Posts by doublelayer

You're not imagining it. Amazon and AWS want to hire all your friends, enemies, and everyone in between

Re: "I don't know how much AWS gives back to the ecosystem"

What did you say about the water when you put it out there? If you explicitly said that anyone could take as much as they liked for any reason, commercial or not, then it's an act you expressly allowed. It's fine to be annoyed at someone who uses something you made without paying you, but if you want to prevent it, you need to factor that in when you license it. The open source licenses explicitly give people rights which decrease your ability to make money just by selling the software. If you don't want companies to make money off your software without paying you, then by all means make your license free for noncommercial use; you won't be the first and I'll be entirely behind you. Just don't make it something else then act all surprised when people do what you said they could.

Re: "Open Source software was never meant to be used the way AWS use it"

"Why GPL didn't make a provision stating that if you rent the use of code to others, or anyway use it commercially, you have to publish your changes as well?"

Because they didn't envision a world where code is run for users rather than sold to them. However, that change would not fix the Amazon payment situation. Amazon already did release their changes. They just made money from the use of it and weren't generous about giving back financially as well as with code.

Re: "I don't know how much AWS gives back to the ecosystem"

"Rent seeking? Are you saying it's unreasonable for Amazon to throw a few coins into a few hats to support all that open source software they copy and paste wholesale and make billions from?"

No, I'm saying I don't agree with someone who demands it when they chose an open source license. Just as I don't agree with someone who makes something GPL and then complains that they can't make it noncommercial use only. You choose your license and it gives others freedoms, including the freedom not to pay you. It's reasonable to be unhappy about this and to complain vociferously, but to unilaterally change the license terms is something they have the right to do but I don't like.

Re: "I don't know how much AWS gives back to the ecosystem"

Not to praise AWS here, but if you're talking about Elastic,, that's not exactly the way their decision got made. They didn't like the fact that open source means you're allowed to use it for free. I get why someone at Elastic might be annoyed at AWS for making use of something that was given away, but that's part of the calculation when you use a license which effectively says "no support and you can use it without limitation". AWS didn't pay them very much, but they did upstream patches. Elastic wanted to rent-seek on their code and switched the license, and AWS chose to use the freedoms they were given. When you consider that Elastic got assistance from many external developers and didn't pay them for that, you can see why not everybody is on Elastic's side.

Hijacked, rampaging infrastructure will kill humans by 2025 – Gartner

Can I get this job

I'm wondering how I can get the job where I say what I think will happen and then people report on it and presumably somebody pays me for that. I think that people will try to use technology to cause harm, like has already been done by attacks on critical infrastructure. That's not a surprise to me. As wars start, attacks designed to cause inconvenience to civilians should be expected, and inconvenience to everybody almost certainly also means significant negative consequences for a subset (E.G. those who happened to be in medical distress during an electrical blackout). This should be prevented by rigorous security procedures, at least in line with the severity of consequences of a successful attack. How much for this prediction, calling all buyers?

In a complete non-surprise, Mozilla hammers final nail in FTP's coffin by removing it from Firefox

Re: True

If you have a particularly determined MITM attacker, they'll check whether you read the hashes of the file you're downloading and switch them for the hashes of the file they're sending. I admit that's not a very likely event, but if they're already prepared to modify your download, that is a way to bypass your hash check.

A larger risk is people who don't know to check for integrity or who are lazy enough that they don't, in which case there could be a security risk. Not in my opinion a strong one, but strong enough that I'll give users an encrypted method to download things.

Re: Fine advice, but not relevant to the article or browser

That is unfortunate, and as you probably already determined, I don't really like this. Even so, it doesn't change my original point. If the web browser is displaying a document which is effectively an application, then someone else can with great ease implement an SSH client that runs on it. There is still no reason for that to be integrated into the browser.

Re: Cleanliness is next to godliness

I don't think it ever supported uploads over FTP. I think that was just for downloading files or browsing the directory tree. FTP clients exist for that purpose, and they'll probably do it better than a browser does.

Re: Fine advice, but not relevant to the article or browser

"And yes, they should have added support for sftp/scp/ssh to the browsers decades ago."

