Posts by doublelayer

In a desperate bid to stay relevant in 2020's geopolitical upheaval, N. Korea upgrades its Apple Jeus macOS malware

Re: "Believed to be operating out of North Korea"

Attribution is hard. It's. possible that someone's been framing North Korea for an unspecified length of time, and they either are responsible for everything attributed to that country or are very good at mimicking characteristics of their malware to do the framing. If so, they're really good at fooling everybody. However, we've seen what it's like when people try to blame North Korea--someone who is probably Russia but theoretically could be someone else tried to do that a couple years ago, and they didn't stay hidden for very long.

As for solid proof, there are several types. The basic type of having found assets in the malware relating in some way to North Korea applies to most of them, but could obviously be faked given some effort. This runs from the simple string frequently used there to a network address that has been operated by Pyongyang interests at some point. There is also the tactic of code comparison. If a group uses a similar module (similar in the sense of similar compiled code) that was previously reliably attributed to North Korea, then it's probably North Korea doing it again. They're the only ones with the source, so it's extremely unlikely that someone went to the effort of reverse engineering their codebase just so they'd produce similar binaries. And finally, we can have extra confidence in some of these tactics because there are some pieces of malware to which the North Korean government has admitted. Using these tactics, researchers who have spent years looking at malware from different groups can do a reasonably good job of telling when one of those groups spins up again. Nothing is guaranteed, and attribution is very tricky, but don't presume they don't know what they're talking about.

Beset by lawsuits over poor security protections, Ring rolls out 'privacy dashboard' for its creepy surveillance cams, immediately takes heat

The problem is that you can apply that logic to anything at all. If a parent installs a desktop that has a camera on it, for example an all-in-one machine, they have now recreated the same environment. A malicious actor who gained access to that machine would have the same capabilities as one who gained access to this IoT device. They can't easily keep moving that desktop around with them.

I don't think we'd believe them totally blameworthy if that computer got infected with malware to their detriment. Yet if it did, they're likely much more responsible for the problem than someone who installed this IoT device. From the sound of it, the cameras could be accessed with relative ease online by guessing a password, while getting malware onto a desktop usually requires the user to fall for a fake download or phishing email. On this basis, attempting to blame the parent for something the manufacturer could prevent seems limited at best.

I'm considering the statement "Joke icon yes, but part of me actually wonders if this would be justified in some odd way." as cancelling the sarcasm. That's a terrible idea. There are cameras, microphones, and speakers on lots of things, including laptops, phones, some desktops, and various other devices. If you include those devices that lack a camera but do have a microphone and speaker, that's almost every consumer electronic device.. And somehow, it's the users' fault when that device gets hacked? Instead of the manufacturer who could have made the device more secure? When it's already been pointed out that no matter how much the users might want to spend time and effort on a more secure configuration, they don't have the option?

Having trouble finding a job in your 40s? Study shows some bosses like job applicants... up until they see dates of birth

Re: driving down costs

That presumes several things:

1. There are ranks.

2. The managers want to move this employee up the ranks.

3. This employee wants to move up the ranks.

However, in most cases, one or more of those things won't be true. For example, I don't want to move up the ranks of most employers, because my job is software development. Some places will have a "senior developer" role, which is effectively the same as my current position but they're paid more and have a bit more independence. Others don't bother with that; there is one rank and you just get pay raises if you've done well. Many of those places also have the concept of going up the ranks, and if you do so, you stop writing code all day and start managing others who do that. I don't want to manage, and therefore I don't want to go up.

In this case, however, the problem is that the employer wouldn't want to move the employee up the ranks. Doing that wouldn't help them at all; they'd still be paid a higher amount, in fact they might deserve another raise which a discriminatory company wouldn't want to provide. In addition, a good helpdesk worker elevated to a new position wouldn't even be doing the helpdesk job they were so good at, and their superiors might now have to deal with their management, which is untested. Do you think a company that is already willing to discriminate based on age is going to take that risk, or will they try to get rid of the risk and hire a replacement at much less cost to them?

