Posts by doublelayer

The Honor MagicBook Pro looks nice, runs like a dream, and isn't too expensive either. What more could you want?

Re: How much does it weigh?

Businesses want that, but personal machines often are purchased with different requirements in mind. For one thing, you don't need a big screen or keyboard if you're going to be using it as a desktop with a battery backup, and in fact size is probably not helpful as it makes it harder to put the computer away while using the full-sized peripherals. Meanwhile, people still have a need for a laptop which is portable and runs for long enough because there are times when we have to wait elsewhere. Parents, for example, may need to wait for their children and may wish to be productive while doing so. Or you could be in a queue at somewhere which has a long wait because of pandemic restrictions. For use cases like this, battery life is quite important as are the quality and size of the internal display and keyboard.

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Re: All Employee Emails

My problem isn't all-employee emails, but rather being added to too many groups. There's a group I'm in which is rather small, but we support a variety of things. The problem is that I support about two of them, so I'd not be able to help with most requests. We created multiple email lists so users could ask only those people most likely to know about the thing, but a lot of users don't appear to be sending their requests to these specific mails. Instead, they find the larger all-team address and send their request there. I can't ignore that group because some things that do apply to all of us get sent there but also because the requests for those few things I do support are going there. Still, about 90% of the mails that are sent to that group are useless.

Re: Perhaps

"Remember, a lot of people were already used to "instant" email - using a terminal login to a Unix server meant you were under a "push" model."

Is that true? I wasn't around for the older systems, but any time I've used modern email on a terminal it hasn't pushed notifications even though the mail was pushed to the server. The two ways I saw things were if I launched a terminal mail client or a message on login informing me of unread messages. If a message arrived while I was working, I didn't see it. Of course, I didn't bother trying to change this since I also connected the account concerned to a normal client, but did it work differently in the past?

Re: Perhaps

At my job, if I receive an email during work hours, it will have come in fast and I'll read it reasonably soon. I have to parse through emails that I don't really need to receive, so it's not instantaneous but I'll get to it soon enough. If you send me an email after work hours, we'll talk tomorrow. I don't sync my work email to my phone or personal computers and I don't use the work computer when not at work. If something urgently needs my attention, and it probably doesn't, there's a reason that some of my team members have my personal phone number. There's also a reason why nobody else at work has it, because there will always be someone who thinks their problem is urgent when it's not.

If people want constant contact with me, even outside work hours, those people can inform me that I need to be on call, provide me with the equipment, and pay me extra for the fact that I will limit my actions when on call so I'll be available to answer calls and respond quickly. Otherwise, they will get contact during work hours at an initial priority level that allows me to get normal work done between requests.

Apple commits to support human rights - 'We believe in the critical importance of an open society'*

Re: Engagement

"increasingly a thing now"? "not a good look"? "These are not the phrases of an expert."

Actually, they are. While that post may not have come from an expert, experts use those phrases with frequency. "Increasingly a thing now" is a quick and informal way of saying "is a policy which has been adopted with increasing frequency by a variety of participants". "Not a good look" is a quick and informal way of saying "even if the decision is in line with the ideals of the institution, it runs contrary to the ideals of an important section of the public. Continuing to pursue the current course may result in a negative reaction by the public which may carry with it additional consequences".

But also, who cares ["What relevance does the phrasing have to the discussion"]? This is an internet forum. We state our opinions here. This is not limited to experts and there are nonexperts here. We also write informally to get our point across. Do you have any comments about the opinion stated in that point, or do you simply want to point out the use of an informal expression on an informal forum because you aren't able to refute the original point on its merits?

Re: Engagement

This is Apple we're talking about. Why you brought up Google is beyond me, but since you have, Apple could take a page from Google's book. Granted, a page Google's been trying to rip out of the book, but they haven't yet. China told Google that they have to filter things for Chinese searches. Google decided to stand for freedom of information there and refused. China blocked them. That's standing up for what you believe in. Apple ... hasn't.

Now that's not fair to either of them; Google has been trying to build a Chinese search engine, only being stopped by small commercial things and a protest by their own workers. Therefore, I can't give them any credit now for standing up for stuff. The fact remains that at one point, they had principles and they stood up for them. That would be nice to see again. It's not exactly fair to Apple either, as they have stood up to some things. They stood up to the Americans when they wanted a backdoor; that was nice. So they're not terrible. They have not, however, stood up to China's requests for censorship.

Remember OpenAI's GPT model that was too dangerous for mere mortals? Well, it's now for sale on Azure

Re: facial recognition

"Also, why would 2 days in detention mean $12 Million payout? Was Mr Oliver paid $6M a day and he missed out?"

In the case of the teacher, incorrect testimony, while damaging to the one arrested, is likely not intentional and can't produce damages. In the case of the police, let them suffer. They used software that isn't capable of doing anything correctly to arrest an innocent person. Despite it being easy to disprove the incorrect software by comparing pictures, they got him anyway, failed to do the comparison when looking at him in person, put him in a lineup, failed to see the differences, put him in prison, failed to check that picture again, pressed charges, failed to see if he was the person they thought he was when they were constructing said charges, and it eventually fell to someone else to point out this rudimentary difference and end the farce. If I had kidnapped you for two and a half days, I'd spend years in prison (in that state, I could get a sentence of life imprisonment). I view several million as an acceptable alternative punishment for what is, in effect, a very similar offense.

