Posts by doublelayer

How to find forgotten Wi-Fi passwords and SSIDs in Windows and Android

Re: More Goddamned-Creepy User-Tracking

If you've enabled backups, then you should expect that deleting something from the main storage will not remove it from the backup because otherwise, the backup wouldn't serve its purpose as a backup. If you deleted a WiFi network you wanted to restore, getting it out of the backup is a perfectly normal thing to do.

What they were asking is whether it sneakily stays somewhere, and although that's possible, there's no evidence suggesting it does. It stays in that list because it's been told to connect again if it sees that network, so it needs to remember the network in order to do that.

Science confirms what we all suspected: Four-day weeks rule

Re: stuff that involves lots of other people being at work

Nobody is saying that we should or even can deny people the choice to take worse positions. Shops that cut night shifts did not do it because we were trying to stop them. Mostly, they canceled them because those are the worst shifts, they would have to pay a lot to get people to agree to work them, and they didn't want to pay a lot. Either they didn't want to pay any shift more than another, and they would have to, or they were willing to pay a shift more, but doing so meant it wouldn't be profitable enough for their liking. That was considered easier than cutting a different shift because there are fewer people who want to take it or because there are fewer customers making it worthwhile.

I'm not sure what the alternative is here, since presumably you're not suggesting we mandate that businesses fill shifts at all hours. The businesses and workers will continue to follow the very typical pattern of deciding what shifts to offer and take based on costs and benefits.

Re: There's a lot more to this

Not really. A four-day week should work as well for manual workers as office workers. The problem is that some of that may be equally badly. A person working 80% of the hours might fly 80% as many planes, but a helpdesk tech working 80% of the hours might fix 80% as many user errors and a retail clerk working 80% of the hours might sell 80% as much stuff. There may be occasional positions where productivity isn't as linked to time spent, and the reduction in time available might encourage management to waste less of the time that remains, but there's no guarantee of either.

That doesn't mean it wouldn't work. The health benefits reported in this paper may be a little obvious, but they are also real. That helps the employer even if the employees aren't being more productive as a result. It might reduce turnover rates, increase morale, and various other things which, while difficult to calculate, do have compensatory benefits to the employer. Whether those are enough to be worth 20% I don't know, but they are definitely not 0%.

Re: Every. Single. Study.

I don't know the situation there, but one reason that might happen is what happens when you don't have many staff to begin with. It's easy to make sure there are always people available when there are ten of them, because you could make it so only two are taking each day* and there are always eight left. It doesn't work very well when the number is low and the normal day off plus one or two people off sick could make that zero people available. Knowing the risk, someone might decide that predictably shortened hours might be better than turning someone away because there's unexpectedly nobody available today.

* This brings us to another question about four-day weeks: how do we decide which day people are going to not work? When does it make more sense for everyone to take off the same day, and when do we need to spread it out? And when we do spread it out, how do we balance those who get the good days? Because getting Friday off is nice, because you can do something longer or get a longer rest, whereas taking of Tuesday will be equally useful if you're just doing small things but is not as flexible for anything larger. If it changes randomly so everyone gets some Fridays, then it makes scheduling recurring things on that day off difficult.

Re: Translation

"I'm not really interested in the productivity and labour impact to be honest,"

The companies who are asked to implement it will be, though. If you want this to happen, there are a few ways to convince someone with the power to make it happen:

1. It will save you money.

2. It will make you the same amount of money, but people will like working for you more, which simplifies back to "it will save you money" after all once you think about reducing recruiting and turnover costs.

3. It will cost you a small amount of money, but when you factor in those things, you come out even.

4. It will cost you money, but it will cost your competitors more money.

5. You don't have a choice; if you don't do it, nobody will agree to work for you.

6. You have no choice, it will be mandated.

If you can convince someone that one of those things is correct, it could happen. If the one you convince them of is number 6, their response will be to do what they can to make it not mandated, at which they will succeed, so better that it's one of the first five. If you can't, then it won't be implemented. A productivity number helps with this, and some studies can be cited which found that productivity was not impaired. I'm not sure how much I believe them, because the summaries tend to suggest that productivity wasn't impaired because pointless meetings got canceled which suggests you could have probably improved it by just doing the cancel meetings bit without the extra day off bit, but still, that can help make the case. This paper doesn't consider that aspect, which is fair enough, but that means it's missing an important element because "health improves with same amount of work done" is a much more convincing headline than "health improves, work done decreases", and we don't have enough data to know which one this is.

Re: Translation

And if that's the case, then you can put numbers to that and ... the authors didn't. Maybe they didn't because collecting and comparing productivity numbers is actually really hard. I'm sure that all of us in an IT-related field have seen the attempts to put a number on our performance, but number of computers fixed, lines of code written, task board tickets closed, plan document pages written, etc per week tend not to be useful numbers. Perhaps that's the only reason they didn't draw a conclusion about that.

