Posts by doublelayer

Deadline draws near to avoid auto-joining Amazon's mesh network Sidewalk

Re: Overblown

Most of this is disputable or wrong.

"we’ve been sending our traffic over other peoples network kit since the internet began. In terms of security threat, it’s already solved by TLS."

No, that's not how this works. The threat is not the security of our data. The threat is the pathway to a potential attack. If someone can use the sidewalk system to access a device on my network, they could use it to gain information about my network and other devices on it. While we have been using others' equipment to send our traffic, we typically don't allow unknown devices to use our equipment.

"Finally doesn’t apple’s Find my device do the same thing?"

No. It doesn't. It uses the network information already known by the device, which works pretty well because a lot of them have cellular radios and have connected to WiFi before. It does not have a secret tunnel through others' devices.

"As does lorawan"

LoRa? No, that doesn't either. That's a radio protocol which doesn't even connect to the internet. If you want to bridge the LoRa network you've set up to the internet, you need the equipment which does it. Or someone might (might) have one already and agree that you can use it, but that's like asking your neighbor to let you use their WiFi. It is not required for the system and not expected by it either.

Re: I wonder if...

Well, sort of but why would you do that? If you're worried about a specific device broadcasting, then you can put it into a more convenient shielded thing. If you're worried about a device you don't know about, then it's probably not on your person, but instead in something that goes around with you such as a bag or a vehicle. A bag which blocks signals is likely more useful than trying to make clothing for the purpose.

Huawei names first tablets, phones to run its Android-in-disguise HarmonyOS 2

Re: Huawei is owned by its workers

First, that's not what those who distrust Huawei cite as their reason. Second, Huawei isn't owned by its workers in any sense. The closest you can get is that it might be directed by them, but from the methods used, this isn't really true either. Workers get the right to vote in an election which eventually gets to select people who eventually get to select the directors for the company, which looks promising, but their candidates are named by the existing leadership and not by the workers. Therefore, the leadership can prevent any disagreement by restricting available candidates. The actual ownership of the company is held by a holding company and its founder, and the holding company in turn is owned by a group supposedly representing a trade union, but a trade union of the type administered by the government. Some have argued that this makes Huawei owned by the Chinese government, and legally it's sort of true, but I don't think that makes them any more beholden to the CCP than they would be anyway merely by the CCP having a bunch of power.

I agree with the original poster, but your stated reason is not at all the reason that Huawei has detractors.

Surviving eclipse season and resurrecting 25-year-old software with Windows for Workgroups 3.11: One year with Mars Express

Re: air filled, so lucky!

You could always try packaging it up and mailing it to them without a return address. At least that's what the BOFH would do.

Re: The Mars Express is a testament to the intelligence of our species

"Intelligent minds getting together to solve problems will overcome everything but the heat death of the Universe."

Or unintelligent minds refusing to do things.

Re: ET and all that......

"I wonder if, should we have an outpost on Ganymede, would it be possible to view a TV broadcast, or even listen to a radio broadcast ?"

As they are broadcasted now, with technology like the kind we have now, no. We use a variety of transmission systems but none of them are designed to send radio or television into space. A lot of more common systems use wavelengths which don't travel very far (it's a function of frequency), which is why the local television signal can't be heard in another continent. There are a few things we use which cover much longer distances, but they do that by taking advantage of conditions on Earth which don't make it easy to receive it outside the planet. The most common of these are transmissions which reflect off the ionosphere and thereby bounce around the world for a longer range, but the same electrical conditions that allow the ionosphere to reflect the signal elsewhere make it very hard for the signal to get through it and out into space.

If we had such an outpost, we would set up a communication system which can reach it, just like the systems we have for communicating with spacecraft, but it would involve large changes to our current systems to deal with the transmission problems across such large distances. Or theoretically, someone could find a way to focus on a very weak signal without picking up all the static there would be, but people have been trying that for a very long time without getting it.

