Posts by doublelayer

Don't make an iOS of yourself – Apple's patched its OSes, you know the drill

Re: SOS call?

It calls the emergency service if possible, and you can also specify some emergency contacts who will get an automatic message that you have used it, including your location. This feature is a little annoying if you don't know it's there, as there are only two options: call it immediately if the trigger happens or give you a window where you can cancel the call but you don't have long. Inadvertent activation is quite possible (especially for newer iPhones where you have to simultaneously press two buttons which are on opposite sides of the phone). Perhaps they have now made that even easier to accidentally do.

Re: Digital Legacy

You're factually correct here but it doesn't matter. Apple is completely capable of getting law enforcement access to this data (the key is not an encryption key). However, this isn't new because the data it gives access to is that stored in iCloud. They already give this out if there's a court order. So this neither increases nor decreases the amount of data available or the effort to get at it. Situation unchanged.

MPs charged with analysing Online Safety Bill say end-to-end encryption should be called out as 'specific risk factor'

Re: I must be reading this differently to everyone else

I don't think that's what they mean. A lot of harmful communications can happen, but most of the stuff they've talked about is the public social media or similar services. E2E services don't really work there because every participant needs to have the keys, so it usually means a direct communication system. Regulation of social media is and should be very different than regulation of private emails I send, in that there should be a lot less regulation or perhaps none*. I therefore think that it is the traditional excuse to identify encryption as a problem in order to argue for limitations, interception, or a ban.

* Sending emails which enable a crime is already criminal activity, so no email-specific regulation is needed to make it so. Sending emails which are evidence are already discoverable as part of court proceedings which have rules for destroyed or unrecoverable evidence, so that's covered too. I don't think they need more than that.

And yet there are large chunks of the world's population who don't eat them. Many of those could choose to and don't for their own reasons, but in some areas, it's prohibited at a higher level. I could not make you dislike the taste, but I could prevent you from eating them if I had enough power and the desire to do so.

You can't prevent encryption from existing at all, but you can prevent the general public from having access to it. You can block services that would use it. And if you do those things, you can identify those people who have created their own encrypted communication systems and target them. Nobody wants to go that far that I've seen, as encryption is still of use to some transactions, but China has taken a lot of actions to block communication systems that don't include a forward-to-government option. Other countries have spoken about desires to follow that lead.

Ooh, an update. Let's install it. What could possibly go wro-

"Yeah but it worked, didn't it ?"

Everything works if you throw enough money and staff at it, but that doesn't usually qualify. Did it sustain changes in conditions? Could it survive the loss of the tech staff? Could it run on a modern computer or OS? The answers to all three could easily have been no and technically it still counts as working.

I've worked with codebases that are like this. As long as everybody who ever wrote it is still there, it will work just fine. Try to understand it later without their help and you'll be very stuck. It takes determination to be clear enough that someone can figure out what it does without needing your help.

Is it decadent that I use four different computers each day, at different times?

Re: A Sage solution

I bet it's really boring most of the time, but if they ever are curious about what something is, no reason for them to deny their curiosity when they have the power (apart from efficiency or dignity but those are easily ignored). You don't have to constantly commit offenses to abuse your power; once in a while still counts. Meanwhile, I'm also sure there are many people working there who do care about the speed of passengers and only investigate something when they think it is necessary. I'd like to know who they are so I can prioritize travel when they're on duty.

International Monetary Fund warns crypto-related risks could soon become systemic

Re: IIn other news...

This only works if they have lots of small wallets. If we know they're large, it means we have identified large wallets. They can only sell part of that by transferring part into a new wallet and selling that, and that transaction is public. Given that, when it was created, individual Bitcoin were worth basically nothing and now they're large, anyone keeping value in 2009 is unlikely to have created wallets so small they can sell them today.

But what if I'm just stupid and they did exactly that, creating millions of wallets to store effectively zero value. We would still know about it, because the date on the wallets' transactions would be old. If a lot of wallets with no transactions since 2009 start having new transactions, someone will notice this. The data is out there, anyone with the desire can access it, and we can identify wallets that have a lot of Bitcoin or old Bitcoin. Since we can do this, we have the ability to notice when someone starts selling from them. A lot of the old ones probably belong to people who forgot or lost their Bitcoin, but certainly not all of them. Any investor should know this and take it into account, as they should with most other limited commodities where the same provisos apply.

