Posts by doublelayer

That long-awaited, super-hyped Apple launch: Watches, iPads... and one more thing. Oh, actually that's it

Something isn't making sense

"We also saw the same repetitions of Apple’s purported eco-friendliness, which will be put into practice by removing the USB charge cables from its Apple Watch line-up."

Maybe it's just because I don't have one, but I was under the impression that most smartwatches, including Apple's, use a nonstandard connector so they can be more waterproof, smaller, and give their manufacturers an extra income stream from sale of chargers. Even if Apple's watches have always used the same connector, anyone who hasn't purchased one before won't have one and anyone purchasing one now probably got rid of the last cable when they gave it to the same person they gave the old watch to. It seems to me to be the cable least likely already to be available to users. Lightning cables, however, would already be available to anyone who has previously purchased Apple gear (and are more easily purchased at shops), USB-C cables are becoming more common and may soon start to accumulate, and Micro USB cables can be found in quantities of five to ten in any closet in my home (or my family's homes). Am I just wrong about Apple's watches using a cable type specific to that unit and they're more common than I thought? If not, what are they thinking?

Singapore to test compulsory COVID-tracker usage as condition of entry to some venues

Re: This will enable us to open up safely in the coming weeks and months

"The point is you are not allowed in without one. So there should be no unknown persons."

The "unknown" referred to persons who are not known to have the disease, but they do. They are asymptomatic, go in, infect others who will not develop symptoms for a week, and those others will infect still more. The point is that this tracking system is not sufficient to allow completely normal operation while rates of transmission are still high. It can allow some increase in safe levels of social interaction, but if something like this is sold as a panacea which will allow perfect containment of infected people, people may have a false sense of security about what it's going to do. If this leads to normal levels (in a densely-packed city, very high levels) of close contact, it will not take long to prove this point. Sadly, that proof will come in the form of new cases, including deaths and long-lasting health effects. If only we could consider it before overselling something.

Who cares what Apple's about to announce? It owes us a macOS x86 virtual appliance for non-Mac computers

I'm assuming here that the comment is referring to the perspective purchase of ARM by NVIDIA. While they're not using ARM's cores, they still have to pay a license fee to ARM in order to be allowed to produce compatible cores of their own. This could give ARM, NVIDIA, or whoever eventually buys it to have some leverage against Apple and increase the demanded license fees, although NVIDIA has promised not to do that.

Re: What is the Author actually asking for?

Yes, Apple didn't bother to make it run in the environments they want to prevent. I'm with the original poster, though. The article specifically says that they don't care if the OS supports new hardware released after now, and they don't care if it gets security updates. At this point, I find myself asking why they need one at all--you can get that and more just by buying an Intel-based Mac today. To me, a VM is only useful if, in 2025, I can still run the latest OS with security patches on the hardware available for purchase then. If what I'm going to get is a VM running what an Intel Mac runs today and nothing more, then I might as well just get an Intel Mac today; the benefit is the same.

Brit MPs to Apple CEO: Please stop ignoring our questions about repairability and the environment

Re: The easy solution

That's easy, but it solves nothing. If I want a phone, I have to get one from someone. One of the benefits that Apple provides is long software support, which I really can't get with Android devices. This means that it is safe to use for longer, lessening my production of electronics going to recyclers. There are a few devices that, via Lineage OS or similar, get support for much longer. I'm currently using one of those. I am going to have to replace it at some point soon though because it is now rebooting unexpectedly (I blame the battery but I don't have evidence). Still, that device has lasted around seven years whereas its manufacturer dropped support and security updates for it in 2015. Unfortunately, scanning Lineage's supported devices list doesn't bode well as they're low on supported modern devices.

You want a real solution? Get the Android manufacturers to increase the lifetime of software and security updates along with some standard for repairability. Otherwise, I'm faced with the choice of Apple (software will last but hardware won't, probably fine since I have a good record of not damaging my hardware) and most other manufacturers (software won't last and hardware ... probably won't be any more repairable than Apple's to be honest). Dropping Apple from my list isn't going to help solve the base problem.

My guess is that they sometimes just "repair" something by going to the back room, finding another device from that range, and swapping the data over. The device which probably could be repaired is put on a stack of things that will be sent to a repair center where the knowledgable repair technicians will eventually repair its fault, erase it securely, and make it available for sale as refurbished once they get around to building that center, which is scheduled to complete in 2030 but might be delayed because they've just had to move it from China to Mexico and they're looking at moving it again to either Argentina or China for some tax reasons. In the meantime, there's no use keeping the broken parts around so into the big bucket for the electronics recycler at the end of each day.