Surprise! Voting app maker roasted by computer boffins for poor security now begs US courts to limit flaw finding

Yes, it seemed to me as if you were trying to be conciliatory. Statements that start like "I can't see anything wrong with Voatz position - providing" sound as if you think there's a possibility where their recommendations can be accepted. You clearly hedge against that with the recommendation you provided, and that limitation is useful, but in my opinion you've already given up too much by giving them anything. My reasons for that opinion are stated above.

I get that you're trying to be conciliatory, but that approach is extremely unacceptable. They shouldn't just be liable after their travesty causes massive problems. That way would help, but it's a lot like saying that I'm responsible after my non-IAEA approved nuclear reactor spreads radioactive waste over the local area. When things are this important, they need to be responsible before anything happens. That means that, when there are sufficient amounts of consumer information involved, when the government is going to use it, or when a malfunction could cause injury or death, the law should require that they do testing with independent testers and they should either have to implement the fixes to any bugs the testers find or appeal the decision not to. Having researchers who test systems simply helps this process and makes it cheaper. We require it of people making medicines or medical devices. We require it of people making cars and aircraft. We require it of people growing or manufacturing food. We can require it of people using the public's data, too.

Re: Voatz meet the Streisand Effect.

Ah, but it's not the discussion that they mind. If people investigate a system to find that it's a hideous mass of holes, they're violating the trust of the organization that put out the hideous mass of holes. It's important that we respect the rights of places that don't bother doing their own security testing and choose to use untrustworthy and unsafe code to store and process our information to make money. More than that, we must protect those who don't want to bother making good products from people who shamelessly figure out whether something will become a safety risk and, these people have no scruples, have the gall to tell the public about it after they tell the company who doesn't fix it. Consider how you would feel if someone researched the safety of cars and told people about the ones that blow up so you couldn't purchase one of those. Consider how you would feel if there was someone with the audacity to check if the claims of other product's advertisements were true and call out the selfless manufacturers when they were found to be lying through their teeth. These people must be stopped today.

As Amazon pulls union-buster job ads, workers describe a 'Mad Max' atmosphere – unsafe, bullying, abusive

Re: Not enough

Not really true. Some regulations vary between states, including some important ones, but a lot of others are federal. There is much more similarity between states than there is between European countries. In addition, all of Amazon's warehouse activities in the U.S. are directed from the same location, whereas their operations in other countries are often managed locally (those local managers still get commands from the American office, but they do things differently and may be in a position to operate differently). Therefore, the management decisions are much more likely to apply to all of the U.S. than they are to apply to other countries.

Re: Not enough

As the regulations and conditions vary with national laws, it would make sense not to attempt to generalize for every location, but instead to take them separately. As such, since the U.S. is one of Amazon's largest markets, it's not unreasonable to write about that one in its own article with additional articles about other countries to follow if interesting things are found.

You should also be aware that, although The Register is based in the U.K., it has had several writers in San Francisco for years covering topics that have a connection to America. I have also seen writers based in Sydney and others who don't state in their byline where they are. Welcome to the world, there's lots of parts of it to see.

No, other places do the same thing. How public it is varies, but I've seen reports of it at a few big companies. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the kind of manager who thinks the exact time a coder leaves work or whether they wear a tie when they're not seen by anyone is also the kind to think that this will improve productivity.

Re: corporate employee or fulfillment center associate

On the surface, they're just two words for two different kinds of jobs. An associate does physical things in warehouses, an employee works at headquarters writing code or planning things. But of course the answer is that employees have skills which they will use to market themselves to a competitor so they get some consideration, while the associates need money, which is why they agreed to be associates, so whatever Amazon wants to do with them they will.

Why cloud costs get out of control: Too much lift and shift, and pricing that is 'screwy and broken'

Re: Cloud certainly has its place....

I don't think that's it. If they just kept increasing the prices for the same thing, that might apply, but they don't seem to do that very often. Instead, they have so many products, each of which has sixteen variants, and each variant of each product has a different price depending on where you host it, so nobody can really keep track of the price differences. Also, they don't bring people's attention to the things where they make the most revenue, meaning they can slip in a slightly higher than expected bandwidth price and people only notice if they do a lot of research. It's not quite extortion based on lock-in, but instead a morass of complexity.

For example, just look at bandwidth charges. I wanted to do a simple comparison to demonstrate how quickly those could run away on you. So I tried to find the prices. I found Azure's quickly. Google's took longer but was still in my first set of search results. Amazon's was tricky to find via DuckDuckGo. I found unrelated AWS pages, third-party blog posts purporting to explain it, outdated information of all kinds, and increasingly shrill requests by Amazon to let them do the math for me (only about 58 steps). If you scroll down a lot on this page, there are transfer prices for EC2 VMs, and for all I know there are different charges for every other product but I got bored. Now we can begin to actually compare the prices for bandwidth. Microsoft's seems cheaper, but Google's is a little unclear how a public-facing one will work, and each one offers different prices based on the selected region, includes exceptions for certain types of traffic, and doesn't show you the full set of numbers in one chart. I think this illustrates the problem. I could figure this out, do some calculations, and actually estimate the bill for each system. Except these prices are for one aspect of one product and there are a hundred more products and price lists to consider. The more chaotic the set of systems, the harder estimating a price will be even for routine usage and the easier to quickly find out that something was overlooked.

As promised, Apple will now entertain suggestions from the hoi polloi on how it should run its App Store

Re: A larger share ?

"It costs $99/yr to register as a developer and be able to submit apps to the App Store. Not free but not far from it."

Well, that does build up. Especially if I'm already making free apps and giving my time away, it's a little annoying to have to give Apple money so I can give my code away for free.