You can age discriminate either way. The article talks about discrimination against older people, which is certainly seen and quite a bit in tech specifically, but there are also examples of discrimination against young people, usually in different fields. It's often because the young are believed not to have sufficient experience or to be unreliable. Either way it's done, it's a very limited generalization. It's wrong to do, and it's usually not at all productive anyway.

Re: What jobs did they try to get?

They say what jobs they were talking about, and they never claimed that the percentage was representative of anything else, only that it was significant. All this says is that age discrimination happened in the dataset they used at a high enough level that it's worth considering doing something about it. It doesn't necessarily mean that it happens everywhere, but when you combine this research with the many other times age discrimination has come up with varying levels of proof, it seems pretty obvious that it's pervasive and needs extra looking into.

Bruce Perens quits Open Source Initiative amid row over new data-sharing crypto license: 'We've gone the wrong way with licensing'

Re: Admittedly a fan of a new license

As with the last license, after having read the one you mention, I have little objection to its content. However, I see no particular merits to this license and a few annoying aspects. The first is that this license includes many phrases that sound like this: "Nothing in this Licence is intended to deprive the Licensee of the benefits from any exception or limitation to the exclusive rights of the rights owners in the Work, of the exhaustion of those rights or of other applicable limitations thereto." It's reasonably clear what this sentence means, but it is by no means the clearest way to say that and the whole thing is written like this. Compared to the clarity and terseness in many other licenses, this is worse.

Second, I note the geographic limitation to where this license can be argued; if I produce a work licensed under this in Canada and someone in India violates that license, I can only pursue some types of actions in Canadian or Indian courts, and must pursue some types in Belgian courts. That might never be a major problem, but I see no benefit to the restriction.

Re: Am I missing something ?

I think the point of not needing a lawyer is that the people writing the code shouldn't need a lawyer to figure out what they are and aren't allowed to do with existing code. Just like you probably wouldn't hire a lawyer to read the terms of service documents, you shouldn't have to before you contribute code to an existing project.

Take this example, which I recently did. I had an open source project that was a bit fiddly to get running, but less technical users wanted to use. I wanted to package up a version of it in binary form. However, you needed to link with some libraries that were under different open source licenses. Furthermore, I wrote a small skin around the main project to make the process of starting it easier. The following questions could be asked about my final package:

1. Do I have to list the licenses for all of these libraries somewhere, along with their original source locations? If so, where do I have to put this and do I really have to include four copies of the MIT license that differ only in the copyright line at the top?

2. What license is my extra code? Am I required to put it under a specific license based on what I'm doing with it? Do I have to set up a repo for what is a very small chunk of code that isn't very important?

3. Does any part of this cross the line into "derived work", and do any of my licenses have an extra requirement for those?

Depending on the specific licenses involved, the answers to those questions might not be obvious. Fortunately for me, all the licenses I needed were permissive, so I didn't have to worry that I was violating a more specific one. I think that the original sentiment was that licenses should remain simple enough that questions of this nature can be answered without needing to spend a lot of time considering legal language or checking definitions in legal texts or case law. Admittedly, I don't know if that's a problem we have seen, but I can see the theory of why it might be.

Re: Mixing freedom and money - or obligation

I'm not disagreeing with you, but there are also reasons people choose to use less permissive licenses. Linux is GPL, for example, to keep the community benefiting from the code that was given away; the original authors aren't demanding anything from users, but if their work is extended, they ask that the results are similarly given away. I frequently find it irritating to decide exactly what license I should put on some code, and I often feel, after reading some license comparisons, a desire to simply release the thing, say "do what you want with it", and call it good. Unfortunately, that approach usually doesn't work because potential users are unsure about what is allowed without a specific license and I haven't included those indemnifications that every standard license has.

Re: Am I missing something ?

Having an external critic who can at least review licenses is a little useful for people who don't want to read the text of a long license or who might miss a thing that turns out to have a legal meaning but looks innocuous, and as such they could protect people from an intentionally hobbled license or one flawed by someone's imprecise legal language. It's unimportant to you if they approve of your license, but it could be important if they approve of someone else's license that you're using, and what they think of yours could be important to potential users or developers of your thing.

