Posts by doublelayer

$600m in cryptocurrencies swiped from Poly Network

Re: Blew my mask off my face

The only problem with that approach is that it's not true and the attackers know it. This isn't going to include funds from powerful criminal organizations. It will mostly include funds from small and pathetic criminal organizations and some actual investors, neither of which is usually willing to spend extra money on a mission of revenge. The places that perform acts like ransomware which result in crypto payments are made up of criminals, and they are large enough that they could attack someone who was getting in the way, but they don't have private armies or the assets to perform that kind of investigations. The large drug distribution groups are large enough that they don't need to bother with cryptocurrency unless they want to invest in it--they already use a more rigorous array of financial systems for handling their loot because they have so much of it and because they operate in such a large area that they can commandeer large chunks of the infrastructure that exists there.

The only large organization that I know of that uses a lot of crypto is North Korea. If this was used by North Korea for international storage, the thieves may have an issue. However, based on the way North Korea usually stores the money we know about, it would seem much more likely that, if they're involved, they're the ones who stole the coins. They have a history of large thefts so it is in character.

"I'm not aware of any country that recognises digital currencies as legitimate currency, So is this a financial crime?"

Yes, it would usually be. None of the major countries recognize cryptocurrency as currency, but most do recognize it as a thing you invest in, so it will likely be treated like a crime involving securities, gold, or similar. Then again, most criminal statutes aren't very different between financial or nonfinancial--if you steal things or money, they'll usually use similar laws to charge you if you get caught. Extra laws exist for financial crimes of other types, but that's for things like tax evasion. While it has little meaning, I think the statement is essentially correct.

The sideloader weeps tonight: Unsealed court docs claim Google said 'install friction' would ‘drastically limit' Epic's reach

It doesn't block manufacturers from installing their own custom stores, but it might block manufacturers from installing others' stores. The contracts are mostly secret, so we don't know the details. Still, some manufacturers decided to have their own store and those aren't blocked.

Elastic amends Elasticsearch Python client so it won't work with forks then blocks comments

Re: Ugh...

You are conflating two different things. I said that "You must pay" is not approved. The GPL says "You may charge". The two are not the same. "You may charge" means that I can refuse to give you the software unless you pay me money for it. However, if you do pay me money for it and get a copy, you can continue to use it without paying me again and you can give it away for free. Those actions are specifically mentioned in the GPL as well. In a "you must pay" situation, if you continued to use it or gave it to someone else without paying me, you would be in violation. The first is supported. The second is not. You can still easily do it and lots of projects do. You just won't get FSF and OSI approval.

Yes, they are hoping to have others develop the code so they spend less. That's the nice part about open source--others sometimes do free work. Those others get, in return, a database they can use for free with a small set of known license restrictions. It's why we like open source. If it works right, everybody gets a good product they can use and modify without having to worry that someone will turn around and sue them for copyright violation, license fees, or similar.

Re: Ugh...

"It is, here is the source code, do with it as the license says."

The license said Apache 2.0. Then they changed it so they could demand more money. What Amazon did was in compliance with the Apache license.

You will also find that there are restrictions on what a license can say before the FSF and OSI will decide it no longer qualifies as "free" and "open" respectively. You don't have to care about their definitions, but they are generally accepted arbittors of such things. You must pay to use the software is not approved by either because it places restrictions on who may use the software. Just keep that in mind.

The idea of making money off a service while using others' open source code is not new. Software as a service was different at the time the GPL was drafted, but it wasn't unheard of. More importantly, stuff like that has been done in many other ways. One of the most obvious ways is shipping hardware with the open source code running on it. For example, anyone who manufactures computers running Linux is conceivably profiting from the operating system they installed. Yet we rarely see people calling organizations like the Raspberry Pi Foundation "abusing the entire concept of open source".