Chinese database details 2.4 million influential people, their kids, addresses, and how to press their buttons

Re: Thought experiment

"Replace Chinese database with Facebook database. Would anyone be shocked at the revelations?"

I would. Only 2.4 million? Facebook can do better than that. China should really consider just buying Facebook's database.

Maybe countries do all try to collect this, but in my opinion, they shouldn't. If a country complains about this database, I would expect them not to have collected their own (well, actually I expect hypocrisy at every turn, but I would hope that they haven't created their own). At the moment, however, we try to prevent our countries from violating our rights in that way, and using this database as an example of why it doesn't matter because China does it too doesn't help.

Re: Oh....bad....bad....bad.....Nothing Like That Going On in the US or the UK.....No Siree!

What was done in the past is important, but a lot less than what is being done today. One is a terrible event for which we should try to atone. The other is a very terrible thing that is harming people actively. If you care about what the British empire did to those it virtually enslaved, you probably don't like human rights abuses. We cannot go back in time and terminate the British empire's crimes, but we could attempt to stop the crimes that occur now. Ignoring those who are harming people because some of our ancestors did similar or worse things to others of our ancestors is missing the point and perpetuating the thing that must be destroyed.

"What utter and complete bollocks. You really think the Chinese are going to invade Europe or the US?"

That's not what the person you replied to was saying. What they said was that, if you live in China, that could happen to you. This is true, because it already has to millions of Chinese citizens. The post was comparing democracies, which don't do this, to China, which does. They weren't claiming that China was going to come to democracies and do it to the people there. The rest of the post has some points that are worth arguing about, which I'll do in a different post, but if you want to argue with this one, understand what was said.

Re: Good old propaganda

The number of people in a database is a relatively unimportant metric. More important ones include the breadth of information in the database (reportedly extensive), the degree to which such information can be used for leverage (uncertain, but sufficient to alarm the researchers), and exactly who is in the database (reportedly people with more influence than the average citizen). Those factors will determine how worrying this is. Maybe after more data about what is contained is released, we may be able to determine how worrying we believe it to be.

Bad apples: US customs seize OnePlus earbuds thinking they're knock-off AirPods

Well, this is also the place that tried to force access to an Apple-owned corporate laptop, so maybe they're just jerks who don't quite understand how to do the "protection" part of their ostensible job.

Don't pay the ransom, mate. Don't even fix a price, say Australia's cyber security bods

Re: I agree with every word

"Good for you - easy to pass judgement when your livelihood is not affected. Would you not do everything in your power to save your business?"

Everything in my power? Even on the brink of disaster? That's a hard no. Consider this situation:

You and I run a business together. It's small, sometimes profitable. We get a large contract which requires us to invest a lot of our money, but it's going to pay us good profits. After considering it, we accept. Then it turns out to be a scam. They've stolen our money. We'll have to declare bankruptcy tomorrow because we haven't the money to pay for the lawsuit to get our resources back. Our employees will lose their jobs. This is terrible and it's not even our fault. We could try to liquidate our resources, but our building's not worth much. Then it strikes us. While our building isn't easy to sell, we've insured it for quite a lot because it's important to us. If we committed insurance fraud, we'd have enough money to save our livelihoods and those of our employees. All we have to do is burn the building down tonight, taking care not to let anything happen to other buildings, and file a claim. Would you commit the fraud?

I'm guessing your answer is no. Why not? The only entity to get hurt is an insurance company. They have plenty of money. They can take it. Still no? If you don't, your employees are going to have to spend tomorrow on the phone to the unemployment office and your bank account is empty. Still not doing it?

Of course you're not doing it, because insurance fraud and arson are wrong. You are doing harm to someone. Paying the ransom, in addition to being a bad idea, is also harming others by making more of a market for others to develop and deploy ransomware. I won't do "everything in my power to save my business" because some of the things in my power are wrong. Sometimes, I have to do what's right even though it would work better for me to do a wrong thing. Some countries make paying the ransom illegal for exactly this reason, but even if yours hasn't, you have to take into account the harm you're going to do. Of course arson is more dangerous than paying a ransom, but if we compared it to insurance fraud without arson, they're quite similar. In fact, I think paying a ransom is worse than otherwise-victimless insurance fraud--I have more sympathy for multiple, mostly small victims of ransomware than a large, cash-rich company. Yet I still won't commit insurance fraud. And I won't pay a ransom either.