Re: IIn other news...

Your assumption is correct, but the conclusions you draw are likely incorrect. Before I explain what I mean by that, I want to first say that the situation you describe is not a Ponzi scheme. It is a crime (you use the correct term pump and dump), but it is in no way a Ponzi scheme as future investors' money would not be used to repay fictional gains. I have seen the term used in many cryptocurrency situations to describe criminal activity, real or imagined, and I want to ensure it's used correctly so the discussions are clear.

It's very likely that the creators of Bitcoin kept a lot of it for themselves. We can even identify some people who have done exactly this because the blockchain is public. We don't know if any of those people created the currency or if they're just early adopters, but they have stashed a bunch of it. This isn't really surprising, and it's also known to people who invest in it. They should be aware that some people have large quantities and could affect the value. The same is true for any other limited thing, especially including companies' stock. This makes it a riskier thing to speculate on. At least with Bitcoin, if someone who has a lot starts to sell it slowly, it's obvious from the transaction data that it's them doing so.

Ransomware does have real value. To terrible people only*, but it does. Just as cryptocurrencies have some value from people using them for storage of value (bad idea) or transfers (better, but still not a great idea). In cryptocurrency's case, it's likely that the real value is a lot less than the market cap due to a lot of people using them only to speculate.

* I don't think the people selling services to prevent damage count as they would be selling those services for other security things anyway, so I'm counting the criminals and the businesses that work around them, thus only terrible people.

T-Mobile US figuring out international roaming on 5G

I think this is their major problem. I'd use a connection with individual SIMs for multiple devices if it was feasible to do so. However, every plan that I have seen charges for each connected device, even if those devices aren't sending traffic. The fixed costs just to maintain connections can easily exceed a hobby budget, and that's before those lines get used. Since that's the case, it becomes easier just to use my phone's connection for cases needing the internet and use WiFi, Bluetooth, or LoRa to mesh in anything else.

What if we said you could turn any disk into a multi-boot OS installer for free without touching a single config file?

This is useful

I built a thing like this using a Raspberry Pi and tiny screen, but this method sounds a lot nicer. It's probably much faster as well if you use a reasonably fast drive.

Apple wins Epic court ruling: Devs will pay up for now as legal case churns on

Re: Epically wrong.

You asked, so I'll answer.

"Can you access the App Store from your device?": Yes.

"Is it safe to use,": I guess so. I don't view that as a high bar, though. A lot of software is safe to use without justifying it being forced on me with mandatory payments.

"fast, reliable": Not really. Updates don't show up instantly, sometimes they don't download right and I have to press again. I've had Signal tell me that a new version is available when Apple doesn't think it's true.

"and tailored to your preferences?": Not in the slightest. My preference would be for the old layout where the search and updates tabs were not hidden and where search would at least find the app you typed in rather than show five unrelated ads and go into the results list organized with bogosort.

"Are the apps themselves curated and high quality?": No. They're just what was sent in. A lot of crap apps are there. Apple only tries to keep out active malware and stuff that competes with theirs.

"Can you install them without having to learn what sideloading means?": By definition, yes, but the implied argument is a tautology. People on Windows can manage to install software without having to learn the word sideloading, so it doesn't seem to be a problem. I could as easily say that sideloading should be the only mechanism because then you wouldn't have to learn how the store app works, but that would be just as weak.

Re: The difference between Apple and 3rd party payment options

I entirely agree with your opinion as based on your facts. Unfortunately, all your facts are wrong, which is why your opinion and the one I'd like to share doesn't work.

"I don't pay more for a book or music as another poster mentioned - that 30% take doesn't apply to that. Unless I'm very much mistaken this morning..."

You are very much mistaken this morning. Those are digital things, so if you use IOS to buy them, you pay Apple a fee even though you're getting the item from someone else's app. You can buy them elsewhere and transfer them onto the device, but without doing that, you're not allowed to buy them from anyone else or even to be told that you have that option.

"My view: if I create an app platform, I can charge what I like on it, with my payment processor, etc - letting the consumer / developer market decide if they want to sustain it."

I agree, and if we had a choice, then Apple could do what they like. Everyone could decide whether they want to use Apple's payments or not. It's convenient, people trust Apple, they already have system integration, so they'd likely get plenty of business. If people didn't like it, they'd pay someone else. By preventing anyone else from operating one on IOS devices, Apple has removed this option.

