Posts by doublelayer

There's always a coronavirus angle these days: Honor intros new smartphone with built-in temperature sensor

Re: I'd rather like that function on my phone

I don't think it does that. An infrared sensor usually needs to measure the temperature of a specific object in my very limited experience. If you measure the temperature of something with sunlight on it or with an air vent near it, it won't reflect room temperature. Maybe it would work for items outside the paths of those things, but I'm not sure.

I wonder how tricky software support for that will be. I once had a phone with a temperature/humidity sensor in it (Samsung Galaxy Note 3 FYI), which was meant for room temperature. I didn't have much of a use for it and that was quite a good thing because I don't know how to use it. There wasn't any app I could find supporting the sensor because, as far as I can tell, only Samsung ever put them into phones and not that many. I did find an API in AOSP that was supposed to be used but I got bored before writing a basic reader app with it. I hope the manufacturer includes the app for this because there's probably nothing else that can read from the sensor.

$5bn+ sueball bounces into Google's court over claims it continues to track netizens in 'private browsing mode'

Re: Forensic analysis of Google Chrome's Incognito Mode

If network traffic was out of your remit, then you're completely unable to make a claim about the case being flawed. The case concerns data going to Google. You only know about data going to the hard disk. Those are not the same, and you've now admitted you have little information about what Google did or didn't collect at the time. Given that they are known to use Chrome to report back to Google with extra identifiers and you have admitted that you don't know whether they're still doing that, your comments seem entirely without merit.

In addition, I wonder about several of the things you talked about. You mentioned data storage. How about data retrieval? Did you check if data from the profile was read off the disk, potentially leading to transmission? Did you check methods of exfiltrating data that should not be visible from an incognito browser? Did you check whether any fingerprinting methods were successfully prevented; if the mode works as even Google claims, there are some that should have been blocked. From the sound of it, you only used a clean profile, so by definition you could not check that latter point, but I only saw the summary so you might have. If your only concern was data left on the disk after use, I'm afraid I think you focused on the simplest and least concerning aspect.

Re: Stupid web developers

Any reason why they can't? No. It would be straightforward. Any reason why they won't? Several. They include these:

1. Administrative hassles keeping the libraries up to date.

2. Cost of the bandwidth they're now using.

3. Getting website developers to use their system.

4. Convincing developers and users that their system is secure and won't result in malware-laden versions of those libraries being injected.

5. Convincing developers that the system isn't going to go down without support at some point, requiring emergency edits to their pages.

It's quite unlikely, but it is possible.

I agree, actually. Incognito mode doesn't mean there's any more protection from Google. The case as it is needs to be changed. Instead of pointing out the incognito mode problem, they should point out that Google is gathering information by sneaky means without disclosure no matter what, with little ability to stop it short of aggressively blocking all Google services. That takes the potential plaintiffs list from those who use Chrome in incognito mode up to the entire population of the country, and that's mostly because I don't think U.S. courts make it easy to include most of the internet users in the world in a class action.

You perhaps are focusing too much on the wording. They warn about the ISP, but they never warn about what Google themselves are doing. They don't offer any way to stop their tracking. But they do have a button that tries to imply that it might help. Just as they have switches that imply they stop collection of location history from Android phones but in actuality do nothing. It's dishonest, misleading, and harmful. If some lawyers can find a way to make that cost Google, I say go ahead.

We have Huawei to make the internet more secure: Dump TCP/IP to make folks safer says Chinese mobe slinger

Not open, not interested

The protocols that underlie the internet are so important that they must be open. They must have all details of their specs available for public perusal. Until this mechanism is released in that way, which means full access to all specifications, an open body clearly independent of corporate interests which can propose and make changes, clearly free of patents, etc. I will have to oppose it. TCP meets those requirements. UDP meets those requirements. QUIC meets those requirements. Anything else must also meet those requirements.

Lenovo certifies all desktop and mobile workstations for Linux – and will even upstream driver updates

Re: Year Of Linux on the Desktop

Because Linux on a desktop offers a lot more benefits to the user and to the community than Linux on a locked-down system. Linux on a desktop means a great deal of user choice and hardware openness. Linux on a desktop likely means you can also get BSD on that desktop, or Windows, or many other OS options because drivers are available for OS developers of most types. It also means people develop more for the Linux desktop, meaning more applications for us and more convincing arguments that it is worth the time of commercial enterprises that don't yet have good Linux functionality.

Linux on a smart oven gives us little. We almost certainly can't log in or install software or reimage it. Linux under Android is pretty much the same--it doesn't prevent locked-down phones and it doesn't give us any compatibility with desktop/server Linux. Neither encourages others to adopt the culture of open software, and neither helps the current users.