Re: Easy to say

Good backup policy requires, absolutely, at least one set which is stored offline and off-site. That's because you need that copy in various cases, including fire, flood, theft, or ransomware. Don't have that and your backups aren't good enough.

Of course there are occasions where people find their system wasn't good enough and they have to make a hard choice between paying a ransom and manually recreating their data. If you do backups right, it's much less likely you'll end up in said situation. But what happens when you do? Well, you have to keep in mind that when you pay, not only do you expose yourself to risk of losing your money on ransomware that doesn't intend on decrypting for you and the possibility that you're now known as a person willing to pay up, but you're funding attacks on other innocent people. It is not only your business that is being harmed, which is why some countries have made the payment of ransoms illegal. People who ignore this are complicit.

Cops called to Singapore golf club after 'wrongdoers' use scripts to book popular timeslots

Re: Why would that help?

The original suggestion is an auction. In an auction, there is no ticket price. In an auction, the person willing to pay the most gets the thing. So unless the person who is willing to pay more doesn't get to attend the auction, they will attend the auction and pay their price there. No scalpers will be able to sell at a higher price because anyone willing to buy at a higher price would attend the auction and buy there at that higher price. Whether that's actually a good suggestion is another question, as it doesn't leave any opening for people who can't pay the high prices, but at least understand the suggestion before discussing that bit.

Re: But They Do Dress Funny

They aren't doing that. Did the site go down? No, it didn't. That's not the complaint. The complaint is that it's not fair that people with bots are getting the nice slots immediately. That's a valid complaint, but it's not a violation of the law. Valid responses include making bots a violation of the terms, cancelling the accounts of people who use them, or taking technical action to prevent the bots from working. All valid things.

Let's say that I post a page to my personal site and you visit it. Effectively, you're performing a DOS because my server is going to send that page to you. If enough of you do it, my server will run out of resource. That's also the exact point of my putting the page up, so people will use my resource to read it. I cannot blame people for using my resources by accessing public services that I put there and made public and could either make nonpublic or in other ways protect. By doing this, I am taking various risks. For example, I have a bandwidth limit and if enough people access my files, I'll exceed it and I'll have to pay a higher bill. I accept that risk when I put files up and allow the public to access them. If I don't want to run that risk, I can take the files down again. It's on me to manage my own resources and set terms. A DOS attack is when someone deliberately intends to take down my system. A flood of interest in the thing the site does which the server isn't able to handle is not an attack.

Using a system for the purpose it was designed isn't misuse. Using that system with a bot when bots are prevented in the terms of service is a violation of that contract. Let's assume they've put that in (if they haven't, they have no case. Assuming they have, they can execute the penalties in that terms document for bot usage, such as closing accounts, charging fees, whatever they think is best and can get customers to agree to. However, it's not computer hacking. It's a violation of what they want.

"I know this is a leap so far I've practically already broken my legs and popped my knees, but it feels very much like 'if it wasn't locked they can't complain someone let themselves in'"

You are entirely correct. You've leaped so far that you're in orbit. If it wasn't locked, but they don't have permission to enter, then the law says they're not allowed to enter. This is a lot more like "it wasn't locked, and there is a big sign saying that people are allowed to come in, and people do come in and we like that, but someone came through with a bicycle and we don't like those". If it's your property, you can tell people not to come in with bicycles even though they're allowed to walk in. You can make them leave if they do so anyway. It is your rule, not the law, that says this.

Adtech's bogeymen are tracking everything - even your web visits to mental health charities, claim campaigners

Re: It's for charidee!

Let's assume that you're correct. To that, I say this: I don't care.

If I drive up to a location where medical care is needed in a car that has seen better days, because I decided to put more money into medications, then I have even more medications to provide. I am not there to impress the locals. I am there to provide help. Those who think I can't and won't help them will watch me prove them wrong, because that's why I'm there. I will tell them of what I can do to help. If I know what I'm doing, they will see that I back up my words with actions. If someone else doubts me, they can see it for themselves or hear the reports. In no way does a fancy car help with this.

Re: It's for charidee!

Well, if you're going to use "You don't know how much they paid for [the cars]", then I can fire it right back at you with "You don't know how much the particular charity paid its director". The problem isn't when charities provide a reasonable salary for people who control it. There are those who think that a decision to run something charitable must necessarily come with a requirement to volunteer everything, which isn't really fair. But simultaneously, there are charities which don't care about their purpose and use their ostensible purpose only for easier fund raising and tax freedoms while funneling the proceeds to some powerful people. We've all seen them. They include places like ICANN, which really needs millions of dollars from the sale of new domains nobody wants so they can fund their incredibly expensive duties of ... well they have to have two lockboxes for the DNSSEC keys, those maybe cost some money.