And maybe they didn't because it's really not as simple as you state. Whether I'm productive can have lots of causes, my happiness is only one of them, and it has a larger effect in the long term than it does in the short term. I've had weeks where I was not enjoying my work at all but I was getting a lot done, usually because someone wanted something urgently (occasionally there was a real need, other times they just demanded it and were in a position to do so). Quite frequently, that was accomplished by working lots of hours to do it. Great, we have a datapoint, everyone should work long nights and we'll get productivity. Except, of course, that at the end of such a week, I was a lot more tired, things had been neglected, and even if I wanted to work that hard continuously, I couldn't, and of course I didn't want to which would have made it even worse. Let's take the opposite approach: I'll work one day a week on full pay. That will make me very happy, but the job won't get done. I may be very productive during that day, but it won't be enough time for me to do as much stuff as I was doing before. The link is not as absolute as you describe.

For each set of person and task, there are a few curves modeling productivity. Work too many hours and it suffers. Work too few hours and it does as well. The short term, medium term, and long term curves will be different. Somewhere on that curve is the local maximum for output of suitable quality, but that peak on the short term curve might be well into the very bad end of the long term curve. The biggest problem though is that the only way to even start to guess at what those curves might look like is to make everyone run through multiple years of tests, and by then, the data is likely out of date and they hate you. This is why we end up having to guess at something that's reasonable for those doing the work and those paying for the results, using large studies to try to evaluate it. This study doesn't, but that doesn't mean you can decide for it what the answer should be.

Re: Translation

It's useful to consider that, although some studies have involved productivity, this one didn't. The article makes no mention of whether workers were as productive per hour or per week across the study but instead refers to "burnout, job satisfaction, and mental and physical health". Those things have a major effect on productivity in the long term, but they do not prove productivity is unchanged in the short term. Some other studies have found that productivity is unchanged, although others do not, usually because whether productivity changes depends on annoying little details like whether the companies that switched canceled pointless meetings to free up time or not, which depends on how many pointless meetings they had to cancel.

As AI becomes more popular, concerns grow over its effect on mental health

Like it or not, more people are using AI more often. That makes it more popular in the "quantity of people choosing to use it" sense. It's making me more annoyed, as I've had to correct people who used it to ill effect so often that I've now created and memorized a form message explaining why the AI result is unreliable and in this case wrong.

Microsoft-owned GitHub: Open source needs funding. Ya think?

Re: Proprietary?

They could try, but there are a few problems with the idea.

People who use a lot of GitHub's additional services like automated build pipelines already pay them for that. People who don't use a subset, mostly hosting. If they try to charge for hosting, they're going to end up with a much bigger, more confusing, and more dangerous to their brand version of GitLab's hosting crisis. I think that, if they tried that, it would end the same way, and I think GitHub knows that and doesn't want to drive people away, so they won't try.

And, if they did, since there's no tie between GitHub and the funding, they could easily migrate to some other hosting. It would be very easy for some EU company to come along and offer extremely cheap Git hosting for any project being removed from GitHub since there's already money for it. I don't think you'd even need that, since a fund that size would likely only be funding a smallish subset of projects, and they could probably be hosted quite easily with donated resources from places like university mirrors. The idea has so many holes and functional alternatives that I don't think it would be attempted.

Both of your examples have a lot of software involved. Apple does charge more for their hardware than the hardware costs, but at least some of that is because some buyers want to run Mac OS and are paying for that. Mac OS is not free. How much does that explain the price difference, and how much therefore is just from the brand? I don't know, neither do you, and likely Apple would have some trouble answering that. Nvidia not only has a lot of compatibility that other GPU manufacturers don't, but they also tend to make faster, if incredibly power-hungry GPUs. People who want fast and compatible are buying a real advantage, not the bragging rights that an Nvidia card is powering this box of theirs. At least mostly, as I could see some gamers having a brand loyalty problem to a GPU manufacturer, but if LLM companies could make more models with someone else's chips, they would.

Re: Borkzilla begging for money

Read the article again. They are recommending that people pay, not for GitHub, but individual open source projects, and not just those who host on GitHub.

Re: Proprietary?

The hypocrisy pointed out in the article is valid, but no, you don't understand it correctly. The correct version is:

An American owned company running proprietary software, is advocating that the EU give them <u>the authors of open source software, not them</u> lots of money as part of the EU's sovereign technology push to reduce their dependance on American technology.

GitHub does not stand to benefit if the EU goes along with this. The projects funded are likely to be at least partially run by people in the EU. But the article is right to say that Microsoft could easily pay the amounts they recommend. Admittedly, so could the EU, as it's about €0.78 per EU resident per year. In both cases, it would not be hard to spend that much and have a use for more money, so neither funding approach is very likely to end there.

