Posts by doublelayer

US lawmakers press Trump admin to oppose UK's order for Apple iCloud backdoor

Oh, the relevant parts of the US government can get the truth from Apple, and they likely already have. They just aren't likely to share it with anyone because various people would get angry if they did, and possibly because the kind of people who can get Apple to tell them are also the kind of people who would quite like the idea of having a backdoor themselves. They have repeatedly ignored requests for information or to follow the law coming from the same few legislators who care, and if it suits them, they can ignore this too.

T-Mobile goes live with beta of satellite phone service for the US

Re: There is no escape from the surviellence network

"Free has always meant freedom in English,": Oh, how clever of you. It has. It has also meant several other things, and you understand which of those they meant. If you don't understand, read the dictionary entry for free on a loop until you understand that there are other meanings.

"You do in fact need to pay for the mobile plan to use it - they merely "generously" claim that they won't increase the price of the mobile subscription if you send a SMS and it happens to use a satellite until July it seems (chances are they already increased the price a couple of months ago to cover the satellites rent and will increase it more in July)."

As you can see from my other comments here, I think their pricing is likely to be high for a long time. However, your allegation is false, which you can prove easily from the article. Users of other mobile providers in the United States may also use it for free, according to them, meaning that yes, it is actually free for this short period.

"Freedom enjoyers who write free software that respects the users freedom certainly won't be annoyed when I call their free software, free software, instead of insulting it by calling it "FOSS" or worse "open source"."

I think you'll find that a lot of people who write what you'll call "free software" don't have the same ideological problems you have with other terms. They may use them themselves. I, for example, write software and use the GPL or AGPL on some of it. I describe those things as open source. If you come to me and tell me how wrong this is, I will, in fact, be annoyed with you. Of course, this may not be sufficient proof of my claim because there's nothing saying you would enjoy any of my software, but I am confident that I'm not the only one in this situation.

Re: There is no escape from the surviellence network

You: The article has written; "Free text messages", "Access will be free until July"

Which, as you well know, is true, in that you don't have to pay until July when it starts being not free at all. But do go on assuming that there is only one definition of "free" and it was created in 1983. Surely, it will eventually convince someone that they were a complete idiot when they used it to talk about prices, which only came about when some anti-FOSS people wanted to torpedo the word. It will also make the people who make the software you like annoyed with you.

"I see this being useful as a fallback connection for areas with little to no reception—once this exits beta they will probably bundle it into existing plans for just that purpose."

I doubt it. For one thing, this is probably more useful as a fallback for when it would be more expensive to build a tower than to give people worse service. There are many rural locations where it isn't cost-effective to build a tower, so this may be their excuse for labeling this area as in-network when you can only use the satellite. But that becomes a competitive advantage, and that means profitability. If they can be the only network that has anything, albeit an inferior* satellite, then you can charge more. Rural cabled internet already does this significantly, where someone might be paying twice as much for ADSL than an urban resident would be paying for symmetrical gigabit. That works for a cable which collects your address in order to tell you what services are available at your house and how much they cost, but that doesn't work for a mobile provider who charges the same amount everywhere in the country. Satellite becomes the perfect tool for charging people more where that service has no alternatives while charging people less if they could easily go to someone else's service. Therefore, I predict that this will be a charged extra until other providers in the same market are offering satellite service too.

* We'll have to see what the satellite service is like. I am predicting that it won't be very convenient to use and that there will be restrictions that make it less useful than a ground station. Maybe this will be proven wrong; I didn't think they would get LEO satellite to standard phone compatibility this fast.

Re: There is no escape from the surviellence network

You could leave the phone behind, or you could disable your network. If you were running to the woods to avoid surveillance but you took a connected phone with you, you're avoiding surveillance wrong. Plenty of forests have mobile service from terrestrial towers.

Of course it's not free, it's $15 per month for an unspecified usage cap which the article doesn't mention but I'd be surprised isn't there. But since nobody said it was free, I'm not sure how beating your favored drum is relevant.

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

Re: The real question

"The hard drive is inside a PC casing": No, it's loose. Try again.

"covered with dirt so it's more or less protected from the elements": No, not dirt. It's covered in rubbish of many types, some of which is much nastier. Not that dirt is great, because dirt lets water through and water is nasty to hard drives. But I admit that it's probably no more broken now than it has been for years, given that high pressures will probably have slowed some processes that could damage it. The damage it received was probably mostly front-loaded.

"And it's obviously sealed.": There are several posts here explaining how it's not sealed. Why are they obviously wrong?

To say nothing of the other ways a hard drive can be destroyed, such as getting crushed by the weight above it or through violent contact with machinery that is not intent on preserving things.

Re: Is the needle even in the haystack?

I don't care if they do. I got rid of it. If they want it now, that's theirs as long as I have no more responsibility anymore. It is why I erase things before getting rid of them, though.