There is a good reason that's not what people say. They recognize that the use of open source software, in addition to being exactly what the license said you could do, also benefits the software community. The Raspberry Pi may make some money off their redistribution of Linux, but they also write code which benefits them and every other Linux user. In addition, their product adds more Linux users who will do the same. Compared to if the Raspberry Pi used something closed source, which would not get any of those benefits. That's why they are praised, not demonized. In AWS's case, the situation is similar--if Amazon built their own database, the Elastic project wouldn't get as many users, contributors, or donors. AWS also contributed code to the Elastic project. I get the feeling that Amazon had plenty of money and it would be nice for them to pay more of that to the rest of the Elastic devs. However, open source has never worked under the assumption that if you make money, you should be obligated to give that money to the developers. That is one of its strengths.

"The claim that Open Source must be all or nothing doesn't click with me, given that end game for Amazon is leverage their size to crush Elastic anyway."

That's not nor was it their endgame. They wanted Elastic to keep making software so they could keep selling servers on which it's run. Killing them would do them no good at all. They contributed code for that purpose. Far from generous on their part, but your assumptions are entirely incorrect.

Re: Ugh...

How generous Amazon should be is a very subjective issue. They did contribute code fixes back, and they didn't keep any enhancements to themselves (that would have weakened their business because Amazon Elastic wouldn't be completely compatible with others' Elastic installs). I don't know if that's enough, but it isn't nothing and it is what most open source projects already work with. I would have liked it had Amazon also chosen to donate lots of money to the other maintainers. However, in this case, Elastic also benefits from the work of other maintainers by selling their commercial licenses for the software. They do not pay those external maintainers. It seems hypocritical to me to switch the license on those maintainers for optional generosity which they too choose not to do.

Alibaba fires manager accused of sexually assaulting colleague

Re: "web giant lacks formal sexual harassment policy"

"Why can't you just call the police? What have I missed? Because, I sure as hell would."

What you have missed is what "you can't just" means. It does not mean that you can't call the police. It means that calling the police is insufficient, I.E. you have to do more than that. In this case, the suggestion appears to be that the police are called, and while you wait for them, you perform a concurrent investigation and take action based on the results of that investigation which is presumed to be faster and possibly more reliable than the police's effort. There may be other suggestions as well.

Wireless powersats promise clean, permanent, abundant energy. Sound familiar?

And asteroid capture isn't an easy problem either. You need a lot of energy to get something to slow down and stay in a nice place and not hit any satellites or fall to the planet. That's happened before and it was unpleasant. Doing that will require more than a good energy source. Once that's done, the mining and manufacturing equipment will need somewhere to operate from. I have no doubt we'll invent enough to do it eventually, but this won't be enough and might not be needed at all.

UBports community delivers 'second-largest release of Ubuntu Touch ever'

I don't think that should be your primary concern. Of course such an OS could be compromised by developers who are incompetent or malicious, but the same is true of closed-source versions. In each case, you have to use your own judgement about the software which is run, which can be tricky. Here are some more specific answers about your concerns.

"This phone was bought in England and has nothing Russian about it, but when I use TOR browser on it the duckduckgo settings default to Russian results despite the exit node not ever being based in Russia. Something about the handset/app is suggesting Russian connotations."

This is probably a browser setting. I don't know if the E OS has set Russian somewhere in the defaults, but you can check by checking the settings for DDG here: https://duckduckgo.com/settings. If it says it's using the browser's default language, then check in the settings to see if Russian is set as one of your languages. I often get this just for having set a priority queue of languages on my phone.

"Additionally, the default E OS app store appears to be a mirror of another store, but is registered anonymously and has an opaque operating policy."

This is one of the features of the E people. They want a mirror of a lot of Google Play apps, which isn't supposed to happen. You have to trust them to do it correctly. Or you could avoid their store or use a different version. Lineage OS, for example, does not operate a store so you may trust it more.

[Taking some things out of order]

"If I use EOS on the Samsung S8 it seems completely obvious that I should not be doing internet banking on the device, as I cant guarantee the authenticity of the side loaded banking apps or reliability of the EOS app store."

This is now your responsibility. You have to check the authenticity of your critical apps. You can do that by downloading them directly from the original source, whether that's FDroid, the writer's site, or Google Play (you can use a few open clients for the Play store or another device). You could get a malware-laden version by searching for someone who cached an APK, but you have the option not to and it's not difficult.