That said, since they don't provide answers to various questions because that would be too close to legal advice, their usefulness ends there. The same provisos apply to other major players in the legal side of open source, such as the FSF and the places that actively search for license violations. They have some useful purposes, but it's important to know what they're doing and the many useful things they won't do.

Re: Admittedly a fan of a new license

I don't have an objection to this license per se, but I don't see the merits you have described. It seems about as easy to read as other similarly-sized licenses, and more complex than many shorter ones. Furthermore, I note the following potential problems.

First, there is a clause allowing the original author to dual-license the thing, letting a proprietary version exist. This may sound fine in that a company is unlikely to pay someone for something they can get for free, but it might also allow them to produce an increasing number of different versions under different licenses that will prove in future to be a pain to reintegrate. Worse still, it's not exactly clear who gets the right to dual license. Theoretically, only the original author gets that right. But since this license applies to all parts of a derived work a la GPL, what happens if I update the work of someone else. I might be able to dual license my additions while keeping the original code open, or I might be in violation if I try. I'm almost certainly not allowed to dual license the whole thing, but if I'm able to dual license my additions, I could be able to effectively nullify the requirement to release them under the same license by applying two licenses and then not distributing a version under the original license.

Second, you have expressed that you like the sunset clause. That clause reads as follows: "The conditions in sections 2 through 5 no longer apply once fifteen years have elapsed from the date of My first Distribution of My Work under this License." This looks problematic to me. What does "first distribution" mean? If I release an update, does that count as a subsequent distribution of the original thing or does it start the clock over again? These questions may seem pointless, but it's this type of difficulty with licensing that can hamper innovation or rights to source. If I don't know whether or not I can do something, I'm less likely to work on a project, and companies who wish to take open source and turn it proprietary will jump on a license that has problems allowing them more leeway than was originally intended.

Snakes on a wane: Python 2 development is finally frozen in time, version 3 slithers on

It's not only Python that does this. Perl and PHP both have made breaking changes between versions, in fact quite a bit more frequently than Python did. Nobody likes breaking changes, and I'm sure the PSF would have chosen not to if they could get around it. However, by forcing the tricky unicode handling parts to be made clear, they unearthed many potential future bugs, which would have been found later on in less pleasant circumstances had they not broken that. For the same reason, if you designed a C-like language today, you could probably suggest some improvements to it that can't be implemented in C itself to preserve backward compatibility. Not everything about the update was necessarily a good thing, but I think there is sufficient merit that the language shouldn't be counted out.

Re: More lazyness than anything

I haven't really found that. For everything you could do with strings, you can do the same things with byte arrays. Just remember to open all your files as binary and prepend b to your strings (s.split(b"\n")) and you won't encounter any unicode problems. There are many very annoying things with handling unicode strings in python, but I view this as the fault of our many text encodings rather than the language itself. It's not the PSF's fault that there are at least five commonly used methods of encoding unicode characters and at least seven non-unicode encoding tables used on typical systems.

We live so fast I can't even finish this sent...

Re: Now you know what 2020 is going to look like

Even they would subdivide things. Early Victorian, mid Victorian, and late Victorian were all used when needed. The decade time unit is pretty useful because the average person will live through a small number of them, and their parents lived through two to four before they came around. If things are changing, the changes are noticeable across the decades when they wouldn't necessarily be as obvious from year to year. I couldn't say there were really obvious differences between 2014 and 2015 in many realms (except things like geopolitics where a boundary occurs whenever a crisis happens), but doing the same between the 2000s and 2010s is very easy.

IT exec sets up fake biz, uses it to bill his bosses $6m for phantom gear, gets caught by Microsoft Word metadata

Re: Greedy and careless

I think that would still be a conflict of interest, forbidden in many contracts, and intentional misconduct. If you took efforts to hide this from the company, that would be fraud. Not being a lawyer, it's possible there'd be fraud even without trying to hide it from anyone, but even if not, you'd definitely be fired and have action taken to recover as much of your pay as possible under breech of contract. That said, it'd probably be easier to hide that fraud than the kind this guy attempted.

