benefit of the doubt that I want my family and friends to give me when they tell me that they really have tried forgetting the Bluetooth device and repairing, but actually they just turned Bluetooth of and on.

Re: Doubtless with the assistance of a baseball bat peppered with rusty nails.

True, as offenses go, this is relatively minor and doesn't deserve that much punishment. That said, "major changes to config file, don't check it for viability, send directly to production, go home" is a bad enough mistake to require some unpleasant talks about how that's never going to happen again.

United States Congress stormed by violent followers of defeated president, Biden win confirmation halted

Valid points, but some of them are quite limited. For instance, you spend some time on the power of a private company to ban someone. Specifically, you say "If Trump can be banned from these products, then any of us can for any reason - is that the world we want to live in?". That's already the world we live in. Facebook can ban you for violations of their terms of service, and they get to write the terms of service. That's because Facebook built and run the entire network. They get to choose, subject to laws, who they want or don't want. If you don't like this, don't post on Facebook. If you do like this, don't post on Facebook; they're really creepy.

In general, I am willing to accept a lot more misinformation than I or anyone else would like, but primarily because every mechanism I can think of that suppresses the misinformation will either get abused or neglected. Probably both. However, places you can post stuff shouldn't be under an obligation to give me their platform if they don't want to. If The Register's moderators don't like my comments, because I'm abusive or offensive or I like Python and they hate it, they have the right to ban me. They have this right because it's their comment section, which they have no obligation to provide for me. In the same way, I sometimes allow comments on blogs I write. If you come to one of my sites and post one, you have no freedom of speech whatsoever. I will read your comment, and if I don't like it, because it's spam or offensive or I'm feeling grumpy, it doesn't go up. There are places on the internet where you can post anything you want and it basically never comes down. You want to post something which others keep taking down, go there. Or you can set up your own site, which is pretty easy and has very few restrictions. If Facebook tried to control the entire internet and lock you out, I'd have a massive problem with it. As long as the thing Facebook locks you out of is Facebook, that's their right.

Re: Unfortunately ...

"our Constitution only provides for that charge in times of War."

I don't think that's entirely true, and because I'm in need of distraction, I'm going to overanalyze why I think that. You can probably skip this when you get bored.

The relevant part of the American constitution reads as follows:

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted."

So it appears that treason has two definitions, neither of which includes anything like "in time of war". I'd argue that one of them at least implies war: "adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort", but you can have enemies without having war with them, or you can have enemies with whom you can't be at war in the international law sense because the enemies aren't states. But fine, I'll restrict this to define enemies as countries the U.S. declared war on. Somehow, I think people would define it differently if someone was being charged after working with a non-state organization which wished to destroy the U.S., but we'll leave that alone.

The reason I can do that is that there is another option listed there: "levying War against them". Once again, we have a word without a clear definition. War could mean a state of war declared by a recognized country, but I don't really think that's an honest description of how it's used. Let's try a dictionary. While it includes "Organized, large-scale, armed conflict between countries or between national, ethnic, or other sizeable groups, usually involving the engagement of military forces.", it also includes "Any conflict, or anything resembling a conflict.". It appears the dictionary isn't going to help much in getting a firm definition of what is and isn't war.

Let's instead try history. What have generally been called wars? The traditional country-fights-country things, of course, but several smaller things too. Civil wars, which don't involve a declaration of war since each side considers the opposition government at least illegitimate and often beneath consideration. Wars which didn't have a formal declaration (Korean War, Iraq War). Campaigns involving smaller wars (war on terror). Not to mention that it's also frequently used by people who aren't governments (I.E. "we are at war with [something they don't like]". If these are wars, then perhaps "levying War against them" is easier than it seems. Maybe even saying that you intend to be at war with the U.S. is enough. Maybe an act similar to one taken in a war is enough. On that basis, a violent attack on a government institution might be sufficient, as that's certainly enough to start a war if a country did it and has certainly started an armed conflict when a group of people did it.