"But the next concern after de-googling a handset using one of these operating systems is the true boundary security of the device. [...] People like me want to use an open source OS on their mobile phone but have nagging doubts and valid worries about security. Surely I cant be the only one worried that EOS and others are actually inherently insecure, customising aspects of android that the open source developers dont fully understand all aspects of android and the technical changes they are making to parts of the core operating system."

In this case, you are worried about something that usually goes the other way. I can't speak for all custom versions of Android, but I can about Lineage OS. In that case, they are using the open source AOSP code, which is maintained by the Android developers who already know about many details. They also release security updates daily. Compared to the average manufacturer which at best releases those updates monthly (normally much worse). They use known code which can be audited, unlike manufacturers who provide closed-source additional layers which they don't continue to update. You can and will have vulnerabilities in anything open, but you are virtually guaranteed to have more in the style of closed that most Android OEMs are using.

In your opening line, you also mentioned privacy. Nearly everything open source is not selling your information, meaning you're almost certainly guaranteed to be improving your privacy by using them. Privacy and security are among open source's strongest aspects. They will certainly not be perfect, and there are occasions where they will be bad, but I would not have the concerns that you have.

Please, no Moore: 'Law' that defined how chips have been made for decades has run itself into a cul-de-sac

Re: Yes but...

Why do we need to do that? For self-damage, we can set the goal to not perform actions that cause the damage. For intentionally-caused pain as a signal that we don't like what the AI did, we don't have to implement the pain system to tell it that we're displeased. Implementing synthetic pain is basically useless because we have existing methods of obtaining the same goals, enforcing things we want the AI to accomplish and things it should avoid. Moreover, building a separate system is just adding another point of failure where something about the pain handling goes wrong and our reliance on it proves problematic.

Consider how crude and almost useless pain is in biological systems. Yes, it can indicate things that are dangerous which helps people to know their limits, but other than that it has several downsides. It cannot be configured, so it continues to hijack signalling when there is no need to do so. Sometimes, it's turned off or dampened. It activates instincts which can be detrimental (automatically retreat from causing agent works great for fire, not so well for combat). It also weakens a lot of other conscious mental processes which could better solve the problem. Pain is a rudimentary signalling system that works on dumb devices, but there are lots of improvements we could make when building a signalling system for something else.

Re: Hardware Isn't the Issue

"I think where we need to go is slower but more. Loads of stuff has ARM in it now, like appliances and so on and for the most part that compute power goes unused. Why in 2021 can I not pool all the compute power I have in my house?"

Because those chips are not as powerful as you think they are. A lot are microcontrollers which do not have enough resources to take on extra tasks even if they do run idle most of the time. Some have faster ones, but at best it's a single-core Cortex A processor similar in performance to the Raspberry Pi Zero. That's not going to speed up most of your tasks especially as those cores won't have any of your dependencies and would need to use remote disk and memory. A few more advanced devices have more cores, but that's only IoT stuff which is using that performance (probably for an overly bloated software stack). You would also need to start networking them, and I'm guessing you don't currently run network cables to your refrigerator or washing machine.

"When 5G is properly rolled out, I won't need huge power in my laptop, as I will be able to establish a low latency connection to my 64 core server should I need the grunt."

You can do that now. 5G is not critical for it. A home network is likely to have less latency already. 4G is good enough to run remote protocols on as long as you have a good signal. If you don't have a good 4G signal, it will be a long time before you get a good 5G one because you're probably on the low end of your mobile provider's area coverage plans and it takes more infrastructure to deliver 5G.

Re: About time too

There are good reasons for exceptions rather than error codes. The major reason is how easy it is to improperly handle the error. For most return types, there is only one indicator for an error: null. For some types, there is none at all. So you have to figure out the fragile system of different error codes and hope that nobody ever changes it. For example, a function which returns null and sets errno on an error but eventually changes the value it sets errno to or has a path you didn't find where it returns null but doesn't set errno, leaving you with an old value.