"Epic's claim is just without merit."

Did you have other reasons? Because both of your supporting ones are incorrect.

What came first? The chicken, the egg, or the bodge to make everything work?

Re: Bootstrap

No, I think it's honest. I have lots of stuff stored in my brain that is of no use or which I would actively like removed. I can tell you phone numbers for people who I haven't called in a decade and the number might not even work any more. I can remember instructions for operating equipment that is so obsolete that there probably aren't any examples still running. I can also remember embarrassing incidents which have no effects on my life today but which can cause small periods of discomfort any time my mind wanders to them. If my memory was read/write, I could easily press delete on those and put something else in their place (IPV6 addresses, perhaps, because I can never remember them). I think it qualifies as read only.

BOFH: Time to put the Pretty Dumb F in PDF reader

Re: What's the catch?

He doesn't have to go for the kill each episode. In fact, although he has several methods for not being arrested, he probably can't use them that often. He got the project canceled, money from the boss, and if he wants to send the written information to the IT director, he might be able to cast some blame on the boss. There's also a chance, though small, that the boss will learn to respect the BOFH's advice on these matters. When he's had those rare ally bosses, that's often been the starting point. That could be enough for now.

More than half of UK workers would consider jumping ship if a hybrid work option were withdrawn by their company

"I don't really understand carbon offset, but in commute terms I must have saved/planted a small woodland at least."

It wouldn't count as carbon offset, but good to do anyway. Offset has to be a carbon-negative activity like sequestration in a new plant so it can be used to reduce the emissions from some carbon-positive activity elsewhere. You have reduced the amount of carbon-positive activities you're doing, so it obtains a similar end result.

In that case, I don't think it matters much. Having such a facility wouldn't do very much over working from home. They could provide some amenities for the office workers that are shared among the remote working spaces, but there's little need to do so. Meanwhile, the benefits of office work with physical proximity among team members, availability of equipment or facilities that wouldn't be installed in a home, etc. are still not going to happen.

For a company, it is just a slightly more limiting (only hiring near the locations they've rented into) and expensive (rent an office rather than buy a chair and desk for an employee) method of getting the same thing they can do right now by having people work remotely from wherever they want. For a worker, it's also slightly more limiting (they may have to move to one of the suburbs with the office in it if they're not allowed to work from home) method. A worker who prefers remote work gets little from this. One who prefers to work in an office gets an office environment, so if they only care about a separate work environment, there's a little value but no other benefits.

That works if everyone who has to go in really lives in that town, which might be possible for a few types of work, but isn't going to happen if the office is big or the people have lots of options. I wouldn't want to choose the place I live because I essentially have to in order to work at my job, because if that job stops being available, I've probably greatly increased the difficulty when I have to commute to wherever the new job is. Jobs in a city entail a commute, but a predictable one even if I switch from one place to another. This is less of an issue if you're renting your housing so there's less inertia involved if you have to move. It's also not an issue if you have some certainty that the job will continue to be available and what you want to do for the long term (if it's your business, for example).

Open hardware smartphone PinePhone Pro starts to ship – to developers only, for now

Both. It's relatively new, with a small number of manufacturers, and it doesn't have the kind of usage that other screen technologies have gotten. You can't find very many electronic things that don't have an LCD on them, so LCD manufacturers got a lot of money to improve their products. E-ink is mostly sold on ebook readers and that's kind of it, so they haven't had the resources to get similar levels of technical improvement or price reduction. It will come at some point, but probably will take some time.

Re: HK is CCP now

Officially, they're based in Malaysia, but their operations appear to be mostly remote with a lot of core people in Europe. The products are assembled in Shenzhen and shipped from Hong Kong, and they use processors from two mainland Chinese companies because those have good mainline support. You can use that set of countries to decide whether you have problems trusting them, but if you think that products manufactured in China are intrinsically untrustworthy down to the component level, Pine is the least of your problems.

Given the success of the Raspberry Pi, I think they have a chance. The Pi was intended for educational purchases, which they've had some of, but schools have often taken the attitude you described where they don't really care whether the software or hardware is open. Yet they've still had a lot of success with the general public (admittedly the technical side of it), selling to people who know what Linux is but don't have the knowledge to contribute to it. Through support and sufficient information for nontechnical users, that product worked. I hope that a similar story can happen with Linux-based smartphones; they'll never get a large share of the market, but if they can get enough users that there's a stable supply of new models and software updates, they will work for those of us who care about the benefits. I can't guarantee that will happen, but I wouldn't count them out just yet.