On the topic of cars, you need a reliable, well-built car if you're going to do field work on unreliable or nonexistent roads. Reliable. In good repair. Not one that looks nice. For one thing, after you drive a car that looks nice off road for a while, it's probably going to stop looking nice, so they're taking something valuable they don't need and causing damage to it. If they were able to explain that the car-maker concerned really wanted to donate a bunch of luxury cars to their charity, I'd accept it (though by auctioning them they might have been able to afford a greater quantity of superior cars or even more medical equipment). However, we have no reason to think that happened. Meanwhile, flaunting expensive items while working with people who probably will never own them is in poor taste, at least in my opinion.

A lot of charities are a lot better at this. You can easily find ones which spend most or all their resources on the specific cause they're working to help with, whose directors are earning a living but not exploiting the assistance of the donors, whose employees and volunteers are different primarily in the amount of time they put in. The fact that many of these exist doesn't make the exploitative charities disappear.

Something to look forward to: Being told your child or parent was radicalized by an AI bot into believing a bonkers antisemitic conspiracy theory

Re: GPT is not a truth-teller machine

Yes. It did what it was meant to do. However, we might want to consider what we want to build things to do. For example, if I built the Infinite Manufacturer, a machine which could make things from a command using only rubbish as input material, I'd have produced quite a successful invention. If I failed to think about what it should do when asked to please manufacture a devastating nerve gas, it might be a good thing to point that out to me so next time I can build either a machine that sanity checks what it's being requested to provide or a machine that doesn't know how to make weapons of mass destruction.

Re: Wibble Wobbles and Letting Cats Out of Bags

It depends where that training comes from. Maybe we could even get GPT3 to teach AMFM to use shorter sentences and that "methinks" is really not that common a word unless we're trying to sound old or whimsical. Then again, I've never figured out exactly why someone unleashed this on our peaceful comments section or why an actual person writes posts from it once a month or so.

Drone firm DJI promises 'local data mode' to fend off US government's mooted ban

Re: Flying sharks

Drones which don't have additional controller hardware but operate from a phone are almost certainly using WiFi. They might also have a Bluetooth connection, but it is shorter range so it's not likely (and that can be logged as well). For that, you can in fact tap the connection on the phone's end or with something in the middle. For drones with a separate controller, it's harder but you can still figure out some things. For example, you can figure out what the frequency is and see if you have to worry about someone listening to it. If it's a band used by cellular providers, then it could theoretically be using that to exfiltrate (and if it's not using the mobile networks but still using those frequencies you shouldn't be operating it), but most likely it's a higher frequency and the only way to listen to your commands, even for someone who does have the decryption keys, is to be near you.

You could test it by connecting both the drone itself and the phone controlling it to a network which logs all the packets. While a company which wants to collect could think up a sneaky way to hide data, it's a lot harder to communicate without an interested party seeing that it's happening. Unless they've decided to include a ridiculously expensive and pointless cellular connection circuit, they will either have to use your network or keep things local. It should be provable whether they've lied here.

Go Huawei, Android: Chinese telco biz claims it will spread Harmony OS for smartphone to devs come December

Re: “Others have tried and failed"

It's already a Chinese ecosystem. Android, minus Google's spyware, plus the popular Chinese apps. All the stuff they use can be maintained and has successfully been maintained for years. They don't need this in order to have a home-grown system.

Chinese nationalism is one thing. It's the wrong thing for this argument. It's the thing that convinces people that Huawei might really be the Chinese government's sigint system, because of course all companies were founded for that purpose entirely. It makes a false equivalence between Huawei and the Chinese state, and it ignores that there are other manufacturers of phones based in China. There are several. Huawei has the largest section of the market share, but if you combine numbers 2 and 3, they have more. Include all the smaller ones, and they dwarf it by hundreds of millions of devices. You can be a Chinese nationalist, want to avoid any foreign-made tech, and still buy an entirely Chinese phone (hardware, OS, apps, network) without Huawei being involved. Or you could buy a device where Huawei is a little involved but it still doesn't run Harmony. Unless Huawei manages to convince the Chinese that other companies based in Shenzhen and Shanghai are somehow foreign, they can't just ride the wave of nationalism for their OS to be a success.