Re: The real question

I have a challenge for you. Get an old laptop hard drive. They're extremely cheap these days. Write some data to that drive. Then bury it with no protective arrangements, ideally in a place that gets rained on and next to rotting things for a year. See how recoverable that is when you dig it up. Corrosion is more powerful than you think. Of course, the options of the drive getting smashed or simply being impossible to find are there, but in the situation where you found it and the platter hadn't shattered, you would still have a device that is not in good condition to be read.

Re: There's a simple solution to all this.

Buying a landfill and excavating it, even in the cheapest, most destructive way, is going to cost more than that. Recovering data from a corroded hard drive itself is extremely expensive, because the average data recovery specialists don't see things in the condition this drive would be. Maybe he has found some people willing to make this bet, but if that's all he's raised, he will need more.

Re: Oh Dear, Oh Dear, Oh Dear

And if he ever buys it, remember to subtract any charges for doing any excavation with zero environmental damage and making him clean it all up afterward. Make sure that money is put in an account that can only be used for that purpose before he takes possession. At that point, let him give it a try; it's not our problem if he wants to waste more of his life on an impossible dream, but we're not letting him break things while doing so.

Re: The real question

No need to reconstruct the blockchain. That is already public. All he needs is the private key that gives him access to the wallet, multiple keys if there are multiple wallets. It's almost certainly an all or nothing thing. If there's only one wallet, he only needs 256 bits. Possibly 384 bits if it's base 64 encoded or 512 if it's stored in hex, but either way, a couple sectors could be it. To find those sectors though, you'd probably need the file table too.

I'm a security expert, and I almost fell for a North Korea-style deepfake job applicant …Twice

Re: A job's a job

Because that's not what you said earlier. You've written a softer message, one that I agree with, and pretending it's what you've been saying before. You did not defend Koreans as a people because nobody was attacking Koreans as a people. I'd happily employ someone from North Korea who had escaped, because they would have to escape for it to be possible, because nothing is intrinsically good or bad about their national origin. Your defenses have been of North Korean government-organized operations by denying that they were this, or pretending that they didn't install malware, or mutating the reasons why anyone would hire them to ascribe to the employer a level of complicity that they did not have. Now, you're deflecting from this by suggesting that those who say otherwise are prejudiced against Koreans, when in fact we're prejudiced against state-run criminal groups no matter who runs them or where they were born.

I too have worked with people from lots of countries, nearly all of whom were wonderful people. Many of those were former residents of countries whose governments I do not trust at all. They were not installing malware on corporate devices. They weren't copying customer data. They were not being monitored by agents of the government of the land of their birth, at least as far as I know. The people in these articles were all of these things, and that is what we have a problem with.

Re: Asian accent!!!

I'm guessing this is why they pretend to be Polish or Serbian, assuming that people will not know what a Serbian accent sounds like and will mistake their Asian one for a Balkan one. Trying to pass it off as Chinese might be easier, but I think many small companies would not hire a Chinese remote worker at all due to more complicated Chinese labor laws and they would also probably offer a lower salary.

Re: Interesting

There are other tactics. The first interviewee, for example. The second one used GPT-style answers, but the first one knew what he was talking about or was better at cheating. Probably it was the former; some of the North Koreans they use are quite well-trained. They don't always do great work once they're hired, although sometimes they do. It would be possible to have people who know what they're doing do the interviews, then swap in others for the actual job. That is easy for an orchestrated campaign the way that North Koreans do it, but it wouldn't be hard to hire someone to fake being you for a couple interviews. Vigilance and processes that verify as much information as you can will always be necessary.

Re: A job's a job

Maybe because, on every single article where North Korean activities are brought up, martinusher can be counted on like clockwork to show up with an explanation of what is happening which ignores facts stated in the article, denies facts you can prove with a quick search, and has a benign explanation which is wrong but also wouldn't be acceptable if it was what actually happened. For example, the argument that employers were intending to hire Chinese remote workers when the article said that they were impersonating US residents or claiming that these workers are all free agents just trying to make an honest day's wage for an honest day's work.

This comment is no different. It suggests that North Korean workers are free agents again (they're not), that the stories of installing malware into companies are fiction (they're not), and follows the same inaccurate playbook. I don't know why he does this, but he does do it routinely. It goes on to blame the companies that hire these workers, so not only is it your fault if you hire a North Korean, it's your fault if someone manages to commit fraud in an interview to look better at their job than they are. In reality, those who fraudulently complete interviews using ChatGPT or someone else giving them answers are not fulfilling the needs of the market, they're lying for personal gain, or in the case of North Koreans, survival and tiny perks. People who become victims of fraudsters may be many things. They may be greedy, miserly, stupid, or they might not be any of those things (it all depends on the context), but they aren't getting what they wanted or it wouldn't be fraud.

