Posts by doublelayer

The bank of Bitcoin: MicroStrategy's share price rides high on the back of cryptocurrency investment

Re: Taxes

"at minimum they can seize your wallet even if they can't open it."

No, they can't do that. Either they get the private key from you, in which case they can open it and transfer all of it away, or they don't, in which case they can't do much. If they can't get you to divulge the private key, then you still maintain control and can exchange the Bitcoin with someone else. Whether you can find someone else that wants to transact without turning you in may be another problem, but the government isn't seizing anything in that scenario. In the case where they seized Bitcoin from corrupt officials, they arrested them and indicated that their sentences would be a lot longer if they didn't give up the ill-gotten crypto.

Re: Investment? Speculation!

Bitcoin = A mathematical construct which can't really be used as currency very often because it takes a long time and a large fee to spend any of it and is deflationary so people often choose not to. And also it takes some technical knowledge to use properly or trusting a company to hold all your resources to use dangerously, so few people go to the effort.

Dollar (or Pound) = an imaginary made-up currency which is used by a bunch of real people to make real transactions, is held by people and financial entities in large amounts so it's not that easy to devalue quickly, and is easily converted into goods, other currencies, or other commodities.

Unlike some here, I want to see a cryptocurrency that can be used as currency and think it's possible to create one. However, Bitcoin has failed in all the necessary steps to be that. It is not feasible to transact in it. It's hideously inefficient. It does not offer the kind of privacy that is necessary. It's just a random commodity for people to gamble on now, the dreams of enthusiasts broken.

Alexa, swap out this code that Amazon approved for malware... Installed Skills can double-cross their users

Re: Talk to a computer? why would I do that?

It can be a little handy depending on how its done. For example, I use the voice interface on my phone on occasion, almost always to do one of three things. Those are faster to do by voice than by touch. Compare these:

Set a timer:

By voice: Press button, hear tone, say "Set a timer for 25 minutes", done.

By touch: Retrieve phone, type unlock pin, find the clock app, select the timer page, spin the little dial to select 25 minutes, press start, lock phone, done.

Call a contact:

By voice: Press button, hear tone, say "Call name", hold phone to ear.

By touch: Retrieve phone, type unlock pin, find the phone app, press the contacts button, scroll to find the person, press the call button, put phone to ear.

A lot of other things though don't get the speed advantage, and are only useful when you can't use the touch or visual interfaces. A well-done car voice interface would be useful, but I've not seen one. The best cars at least let you use the, usually much better, phone voice interfaces rather than make you use theirs.

Ever felt that a few big tech companies are following you around the internet? That's because ... they are

Re: Not quite true

"You can have your site hosted on Azure, sure. You'll probably be using your own domain name as well, so nothing need be loaded from any Microsoft domain, certainly not any other than the azure domain(s)."

First, I'm not sure whether they also check IP addresses to block anything coming from MS or AWS subnets. Let's assume they don't. There are many reasons one might have an Azure or AWS domain in their HTML. Here's one reason: they're using the CDN functions. I've seen lots of sites which host themselves on local hardware or a smaller cloud provider but use AWS to host big files. Their site will be loaded from elsewhere, but when people click the download link, it will go to s3.amazonaws.com. Now there is an Amazon-controlled link in the source, so the site gets flagged.

The site could of course specify a CNAME so their domain is seen in the source, but the plugin should be checking where that resolves because trackers do the same as reported yesterday. Once again, Amazon's pulling the strings. Except they're not. They're just providing servers to store the big files. Someone from Amazon could point this out. Someone from Google will point out that people use YouTube as essentially the same thing for videos they've made so they don't have to write a video player or host the big file. They will show what happens when their sites are removed, namely that the page with download links looks the same and the page with a video looks the same except for the video box. Those arguments could convince people that the plugin's report on trackers or control is simply a lie, and thereby destroy its purpose.

Not really. A lot of sites don't use those providers, and some others use multiple providers. It's true that the big three are quite large, but if they all went down simultaneously, which is unlikely, there'd still be a lot of stuff online. In order to take down large chunks of the internet, you need to take down cloud providers, at least AWS and Azure, but you also need to take CDNs like Cloudflare and Akamai out of the equation. Even without those, lots of large institutions host their own services and small cloud providers would still run. My website, for example, would be fine. So would El Reg once they routed around the downed Cloudflare.

The structure of the internet is indeed fragile, but not in the way you think. It's not fragile in the sense that one big hit will take it down. One big hit will cause some grumbling while people repair the damage, but a lot of things will work fine. It's fragile because each individual part of it can be disrupted with some ease. Still, while things are strong, those breaks will be repaired, undoing your destructive work.