Re: The biggest problem

That's exactly the point. All five of those examples are China-based. All compete with Huawei. This isn't a market where all the domestic players drift along in unity; they're constantly looking to improve upon their devices and increase their market share. And all five of them wouldn't want to adopt an operating system that gives a major market advantage to Huawei because Huawei has seen the code and they haven't. Chinese nationalism goes only so far. It will likely get the most popular Chinese apps ported to Harmony. It may convince people to buy Harmony phones even if the OS is worse than AOSP. It will not make all the other companies fall in line behind what is just another phone company. Huawei isn't the government, and the other phone manufacturers there are not slaves to what one company does.

Re: “Others have tried and failed"

That's far too generous to it. China is a more captive market, but there are lots of smartphone manufacturers there and they're not all Huawei. Huawei isn't making Harmony OS completely open for all of them to adopt; the parts that will be released won't comprise the whole thing. Do you really expect that, when they release this next year, several other phone manufacturers will immediately start licensing it and competing against the people who wrote it using the same software? They won't. Instead, they'll keep using what they used before: Android based on AOSP. Given that's what most Chinese customers are familiar with, that will still be a formidable competitor. It isn't a foregone conclusion that Harmony will lose to Android, but it certainly might. Thinking that Huawei owns the China market is remarkably similar and similarly incorrect as assuming that the Chinese government's international spying section and Huawei are the same place.

Re: The biggest problem

"There will almost certainly be some form of ABI for running Android apps with minimal additional overhead."

Uh, I really doubt that. They might have a few things they can do which increase compatibility, and their compiler will take the same set of languages, but they're ditching all the Android system APIs. If they're going to emulate it, they'll have to include a lot of duplicate APIs and implement what's effectively the thing they already have. Minimal overhead is tricky because we're layering system API calls on top of one another, but it's possible with concerted developer effort. If they do successfully implement this, there's no reason to develop for their OS, because someone could just develop for Android and run that. It also won't help in other markets, because they're not creating an alternative implementation of Google's GMS APIs.

China won't mandate Harmony OS on local devices either. If they do, Huawei's happy. Xiaomi, Oppo, Realme, ZTE, TCL, and everyone else is unhappy. Unless Huawei really does have a very close relationship with the government, close enough that the government will voluntarily kill most of the domestic competition, it's not going to happen. Harmony will have to compete on its own merits. We'll have to wait and see what those will be.

Unexpected risks of using Apple ID: 'Sign in with Apple' will be blocked for Epic Games

Re: More secure? Only maybe

I'm afraid I don't agree on either point. A site can get hacked in a variety of ways, including in a way that allows someone to provide a password and impersonate a user. Just because they originally didn't do so doesn't make the site any more secure unless the site requires third-party sign-in. If the site does require it, it can still be hacked in such a way that the information available to a user is stolen.

On the subject of nothing important being connected to such accounts, you might be surprised. You're correct (I really hope) that no banks or email providers let people do this. However, places which do have this option include places which process payments, collect names, addresses, and phone numbers, enable access to potentially-sensitive documents, or can be used to impersonate someone. A lot can be done with access to lower-level accounts.

Re: How very petty

There is no technical issue. Since Epic violated the agreement, Apple is cutting off all the services they used to provide to Epic. Some of that is going to affect Epic's customers. Apple knows that and accepted the consequences. Epic knew this would happen to them and affect their customers. They chose to take that risk. Who you blame for the pain to the customers is your choice. I can't even bother to make up my mind anymore.

More secure? Only maybe

"It can be more secure to use one or two identity providers run by top technology companies, rather than using separate logins for every internet service, since the likes of Google and Apple are likely to run more secure systems."

That is true, which is why it's so important not to reuse passwords. However, while your password is likely more secure when the big four are the only people who have it, here are some other things that can happen:

Privacy nightmare: Any time you want to log in to something, your provider knows where, when, and how. Including things they have nothing to do with. Do you trust them to have that information? If they ever do get hacked, all your information is neatly stored in one place.

Companies can take it down for you: If they feel like it, the authorization providers can cut off your account or the ability for places you use to use that sign in. In the former case, you lose the ability to log into anything. In the latter, just the specific place (that's this article). Either way, your access could be disabled by someone who isn't the place you're interacting with.

Single point of failure: If the service you're using has a technical issue, or your ISP or theirs has an issue, you could lose access to all your SSO abilities even though you don't have any problem accessing the thing you'd like to log into.