One of the limiting factors that prevents them from charging more is that they have competitors who aren't. If I make laptops and decide to increase my prices by 5%, but you make laptops and don't do that, I expect some people to stop buying mine and start buying yours, so I don't put in that increase. If someone puts on a tax of 5%, then everyone has to pay it. At that point, I know you'll increase your prices too, so it's safe for me to do it. It is possible that someone chooses to take less profit in the hope of winning more customers from the rest of us, but I still expect so many people to raise their prices that it feels possible. Also, one of the risks of raising prices is angry customers who see me as greedy, but if the tax is going into effect, I have the perfect excuse by saying that I won't be getting any of the money and it's a legal requirement, which, if true, tends to be pretty good at making angry customers go away and be angry at someone else.

Intel abandons chip plants in Germany and Poland, confirms more layoffs

My best guess is that they're focusing on how to get people who previously wouldn't buy anything other than Nvidia because of CUDA to buy an Intel part instead by developing some more software. They could try that either by building a rigorous compatibility layer with CUDA like AMD's been periodically trying and trying not to have to, by building something better than CUDA (good luck to them), or something like that. Of course, that's just me trying to turn a dangerous combination of management speak and speaking to the nontechnical* into actual words, so it's likely I've completely missed their point and guessed wrong.

* Management speak is bad on its own, but when you add in talking to investors who do not understand why people buy chips but will overreact if the words say anything about competitors doing well, almost all remaining meaning is lost.

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

True, but in Liam's defense, that's one of multiple options. You could use any web-based word processor. So if you don't like Google, you can use Microsoft's or Apple's, or if you can convince people, Collabora Online. A Google account becomes optional. My problem with Liam's suggestion is that I don't see why that's any better than a normal Linux where, in addition to any or all of those, the user also has multiple offline word processors where they can save their files to their own hard drive without having to pay for a subscription service, either with cash or with their data. So far, the only reasons I can understand are either mistaken (the users will break everything so need something locked so tight that they can't) or come with tradeoffs (automatic backup of user files would be useful, but the privacy or financial consequences are ignored as if they don't matter).

Re: You're missing the one thing ChromeOS had that all other distros lack

"If installation can be made as simple as download setup.exe and run it, job done."

That doesn't support the concept in the article, which made no mention whatsoever of ease of installation but did spend time advocating for Chrome OS features (I.E. lock down everything) as the solution to this problem. If installation were as easy as you describe, you could install anything using that method.

And it never will be that simple to install an OS. You have to make choices like:

Do you keep Windows and try to set up a working dual boot, or just destroy it?

Do you copy all the user files to the user's new home directory? What if you don't have enough disk space to manage that?

Do you try to set up emulation for software they have installed? Do you try to find alternatives. Admittedly, the article's proposed feature set makes that simple: you can't run any of those, whether native versions or under emulation.

And you have technical challenges as well, because a program running on Windows will have some annoying workarounds needed when entirely erasing Windows and still having the tools to easily write something else without starting any new sessions. It's possible, as anyone who has ever let "rm -rf /" run to completion can attest, but it increases the workload for writing the installer which booting to the installer and just writing it like a normal program doesn't have.

The who is clear. They're referring to Steve Graham, and they are defending Linux against the last part of that comment. Specifically, the part where difficulty installing Alpine on a Raspberry Pi is used to explain problems others would have with Linux when they're completely unrelated. They were right to make that defense.

Of course Alpine is harder to configure than the general Linux distro. It's specifically built to exclude almost everything, and you put back what parts you need. That requires you to know what parts you need and what parts those parts need. A lot of distros don't make you do that, and Steve was not using Alpine because Raspberry Pi OS didn't work, but simply because he wanted something smaller. The average user would not install Alpine, and their choice of Ubuntu or something built on it would include most of the things they'd need from the first installation, with a relatively convenient way of installing more. Not everything, certainly, and for some users there would be some problems getting some functions they couldn''t do without, but a lot of users would not need to tinker with anything to get that experience.

I don't think that's the difference you claim it is. You probably could have obtained a similar effect by installing most stable desktop Linux distros on a former Windows machine and, if necessary which it probably wouldn't be, showing her where the browser icon is. If your sister's laptop had a hardware failure, I can understand why you didn't, but that does not prove whether it would have worked or not.

Neither of which is a big deal, because most of the users we're trying to convert didn't have those before and dealt with it just fine. Windows can sync everything through the cloud, if you set it up. Most people didn't. Storing some documents in OneDrive because various Microsoft applications default there is not the same thing. Nor did they have single sign-on. They had account-specific passwords and maybe stored them in a browser's password manager. These are not the most important features. Incidentally, they're also not what you spent most of your article on. You mentioned those features along with plenty of other ones that either don't matter to those users (update stability is great and would be welcome, but people don't find themselves needing it very often) or harmful (fixing the "how do we convince users that Linux can do as much as Windows" problem by making sure that it can't but telling them that's a good thing).