Re: vulnerable? Who, us?

It would be really hard to interrupt the routing to all four. Each has a bunch of places where they can reroute traffic, so you can't attack a physical place to interrupt their service. Meanwhile, if you tried something like a BGP hijack, you'd have trouble getting all the networks to go through you and those which did would quickly realize their mistake when everything breaks. Also, if you did interrupt service, a lot of the world would be annoyed but many things wouldn't break. Take El Reg. There are Google and Facebook URLs in their pages, so they'd get blocked by this plugin. However, if Google and Facebook go down, their site still works. It's not hosted on AWS or Azure either, so you could cut all four and the only thing that would change is that there wouldn't be so many ads and the Facebook share button would go away. I've emulated that on my network on purpose anyway.

Microsoft unveils swappable SSDs for Surface Pro 7+ but 'strongly discourages' users from upping their capacity

I agree that it's not fraud, but most of your suggested reasons for the statement are invalid.

"Messing about with your primary SSD can be a recipe for disaster, reinstalling can be a 'bit of a pain', all they're saying is 'good luck with that... we won't support you if you do'"

This is a replacement, and the machine is designed for business customers who are almost certainly applying an image to any device. Reinstalling is what these people do all the time. What do they think people buying the disks are doing with them? They're reinstalling Windows onto the new disk to replace the one which failed or got destroyed. They support that, but they'll not support someone doing the same thing with one of different size?

"I once thought I'd been right clever migrating Windows 10 to a larger SSD, converting to UEFI boot from an old style bios boot."

Yes, that's dangerous and tricky on basically any OS. Just because you can make your software break isn't sufficient reason for them to change their support system. After all, I can break Windows in a variety of ways but none of that would cancel my warranty with the hardware manufacturer.

"Misalign your partition accidentally on resize/move, or go to a device with a different logical block size and you'll get 'reduced performance'."

Then reinstall and move the files over. It's what everyone is going to do anyway. They could even say "Don't migrate. You don't know what you're doing and you'll just make a mess".

"Go to a bigger capacity but SATA bridged M.2 will give you 'reduced performance'. (Assuming here they have full speed M.2 in?)"

I don't know, but whatever interface they're using for their 128 GB drive is the same one they're using for their 256 GB drive. They go in the same machines and have the same reported speeds. Thus that's not going to intrinsically change the speed. Only if they've built the firmware in such a way that it can't handle other sizes will speed change. If they've done it, it's either malicious tampering to break upgrades or really lazy.

Re: Strongly discouraged

They might discourage you from buying a larger one in the hopes that you instead buy a new Surface with a larger disk. Or to make you concerned about getting a third-party one when they eventually become available. They could be hoping that people think "You can't even replace the disk with one of a different size. No way this one from another manufacturer will work." and then you'd buy from them. I don't think it will really help much, but they could be thinking that.

Your PlayStation comparison is possible, but I doubt it. Before I say too much and look stupid, I am not a gamer and know relatively little about the device, but I read this description of the SSD. Based on that, it looks like they've designed a drive for really fast reads so they can load large game data quickly. That's not the kind of drive you find in a tablet-laptop. Among other things, it looks like the fast speeds from Sony's drive come with a higher power requirement, which isn't ideal in a battery-powered device. Even if MS does have unusually fast drives, Windows can run on spinning drives today, so it clearly doesn't need it. They probably would be more successful at selling these replacement drives if they said "Other drives will work, but these ones are really fast so you'll like them better". I don't think that's the case.

Re: Windows and Storage space

I can't speak for the HP Stream, and you seem to have had success with it. The one I saw ran an old Atom part and really did not want to boot to external media. It had a micro SD card slot, but wouldn't see that in UEFI. It had a USB port connected via a dock, and wouldn't see that either. The only external port it would see was an OTG micro USB port. Even then, it wouldn't work well if you tried to boot off a drive connected to that. The internet told me it needed a custom 32-bit firmware patch, although the processor was supposedly X64-capable, but I tried repeatedly to put that patch on a Linux disk with no luck. I had some success deleting everything off the internal disk, performing a Windows reset, updating, reset again, and then it was updated again, but there's no way I was doing that multiple times.

Re: Strongly discouraged

My guess is one of these happened:

Option 1:

Manager: Let's prevent people upgrading their drives so they have to buy a new product when they run out.

Engineer: That sounds fun. I can think of several ingenious ways to make them break weirdly by messing with the firmware.

Option 2:

Manager 1: Let's prevent people upgrading their drives so they have to buy a new product when they run out.

Manager 2: Good idea, but having an engineer mess with the firmware would be expensive. Let's just say things that make it sound like we did.