Openness to breach: If your account isn't well-protected, for instance because someone offered you the option to log in with another party but served you a spoofed page which you didn't catch, they could be able to log into other services as you. While all four of these companies offer multi-factor authentication and it's usually well-implemented, that doesn't mean that everyone has that turned on and configured securely. If they don't, this could be a lot like reusing a password.

Compare this with a password manager, and in each case the password manager will win. Use one.

I won't be ignored: Google to banish caller roulette with Verified Calls

Re: I'm trying to think how many unsolicited calls I've actually wanted

That's why my suggestion would include the ability to reject blocked caller ID (or omit it entirely). One interesting option is to be able to announce to the caller that blocked caller ID is not accepted so they can choose to show the number. You are only slightly correct about the phone companies being able to identify spoofed numbers. Often, the originating connection knows who is really calling and bills that person, but that doesn't necessarily mean that, by the time it gets to you, your phone provider knows who it is specifically. This variable is meaningless, however, because you can't really get a phone company to do anything about a report. If you call them today, they won't have much infrastructure for identifying or pursuing the scam, partially because, for connecting the call, they'll get paid a small amount. My suggestions would require them to do this and remove any possibility that they'd conveniently fail to identify the source. Any unwanted calls would have to come in clearly identifying their source, which means most criminal attempts would be stopped quickly and commercial bulk-calling could be more easily targeted by data protection authorities.

Re: This is pointless

There is a basic phone dialer as part of AOSP, and I've seen a lot of Android phones use that as the default. I think this one is a different, Google-specific dialer, and I imagine it's shipped on Google's phones. Whether it's routinely provided by other manufacturers I'm not sure, but if this is valuable enough to Google, they'll make it one of the required preinstallations for manufacturers using Play Services. Android users can, however, change the default app which receives calls to something more trustworthy.

Re: GDPR

Yes, they would have to add Google as a data processor and specify in their updated privacy notice that they're going to do it. It will definitely be specifically opt-in, an easy switch that isn't connected to anything else, just like people have to do with tracking cookies now. Now once the data protection authorities realize that nobody's doing that with tracking cookies, maybe we'll actually make progress and stop this idea only five or six years after it's implemented.

Re: the customer's number and reason for the call are deleted from Google's servers

No, I think it's the truth. No footnote needed. That information is in fact deleted. The minutes between sending it to you and deleting it permanently are just spent running it through a parser which adds relevant chunks to your advertising model.

There's another truth in the article. Some of us might feel doubt when we hear that "The advertising behemoth also insisted that it wouldn't share sensitive information about users with its business partners", but that's also entirely honest. It will not share any of that information with the partners. It will sell the ability to use but not view that information to the partners, entirely different.

Re: its clients might stop you from ignoring calls from numbers you don't recognise

I believe the intended meaning would better be expressed as "Its clients might be able to assure you that you would like to accept their call even though you don't recognize their number". However, there's another meaning, and Google might like to implement that one. That meaning would be clearly expressed as "Its clients might be able to use this to bypass existing restrictions and get their notifications into your face more often, rewarding Google for the privilege while irritating you".

Re: I'm trying to think how many unsolicited calls I've actually wanted

I tend to answer any calls that come in (assuming I'm free), known or unknown. Scammers find themselves subjected to whatever comes to mind, although most of the time it's automatic calls who just get silence until they hang up (I'm hoping that this costs them more). However, I have the luxury to do this because somehow scammers already don't call me very often (about twice a month). Maybe it has something to do with my efforts to irritate them, but it's probably more dumb luck.

What would be useful in this circumstance is a policy change and a technical one. The technical change is to verify calling numbers and prohibit number spoofing*. The policy change is to require a mechanism to report scams to phone companies, which would be required to investigate and terminate those who get too many requests**. Both of these policies could be implemented without much consequence, and they would likely make a large dent in unwanted calls.

*My suggestion would entirely eliminate the ability to spoof a number. Two modifications are possible. First, we could allow people to provide an alternate number that will be recognized as long as their calling number is also provided and verified. Second, we could allow a blank number which clients could explicitly accept or reject. If spoofing is really that important, I think those suggestions will provide any benefits I'm willing to accept.

**In order to deal with the risk of using faked scam notifications to attack a number, the policy would only require action if a verified call from the number was made in a short period of time preceding the notification. Perhaps there would be a noise level wherein an investigation is only required after three reported scams.