I don't support Linux out of a desire to see kernel installation numbers increase. I support Linux because it means benefits for me, people like me, and the community of computer users as a whole. Sadly, there are many places where the Linux kernel doesn't automatically mean those benefits exist, and its use there does not factor into my calculations of success.

Privacy activists prep legal challenge against UK plan to keep coronavirus contact-tracing data for two decades

Re: Democracy in action!

It is about both retention and collection. But primarily, it is about collection. People who intend this as a data stream for research purposes will want to collect and retain more. Neither are needed for contact tracing, and thus neither are justified. Even collecting the unneeded information (contact information for people who have not tested positive, for example) without retaining it for long periods would not be acceptable. Don't fight about retention just yet--fight about collection first and then we can decide about retention of the much smaller set of allowable data.

Re: Democracy in action!

It does matter what the incubation period is. The stated purpose of the app is to track contacts. You don't need years of data collection to do that. It is not to provide a bunch of unverifiable and possibly polluted data to researchers, and it wouldn't. The data only concerns who is near to whom, and has a lot of noise they couldn't filter out, such as the possibility of barriers between people that the app couldn't detect. It wouldn't be of much use to researchers, and even if it would, nobody ever agreed to turn their lives over to researchers.

I would use an anonymized, secure app. I would use it because I think it has the potential to save lives. I would not use it in order to provide raw data for researchers. It wouldn't help, and it was never part of the stated purpose.

Re: Democracy in action!

The incubation period for this disease is well established. It is less than twenty years. It is less than ten years. It is less than one year. It is, by all measurements, much less than one month. As there might be a little doubt, we could compromise on one month. No higher.

In addition, there has not been a valid argument thus far as to why the data for people who have not tested positive needs to be available to the government at all, nor was there a valid argument for why the information has to be connected to identities. Contact tracing would function equally well* with anonymized details which are released publicly and to health authorities only on a positive test and identifiable only by contacting devices using privately-stored information.

*In fact, it would work better. Many people would be willing to use such an app if it worked in this anonymous and private way, but would refuse if it did not. With more uptake, the results would be better.

Contact-tracer spoofing is already happening – and it's dangerously simple to do

Re: OT - Did I miss something? 301 moved permanently??

I noticed that too. It just seems wrong. Incidentally, a recent email from their tech panels was sent from marketing at theregister.co.uk, so they haven't switched over completely. Said message was delivered about 12:00 UTC today (Tuesday).

A few reasons:

1. They'd need some method of identifying the page to the user so it was obviously not generic and the user could determine that. Probably the best way would be to use the phone number as a key.

2. They'd need to stop bots from scraping the pages and tracking people by watching the pages pop up.

3. They would need to consider these issues and understand that the public is not made of children.

4. They'd need to invest some time in thinking of and creating a good system.

5. They'd need to consider the point of this endeavor rather than just jumping to the first idea someone had.

Re: Unhearing government

If you do succeed in sending the report in, does anything happen? In my experience, nothing ever happens with reports sent to the registrars of the domain and the operators of the rented server, so I'd expect someone who is neither to have even less effectiveness. Usually, I just ensure the domain is blocked on any firewalls I can, send in the reports anyway, and possibly try to tamper with the phishers though I have a feeling my efforts there are always useless.

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Re: “which functions are meant as internal or external. Function names get exhausted..."

That is only of minor help. It does mean you can reuse names, and it means you don't have a risk of calling a function that isn't meant for external use. It doesn't make the code more readable or traceable. A function that declares three functions inside it and then implements all the functionality by calling them means you can take many routes through it. One that is a single function means a reader can determine easily what flow the function takes without having to skip around to the different internal functions. There is often a good reason to dislike a large function, but splitting it into multiple dependent parts so you can argue that it's separate doesn't change what it really is; it's still a large function.

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

"One reason is to stop people having too many levels of indent. Especially helps with an 8 width tab stop as indent."

I often want people to use more indent. If they are so annoyed with short lines that they start cutting try/excepts out, I will probably have to fix it later. The problem is that you end up with code that looks like this:

class something:

def a_function(self):

if a_condition:

for item in a_list:

try:

value = lookup_in_dictionary

try:

all_your_complex_logic

goes_here

That's a very simple function, really. Yet the only complex part will be split into a 24-character worm, making it a pain to debug. And sometimes, people deal with this by working to avoid things causing an indent. If the function ends here, you can do a few excusable things. Instead of "if some_condition", you do an "if !some_condition: return" and drop down a level. If you have an else, that's out.