Code contributions to GCC no longer have to be assigned to FSF, says compiler body

Re: Apple and GPL

The original code implementing GCC was copyrighted to the FSF, and thus they would have the ability to sue without owning the copyright on each additional contribution. It's true that it wasn't well-tested at that point, but they could have and it would have worked.

Re: Apple and GPL

This doesn't really relate to any of the copyright assignment issues. It's only an asset of the GPL. No matter who had the copyright to GCC, Apple or NeXT still couldn't use it and build a proprietary compiler.

VC's paper claims cost of cloud is twice as much as running on-premises. Let's have a look at that

Re: This Is My Shocked Face

I don't think so. It's not private, as it's the thing all your customers download and run on their equipment. It doesn't contain any sensitive information, and if it does, that's the biggest of your problems. More than that, you have the code for that elsewhere, so it doesn't matter much where you run that code because you can stand it up elsewhere in a disaster.

Big Tech has a big problem with Florida passing a law that protects politicians from web moderation

Re: suppose one gets this messages when logging into Big_Tech site X

The main difference is that race, religion, and national origin are all protected characteristics in civil rights legislation, where as hate speech or "You annoyed me" are not. There is a list for your country. Maybe you should read it.

"Private businesses apparently cannot discriminate against people, or so the courts ruled regarding the bakers."

You will find when you read about it that the bakers concerned objected to writing a message on the cake, refused to do so, and were upheld by the courts. Ergo it is legal for companies to refuse to write or publish when they do not want to do so, or to discriminate using certain nonprotected characteristics. These rules may not apply if a company has a monopoly position. Most social media companies do not have such a position in the relevant market, namely that of online publishing. Whatever your feelings about the companies themselves, the people they choose not to permit, or the things they do, the above are facts about the legal situation which you will need to factor into your argument.

AWS Free Tier, where's your spending limit? 'I thought I deleted everything but I have been charged $200'

Re: Put this on the long list...

And remember also that people who say always are usually wrong. Whether they say cloud is always better or always worse, they're either oversimplifying, trying to get your business, or don't know what they're talking about.

Re: spending limit cannot be applied to pay as you go ...in production,

Code of all kinds includes limits to prevent problems that were not found in production. It is why production software checks whether memory was allocated correctly and handles out of memory conditions even though their assessment indicated that this was unlikely. For the same reason, they should have the ability, especially when it's only running on their systems, to have a safety cutoff for various types of unexpected resource usage. Most software running on the backend already has a lot of things like this. For example, a system which checks individual jobs for ones that seem to be taking too long or too much processing and may therefore be malfunctioning. Such jobs can be investigated or killed to prevent them causing damage to the rest of the backend.

Apple sued in nightmare case involving teen wrongly accused of shoplifting, driver's permit used by impostor, and unreliable facial-rec tech

Well, while we're discussing expectations and assumptions, I expected you to read the article before commenting and assume that you didn't. Here are a few of the things you've gotten wrong.

"So there is a thief. He is photographed, and he loses a forged library card with his photo and someone else’s name."

Nothing here is correct. Not a library card. No photo on the card, which is a permit for an as yet unlicensed driver. Card is not forged, but a true card. Thief and rightful owner of card are two different people.

"They conveniently deleted the picture” is also nonsense. Nobody claims it was his picture."

Except Apple and their security contractor, repeatedly, after being informed multiple times of their mistake. But nobody else, except sometimes the police. But nobody else.

"And I assume the thief had long been convicted, no reason ans possibly illegal to keep his picture after that."

No conviction has happened. Because in order to convict someone, you have to identify who they are, and when they tried to do that, they found out they were wrong about the identification.

The Epic vs Apple trial is wrapping up, but the battle has just begun

Re: Costs

"30% sounds a lot until you look at the details. If the cost of a transaction is $.25 and the sale is $1, the net on the 30% is 5%."

You just made up those numbers and they're utterly ridiculous. The cost is nothing like that. It never was, and it certainly isn't now.

"Epic signed the contract and should have to live by it until the next time it comes up for renewal. If they are contributing so much to Apple's coffers, they should be in a good position to get some concessions."