Smart speaker maker Sonos takes heat for deliberately bricking older kit with 'Trade Up' plan

Re: "my CD player and turntable are still going after more than 30 years."

It has nothing to do with the fuel source. The kind that use fuel pumped into a tank can have connected and brickable firmware, and the kind that plug into a wall can have firmware that runs without connecting to request updates. The problem is not with EVs, and blaming them specifically distracts us from the real problem, which is cars that require connections. A car that can receive an update, including one that could brick it, is not the major problem because intentionally bricking a car would be illegal in most areas. But one that will install updates without user approval or would stop functioning as well if the updates were blocked are very bad.

El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail

Re: Deleted

Prompting the user won't work unless we also make it impossible to read messages in the folder. Most of the time when people do this, they are just going in to read something. If they can do that without restoring, they'll never see the prompt.

We might also consider changing the client so there is an archive folder and deleting a message from the inbox or sent will send it there, with deletions from the archives folder going into the trash. Reconfiguring this would of course be an option. I will admit that I'm an abuser of deleted items, in that I will delete messages from my inbox when I'm confident that my responsibilities with regard to that message are fulfilled, and then someone will come to me a couple weeks later requesting information from that message and I'll go into deleted to search for it. Now that we live in a world of very large disks, I think we could manage an archive-by-default policy.

Re: Deleted

Windows won't let you either, at least not with the normal interface. Mac OS makes it a little easier to edit the files in their hidden trash location, but you have to go to way too much effort to do so.

Huawei's P40 and P40 Pro handsets will not ship with Google Mobile Services, Richard Yu confirms

Re: It's a Global Market

Theoretically, that could be possible. But that's not currently the law; it is still legal to sell Huawei equipment and to operate that equipment that is currently possessed. The only thing that's currently illegal is for businesses to sell or buy from Huawei. For the FCC to mandate that carriers disable access to Huawei devices would take either a new law or the FCC going far outside their typical permit, as they are usually allowed to forbid equipment only if that equipment is allowing violations of radio frequency regulations, which these devices aren't. While the FCC has proven itself willing to do stupid things, this would be another step forward and it would instantaneously be challenged in court. I expect that, when the U.S.-China trade war eventually winds down, Huawei will be taken off the list and will once again be able to buy software and sell hardware in America. They might still not be able to sell parts of a communications system to U.S. carriers, but they'll be able to license Google services and sell phones to consumers.

Re: It's a Global Market

Sure, but I don't know what your 3.5 million refers to. If you're talking about the population of the U.S., that's 330 million, and they can still buy Huawei equipment if they want to; it's businesses who can't. The number of people who use Google Play is quite a bit larger, but the number of people who want to use it is unknown. Even if they were limited to just the Chinese market, it's already a really big market. I think they'll be fine.

Re: if they provide a good alternative to the Play Store

I fully expect those resources in a matter of weeks after the phones are launched. Sadly, I also expect that there will be identically worded posts with APKs with malware included*. This is a perfect opportunity for criminals, and I think they'll be taking it.

*Or, depending on your view of Google Play Services, additional malware included.

Re: Maybe not such a bad thing

I am very happy with FDroid. However, first, Huawei doesn't need to assist it; they're already doing fine and, second, it wouldn't help with the app problem. The general user wants a relatively small set of apps, including their banking and shopping apps, apps from companies they use frequently, and maybe some games. None of those companies are at all interested in making their apps open source. FDroid is great primarily because it requires all the apps on it to be open source and to submit to analyses of potentially unwanted functionality that get listed right there in the results list. That's why I always try to find an app there before anywhere else, and why nearly every popular corporate app won't dream of listing itself there.

FYI: FBI raiding NSA's global wiretap database to probe US peeps is probably illegal, unconstitutional, court says

Re: Read the 14th amendment

That's true, but as a subset it can mislead people into thinking that the law only applies to the subset. For an example, Linux machines are a subset of computers. But if I said "The Python programming language is generally supported on all Linux machines with sufficient resources", which is true, it may sound as if I'm saying that it is less likely to run on BSD, Windows, or Mac OS machines, which is not true. Your original statement was factually correct, but not phrased in a clear way. I appreciate the correction having been made.