"There's no requirement that the developer charge for their app, and indeed many are free and rely on advertising to make money for the developer. Apple does not get a cut of in-app advertising, so all those developers are "free riding" and the 30% they make off those who do charge goes partly to defray those costs."

Rubbish. A free app does make Apple money; it makes users want IOS devices more because that app is there. They don't pay the developer for it. They do provide some bandwidth so users can download it, but they already have a bunch of servers and most apps are small. It does not take much money to provide that service, and as we've already established, they already get money from the developers of said free apps with their annual fee.

"If they were forced to significantly lower that 30% they'd probably have to institute a minimum price for apps."

They wouldn't have to and they wouldn't. The free apps help them, and if there was a minimum price, developers wouldn't publish many of those free apps for a fee. Some would not want to attach their donated code to a charge, and some companies wouldn't want their users to have an initial charge for an app that might put them off from trying it.

"Compare with Google where they are collecting both the 30% fee AND making money off the in-app advertising for that majority of apps which use Google for their in-app advertising."

That's also potentially problematic. Google has one argument which is that you can use other stores, but I don't think that's enough. So I'll compare and recommend investigation of them as well.

Re: A larger share ?

Google's security testing has been repeatedly shown to be harmfully insufficient. The level of malware in the Play Store is ridiculous, the length of time it remains there is extensive, and the ease with which developers of the crap make slight modifications and get it back there is alarming. I do not consider "security testing" which routinely allows clearly faked apps containing nonobfuscated malicious libraries to be published to be worthwhile. What's worse, when the headlines and articles tell those stories, the apps are usually still there, when you'd assume that as soon as someone found one, Google would have quickly verified and killed the listing. While I can't give Apple that much credit, the incidences of this in their repository are significantly less worrying. It will happen to everyone, but if one company makes a real effort to prevent and curtail it and the other one runs a small automatic checker and calls it good, one is a lot better than the other.

Re: A larger share ?

Me: "The problem is that Apple also has numerous restrictions that serve little purpose other than their own enrichment."

Reply: "Eek: They're capitalists, call in the NKVD!"

No you don't. That's not what I mean and you know it. They do everything they do for their enrichment, but we have laws against leveraging a dominance in one market to force restrictions on others. Those laws are capitalistic, because we are attempt to foment fluid competition. Apple is trying to restrict that. The specific actions they take are anticompetitive. Capitalist countries have laws against anticompetitive behavior to protect capitalism, not to damage it.

A monopoly doesn't necessarily require having all of the market, but you are correct, Apple's monopoly on their platform doesn't give them a monopoly on the entire mobile phone market. Instead, this is an oligopoly because, between them, Apple and Google own about 99.9% of the market for mobile operating systems. Unsurprisingly, most laws restricting the abuse of market dominance include oligopolies too. In my opinion, Google is also deserving of some intensive investigation for anticompetitive practices.

Re: A larger share ?

Unfortunately, the general gist is starting to lose its parts. The benefits that Apple provides to developers and users from their 30% cut include security testing, providing the CDN for app delivery, basic upgrades (for example, they automatically updated apps to 64-bit if the developer didn't bother but the recompile worked, meaning users continued to be able to use the apps), and a simple way for users to find an app which hopefully makes it easier to get users who might generate cash flow. I don't necessarily have a problem that Apple charges 30% for this. After all, Google also charges 30% and they don't provide any security testing. The problem is that Apple also has numerous restrictions that serve little purpose other than their own enrichment. They routinely ban apps which compete with their functionality, including functionality they didn't have when the apps came out. They also feel they have a right to other chunks of revenue for which they provide nothing. They don't offer any transparency into their decisions about why something got banned. Sometimes, they allow prominent apps to violate some of their policies (no device fingerprinting, for example) without consequences. These sound much more predatory.

I'm rather willing to give Apple a pass on some of the behavior that really annoys other commentors (yes, it often annoys me too). I'd really like to have an IOS which has no restrictions on what apps I can install and what they can do, but I understand that Apple's intent is to provide a mobile operating system that enforces security by restricting everything. I can go elsewhere for something that doesn't want to go that way. When they restrict their users because it's an advertised feature, even when I hate that feature, I'm willing for that to continue. However, their abuse of their monopoly in order to force other restrictions on developers is harder to swallow. As I see it, they can either drop their monopoly or they can remove their predatory practices, and I'd accept either.

'We're not claiming to replace humans,' says Google, but we want to be 'close enough' that you can't tell it's a bot talking

Re: And . . .why ?

If they can get it good enough to convince someone with a big call center, the business will fire half the call center workers and put that money Google's way. Then the businesspeople who heard the demo won't ever call said call center, so they'll never hear how well or badly it does in real usage. Then Google can show the same convincing demo to other businesses and cite that one as a proven success story.

I can answer the article's question

"Google's criteria for ethical use and how it will prevent misuse was not stated."

However, I have access to some documents which should make them clear. Here is their ethical review form:

Your name:

Purpose of your use of the system:

Credit card number:

How much credit would you like applied to your account (note: this credit is nonrefundable):

Urgency of your request:

And this is the misuse form letter:

We have received a notice that your usage of the system is considered misuse. Your account has been closed to prevent you from continuing to misuse. If you wish to continue to use these features, please submit a request for appeal within your account dashboard. We ask you not to create a new account as we are currently unable to process appeals between accounts for privacy reasons; information connected to one account cannot be attached to another one. [Wink wink]

Salon told to change ad looking for 'happy' stylist because it 'discriminated against unhappy people'

Re: They have a point.