This House believes: A unified, agnostic software environment can be achieved

Re: There is no "one-size-fits-all" solution

Well, the best way to do that is probably to put a screwdriver on the end of the handle with a cap over it, which makes for an inconvenient interface to the driver, but it can be done. It gets progressively harder when you want to add even more tools to it. If you try too hard, it won't fit in a hand, will cost ten times as much as the individual tools, will break and be impossible to repair economically, will be hard to use for a situation not envisioned by the original creators, or all four.

That's true, but it's going to happen anyway even if everything was open source and free. People just don't agree on what the best thing is. We have a lot of languages that are freely available, for example, but that doesn't prevent people from rejecting them and making more, or for that matter rejecting anything released after 1990 and complaining that anyone who doesn't hand-code everything in assembly is just lazy. We could do a lot to create a unified standard for basically anything, but it's not going to be universal no matter how much effort we put into it.

Cuba ransomware gang scores almost $44m in ransom payments across 49 orgs, say Feds

Re: where to?

Really, I get that the name collides, but the article never says it's based in Cuba or has any connection. Nor does any other article. Nobody is telling you that Cubans did this. The Cuba name was based on technical not geographical conditions. Therefore, you're jumping to conclusions about the reliability of information based on something it never said.

For a direct military response, where would you have them strike? A lot of ransomware is individual criminals working remotely. Would you have their houses destroyed from above? Their neighbors would not approve. Even when a country ignores their actions, they aren't hosting them in a location that can be targeted. If they did and someone attacked it, that would be an act of war. Since they don't, it would be an act of war and a war crime at the same time. Perhaps a bit extreme.

For a hacking response, I don't think there's anything preventing someone trying to hack the systems used by criminals. The authorities are unlikely to arrest someone for doing it, in large part because the criminals are unlikely to report the crime to them. Providing support for such privateering, on the other hand, would lead to similar complaints that the supporting government is also helping criminals.

I think some harsher responses are justified, but these ones are risky or unethical.

I think Cuba is the name assigned to the ransomware group, likely from names they use themselves, rather than an attempt to attribute the behavior to the country of the same name. I was looking for information to prove this, but they seem to be quite new as an attacker and most searches are just giving me a bunch of articles about this same announcement. None of the ones I've read have said that the country of Cuba has a connection to these, and if it did, they would be likely to call it "Cuban ransomware" to indicate its origin. I'm pretty sure therefore that it's just a name.

Update: PC Mag says it's probably based in Russia.

Tech Bro CEO lays off 900 people in Zoom call and makes himself the victim

Re: Timing

And he probably chose to do it now because people were about to take time off, for which he's now not paying them. Some people may have the opportunity to cancel spending that would be harmful, but I don't think that's something the company gets credit for.

The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day

Re: The power consumption thing

This issue isn't new, but its uses in cryptocurrency arguments are mostly incorrect. It's true that a renewable source that's spiky might have problems providing power when it's wanted, but people usually don't bring their mining rigs to those sources just to use them when it's particularly sunny one day while being powered off all night. They want to get their returns from the equipment, and running them only for little chunks of time is not an efficient way to do that. That's why they tend to prefer more predictable power sources, including hydroelectric, nuclear, and fossil fuels. Waste gas burning is stable (while they're extracting from that location) hence it's being used.

Re: We know it has no future

Power in El Salvador is neither cheap nor always environmentally advisable. Perhaps fortunately for them, a lot of Bitcoin mining isn't done there. I will grant that they do generate a large amount of renewable energy. Unfortunately, that is not enough for their demand. They burn hydrocarbons for a lot of their power generation. They use hydroelectricity, which like most countries in the region is seasonal such that in the dry season, there is often a need to limit power usage as the hydro plants aren't generating as much. They are also a net importer of electricity by a large margin (imported about 11.9 times the power they exported), opening them to the environmental consequences of the methods the countries around them use to generate the power that they import.

"BTC is unique among "cryptos", in that it's limited, decentralized, unconfiscatable."

Come on, there's a whole bunch like that. Not all of them, certainly, but if you want to sell the benefits of Bitcoin, lying about its uniqueness is not a good start.

"This piece might have some relavance if it was written around 2015 but things have moved on a lot since then."