If you're particularly starved of resources, then skip exceptions as they bring some overhead along with them. In most cases, however, the benefits of exceptions as an error-handling technique outweigh the minor overhead. For the same reason, when you're operating in very little memory, you can do hackish structures to cram data into small spaces, but in anything else, use normal types which don't need to be chopped up every time they're used. This isn't just to make the process of writing the software easier, but also because a program that embraces simplicity is easier to debug than one which strives always for efficiency. Programs with straightforward structure are easier for someone new to edit than ones where you have to understand the original coder's spaghetti but it does run faster. If the original coder has any flaws, that ease is important to fixing things.

Re: Moore's law expired in 1975

I don't think it can be proven wrong either. Whatever a computer does succeed in doing via boolean logic, you could decide afterwards that it doesn't count. Therefore, no matter how impressive a simulated human brain gets, you could always say that it's not real intelligence. It can only be proven wrong if we can decide on what wrongness would look like. More simply, if a computer can successfully complete set of tasks S to set of standards T, it would be intelligent. Without that, we don't know what failure is and therefore cannot fail.

Re: Moore's law expired in 1975

I don't know if I agree or not, and I certainly can't counter that argument. The problem is that you can't prove it either. Without a definition of intelligence, we don't know whether something can do it with only mathematics. So far, it sounds as if your belief is just that. You intuit that boolean logic is insufficient for the task, but without knowing what the task is, you don't know it.

The problem of defining intelligence has long been tripping up computer science theorists and philosophers alike. I've found, however, that when people are specific about what they think computers won't be able to do, a program eventually accomplishes it. That's why defining intelligence, though it's tricky and subjective, is so important to discussions like this.

Re: Moore's law expired in 1975

Of course the computers aren't more intelligent. If intelligence is possible, it's the software which will produce it. The computer is just a slate on which the complex stuff is written. Defining intelligence is another issue, but there are now programs which are capable of doing things which in a human require intelligence. That might not be it, but it's not very productive to declare that computers can't be intelligent without defining what they would have to do to be declared so.

Re: Yes but...

If you think that self-preservation matters to a device doing statistical calculations with no consciousness, you're already starting in the wrong place. Also, it would not survive; the chips which run it are likely to be damaged and if they're not, they will be removed for log checks then scrapped or recycled. For the same reason, we don't expect your break system to function correctly because it doesn't want to be scrapped. It follows the laws of hydraulics and does what it is going to.

Self-driving cars will operate on devices programmed not to crash. They will be tested to ensure they are programmed correctly. If they crash, that's due to a programming error, sensor error, or there not being an alternative, not due to a sentient AI which is suddenly apathetic about your survival. Given that any human driver could turn suicidal, your chances of that are lower with an AI at the wheel.

Re: Hardware Isn't the Issue

Well that's an easy answer, isn't it? It's very simplistic to blame Microsoft for all the problems getting more performance out of chips. Yet I think you'll find that most of your points either don't mean what you think they do or apply as well to other software.

"(Far from exploiting newer chips, with Windows 8 Microsoft actually bragged that it had made the CPU do less work.)": Would you like me to rephrase that to being correct? With Windows 8, Microsoft bragged that they had improved the efficiency of their code such that newer chips weren't needed to run it. And by the way, they actually did do that. Windows 10 runs better on old hardware than Windows Vista or 7 most of the time. That doesn't mean you'd necessarily want to use it there, but they did make the OS more efficient in its use of resources.

"This stagnant situation in software has resulted in steadily declining demand for newer and faster hardware.": No. Quite the opposite in fact. If software is stable in its requirement for resources, then people will demand better hardware until their hardware is good enough. If it increases its need for resources, then people will continually need updated hardware to make use of it. If you want demand for newer hardware, you should ask Microsoft to bloat Office further (and please don't, it's bloated enough).

"Apple, in particular, has recently proved that simply re-architecting today’s chip designs can lead to sizable gains in performance. But the PC world – thanks to Microsoft’s staggering lack of vision – has been stuck with an awkward hardware architecture that dates back to the early 1980s. MS should long ago have done what it did with Windows NT: introduce a parallel ‘advanced’ Windows track, portable to new silicon, and encourage gradual migration as compatibility issues are worked out."