I'm done now. I think the original interpretation is incorrect. I need to sleep.

Crowdfunded Asahi project aims for 'polished' Linux experience on Apple Silicon

Usually, people who want to run Linux on a Mac bought the Mac at least partially for Mac OS but also want to use Linux for other tasks. If you already like Apple software, running Linux on the hardware is still useful because you have the choice of both environments. At least it was when Linux could be installed without much hacking, maybe with a few less important hardware not having drivers, but mostly functional out of the box. It might not be so useful when it has to be custom untested code to work with Apple's new processors. If people buy Macs just to run Linux on them, they must really like the design of the laptops. I don't think that's often the intent.

"I thought properly Linuxified Chromebooks were a thing. Maybe they're not powerful enough for Linus."

The most powerful one I've seen has six cores, 4 GB of RAM (maximum supported), and relatively slow access to storage. If you are hoping to do serious development on that of something large, compiling alone will take a very long time. If you want to use it because it's thin, light, and low-power, that works. If you want to develop small to medium projects on it, it will work but you'll notice a speed problem. If you want to develop a big project on it, you should have a good reason for not wanting to use anything else because you will have to sacrifice a lot of time and inefficiency. When compared to the Apple M1 chip, performance is not even comparable. It all comes down to the purposes to which the device will be put.

Re: ARM Chromebooks and Linux

It exists, but in each case it includes a bunch of system-specific cludges which might work. If you want to port, you can start with some of the OS code from the PineBook Pro, which is effectively the same kind of hardware as a Chromebook so more of their code is portable. Still, you'll have to get into the bootloader yourself, and the GPUs on ARM-based SOCs often lack driver support, which you'd have to fix. And then there's the drivers for other things, which should be standard but probably are not. So on second thought, you could always just buy a PineBook Pro if you want an ARM-powered light Linux laptop that you can be a little sure will work.

Re: Why do some people feel compelled ...

I've been doing that for years. Nouveau has literally never been one of my considerations. If I expect the user to be running Linux, office software, and a browser, I don't have to do very much to get extra graphics support. Sure, if they tried to stream 4K video to the old computer, it might have a problem, but usually it's old enough that it can't output that anyway. I don't need Nouveau to make LibreOffice usable; it will work fine even on ancient Intel integrated graphics. It's the more intensive stuff like image editing that needs a more poerful GPU, and as you've identified I usually don't expect the recycled computers to be used for that very often.

Away from the besuited world of the ThinkPad, Lenovo lets its hair down with refreshed IdeaPad and Yoga lineups

Re: High-end?

As for the CPU, Passmark has benchmarked it as faster (multi-core) than the I9-9900K desktop CPU. I realize that's two years old now, but it was a relatively high-end desktop part when it came out. This laptop processor has quite a bit of power behind it. I'm not a gamer, so I don't know how to convert from GPU benchmark numbers to gaming performance, but the RTX 2060 appears to have the capacity to get a lot of pixels calculated, including driving 4K displays. If you really need the highest performance, a desktop is necessary. If you don't, and it seems that a lot of games don't, you can probably do fine with the hardware in this laptop.

US backs down from slapping import taxes on French goods over Macron's web giant tax

Re: Unfair?

"So paying taxes on the money you make is unfair now?"

The American argument is essentially that it's legal for other countries to set tax laws that apply to everybody, including adjusting them to charge more for large companies, but that France's law is targeted specifically at them. The argument would therefore be that France should change its general tax legislation to remove the loopholes that result in a lower tax payment from the companies concerned, rather than creating a new type of tax which has limits placed on it such that only a specific set of companies have to pay it. I'm not saying this argument is a good one, but it is what they're using, and the current trade rules appear to at least somewhat support them; basically every company which qualifies for the digital services tax are American, and it can be argued it's effectively an anti-American tariff.