"Successfully suing someone would make you happy."

I haven't ever done so and I hope I never will because I honestly don't think it'd make me happy. If I'm suing someone, they probably have done something bad to me or to others, and I'm trying to get them to stop doing that. So I would be pleased if the successful suit meant that they would cut it out. However, it's not the kind of happy that lasts very long, being the cessation of a bad thing rather than a start of a good thing. The only other part that might result in happiness is if I get a large settlement, but I think even that would only be of minor benefit to my mood. Maybe I'm just imagining it wrong.

Re: I'm with Richard

"The old one cranked up their prices by 50% following the post(?)-covid reopening."

Most likely, they are having fewer customers because they have to disinfect everything every time one leaves and because they might have had customers closer together previously. If they can't do as much work in the same time, they might only be able to manage to stay afloat by charging more. Not that that puts any restrictions on you, but it's worth considering why they might have done that.

Anyone else noticed that the top countries for broadband speeds are well-known tax havens? No? Just us then?

I really don't think that's how it works. If 71/100 meant that 71% of the population had a device, it might be arguable that the age disparity explains it. However, given the figures for developed countries, I'm guessing the truth is very different. Germany, for example, has 55 fixed connections per 100 people and 132 cellular connections per 100. It's possible that this means that nearly all Germans have a device, 32% have a second one, and a little over half the people still use fixed lines. I think it's more likely, however, that most of the fixed lines are going to corporate or government offices, and a lot of the cellular devices are likewise. This especially applies as some of these devices might be IoT things using the network.

It seems we are unlikely to agree on what exactly these numbers mean for the availability of networks, so let's look at a different set. Wikipedia has a table estimating the number of internet users from subscriber information and surveys. Each row of this table could be disputed, but I think it's likely that most rows are trustworthy. It is estimated there that 38.66% of Pakistanis accessed the internet in the last year. The reason this number doesn't surprise me is that, even where mobile phones are available, there isn't necessarily data usage from them. A phone attempting to do much online over 2G isn't going to succeed very well. Modern feature phones may have web browsers, but modern web pages are going to take forever to load across the miserably slow connection and they're also going to render badly. Also, if people are having trouble affording things, they probably aren't using the most recent of feature phone designs. An old 2G phone still works fine if the area has that capacity. What's more, most contracts I have seen offering 2G data are close to extortionate. For people using feature phones, they're unlikely to afford routine data use. Also keep in mind that it is estimated that 50 million in Pakistan don't have electricity, which demonstrates the level of financial difficulty they're in. Meanwhile, calls or SMS messages are usually much cheaper. This doesn't have to apply to everyone; 82 million users is still a lot of users, but if there are such areas then we can't really claim to have worldwide penetration.

That still doesn't prove that "There are very few people in the world now who don't have internet connection." For one thing, those numbers don't state how many of those phones are capable of using internet. If it's a feature phone with 2G, then it probably doesn't do internet at all. If the local network is 2G, it's likely that the population isn't using it for internet even if their phones technically could.

However, the original statement was about the world, so let me find some countries that are more to your liking:

Chad: 1 fixed line per 100 inhabitants, 52 cellular per 100, 16 million people in total

Haiti: 1 fixed per 100, 61 cellular per 100, 11 million total

Kiribati: 1 fixed per 100, 43 cellular per 100, 110K

Pakistan: 1 fixed per 100, 71 cellular per 100, 208 million total

Papua New Guinea: 2 fixed per 100, 55 cellular per 100, 7 million total

Sudan: 1 fixed per 100, 77 cellular per 100, 43 million total

Those are some large gaps. In addition, it's worth keeping in mind that a bunch of connections can still be in one particular area, particularly if people are using multiple devices or if companies deploy cellular infrastructure (usually, the number of connections counts individual devices, and they don't care that a company may have deployed a hundred devices for corporate purposes and people aren't using them). For context, it's worth keeping in mind that, even with it's 1.27 connections per person rating, the Philippines is estimated to have 20.6 million people without access to electricity. I'll grant that a phone is easier to keep charged when power is problematic than most other electronics, but I'm still guessing that some of those people can't afford a phone any more than they can afford mains power.

Qualcomm flexes latest Arm chipset for laptops: Snappy performance and battery life if you can put off your upgrade long enough

Re: A notepad anyone

By "notepad", do you mean tablet with handwriting recognition capability? If so, why this chipset and why Chrome OS? First, you're likely going for lots of battery life, but the 25 hour estimate/exaggeration is for a laptop which can have a bigger battery. Most tablets don't have as large a battery because they have to put that all in the screen bit, making it really thick, whereas the laptop can put it in the keyboard bit. If someone wanted such a tablet with really nice battery life, they could of course make it thicker, but it might be better just to use a lower-power processor since it's designed mostly for writing.

For the software, Chrome OS seems ill-suited for, well a lot of things, but this task is one of them. If it's intended to be a notepad, I.E. frequently used to write documents, you want as much availability, speed, and power conservation as you can get. For example, interpreting writing in real time can be complex, so a recognizer that runs in native compiled code on the device itself is going to be fastest and use the least power. One which runs on the device but in JavaScript is going to be slower and will put more weight on the processor, whereas one that runs on the cloud will only work when the device is online, include a latency problem, and unnecessarily use power communicating with said server. While Chrome OS has been grudgingly adding some of this, most other OSes are significantly more eager to use the device for processing. Linux, Android, or Windows would all be able to do the job much better, especially given that the latter two have both had manufacturers who have invested in handwriting input quite a lot.