The IoT wars are over, maybe? Amazon, Apple, Google give up on smart-home domination dreams, agree to develop common standards

Re: TCP/IP

As I read it, the protocol will not, in and of itself, require internet access. The IP connection could be to a LAN only, and the devices could then receive instructions from another device on the LAN. However, whether the manufacturers choose to let you do that is up to them. They could easily require a connection to the internet in order for the devices to pay any attention to commands and you couldn't do much about it. Still, if this gets implemented, there will probably be at least a few devices that don't require access online to be remote-controlable.

Re: they kinda missed a trick here?

Nothing stops them from doing that, but that's pretty much what they're already doing. There's no need for them to adopt a new standard if they want to keep doing that, and I'm sure many devices won't abandon single-backend policies on their products. Those companies who do adopt this, on the other hand, are probably banking on making money by selling more devices that can interoperate. They're probably also banking on customers not blocking the extra data flow that reports back to them as well, so it's not as if this new protocol fixes that problem at all. But at least it should be easier to control the devices using local machines and keep using things after they've been abandoned by their manufacturers.

Put the crypt into cryptocoin: Amid grave concerns, lawyers to literally dig into exchange exec who died owing $190m

Re: What's the point?

The problem with that plan is that, if the money was stolen by someone in connection with his death or he faked the death, all the evidence is in exactly the same place and time, namely the days around the theft and the death, whether fabricated or not. A description of a person might work if you have some idea where that person is and enough details to identify them later on. However, we do not have any good idea where he could be now, and he's had plenty of time to disguise himself. Even without having put a lot of effort into a disguise or obtaining plastic surgery, the generic description of a person as provided for most people would be of no help at all when our search area is the entire planet.

Logically, the best course of action in determining where the money is is to try to track that money. Whether it's him who has it or someone else, they can best be identified by tracking where the money is being spent.

If we know with certainty that it is, in fact, that man who stole the money and faked his death, we will still need to track any accounts that may hold information and those connected to the wallets to find him. If we know with certainty that he is dead and therefore someone else stole the money, our best chance of identifying that person is to check on his accounts for pertinent communications and monitor the accounts connected to the money. Either way, the course of action is the same.

What's the point?

This investigation can end one of two ways:

There's a body there, and it's him:

Meaning: The money was stolen by someone else, and we don't know who. Let's see if we can track any records of their activities to identify and find them.

There is someone else's body there, or they've found a way of faking a body being shipped around the world and buried:

Meaning: He almost certainly was the one to steal the money, and is somewhere else. As his identity is now believed dead, he's not using that identity anymore. Let's see if we can track any records of his activities to identify and find his new identity about which we have no details.

Either way, the answer will be to try to track the person who has access to the stolen funds. It doesn't really matter if we know that it is or isn't him, because whoever it is is going to be hiding somewhere and not announcing their true identity. Until the person is found, nobody can get their money back and no charges can be pressed.

Re: Having identified where the money went ...?

I would have assumed that he converted the money or some of it into a nontraceable cryptocurrency (zcash, for example) or something physical so he could live well without making any other withdrawals for a while. But given that it took these people several months to figure out that any money was missing, it's also possible that he has been withdrawing regularly and they haven't figured it out yet.

Wham, bam, thank you scram button: Now we have to go all MacGyver on the server room

Re: Helping out...

But you probably give that number to people or enter it on forms from time to time. If not, you might not need that number. My mental phone book is sadly pathetic. I can give you the phone number of friends I had in 2007 when I placed calls by manually dialing on a land line, but people I've met since then, including those I call or send messages to frequently, are only known by my contacts database. I have that backed up, but maybe I should try memorizing the numbers.