Why should they do anything like that? SSH is a control protocol, which has very little to do with browsers. Why should a browser do the job of an SSH client when you can go get an SSH client? At least with FTP, the browser's job of downloading files is part of what FTP is for. Similarly, I don't think a browser should implement the uploading features of an SCP/FTP client, because that's not its purpose.

A browser, to me, is a tool for getting files over certain protocols and displaying them to the user, and shouldn't try to do much more than that. Opinions vary on what documents a browser should display (run scripts in them, have a PDF viewer in them, etc), but I would hope that we don't also have to shove every other kind of program into that.

Ad tech ruined the web – and PDF files are here to save it, allegedly

Re: re-sizing and re-wrapping text

"In fact, for most purposes an editable form should just be a text document with spaces to fill in stuff."

No, it shouldn't. Unless you're processing everything manually. Having a HTML-based form lets you get the contents of boxes without having to do any parsing and insulates you from whatever people might have done to the surrounding text. A text form is fine if you want to handle it that way, but nothing is wrong with a more common solution that's been supported for decades.

"With a special place to be reserved in Hell for the writers of anything with compulsory fields unless said information is of absolute necessity"

No problem with that either. They have to put something in fields which you want because it's your form. If you don't want to provide that information, you can probably just put in junk. If you don't like a form which requires you to enter an email to send them information, then don't send them information; they're obviously not interested in anonymous input.

Re: Yes, but let's miss the point and argue about trifles

These discussions aren't as pointless as you think. We all agree that ads are a nightmare, probably useless, and that we'd be happier without them. Well, probably some people don't, but I think most of us here do and I'm prepared to skip the people who don't for now. The problem is what we do about this belief above the ad blocking systems we have running. The stated solution in this case is PDF, which isn't really a good solution because, if it was used by others, ads could be integrated in it as well through JS integration. This guy has simply decided not to put in any ads, which is great, but he could have used lots of formats to do that.

Since many options are available, it's worth discussing what format is optimal. Let's say I wanted to kill adtech so I decided to send you all my pages as image files of the rendered text, and to prevent possible bugs in decompression software, in an uncompressed format. That does technically solve the problem of active code in documents--you're not getting any scripting in a raw array of pixels. However, that's a terrible solution and you should tell me that before I waste my time on it. PDF is not that bad, but it also has problems that make its use suboptimal in this case. Hence it is worth discussing what would be best for a format without advertising or tracking.

Re: There's a lot of truth in what he says....

His complaints are true, and his reaction doesn't do anything about it. You can write very ugly pages with HTML, you can have lots of ads and trackers, it makes a lot of the internet a pain. His solution, however, is just not to do that, which could be done as easily with clean HTML as with PDF (better in my opinion). It doesn't change the calculations of the ad-supported business model, nor does it really fix problems. Not only that, but he also has to use some HTML so users can find the PDFs; they do hypertext badly. The complaints aren't original, and the solution isn't an efficient way to resolve any of them.

Re: re-sizing and re-wrapping text

This implies that feedback forms are necessarily wrong. I don't have them on most of my pages mostly because I don't want to deal with the readers' feedback, but if someone does want to give that ability, why should they be limited to writing an email address for someone to copy and paste over? It can be done without JS, it has been done for as long as the web was a thing, it doesn't prevent archiving, so what's the major problem with it?

Re: re-sizing and re-wrapping text

"BUT, if you don't allow scripting, how are you going to do"

"slippy maps (Google Maps, OSM, etc)?": Well, you could have a client program which you download and run so you know what is running what code, but at some point you either have to let a complex program run on a browser or not.

"Editable forms?"

With the HTML tags form, input, etc. They've been there since 1990. That's what JS pages use too, they've just got extra junk around them.

"Spell checking?": Your browser does that. It sees a texttarea tag and uses its local spellchecker on it. It works pretty well especially because you control the dictionary and it doesn't have to send the typed text to a remote server to check against their dictionary. Most sites where you see spellcheck in action are doing that. Try turning off scripting on this page and writing some misspelled words in the box and I'm guessing it will be the same. It certainly is for me.