Maybe you want something which is different from what I think you want. If I'm correct, however, I don't think your suggested approach is the best one.

Re: There won't be laptops with 25 hour battery life...

I guess the main benefits are these, in increasing priority:

1. You might want to have a laptop with you while you're away from power for an extended period. For some reason. I'm not sure exactly why. The best option I have is that your residence might lose power intermittently. If it was longer, the battery would still die on you, so it still has to be a short time (maybe a week maximum) away from power.

2. You have a long journey ahead of you but the vehicle which is involved doesn't have a mechanism to recharge your device.

3. By using less power, you can reduce the number of times you have to recharge and prolong the battery's life.

4. They're lying their face off and 25 means 13, but at least with 13 hours of battery, it will last all day of frequent use.

Dating apps swiped left on Pakistan’s request to clean up their acts, bans followed

"Starlink (in future), or one of the myriad satellite providers in the area (if you can put up with the latency)"

No on both options. Starlink's operators have explicitly stated that they will comply with local regulations (I.E. censorship). So does pretty much every satellite provider, because if they don't, their equipment for subscribers to use the system is illegal to sell in that country. If you do find an operator willing to violate that (spoiler alert, you can't), there's another solution which has been time-tested on satellite TV receivers. Ask Turkmenistan to recommend a good hammer for destroying dishes and they might even throw in the good hammer to use against the users of those dishes as well.

Really? How would that work? Let's simulate it. You are in a house, representing Pakistan. To be nice, I'll give you five separate internet connections in that house. I run all of them, and I'm blocking specific traffic on all five. Now you can play whack-a-mole with me if you want by using VPNs or the like, but you want the internet to solve your problem for you. So how does your fixed internet prevent me from blocking packets when I control all the lines along which packets might come?

The internet does route around damage, accidental damage that is. It doesn't route around someone deliberately damaging it thoroughly enough that it can't route around. That's why we have things like VPNs so intentional blocking can be circumvented. It requires effort because the thing you're trying to combat is complex. No matter what automatic system you create, a sufficiently motivated person can take it down.

Someone's getting a free trip to the US – well, not quite free. Brit bloke extradited to face $2m+ cyber-scam charges

Re: It's only money...

You aren't getting it. No matter how it happens, if the crime occurs in country A, country A thinks it has the right to try him. And they do, according to all of international law. The money he stole was in country A. Now, it's not. The theft occurred in country A. Back to my previous example because it's more obvious. If I'm in country B, and it borders country A, and I fire a gun into country A to kill someone, but I haven't left country B, the murder occurred in country A. I can be tried in country A. If I ever go to country A, they have the right to charge me. They will ask country B to have me sent over and country B will likely not care that I was standing on their soil when I committed the crime.

Re: It's only money...

That is certainly an option and when something isn't a crime the country holding the person usually refuses to extradite. The first part, is just not what anyone does. If you murder someone in country A and leave for country B, you should expect to be sent back to country A to face your trial. Same thing if you murder someone in country A by firing at them from country B or if you use electronics to commit your crime. The crime occurred in country A and country A feels it has the right to charge you. Centuries of legal thought, treaties, constitutions, and organizations agree with them.

Re: It's only money...

The criteria is indeed where the crime was committed, and the law has become rather clear on this. By "law", I mean most countries' laws, including even the dodgy countries. They usually hold that the computers or victims involved, you know, the ones where the negative event happened, are the place that matters. However, the location of the criminal can also be important. The result is that either country can charge the person, and in fact both countries can choose to charge the person. This isn't unique to cybercrime either. Before we had computers, we still had international crime. For example, someone could call across borders to assist a crime. What happened? The country in which the crime happened charged the caller with assisting it, and they requested extradition. They usually got it, too, because the crime was committed in their country while the criminal was in another one, no different from someone firing a weapon across a border.

Re: It's only money...

Extradition is a normal part of the legal process. If the perpetrator is not in the same country that the victims are, extradition is a way to get the perpetrator to face the charges in the country where the crime happened. The U.K. gets to deny the request if they want to, but they had no reason to do so in this case. If an American group defrauded British banks, the same type of request would have occurred in the other direction. It has nothing to do with subservience or international diplomacy, it's a bog standard part of international criminal law.

COVID-19 tracing without an app? There's an iOS and Android update for that

Re: and will appear in an Android update due later this month

They bundled it into Google Play Services, so unless you've taken steps to kill that, you'll get it. So you get that update, but the security patches will still stay away. Android's fun, isn't it?

Re: Future of this

Several important variables aren't known. For example, how frequently cookies are changed. If it's twenty minutes, we're probably fine. If it's two days, we could very well not be. The reason we might not is that people already use Bluetooth to fingerprint passing devices. They do this in a variety of electronic things placed in places where people walk, including advertising screens. If someone evil did want to create traces of people's movements, they could use machines like this and infrequently changed cookies to track people over short periods. With two days of someone's movement, it's probably much easier to connect it to their next cookie because many people stick to some sort of routine. Alternatively, how could the feature be used to get everyone's cookies uploaded regardless of a test? If that's possible, it's potentially rather valuable from a tracking perspective.