Open access journals are vanishing from the web, Internet Archive stands ready to fill in the gaps

It's not that there is a problem downloading a single PDF. There's a problem downloading ten thousand PDFs. I could download them in bulk, if I were paid to click each link, get the URL, send it to wget, yawn, and find the next link. However, nobody's going to do that. Sites can take steps to make it hard for a program to find their files. They can arrange never to have a full list of things, avoid serial numbers, track and block things that look like bots, captcha when they don't need to, include circular links, change their format twice a week, only spawn links with JavaScript, require an account and log it out every ten minutes with required 2FA to get back in, [editor's note, removed the next nineteen suggestions as we presume any reader is both bored of this and gets the point by now]. Any or all of this could make it very difficult to get a bot to crawl a site successfully and actually retrieve all the content. Some of these sites aren't doing it for a public purpose; they're not Wikipedia. They want people on the site giving them the opportunity to advertise, so they'll do their best to hold their content back even when it's not their content and someone else wrote it.

Re: OA publishing

Journals could still do that. People could pay them for copies of a journal where the journal's employees have read a lot of papers and republished those they view as meritorious. The journal becomes a service which provides their reviewing expertise and a smaller number of total articles to the reader, and the reader pays for that service. At the moment, they're failing to really do that and simultaneously demanding fees from everyone involved who is actually doing the work. There's your alternate suggestion.

A lot of research in academia is done at a place which at least pretends to be working for the common good, rather than a search for maximum profits; if they had profit on their mind, they might not publish the most interesting research. Yet there is a layer between researchers and the public (or other researchers), which takes advantage of this and reverses it.

Apple to Epic: Sue me? No, sue you, pal!

Re: Microsoft Has anyone else noticed...

No, not about those. The "careful" referred to desktop operating systems, where they have a monopoly. They've been careful not to do too much to competing desktop operating systems so the courts don't go after them again, because the courts would likely hold that they still have a monopoly. They don't have a monopoly in mobile OSes, or in code repositories, or in social media, or in job placement websites. Different markets, different levels of control, different restrictions. What's illegal is to use dominance in one market to either try to destroy competition in that market or obtain dominance in another market. Know this so you can argue on the facts.

AI in the enterprise: Prepare to be disappointed – oversold but under appreciated, it can help... just not too much

Re: Performant in the Enterprise

So the question is "Have people rebranded old things as AI"? Yes. Question answered. A pity that doesn't seem to be what the arguments in the articles are talking about, since they both agree that this has happened.

Maybe it's "Everything called AI is something old which has been rebranded"? Depending on your definition of "old", that's either an obvious yes, because every program is going to be based on things that were known to us a while ago, or an obvious no, because I can point to at least a couple tools we didn't have before but we now do.

Either way, if we're just arguing about whether AI is old, we're going to come up with obvious answers. I interpreted the spirit of the question as involving some level of "Is the stuff called AI of use compared to what was previously available", which would make the debate more worthwhile, but I've now seen at least four interpretations of what the question really asks so I haven't a clue now.

Re: Performant in the Enterprise

I disagree. For one thing, what is a "dumb algorithm"? Does "dumb" just exist in the subject to contrast with "intelligence"? Does it actively mean "stupid", which means what is called AI would be less useful? For that matter, what about "yesterday's"? Does it mean that, if anything new was created and called AI, then I have to disagree because that algorithm wasn't here yesterday? Or perhaps it means that it was based on things known to us already, making pretty much everything a thing of yesterday.

I think both sides are agreeing that AI is a nebulous term that has come to be applied to many different things, but the question asks us to decide what AI is and we only have two choices. I've seen things called "AI" which are old code and most certainly stupid. I've seen "AI" which is old code but it's rather useful. I've seen "AI" which uses new techniques and has shown dramatic improvement recently. I've seen "AI" which uses new techniques and is either going to be abandoned as useless after eating through a large budget or cause active damage to its unfortunate users. How am I supposed to assign all of this to one of two buckets when I don't even know where the boundary is?

The Honor MagicBook Pro looks nice, runs like a dream, and isn't too expensive either. What more could you want?

Re: Or you could be in a queue

Depends on the location and style of queues. I'm in an urban place so I see the typical types, but I've been informed by people who live in more open places of queues of cars, sometimes very long ones. If you have to sit in a car for two hours (this happened to a friend of mine), you can type on a laptop. Especially if you're not the one driving.

Re: New requirements / brandname

Probably. It depends on repairability, compatibility with existing docks, and a reliability calculation that might not yet be available, but otherwise it's just a different model. Companies already routinely consider at least five brands, so adding another one shouldn't be that difficult.