There are two other methods I've seen to do this more cleanly, and both are bad. The first one is what I said earlier--they just ignore some things. Do they really need a try there? Yes they do, but they'll skip it and wait for that to be discovered later. The other is what the programming teachers told us to do. They'll take the functionality and put it in its own function, then just call that. If that function really gets used elsewhere, that's fine. If it doesn't, you end up littering your code with functions whose only point is to make the code easier to edit. A new coder doesn't understand control flow or which functions are meant as internal or external. Function names get exhausted and you end up with nondescriptive or confusing ones. Cutting eight characters to four and allowing lines to go longer allows you to keep these sources of bugs at bay.

Nice wallpaper you've got there. It would be a shame if it bricked your phone

Re: The cardinal sin of programming

It looks like most RGB images will work because they will translate successfully. Only ones that go out of bounds during an RGB-SRGB conversion will cause the crash. I don't know what the conversion process looks like, but you can probably find the algorithm out there. Any RGB picture that pushes one of the components over 256 should do it.

If you do find that algorithm, please replace any mathematical formulas with min(255,[original_formula]) and send that in to Google. I think that might earn you a nice job as best programmer on the core system UI team. If you want to go for the ultimate job security, you might prove to them that you can think ahead by doing a max(0,...) check as well.

Re: Pics or it didn't happen

Not to worry. You can determine the voracity yourself. Just download the image and try to use it as a wallpaper. You can get it from the linked tweet. I urge you to enable USB debugging and approve your computer before you try it though--it might help with the reset process. In fact, it's possible you might be able to use ADB to reset the wallpaper setting depending on how much access you have. No guarantees though.

Not the Wright stuff: Bitcoin 'inventor' loses bid to sue YouTuber who called him a liar

Re: Brave

It's rarely a good start when the major feature of a software product is something I want to switch off. Adding things is different--a normal browser with an adblocker originally just shows everything, and I'm adding the functionality to remove some of those things. A browser that inserts other things is probably made by people who are willing to do that in other areas too, and thus it falls down in trust. How do I know there won't be other dodgy features that I would like to switch off but either I can't or I don't get informed about their existence. At least with a basic browser, I know what features it has.

Re: Brave

The end sounded good to me, too. I don't have any cryptocurrency (well, I have enough to buy an individual paper clip at market prices), but it doesn't hurt to provide that functionality. What doesn't sound good is the other side, which is conveniently left out of their statement. According to the Wikipedia page, Brave removes others' ads, then inserts some of their own (no thanks). Also, the cryptocurrency system uses their own rewards system which doesn't sound at all dodgy. I'll stick to a normal browser, thanks.

Nokia's reboot of the 5310 is a blissfully dumb phone that will lug some mp3s about just fine

Re: Wireless FM radio

That hasn't been an issue for most of the lifetime of FM. Even the earliest portable radios could receive it with antennas much less than the wavelength. Consider a simple radio with a telescoping antenna. While it may need to be extended to receive weak signals, it still receives plenty with the antenna retracted. That size for many sets would fit just fine along the length of this phone. Whether they did it is another story, but if they did, it would work.

Re: re:podcast

You can do that with most terms describing something using modern technology. A lot of the terms are either technical terms that have been generalized or invented words that save time. An example is streaming, a technical term describing a method of sending data, and quite a generic one at that. The public seems to have redefined it to mean receiving video or audio data online, whether that data is streamed or predownloaded. They rarely use it for many other things where streaming is used, like streaming video out of their machine for a videocall or streaming data in both directions for a torrent download.

In the case of "podcast", it's a relatively short way of saying "media file attached to a subscribable feed, likely an RSS feed". Just like "blog" is a short way of saying "a website on which articles are posted" or "wiki" is a short way of saying "a website that can be edited by the public". I don't see much problem condensing terms like that.

Re: Wireless FM radio

I believe their statement there means that you do not have to plug in a wire to serve as an antenna. Most phones with FM radio capability do not have an antenna built in and use the wire connected to the 3.5MM jack to serve as the reception antenna; without it, you either get an error message or just get static. That said, I couldn't find a manual for this device and I'm certainly not buying one, so I cannot confirm my supposition.

Re: Would this be a good 'phone to have ...

I looked up information by country, and it seems that it's already been shut down in Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Canada. Taiwan, New Zealand, the United States, and Switzerland will be following suit soon, some of their providers already having dropped coverage while some others maintain it. The remaining areas where 2G will remain for some time are Europe, Africa, and South America, though details are not clear. Keep that in mind before buying something.

Did nobody tell them about the lockdown? Logitech releases new 'luggable' mechanical keyboard for LAN parties

Re: 200 quid?

Those are two cheap computers. In my experience, you can get computers for that price but they're not very good for most tasks. I tend not to spend that much, and I can survive on much less resource than some people I know, but I would be hard pressed to find a computer with sufficient specs for that price. When you say that, are you referring only to the processing and memory or does the price include case, storage, and connectivity as well?