Re: You missed the point

I know what Chrome OS is. This isn't about Chrome OS, but whether an open source thing that's very similar is a helpful idea. I don't think it is because it misunderstands almost everything about what people need and what the problems have been with adoption of existing Linux distributions. It fixes none of the real problems and it introduces several more, so I think the idea is a bad one and not worth investing in unless some people choose to do it on their own anyway.

Re: I'm getting old... computer says ....

Clear Linux and Clear OS are completely different things. I see why you confused them, but you got it wrong.

Re: I'd love to know what the market demographics would be?

This is not about IT departments. This is about the home user. IT departments can answer this question because they can state all the options with cost numbers next to them. Figuring out the cost of switching all user desktops to Linux may be tricky, but it's calculable with some effort.

This is for home users, where they don't have someone who can give them the Linux options with a full list of changes they have to make, tradeoffs that apply, and costs of the alternatives. The home user has to figure it out themselves and they don't know all that information. The suggestion in the article is intended to fix that anyway, but it doesn't actually fix it because, instead of trying to help with those issues, it tries to pretend they don't exist and remove the problems instead of solving them. The users' problems tend to be things like "How do I manage my music library which is one of the things I happen to want to do with my computer", and the article's version answers questions they have often never faced like "what if an operating system update breaks the filesystem" (they usually don't).

"If you're in a corporate environment that could be your own service."

If you're in a corporate environment most of this is easier. Choosing a Linux distro is easier because you don't have to ask for opinions. Upgrading Windows versions is easier because there's a budget for replacing older machines. None of this is about a corporate environment, whether or not they choose to use the thing after it's developed. This is for the home user. The home user who needs an operating system that's locked down to only give them a browser tends not to be the one running the services for that OS to connect to. Hence the question of where you would run that and how you would deal with the administrative problems, both financial and regulatory, that would be involved.

In practice, the way that will be handled is that it won't. Some of that will be built in as local software, a client for some server software might get added, and then the devs will leave, assuming that someone else will run that server somewhere and figure out how to do it. Not because the devs can't, but that smart ones realize that this is going to be expensive to run and support and take away time from improving the software.

Re: We need a new OS, but we do not need a dumb terminal.

Their comment did talk about that suggestion. Paid backup is the logical answer, but they were considering people who don't think about the problem until after they needed it. In that case, a paid system often doesn't work because people don't pay for it until after they think about it. A system that does not require payment because it destroys the user's privacy results with them still having some of their data, whereas a paid solution that they don't use means they still lose it.

I see this as the user's problem. I'll make sure backup software is available, I'll give them options to back up to local hardware or to an external location, neither of which will be free, and if they choose not to and lose some data, that's an expected result of their actions. The problem the previous poster was talking about arises when you want to have a good result even when the user hasn't done what they need to, and my version does not solve that problem. If you want to solve it, that's where the straightforward "ask them for money" plan develops holes.

Liam wasn't asking for a new OS for the Chromebook. He was asking for an OS that would turn laptops previously running Windows into something like a Chromebook, with every limitation that Chromebooks usually have, minus the limitation of having to sign into a Google account, plus the limitation of not being able to run Android apps, and in practice probably with a couple more limitations than even Chromebooks have when trying to run Linux software locally.

Re: You missed the point

I agree that scorn isn't helping, but I think what they're getting from this suggestion is unfounded condescension. From the features you've added to your suggested solution, you'd think that the problem with existing Linux is one or all of these:

1. The users are too stupid to understand multiple icons.

2. The users will break anything, which is why it needs to be locked down.

3. It should be expected to break every five minutes, which is why we need several layers of autorecovery.

In reality, none of those problems are significant problems to Linux adoption. You can put a lot of users in front of Ubuntu or Mint with no modifications and they can figure out, surprisingly enough, how to click on the Firefox icon. I have done this several times and identifying how to launch the browser was always the users' first steps, even on that one occasion where I forgot to tell them that they were getting a Linux machine and they just got a surprise when booting it. While anyone who tries can break a Linux installation, it's not likely to do so on its own, and you do tend to have to work at it.

This also ignores why Chrome OS is as common as it is, and it has nothing to do with its features. It is successful because there's hardware you can buy running it. It's successful because that hardware is cheap. People have often purchased Chromebooks unaware of the software they'd end up with, and most unaware of the security death dates built into the thing. People who are willing to install your Chrome OS imitator will be fine with many of the choices we have now*, but your problem is all those who won't install it, either because they don't know it's an option, don't want to risk a change from what they have now, or have a problem with the wipe and replace process.

* There are distros that are just unstable. Those must be removed from consideration. There are ones that don't have graphical tools for the basics. Those also must be removed. There are a lot of things remaining, desktop-oriented GUI-default operating systems with a browser preinstalled, which will be fine for this purpose. The reason why the task is more difficult for the rest of us is that we're also trying to find a distro where the average user can, equally easily, use all sorts of other applications locally. It is harder to find a distro that makes it simple to run a piece of Windows software through Wine without needing to know much than to find one where the user can get to a browser.