Re: Old scams in new jackets

If the company is remote, where do you send the person? It also makes any interview very expensive when you have to fly the person from Poland or Serbia to San Francisco. Not that it wouldn't help, but there is a reason why a lot of companies, even those with offices, don't do their interviews in person. Your solution could involve sending people to the offices only for the last interview before giving them an offer, which would be slightly better.

A win at last: Big blow to AI world in training data copyright scrap

Re: "The copying of our content was not 'fair use.'"

The guy in the Lehrer song isn't exactly the hero of it, you know. This issue is not about picking the more sympathetic corporation. This issue is about finding the right rule, either currently, where we're trying to figure out what rule the current law already says, or for the future if we decide that is wrong and we want the law changed, for every situation where this crops up. This means that the giant AI corporation copying an individual's work without permission and a scrappy individual with an AI model copying a massive enterprise's work without permission should be treated the same way. That way, they both know what is required of them before they start out. In fact, I would suggest that the sizes of corporations demonstrate why we need that clarity; the kind of thing that large AI companies do routinely would be immediately and rigorously smacked down if an individual did it, and only similarly large corporations have the legal might needed to push against it. This is unfortunate, but I support the people with copyright, even if they are large, because by defending themselves they also defend smaller creators with the precedent.

Re: "The copying of our content was not 'fair use.'"

"Am I violating Reuters's copyright by doing so with their material?"

Well, if you are told you need to pay for it, but you find a way of getting a copy without paying for it, I think you'll find that courts think you are. The same reason that, if I ever get a copy of the AI models these companies make and use them, even if I don't sell them, they're going to think that I don't have a right to do it.

Re: "The copying of our content was not 'fair use.'"

Patience might be helpful here. You're demanding a response from people mere minutes after posting something. These forums don't work that quickly. You're also getting angry at what is at most two downvotes your original post received (no, not me). For all I know, it was only one by the time you complained. Get used to it, more people will express their views through votes than through replies. You may not get many votes or replies on this topic because the copyright of legal documents is not an article a lot of people are likely to click on, but if you do, they won't come through as quickly as that.

Re: "The copying of our content was not 'fair use.'"

If I want to train some AI on publicly available court decisions, I have a brilliant idea: I should do it with the public court decisions, rather than someone else's summaries of those decisions that I don't have permission for.

Yes, I do like paying people for things if I like the price. If I don't like the price, then I don't buy them. Price discovery and an open market are almost always available. If I want a certain book, then it is not hard to find the places selling the book and how much they charge to get a copy. If they all charged £200, then I will probably read a different book. Of course, there have to be some restrictions. For example, one of the only cases where anyone tries to charge £200 for a book is for textbooks, which is why I would buy used ones. I'm sure textbook authors would try to prevent people from selling used copies if they could, and I will fight against any attempt they may make to do that, but that is much less far than you constantly argue for.

Ignorance really is bliss when you’re drowning in information

Re: Puzzled........

That can be part of the problem, the extra time spent trying to take the information provided and figure out what truth is, but it is not the whole problem or even the largest part depending on where you're getting information from. For example, a thing that happens very often is that some incident occurs and broadcast news and websites start to post information about it. They are going for speed, which means the information may be faulty, but if you're using reputable sources, it is probably fine. The problem is that it's little pieces of disconnected information. To understand the situation, you need to either assemble the puzzle of data until you have the truth, remembering to immediately remove any pieces when they report that oops, that wasn't quite what happened. The other approach is the one I've often taken. I don't know if it's healthy, but when an event happens, I respond by ignoring any news for several hours so that, when I do read about it, they can provide me with a more cohesive report.

The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

In the interest of disclosure, did you receive any funding from someone who disliked USAID or stood to gain from its destruction? If you say no, should we believe you? After all, the articles and comments on a relatively niche tech-related news site are such valuable online territory, we should expect all authors and commenters to routinely receive thick brown envelopes for their writing. I'm mostly funded by the Paraguayan navy, the authors of FFmpeg, and the people who make SATA connectors. Who's bankrolling you?

Re: What kind of fearmongering article is this?

"It implies that some wide-scale microcode attacks are taking place, but there isn't any?"

It doesn't. The "biggest microcode attack" refers to the political point in the second half.

"If an attacker has ring 0 access, they are just going to use that access to achieve their goal and will not waste the extra time and effort required to write microcode updates that achieves that goal."

That is true if it is as difficult to write a microcode update as it traditionally has been. If everyone could do it, they would do it to hide better and, if they could find a way, maintain their attack even when other things are booted.

"If you want to fix the microcode security issue, the only solution is to make the microcode updates free software and then the users will collectively be able to verify if any update serves them or is proprietary malware."