Do we really have to worry about this? Probably not. If you wanted to track someone as a government, there are better options out there. However, these are sadly questions we have to ask. If I had never been subject to involuntary data collection at the hands of governments (in some cases not mine) and companies (in some cases companies I have never voluntarily interacted with), then I would be able to dismiss the worries with the argument that they don't want to track me and this tool would be poor at doing it, and if it's going to help prevent new infections I'm willing to take the minor risk. However, the appetite for data has been proven to be extreme, and the degree of consideration that data collection organizations have for my privacy has proven to be zero. With these facts in mind, the risk is greater. With this higher risk, I have to give real consideration to the other aspects, which aren't good. If this doesn't really help much, is it worth it to me to take a risk that it will be used against me? Might it be better for me to continue to stay socially distant instead?

Brave takes brave stand against Google's plan to turn websites into ad-blocker-thwarting Web Bundles

Re: I'm not worried

And you are entirely correct. The only minor problem is that "to a point" means "pretty much all the way". They have bent the W3C to their will. They have bent other standards bodies to their will. They have bent enough web devs to their will that there are sites that say they'll only work in Chrome. This is a lot of power, with proven efficacy. It's always possible that they hit a wall sometime, but they've already gotten farther than I'd like them and I see no reason they're going to stop any time soon.

Re: Err...

Why yes, it is. Now all you have to do is press charges. You have two options:

Option 1: Go to your local law enforcement and inform them that a crime has taken place. They will immediately investigate and charge Google in local court. You will get paid at the end of the case. [muted tones Case will not end in your lifetime and might not even start because everyone uses Google tech police know who they can charge and who they can't and will laugh uproariously once you leave actual chance of getting recompense one in 18.39 million actual chance of change 0.]

Option 2: Sue Google yourself. You can attempt to pursue them under various laws depending on your nation of origin. You will have to bear more costs, but you'll likely get a bigger payout and Google will have to reimburse your legal expenses. [muted tones Case will not end in your lifetime but we'd expect your lifetime to be rather shortened lawyers will work you over with unending questions and contracts until your bank account is empty you'll probably also be the target of a discrediting campaign aimed at getting you fired and making your lawyers drop you as a client not recommended for anyone with a history of depression or for those who want to avoid a future of depression]

In this case, however, Google is making available tech that is voluntarily adopted by those who create content. Well, that's not exactly true. It's tech to be voluntarily adopted by content creators after their advertisers require it of them and volunteer the use of their own CDNs and extra tracking scripts. For this specific case, the viewers of the content are the only ones who will be able to complain about the involuntary restriction on their web usage. Said complaints will be filed in a big recycled paper bin.

Re: I'm not worried

So how many sites use Google ads or analytics? Google has managed to get lots of stuff into theoretically open web standards. DRM tech they control. Google Maps as a W3C standard. They've done similarly with JavaScript APIs, and they have a near monopoly on browser extension APIs since Mozilla has adopted most of theirs. These things are all "open" in the sense that we don't have to pay Google for it to use them on our websites, but they give Google extra power over the web and web developers haven't been shy about using them. Why do you expect that this one will be so different, and even if you're right, what happens when they come back with a different "open standard" in a few months?

Amazon spies on staff, fires them by text for not hitting secretive targets, workers 'feel forced to work through pain, injuries' – report

Re: I'm glad...

Yes, they did. It only affected California, but maybe Amazon's employees should be considering testing the precedent in other states as well.

Re: Dystopian Nightmares Inc.

"and what happens inside these major cities?"

Until recently, you might have more of a chance to find a job willing to accept you. This was a little limited because rents are so unreasonable, but because there are large companies, there are also a lot of jobs for people with certain types of experience which could be easier to get. Because all of those people were in the city to work in the office, there were more jobs to provide services to them, which in turn created jobs that work well with lots of available customers in close proximity. New businesses requiring specialized employees might be attracted to the cities as well since the existing companies had already attracted employees who could be poached to the new company. In a smaller area, the small set of available customers makes it hard to start anything new because you are competing with existing businesses that have the advantages of long relationships and you have a finite ability to get people interested.

Now that we have a pandemic shutting down cities, the future may look different. Those of us posting here are probably fine, because we're mostly technical people who can work from afar and/or have in-demand skills. There are many who do not have these advantages, and their experience may be significantly worse.

Google and Facebook abandon Hong Kong landing of new submarine cable

Re: Let's just hope

Google's primary purpose in existing is parsing lots of data into a useful user model that lets them microtarget. They're not great at it, but their secondary purpose is pretending to parse lots of data in order to microtarget, and to prove that they're doing so they collect lots of data. They're pretty good at that purpose.

It's not easy to capture and store the data coming through a large international cable. Disk speeds aren't sufficient to do it. However, Google has a lot of programmers who work on big data-crunching programs with dubious usefulness, so they have the kind of expertise they need to write a program to extract potentially mineable data from that massive flow. For example, they could track certain metrics of specific addresses to map frequent data flows. Depending on the IP allocation to average American connections, this could be easy (IPV6, IPV4 where the carrier isn't low on addresses) or a little trickier (client is behind CGNAT). Similarly, they could log and store the first few packets of an encrypted flow, where potentially unencrypted initiating information such as domain names or a cleartext HTTP request which hasn't yet been redirected to HTTPS can be found. Is there reason to do this? No. If you're looking to advertise, you wouldn't want to waste that much energy on information that's likely to be polluted and hard to get anyway. However, you also wouldn't do all sorts of other tracking that Google has done, so whether it makes sense isn't the best metric to decide whether Google will attempt it.

What would you prefer: Satellite-streamed cat GIFs – or a decent early warning of an asteroid apocalypse?

Re: Poor Countries?

"I'm not coming down on the side of fibre vs satellite, though. Too many other complex factors."