Apple does not offer concessions. They won't, because they have a lot more power because they have a monopoly on IOS app distribution. That's what this case is about because that can be illegal.

"There is also the matter of data security compliance across many countries. That alone is a big cost in attorneys that any one developer may not be able to afford."

This is a rubbish argument. Apple does not assist developers with this compliance. Those costs are entirely the responsibility of developers and have always been. If you're using the throw anything at the wall defense, it's best not to throw outright lies up there. At least misstate the truth, come on.

"If Epic is so big, how come they haven't negotiated a better deal with Apple?"

Apple doesn't offer any deals. They recently changed from one option to two options to avoid more legal scrutiny. It didn't work. They feel that, because they have a platform and can prevent people from posting, that they have enough leverage to demand whatever price they want and the other side will have to pay.

Re: Knock on effect

What free stuff would they be giving you or anyone in that case? They would be allowing you to run code made by someone else, paid for by you, retrieved from the developers directly. Apple wouldn't be required to give you anything. If you chose to use third-party apps, only you and the developer would have value transferred.

Re: "Apple’s ironclad control of the iOS platform"

You made an excellent example:

"Imagine what would happen if MS banned the Epic store app from Windows..."

This is great. Because MS can't ban them from Windows because they want money. Microsoft does not charge them for the right to have a Windows binary. They don't collect their transactions. They don't restrict who can run code on Windows. That's what Apple thinks it should have the right to do.

Re: "Apple’s ironclad control of the iOS platform"

"That 30% also gets your product marketed to hundreds of millions of potential punters;"

I don't think it really does. Unless coming up when people search for the name counts as marketing. They don't include advertising with App Store publishing, so unless you show up in one of their lists of nice apps, then you don't really get anything related to marketing. I don't know if anyone ever reads those lists, nor do I know if Epic has ever appeared in them. I'd be curious whether people would take a deal which is "You may use other payment providers and you will never appear in any of our suggested app lists". I expect most would take that contract.

Apple's services are in providing a CDN for downloading the base package, and that's it. They don't host any of the other app-related services. That certainly doesn't cost 30%, and that isn't even used when doing in-app purchases.

This is tough for me, because you're partly right and partly wrong, each to a large degree.

You're absolutely right that he was not forced to concede anything of the kind. His statements about malware were made as part of his argument. Epic didn't need him to say that and he volunteered the statements.

You're wrong though because you're assuming the statements misconstrued here were about fraudulent payments. He made those statements too, but that's not what they were talking about. This is what they were talking about:

"There are multiple stores on the Mac," Judge Rogers told the exec according to reports. "So, if that can happen on the Mac, why should we not allow the same stores to exist on the phone?"

"It’s certainly how we’ve done it on the Mac," replied Federighi, "and it’s regularly exploited on the Mac. iOS has established a dramatically higher bar for customer protection. The Mac is not meeting that bar today.

[...]

"And as I say, today, we have a level of malware on the Mac that we don’t find acceptable and is much worse than iOS. Put that same situation in place for iOS and it would be a very bad situation for our customers."

Quoted article

Re: "Apple’s ironclad control of the iOS platform"

Well, in my opinion, which has no legal value, Epic made the thing that someone wants to buy, meaning they're providing the value to the other side. Apple provided that value when the user wanted to buy an iPhone, so they keep that profit. Epic provide the value when a gamer wants to buy whatever useless thing they're selling (I don't know what they sell), so Epic should keep that profit. I don't think Apple should have the universal right to demand the exclusive right to payments their users make.

Facial recog firm Clearview hit with complaints in France, Austria, Italy, Greece and the UK

Re: videoconferencing?

Such videos, if not made public, are unavailable unless the conferencing companies sold them. They don't have any need to do that, and it would be tricky. There is little risk of that happening.

Re: Copyright as well as data protection

The big social media companies do not get your copyright rights. They get a right to use your uploaded images, but A) that doesn't give them ownership and B) it does not extend to others. Their terms of service will include statements to that effect. I've already confirmed the major ones have such clauses.

Re: File That Complaint!