The suggestion to implement taxes of this type by simplifying tax law so it's harder to avoid is a persuasive one, though politicians rarely want to go to that effort. In my opinion, such modification is better than a tech-tax whether you subscribe to the U.S. argument or not. The reason is that a sector-specific tax doesn't fix the problem for any other company which is avoiding paying its tax in a method the citizens dislike, so if the avoidance problem can be resolved by making it harder to avoid, it is likely to increase tax payments across the board without needing frequent patches to target particular offenders.

OpenAI touts a new flavour of GPT-3 that can automatically create made-up images to go along with any text description

"I'm just thinking about the kind of work that I could do if the a database of all of human knowledge was directly interfaced with my brain as though it was part of me. Imagine having intuitive access to that."

I'm imagining you with a phone embedded in your head. All you have to do is to think of something and you'll quickly get a search of all the stuff written on it. Most of which tells you information you don't need, a lot of which is wrong, a lot of which is designed to convince you rather than inform you, some of which includes what you want to know but is written in a way that you don't find it, and some of which includes what you want to know but you can't understand it.

Also, how is this getting us anywhere closer to the singularity, for that's basically what you're asking for? All this does is cut up some images and put them together to attempt to correspond to a label. The model doesn't understand what any of these objects is; it only understands what they look like, and that's being generous. I can give you that too, and I'd not be using AI either. If I just tag a bunch of sections of pictures "this is a chair", "this is a piano", "this is a dog", I can get a program to read your sentence and paste them on top of a background "this is a living room", "this is a street", "this is a lake". What this program does is cut out my labeling process by taking a bunch of chair pictures and determining automatically that they're mostly chairs, but it needed someone to write that label to figure that out. It shows effort on the part of the programmers, people who write image captions, and the willingness to spend a lot of computing time building a model, but doesn't really help in the creation of an intelligent computer.

Welcome to the splinternet – where freedom of expression is suppressed and repressed, and Big Brother is watching

Because it takes a lot of time, and they don't need to. They just need to have the ability to do it if they want to.

China doesn't need to cut their people off the internet if they have the ability to block things they don't like. In an emergency situation, they can do so without affecting the rest of it. Meanwhile, they get the benefits of being on the internet, such as the international markets, access to stuff produced elsewhere which isn't political, etc. China doesn't need that access to survive, but while it's harmless, they'll take it. If it should ever become harmful, they'll block it. Even if at some point they decided the entire non-China internet is harmful, they now have the ability to cut it within an hour.

Re: "It controls the military completely"

Pronoun, antecedent identified incorrectly. -1 points.

"In China, the Communist Party runs the show. That makes tight control of the internet not only possible, but advantageous. 'It controls the military completely. It controls information networks. It controls political perception. It controls the media. It controls the economic design of the country,' Ghosh points out."

"It" does not refer to the state. "It" refers to the political party. A state's military should be part of the state, not of its ruling political party. Be careful with pronouns; they can lead you to incorrect conclusions.

Re: Explains why P2P networks are getting so popular

A network that only has a small number of participants on it because it's really difficult to get on it self-selects the population who is interested in anonymity and capable of using complex tech. All a dictatorship needs to do is identify the small set of people joining that network to have a wonderful list of dangerous elements who need some reeducation. Only if there is some way of hiding in the crowd can that be avoided. Your network which has high barriers to entry is harming you, to say nothing of how it makes any plans you have weaker. If a hundred cryptography experts agree that a protest is needed, it will mean a hundred dead cryptography experts. If a hundred thousand people, most of whom are not cryptography experts, agree because they're all able to coordinate, there's much more chance that something less deadly happens.

Unless you live very close to people, the hardware we have doesn't make it easy to participate in a mesh network. An ad hoc one in a crowd, sure. A long-term one which can be used to organize or find things, no. Worse, in a mesh network, you have lots of ways to interfere with it, either by disruption, impersonation, or surveillance. We should create a good standard mesh network protocol which has clients for existing hardware and has security and anonymity as primary goals, but it will still be of most use for short-term networks.