Re: Gaming...

A cursory check says probably not. Thunderbolt is more an Intel thing. AMD processors can support it, but usually only with one of only a few boards, and all the ones I found are for desktops. This laptop's may be customized to support it, but more likely they haven't considered it as it doesn't appear in marketing for the device.

Re: Decimated

I'm afraid you may have shot your argument in the foot there. You said:

"Are you aware some words have more than one meaning?"

Yes, they seem to be. The original argument about decimate only applied to one of the meanings, and they proved that there are additional meanings which were used in this situation. You have only proved that the original meaning is still one of the options, not that it is the only option. By asking that question, I think you are also admitting the validity of their definitions, and thus the article's usage.

Re: Decimated

Deci does mean one tenth, but that doesn't necessarily mean that any word using the root means to reduce by one tenth. It could also mean to reduce to one tenth, to reduce by tenths until the desired outcome, to divide into ten even sections without reducing any of them, or any other mathematical operation you want to create where 0.1 is an important factor.

Re: How much does it weigh?

Businesses want that, but personal machines often are purchased with different requirements in mind. For one thing, you don't need a big screen or keyboard if you're going to be using it as a desktop with a battery backup, and in fact size is probably not helpful as it makes it harder to put the computer away while using the full-sized peripherals. Meanwhile, people still have a need for a laptop which is portable and runs for long enough because there are times when we have to wait elsewhere. Parents, for example, may need to wait for their children and may wish to be productive while doing so. Or you could be in a queue at somewhere which has a long wait because of pandemic restrictions. For use cases like this, battery life is quite important as are the quality and size of the internal display and keyboard.

The Wrath of Amazon: JEDI wars rage on after US Department of Defense affirms Microsoft contract

Re: Was this the contract that was originally awarded to AWS?

No, the article describes in more detail, but the course was basically this:

Contract created by department, bids requested -> Oracle's bid to run part rejected as the provider needs to run all of it -> Google decides to drop out -> Amazon and Microsoft submit bids -> Microsoft's bid accepted -> Amazon sues saying Microsoft's is invalid -> Oracle sues saying "we want money and we're unhappy we didn't get some" -> Amazon wins a preliminary case -> Oracle eventually loses theirs -> Amazon loses a case -> Amazon wins a case -> department says they still like Microsoft -> Amazon doesn't like to hear that, tries again -> you are here.

Expect that this will end soon, maybe 2027 or so.

Amiga Fast File System makes minor comeback in new Linux kernel

"Fast forward 30 *years* and Windows Explorer has finally got "native" support for reading/writing ZIP files. (But no other compressed formats.)"

I remember that already being there by the days of Windows XP, so we could just fast forward ten years. Then again, the way that that is implemented isn't particularly useful; it's just the same interface to view files but it doesn't make archive handling transparent to an application. Fortunately there are libraries like the ones designed for 7zip which can provide a common interface to various compressed files which programs can use to implement better support inside them.

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Re: All Employee Emails

My problem isn't all-employee emails, but rather being added to too many groups. There's a group I'm in which is rather small, but we support a variety of things. The problem is that I support about two of them, so I'd not be able to help with most requests. We created multiple email lists so users could ask only those people most likely to know about the thing, but a lot of users don't appear to be sending their requests to these specific mails. Instead, they find the larger all-team address and send their request there. I can't ignore that group because some things that do apply to all of us get sent there but also because the requests for those few things I do support are going there. Still, about 90% of the mails that are sent to that group are useless.

Apple commits to support human rights - 'We believe in the critical importance of an open society'*

Re: Engagement

"increasingly a thing now"? "not a good look"? "These are not the phrases of an expert."

Actually, they are. While that post may not have come from an expert, experts use those phrases with frequency. "Increasingly a thing now" is a quick and informal way of saying "is a policy which has been adopted with increasing frequency by a variety of participants". "Not a good look" is a quick and informal way of saying "even if the decision is in line with the ideals of the institution, it runs contrary to the ideals of an important section of the public. Continuing to pursue the current course may result in a negative reaction by the public which may carry with it additional consequences".

But also, who cares ["What relevance does the phrasing have to the discussion"]? This is an internet forum. We state our opinions here. This is not limited to experts and there are nonexperts here. We also write informally to get our point across. Do you have any comments about the opinion stated in that point, or do you simply want to point out the use of an informal expression on an informal forum because you aren't able to refute the original point on its merits?