That won't work, especially as the microcode changes every time a processor manufacturer changes their internal model. Microcode for one chip versus another could be quite different even though the ISA is the same. Microcode as free software might help some people who could audit what is in it or write their own, but it wouldn't be as transformative as you're describing for a similar reason that the underpinnings of Android are theoretically free software too but yet most devices cannot have anything but the manufacturer's image flashed. Of course, it's also not going to happen because it is one of the major ways that processor manufacturers improve the speed of their chips, so releasing it would hurt their competitive position so they won't do it.

You could edit the microcode to intercept the add call and choose to return an incorrect result. Adjusting the adder itself would probably be infeasible, but bypassing it might be much easier.

Microsoft quietly erases Windows 11 TPM 2.0 bypass workaround from help page

Re: TPM and Linux

Those being tied together is the entire point. You respond to the motherboard being broken by restoring your backups to the next version. Maybe you don't want that, which is why you would choose not to use it (you still have backups, though, right), but the unrecoverability if the drive and motherboard are not together is considered an advantage to those who use this method because it becomes more difficult for a misplaced or stolen drive to be cracked. As usual, this is just one option, although quite a popular one.

Re: TPM and Linux

I don't know what you think a TPM does, but it sounds like you've misinterpreted it. Many Linux systems use a TPM quite intentionally for the same reasons that Windows does. If you use LUKS volumes, one of the most common configurations is to use a TPM so that the volumes are linked to the computer in which they were created. This means that, if I get a copy of your drives and start brute forcing your key, I'll almost certainly fail because I don't have the part stored in the TPM. Of course, you can use LUKS without a TPM if you want, but it's really not unusual to use it. A TPM is a relatively dumb piece of hardware/software and like any other part of the computer, you could use it for malicious purposes. Since it can be used to run only a certain set of software at boot, you could use it to make sure the computer doesn't boot anything except Windows. However, if you're concerned that they'll do that, it's worth considering that there have been TPMs since 2003 and can you point to any time when they did this?

Re: MS doing their best to slow down the adoption of Windows 11

Do you have any idea how one would use a TPM to accomplish either goal 2 or 3? That's not what TPMs do.

To be boring, probably the reason they put in the requirement is that they turned on Bitlocker by default, Bitlocker requires some version of TPM to have drive encryption without requesting a password at startup, and they want to be able to cut 1.2 compatibility out of their code at some later point without having annoyed users yelling about how their update is breaking drive encryption. The requirement, along with the restrictive processor requirement, is generating a lot of ewaste that I disapprove of. Again, I think this is probably less malicious than lazy, because it enables them to compile for newer instruction sets whenever they want, but machines with Skylake CPUs are not out of date. Microsoft used to be much better about allowing the user to determine when their hardware was old enough to need refreshing; Windows 7 or 10 wouldn't run well on something ancient, but it would run. Unfortunately, Apple has done similar things with their shortening Mac OS lifetimes, and just like Windows 11, a simple tweak to the installer makes the modern OS install just fine, demonstrating how unnecessary the hardware requirements are.

Creators demand tech giants fess up and pay for all that AI training data

Re: False perceptions by 'creators

And this is why I am a fan of copyright. It makes it possible for art to survive, but it does that by letting people express how interested they are in various types of art. If I find something unpleasant or annoying, I don't buy it, and if everyone doesn't buy it, then the artist who made it will either change their approach or do something else. Our other options appear to be not supporting anyone, in which case only the richest artists will be able to make all the art they want, or we support artists through direct funding, in which case many artists that nobody likes will be funded just because they are artists. I oppose both of those alternatives.

Re: where this gets real sticky

Musical copyright cases are often complicated by the problems you're describing, with one creator thinking they own a simple set of chords. This is why they often lose them, though it's mostly a role of the dice to see what the jury thinks that day. However, your simplification misses several important points.

Yes, there are twelve notes in an octave. There are also many octaves (technically unlimited ones, but we can limit it to seven or so), and many instruments can and do use notes between those twelve, and there's a lot more to a sound than its frequency which is why we don't listen to all our music played on the sine wave. That makes no difference, because it's similar to saying that there are only twenty six letters in the English alphabet, so anything written is just an arrangement of those. Not every melody has been previously generated, even if they have similarities. While some people may try to claim ownership over sections that are far too short, there are people who create new works and seek to protect the whole, rather than each component. Meanwhile, people who intentionally made minor changes still had to compensate the original creator; while some people may have decided that covering someone else's song would be a quick way to fame and some of them were right, they had to pay for the right to make that cover. The same is true of sampling. It wasn't free when the people you're talking about did it.