Could you clarify? I do not see that the last six years have done much to change the points listed in the article. I think the original idea of a cryptocurrency has some potential benefits. A currency that is available to everyone because it runs worldwide could reduce the inefficiency of international money transfer. One that is free of external control could weaken dictatorships that use it as a stick to punish the populace. One that cannot be inflated could prevent some types of ill-considered monetary policy (though that one has an obvious counterexample). One that is truly untraceable could limit the invasion of privacy we are frequently subjected to (though that also includes helping those who want to commit crimes with it as well).

Whether or not you agree with these potential benefits doesn't matter though. The reason is that the successful cryptocurrencies do not live up to any of those potentials. They are hideously inefficient, they have not been adopted in a decentralized way, they do not have any stability in value, even when they have temporarily stable trading, and they do not maintain the privacy of the users. Without the benefits of cryptocurrency as a currency, you have little other than an otherwise useless thing to speculate on while it consumes lots of resources just to exist.

How to destroy expensive test kit: What does that button do?

Re: Touch is enough

If it hadn't been the broken one, I would have asked why they left something really tiny and sensitive somewhere where anybody could pick it up, and therefore any accidental movement by people, objects, or even the air could cause expensive damage.

NixOS and the changing face of Linux operating systems

"thus /user became /home ... except in the appleverse, where they "simplified" it to /Users (Caps in a system directory name? WTF‽‽‽)."

I have to ask. Why is that a problem? I distinctly remember you defending the case-sensitive filesystem a while ago (I was too), so you don't seem to mind having capitals in some filenames. So why must a system directory be lowercase if other ones can be uppercase? When I use Mac OS, it's a little annoying so I would prefer lowercase, but I don't think that's a firm rule. It also allows them to use PascalCase for multi-word names, which is probably why they're doing it.

Re: rm -rf /*

"There's a perfectly valid prevention for that particular accident:"

Yes, but how often does that particular accident happen? It's pretty deliberate, you have to be root, not know where you are in the filesystem, and frequently use the -f flag without knowing you have to. It surely happens, but I think it's probably minor compared to the various other ways one could destroy a system by accident (it's much easier to accidentally destroy something with a dd command typo).

Re: ITYM ...

Consumers have this nasty habit of wanting things updated, especially when they're always online and running software from other people. In DOS days, maybe a read only OS would still have worked, but by now, it would not. We could try monolithic OSes where everything is updated at once and can only be replaced in its entirety, but that's just going to hide the small changes that still happen at the cost of a lot more bandwidth and storage used for updates.

Dev loses copyright appeal over forensic software after judges rule suite was owned by his employer

Re: From memory...

It depends on the contract. The employer had turned it down, so most likely, they have waived their rights to have that project (if they had those rights in the first place). So on the face of it, you're probably fine. This is contract law though, so that's not good enough. Here are a few reasons you could still be restricted:

1. If the project competes with their products, they could have a clause restricting competition. You couldn't distribute the project without angering them.

2. If it used information they considered proprietary, from common code to knowledge of an algorithm, they could claim that your project was violating IP rights they held and sue you for that.

3. If the contract says that they get ownership or first right of refusal over your external ideas, then you have to make sure that the right person turned it down. It's not enough for your manager to say they don't want to use it. Often, there will be a separate person who needs to agree. You really want to have the acknowledgement that you can develop it without them taking it in writing, stored on your own equipment, and unless really obvious, reviewed by someone at least familiar with contracts.

Re: Contract versus open source?

Your first question is easy: your employer owns the copyright. This means you'll want their permission before you upload it. They might want to review what parts you're taking out first. Since they suggested Apache licensing to you, I'm guessing they already planned for this, but it never hurts to have an email saying so to avoid the problem this article describes.

Your next question seems to be around the use of the software. This chunk:

"However, there is/was talk to embed the tool into a wider proprietary tool stack of (soon to be former) employer. There it may play a small but crucial role."

I'm assuming that the employer you're talking about is the one you originally wrote this for. If not, only the first point below applies. Your employer has no problem here for two reasons. First, Apache 2.0 is a permissive license, so you can put code into proprietary systems. Unlike copyleft licenses such as the GPL, you don't have to use the same license for other components. Second, as they own the copyright to the code, they are permitted to apply a different license to it. If this had been the GPL, but you wrote all of it, the employer that owned it could still use it in a proprietary system because their version would use their own license instead. Therefore, your component can be used in a proprietary system without having an effect on the licensing or distribution of that system.