Twitter, Reddit and pals super unhappy US visa hopefuls have to declare their online handles to Uncle Sam

Re: Question (not a Merkin)

Short summary:

U.S. Citizens: Covered.

Noncitizens inside the U.S.: Covered. The Fourteenth amendment extends the rights to all "persons", which has been interpreted to mean everybody, including illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants can say everything they like as they're deported.

U.S. Citizens outside the U.S.: They are covered by those protections as far as the U.S. is concerned, but they have to follow the laws of whatever country they're in. For example, if the U.S. decides to search their stuff, they still need a warrant.

Noncitizens outside the U.S.: Basically, the U.S. doesn't give them any rights whatsoever. This applies to visa applicants and basically everybody. Whatever they want to do to you, they feel they have a right to do to you.

Note: Certain areas in control of the U.S. are not considered parts of the U.S., including Guantanamo Naval Base, Diego Garcia shared base, and other bases operated in whole or in part by the American government located outside the boundaries of the U.S. If you end up on one of those, you have no rights and they'll probably show you exactly how fun that can be.

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

Re: Ah, customers.

I'm not exactly sure who you replied to, but if it's the person immediately above you, I seriously hope their attitude is used during the development of flight control systems. If you respond to malformed data by throwing an error and skipping it, then you can handle the loss or damage of some of your equipment. You know it failed, you know it's not available, so you fall back to something else or alert the pilot. If you handle it in some way, you don't know what it necessarily means. This is similar but not identical to what took down the 737-max--their data was wrong, the computer didn't control for it, and it crashed the aircraft. It wasn't a format error as much as an unreliable piece of tech, but by failing to identify when it was going wrong and take appropriate action, including crashing the autopilot and making the pilots control manually, they smashed up two airplanes, a few hundred people, and their company. You cannot be liberal* with possibly damaged data if it means people die.

*Liberal: In the sense of accepting it. Liberal reading with frequent rejection is fine.

Re: Ah, customers.

A lot of standards are very strict about that. You get sections like "This value must be 0 or 1. If any other value is sent, the process must fail." or "Attempts to pass data that does not follow the above format must be rejected with the following error code".

What's more, this is often a good thing. It prevents certain types of malformed data from being processed in such a way as to create unpredictable results or security problems. If it says ten bytes, and they give you twelve, that could be a buffer overflow if you don't check, meaning a security problem and a likely cause of really broken code. Even a thing that's less obvious can be problematic. If I support 0, 1, or 2 while the spec only supports 0 or 1, then if they change the spec to have a 2 but it's not the same as my 2, I've got a broken nightmare, my users are using it, the standard's been violated, and one or likely all three of us has a problem on our hands.

Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps

Re: @El Reg, teach your authors some basic journalism

Do you really fail to see the link between the death count and the tweets concerned? The proposal and fight over mail-in ballots is a result of a risky situation. The death count helps to indicate why the situation is risky. Without the high death count, there would not be a situation leading to the call for mailing ballots. Without that call, there wouldn't be this argument among political figures about the legitimacy of doing that. Without that argument, the tweets that are the subject of the article would not exist.

You're not getting Huawei that easily: Canadian judge rules CFO's extradition proceedings to US can continue

Re: @WolfFan - China really shouldn’t have

I am not saying they have. If they decide they want to increase the pressure, it's well within their abilities to start the charge process, with real information gathered from these people or with completely invented evidence. I have little doubt that they would do so; China has not proven itself capable of justice under its current government. My earlier point was that, even if they had some type of valid charge, the trial wouldn't be valid because they aren't being tried for those crimes, but held for use as political game pieces.

This can be used in two ways. First, it pretty much invalidates any complaint China may have about Canadian operations, as Canada has adhered to the rule of law while China has thrown it out the window. Second, it can be used as a comparison to allege that statements of a similar nature by the American president mean that a fair trial there will likewise not be forthcoming. In my opinion, I think a trial there would likely be fair, but there may be attempts at interference after it completes. Still, if the American government wanted the trial to be clear of qualms about its integrity, the president shouldn't have made those statements. He did, nobody stopped him, and now they're going to have to lie in that bed they made.

Re: @WolfFan - China really shouldn’t have

The original accusation by American authorities was that she made fraudulent claims to American banking officials about not doing something that would be illegal in the U.S. She and her company are allowed to do those things, but American investors are not allowed to invest in them if they do. She supposedly told them that those things were not happening so they could invest while continuing to do them, which would be fraud. The same would be true if she lied about what the company was doing or could do in some other way, for example if she told investors that Huawei had chip-manufacturing capacity they didn't have--Iran is only relevant because of a law impacting the investors which caused them to ask for details.