Even if we decided that music has two few components, that doesn't extend to other forms of work. There are a lot more arrangements of words than there are of notes and more reasons to string some of them together. Depending on how into information theory you want to get, you can put visual art above or below music on the entropy scale, and even if you consider a picture to have less information content than a song, video lets you extend that quite a bit longer. Generative AI companies have been helping themselves to all of those things without permission. To me, how original these things are is not the question. If it was copyrighted (it was), and they considered it worth including (they did), then they need to obtain the rights to it. A lot of those rights will be really cheap. If it was so unoriginal that it didn't add anything, there should have been no problem excluding it from the training data. They included it for a reason, they found that their models were better with it than without it, and they can pay for that.

Re: False perceptions by 'creators

I think we all get that to some extent, but the creator of this thread appears to think that's all we should ever need to create something that's not physical. I do wonder, other than wordy defenses of piracy, what things that person creates? It would make a lot of sense if those things were physical, the one category they still think has value.

Does DOGE have what it takes to actually tackle billions in US govt IT spending?

Re: Going after federal government tech spending ...

The problem with this response is that you're acknowledging the problems but proposing, as a fix, nothing at all. The problem with a chaotic payment code system is to make an authoritative payment code database if you really need that, or a simpler set of payment codes if you don't. "Just enter the bloody payment code" is not a solution to any of that, since the problem is not knowing what the code is and the results thereof including plenty of wasted time for several different people. Most systems I've used already don't accept a report without a payment code, meaning that inaccurate codes are a much bigger problem than missing ones, but inaccurate ones are harder to quantify with a lazy database query. As for the comment box, you do realize that entering "mobile phone" in the comment box of a charge already using the payment code identifying it as a payment for a mobile phone does not actually give you any information, right? On that basis, we should just enter "payment" in every comment field. It gives you no information, but there's no empty strings in the database, so surely that's an improvement. Empty comments boxes are not sufficient evidence of a problem, because sometimes, you don't need them. They are marked as optional for a reason.

As I said before, this is not a call to just accept any expenses without documentation and pay them all. There is probably a lot of waste. Shouting about paperwork does not fix waste, whereas performing boring, manual analysis does. The fact that paperwork has errors is also not sufficient evidence that waste exists or where it is. This is even more true when we leave the discussion of waste and enter the one about deliberate embezzlement, because while embezzlers may have many flaws, they are smart enough to figure out what payment codes they can use to steal the money by understanding what differences apply to the different budgets and which ones are easier to steal from. People conducting financial fraud tend to produce much better paperwork than people who are cluelessly trying to do their job and submit their reports with as little wasted time as possible.

Re: Going after federal government tech spending ...

Partially, it's because we've probably all had the experience of the way this type of paperwork ends up working out. When submitting expenses, you must enter the payment code. The correct payment code for your payment is 1924[general services]/2001[travel]/2014[routine business travel]/0103[motorized travel]/2005[per distance billing fuel and vehicle maintenance]. Finding that code will take twenty minutes of searching through internal wiki articles and that file that's on someone's SharePoint/Google Drive and doesn't look authoritative, but you're going to use it because you've tried for a long time to find something better and you've failed. By the way, when you travel for a slightly different reason tomorrow, that 2014 needs to change for what looks like a similar transaction. It's not that it's not a good idea to track this information, but that most of the time spent doing it is not adding any useful information but is costing a lot more in paperwork. Not just filling out that form either, but sending someone to investigate it when someone should have selected general business travel but accidentally selected travel to customer site because they traveled to a customer site but the code is more specific than that.

In this case, the insistence on filling out the comment field demonstrates how little they understand this. Sometimes, you need the comment field to explain why something was purchased. Sometimes, you don't. If you're paying the monthly bill for a mobile phone you need for access to something, and you've already filed it as such, then there is nothing more to put in a comment box and its blankness is not a symptom of any problem.

To find fraud, you have to work a little harder than complaining about forms. To improve record keeping, you have to work harder on having procedures that can be realistically followed. But by all means complain about comment fields and payment codes; it makes it look like you know what you're talking about and doesn't require the slow and boring bits that could actually solve a problem.

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

Re: Fair comment by Linus

They can't block it, which is why this code might be merged after all. However, they can get angry about the existence of that code and complain, which is what they are doing. Perhaps their complaints about that code will be sufficient that it won't be merged. As a project with relatively loose governance other than that Linus mostly can decide things if he wants to, there's not a lot of official blocking or not blocking. Since Linus has not made it clear what he thinks about this code, only disagreeing with one of the people arguing who is neither the person who wrote the code nor the one who originally stated that he will do any thing he can to stop it, we still don't know what will happen.

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

Re: Security?

The fears appear to be that the NPU or software that uses it will be designed to do things that violate the user's privacy, for example the Recall software which collects a lot of sensitive information without asking and then stores it in such a way that it becomes a juicy target to anyone with local access. They may also fear that Microsoft will start copying that to their own servers, which the software does not currently do.