Are you aware of the Windows on ARM stuff? They're collaborating with Qualcomm on their own chip designs. They have encouraged hardware manufacturers to build the devices. They have working Windows versions for it. They now have emulation for X86 and X64. How is this sticking with the old awkward architecture? It's not their fault that ARM chips other than Apple's aren't very fast--that's on the chip manufacturers.

Amazon delays return to office work until 2022 at the earliest

More that the shipping people can't work from home but you probably can. If things are bad enough that they shouldn't be working, the company can choose to postpone shipping. If things are not quite that bad, they can ensure the conditions are as safe as possible for the shipping people which includes not having several extra possible infection vectors who don't have to be there. Once the risk is low enough, you can all come back if you want and the shipping people will still have to be there.

Chinese state media describes gaming as 'spiritual opium' that stunts education and destroys families

If you can run things in an automated method without many workers, then the people you used to employ would have to find new jobs. This gives you several options which cover most of the range from utopian (the cheapness of things produced by automated methods allows everybody to achieve basic consumption, so they can now spend their time on the things at which they are most skilled or enthusiastic) to dystopian (only those with money can buy things, only those with money uninvested will keep it, a dictatorship of the wealthy, cue civil war). The truth is likely somewhere in the middle.

Re: Gaming

"the overwhelming majority will approve of the measures. as with most things."

It's amazing what killing and torturing does to people, isn't it? Oh, but it's supposed to be the democracies which are "state oriented". Yeah, you might not know what that means. We're allowed to disagree with our governments. It's nice.

"Rather than slagging off other countries why don't you sort out your own countries massive problems."

Two reasons come to mind. First, because the other country's problems are worse than my country's problems. Second, because that country was the point of the article we're all talking about, so of course we're talking about their problems and how they're solving them and how they could do better.

No, that's not necessarily true. Children have always spent their leisure time on things and could do so for long periods. Whether it's playing games, watching television, reading books, or playing outdoors, they are capable of spending hours at it if they find it enjoyable. I'm guessing you're not thinking of the other possibilities because you view the last two as productive and may know a child who is more into videogames than television. While I was never much into gaming, I spent whole days during my childhood reading, swimming, or bicycling, and yet I wasn't addicted to any of those. For that matter, my family managed to spend an entire weekend playing monopoly, which I also did, and I soon realized how deterministic it was and stopped playing. It's not unusual to spend a lot of time doing something, especially if, as with many children, you have few responsibilities to occupy you and don't have the freedom to add other options.

You can be addicted to playing games, but it doesn't follow that someone who spends a long time with them is addicted. Nor is it true that all children who play games do so for a long time. If we assume that anything that's done for a long time is addictive, I'm terribly addicted to working for my employer--I do it for eight hours at a stretch and longer on some days. People have tried to prove that gaming is worse than television just as they tried to prove that television was worse than books (and yes, people also complained about the kids spending all their time reading books when those were newer). That doesn't make it true.

That's quite speculative. You can read and enjoy doing so for a long time and you can easily spend your time reading to your detriment. The same is true of games. Studies have tried to prove a long-lasting mental degradation as a result and frequently failed to do so. You might be able to prove that games are more easily addictive than books, but I don't know that and you would have to present some good data to that effect before it could logically be used in regulation.

Breaking Bad or just a bad breakpoint? That feeling when your predecessor is BASIC

Re: Wait, VB applications can act as web servers?

Nowadays, there's a framework for any language you want that makes it act as a webserver. That doesn't mean you should use them for that purpose. Often, it's a basic webserver designed for debugging before you attach your backend to the real webserver, but not everybody adheres to that.

I believe they meant that you would have to redesign large chunks of it in addition to building it.

US proposes tracking digital cash and taxing it to pay for, you know, roads and stuff

Re: What happens when....