Ubuntu on a phone, anyone? UBports reaches 18th stable update, but it's still based on 16.04

Re: Linux phone

You can get one of those. A few devices out there support a straight Linux OS without any Android additions. The problem with them has been that they're not polished for nontechnical use; some software is beta quality and requires you to enter command line commands in order to do some things. From your requirements, I'm guessing that's not going to be a problem for you. Calling from bash should be pretty easy with it.

Windows 11: What we like and don't like about Microsoft's operating system so far

Re: Can't they just drop the GUI and boot to powershell

Oh no, please don't even say that.

Powershell:

get-agreementstatus /false | convert-touseful /source-command get-agreementstatus | send-to /site theregister.com /user "MikeLivingstone"

delete-memory /force

Amnesty International and French media protection org claim massive misuse of NSO spyware

Re: NSO itself already faces a lawsuit from Facebook...

And they deny that though it's Facebook, so it'd be entirely in character. Doesn't change my view though. I'm hoping that Facebook manage to trample NSO out of existence. If they could do that by spending massive amounts of money causing them to crash slightly afterward, that's just a bonus.

Teen turned away from roller rink after AI wrongly identifies her as banned troublemaker

Re: exhibit ingrained racist assumptions in the design

At some point, laziness is no excuse. Take a related thing. If I install equipment which is faulty and is likely to kill the people who use it, but I don't know that I've done so, that's negligence. Still a crime, but a lesser one. If I know that it's likely to kill but I leave it up, I've committed a larger crime. A thing which is known to cause injustice and is left in place is at least tacit acceptance of those consequences, especially when the alternative, removing the system, is such a cheap and easy action to take.

Re: "If" - Context

It all depends on the size and quality of training data and the effort of the developers. If you start with a nonrepresentative sample that hasn't been cleaned up, pump it through the training process until the percentages are high, then sell the result, you'll get something inaccurate most of the time. If you're selling a product though, the number of photos and high test scores are all you're quoting, so many companies do that.

With rigorous attention to detail by data scientists and machine learning experts, you could get something which is significantly better. However, it would be a lot more expensive and it would still be wrong often due to unavoidable problems like poor cameras. At this rate, most people have either concluded that they don't want to do something that will never be even close to acceptable or that, if they're going to be inaccurate anyway, no use spending a lot of time trying to improve. And there we are today.

Re: exhibit ingrained racist assumptions in the design

"Physics isn't racist, it's simply physics."

Sort of. Physics isn't racist and nor are these cameras racist; they have no ability to change what they were programmed to do. Two things in this situation are racist though. First is the AI algorithms which have been inappropriately trained such that they're more likely to be incorrect about certain groups. That's not the program's fault as it's just performing mathematical operations, but it is a fundamental inaccuracy. The larger thing, however, is the use of all this stuff. If you use a camera you know won't capture people correctly and feed that information into a model which you know won't judge people correctly, that's a racist act. You are using tools which have the result of creating unjust circumstances, whether that was the explicit goal or not.

How to keep your enterprise up to date by deploying the very latest malware

Re: Been there - on a Nuclear Power Plant

Not only did this not cause damage, but it is designed to prevent damage. Had that been the actual reactor, the company would have been very angry. Because the reactor melted down? No, because it failed safe and the company would lose money. That feature is designed specifically so a "Jerry" or someone doing the same deliberately can not cause a safety failure.

Microsoft, Google, Citizen Lab blow lid off zero-day bug-exploiting spyware sold to governments

That's not how that works. They need to fix the code, but using a security hole is still illegal. Failing to lock your door means you're more likely to have your stuff stolen and you shouldn't do it, but it's still robbery if it happens. Facebook's failure to produce entirely bugproof software doesn't in any way justify the malicious use of those bugs.

Re: Country of origin

If you get found out, that's a serious crime and you go to the prison the government concerned thinks you'll dislike the most as an example to the others doing it. In reality, you get ten bitcoin. A zero day is a zero day because nobody's got good information about who knows about it, so it's easy to tell someone about it without generating proof that you did so. Not only could they have found out about it themselves, but it will take long enough for someone to find out that they have it that, when that does happen, the exploit isn't useful anymore.