Tesla bets on bot smoke screen as political and market realities bite

The most convincing benefit of humanoid robots I can think of is that it might be easier to train them to do a task that a human was already doing without redesigning the process. For anything done at scale, that would be inefficient, because a machine specifically built for the task connected to a process specifically designed for that machine would be able to get the most out of both. However, for smaller things where that would cost too much in designing and manufacturing those custom machines, something that can be mass-manufactured and has the physical capabilities of a human might be a way to reduce the cost to automate. Similar to how an embedded device with a board that only contains the components you use is the most efficient if you're going to build thousands of them, but that if you need six, sticking in a Raspberry Pi can be cheaper because those already exist and don't need any board design, manufacture, or firmware writing.

The problem with the idea is that humanoid robots would need to be adopted in so many places to bring their manufacture price down to a level where they'd compete with just having a human there to do it. I doubt Tesla's going to manage that. Without some adoption, the prices can't come down, and without prices coming down, the cheapness argument isn't available.

The tiny tech tribe who could change the world tomorrow but won't

Re: "There are ten people in the world who could decide tomorrow"

There aren't. Even if there's a single person at each of those companies, which there isn't, their choosing to try to standardize this wouldn't make any difference. Not even for their own hardware. Samsung's chief of UI commands that colors will always appear in the same place. The phone, television, appliance, watch, website, web app, individual phone app, Windows laptop driver setting program, etc teams all have to get that memo and implement this change, but not all of them even have the same places. Phones and televisions at least both have a device settings page, and I'm going to guess that any setting they offer about colors is already in there under display, but many of the other things don't have one, so it can't be put there. Just trying to standardize Samsung's UI settings would take lots of people.

But that's not what the author wants. The author wants to be able to set that globally, up to and including inter-device automatic sync, effective on all software and websites. That's far more than ten people. Let's consider what the worst group is for the user described who can't see blue on white well. The worst system isn't the one that allows you to make that change but you have to set it manually. That's annoying of course, but at least you can set it to something better after some effort. The worst ones are the ones that don't have any options for color schemes except whatever their UI person set it to, and that's a lot of things. A standardized place to put the controls and syncing the data structure everywhere, while being mildly tricky and almost impossible respectively, would do nothing to fix that. So even if those ten people existed and could perfectly coordinate and impose the plan on the hundreds or thousands of people it would take to implement it everywhere, the biggest problem would still be there.

IRL Com recruits teens for real-life stabbings, shootings, FBI warns

Re: Shirley

And you see everything as a forest, even if it's a single tree in a field. The people committing this crime may have lots of reasons to do it, but some of them are not poor, not revolutionaries, they think it's fun. Swatting was and probably still is popular among videogaming communities by people, often very young ones, who did not realize what would be the result of their actions. It was basically just a higher-end violent prank because the people carrying it out didn't consider how possible it is to end in murder, and that worked a lot of the time because, although some of these events do end in deaths, a lot of them just have everyone in the house and probably most of the neighbors absolutely terrified, property damage, but no deaths or injuries. People who think of this as a prank are not doing it out of desperation for the job they don't think they'll be able to get, and many of them are at the stage in life where they're not thinking much about their future plans.

Re: Shirley

You really ought to do something about your monomania. Just as the article about North Korean scam workers wasn't about the level of payment for the average worker, nor is the choice from some people who, by the article's description, probably aren't of working age yet to commit violence about the level of payment for the average worker. There are problems in life that aren't about wage rates, and even when a connection can be made, there are reasons to consider both of those rather than jumping straight for your favorite. The result of taking this sharp turn on every article is that any points you have that are actually convincing get drowned out by the "what is that guy's deal" thought that goes through my head every time you divert, and how not just I found your argument so unrelated that you came off as a supporter of North Korea last time, even though I still think that's not what you were trying to say.

Only the low-level people, the ones stupid enough to go commit the violence themselves, need to have their names and addresses stored in a database. They likely provided that information so the people with money could mail them things, whether that's payments or supplies. As long as the high-level people don't broadcast that database, the rest of the people won't be easily identified. Just because one person has terrible opsec doesn't mean everyone does, and in this situation, the person who logically should have the best opsec is probably the person with the database you want to see leaked, so it's not that surprising that it hasn't been. As crime that starts online goes, this kind of operation is one of the most dangerous to the people carrying it out, so we're not dealing with the smartest people except, possibly, for the anonymous ones directing it from afar and not getting themselves in danger when they want someone hurt.

UK to ban ransomware payments by public sector organizations

Re: About time too!