Manager 1: What if people try and it works fine?

Manager 2: The paranoia of expecting that an engineer will have messed with the firmware so it will break later will get to them soon enough.

I'd also like to know whether these are any different from normal hardware. The article notes that the ones for the Surface Pro X are a little different, but doesn't comment on these, perhaps because IFixit hasn't gotten any of them yet. I really hope they haven't taken a standard part and forced it into a slightly different package just to lock people in.

What's CNAME of your game? This DNS-based tracking defies your browser privacy defenses

I didn't vote either way, and this is supposition, but I'm wondering if the downvotes are because people sometimes treat NoScript like a perfect firewall. It's not. It can help, but if people think they can just install it and everything will be fine, they're wrong several times. It helps in the case of running JS from a site like this, but most of the time, a site will just pull in a script from the source in the HTML. So in the case of this attack, it's not all that likely to produce different results on a site using this and a site using classic attacks. Therefore, though it's useful, it isn't really a good solution for the problem as described. Maybe some are expressing that view in their votes.

SpaceX small print on Starlink insists no Earth government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities

Re: Remember...

"I'm sure there are nation states that would be happy to give access to their airspace if the USA don't want to play."

There are, but how happy will they be taking the risks? If the big and experienced countries agree not to help a random company, the random company has to choose among the small countries with no history of supporting a launch. They can't choose a country so small that their rocket will end up in a neighbor's airspace unless they can get support from multiple countries, so now they have to choose a large country or one next to the ocean in the direction of their launch. Then they'll need to build the launch system which the country doesn't have, and the country probably isn't paying for that. Even then, the country is taking the risk of rocket explosions or similar happening overhead, and do they really think a company which has officially disclaimed their responsibilities to the treaty is going to honor the environmental regulations for the cleanup process? Also, if the big countries care enough about not letting the launch happen, they can provide some incentive to the selected country not to provide the assistance and make the company bounce around wasting their time and money trying to find new places to launch.

Re: It's all about the forces involved

That heavily depends on the desires of other countries to mess with the situation. If say, someone in the U.S. establishes a colony somewhere and refuses to obey the treaty, and the U.S. wants to defend the treaty, all they have to do is prevent any supply launches until things change. Companies trying to launch from elsewhere will have trouble getting access to the launch capacity since existing launches would be going somewhere else and it's not easy to get emergency access to a launch facility with your own rocket. Only if existing governments wanted to provide that emergency access in order to annoy the U.S. would that change.

Once there is a lot more development where the colony is, that situation will be different. At that point though, there will be authority of some sort established there.

Re: Remember 1776 ......

I think the analogy still stands. Spacex is a shipwright. Current governments are like the colonizers. Neither has a right to decide unilaterally what the law for those who live there should be. If one has more right, it is the governments because that's where the people are now. Spacex though ... it just builds ships. It should stop trying to assume authority it doesn't deserve.

Re: Remember 1776 ......

They built it here on Earth, where they have a legal requirement to put on the radiation warning marks. I'm sure some chips inside it still have serial numbers that are readable too, but they didn't keep those for people exploring Mars in decades to come.

"How do you distinguish that situation from the Australian satellite bumping into the French one?"

Which one moved last? If the Australian satellite is on a steady course, then the French operators knew it was there. There are big databases of where satellites and other orbiting objects are to prevent exactly that. If the French satellite launches into the orbit of the Australian satellite and they therefore collide, it's the fault of the operators of the French satellite. Those operators are under France's jurisdiction and come under any French and EU space regulations.

Re: Remember 1776 ......

"After all a relatively small handful of frontiersmen (people for the PC) beat (or at least drew with) one of the foremost military powers."

No, that's not what happened. For starters, it was more than a handful. About 250000 American troops served during the course of the war, with 60000-90000 at once. That's small by modern wars, but not very small. Especially as they did not beat the British. They drove the British away, but they didn't conquer Britain or cause it to collapse. They couldn't even take Canada from them despite trying. The reason for their win was that they had resources where the British by and large lacked them. The Americans could operate using local troops and resources, whereas the British had to ferry all their troops over the Atlantic and buy or take resources from Americans who already had them. And let's not forget that French assistance was required to complete the victory.

In comparison, a Mars trip has all of these reversed. If countries on Earth wish to impose their will on Martian societies, they won't have to do it by sending troops over. The easiest way is to stop sending stuff over. It's much easier for someone on their own to survive on Earth than on Mars, and stuff breaks.