Laundering the crypto without getting found out and landing in the first sentence is an exercise for people who like committing crimes.

Because the people they've seen the malware used against are definitely terrorist material, aren't they? Stuff like this gets sold to governments which don't value their citizens' rights (or anybody else's for that matter). It's not a law enforcement tool. It's a tool of dictatorship, which can be proven by watching who ends up a victim of it.

Windows 10 to hang on for five more years with 21H2 update

Re: okay...

I don't think that's correct about Windows or Linux. There's just 10 or 11 for Windows, and you spend about ten minutes deciding what license you need. For Linux, there are plenty of options to choose from, but you can decide on one and just stick with it. If you like Ubuntu, for example, you can probably bet on it sticking around for a long time. For Apple, I would say things are similarly easy except I don't understand your complaints. You choose a machine and run their OS, updating it every year unless you have something that doesn't update quickly. In any case, it's not a lot of work unless you want to really optimize things by repeatedly changing to something marginally better. If you want to pick something and not change it, you will probably be fine with a variety of options.

The lights go off, broadband drops out, the TV freezes … and nobody knows why (spooky music)

Re: What is this meter thing and cut-off valve all about??

"My water comes out of a hole in the ground from a natural spring. Goes through my house and back in to the ground."

And does anything clean it before you drink it? Do you run your own filters?

"Percolates through the field and right back down the hill. Zero waste."

And do you filter the waste water before releasing it? Because not all the things that end up in waste water will be appreciated by the plants growing on the field, let alone someone receiving the excess.

"It sounds like the government can shut off your water and use that to coerce you."

Er ... I suppose they could. Of course if I was the government and wanted to coerce you, I'd use somebody from the military. Unless everything else you do is also independent to your house, water's not the only thing that could get cut off.

Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

Re: Shock

That's true, but just as phones went from luxury to convenience to requirement, mobile phones and smartphones are following that same curve. I would say that mobile phones are pretty close to required now, as people expect that they'll usually be able to reach you even if you're not at home and also that you can send and receive text messages. Smartphones aren't there yet because you still can do most things people expect if you can receive SMS and standard calls, but those are easily into convenience and I predict that they too will become effectively required.

The same things apply in other types of services. For finance, banks were once an option, and now for most positions, the option of getting paid in cash isn't available so you need one. Payment cards went from unknown to optional and now we're seeing more businesses rejecting cash payments. I don't like that last change, but that won't prevent it.

Re: Attempting real privacy while self-promoting is difficult.

That depends. You can find some information about me if you do research because I published who I worked for. I did that because other employers seem to be confused if they can't find it. That doesn't prevent other aspects of my life from being private. I didn't publish my browsing history, my financial details, or my communications. I don't post photos of myself or places I go. Privacy can mean a lot of different things, and some information can be public without all of it being so.

Re: Shock

"So you have to pay for these services (which are not required to use) in some way or other."

That's simplistic or just wrong. A lot of services are effectively required even though we once did without them. Yes, at one point there were no telephones, then they were luxuries. But try having no telephone now and you'll find some things won't work. Getting jobs, for example, can be difficult if they can't contact you. Phone may die and be replaced by email, but if you want to have neither phone nor email, you'll have trouble getting employed. It's subjective how inconvenient a lack of something can be before it becomes a requirement, but there are many things quite high on the inconvenience scale which are privacy risks.

BOFH: But soft! What light through yonder filing cabinet breaks?

A better method, at least as temperatures decrease, is to use the heating for building heat and make the building services budget pay for the power. Because that would entail reducing the power usage on the other departments, they'll have to add some more capacity so finance doesn't see an anomaly in their own bill. Using desktops to mine is even less efficient, but if that's what needs to be done to keep the budget in reasonable bounds, who are we to complain? Also it's probably not safe to complain.

The coming of Wi-Fi 6 does not mean it's time to ditch your cabled LAN. Here's why

Re: What really grinds my gears.

Thank you. This clarified a lot for me. I remain opposed, but now that I know what you suggest, it makes more sense.