Later, the president decided that she could be used as a bargaining chip, which is very very wrong. That needs not to happen, and just saying that makes it very concerning. It may in fact lead to the dismissal of the extradition because her lawyers in Canada can claim the statement means that a fair trial cannot occur; they have already started that particular argument. However, it does not prevent the original charges from still being valid charges if proven. Similarly, there may be valid charges against the two Canadians, but China has proven that they too intend to use these people as bargaining chips, which makes the issue of a fair trial relevant.

cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell: Microsoft leads aged command-line interpreter out into 'maintenance mode'

Re: Never used PSH... question

Not at all is the better answer. While the commands have aliases, the parameters very much do not.

Consider this command that I've used with some frequency. If I know a file is somewhere in a crowded directory and part of the filename, but I can't find it, I can do this to give me the full path:

dir /s /b | findstr [name]

Not a clear command. Neither /s nor /b are clear; you just have to memorize them. What happens in PowerShell? Neither parameter is recognized, and they're treated as paths. There are certainly replacement parameters. However, I would need to look them up. Instead, I'll just move over to git bash and use the real ls and grep to do it properly--the dir way is faster only because I have memorized it.

Re: Microsoft only have themselves to blame

"The verbosity, though, means you can actually usually take a correct guess at the command you're after, and its parameters, without having to Google what you're attempting to achieve."

I'm glad that works for you. It doesn't work for me. I usually have no clue what a command is called, and I am often very baffled about how I'm supposed to extract parts of the results. I have to wonder if part of the reason you know these things is not that it's so clear and standard, but that you've used it enough that most things you want to do frequently you've already seen--while you may not have memorized them, you can take guesses based on having seen them before.

The problem with PowerShell is that it's intended both as a CLI system and a programming language. Not a scripting language, but a programming one. Meaning lots of things like exceptions and type confusion which can be harmful. Consider how a user interacting with it as a CLI sees certain elements. An easy example is error messages. Let's compare some error messages printed by unix tools and PowerShell commands:

Listing a nonexistent directory:

me@machine:~$ ls /doesnotexist

ls: /doesnotexist: No such file or directory

PS C:\>ls c:\doesnotexist

ls : cannot find path 'C:\doesnotexist' because it does not exist.

At line:1 char:1

+ ls c:\doesnotexist

+

+ CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (C:\doesnotexist:String) [Get-ChildItem], ItemNotFoundException

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : PathNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetChildItemCommand

Copy a file onto itself:

me@machine:~$ cp file1 file1

cp: file1 and file1 are identical (not copied).

PS C:\>copy file1 file1

Copy : Cannot overwrite the item C:\file1 with itself.

At line:1 char:1

+ copy file1 file1

+

+ CategoryInfo: WriteError: (C:\file1:String) [Copy-Item], IOException

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : CopyError,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.CopyItemCommand

Yes, the information is there. The error messages are possibly a little better, in fact. But the rest of the data is useless and it gums up the output stream. It's all there because people are expected to run these commands in scripts and catch these things. Well, let's say I'm writing a script to copy things and I want to catch the copy-onto-itself bug for some reason. What do I catch? Look at that error printout from earlier. Is it WriteError? IOException? CopyError? Which of these can I even catch? What else might cause that but not be this particular error? Is there a CopyFileOntoItselfException?

None of that is obvious. An easy method to find out is to go online. What if I don't want to? Well, on a unixy OS, I can do "man cp" for a full log or just run cp with no arguments to get a summary. What about PowerShell? Maybe just "copy" will do the trick:

PS C:\>copy

cmdlet Copy-Item at command pipeline position 1

Supply values for the following parameters:

Nope, that's not it. Might they have made a man command for me? Yes, they have. While we're on the subject, I'm noting here that the only way I can find commands is by entering their unix versions and seeing if someone at PowerShell HQ has linked them to me. While get-help is not that hard to guess, I could see several other options such as get-documentation, describe-command, show-manual, and various other things.

Let's try "man copy". It pulls up a typical man page, except the basic one doesn't really say anything. It talks quite a bit about the command being able to copy and rename a file in one command because well, duh, but it spends only a couple terse lines talking about parameters and doesn't mention errors or exceptions. There are two other views, detailed and full, and maybe one of those contains that information. Detailed doesn't. Full doesn't. Finding out that neither does takes reading long man pages with very long examples sections.

So if I want to use it as a method of launching things, I end up having to see plenty of pointless details that only matter if I'm writing programs. If I'm writing programs, I have to hunt the internet for information about what a command can do. They should start with a good CLI and build the scripting onto that, but they didn't. It shows.