But let's say this is correct. How does it change how a Martian constitution should work? I find the concept annoying not because I think Mars shouldn't have one, but I think that, if they're going to have one, it should be written by people who established a society and wish to remain on Mars. Not by some random company which builds vehicles. It's like saying that the U.S. Constitution should have been written by shipwrights in Europe who would eventually bring people over, for the moment ignoring the native population of the Americas because everyone at the time did. They have no right to assert sovereignty.

SD card slot, HDMI port could return to the MacBook Pro this year, says Apple analyst

"USB-A may be nice to have a single port for whatever, but really it's time things moved to USB-C. USB-C to A adapters cost next to nothing. For those legacy devices, you can buy one for each device and leave it permanently attached."

Perhaps, but most devices, including those sold nowadays, still use USB-A. I needed some flash drives recently. I bought USB-A ones. There were some USB-C only ones, which weren't going to work on anything older, and some with an A on one end and C on the other which were about five times as expensive. The same is going to be true of virtually every USB peripheral. Those that stay in one place can have dongles attached to them, but for a flash drive, the dongle will make the thing a lot longer and more prone to damage. Also, you just know it's the thing you will lose right before you need it.

I have no objection to USB-C as the universal client port that we should put on every device using USB to charge or receive data. I don't really mind if we eventually get USB-C as the universal host port, although we're going to have to find some way of indicating which direction we want the power and connection to go. Until we actually get that though, we're going to need USB-A ports, and more than one.

Microsoft sides with media groups, together they urge Europe to follow Australia's lead, make Google, Facebook pay for news article links

Re: missing the point?

These are perfectly good concerns. The problem as I see it is that these laws aren't likely to help with that. Just because Google gives some money to some publishers in order to link to their content doesn't mean those publishers are going to do good things with it. Also, they're likely to only make such connections with the very big news organizations. Smaller journalists won't get paid, but could still file complaints, and Google will probably deal with that by deprioritizing them in search results.

We need to identify what the true problem is and take steps which directly fixes the problem.

If the problem is overquoting which means people don't click through, fine. We can solve that problem. Quoting of more than one sentence is now a copyright violation. You can link, but the only text you can show is a headline or one sentence of the content. That should fix the quoting problem. If quoting is not the problem, then what is? Because the law as it exists now doesn't restrict quoting. In fact, it either allows tech companies to continue quoting for a token payment or restricts everything, from linking to quoting, if there's no payment. That's fragile at best, but more likely completely ineffective.

Re: "... pay publishers for linking to news content on their platforms"

They already complied with the law by not showing any news, but that got the Australian government very angry. How dare they decide not to do the thing that the law was created to prevent them from doing? It seems as if the point of these laws is to take money from tech and give it to publishers, not to fix tech's abuses. I'm not even sure they can really explain what those abuses are, although they clearly exist. The way the law is formulated seems tailor-made not to actually change anything.

Facebook and Apple are toying with us, and it's scarcely believable

Re: Point

"Bitcoin is a great example. Government & banks have been trying to kill it for over a decade."

Not really. Some governments don't like it because criminals use it, but few have tried to make it illegal and none have really taken efforts to prevent its use. An actual cryptocurrency would likely get the ire of banks, but Bitcoin isn't good for exchanging value or storing it. As a investment to speculate on, banks hold a lot of it.

"It simply cannot be killed. There is no plug to pull, no company to fine/break up/shut down."

If they wanted to, they could do a lot. They know where mining happens. They know where exchanges are. They could act to disrupt it in such a way that it collapses in on itself. They don't because that's expensive for basically no purpose. Why spend millions destroying something unless you really hate it? They don't as stated above, so they don't try to kill it.

Re: Uh huh

That is not in itself a rebuttal to that argument. Samsung has said they will update for four years. First, we will need to see that. They have failed to update for very long before, and we haven't actually seen them do what they've said. Meanwhile, Apple does continue updating, we have seen it, and for longer than four years. The comparison between the two indicates Apple to be better at long-term support. It is easier for them perhaps, but still, the comparison will get made and the facts point one way for now.

I think I made myself quite clear. I agree with you on the first point, with the reservation that people often buy iPhones to run third-party apps. I disagree with you on the second point, and think the article is broadly correct when it claims that developers can't sell their apps outside the App Store. Despite some theoretical workarounds, it remains infeasible. I notice your second reply focuses only on the point on which we partially agree.

My point in arguing this is to illustrate that your defense of Apple is ill-founded. Despite your comments, the article did attack Apple on the basis of their monopoly of distribution. The statement about not being able to sell "anything" without going through the App Store is just such an attack. Your defense of it as inaccurate is in my mind incorrect. Not that there aren't arguments in favor of such a monopoly, but I don't think that is a good one.