Lobes carry the load, says IDC: 'Hearables' sector accounts for half of all tech clobber sold

Earworn wearables

Come on. A smartwatch is more than a regular watch. It's a watch that does more stuff and dies really fast. It's distinct. The things being called earworn wearables or hearables now, on the other hand, are just earphones. You put them in your ears, connect them to something else, and they make sound based on what the thing you connected them does. It doesn't run apps or let you program it or have any function without a connected device. No special name needed.

I wonder what people would think of a real wearable based around an earphone. I have a feeling the lack of a screen would make it rather unpopular. The only thing that comes to mind is a set of earphones that have a voice assistant built into them rather than requiring a separate phone to do that. While it's not a thing I or probably anyone here would want, it sounds like a thing Amazon might experiment with for a while.

Google Chrome will check for leaked credentials every time you sign in anywhere

Re: what happens when Google's master key gets compromised?

The approach they claim to use wouldn't work most of the time. While it works fine if the passwords were originally in plain text, it doesn't work if the hashes were salted at all or used a hashing algorithm other than the one Google's decided upon. Chrome wouldn't know the salt or algorithm to use, meaning the sent data wouldn't be matchable to whatever is in the database. Google has a lot of employees intelligent enough to understand this. Logically, they considered it. My guess is that they made the system work and now are being a little evasive in explaining exactly how it works.

Re: Is this *another* attempt to smother me in Gmail shit ?

I wholeheartedly agree. However, I don't know of a reliable external email system that hasn't recently gained the desire to have your mobile number for verification (verification, I say. Not advertising or data selling. Stop questioning us, you puny end-user). My main email is through my own mailserver, but I need an external email which runs the accounts for the domain name and mailserver, so if there's a good one out there that isn't likely to start demanding extra details, I'd like to identify it.

How much cheese does one person need to grate? Mac Pro pricing unveiled

Re: Use

That may be, but the original question was whether they have any point. They may not be the best machine out for video editing, but it's conceivable that someone could use it for that. In addition, a lot of video editors are attached to Apple equipment and software. I'm not saying they need to be, but if they are, this could be the machine they're looking for. It's certainly overkill for anything I do, but that's because I can offload tasks that need a lot of CPU or GPU power, as I rarely need to have so much power right at my fingertips.

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Re: But on the other hand...

I'd agree with you if they had tried to hide what their item was made of, but nobody did that. The ingredients are always in the name, usually as the first word. The reason words like burger and milk are used is that they describe what the food item will be like. Almond milk is designed to be similar to dairy milk but be made of almonds. There is absolutely no ambiguity that almonds are involved and that, therefore, this is not dairy milk.

Meanwhile, using this term better indicates to a perspective customer what type of product they're dealing with. It'd be like if you prevented anybody other than Apple from using the word "book" in the name of a laptop, anyone but HP using the word laptop, or anyone but IBM using the word computer. Everyone could still sell laptops, but you wouldn't necessarily know whether a device was actually a laptop because that useful descriptive term wasn't allowed.

Re: AKA Libertarians

I really don't care what I'm called. My title is software engineer because that's what my employer decided to call us, though I doubt they had any reason for choosing that over something else. I'm a programmer. I'm also a developer. The word engineer is hard to define. At one point, it only meant people who dealt a lot with engines, in which case nearly no modern engineers would count. However, in its current usage, an engineer is someone who designs and builds something from a relatively low level. I think I qualify under that unofficial definition.

Re: Rename the terms?

I don't think it's "electrical" they have a problem with. I think that, based on their current stance, my title of "software engineer" would also be covered. It's patently ridiculous, but for some reason they're interested enough to fight the issue.

Re: AKA Libertarians

Since you aren't mentioning the topics in the article, only attempting to attack the case based on the source of a lawyer, I can only assume your comment "regulations that you or I might consider sensible safety precautions, but which they feel unnecessarily constrain corporate entities like "engineers" is meant to apply to this case.

In which case, you'll need to do a better job. These safety precautions... what are they? Having passed a test and paid for a license saying you're competent to engage in civil engineering? I'm fully in favor when the person you're making do that is a civil engineer. But there's a big difference between "civil engineer" and "electrical engineer". For that matter, my job title at the moment is "software engineer". Should I have to pass that test and pay for that license as well?