Re: Strings

No, I think there are two faults: one with the programmer and one with the vendor.

The vendor's comes first: they need to make a better method of figuring out what version of things is being run. They have lots of methods, but as pointed out they don't have a specific format.

But there's also the programmer. It's pretty clear that trying to extract version information or really anything from a copyright string is bound for failure. It's not meant to include all that information. The internal string that gets rendered could be any of these:

"Microsoft Windows Version 10.0.15926536, copyright 2001-2020 Microsoft Corp"

"Microsoft Windows Version 10.0.15926536, copyright 2001-{$current_year} Microsoft Corp"

"Microsoft Windows Version 10.0.{$patch_version}, copyright 2001-2020 Microsoft Corp"

"Microsoft Windows Version {$major_version}.{$minor_version}.{$patch_version}, copyright 2001-2020 Microsoft Corp"

"Microsoft Windows Version {$version_number_string}, copyright 2001-2020 Microsoft Corp"

Or even "{$product_name} Version {$product_version_string}, copyright {$copyright_start_year}-{$current_year} {$product_vendor}"

And that's just a few of many possibilities. Relying on that isn't a good idea. It's bound to break, and I'm surprised MS did anything at all on hearing it. I'm actually surprised they did hear about it--if I had written a script and it broke, I wouldn't anticipate any assistance from them and I would have found some other method to get around it.

Raspberry Pi Foundation serves up an 8GB slice of mini-computing goodness

Re: What happened to the Pi Zero W?

They're quite popular, and there never seem to be enough manufacturing runs. They've been one per order basically everywhere since release. I guess the manufacturing capacity has been focused on the 4 instead and supply for the others has suffered. I'd check smallish resellers as they probably ordered in bulk and may have a few in stock. Amazon and similar general selling sites will never sell such a thing at list price.

Re: Further back than that....

I think this is probably near the high end of prices the foundation will want to target, because if they go higher, they'll start being similar to other computing devices. Still, the small computing devices you can buy for £74 or thereabouts are going to have nothing on an 8GB Pi 4. Most that I have found at slightly higher pricepoints are Intel Atom-based things with a whole 2GB (4GB if you find the one place selling them on clearance). Meanwhile, it's still lower than the price for a low-end laptop unless you're entering the used market. If your use case can benefit from the extra memory, this probably offers it at one of the best prices out there. If it can't, the 4GB version is available for significantly less.

I don't know how we would find that out, but completely anecdotal evidence from my experience is that rarely happens. I have 16 GB in my laptop, but it's an Intel processor at 2.9 GHz (from a while ago). Other machines I've set up tend to have faster processors if they are paired with that much memory.

You are correct that it is certainly possible. The question is how many people can really use it, because if the Pi foundation thinks it's not that many, they have little reason to make one. They're probably not making much more profit on high-memory versions, and even a small manufacturing run means risk if they can't sell them.

Doesn't really surprise me. At some point, lots of memory isn't so useful unless paired with enough processing, and they can't do much more of that without running into major thermal or power problems. I'd imagine that many memory-intensive tasks one might want to do on a pi-style machine will become processor-limited rather than memory-limited. In my case, most memory-intensive things I do involve either running VMs or manipulating large databases, both of which also require a lot of processing.

Clearview AI sued by ACLU for scraping billions of selfies from social media to power its facial-recog-for-cops system

“Clearview AI is a search engine that uses only publicly available images accessible on the internet. It is absurd that the ACLU wants to censor which search engines people can use to access public information on the internet. The First Amendment forbids this.” (Tor Ekeland)

Hey. You seem to be missing several important details about reality. Let me inform you about them.

Search engines don't have full access to everything, nor do they have the rights to any piece of information they find. That falls under other laws, not the first amendment. The first amendment does not allow you to store information you don't have a right to. The first amendment does not allow you to mine biometric information. The first amendment means you can say things and print things, nothing more. Did you sleep through constitutional law class?

Paying Arizona: Google sued by state for location data revenues after tracking state's citizens via mobiles

Finally

Let's hope this continues to spread and more cases are filed against them. This has gone on too long. Let's also hope that the judgement runs along the lines of $10 per person per day of owning an Android device from which Google scraped data. Of course it won't happen, but hope is fun sometimes.

Embrace and kill? AppGet dev claims Microsoft reeled him in with talk of help and a job – then released remarkably similar package manager

Re: All big guys have similar attitudes

That's bad, but it's often hard to combat. Unless a patent or copyright was violated, nothing blocks someone from looking at what you did and trying to copy it. We probably wouldn't want that anyway because the big companies would be able to accuse anything that is at all similar to something they did of having seen their thing, which they're already distressingly happy to do.