Re: Explains why P2P networks are getting so popular

How many of your immediate family members know what those things are? How many of your nontechnical friends? There are plenty of systems that exist to protect privacy, but you can't exactly claim victory unless those have been tested. For example, how easy would it be for a dictatorship to detect and block each of your suggested P2P systems? How easy to intercept and read them? And, perhaps most importantly, how hard would it be for a new user to join one without a helpful close friend giving them all the necessary things? If a repressive regime censors the software you need and you can't easily obtain it otherwise, you can have a very anonymous network and still not get anywhere.

Re: what if the net stopped being one big, connected thing?

And, as accurate as the sentences said were, they're not universally so. New laws and regulations restrict the freedom of big tech companies in democracies. In dictatorships, the only regulations are new "thou shalt do what we tell you to when we tell you to" ones. I want more privacy, but I have the freedom to evade corporations here and, depending on where I live, the freedom to sue them for privacy violations and win. I don't have that power in China, where the social credit score is not optional and your options for redress from the government primarily include paying a bunch of money to gain citizenship in a different country.

Techies start growing an Alphabet-wide labor union: 200-plus sign up, only tens of thousands more to go

That has to be considered, and don't worry, the company will consider it for you. The problem is that the alternative is no different. If the company signs the contract and enough of their staff leave based on the arguments made in the post I replied to, the company might well go bust anyway because they lack the staff to fulfill their requirements and are spending all their time trying to hire new ones. At least if the employees concerned attempt to convince the company that it's a bad idea, the company knows that's going to happen and can decide whether it's worth the risk. There's little downside telling the company "I don't like this idea, and if you do it, I will quit".

That's a good start, but you can also try to convince your current employer not to do things you don't want to do. If your current employer isn't someone you have an objection to, but they have started to consider doing business with someone you have an objection to, you have two options. You could quit immediately so you don't do something you object to, or you could go to your employer and suggest that they might want to consider changing their mind. If they do change their mind, you keep a job, they keep you employed by them, and everyone's avoided a negative. If a lot of your colleagues also object to the considered project, you in combination are more likely to convince the company not to do the objectionable thing.

This benefits you, obviously, since you don't have to look for a new job if your employer doesn't do what you want, but it also helps your employer. If everyone only operated on the "never work for people you object to but also never complain" principle, the company would likely sign the contract to work for the objectionable place, lose a bunch of employees, end up in a crisis, and have trouble. If they just don't sign the contract, the company is as fine as it was before and can find a less objectionable contract. No guarantee that they'll change their mind, but if you try to suggest that they do, it's possible it ends better. It can't really end worse, as even if they do nothing it's no different from your original plan.

Singapore changes the rules and will now use COVID-19 contact-tracing app data in criminal cases

What worried people all along

I have tried to be willing to acknowledge the usefulness of contact tracing applications, but this is exactly what people feared when they were launched. This is the underhanded action that can kill trust in a government, and for governments already lacking it due to pervasive privacy violations, also kill the benefits of contact tracing. When we're faced with a crisis where public participation is required to avoid causing a great deal of preventable harm, eroding the public's trust in government is among the worst things that can be done. At this point, I think the operators of app stores should remove the Trace Together application as malware; only a decentralized tracing app can ever be permitted, and even those must be subject to review.

Explained: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32

Re: MS, how about recognising EXT,HFS+ formats so it doesn't result in the format dialog box

For HFS+, you can get a driver for it which gives Windows read-only support for it from Apple's Boot Camp drivers collection. I haven't used it in a while, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it supports APFS now as well.

Julian Assange will NOT be extradited to the US over WikiLeaks hacking and spy charges, rules British judge

Re: This confused me

The OSA is a law. You have to obey it if you're in the UK. Sometimes, you may be asked to sign a document acknowledging that you know this, but if you've never signed it, it doesn't change. For the same reason, you don't have to sign a document saying "I acknowledge that there's a law saying I can't kill people when I want to". If you do kill people, it's illegal whether you've acknowledged it's illegal or not. It's how laws work.

Re: This confused me

"I never saw a clause in the (admittedly short) forms where secret information from another state was necessarily a UK secret."