Here are some considerations that will apply, making most of those factors unimportant or nonexistent.

"Sociopolitical, for example - how many tyrannical governments like shutting down internet access,"

These systems have already agreed to comply with governmental censorship. They have to. If someone sent up a satellite to do two-way comms in an area where censorship was going on and didn't respect the government's regulations, the government would go around with radio vans and find people who are transmitting to those satellites. The dishes would be smashed and the users imprisoned. If that country had the ability to further punish the satellite operator, they would. The point being that if a government wants to cut off the internet or mess with it in a different way, they're still going to do so even with this system.

"how many twats like to set fire to cell phone towers or microwave relays?"

I've seen people attacking towers, but relays don't seem to be as targeted or as vulnerable (they're not as densely packed so the operators can afford to secure them). The problem is that, after the signal goes from the user to the satellite, it still has to come down somewhere and go to the other services run along the ground. Satellite manages to make extra paths for the last hop from ISP to user. It doesn't liberate us from the rest of the ground-based network.

"How much of our essential infrastructure such as food distribution and emergency coordination relies on the internet,"

A lot. You can try to make a satellite web, but if the internet goes down around the downlink places, it's not going to do you any good. If you want to make those things not be so reliant on the internet, you have to use something different. Point-to-point radio link, satellites that don't downlink and connect two devices on the same network (not what these constellations do by default). Those are good ideas, but this doesn't accomplish them.

"and how resilient is ground based infrastructure to storms, fires, trawlers, civil unrest"

If we're going to worry about those things, we have to worry about several other things. First, we have another ground-based thing that runs to all these places: electrical power. Can you run the satellite receiver from a battery easily available to users? I'm guessing it takes something larger like a UPS, which most houses don't have. Second, how resilient are satellite dishes to those things? A storm can smash them or knock them out of alignment. Fires can release smoke which occludes or corrodes them if it doesn't just burn the building down. Civil unrest can cause damage if people want to use hammers. Third, you could ask similar questions about the satellites, as they may have resilience problems to radiation, collision, or overwhelming traffic. Finally, you still have to take into account that the satellites are relying rather heavily on ground-based downlink to provide all their services.

Re: Poor Countries?

Which is the reason that ISPs often get government subsidies for running services to rural areas. Also why houses that are further away often use copper instead of fiber. Copper lines are worse, but if properly maintained, they're fine. The original point, that it is quite possible to connect these places without requiring satellite, remains. Just because the ISP near that house didn't choose to doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem requiring LEO satellite to fix. The original copper line going there (I'm pretty sure there is one) could carry data. The ISP could be required by regulation to maintain that. The regulator could enforce that by issuing fines to ISPs which fail to do so. Problem solved.

The argument being made here is basically that this satellite constellation provides service where it wasn't feasible to provide it, or at a much cheaper price than it could. This doesn't mean that it is cheaper than the most expensive alternative run only to one building, most things are. The argument that must be proven is that it is cheaper or better than an alternative which also provides reliable service of sufficient quality when calculating the prices to run that service to all who will be using it. All of us have to sacrifice our own amateur astronomy desires and benefits we get from ground-based astronomical equipment, as well as extra difficulties in space and a more restrictive monopoly on radio spectrum. If it only helps in a small set of places, it may not be worth it. If you raise the bar for alternatives to make it seem better, you're just muddying the waters without actually improving things.

Re: Poor Countries?

There are other ways to get service to rural areas. Fiber is not quite as expensive as you think. It gets divided per user, which means it doesn't happen, but when compared to the price of launching lots of satellites, not quite as much. There's also geosynchronous satellite, which is a little annoying from a latency perspective but it works without polluting orbits and covers a large area. You can cover lots of places by doing that. If someone really wanted to get service over the massive areas that don't currently have it, they could do so more easily with a small number of geosynchronous satellites or investments in local fiber and cellular providers. The benefit to Starlink and those like it is smaller and mostly focused on already-developed countries. For one thing, it allows those companies to get licenses to use orbits and radio frequencies that are worth quite a lot. For some areas, they will have captive markets because land-based ISPs have been ignoring their requirement to serve rural customers. It will provide better service to ships or aircraft. It allows companies to justify investment in rockets that nobody else is using. They get an early-mover advantage on LEO, and can rent out that expertise to other companies. And it's a way to waste money if you have a lot.

We now have to decide if those benefits are enough to justify the harm to others. We should be considering the real benefits, not the possible benefits that could happen but probably won't. If we allow companies to fill the argument with could-happens, we're going to lose no matter what side we're on.

Re: Balance

I think you're getting overoptimistic. There are certainly good uses for an internet connection everywhere. No disagreement. However, I remain entirely unconvinced that these satellite plans will ever put internet there. The reasons for this are many, but here are a few of the big ones:

There are lots of small places that don't have internet. You could try to assemble connections for all of them, but that will mean having a lot of people whose main job is finding places, talking to the people there, assembling the devices to send over, getting them in, setting them up, etc. Charities might do some of this, but I don't expect the companies to find charities and offer them several thousand satellite uplinks.