This situation strikes me as similar to recent complaints by developers of open source software that cloud providers have been running their software and making money from doing so without paying them. The issue is clear and it's undesirable, but it's also unsurprising because the license terms of much of that software state quite clearly that people are allowed to do this. If I had looked at AppGet's operation and created a competitor on my own, I would not have violated anything and the author probably wouldn't be very upset with me. If MS had done the same without talking to him, he would have been more annoyed but couldn't prove much. The issue seems like a recruitment and PR fiasco given their talks with him, but it doesn't change the justification of any other actions.

Rich Communication Services: Nobody uses it, nobody wants it, but analysts reckon it's on the verge of a breakthrough

Re: Nope

Um...not really. The centralized model argument is the only good one you've made. The security of the protocol itself has been verified repeatedly, and the data available to a potentially malicious Signal server is known. We have access to the code and we can take chunks of it, including their protocol, if it suits us.

The centralization argument is a good one--we shouldn't rely on Signal's servers because they could be compromised or removed. That's a valid concern. However, the comparison here has been between Signal and RCS. RCS is also centralized. Now I can hear the arguments already--Signal runs the only servers, whereas RCS is run by multiple mobile companies. The problem being that you need your mobile company's servers to send or receive RCS messages, and you also need your recipient's provider's servers to be operational. That's two single points of failure or interference. In addition, it restricts you to using one communication mechanism to send RCS messages--no sending one over WiFi unless your mobile provider supports it, and even if they do, it takes exactly the same path after leaving your local network. Neither are decentralized.

A decentralized communication system with end-to-end encryption would be nice. The one I've used before is encrypted email, which does offer that but has some usability problems. We can use a few other options or design a new one. RCS is not it.

In addition, RCS places a lot more requirements on hardware and mobile provider support. If I have any network connection, I can send an email with encrypted contents. If I have any verifiable mobile connection at setup time and any connection later, I can send a Signal message. If I have any mobile connection on any provider worldwide, I can send an insecure SMS message. If I have a specific set of phones running on one of two providers in the U.S., I can send an RCS message. That means that, if I go to a different country and get a local number, I can still send email, SMS, and Signal, but RCS is not an option no matter what I like--I just have to wait for someone there to implement it and hope they do so with the encryption enabled, because I can neither verify what their code looks like nor bypass them.

Oh, is that so. So what I'm hearing is they added end-to-end encryption. In a build that isn't the suggested one. On two carriers in America. Who have partnered with Google to get it. Twelve years after the initial protocol was started.

Given that we've had completely functional, auditable, few-restrictions end-to-end encryption on Signal for six years and completely functional, auditable, no-restrictions, decentralized end-to-end encryption on email for at least twenty, you'll forgive me if I find the introduction of the feature in a limited beta version of a protocol that's only available for a third of one country's mobile market on specific hardware only unimpressive.

Except RCS offers basically none of those benefits. Encryption: no. Centralization: yes. It's a little decentralized because you can go through your mobile company and skip others if your recipient is also on that provider, but it's still using a relatively small set of centralized servers, and given the number of times people have demonstrated successful attacks on those servers, it's likely not private.

You want decentralized, encrypted, text communication with support for rich content, images, etc? Good news. We have that. It's called email with PGP. You can use WiFi or cellular to do that. RCS is no more secure than SMS and likely less useful or secure than most centralized chat apps.

Twitter ticks off Trump with new 'Get the facts' alert on pair of fact-challenged tweets

Re: I would pay full ticket price...

The weird versions are trying to explain what it means. Many don't seem to realize the "Congress shall make no law" part; they think that there should be no limits whatsoever. For example, all the people who get very annoyed when someone tells them to leave a private place where they have been lecturing without permission. The explanations are attempting to state this in clearer language because those people either never read the text or don't understand what it means.

Re: I would pay full ticket price...

You have to summarize the points and include a clarification that many people seem not to realize. My suggestion is this:

The first amendment means the government can't make what you say illegal, but other places can decide what you can say on their platform.

That's for the 140 character limit. If I'm allowed to go to 280, I'd include the following clearer version:

The first amendment stops the government from denying you the freedom to say or write things, but the government can still restrict your actions while you say those things and private organizations can decide what you are allowed to say when you're on their platform.

It doesn't cover the other rights granted by the amendment, but it at least gets the point of "freedom of speech" through.

China to test digital version of its currency at 2022 Winter Olympics

Re: Why the uproar ?

What's different here? Well, let's check out a few things. If I'm in an oppressive country and I want to do something about it, money is quite handy. Here's what can happen now:

My friend: I'd like to start printing a lot of information that I have found and distributing that.

Me: Sounds good.

Friend: But I'm afraid that they'll figure me out when they realize my bank account has been drained right when the publications start.