I like this idea. We could start by having any reader in a GDPR-covered country start submitting requests for erasure of their data. Here's a form letter which could be of use:

https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure-request/

I'm guessing most of these will be ignored, and we also won't generate sufficient traffic to annoy them, but by doing this in a variety of EU countries, we could also get more documented incidents where the letters are ignored, which can be used in complaints to data protection authorities.

Re: Has anyone tried filing a DMCA takedown notice against them?

The problem is that you don't know for sure whether a given picture of you is in their database. They don't have that information available, and therefore you can't give them a reference to the data that violates. You could still make a case under some cases, but first you need a copy of the data they have on you, which you can only get if there's a law requiring that and they're obeying that law.

Desktop renaissance? Nope, rebound of hefty PCs is just because there's notebook shortage – analysts

Some of us have larger residences and can easily work in a dedicated or comfortable room, or live alone so we don't have to move things as often, but lots of others aren't in that situation. Considering the number of people who live with family in a small place and may have two people working from home full time, there are many who won't have convenient dedicated locations to work and will use some other room. That is why some people (most people if we use the numbers from the article) still buy laptops even if they're not using them outside their homes very often.

Oh, that sounds fun. After I finish working for the day, I just have to unplug seven cables and wheel my desk somewhere else. I don't know where, because if I had a nice convenient place for the desk to be stored then I could probably just work from there and not move it.

Unfixable Apple M1 chip bug enables cross-process chatter, breaking OS security model

Re: Major security risk

"Are you trying to say that vaccines won't work in Australia?"

No, of course they're not. Here's what they said:

"Difference is, the UK is rapidly approaching the point of herd immunity (induced by mass vaccination), whereas Australia is a sitting duck if it starts getting a foothold and running out of control."

The degree to which they're at or near herd immunity is disputed, but the point about Australia is that the UK has given about 63 million jabs and Australia has given about 4 million. If the virus were to spread a lot in Australia, its people would have a lot less protection due to vaccinations. Fortunately, Australia has already gotten quarantines working pretty well, so that probably won't happen, but the point about differential vaccination rates is valid.

Re: Easy to protect against

It depends how often you want to thrash those bits. If you flip them randomly every 0.5 seconds, that means the channel is corrupted once in every 512 KB transferred. If the applications use packets and checksum them, they can figure that out and retransmit. You would probably have to flip them a lot more often to block the channel, but then you might see some performance degradation.

Re: Major security risk

Using two vaccines and the most dangerous variant makes sense. If you protect enough for a less dangerous variant, it will not be enough for the most dangerous one. So do the math on the most dangerous one both from vaccine resistance and health outcomes unless one of these situations apply:

1. There are so many different dangerous variants that protecting against the most dangerous will still result in a large risk from other ones, in which case the numbers are even worse.

2. The plan is to prevent that most dangerous variant from getting in at all. If that succeeds, then you don't need to create immunity to it, but that opportunity has already passed for the UK.

US Patent Office to take only DOCX in future – or PDFs if you pay extra

No, they're not. There are a bunch of tools that create PDFs and they do weird things to text layers. Sometimes they'll omit some characters because a font they used had a different glyph for a few combinations. Because their font didn't keep the characters apart, they're left out of the text. I've seen that repeatedly. Or there will be a table, and the text from the table will come out just as it went in, but the table's organization is completely destroyed. Row major, column major, sometimes completely random order, there's no way to tell. Whitespace sometimes indicates what it used to be, but it never lines up completely so if you try to split on whitespace you'll find the table is not easily parsed. There are lots of ways getting just the text out of a PDF won't work.

Re: You want interoperability?

Plain text in which encoding? Does the line ending matter? How about long lines vs short lines? Mathematical formula in what format? Written as words or assume the reader knows LaTeX? Tables allowed or not? If written, use the Unicode box drawing characters; only _, |, and -; or no lines, just line up with whitespace? Unicode or ASCII quotation marks? Diagrams permitted as separate images referenced by filename?

Plain. Text. Lots. Of. Questions.