That could happen, but shareholders facing the prospect of their shares becoming a lot less valuable by sustained loss of activity tend to forget why they put that rule in, even if you managed to get them to instate it in the first place which isn't easy. Some companies can try it, but I think most won't and those who will will often cancel it when it gets important, so I still favor a legal ban on paying ransoms.

That's sort of possible, but it's not as useful as just passing a law making ransoms illegal. Unknown groups or groups someone forgot to put on a list wouldn't be a problem if you're clear that the entire activity is prohibited. Penalties for doing it anyway could be written into the law, rather than relying on discussion of who got what support given the likely but unknown large cut by the unlisted people who broke into the company in the first place, since a lot of ransomware operations use this model. It's also pretty much as difficult to do that as to put ransomware groups on those lists and charge people who pay ransoms, so since one is not much easier than another, the clear one is probably better.

I think it is a bad thing, both pragmatically and idealistically, to pay a ransom. However, the idea that it could be faster is correct at least some of the time which convinces people to pay. When it works, which is by no means guaranteed, the decryption software can be run to somewhat quickly bring computers up. You still need to do a lot of work from there, but you're doing it while the rest of the machines are working. The cost of interruption can be high, so that can seem appealing to someone who is either ignorant of or trying not to think about the high chance that it doesn't go as well as they picture. That's why people pay. If they knew how often that key doesn't work or the infection comes back for another payment, maybe they wouldn't.

Also, those who choose this option tend to be doing their jobs badly, which can be catastrophic in a situation like this. For example, when the computers are functional because the ransomed decryption was run, it can be very hard to convince management that you need to gradually take them down for a complete reimage anyway, but if you don't do it, then at the very least, the same vulnerability exists for someone to exploit and quite likely the original ransomware is still there. Several businesses have gotten a series of infections, either from the same source or from multiple ones, until they did the proper thing and rebuilt securely.

Re: About time too!

It's a lot harder to prove that you won't pay if no law requires it. Let's say I'm the CEO of a company and I make a preemptive public statement to that effect, ignoring the various problems of doing so. It's not hard for a ransomware operator to conclude that I'll change my mind when looking at the likely loss of the company I run. Even if I don't, the damage might get the board or shareholders to remove me and put in someone who doesn't mind paying so much. Either way, it's a lot easier for them to believe that I'm bluffing than if they know I'll face consequences for paying them and will be considering that.

And now for our annual ‘Tape is still not dead’ update

Re: The whole point of backups...

"You can abandon Microsoft products or abandon offline backups, but not both, and the former is for most companies impossible."

And, if you do choose between those and opt for abandoning Microsoft, you made the worse of the choices, because plenty of ransomware targets Linux servers because that's where lots of companies store the valuable data. Only taking out the Windows desktops is annoying and they'll lose some things, but if you can take out that central infrastructure which is often Linux-based, that's the valuable option. Offline, or at least immutable, backups makes recovery much easier, although it's still worth putting more time into prevention.

Google AI Overviews are killing the web, Pew study shows (again)

Re: "Killing the web"

Google makes money from showing advertisements to people and getting them to click on them. There are adverts on the search page. Those are still there with the AI answer. Clicking on an actual result does not automatically earn Google any extra money, and if that site has no Google ads, it doesn't. The search is the product they offer in order to get the ad revenue and data which they use to target ads, or at least tell advertisers that they can.

I feel similarly. Whenever it tells me that the next block is AI-generated, I automatically go into search for end of this without reading it mode. Mostly, this works, although I have one tool which has a section marked as AI-generated which I think is actually just a template with things pasted in and I do need to read it, so I have to deactivate my instinct there.

Re: "Killing the web"

How does this hurt Google? They still get searches and collect the ad revenue on that. When the AI result is wrong, the user searches again and gets another set of ads. The people who are hurt are sites who earn money from visitors, whether they use advertisements to do it or anything else.

Quantum code breaking? You'd get further with an 8-bit computer, an abacus, and a dog

Re: Encryption is good, but it isn't the answer.

"Real data theft has historically not been accomplished by unlocking encrypted data, but by exploiting horribly designed software and poorly managed systems."

Because and only because decrypting data is hard. I don't know whether quantum computing will make this trivial soon or ever, but let's assume it happened and review what would happen in that situation. Now, getting access to your traffic is easy if you use WiFi. Not my WiFi, any WiFi near which I can put an antenna. Or if you use mobile internet, or satellites, or a cable I can monitor. Those aren't major problems now because there are multiple layers of encryption on it, and even if I can crack your WiFi password from next door, I still need to break the HTTPS encryption before I can grab credentials. Not so if encryption is defeated.

And it's not just copying data. Now that I know the keys, I can also impersonate things and intercept your communications. That's just thinking of me with the stuff I have near me. For someone with more power, like an ISP or government, this is dramatically different. They have the ability to collect a lot more encrypted data and ways to abuse it. They often don't because it's expensive. If it were made cheap or free, we'd get many more chances to see how badly it goes.