Me: I'll chip in, and I have other friends who are also interested. We'll all help.

Friend: Thank you.

Me: Hands cash to friend.

Other friends: Hand cash to friend.

Friend: Goes to office supply store, buys paper and ink cartridges with cash.

Government of oppressive country: Doesn't know who bought those supplies.

With digital-only transactions, they would know. And they'd know who sent cash to my friend in the first place, meaning that we couldn't support the attempt financially without also being on the radar.

So yes, it's worse because it's China, a dictatorship. It wouldn't be good here either. We don't have to worry about our governments imprisoning us for buying paper and printing a lot, but we do have reasonable concerns about who has access to information. Information about where you spend money gives a potential criminal plenty to use to steal your money or identity, track you physically, and the like. At the moment, if you are concerned about this, perhaps because you have already become a victim of identity theft, you can stop using credit cards for much and switch to cash. With digital-only currency, you don't have that option and you will rely on the integrity of that system. In addition, if that system works like cash, there's a possibility that people will be stealing it with stolen access credentials without recourse, as it has been done previously with cryptocurrencies and stolen keys. With physical cash, criminals can only steal the amount they find--if my wallet is stolen, the criminals don't get any cash I store elsewhere.

Frontier: Yes, yes, we've filed for bankruptcy protection, but that's not stopping us giving key staff $38m in bonuses

Re: Verizon sold wire line knowing this outcome

"This article should really blame Verizon and the like for abandoning the services where they cannot make large profit."

Really? So it goes like this:

Verizon: We have some businesses that won't make a bunch of money. We want a bunch of money. Also, we probably shouldn't just turn them off because that will disconnect all our customers. Any ideas?

Employee: Sell it. Someone will want it. They'll pay us money for it, and the customers get service from that place.

Verizon: Will anyone want it?

Employee: Sure. You could make money. Someone will want to try.

Verizon: Anyone want this infrastructure?

Frontier: Yes please.

How is that blameworthy for Verizon? They didn't want something, and they found someone who did want it. While they didn't think it would be profitable, it wasn't inherently harmful--just not worth very much. If Frontier bought Verizon's infrastructure then decided to take sheers to all the cables, would that be Verizon's fault too?

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

Re: AMD Dreams

But that's not an intrinsic limit either of the instruction set or of memory. Should we need to remove that limitation, it can be done. It would require some OS code changes, but they get updated all the time so we can manage that. Current processors can't connect to that much memory anyway so any limitations would be removed by the time they can. The next limit would be 16 exabytes, which would be much harder to work around, but I figure that one is a long time off.

Contact-tracing app may become a permanent fixture in major Chinese city

Re: @Wade Burchette - Define freedom!

So Jefferson was a hypocrite about slavery, being happy to make others do it while not wanting to do it himself. What else is new? I think the inherent injustice and hypocrisy of basically all of history has been realized before. The question that now concerns us is the present, and whether we like the person who said it, the point still may have validity to the present. Similarly, we should keep in mind the failings of people in the past so we don't repeat them. In this situation, for example, we would be keeping in mind that freedom for some didn't mean freedom for all, so we should be very careful to ensure that everyone gets the benefits we create or maintain now.

Home working is here to stay, says Lenovo boss, and will grow the total addressable PC market by up to 30%

Re: NUCs & Similar

Monitors, definitely. Minidesktops, I doubt it. I think laptops connected to monitors is the way they will go and probably the right one too. The reasons are many.

First, a laptop is likely more useful for the user. Work is most effective at a specific place with full-sized peripherals, but a laptop allows that person to move to a different place if they need to. If their previous office is unavailable or noisy, they can relocate to a different part of their house (assuming they have one available). This also makes it easy for them to bring their machine elsewhere for those occasional in-person events or meetings. Not to mention the benefits of the built-in UPS.

It also benefits the employer. By providing a laptop, they can push several potential costs back onto their employee. They don't have to buy the monitor if they're feeling miserly, nor do they have to spend IT support time on getting peripherals to connect. Laptops are more likely to use a generic power adapter which can be sourced quickly if damaged, which could be useful if the WFH trend leads to WFH from further distances.

Re: I have to say I'm with Lenovo on this

I don't think that's necessarily the case. Not allowing WFH when it is feasible is certainly annoying, but forcing it can be equally if not more so. And there are times when it isn't a good idea, such as when frequent collaboration is required, where physical proximity helps quite a bit. I would actually not be surprised to hear that the least human of bosses try to push WFH when they realize that it doesn't really lead to the decrease in productivity they previously predicted. It allows them to push the costs they had to pay back on the workers, primarily real estate. When they get to pocket some of that cost saving, lots will consider it.