That doesn't matter. The question that the judge needs to answer in this case is rather simple. Basically, if all this happened in or to the UK, would it be a crime. In full detail, if a guy broke into Ministry of Defense systems or published UK classified documents, would the UK consider it a crime? In that hypothetical case, the OSA would indicate that it was a crime. Since the action would have been criminal had the UK been the victim, the crime is worthy of extradition on the basis of dual criminality. It's not the only test that needs to pass before extradition succeeds, but it virtually always has to pass in order to do so. Just because it did pass doesn't mean that the real person could be charged under the OSA; only the hypothetical person who acted against a UK victim needs to be culpable for the test to pass.

The reason a hypothetical criminality test is used is that one country could pass a law making something illegal which another country hasn't done. Extradition in that scenario is usually refused. For example, consider the U.S.'s slavery legislation in the 1800s. The laws of the U.S. stated that it was legal to enslave people and it was illegal for a person who was enslaved to run away. Canada's laws said that it was not legal to enslave people. A person who managed to escape to Canada could therefore live in freedom because an extradition request would be denied; the act of leaving a position of slavery was not considered criminal in Canada, so they wouldn't be sent. Meanwhile, someone who escaped to Canada after murdering people would be extradited, because murder was considered a crime in both countries. Even if Canada couldn't charge the murderer because the victim was American, Canada would still consider the murder to have been a crime and sent the perpetrator to the location where the trial was allowed.

Re: pft

The OSA is not necessarily considered to cover secrets of other countries, though it could. The point is that it is a crime in the UK to release information of that nature, and thus that extradition is permitted on that basis. In most cases, to extradite a person, the crime of which they're accused must be a crime in the country they're physically in. If country A thinks something I did was illegal but country B does not, country B is unlikely to extradite me. If country B also thinks that's illegal, then I'm more likely to be extradited. That works whether or not country B could charge me for the crime.

Here's a simple example. Let's say that I go to the UK, rob a bank there, then flee to Germany. The robbery charge should happen in the UK. The Germans probably wouldn't charge me there for it, because the victim was located in the UK and I wasn't in Germany when I robbed it. Technically, my crime wasn't a thing for Germany. However, robbery is still a crime in Germany, so the extradition request would go through quickly, even though the victim wasn't German. In the same sense, the crimes that the U.S. allege are crimes in the UK, so the UK doesn't have to deny extradition for that reason.

And now for something completely different: A lightweight, fast browser that won't slurp your data

Re: RE DrXym :)

"what?? FF 78 executable is 567K.."

But the full installation is a couple hundred megabytes. Even the compressed installer packages are 50-70 MB. I assumed that the quoted 34 MB was all of the files used by their browser, but even if they chose to bundle most of their libraries into one executable instead of loading them dynamically like Firefox does, their storage usage is much smaller. That said, Firefox supports basically every site and their thing doesn't yet, so expect their thing to increase in size.

I cannot reproduce that. Running the latest stable 84.0.1 here and about:config loads just fine after a warning page which I can suppress if I want to.

Yes, Microsoft Access was a recalcitrant beast, but the first step is to turn the computer on

Re: I'd be shocked if ...

Yes. That's true. Having a separate machine for client and server in a time where machines were expensive would have cost money. Given that the client and server could apparently run fine in shared resources, all that needed to change was that people needed to remember not to turn off the box. The original comment complained about a single point of failure, which this wasn't really. The source of the problem was an operational decision, not an architectural one.

The problem with the original complaint is that it is a textbook solution which doesn't look at any of the specifics. A single point of failure is a negative in a system design, but so is limited time, limited money, limited disk, etc. These things are only preventable if more resources are thrown at the project. Singling out SPOF as the thing which must never be allowed makes it seem as if the person who created the database made an obvious mistake, but the compromise was undoubtedly chosen because the available resources required one. Single points of failure are sometimes necessary, and treating them as anathema is only possible if you're willing to always spend ten times as much to eliminate as many as I can point out, and I can point out a lot.