Re: Ah XML...

"At least with Lisp you don't have to worry whether the end brackets match the opening ones."

Which makes it much easier to miss one of the brackets and mess up the entire expression since there are now several places you could fix it, only one of which works. If the closing ones have to match, then the compiler can tell you where the mismatch occurred. If generated automatically, the readability problem isn't so bad.

Re: "Plain. Damned. Text.."

"You do realise computers predate cars, right?"

That's a stretch. Conceptually, no they didn't, because cars are based on wheeled vehicles and just added the engine. As purchasable products, no they didn't, because general purpose computers, even those which broke down all the time, arrived a couple decades after cars that lots of people bought. The only method I can think of which allows it to work is if you're counting from first attempt to manufacture something of the kind, in which case the computer slightly predates the car, but then the computer got stuck and the car didn't.

USB-C levels up and powers up to deliver 240W in upgraded power delivery spec

Re: I predict excitement

And anyone who has some power-only USB cables knows how irritating that situation can be. It's gotten to the extent that I'll give away or recycle any power-only cables just to avoid it. So maybe a labeling requirement isn't so bad after all.

Be careful, 007. It’s just had a new coat of paint: Today is D-day for would-be Qs to apply to MI6

No, they have to do what would actually happen. The person writes the script to brute force the password and outputs a mostly useless progress indicator which only serves to prove that the program is still running. I'd like to see them have a single terminal which looks like this (at least if I'm the one who wrote it).

Please wait...

10000

20000

30000

40000

50000

60000

That would be realistic, although if they're going for maximum realism, they have to throw in some useless warning output as well:

Please wait...

10000

20000

Password "z0\x94F%": Partially valid header, best candidate so far.

30000

40000

Apple's iPad Pro on a stick, um, we mean M1 iMac scores 2 out of 10 for repairability

Really? Why? I get comparing Apple computers to others and not liking Apple's structure. Computers from others are usually more repairable and likely to last longer. Also they're sometimes less expensive. I don't view that as the only factor, but it definitely is one where Apple loses. But I don't see that factor applying to their phones. Android phones have much shorter software support lifetimes and are usually similarly unrepairable. There are only a few ones out there which are designed for users to repair them. For the vast majority of devices which weren't intended in that way, iPhones score in the middle whereas a lot of others score very low. So what argument do you have for disliking iPhones so much that you look down on those who use them?

Surprise! Developers' days ruined by interruptions and meetings, GitHub finds

Re: Interruption question

The article suggests that it doesn't. Developers didn't have as much problem with those questions, and I think I would feel the same had I gotten questions like that. They're short, probably can wait until I want to click over and answer them, and they imply that the system asking them actually cares about what I'm feeling. Also, it's the chance to put more data behind the call for fewer meetings. So I think I wouldn't mind that kind of question popping up from time to time.

Apple is happy to diss the desktop – it knows who's got the most to lose

Re: That Harvard Guy's bio ....

It's obviously a series of jokes. In my opinion, none of those jokes are funny, but they're clearly intended as such. The problem is that jokes which aren't funny and do sound like bragging can be interpreted as either just bragging or trying to hide bragging under a veneer of self-deprecation. He can do whatever he wants, but I wouldn't recommend such an attempt unless you want some people to express views as seen above.

Mobile to the enterprise: go away

"it is true that Win10 in a well-maintained enterprise environment is no more inherently vulnerable than Apple or Linux would be, were that ever to happen. But all three are the wrong answer to 21st century general business computing needs."

This argument is not a good one. Of course the complexity of a desktop OS means there's more work to do when a bunch of people are using them, but the reason that's still the case is that simpler mobile devices frequently come up short. Whether IOS, Android, or Chrome OS, these things will not be suitable for some users and some companies. You could still segregate the business into those people who can use something simple and those who can't, but that means you have twice the variety of systems to support for your users.