"What I know is that the unregulated 2.4GHz non-ISM use is a hot mess in saturated environments because people simply believe that more power (transmitter output) and more APs is more better."

That's part of it, but the major part in my experience is that there isn't very much of it. It has 14 overlapping channels of which the U.S. disallows 3, so it's not ideal for the use. It's not the user's fault that, decades ago, someone gave a relatively small band for unlicensed use. The larger 5 GHz band did a lot to improve this, and there has already been a third new band created for it.

This is, to me, the only problem that can be solved. If you didn't expand the bandwidth but you had an exam as you've described, I predict that you'd see either nobody following the restrictions or everybody using those bands and having the same level of collisions as before. If a single licensed user can set up an access point for other unlicensed users to connect to, then the ISP-supplied equipment, which represents a lot of user equipment, could be installed by licensed technicians, meaning you'd still have the same number of access points and they'd still have the positioning and contention problems. Your only hope is that basically nobody can use the band, but that only helps the few people who get licenses.

"How does one resolve that in an unlicensed space today?"

I abandoned 2.4 GHz in areas where a lot of other users were on it. I configured access points to only have 5 GHz signals running by default. Devices which couldn't support 5 GHz could still be accommodated by temporarily enabling a usually disabled network, but those are less common now. Not an ideal solution for everywhere, but fortunately I'm not a network admin.

Re: What really grinds my gears.

"Amateur space cannot be used for commercial purposes, period. Furthermore, amateur space is not "assigned" to any one licensee."

And good things those are. The bands which are assigned to a single licensee are operated by businesses which sell that access to the public. Allocating more space for a private user's ownership when we have a suitable public space in which that user can already operate is not benefiting anyone. If you have WiFi crowding problems, then you can use a wire or you can expand into the new frequencies allocated for it. 5 GHz is significantly larger than 2.4 GHz was, and we now have new bands for version 6. This doesn't solve all your problems, but it's not the responsibility of spectrum regulators to solve everything for you by taking things away from the rest of the public.

Re: What really grinds my gears.

You have suggested the plan for a restricted WiFi band. That means that you have an idea about who should be permitted to use it. I'm not asking you for the exact writing of the exams, but for its general intent. What things would you tell the person writing the exam? How would you establish whether a given person is deserving or not.

This is your idea. You proposed that a restriction be in place. You have to have some idea about who gets access, and even if that's just a baseline of some things that they'd be required to do, it would help elucidate your point. Without that, I only have your vague statements about the "unwashed masses", a phrase which I must tell you isn't helping your point in my mind. It sounds as if you're saying "There should be some people with the special access and I can only tell you that I'm one of them". So far, I have heard no beneficial result from such a plan other than you would get private space and you want it. All this seems to do is to take even more bandwidth from what you've admitted is an overcrowded band for the benefit of an elite class which you can't even identify. I'll vote against.

Re: With 5G, there's no longer "work" or "home" or "mobile"

Using any wireless connection opens up the risk of eavesdropping, but if you let users use WiFi, that's already a risk you have to handle. In fact, if you let your users use a wired connection that's not the business network, you already could have that problem given the places where traffic could be captured. This is a known problem. Acceptable solutions are not allowing any external networks, allowing external networks only with a secure layer like a VPN on top, or deciding you know the risks and you'll take them. Changing from home ethernet to mobile doesn't change the calculation there, as by the time you got to allowing home network you probably needed an encrypted connection already.

Re: What really grinds my gears.

"An exam and enforcement, to answer points one and three, respectively."

Slow down. That doesn't answer point 1. What is on the exam? Only people who can answer electrical engineering questions about radio equipment get their private WiFi? That's like the amateur exam. In that case, there are already amateur bands, use those. I get that you'd have a mechanism for proving whatever it is you're proving. I want to know what the qualifications would be.

Re: This months of work from home showed too....

"Long term I expect WiFi and LTE to converge."

I don't know exactly what you mean by this, but in most of the possibilities which come to mind, I don't expect that nor would I want it. The main reason that merging is impractical is that they're run by different people and connect to different networks. I can't just start setting up my own LTE equipment without licensing it, and if I did, I'd have a nightmare of access control. LTE and 5G standards are great for their purpose, namely having a few open internet networks for large area coverage. WiFi is great for its purpose: having a radio connection option for an existing network. Having LTE which connects through a private network is a recipe for never being sure whose watching your data or whether you're on the secure one.