Re: From memory...

I don't think they were lucky*. Essentially, he received a bonus that was directly proportional to the revenue his work generated. A lot of places tie bonuses to results in that way, although often without telling the person how they'll be calculated. Just receiving a separate payment for performance isn't that unusual, and it furthermore indicates that they were the ones selling the work (and the only ones to do so). That sounds like a normal setup to me and the suggested alternative sounds like a setup that would have undoubtedly had a contract to specify it.

* I think they had the advantage in this case, hence not lucky, but that doesn't mean I think they're right. It's entirely possible that they intended a licensing arrangement originally and are now reneging on that intent. The problem is that neither side can prove it and, without proof, the company's story is a lot more plausible. Whenever you're doing something like this, make sure you have the contract and know what it says.

American diplomats' iPhones reportedly compromised by NSO Group intrusion software

I suggest three alternatives more plausible (to me at least) than that the NSA and its ilk outsourced something we know they like to do themselves. In increasing order of likeliness:

1. Israel supports them (obviously), so asked for a few countries to be left off the list unless they do an additional review.

2. When they were claiming not to do any business in the U.S. to avoid a lawsuit, they added it themselves to use as an argument.

3. They're lying and no such exception exists now or ever. These are criminals who aren't in court, so nothing prevents them from tossing out falsehoods.

When it comes to renting tech kit, things can get personal, very quickly

Re: Why wasn't THE major problem mentioned here?

This is very true. I have no doubt that there are people who think renting is a great way to handle every asset, but the comments alone make it clear it's not 52% of people. However, I can explain how the vote got that way. Here's a list of what not to do next time:

1. What hardware? Some people interpreted it as only servers, and therefore being a debate on cloud versus on prem. Since some articles mentioned desktops, this wasn't the only argument. This is a basic detail of the premise that the debaters didn't agree upon, so how could the readers know what the topic was?

2. What's the actual disagreement? Renting hardware is just bad in general? Because the debaters covered lots of different reasons, most of them completely ignored by others. A narrow debate like "Renting hardware is better for the environment" is clear, but a general one works well enough if you make the debaters talk about it in general. As it was, only Tuesday's article mentioned the environmental impact, and it didn't mention anything else, so it makes it seem like that debater was addressing a different proposal than everybody else.

3. One short statement on what the debate was. As it is now, the proposal is a paragraph of background that doesn't necessarily state an opinion. The debate proposal should be a simple, non-compound sentence that clearly states a point. Ideally, the sentence is so simple that the insertion or removal of a "not" clearly indicates what the against side thinks. In my opinion, you should also replace the for/against voting buttons with this sentence and its negation. In this case, the proposal could have been "Renting desktop equipment is a bad decision". The negation would say "Renting desktop equipment is NOT a bad decision". Unless it wasn't desktops, see point 1.

4. A little less necessary, but have the debaters respond to one another. We heard four speeches and now have to vote, but a lot of debates allow the debaters to make their addresses, then ask one another questions, then summarize what they think best supports their point. I think that's helpful.

5. Either allow people to change their votes or hold voting back until the arguments have ended. Again, this is more an opinion, but I think it helps make sure people are reading more than one article before casting a vote. When I vote on these debates, I tend to wait until Thursday to do it because sometimes the against side argues a point that I didn't think they would, so I no longer support them. If I disagree with Monday's article and vote against, that doesn't indicate that I support Tuesday's point.

Re: Duhhhhh...

"then decided to check the largest data set on a binary question which is easily accessible to him: the last US presidential election's popular vote. Sure enough, if memory serves, Biden won the popular vote with something like 51% to Trump's 49%."

Yes, that election fits the pattern (51% to 47% including votes for other candidates), but it doesn't always hold. Just looking at U.S. presidential elections, there are several that don't end up going that way. 2008 was 53-46, 1996 was 49-41, 1984 was 59-41, and 1972 was 61-38. Source. It's not surprising that there are many binary choices that don't have a clear majority, though. The reason is that a lot of the binary choices where there is a clear majority don't need to be asked (Do you like to eat food? Would you like to suffer an injury?). I'm not sure there's anything special about a 4% margin that makes it more likely.

Nextcloud boss: You gotta fight … for your right … to 'plug into Windows and offer the exact same service'

Re: Er what?