I'll grant the first inaccurate statement is worth some consideration, but only some. A smartphone which can run apps is most frequently used by people who will install at least some apps on it above those default Apple ones. But it's true, an iPhone with no account set up can still do various PDA-style tasks, and that may be enough for some.

The second one though... No, I can't really accept that as a reason the App Store isn't a monopoly over distribution. In order to sideload a file like that, you need to find an ID number which isn't easy to find (there are a bunch of numbers in the about section and that one is not there), send it to a developer who has to provide a custom version specifically keyed to your device, and accept the risk that the developer will suddenly stop doing that when Apple sends the strongly worded email about not adhering to the store terms. When compared to Android (settings, security, allow apps from unknown sources, open the APK), it's a very different experience.

Neither statement is correct if you're pedantic, but it's clear what was meant. Are you contesting these points because you actually think that technicality changes the situation, or just to point out the inaccuracies of language?

"With Apple, you can't use an iPhone if you don't use the App Store,": Well, you can use it as a phone with a mail client and browser, but if you want any of the apps that it is perfectly capable of running, you'll need to use the App Store.

"and you don't get to sell anything to iPhone users if you don't go through the App Store.": You can sell them lunch, so technically not true. If you want to sell them software that runs on their devices, which is what's relevant, then you do have to go through the App Store.

Before someone brings up jailbreaking, A) Apple forbids jailbreaking in their terms of service, making it a grey area although recent laws have made it clearer, B) in order to patch security holes, Apple frequently prevents jailbreaking from happening, and C) only a very small subset of Apple's users even knows you can jailbreak let alone how.

Re: Feel odd

"I thought it was still at the manifesto proposal stage."

No. As of last week, this very paper reported that the law "passed the lower house of Australia’s parliament yesterday. Passage through the Senate and into law is all-but-assured.". That's well beyond a proposal.

I agree that the problems identified are real problems. Unfortunately, laws seeking to solve them often take the form of choosing a victim and regulating just them. Instead of making a law identifying companies specifically or setting conditions such that there are only three or four companies affected, the right answer to most of the abuses of big tech is to regulate them and everyone else. That might mean clarifying how much of a newspaper article can be quoted as fair use under copyright law. If that's the headline only, so be it. Instead, this law sets up definitions of search engines, social networks, and news companies arbitrarily and writing regulations to attempt to make that solve the problem. It might solve some of the problem now, but when other companies start doing the same thing, it will require even more patches to keep working.

The same sort of problem is seen when trying to tax big tech. Big tech avoids a lot of tax and many countries are justifiably angry about that. However, many of them decide to fix this by making a specific tech company tax, instead of actually researching how the big tech companies are avoiding tax and changing the tax law to make those loopholes go away. In the short term, the two solutions will look similarly effective using the metric of how much money they got, but in the long term, the first law will get nullified by smart tax accountants and lawyers who argue whether something is truly big or tech while the second will be stronger and will protect as well against a similar violator who operates in a different industry.

Huawei loses attempt to rescue CFO Meng from US clutches despite using 140-year-old law in High Court

Re: Allegation

That's not as unusual as you describe it. As a parallel, consider how GDPR works. EU member states enacted GDPR, which operates on any company that operates in the EU, whether that's based in the EU or not. If they don't want to obey that law, they have the freedom not to operate there. If they do, they come under the regulation and can be fined on global turnover. The same logic applies here. HSBC uses U.S. money from U.S. clients. That means the U.S. can require them to follow U.S. law.

I think you'll find they did and are still doing it. If you have lots of lawyers who keep appealing and pulling out new reasons to reconsider, it gets longer. Also, she was detained in late 2018. They've only had two years.

Re: Allegation

HSBC operates in the United States. It sends money to and receives money from U.S. banks using U.S. infrastructure and has U.S. clients. It has the choice not to do these things. Please note that it's not just dollars. A bank can hold a bunch of dollars if it wants without coming under U.S. jurisdiction. If it operates in U.S. financial markets, then it has to follow U.S. laws. Banks have the choice not to do this if they don't want to follow U.S. law. There are banks which do it. The large ones usually decide that there's more money in operating in the U.S. than operating in Iran, and they choose U.S.

HSBC did choose to operate in the U.S. And they chose this knowing their requirements. If the allegations are true, they asked SkyCom if what they were doing was going to be illegal under U.S. law. SkyCom said no. SkyCom was lying.

"Anyway, what right does the US have to insists that no one can have any business relationships with a country that they sanctioned?"

None. And if that's what they had a problem with, then they would not be able to prosecute. However, your statement indicates you don't understand what their case is. Let me enlighten you.