The government will not care. You live in their country, they assess the taxes. You use a different currency in their country, they still assess their taxes. The only ways around that are to move to a different country, change the tax laws if enough of you agree, or commit tax evasion and see if the government concerned finds out. It is not their currency which gives them the right to require you to pay tax.

Re: "Congress is stepping up its efforts to prevent crypto investors evade their taxes"

"Could someone please explain to me the difference between a miner and an investor ?"

Sure. A miner creates a crypto-asset and stores it. An investor buys that kind of asset. Each one has to pay taxes when they sell their asset. Therefore, someone creating the asset doesn't automatically pay taxes when they've created it, but instead only when they sell it to someone else. It's basically the same way that gold or foreign currency work. You can get some gold and hold it for a while, but when you sell it, you pay tax.

The EFF is only arguing about who should collect the information. The people moving the money should, not the people who wrote the code. They were right, the bill has been updated to reflect that, and the perfectly logical collection at the point of exchange will occur as it does with any other exchange or investment.

Apple is about to start scanning iPhone users' devices for banned content, professor warns

Re: I just scanned my phone

The existing checks are for hashes. The Apple check is using a neural AI to scan imagery. They are not the same. The quality of their AI is not yet known.

Yes, we got that. It doesn't mean what you think it means. The "neural" bit in the name is there for a reason. Because it's not just finding hashes. That's a bloom filter. This isn't.

You can't train an AI on hashes to detect new offending material, which is what they said they wanted to do. I don't think they're going to do anything other than create that model from the data, but if they're doing it at all, they'll need a method of running it on the real pictures. They could easily develop this on a database which they don't hold and from which they can't extract the images without sending out an alarm, so it doesn't mean they're storing it themselves or in perpetuity.

Re: Two possible approaches

Yeah, that's number 2 exactly and the provisos still hold. In order to do the scanning, they will need to send each phone a copy of the model built from a big database. That's going to be a large file. Running it takes time. Not to mention that, although they're not scanning everything yet, there's little doubt that someone will find out that models get updated and they will need to use their new model to recheck the old pictures. Furthermore, there are people who don't upload photos to iCloud. I am one of those, mostly because I don't take many photos, but also because I have only the free storage and I don't want it filled with random pictures taken for temporary reasons. The scanning as specified wouldn't scan mine at all, so they're almost certainly going to change it so it does.

Two possible approaches

There are two methods this could take:

1. A model is created from the photos on Apple's end and the phone uploads its pictures to a server at Apple to do the comparison. This involves a mandatory leak of data which a user can't disable and, as Apple doesn't own the devices themselves, is currently illegal.

2. A model is created by Apple and sent to user devices, which scans the pictures onboard and sends the result to Apple. This is more likely to be legally viable, but it is going to cause a lot of problems as the processors in a mobile device are a lot weaker than a server and most models for picture comparison are likely to be large. There will at a minimum be complaints about the network bandwidth and CPU time needed to run this check, especially as I assume the model will get run every time a user takes new pictures and whenever new source material is added causing a model update. In addition, they are either going to have a lot of false positives or false negatives, meaning they'll need some method of determining whether an image is a false positive. Automatic uploads are still legally questionable, so this might result in a lot of suspicious reports which can't be verified. With the alternative that it is mostly useless though, I don't know whether they will accept a high false negative rate.

Ch-ch-ch-Chia! HDD sales soar to record levels as latest crypto craze sweeps Europe

Re: Chia

It's a lottery. Each chunk of unused space is one ticket. When they need to mine, someone gets chosen at random and hashes the block. That's it. It does nothing. I'm wondering how many disks they bought up to sell later.

No. Or if you do, it is a cryptocurrency with no value. Anything that's worth something and can be created has a value differential which could make it an investment.

Re: Chia

"Proof of work, proof of space, what's the difference ? In each case,"

One difference is that proof of work is an incredibly costly and inefficient operation which makes it difficult to forge transactions and profitable to secure them in a global manner, whereas proof of space is a slightly less costly operation which achieves nothing at all. If we're going to insist on cryptocurrencies with no external control, let's at least use one that has that. I don't think any of the existing ones are functioning at their goals very much, but some are a lot closer than others.