As for the standards themselves, there's a lot more similarity, but this doesn't mean merging makes sense either. What does make sense is sharing stuff between standards, which can already happen. If WiFi comes up with an interesting solution to a radio communication problem, I have no doubt the next 6G standard will implement or enhance it. However, I don't think they'll ever change the two standards for public and private approach.

Re: What really grinds my gears.

"I kinda wish that that there could be a WIFI equivalent to GMRS (at least here in the US, it requires a license to use)."

Tell me, if you were placed in control of the regulator and implemented this, how would you set it up? Specifically:

1. What does a user need to do to prove they deserve a license?

2. How do you, if at all, get device manufacturers to keep that band in their products rather than just drop it and only support the unlicensed ones?

3. How if at all do you restrict people from operating on licensed WiFi bands if they don't have a license?

Point 1 is the most important to me. I can't really think of anything you would do to deserve the license over others. "Educated WiFi users" is not a category that makes much sense to me, and it seems like you're just paying for the privilege of a private band, which seems to have no public good at all since there is limited capacity in that area. I get that it's better for you, but I don't know why the regulations should be changed for that.

Facial-recognition technology gets a smack in the chops from civil rights campaigners

"the only way evidence can be used to support a conviction is if that evidence supports that conviction. If they didn't do the crime, the evidence didn't support the conviction, some other factor - *human* factors - perverted the process."

I tell the court that the defendant was matched with images believed to be of the perpetrator, and the algorithm concludes that they match with a confidence level of 99.4982%. This was trained on a database of seven million photos of human faces. A nontechnical juror hears these impressive numbers and assumes the computer must know what it's doing to produce such a precise number and since it had such a large dataset. The juror is not familiar with the technology and doesn't hear the facts that make this less trustworthy, namely these:

1. The seven million photos were stolen off social media, meaning they were taken on very different cameras, subject to intentional and unintentional editing, and are of better-targeted at the subjects' faces.

2. The images were biased toward one ethnicity causing less accuracy on those with different facial features.

3. The software is using machine learning which can't really provide more information about how it concluded various things.

4. The program hasn't been rigorously tested on extra information because that would require retraining which is costly.

5. Machine learning models always produce really precise numbers.

6. Jurors tend not to know how easy it is to do machine learning wrong.

There are a lot of human factors there, but it's still the fault of the technology usage and can be solved by not allowing the flawed technology to be used as evidence (or at all).

"And once again: Is it worse than what has basically always been there?"

Yes. It is very much worse. Mostly because the computer has a lot less data. If you put someone in a line, the person can take their time looking at some people and try to be honest. No guarantee, but they can do it. The computer is attempting to do the same from a moving crowd, possibly getting only a few frames with moving subjects in them, and all without the instinctual visual knowledge about human faces that is learned to some extent from infancy by all humans with functioning visual organs. It's been tried, repeatedly, by different people in many places. It doesn't work.

Hong Kong working to share its digital IDs with mainland China

Re: Bejing is just the Federal government

Hong Kong is not supposed to be entirely subservient to China's central government. It is not supposed to be "just another province". This is not an opinion. There is an agreement by China and the UK which specifies that it's not supposed to be. China has given it the status of "special autonomous region" in recognition of this. And to be fair to Beijing, they used to adhere at least somewhat to that agreement.

Of course we object to China's repression of Hong Kong. I object to China's repression of anybody, but Hong Kong is a clear example of why. The people of Hong Kong were given no control over their politics, either by the UK or China, and they clearly want it. When they object to being part of a country which doesn't respect their rights, I entirely understand why and sympathize with it.

"what happened in Spain with the Catalans being the poster child for dumb and pointless repression -- its not as if the Catalans were going to go anywhere, they're stuck in the EU"

You will find that many do not support Spain's actions after the vote for independence. I would also add that, as undemocratic as those actions were, it involved a lot more justice than China's actions in Hong Kong let alone anywhere else they operate.