There are a few things that basically every desktop OS can do which basically every simple OS can't well. Multi-user is one thing. If you have a computer that multiple people may use, you can do that with Windows, Mac, or Linux but just try to do that well with an Android tablet. Yes, they do multiple users, but they don't easily handle the authentication process or sync preferences. Try that with an iPad and you'll find it's not capable of the task at all. How about using a full set of peripherals for someone who works better with some large screens, keyboard, mouse, etc. Some devices won't support multiple displays. Some weren't designed with mouse use in mind and will be painful.

Mobile devices can be used in some places, and they can even be superior for some tasks than a desktop. For most use cases, though, they'll be much worse than a desktop. If you have to have one standard, it should be a desktop.

Tesla owners win legal fight after software update crippled older Model S batteries

Re: is clearly motivated by greed

This is getting old. It's a conspiracy theory to suggest that a big company might be greedy now? When it was clearly somewhat in jest? And the article quoted some other people describing the same company as greedy?

China's Digital Yuan not aimed at challenging US dollar, says former People’s Bank governor

No, it's true. It's not intended to replace the dollar. It isn't capable. It's designed to provide China with the ability to know what any citizen has purchased and to cut all money off at the push of a button in case they don't like someone. Also can plug into the social credit score system. It's a tool for maintaining their domestic dictatorship, not impinging on international money transfers.

Their plan for changing international money transfers already started last year. It hasn't started very quickly, but it's their tool for the job. This is unrelated.

This week, Apple CEO Tim Cook faced surprisingly tough questioning from judge

Re: Hardware Lockin and Appstore taxes

Epic are arguing that the contract is illegal due to existing anti-monopoly law. That is a legitimate argument, and if the courts agree with it, then it is Apple who committed a violation. I don't like that Epic chose to break the contract, but the complexity of the legal system often requires a breech of contract in order to establish standing for a case that the contract violates the law. They could always change that to make such actions easier, but they haven't yet done so.

More importantly, the arguments for Epic and for Apple have a strange asymmetry. The argument for Epic is that Apple is using large market power, which they have, to constrain their customers in a way which has been seen repeatedly, whereas the argument for Apple is that Apple are owed things for [insert something Apple developed]. The law does not agree with you that Apple is owed merely for having decided to develop something, whereas it does have a place for recognizing abuse of market power. In that respect, Epic's argument makes more legal sense. Apple and those who think they are in the right would do well to counter that argument on its merits, namely whether they are actually constraining their customers and whether alternatives to their market exist to a reasonable extent. Sadly, they have also taken to throwing irrelevant arguments at the wall, including the argument that they are great people with an unusual right to get automatic rights of rent collection on anything at all related to their platform or its users. It is not helping their point.

Re: Hardware Lockin and Appstore taxes

The software developer does not owe the hardware developer anything. The user buys the hardware, paying what the company charges for it. The user buys the software, paying what the software developer charges. If the software developer has to license something from the hardware developer, they've already done that.

If Microsoft spends a bunch of money developing something interesting, and you write a program which runs on Windows, it is not your responsibility to pay for their development time. If they want you to, they can charge you a license fee to use their interesting thing and you can decide whether to pay it or not use their thing. If it has nothing to do with you, then you don't pay for it and they'll have to get their revenue from somewhere else. If they choose to give it away for free, then you still have no responsibility to pay for it. The same applies to Apple. They choose to do R&D based on their own interests: selling new devices and keeping people on their platform. If it works for them, that's where the money comes from to pay for the work. If it fails, too bad for them. They choose to spend the money, they have to make the money. You cannot force software developers to pay for anything Apple does.

Re: Hardware Lockin and Appstore taxes

"As to obtaining customer details how can you make a financial transaction without giving personal details away,"

They get payment information from the customer, just like every other time you buy something. They would ask for that information from those who want to buy things, not from Apple. They are thus not demanding any of Apple's records and the original point is still wrong.

Re: Hardware Lockin and Appstore taxes

Most of this is wrong.

"For saying how many middle men have been removed during this period the price for softwarestrangely has not gone down, suggesting that software houses are taking that cut for themselves rather than passing on via lower purchase cost on to the customer."