Here's another problem: have you ever managed to get an internet connection online as easily as the ISPs claim? I haven't. I know how to plug in my wires, but I've often had to call up their support line and get them to realize that they never turned the line on, they haven't enabled my account yet, they forgot but a technician needs to come by and do [they're certainly not telling me what], or they had me down as having a billing problem because they took my last payment and applied it to someone else's account (this has happened to me). I recently helped a friend who set up a new connection which didn't work and the ISP informed us that they provided the wrong equipment and we had to go to a retail outlet to exchange it for the right equipment before anything would turn on. What I fear is that the same thing is going to happen to these. If the companies are going to provide free service, they will still have a billing system and something to cut people off. If the connection fails in one of the various disconnected places for an account broken reason, maybe because the village doesn't pay their nonexistent bill or even the connection went down for a long while while a storm affected the equipment, how are the people there who don't have an alternate communication system going to get someone on the American or European call center to understand the problem. In fact, how are they going to call the call center or identify themselves? What happens if the satellite dish is broken? How do they notify someone and get a repaired unit? Will they get a repaired unit?

One more consideration is how much a for-profit company cares about any of this. It doesn't make them any money, and it has various administrative problems. In order to manage something like this, they need to have business in countries they probably get nothing from, verify that some location qualifies for reduced-price or free equipment and service, handle tech support and repair, manage the risk of equipment theft, and many other things. Each one of those things takes time and money, and the company gets nothing from it. How long will it be before someone from finance lays out these figures and suggests a few other options. There's a cheap way to pretend to care without doing this--you manage the free connections for developing regions project yourself, find a few photogenic schools that don't have connections, provide service for like four of them, and post those stories on your main page. What will stop the companies from doing that?

The projects you suggest are important, and people are currently doing some things in that area. There are projects to collect educational materials and get tech to students. Projects to provide extra communication equipment to far-flung areas. Projects to increase the availability of medical advice and basic medical knowledge when hospitals are too far away. These projects have a real, generous, verifiable purpose. I am not convinced that these satellite internet plans care about any of this rather than the profits they're expecting.

Re: Not just money

Do you really think we're going to get worldwide internet from these? They're capable, but in order to get it, the companies have to operate in lots of places, manufacture the equipment for uplink at an affordable price, make it and service available to people who probably can't pay very much, and deal with regulations and censorship in some way. These are not easy things, and when you consider that these companies already have plenty of money, it seems unrealistic to expect them to invest all that much in providing service to places where the local population has any other option. You'll probably get service because Canada is wealthy, but large parts of the planet won't because the people in Chad can't even pay for a full roll-out of cellular.

If we add a healthy dose of skepticism to the worldwide equalizer potential, we have to ask ourselves if there's enough benefit in providing an extra coverage option to rural areas of the developed world to justify the interference to astronomy (and some other stuff as well, like other uses for LEO or potential difficulties for other uses of space). Might it be better to increase the availability of ground-based cable or cellular connection instead? This is not a question that has an exact answer, but if we temper our expectations of miracles of generosity from businesses that are certainly not going to provide it, we will be better able to discuss the real merits of the system.

Forget your space-age IT security systems. It might just take a $1m bribe and a willing employee to be pwned

Re: Just say no

Well, if you already end up in the yes or no part of the conversation, you're already at a certain level of risk. They might have plans if you say no to make sure you don't report their request to someone. While those plans might be along the lines of "put that guy and the people near them on the don't try list, get the requester out of the country, and send a new requester next time just in case", they might also run along the lines of "turn that guy in right now to get them caught or maybe use a nearby object to attempt to create amnesia so they don't remember what I look like [procedure may have side-effects]". If you agree long enough to get free and turn them in, not only might you have a better safety record but you might actually catch these people, like this time.

Google wants to listen in to whatever you get up to in hotel rooms

Re: Not a bad idea

I'm sure such automation would be handy for the hotel concerned. However, two provisos need to be taken into account before you assume that's all there is. First, you could automate just fine with the technology already present in the room. You currently reach the people doing the tasks by using the phone, so you could install a voice recognition and still use the phone to get to it. Second, the reason there are people is to answer questions or do things that aren't easily automated. You can ask basic questions of an automatic system, but if you want to inform someone that there is a specific problem or a specific request, you're probably not going to have much fun out of a system that might not have been programmed to understand this. You can try and be rewarded, try and have an irritating circular conversation with a robot, or find a different way to get a person. I'm assuming most people are going to have a low tolerance for mechanical misunderstanding before they return to finding a human for anything more complex than asking for the weather.

Re: Just unplug it

How long will it be before they do one of three things:

Option 1: Build the unit into the wall, like they do with a lot of the other things, so you can't steal it but also you don't have access to the plug.

Option 2: Build the microphones into the room so audio reception is superior, which you can't see.

Option 3: Put the assistant into something else which you can't easily turn off or which has backup power. It becomes necessary to try to thwart it by dampening the sound.

Epic move: Judge says Apple can't revoke Unreal Engine dev tools, asks 'Where does the 30% come from?'

"Apple actively discourage versions, and they deliberately built in no mechanism for license upgrades. It was a deliberate decision on their part."

I'm not sure about that. I've had several apps go that way. You're correct that Apple doesn't have a way to say "This update costs 4.99, pay or no more updates for you". However, you can easily (and people have) either release a free update which allows users to buy a newly-available thing via in-app purchase or stop updating the old app and release a new one. I have an app on my device which has not been updated for about two years. When you launch it, it cheerfully tells you to check out the company's new app for the same purpose and offers you a 20% discount on the purchase. I haven't bothered because I don't use the old one very much and it's still working with modern IOS but that company doesn't seem to have been prevented from doing this by Apple. If these apps can do this, maybe Apple isn't responsible for others choosing not to. It doesn't justify other things they do, including the 30% commission on things they have nothing to do with, but I don't see cause to blame them on the issue you're talking about.