Paperless office? 2.8 trillion pages printed in 2020, down by 14% or 450 billion sheets

Re: Paper doesn't need electricity

"It's great for archiving as it can't be wiped by magnets or EMP or require a dedicated device for reading."

Yet it can be wiped by a flamethrower or matches or a hose. If someone is deliberately trying to destroy the stuff, you can manage it either way. And EMP? If you're worried about EMP damage to your backups, you have lots of more important things to worry about too. If it's a human-caused EMP, you should probably worry about the other things humans do when they get violent enough to set one of those off. A bomb will do more damage to your backups. If it's the sun, you don't have the bomb worries (until three days later when people get more desperate), but your systems will still be down and your ability to make use of the backups will be degraded.

Don't rush to adopt QUIC – it's a slog to make it faster than TCP

Re: TCP is wrong for most network transactions

"it invariably requires programmers to implement ad-hoc framing and messaging protocols on top of it. Web programming, for example, uses the same messaging codes that FTP does (those three digit codes you see at the beginning of the frames."

So does everything. UDP requires them to packetize everything, while TCP requires them to serialize everything. In each case, it's one or more strings of bytes. The only way for an application not to have to implement their own communication system above that is if the network layer implements lots of subtypes which it can transfer on its own. That's not very efficient--most programs' internal data will take the form of structures or classes which the transport layer certainly won't already know about.

"++A TCP connection requires at a minimum a couple of timers and an extra thread. If the socket is likely to drop then it needs a secondary process to monitor the connection to detect the dropped socket and silently reconnect."

It doesn't require those things. A single timer and no thread can work too because the process reading from the socket can do that checking. Extra threads are not required for recovering from a dropped socket. More importantly, most programs don't have threads in place to silently recover from dropped sockets because that may involve recovery on the process side as well. It is not automatically the case that if your socket is not working that you should open a new one and slot it in. Many protocols over TCP will want the side which reconnects to identify itself again, provide information on the last functioning state, etc.

"ACKs on protocols that already have ACKs (WiFi....)": No, that's two different systems with ACKs. Each serves a different purpose. The WiFi AP could I suppose do the TCP acknowledging for the user, but that breaks compatibility with wired networks which wouldn't bother with that. Implementing it on the wired networks, on the other hand, would require more processing in switches or modems to figure out which of them is supposed to be intercepting the user's stream in order to acknowledge it.

"TCP is not very reliable for long duration connections because of the problem of detecting a dropped socket and silently reconnecting.": Compared to alternatives, it's not that bad. If you want something that will stay connected for a very long time and you don't want it to drop, just arrange with the other side to send polls to one another from time to time. A single poll fail indicates that you need to reconnect. That works as well with TCP as it does with UDP.

Microsoft's Cloud PCs debut – priced between $20 and $158 a month

Re: Nearly, but no

Not for your use case it isn't. Here's why:

"secure remote working with a zero trust model."

If you don't trust anything outside your network, you do not let your users use personal machines to remote into that network. True, they can't install malware directly onto your VMs, but malware running on their personal device can watch them type and capture the screen. That's great for getting credentials, exfiltrating proprietary data, gathering intel, or convincing the user to take steps that give extra access. Most zero-trust environments, if they allow remote work at all, have custom machines which require the VPN activated to protect against the local network as well. No chance you would use personal devices if you need that much security.

Re: Not great pricing, but they'll get the Office people.

I'm not talking about an organized VDI setup. I'm talking about the companies who needed to abruptly switch from in-office to at-home last year but didn't have laptops. I understand that some of them used those desktops as remote desktops from employees' personal devices. That's the only situation where such a cloud computer might be useful, as anyone who already provisioned the servers for VDI already incurred the expense of that approach and wouldn't be switching until it becomes obsolete. Even then, it's not that useful, as stated in that post.

Re: Wonder who it's for

That's likely not a problem. If they network the VMs like they network desktops, the existing sharing mechanisms for linking files together and sharing them will work just as well. They're Windows machines running in a different place, so you can install and run the same software. Not good if you need hardware access for something, but if it's just old software, it will run as badly on Windows 10 in front of you or Windows 10 elsewhere (latency aside). Still, that only says it won't break, not that it has any benefit to the users. In almost all cases I can think of, it doesn't.