It is illegal for a U.S. business to do business with Iran, because they are in the U.S. and U.S. sanctions on Iran restrict their actions. Those sanctions do not apply to countries outside the U.S. If a Chinese company decides to sell to Iran, that's perfectly legal and the U.S. does not have any legal right to prosecute that.

Banks which want to operate in the U.S. have to follow the U.S. laws just like any other banks. This means they can't do business with Iran. If they invested money in something which was designed to send that money to Iran, they'd be breaking a law in the U.S. In this case, the U.S. claims that a company was set up as a Huawei subsidiary to do business with Iran, but that company wanted money from banks. Under U.S. law, U.S. banks aren't allowed to invest in companies like that, so they were limited to banks which don't operate in the U.S. That doesn't leave many large banks. Instead of using one of the remaining banks, they chose to get around that problem by lying to the U.S. banks, telling them that what they were doing was legal. That is fraud. Fraud in order to get a company to invest is illegal nearly everywhere. That's what the case is about. Do you understand now why your complaint is without merit?

Australian government fights Facebook news ban by threatening 0.01% of Zuck's ad revenue

Re: Just goes to show how out of touch our politicians are

"But it is not as simple as that if they forbid indexing it is for everyone not just Facebook (or Google). It is not possible to forbid indexing to Facebook without it being forbidden to others, that means every other search engine."

Actually, that's not correct. Robots.txt supports requesting no indexing patterns affecting specific user agents and specific paths. It would be entirely possible to do this:

UserAgent: Googlebot

Disallow: /news

UserAgent: Facebookbot

Disallow: /news

UserAgent: Duckduckgobot

Allow: /

You'd have to do a bit of searching to find the relevant user agents, but if Google and Facebook respect robots.txt, you can set it up to ignore just them. If it's individual people choosing to post the links, you have a larger problem, but if you can get your outcome by blocking bots, then you can have finer control of it.

UK Supreme Court declares Uber drivers are workers, not self-employed: Ride biz's legal battle ends in a crash

Re: Not all Californians are idiots...

"I’m a contractor as many here no doubt are and I don’t feel exploited. I work on my own terms and manage my own business. Which is exactly what these Uber drivers signed up to."

Not really. As a contractor, you decide who you're going to work for, what you're willing to do for them, how much they have to pay for the services, and all those details. You are competing against other contractors, sure, but that's the freedom you have. Virtually the only choice available to rideshare drivers is when they will work. That, admittedly, is a choice available to them. They don't get to choose other things though. They don't get to change the prices if they think they're low. They used not to be able to see where they would be going before accepting a fare, meaning they could be taken farther out of their area than they wanted to go. If that's changed, a quick DDG is still showing that it's unavailable.

The degree of freedom is really the important detail in much of this. A contractor gets a certain amount of choice and ability to bargain when establishing terms. You already stated that in your description. Employees don't get as much of that.

Big Tech workers prefer 3 days at home, 2 in the office. We ask Reg readers: What's your home-office balance?

I see that, but I don't see a half and half approach as solving it. If the team doesn't go in at the same time, then the benefits of being in the same place are lost because not everybody is there. If the team chooses the same days to always be in the office, that can work, but it doesn't help the company unless they force different teams to use the office during different chunks of the week. If everybody decides to have Mondays and Fridays in the office and work from home the other three days, the company will need the same office space but will only use it two days a week. That's not necessarily a problem, but most financial departments I know won't like those figures and will probably choose to structure things differently. If the company is large enough, they can ensure that the office is steadily used throughout the week, but that won't work if it's too small to balance teams.

"Can't you just ping a message? I find that works much better,"

It doesn't work as well for me, but that's probably a case-by-case difference. Most of the questions that fit that format are sort of long to type:

"So the database server you set up last month, no not the most recent one, the one for research X. I'm wondering about the schema for the additional fields column. Specifically, there's a reference field in the JSON object which is sometimes populated. Yes, I know what it means if it's a URI but occasionally it is a hex string."

I don't really understand the most popular answer. I get wanting to work from home all the time, especially if the office was an open plan one. I also get wanting to work from the office all the time, especially if it's a nice one. I get wanting to work mostly from the office but having the flexibility to work at home once in a while. What I don't get is wanting to be half at home and half in the office.

To me, it offers none of the advantages. If I continued to work from home full time, I could move away from where I live which I chose so I'd have a short commute, but not if I have to spend half my time in the office. Meanwhile, if I worked at the office to collaborate in person, it wouldn't work very well if there's always some uncertainty whether my half at the office coincides with others' halves. If I chose one location because the working environment was to my liking, I can't consistently use it if I'm half in, half out.