"There's no need to break it [Nextcloud] on purpose, it will get broken anyway just by updating the APIs without telling anybody."

No, because Nextcloud runs their own service. They don't emulate OneDrive, so if Microsoft does change those APIs, Nextcloud will be unaffected. Windows does change, and it's the duty of any company making software to run on Windows to read the updates and deprecations so their software keeps working, but as companies go, Microsoft is pretty good with backward compatibility on such things. Can you point me to a single example where Microsoft broke Nextcloud's integration, intentionally or not?

"Microsoft breaks their own products all the time, so I don't understand the responses here that they wouldn't break a competitor's product, because they wouldn't do anything illegal, because it's not the 1990s anymore, because ... oh shut up."

Break your own product and your users are grumpy. Break someone else's product by accident, and people are still grumpy. Break a competitor's product on purpose, the competition authorities that care (which does include the EU's) can hand out a fine in the hundreds of millions, which they have done before. That's why they try not to break the law.

"What NextCloud wants is an open and stable API as a contract between Windows and client software that doesn't favor Microsoft's own client software."

And does what, precisely? Because most of the Windows APIs do that already. They have to be specific about what they think Windows is doing to negatively affect them. The only thing I can see at the moment is that OneDrive is present on all Windows installations, which they can argue is harming competition, but it's pretty minor. If they did something to prevent Nextcloud from working, the situation would be different, but they haven't and no APIs exist which give OneDrive powers that Nextcloud can't have.

Paranoia doesn't help legal arguments

"The earlier complaint left out Nextcloud's name for fear of retaliation. [...] 'if, at some point suddenly, somehow our cloud would not work on Windows anymore … we will be out of business.'"

Yes, and if Microsoft did cut off Nextcloud in some way, we would have a really big problem. That would be clearly illegal, and I think we would all agree it would be an unacceptable action. It's also a ridiculous leap. Microsoft could have done that before, as they could with other storage providers, and they've taken no steps in that direction whatsoever. They know it's illegal, and they should know enough to know that Nextcloud users would not switch to their product if they broke it. They're not about to break someone's product and incur the wrath of a competition authority in the hopes of a few hundred users. They could use a much easier and cheaper method to add OneDrive users who don't already have cloud storage.

The actual complaint might work, in that OneDrive does have icons on Windows when they're not in use. It's more annoying than anything, as nothing in Windows prevents me from adding as many competing cloud storage folders as I can find. Nextcloud will have to be clear about exactly which closed APIs and functions they wish to see opened. They do not help this point by alleging that Microsoft is planning to kill their Windows compatibility or blocks third parties from installing their software, because those things aren't true and they know it.

Computers cost money. We only make them more expensive by trying to manage them ourselves

Re: Two unmentioned benefits

Both those benefits are real, but I don't think they really work with this debate. Those are reasons that the cloud product could be technically superior than physical servers you run. These articles were talking more about rental or ownership of hardware. Some of the articles only talked about desktops, and even when they were talking about servers, they didn't say they would necessarily be running in a cloud provider's DC. While the debate isn't clear, I'm taking the arguments as including desktops issued to staff--three of four articles have unambiguously included mentions to them. In that case, the topic is much broader than "Use cloud" and I must answer the poll accordingly (I voted for because I think desktop rental is in most cases inefficient).

The climate is turning against owning our own compute hardware. Cloud is good for you and your customers

So what hardware is this debate about

Today's article focused quite narrowly. It only talked about the climate benefits of renting hardware, and it only talked about servers. That makes some sense as the servers are equipment where the renting option is likely to have a climate benefit, but the previous debate article mostly talked about desktops and finance. So what hardware are we going to rent or buy here? Is it just everything the IT department ever sees?

This is an important issue in the functioning of this debate. If we're actually talking about desktops, even as part of the argument, then we can't jump to a "be green, rent" solution. Rented desktops don't use less power than purchased ones, they don't use less materials in construction, they are likely to be transported more, and they may be replaced more often than an owned one which increases the pace of waste electronics. This environmental argument could therefore be twisted to represent the opposite side of the debate. In a good debate, the debaters understand what they disagree about and they make this clear to the audience.

Re: Not just that

Please tell me what disability means you can't press a button, but you can still load cups and pods into a device the button is on. If the device had an automatic loader so they could advance it without touching it, then you might have a point (though in any case you still have to have a method for them to retrieve their coffee when it's done), but it sounds like this doesn't have an industrial new cup supply belt.