And while we're talking, your attack of this case based on a group who litigates other cases is not a very good argument. I'm sure that, if I reviewed all their cases, I could easily find one I disagreed with strongly. That doesn't make them automatically wrong here. For the same reasons, someone who has always argued cases to my liking isn't guaranteed to keep doing so. When you deal with a legal group of the scale of this one, you are bound to have cases you agree with and ones you disagree with. Having not looked into their previous cases, let's presume that I agree with you and disagree with the majority of their cases. That still doesn't make them wrong here. If you wish to prove this case has no merit or is actively wrong, you'll need to start talking about the case.

It may be out of sync with the US govt, but Huawei is rolling out its Harmony OS to more devices in 2020

Re: Makes sense.

It's probably helpful from a continuity perspective as well. Rather than design new platforms based on Linux or Android every time they start making a new smart television, they can stick with this and reuse some code. That is if they remember they've got that code, which has not been a hallmark of other IoT manufacturers.

That said, I wonder how much code can profitably be shared between a smartwatch and a television. While the kernel could be copied, the smartwatch has the problems of limited processing and very limited battery life, while the television is connected directly to the mains and has an excuse for a much more powerful processor. That doesn't mean they can't use exactly the same kernel for both, but one designed for a television might put heavy pressure on a watch's battery and one designed to preserve the resources of a watch might not be as snappy as users of a television would like.

Two can play that game: China orders ban on US computers and software

Re: The year of the Linux desktop

You might want to read the page you linked. According to that page, Red Flag Linux has been out of support for five years, and, while developed in China in the 2000s, has no link to the Chinese government. Quite unlike Kylin, which is currently supported in its native forms as well as a Ubuntu derivative and, while not officially a government-run project, is written and maintained by a university connected to the military.

Re: The year of the Linux desktop

You're thinking of Red Star, which is North Korea's official OS. China has a few things, most notably a Linux-based distro called Kylin, but people there are also free to use anything else, including traditional Linux and BSD distributions translated into Chinese. They don't need a government-written OS just to avoid an American-controlled one.

Re: Say it ain't so!

The man's name is Xi, not Li. And that's just the first thing you've gotten wrong. He's not somehow managing to represent the entire party, with everyone's views forming a part of policy. He's just the one in control of a large enterprise, similar to the way you describe American politics. Meanwhile, he is a dictator who does not need to concern himself with the views of the people. Most parts of the CCP are expected to (and do) support any decision he and his closest subordinates make, without raising issues of their own. If you still think that the party chooses their leader from some miraculous hive mind, read about how Xi got in power and what happened to those other candidates who were under consideration (hint, it wasn't so much fun for them).

I'll grant you that the American people are more likely to give credit or blame to the person at the top, while in China credit goes to the party and blame is best left unacknowledged. That doesn't mean either approach is good. With the former, a leader can get the credit for things they had nothing to do with, leading to support they haven't really earned. The latter, however, is a symptom of the destruction of many fundamental rights and is far worse.

Re: China already has one...

"They [China] use it [Kylin] in maybe 50% of all computers"

No, they don't. According to market share figures source, Windows is by far the most popular desktop OS in China, with Kylin specifically not even appearing on the charts and Linux in general being at a low level, just like in many other countries. While Kylin is available and stable, it's premature to conclude that it has great popularity in China. With this restriction presumably also applying to using Windows as an OS, that might change soon. However, this restriction only applies to Chinese government, so we'll see whether that extends to the populace at large at some point.

Apple sues iPhone CPU design ace after he quits to run data-center chip upstart Nuvia

That would be nice. I wonder, however, if they're talking about other, more enforceable contracts. Two that come to mind are proprietary information protection contracts, if he is using any of the plans he developed while there, and a general employment contract, if they can argue he used company property or spent time at work acting against the interests of the company. The latter might sound like a noncompete, but it's a little different in that it only applies to what you do while ostensibly performing your job. I don't know if they're trying to argue on one of those bases because I haven't bothered reading the linked documents and the article described the situation but didn't go into detail on the arguments. Even if they do, they may have trouble enforcing that, especially if their data capture was from non-corporate devices (and if that's the case, let them fail badly).