My preference is currently to go back to the office, but this is because my office is a closed one without much distraction. I can work privately and also collaborate in person. I would prefer working at home to an open plan office though. I think that, if many chose a hybrid model, employers would compensate by trying to make more efficient use of offices, meaning hotdesking and compressed workspace. If that happens, I'll try to work from home all the time.

You want me to do WHAT in that prepaid envelope?

Re: USB Keypad

I can't answer the first question, but a keyboard should do USB-C now because we're being dragged into the era where laptops are dropping USB-A ports whether we want them to or not. At some point, we're going to live in a world where all the cables end with USB-C and look the same while being different and not always working. When our stuff breaks and we have to buy new stuff, it may be one where that's the only available option.

Soviet 'Enigma' cipher machine sells for $22k at collapsed museum's exhibits auction

Re: Interesting.....but 1000 lines of C can get you something similar.......

"Some of us are doing OUR OWN encryption......and 'nobody's going to decode it'. Are you interested now?"

No. You fail to realize why nobody's going to decode it. It's not because your cryptography is the best out there. It might be, though I have my doubts. It's because nobody cares what you said. Find someone who does care what you encoded and they will try. They may also succeed. Judging from other posts you've made, they may also just bypass your cryptography and attack the endpoints, because your understanding of security seems to have holes in it. Either way, you'll find out firsthand whether you know what you're doing or not. This way won't help. Nor will you successfully brag to anybody, because we know enough to know it's not impressive.

Re: How about the "Selectric bug"?

The fun thing is that that approach still works on modern keyboards and you can build one yourself. In fact, if you prime it with some information about likely languages, you could get a self-training one. I'm sure they already have those at various agencies, but a relatively cheap board can have all the necessary components for it.

Re: Interesting.....but 1000 lines of C can get you something similar.......

What are you on about? None of those things were mentioned in the original message, my reply, or the original reply to mine. Nor are they relevant to the original topic. Also, some of them don't make sense.

"Which AC sent the message via El Reg?": They could just make El Reg tell them that.

"Who read (and decrypted) the message?": I know that one. Nobody.

"How hard is that metadata to assemble?": What metadata? The last two questions? Or something else?

"Is the message time critical?": Depends on the content, now doesn't it? Not metadata then.

"Is the metadata available AT ALL when sent using Signal, Telegraph, Proton Mail, etc. etc?": Using your definition of metadata, I.E. who sent, who received, what does the message say ... yes, it is.

Re: Interesting.....but 1000 lines of C can get you something similar.......

Ten lines of C does that too. What's your point? Other than filling the comments section with junk? You know nobody's going to decode it, because for all we know, you instead ran one line of Python:

base64.b64encode(ssl.RAND_bytes(big_number))

Also, we have no interest. Do you have a relevant point?

Re: Keyboard layout

Depending on who they planned on using it, they had many satellites using the Latin alphabet. Poland, Romania, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary all used the Latin alphabet. There were also languages spoken internally which would have used Latin characters including the Baltic languages. Cuba and Vietnam too, but I think this machine predates the relationships. Also, they might have wanted to be able to encode items received in foreign languages in other countries.

Bill Gates on climate change: Planting trees is not the answer, emissions need to be zeroed out to avoid disaster

Re: @doublelayer

If we wanted to, we could. The comparisons between humans and nature are correct in the sense that nature is a lot more powerful than we are, but only in certain ways. Nature can set off an earthquake and make us very unhappy, while we lack the power to prevent or even predict earthquakes. Nature can do things we can't stop.

Still, we have the ability to cause massive destruction if we put our minds to it, because destruction is easier than creation or repair. It's the same way that I can't build a functioning car from scratch, but I can make one stop working and be difficult to repair given a few hours. Nuclear weapons are a good method to destroy lots of stuff, and if we wanted to use them to clear out the human population, we could do a pretty efficient job of it. Nobody has an interest in doing that, so we don't, but we already have the technology necessary to get close, and that's without ever intending to get to extinction.

Re: Personally, I wish someone would follow through on the other side of the story...

"We can (and did) live from the Arctic to the middle of the Sahara without the support of modern technology and trade."

We did. It wasn't pleasant and involved a lot of dying. I'd like to avoid that if I can. I can't stop a glaciation, but I can take steps to make that the big problem. For the moment, we're having to deal with changes to the climate before the glaciation.

If we had a stable climate at the current pleasant setting until the glaciation, we could focus our energies on doing something to promote our happiness when it does roll along. Given the timeframe, that might give us enough knowledge to go to a new planet which won't have one, or cancel the glaciation through deliberate control which we don't have the knowledge to do today, or decide that we'll deal with it because our smaller population can happily live in the equatorial regions and let the ice take the high latitudes, or any number of other options.