Currently, encryption is like a strong lock. It often makes more sense to try to go around it because people have often not considered that it's not too hard to break a hole in a wall or lift a ceiling and climb over, so they might not have blocked you from doing that. Only when those have proven difficult do you start trying to get through the lock directly. If all secure locks were quickly degraded to those weak ones that get used on internal house doors, there's no need to test the ceiling when a paper clip can get you through that in five seconds.

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

Re: Just do the right thing!

"What interests me is how many downvote the freedom of speech and to hold their own ideas."

Usually, because a lot of people who talk about freedom of speech attach it to something people disagree with. If I write a comment saying that you are a brutal serial killer who likes to torture your victims for a few days first and that I would like the freedom of speech to say so, which part of that are you going to vote on? Especially if you know I'm making it up, so the reference to freedom of speech isn't even making a political point?

That's not at all unusual. I've downvoted people who called for legal protections on privacy. Is that because I oppose privacy? Far from it; I've made some long speeches in fervent support of it in the past. It's because they attached it to other things, like their right to privacy meaning that they should be allowed to have security vulnerabilities in the code they sell and I should not be allowed to tell anyone because that would identify them. In my opinion, those people are not interested in privacy. They are interested in pretending that what they want is a normal legal right.

If I think your idea is stupid, then I will defend your right to not be arrested for saying it and that's where my support ends. That means that if a website decides to not let you say it there, sorry, but that's how websites work. And if the problem is votes or criticism, then it doesn't apply in the slightest, whether or not you add an argument about freedom of speech to the end of the idea, because I'll still be focused on the idea. If I think the speech is actually a crime, like when fraudsters have tried to make the case that they have the freedom to say anything, including lies about the thing they're selling, then I don't even give them that. If you disagree with any of that, we can always debate it, but I'm guessing your downvotes aren't because of ideological differences about freedom of speech but the views you are supporting alongside those arguments.

Why not? The name is just the numeral, not spelled out. I prefer no titles, but I suppose whether you honor that could be separate from whether you honor the name change in the first place. Internationalization is encouraged such that, no matter what language you use when talking about me, you'll always have to clarify that this is a person, not a number. How far could this go before you would decline to use the preferred changed name?

1

Open source's superior security is a matter of eyeballs: Be kind to the brains behind them

Re: egregious issues

Remember, that if people with ill intent did find it, they wouldn't have told you. So you cannot prove whether or not anyone with ill intent knew of the vulnerability and they may have. What we know so far is that, as far as we know, no one has publicly indicated that this vulnerability was responsible for unauthorized access to their systems, but because people didn't know it existed, that wouldn't be easy to know either.

Selling your digital soul to use Bluesky's DMs isn't just a bad idea, it's the law*

Re: GDPR compliance nightmare

That's easy. There are two answers.

The correct one: Of course it's not GDPR-compliant.

The one that will actually get used: The data must be collected for verification purposes. It must be stored for later investigations. These are done to comply with legislation. So it's all legal, and the ICO will helpfully ignore everything else.

And your other question also has an unfortunate answer.

"How does one assure that children don't access these, or verify that the person who has proven their age is the person actually using an account?"

By putting in additional identification and tracking requirements. Facial recognition with presence detection on every login has been suggested before. Not that that will likely work, but it will collect plenty more data.

Re: Moden Slavery

No, they were saying that the "left" and "right" groups are too simplistic and lead to an incorrect dichotomy which always ends up getting simplified to "me, therefore good" and "them, therefore bad". There are too many types of opinions to fit into a one-dimensional political spectrum.

I do agree that there are many people who make a big deal about free speech who then try to silence people much more strongly than anyone tried to silence them. And, in my experience, the people who do that tend to have certain political views they espouse more than others. However, that is far from unique to them, and hypocrisy is a problem no matter what political views have been held by the hypocrites concerned. If I intend to accuse someone of being a hypocrite, and I do, I will focus on their own contradictions or those of someone they vocally support rather than trying to group them with someone else I think they'd agree with so I can accuse them by proxy. The latter approach is likely not to convince anyone who considers that, perhaps they don't belong in that group and your accusation is therefore faulty.

Clear Linux OS terminated as Intel trims the fat

Unfortunately, given their current situation, that's one of the few options left. Some companies manage to survive the chopping lots of pieces off, although the record isn't great, but most companies who end up in a similar situation and try not chopping tend to just sag into bankruptcy.

In the case of Clear Linux, was it delivering a distinct benefit to the business, by either making money itself or driving demand for something else Intel makes? It doesn't sound like it was. That focus on profit is kind of a necessity in Intel's situation, but even if we think of it from the perspective of a company with tons of resources, was Clear Linux delivering a lot of benefit to the wider community? Some of the features in it sound possibly useful, but I don't remember people running it very often, nor did I see many distros including those components, and I only remembered that it existed when I read this article. That isn't a good record for something to continue getting sponsorship, especially when there's a chance they'll fail due to financial problems without that on the budget.