"As for Hong Kong's border regime its in the same kind of situation as Northern Ireland is with the UK/EU -- culturally its in one country but physically and practically its in another. Only time will fix this."

No, I can think of a few other things that could fix it. Independence could fix it. Northern Ireland had a chance to become independent and chose not to. They could have that choice again if they have changed their mind. Hong Kong was never given that right and I don't expect China to offer it now. Autonomy could also fix it. The UK doesn't force Northern Irish people to act more British, but mainland China does have policies intending on making culturally-distinct areas change to conform more, which hasn't been very popular among the general population.

I think that's 3.6% in the first six months, later increasing to 16%. Hong Kong therefore has greater uptake at six months. I don't think they'll have any problem increasing the number--riot control equipment can do wonders when you want people to do things.

ZTE Axon 30 Ultra: Strong effort from an entity-lister, but your tiny child hands may struggle

Re: Chinese Boogyman

I don't think the people commenting here are either denying the existence of or condoning China's human rights abuses. What I see them doing is questioning the accuracy of the claims of malware-laden hardware.

In addition, you will find it hard to purchase certain types of devices without paying some company in a country which has a repressive government. That's not an argument for ZTE, and their history of not updating devices and including bloatware on at least some of them means I'm unlikely to buy from them even if they release a phone instead of a window. If you know of a good way to ensure that electronics aren't built in a repressive country, I'm interested. Until then, it's infeasible to blocklist everything from China and still expect to have equipment.

It has 64 million points of color on the inside surface to give you a wonderful picture from the equally-sized sensor underneath it. Unfortunately, those points make the lens no longer transparent, but you are guaranteed to get that one nice picture no matter how you point the camera.

I wanted to include a second joke here, so I tried to find a unit whose symbol is P. Do we really not have any scientific units doing so? I thought we had used up most of the Latin letters for that purpose.

Report: 83% of UK software engineers suffer burnout, COVID-19 made it worse

Re: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

Under that interpretation, it basically doesn't say anything. I could reverse each line and it would mean about the same. Document the code, but don't let it interfere with you getting it working. Have a contract, but don't let that prevent communication. Have a plan, but don't be rigid. If you assume that both things are necessary, then you get a message that says nothing.

From what they've said and how I've seen it applied, I think they, or at least a lot of them, really did mean to reduce the effort spent on documentation and planning. Even if they didn't, it happened. It's bad that it happened. A balance is needed, and whether they didn't care or those who read it didn't interpret their commands correctly, the result can negatively affect both the customers and the developers. I don't have to blame them for this when a lot of blame can go to management and that's more fun, but neither will I laud their manifesto when it has had such a detrimental result.

Re: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

The manifesto is indeed very different from its application, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's good. Here are a few parts of it which I have seen go badly:

Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

Sorry for the repetition, now I have to take some separately.

"Working software over comprehensive documentation": Yeah, everybody seems to love this. You know what happens? I have to be your comprehensive documentation when people email the developers asking for help (I don't know if not having any support staff is part of the company's agile plan or just something they do). I'm not calling for a weighty manual documenting every line or giving a paragraph on each option, but document what it does and how and keep that up to date. If the software works and nobody other than the devs knows how to use it, it's about as good as it having a bunch of bugs.

"Customer collaboration over contract negotiation": If you have a good customer, of course. If you don't, get that away from me. A bad customer can ask for lots of things that aren't going to work. Whether that's just adding useless features, complex extra requirements at the last minute, or even asking for the impossible, it always happens when you've already done the core stuff. The requirements should be set forth at the beginning, so you can decide whether you can do them. Asking for some minor changes halfway through is fine. Asking for a major feature halfway through is painful but sometimes there's a valid reason. Asking for an overhaul about 90% of the way through is something from which the devs need insulation. Which brings us to

"Responding to change over following a plan": Again, it depends what the change is. Maybe something previously required isn't needed but a new thing is. Respond to that change. Maybe someone had a good idea and you can implement it without pushing out other important things. You can respond there too. But in general, you should have planned for most of the likely changes and you should follow that plan. In that case, you don't have to respond to change every day, meaning you can give the appropriate consideration every time an important change happens. The way management usually messes this one up is to consider anything they decide to be a change to which the developers need to respond. They started caring about something on Monday, so now the devs have to drop everything for it. On Tuesday they don't think it's as critical as they used to, so now it needs to be dropped again. That attitude is appropriate only for bugs which have been newly discovered or found to be more damaging than previously thought. Otherwise, it's a method of moving very fast and going nowhere.