Apple tipped to go full wireless by 2021, and you're all still grumbling about a headphone jack

If you're getting frequent disconnects, my guess is that either you are near a source of bad interference, such as a power line, or one or both the devices have an old bluetooth chip that doesn't support newer versions of the spec. The improvement in bluetooth over the past decade has been surprising and admirable. Not that it's perfect now, but for many use cases, it is pretty good. Only your use case will decide whether you can, or would want to, use only wireless audio devices.

FTC kicks feet through ash pile that once was Cambridge Analytica with belated verdict

Re: Yet another demonstration of the importance of Active Defense.

Why do you find that less than convincing? It would have gone like this:

Prosecutor: In conclusion, this is the evidence against the defendant, and it clearly proves their guilt.

Judge: Defendant, you may now contest any of the points raised against you to disprove them, place them in context, or explain to the jury [replace with judge if not a jury trial] why the evidence does not prove you guilty.

Defendant: Doesn't bother explaining anything because they didn't show up.

Jury: Looks at evidence proving guilt, decides "guilty".

They had a chance to appear and disprove the evidence. They chose not to take it. Unless the prosecution's evidence was completely lacking, and it wasn't, it's little surprise the decision went the way it did.

Consequences?

So, logically this would mean the people committing these crimes would be indicted with some fraud charges and a few other things, and an extradition request would be on the way? No? Oh. So some of this is on the U.K. government then? So the U.K. would be arresting them and charging them in local court? Not quite? So it's a civil penalty? The people will be sued and, if found guilty, they'll have to pay some fines? Not that either, really? Well they'd at least be prevented from running another company or at least required to submit extra oversight documentation that is required to be checked frequently? Wrong again, am I?

Advertisers want exemption from web privacy rules that, you know, enforce privacy

It's not our responsibility to fix the business model of places. If we think they are violating our rights, we can take them to task for it. If we think they are doing something that we don't want to be legal, we can change the law to make it illegal. It does not matter if their refusal to do something we're willing to accept causes problems for them.

There are plenty of ways to make money online without resorting to data harvesting with dubious levels of user consent. The simplest though not the most effective is to put up a page asking for money. You can step this up by making that page nonoptional if you want to use the site. Or you can run ads that are about the content being shown or from advertisers willing to send out their message without knowing everything there is to know about the readers. Or there is that coin-mining code, although that may be detected as malware. Or trying to get your readers to buy something else once they're attracted enough to you. All of these have been tried, and all work.

Nokia 2.3: HMD flings out €109 budget 'droid with a 2-day battery

While USB type C is newer and gaining in popularity, I've seen plenty of things sold in 2019 which still use the micro USB connection. Orientation has never been particularly important to me, and I have a wonderfully large collection of micro USB cables, so it's not very important to me which of those two ports they choose to use. In fact, if I was pressed to make a choice, I might have to go with micro USB only because there are a few different types of USB type C cables that can't easily be told apart from a look at the connectors.

Apple: Mysterious iPhone 11 location pings were because of 'ultra-wideband compliance'

I had assumed that anyone living so close to a border would have worries about the financial problems with jumping from one country's provider to another, and would have disabled their roaming or at least customized it not to roam to the nearby provider. Therefore, the provider actually giving service to their device would be the one from their country and that information could be used to determine what restrictions there are on UWB usage. Perhaps that was an overeager assumption, but I'm still not sure how much precision Apple needs for determining available UWB settings.

Re: In other news

Every large company will be sued by lots of people. Some with real concerns for which the company should (but probably won't) pay through the nose. Some with concerns that are valid but rather minor. Some with concerns that were valid but everybody's forgotten about them and they no longer exist. And some from people who want money, have identified a possible source, and are willing to try anything they can think of to get some because their time must be really cheap. I think you'll find that with many companies, and unless a specific case looks very damning or the company can't handle it, don't expect that to affect the stock price very much.