China proves that open models are more effective than all the GPUs in the world

Re: Stop the Lies

Reasoning is not determinism. Just because you got two different answers from the same starting point does not demonstrate that reason wasn't involved. It wasn't, but that's not enough to prove it. In a human, reason is one of the primary reasons why answers change. The first time you ask a question, the person thinks about the question before stating your answer, and the second time, they've already been primed to think about it and know the structure of their answer, meaning they can dedicate more time to filling out other parts of it, changing their mind about an incorrect part, deciding where to find other information to add to their answer, etc. Giving the same answer would suggest that they are not using reason: they remembered the answer from last time and repeated it to you. If they can do that with validity, chances are they didn't need reason in the first place, for example it's the correct thing to do with a mathematical calculation, but you're usually not using reason to solve one*.

And, since we both agree that these models aren't using reasoning, finding an alternative word or deciding to make do with "reasoning" is an important question for us to answer. There is a case for accepting the use of the term, since we use a lot of anthropomorphic phrases when referring to software. A program does not "read" data from a disk in any way like we read text, but it is much more logical to say that than to say "copies the disjoint sectors containing the data into memory, then copy individual elements through cache to registers for operations". But if we do that, we might help convince people who are annoyingly common who think this is real intelligence, so if we want to focus on fixing that, then we should find a new word. The distinguishing factor between "reasoning" models and others is that the former have prompts which get the model to guess subprompts which will be more likely to answer the original prompt correctly, then execute those, then assemble the results to respond to the first prompt. So we could try something like "multistage" to distinguish it from the type of model that simply starts guessing for a while when the prompt is sent through. I don't think that's clear enough to convey enough meaning, so it probably won't be adopted.

* Very frequently, you do use reason to turn a problem involving the real world into a mathematical problem, but once you are at the point where it's a matter of numbers and operations, then there's no more reason involved. Just solve for the missing part. That's why calculators are useful.

Re: Stop the Lies

What does that mean? If you mean that an LLM with vision capability can't recognize a lemon, you're simply wrong. I happen to have a lemon near me, and I used a model to describe the image, and the summary sentence before it went into unnecessary detail was "The picture shows a lemon on a wooden table". But there are almost certainly fruits I could put on a table which couldn't be recognized, but what does that prove? It doesn't prove anything about intelligence. It proves that there weren't many pictures of whatever fruit that was in the training data, there's not enough distinctive elements in the visual appearance of the fruit concerned, or the model is using incorrect elements to guess at what the picture depicts. Recognizing an element using an algorithm has nothing to do with intelligence.

If you mean that the model can recognize a lemon when shown one, but it has no concept of the nature of a lemon, then you're correct but you can't prove it and, depending on what we mean by "concept", it might have one after all. The models do not understand anything. They do not have an experience of what a lemon tastes like, what it feels like, what the experience of having a lemon is. And yet, it can tell you any of those things as if it does. An LLM can describe the taste of a lemon: "The taste of a lemon is sour, acidic, and slightly sweet, with a citrusy flavor that is both refreshing and

invigorating." or the feel of a lemon: "The texture of a lemon is typically firm and tart, with a rough, smooth, or slightly fuzzy outer layer (depending on the variety) and a juicy, pulpy interior. The flesh of a ripe lemon is tender and easy to bite into, while the peel can be a bit stubborn to bite through.". The model can suggest recipes to make with the lemon forever. It will act as though it does understand what a lemon is, and because of the commonality of the fruit, most of that output will be logical and valid because the training data included lots of things about lemons, so it is hard to identify problems with it.

Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian

Re: Ah, Symbian

Well it can take 4k video at 120 fps, so if people actually have a reason to do that, I can see why they'd need lots of storage to hold the results. I think that just moves the why question around. The other option is people with huge photo or music libraries, and although that doesn't describe me very much, I know people who have hundreds of gigabytes of music, so presumably they would be interested. That model starts with 256 GB of storage. You have to go up two levels, with eye-watering Apple prices, to get to that level. Admittedly, the storage they're using is quite snappy NVME, but still.

‘I nearly died after flying thousands of miles to install a power cord for the NSA’

Re: Less than reassuring!

It's not that surprising. Often, things are considered a specific person's responsibility, and it is sent to them to do rather than trying to find someone who can manage it. The machine is doing the wrong thing, so complain to the machine's support contract. If you try to fix it, that's a waste of time because we have a paid support contract, so you're spending time doing something someone else can do. There's some logic in that, because if the software was wrong, it probably would either require the manufacturer to do something altogether or could be solvable by someone local but not without introducing some other risks. The best workplaces are staffed by people who understand how much you can solve before it is a good idea to call in someone else. Bad ones either stick to a policy without thinking or don't understand what's realistic and what isn't.