Re: "the same old type of business calling themselves Agile"

"For companies, there should be a certification to call oneself Agile. Sorting the wheat from the chaff."

I'd like to see some suggestions on how they'd do that. The main problem is that nobody knows what "agile" is. I've theoretically been "agile" for a while. It's not much different than not being agile. It comes with a variety of words which replaced other words and means the same. A meeting is now a standup meeting. Sometimes they're really short. Sometimes it's an hour long and I'm wondering whether I can fall asleep. Sometimes it's an hour long because we actually have an hour's worth of stuff that needs discussion.

To me, any business is going to write the code using the internal habits and culture. Announcing that they'll be doing this in an agile way just tells me what the various things will be called. It doesn't mean that anything is different for the people doing the work, and it certainly doesn't mean anything useful to preventing burnout. An agile company can still demand that someone write something impossible, stay up late to do it, or handle support requests without assistance. A non-agile company can still look at what their workers are feeling and try to prevent things. This is up to managers paying attention to the needs and status of their workers; we're all doomed.

Huh, it's as if something happened that made people not like CentOS so much

Re: Too much choice?

There is Arch's Pacman which now retrieves ZST archives (a fun thing to find out if you ever try to update an old Arch image which lacks the ZST decompressor which is of course available as a ZST archive). There are a few package managers which exist primarily for embedded, including OPKG which has its own format. Although apt/yum and deb/rpm are the most common, there are several alternatives in modern use.

It had to happen: Microsoft's cloudy Windows 365 desktops are due to land next month

No, a VM of Windows was that and it worked fine. People who run Windows on a physical computer either prefer it that way or need something a Windows VM can't do, such as interface with hardware directly. There's nothing this does that a VM couldn't do.

Re: Umm...

"Am I missing the USP (for the customer, not MS) here?"

Well, sort of but it's not a very big one. The theory is that, in March of 2020 when everybody was being sent home, some IT people had a conversation something like this:

IT1: Everybody here was on desktops because they were cheaper five years ago. What can we do to keep them connected now?

IT2: Buy laptops?

IT1: We don't have the budget for that.

IT2: Have the users come in and take the desktops home with them?

IT1: They might not be able to store them and all the peripherals. Also it would be convenient if we didn't have to deal with all that physical security.

IT2: Have them remote in from something cheap?

IT1: That's a larger support cost if we send a bunch of people something like a Raspberry Pi and they've never seen Linux before.

IT2: Well, I'm out of options.

IT1: You know what would be convenient? Having something where the real computer runs on servers elsewhere and the users connect to that, assuming nobody ever runs into connection issues. That solves the physical security issue without having to keep a bunch of offices with desktops in it.

IT2: We can do that on our servers. Running VMs is possible.

IT1: It would be better if Microsoft did it.

IT2: No problem. I'll just call them and give them the idea, then activate this time freeze device and we can continue our conversation in sixteen months when everyone has gone with one of the other solutions already.

Had they done this in 2019, people would have used it. By now, most perspective users have figured out some other way to deal with the problem.

Samsung Galaxy A52 5G: Sub-$600 midranger makes premium phones feel frivolous

Re: Spook Proof?

All of that is supposition. You assume Samsung installs U.S. spyware. You assume Huawei doesn't install U.S. spyware. You assume that theoretical Chinese spyware wouldn't sell useless information. Do you have proof for any of this?

If we're going to state our assumptions without having any compunctions about proving them, here are mine. I assume neither Huawei nor Samsung install U.S. spyware, nor do they install Chinese spyware. I assume the NSA and CCP have plenty of exploits they'll use to target those devices when they want, but they didn't get manufacturer assistance with that. Have fun disproving that any more than I could disprove what you think.