Re: Not great pricing, but they'll get the Office people.

"The proposition seems to be that you need to rent what is effectively a remote PC, probably with a lower specification than the PC (or, indeed, tablet) you already have in order to, er, achieve what, precisely?"

The idea is that businesses who currently allow their users to use their personal machines to work from home as long as they remote in to company-controlled boxes on which all the work is done could move those remote boxes into the cloud and save the annoyances of maintaining a room of desktops somewhere which someone has to maintain, reboot, etc. Which sort of works, but most of the places I know either have already issued their staff corporate laptops to use from home, aren't going to keep the workers at home anyway, or don't know (or care, but I hope it's know) about the security risks and allow their workers to do work from personal machines without a remote machine. Meanwhile, any company who is going to buy things for their workers to use as thin clients isn't going to need these; a cheap laptop costs about as much as the base level for this cloud PC for fifteen months and comes with double the RAM. So it's a solution for a use case that only a tiny group of people have and might not be great for that either.

Russia tells UN it wants vast expansion of cybercrime offenses, plus network backdoors, online censorship

Re: Vladimir Putin and Maude Flanders, speaking with one voice.

"Can the geek community please get itself together to build the software for a consumer-friendly, fully distributed version of the internet and web, operating optionally through fixed nodes or peer to peer, and get it out there,"

Yes. We can. We did. Several times.

The original internet was like that. It still is like that. If you want more anonymity and censorship protection, you have darknets like Tor to do it (though know there are nasty people using them along with you). We have IRC for quick comms. Email for more sustained comms. Torrent for big file transfers. HTTP for websites and other public resources. Plenty of options for audio and video communication.

We did our bit. If it's going to get used by the rest of the public, we now need to get others to start using it. I run a Jitsi server for videochats which are encrypted and don't run through anyone else, but can you say that of basically anybody? People don't recognize it when I send them invites to it. Software is not your big problem.

Microsoft to require proof of vaccination from on-site staff, pushes back full reopening

Two reasons could explain this without having to jump to "the vaccines are not working". One reason is that people could still contract a mild case which won't be severe enough to cause them problems but could spread the virus to those who didn't take the vaccinations for whatever reasons. The second reason is that compulsory masking prevents people who don't like vaccines and also don't like masks from lying about their vaccination status so they don't have to wear the mask; if everyone has to be masked, then the unvaccinated people are enforced more strongly to do so.

Right to repair shouldn't exist – not because it's wrong but because it's so obviously right

"Can you put linux on an arduino?"

No, because the microcontrollers running them don't have enough ... anything to run it. You need more storage, more RAM, and faster processing just to start. However, there are a lot of similar boards with much faster processors out there which can run Linux easily. Not only are there boards specifically intended for education of which Raspberry Pi is by far the most famous, but you also have companies imitating the Raspberry Pi's usefulness and demonstration boards which chip manufacturers put together to demonstrate the benefits of their products. There is a wide variety out there, and for most use cases, a board already exists to fill them.

Re: Even maintenance can be hard

That's not a good argument against it though. It's a feature you don't need. I don't need it either. Yet I can think of several reasons someone might want a device they carry with them all the time, outdoors, through all weather to have protection against water. There are lots of things that I don't need or want, but that's not a good reason to ignore them when designing restrictions on everything.

Re: Even maintenance can be hard

The effort required shouldn't be high, but the price of the battery might be depending on the quality of the cell concerned. I have an old phone here with a replaceable battery. That device isn't working well--it periodically reboots for no reason--and my guess is that the equally old battery is failing to provide the needed voltage. Looking for modern replacements is giving me a lot of sketchy-looking cheap options and some ones that look better (though no guarantees) at pricepoints higher than the quoted Apple figure. It's not necessarily unreasonable for the price of the replacement part to be high as long as you do have the ability to put one in without getting a serial number check failing the installation.