In the meantime, my concerns are not about mass extinction events (which we could cause if we wanted to; cobalt bombs are available). My concerns are about large-scale unpleasant situations. People complain a lot about migration today. How will they complain if a large region quickly desertifies and leaves its populace trying to escape to find water. That won't be an extinction event, but it will result in a lot of pain for those escaping, likely a backlash against them, maybe some wars, definitely an economic problem. I'd rather we avoid that if we can.

UK dev loses ownership claim on forensic software he said he wrote in spare time and licensed to employer

And always have a contract. His problem is that, from all the documentation available, there's nothing to prove that he had anything before working there or that the company had ever agreed to let him keep ownership. We don't know whether any of that happened. Perhaps you do, but unless you can prove it somehow, he's still going to lose because the same story could get used by someone completely making it up.

A legally airtight contract drafted by experienced genius lawyers would be optimal, but you don't always have to go that far. A simple document of understanding signed by both parties would have been sufficient. "Author will write the software and grant us the right to sell it provided that author keeps ownership and receives payment of the following amount" would have been sufficient. It's not that there was a loophole somewhere. There just wasn't anything at all except a standard employment contract.

Re: I feel like I'm on shaky ground here

Read your employment contract. It's possible you have a nice one, where they own just the stuff you develop on their time or equipment and you can write what you like so long as you're not competing with their products. If they have something stronger though, the law is probably on their side. It's not fun, but depending on how nice the company is, it's not always difficult to go through their system to get an exception. If you do, and I can't stress this strongly enough, get the exception in writing and store it at home on your own equipment.

Re: Everyone knows that

That's not really sufficient. He worked on it during his spare time, he claims, and I'm inclined to believe him. The question is whether he did so as part of employment or not. He was a salaried worker being paid by the company to reproduce the software he wrote. At that point, "company time" isn't really how it works anymore. "Company projects" is more like it. For instance, if I work on the projects my company asked for during my spare time, I won't own any of the code; it's still work done on my employer's IP.

The central question was whether he or the company owns the project, which would probably be settled in a license agreement or employment contract. There was no license agreement, which is what you would need if there was a licensing arrangement. That makes it hard to argue that the code was licensed.

Facebook bans sharing of news in Australia – starting now – rather than submit to pay-for-news-plan

Re: re: Blocking the ABC is downright dangerous

"abc.net.au actually. [...] There is a ton of community groups that post on facebook to quickly share breaking news during bushfire/flood etc emergencies."

Doesn't sound like there's a problem then. People who need to know what the broadcaster is announcing can go to their site. Or turn on a radio or television. Those who want to see or contribute to those emergency groups can go to Facebook to do it. If those groups exist to provide information the ABC doesn't have yet, they'll work just fine. If they only exist to repeat what the ABC has announced, they're not that critical since people could just listen to the ABC.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not really a fan of this legislation. I'd like it if somehow both sides could lose. Still, the necessity of Facebook as an emergency medium seems overblown.

Cambodia to force all internet traffic through national 'Internet Gateway'

Re: Starlink?

Yes, it will still work. The major reason is that Starlink has already stated it will comply with local regulations. That means they will censor when they have to. Which they virtually have to do, because the article says what happens if they didn't; their bank accounts get frozen. If nobody's paying for the service, they won't provide service. Starlink is not a solution.

Has Amazon finally gone cuckoo? Bezos' behemoth turns to crowdfunding for Alexa-powered timepiece

Or, more precisely, a clock with a Bluetooth hands free kit in which is locked down so you can't use it as a standard Bluetooth device and clock. Its Bluetooth functionality only works if you connect it with a separate Amazon device which already does almost all of what this does. If you don't have one, then the audio part will be useless. I'm not sure, but I think it might also not even set the time. It might have a manual mechanism for that though.

LastPass to limit fans of free password manager to one device type only – computer or mobile – from next month

Re: Classic ploy

"so you have to be [...] not literate enough to know password managers are a bad idea (this last bit will probably not win me any friends)."

Care to elaborate? Password managers are juicy targets, and thus they pose a risk to an attacker. Therefore, if you had said something like "Monolithic hosted password managers are a bad idea", I'd be behind you. However, you weren't that clear and if you meant that all password managers are a bad idea, I must disagree. A local password manager means people stop using the same password or multiple weak ones. That's so frequently an avenue for attack that it's probably worth doing something about it. If you have a reason they're a bad idea, you could lay out the details about why so we could debate them or agree and find a solution.