Attaching those fears to an NPU is not really useful. All the unnecessary data collection in Recall is done on the CPU. The NPU just performs parallel calculations. If you mistrust Microsoft's intentions with an NPU, then you should have no more trust in their software on an environment without one. It is possible that an NPU may have a vulnerability in it, but to some extent, it is less likely than a CPU is because an NPU's interfaces are quite simple and restrictive in comparison.

I am not particularly concerned about privacy with an NPU, but I also don't have any software that would benefit by using one. Like many coprocessors that were once optional extras and are now considered required components, it's possible that a lot of software figures out a way to speed something up by using an NPU and they become standard for that reason. The Copilot mark for computers appears to be an attempt to do this the other way round, namely to convince people to buy an NPU in the hope that something will eventually do something useful with it. Admittedly, the more people buy one, the more programmers will try to optimize for it, but I don't care about the speed of adoption if it turns out to be as useful as predicted.

Abandoned AWS S3 buckets can be reused in supply-chain attacks that would make SolarWinds look 'insignificant'

Re: Someone else's computer

"If I get your abandoned domain and use the wayback machine to figure out which admin account registered your AWS account, I can own your AWS account unless you manually changed all of your admin/billing information in AWS."

I think you'll need to clarify that a bit. The email address used for the AWS account is not necessarily going to be found anywhere in the Wayback Machine. I probably didn't post that to the website. Even if you do get it, that isn't enough to gain access to the account. You can set up an email address and try to reset passwords, but if they had any other security on the account, that will not be enough.

"On another note, if someone abandoned bigthinkr.com, and I buy it, why should I be prevented from using an S3 bucket in AWS?"

Maybe you shouldn't. That is what we're discussing. Those who have argued that you should argue that buckets don't have to be memorable, so they could make them unique so that they can only exist once, in one account. I generally take the view that people should be careful about what they do because, even if AWS did that, lots of other systems wouldn't do that and the same problem would apply.

Re: Someone else's computer

This comment is another example of how you're not understanding what the problem is or how it works, since buying an abandoned domain was an alternative to, not a component of, this problem. If you leave your domain but keep your AWS account, then I cannot get access to any of your AWS resources by getting your domain.

Re: Someone else's computer

This is no different to things people can and do on their own infrastructure. S3 bucket names are DNS names and they can be reregistered when abandoned. This makes a case for Amazon deciding that it should only be possible to register a name once and once it is deleted, it's burned forever, but we don't attack the original domain name system for allowing that. As usual, it's the responsibility for the people using those names to keep track of them.

In fact, cloud services makes it easier to do that than traditional ones. If I have a domain name that I've registered and I don't want someone to be able to squat on it, I have to keep paying for it every year. This is one reason why I have a bias to not having very many second-level domains*. If I have a S3 bucket that I don't want people to squat on, I can keep it around for free. I am charged for files stored in it and for bandwidth it uses, but if I delete all the files but keep the bucket around, the name stays registered and I retain control. It is better, however, for me to check such things rather than trust that whatever file comes back from an HTTP request is good enough.

* I generally suggest that a company with the domain company.com refers to other services they run using subdomains (product.company.com) rather than creating another second-level domain (companyproduct.com). It has three benefits. Users can more quickly identify that the domain is related to the company since only they can create a subdomain (unless they've been hacked, which is a possibility), it is easier for the company to keep track of domains they control and make sure they are either in operation or shut down, and for smaller projects, it can cut down on money spent on registrars.

Trump admin seeks to reclassify federal CIOs, opening door to political appointees

Re: The word you are looking for USA is...

Dynasties don't necessarily have to be to children. A dictatorship can work when the dictator hand-selects their replacement. Hitler did that. Franco did it too, but his replacement didn't do what Franco expected. Mussolini and Pinochet didn't get a chance to decide who would come after them because their dictatorships ended before they did, or nearly simultaneously for Mussolini. We might not label that a dynasty, but it can have similar effects.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Re: This is the scariest part of all this, IMO

I thought the same thing when I read that sentence, and to some extent I still think so. However, thinking more about the message, it's an announcement that he plans to sabotage someone else's work, not because it has a technical flaw, but because he doesn't like it. If I was a maintainer and someone submitted a patch for a piece of hardware, and I tried to prevent it being merged because I don't use that hardware and I don't want to worry if my future changes might break it, it would not be productive. Linux works as a project because developers agree to work in such a way that they don't break other parts, considering compatibility with parts they haven't written. The Rust developers aren't telling the maintainers that they must also write their contributions in Rust, but they are asking for the same compatibility that developers of other components are expected to provide.

Code of conduct seems like the wrong way to categorize this, but that doesn't mean that it is a completely justifiable approach to development.