Disability is a good example of the usefulness of a lot of this tech that's often mocked, but it doesn't always apply.

Microsoft adds Buy Now, Pay Later financing option to Edge – and everyone hates it

Kill it now

This is going to annoy anyone using Edge. If they wanted to erode the set of users still using that browser, this is an effective way to do it. I also can't imagine why they thought this was a good idea. A lot of sites already bother people about these useless payment systems, so they're already facing a lot of competition.

Renting IT hardware on a subscription basis is bad for customers

Re: Debate scope is vague

Exactly. It really changes the point of the debate what hardware is included in this. For example, renting some infrastructure, such as servers in a cloud provider's DC, can make sense because it's easy to change how much you have. If you need more servers today, you start renting them then, and when you don't need them tomorrow, you shut them down and stop paying immediately. The article, however, seems to focus on desktops. Those are less likely to have such a spiky profile and renting could come with a variety of complications. If you have a rented desktop, who puts in a new disk if the original fails, who images it when it changes hands, and who decides when it's old and will be replaced? I could see it working somewhere maybe, but there are so many ways I can see it failing badly that I would be very cautious.

BOFH: What if International Bad Actors designed the vaccine to make us watch more Steven Seagal movies?

Re: Disappointing

I disagree. Look at the article. Yes, it's fiction, but the person was not dissuaded by logical questions. That happens in real conversations too, although often in a different way. They don't see how illogical it is to assume every doctor is secretly on board with an evil plot, so asking them why they do it, what the goals are, how they possibly manage the logistics, all lead you into a loop. Worse, if someone else is watching the conversation, the idiot is stating all nature of lies to bolster their point, and I'm not allowed to point out the inaccuracies because it makes me too smug, then the observer sees a knowledgeable person with all these anecdotes and the stupid supporter who can do nothing but ask for details. The liar is happy to keep providing those; their original anecdote was a lie, so they won't mind piling on some more.

Take your own example. If Galileo had decided to counter the prevailing theory only by asking questions about it, he would have gotten answers. The geocentric model wasn't only supported by stories from religious books. It also had a lot of work put into understanding it. For centuries, people had been observing objects' movements and making models to explain those movements using a really complex series of geometric orbital paths around the planet. Those models could correctly predict the movements of the objects quite well, until they couldn't, when they would be changed to account for the problem.

Had Galileo asked questions, he and any observers would have been presented with thousands of pages of rigorous, precise, meticulous, and mathematically accurate calculations showing how everything circled the earth. The only problem is that all that correct mathematics didn't work with the real physics going on. It would have been one questioner against centuries of provable effort and he would have been ignored with ease. He had to say "This model is wrong, I can prove that it's wrong, and I can prove a replacement". Doing that meant that others could verify that the inaccuracies he found were real and that they could similarly verify what he thought. That is what he needed to do and he did it.

Re: Disappointing

Be careful what you wish for, because they have struck here before on serious articles. It might seem beneficial to correct them, and it might seem fun to troll them, but it doesn't take very many of them ignoring your correct points and not caring about your jokes while making it clear that they are putting others at risk to make the exercise a lot more frustrating.

In addition, I have identified a pattern of argument among those who argue against the vaccine. When they think they have an advantage, they'll use all these stupid arguments in the hopes of convincing others. When they know they're talking to someone who is smart enough to recognize those as the rubbish they are, they go into defensive mode. That means they will use a lot of vague arguments that you can't immediately dismiss (the vaccine has reported side effects which can be dangerous, and you have to acknowledge that it's technically true while most of the ones they're talking about never happened). They'll also do the very specific lie, the kind that takes thirty seconds to make up but takes you fifteen minutes to research in order to disprove. This tactic isn't limited to vaccines, but it is popular with that group.

Crypto for cryptographers! Infosec types revolt against use of ancient abbreviation by Bitcoin and NFT devotees

Re: how about "Cryptography means Cryptography"?

The cryptography is both integral to the concept (not bolted on as with many other systems) and differentiates it from the previous currencies. This was an intentional design decision in the initial cryptocurrencies to make it impossible to have a central authority, and the initial designs and arguments for it indicated how important this feature was to the concept. It's really quite different than some other system that uses SSL for security of communications.