This would be hard to get a study on, but anecdotally, I think prices have come down quite a lot. Software purchases in the 1990s were often more expensive for relatively simple software, whereas a lot of software today is free or cheap. I also remember the purchases of software upgrades, which were often rather expensive when you consider that they were usually fixing bugs in the thing I already bought. That still happens on occasion, but a lot of places now view that as maintenance of a product they've already sold and include bugfix updates. Is that because the commissions came down, maybe, but probably not. Is it because there are more people writing it, probably. Is it because they've expanded their business models so less comes via the original purchase price, definitely. But still, if you asked me, I would say that there is a lot more cheap software out there.

"I could talk about book publishing or the music and movie industry and say that they too have not dropped their prices even though they are now distributing direct to the customer."

Well, they're usually not distributing direct to the customer. Also, I think prices have come down. For example, you can watch a lot of movies on a streaming service for a price which would have gotten a small number of rentals, and rentals for a short period. Whether that's the way you choose to spend your movie budget is another story, but it is a price and it is lower.

"I would suggest that the price that people are willing to pay for these products is far in excess of what the products costs to make and that even after all the middle men have been remove the software houses continue to charge the same and keep the profits rather than reward their customer for their loyality."

Doesn't matter to me. I don't need to be rewarded for my loyalty. If I still want the product, I will still buy it. If they cut their prices, so much the better for me. If a competitor creates an alternative which is cheaper, I might go over to them to take advantage of those. You seem to expect that companies will just cut their prices for no reason and somehow you feel you are entitled to this whereas Apple don't have to cut their prices. I don't get it.

"Add in that Apple need money to keep their production going where EPIC have already paid all their costs for making this product and are still not satisfied and demand a reduction in overhead on their micro transactions."

Apple do not need money to pay for their production. They get that from sales. The product concerned is not theirs. It is Epic's, and the value to the customer comes from what Epic provides those who choose to pay. Also, they don't demand that Apple gives them more money on their transactions, since they're more than willing to use their own transaction system and relieve Apple both of the commission and the required labor in managing the transaction.

More power for your Raspberry Pi: A new PoE+ HAT to sate power-hungry peripherals

Re: I want an RPi...

Assuming the dollars you are talking about are American, Adafruit is a good supplier of Pi-related equipment in the US. They seem to have all variants of the Pi 4B at the moment at the Pi's set prices.

It took 'over 80 different developers' to review and fix 'mess' made by students who sneaked bad code into Linux

"Which begs the question - if these now-rejected commits are bad enough to need removing now, what went wrong with the review process originally to allow them to be accepted? Which begs the follow-up question - what *else* has slipped through the review net and made it into the release branch?"

These are important questions, but not really new ones. We know that bad code gets into Linux all the time. They have to keep fixing bugs and security holes and each of those got in at some point. They have decided that speed takes precedence over a very long review sometimes. A useful study would look at the largest bugs and track back to the review which should have caught them. They could identify patterns where the reviews are insufficient. That would have made a lot of sense, but it would also have been a lot more work than committing buggy code to see if the process which has let in errors before lets in errors for the 2684th time.

China announces ‘crackdown’ on Bitcoin mining and trading

"Go for an asset backed cryptocurrency and you're more of an investor but still high risk because those cryptocurrencies are still pretty niche and volatile."

If you want to invest in an asset, buy a fund that reflects that asset. They're regulated and have to verify they actually have that asset. Crypto doesn't add any benefits there. Crypto only has benefits in theory as a method of exchange, and an asset-backed one usually lacks that fluidity without doing much about the volatility problem.

All that Lego has a purpose: Researchers find that spatial memory improves kids' mathematical powers

How to use it best

Now we just have to study which approach is the more useful when building Lego structures. My brother preferred to follow the plans and build exactly what was on the kit. I constructed less sophisticated structures, usually some variation on large box which has to hold various items together, but that meant I had to pay more attention to the strength of my structures which were holding up other things. I wonder which of us was learning more from the experience. My brother's creations held together for years, whereas I would usually scrap mine for parts quickly, so he definitely gets the endurance advantage.