Amazon's Kuiper secures license to take on Starlink in the UK

Rural US internet prices are extreme, so satellite systems can turn theirs up as far as possible. Urban US generally has reasonable cabled service at much lower prices, so people aren't interested in the service anyway. European Starlink has more competition, and the capital cost to provide a cable to most uncabled locations is lower because the distances are shorter, so they have to have lower prices in order to get any customers.

The same pattern is visible when comparing other countries' prices. Canada and Australia get high prices as well, and the UK is not much better with a residential monthly price of £75, but France, Italy, and Spain get 40 euros, presumably because those countries have more competitive and complete terrestrial networks.

FuriPhone FLX1: A Debian-powered brick that puts GNOME in your back pocket

That's the user's problem. Linux is not supposed or designed to protect everyone from anything negative but to allow them the choice. If you choose to run an app that sells your data, then that's your choice, the same way that Linux doesn't block you from visiting Facebook if you enter that URL. However, there are many apps on Android that don't have versions for mobile Linux yet, so having compatibility with it introduces features that some people want. If you don't, you don't have to install them, but many buyers will be happier having that option than they would be without it.

Ontario responds to Trump tariff by pitching Starlink deal into the trash

Re: beverages

No, just alcoholic ones. Ontario has a near monopoly on alcohol sales, especially to restaurants, so it can make that happen. Individuals can still purchase US-produced alcohol from independent stores, but restaurants generally aren't allowed to do that and then distribute it. It does not apply to soft drinks or any other US product.

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

Re: My local hospital rebooted me!

Although some electric toothbrushes might be complex enough that turning them off and on again is both possible and helpful, it's likely that most of them are still relatively dumb and aren't going to break like that. That might mean that power cycling them isn't really possible because you'd have to physically disconnect and reconnect the battery which is sealed in, and that the problem you're experiencing wouldn't be fixed by doing so anyway. In that case, it wasn't that the reboot failed, but that the thing was just broken. It's frequent to try a power cycle when anything goes wrong, but sometimes, the problem isn't going to be solved by doing that.

Dell ends hybrid work policy, demands return-to-office despite remote work pledge

Perhaps it was unclear from the two comments I wrote saying so, but I wasn't describing the rigid scheduling as positive. However, if you're going to argue against it, you have to understand why it happens. It happens for the reason that people disagreed with my comment: expecting to be able to call someone and talk right now interrupts those people during their work. Many people I know pushed back against that, and I think they pushed back too far to the extent that, if a discussion is going to take long enough that it doesn't happen over chat, they want it scheduled with a calendar invitation. This is especially true when it's more than two people meeting. However, your approach can also annoy people who are concentrating on something and are expected to stop working on their thing to help you at a time of your choosing, which isn't likely to help either.

I also agree with you about video. I don't turn it on and have never found that to be a problem. However, there are some people who want to have video on and will ask you to if you don't, and even if it's just a voice call, there are reasons why people might seek out a separate space in an office to have the call. Maybe they find it distracting if there's a lot of background noise during their call. Maybe they plan on discussing things they don't want anyone to easily overhear (so it looks like the ransomware was worse than we thought / the programmer [who sits next to me] had a bug in their code which broke us for two weeks and refused to fix it / can you confirm that they are going to cancel that project). An office without walls can still be unhelpful for calls even if the cameras stay off.

This is a reason why I prefer offices with walls. It introduces a barrier to someone interrupting you for ten seconds, but if a quick meeting is useful, then it's not hard to have one. Another thing a lot of modern offices have not bothered with, eliminating or at least significantly reducing their utility. Of course, depending on what you're doing, the frequency of when that is useful varies. Even limited to my experience as a programmer, some tasks involve a lot more coordination among a team of programmers and others can be done without much collaboration at all. Jobs other than programmer probably have a lot more differences that I'm mostly unaware of.

This is where someone trying to optimize productivity would compare the options and determine what worked the best, possibly with some experiments. If close collaboration was useful, then they could put those people together or just encourage people to set up calls quickly and flexibly rather than sticking to the stricter schedules I'm used to. If people didn't need that, then they could use different structures. Instead, they seem to select something and just mandate it based on no reasons at all, because if they had any reasoning, they could probably get somewhere by being explicit about what their reason was.

Re: Well, it's Dell.

This isn't about email versus chat like Slack or Teams. Either of those can be used for a long thread with lots of participants who misinterpret things or have communication difficulties. In most cases, I prefer email because it makes it a little easier to organize things if you have good subject lines and you can manually organize threads. I certainly do when there are twenty of them that may all get updated. Nothing prevents a Slack thread from going similarly off the rails. It isn't necessarily any faster than email because people can wait to write their message until they have information they need or just some spare time.

The tool is not the factor here. The factor is knowing when a synchronous meeting would be more efficient and doing it, ideally just as long as necessary to resolve this issue and then stopping. In an earlier comment, I've stated my anecdotal experience that there can be an advantage to an environment where meeting synchronously is easy so people do it more often, but that most return to office schemes do not create that environment. From what I understand of Dell's plan, they are unlikely to get that advantage but are likely to harm and annoy their employees.

Yes, a video call can replace an in-person discussion most of the time. However, in my experience, it isn't as easy to have an impromptu video call. Many people, sometimes including me, tend to schedule those on the calendar meaning hours of delay and avoid having calls unless it is obvious that we need one. Therefore, in my experience, there is an advantage to quick communication when people are nearby one another and meet anyway. Depending on the company though, going to the office might not do any of those things. If the team is not in the same place, then being in the office just means that scheduling a video also involves finding a space to be in while you do it or dealing with office noise. Some teams might not need to do this as often either, making the office an expensive way to get that marginal improvement, both in straightforward financial costs of having the building and in other costs like people being more tired after commuting.

Trump’s tariffs, cuts may well put tech in a chokehold, say analysts

Re: US achilles heel is intellectual property

Wishful thinking will not help you. Canada will not do most of those things.

For example, nationalizing or eliminating US intellectual property. Any country can do that, but no country tends to do it successfully. If they did, the US could do the same to any Canadian IP. Companies that intend to operate in both countries, or in any other country, would be cautious about using any of that because of the inevitable legal collisions. It is really not as easy as you think to do that.

But then you step up to deliberately releasing nuclear waste. Canada is not going to do that because Canada is not evil. If they did, that would likely start a full-scale war. It might be better if they just started with war. It violates several treaties, and that would cost Canada most of its allies.

Canada has a lot of economic and diplomatic approaches available to it and we will see them used. While they will not be as instantaneously successful as your ideas, they will also not start a war where both sides will suffer significantly more than any trade war would do.

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

Re: There Is Signal......And Then There Is Noise!

"The only problem with this solution is that it is built on an incredible scaffold of technology which is only one prop removal from coming tumbling down."

How would those things come tumbling down? The software that runs the virtual machine can be open source. The software you're running in the virtual machine isn't, but thousands of copies are available, specifically from people intending to archive them. The open source document conversion tools have many copies on there, and they may even be in the GitHub Arctic archive. Let's say that I am a supervillain and I want to deliberately prevent you from opening a 1990 Microsoft Word file that you didn't bother to save as something else. How would I be able to do that, when all those tools are available for you?

But let's consider age. Maybe we can run Windows 3.1 in a virtual machine now, but maybe in 2050, we won't be able to. I'm not sure why because our ability to emulate old systems has increased rather than decreased with time. Enthusiasts have written lots of emulators and archived plenty of software. In the case of Windows, it's emulating a standard X86 processor and the software to do so has already been written. The processor architecture still exists, meaning that anyone wanting to emulate it, whether to run Windows 3.1 or something else, will maintain it. This isn't true of every piece of software. Something niche which only a few people ever used, has a proprietary format that nobody reverse-engineered, and an activation mechanism which has not been circumvented, could indeed produce a file that is prohibitively difficult to preserve in a usable form. This is why I recommend that people consider the formats used by software if they need the files they create to be available long-term and export them to something standard. Microsoft Word is a bad example of this.

Intel sinks $19B into the red, kills Falcon Shores GPUs, delays Clearwater Forest Xeons

Re: "You saw that you're approaching the end of the line

"What would happen to Intel sales if people didn't feel they had to run Windows on Intel processors?"

A lot, but how would we get from where we are to there? AMD64, including both Intel and AMD parts, is in use because it is fast and cheap. Most other ISAs don't achieve similar levels, with ARM as the primary other example. Maybe RISC-V or Loongson or something else will be similarly fast and cheap some years from now, but it isn't today, so people today buy one of those two. Even ARM is still missing some sectors of the market; they've got chips covering the low end up to laptops and they've got massive tons-of-cores chips for servers, but they don't have something for desktops or laptops requiring more performance than average. Well they kind of do, but only Apple has them and you don't get to run much on them. So AMD64 it is and will be until that sector gets filled in. That goes for Linux and BSD too.

"What would happen if someone came to Microsoft and said "We will design a processor optimised to execute Windows*, and we'll give you a chunk of the profits to do so" ?"

Microsoft would be happy. They'd say "yes please" and sign that agreement. Then they'd leave the meeting and not think about those people for several years while the processor designers spend their own money trying to make a new ISA from scratch. If, by some miracle, those people succeeded, Microsoft would recompile Windows for the thing and, since by definition it would run well if they designed the processor specifically for it, they'd have another product line to sell. They would probably need to write X64 emulation for that new ISA again, which they would do because they already saw what not having it does to an operating system (everybody hates Windows RT) and what having it does for one (Windows on ARM still going strong and gaining more acceptance).