Posts by doublelayer

The company's biggest security hole lived in the breakroom

Re: I dont doubt the story...

Usually, because a dev building the thing wanted a shell to see some logs or manipulate things to test that something worked, so they enabled an SSH server, and of course that's only for this prototype in pieces on the bench. Then someone, possibly the same dev but it could be someone else, took the dev's image and deployed it in production. You also have the occasional person who is much dumber and thinks that Linux doesn't get hacked, and if the customer ever breaks this then we'll need a way to go in and fix it and they deliberately put it in, but in my experience, leaving that in by accident is the much more common reason.

Re: I dont doubt the story...

Option 1: The machines are connected to a manufacturer's network and that has been breached, allowing the attacker to hop from there to networks of users of that machine.

Option 2: Malware on another computer found this machine and the attackers established persistence on it so, even after their initial vector went offline, that machine could still be used.

Option 3: The machine uses UPNP or some other method to obtain a public address or port, and the secure network wasn't very secure, which wouldn't be much of a surprise since someone's putting coffee machines on it.

There are plenty of plausible possibilities other than an internal threat and more plausible ones than that someone managed to guess an IPV6 address to find the SSH connection which is hard to do with the size of IPV6 address blocks.

Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

I can only speculate, but a lot of this looks like people expecting that somebody is going to pass a law mandating a single project, likely involving a bunch of users and funding going to that project, so they're trying to position themselves to be the recipient. If that involves getting rid of people outside the area so you can claim that you're the most European, then why not; politicians probably don't understand the harms that causes, and some of them think that's a positive because surely, not having any developers outside the countries in the plan means there's more sovereignty...somehow.

AI server farms heat up the neighborhood for miles around, paper finds

Correct. I was trying to explain what this argument about heat islands was about. Of course, those who think all people studying climate have colluded or are deluded probably have explanations for always-rural stations too, but I am not one of them so I'll let the next one try to make them. Sadly, so many stations with the longest history of reliable measurements are now near something kind of urban so many studies of climate can't just ignore them without losing detail that provides a lot more information.

The problem is that, when people compare temperatures from the past and the present from the same location, there are various reasons for the collected temperatures to have changed. If you had a temperature measurement station in some farmland in 1920 and kept it there all the way through to today, but today that is a suburb rather than a field surrounded by forest, then it would have increased for local reasons rather than for climatic ones. This is known, and data from these stations is decreased by an amount calculated based on factors believed to correlate closely with those local changes. Of course, with any adjustment of data like this, it has lots of room for people to argue it was done wrong, either because they think it actually was done wrong or because they don't like the conclusions and want to throw doubt on the research.

We know what day it is but these Raspberry Pi price hikes are no joke

Re: 3Gb ram ?

It doesn't sound like the interactive exhibits are products that need to be frequently reconstructed. In that case, the only requirement is a computer of some kind capable of running the software, and there's no need to match a certain model. When building a bespoke system that there's only going to be one of, then there's little need to produce a rigid set of required hardware and advantages in not doing so like being able to replace or upgrade components when they break rather than requiring exactly the same thing.

There are plenty of valid reasons to use a Raspberry Pi. Continually narrowing things down to a requirement that says "it must be a Raspberry Pi, therefore your alternative is unacceptable" doesn't respond to comparisons considering the many cases where that is not required at all or it isn't required yet, comparisons those opposing the Pi are making since they're not yet committed to it. If someone is looking for a thing to run a DNS filter on, pointing out that someone else has designed an entire product range around a Pi and therefore can't just replace it does nothing to prove that they too should use one or that their argument about whether it's competitive is wrong. If you're trying to argue that it is wrong, you have to consider the situation they're arguing from, and one of the axioms there is that there are multiple options that could work and they're trying to optimize among them.

Re: Love

"I don't use them for general use so I don't know why people compare them for that."

I'd have thought it was obvious: some people do use them for that, likely the people doing the comparisons. There's a reason why "general use" is called that. That can be a reason why the comparisons aren't useful to you, but it doesn't make them invalid or really argue against them. I'd note that the keyboard 500s and 400 are especially likely to be used for general use and there are plenty of people who have those.

Many of the things I do with my Pis could be done with equal ease on a laptop with nothing connected to the GPIOs at all. I use the Pis there because I don't need as much computing as a bigger computer could provide, I like the silent and low-power operation when running all the time, and I have them already. Those are reasons I chose those even though I could have gotten more computing for a similar price (though my experience with secondhand machines isn't as good as those making these comparisons). It is a valid comparison I made when choosing and I chose the Raspberry Pi after doing it.

Re: Hopes vs reality?

The long-term example with computers is the same thing that most prices did in the initial stage of technological development because of extreme competition and fast improvement. Using the price trends from the 1990s isn't a good basis for predicting things today. I assume that RAM prices will eventually go back to normal and that Raspberry Pi will bring theirs down to match, and it helps that there are mostly only those two steps required since there are fewer parts in a Pi than there are in other computers. That's not a guarantee of either, and it's certainly not a guarantee that others will follow suit.

For example, I don't expect Apple to decrease their prices even though they claimed RAM prices is what made them increase them. Apple has been raising the price of the base-level iPhone for some time, and I expect they'll keep doing so until they think they're losing market share from doing it which might be why they decided to do a cheap Mac this year. Perhaps they could have, and if you compared the last three decades of Apple machines' prices then they did at various points there, but neither convinces me that they will again soon.

Re: 3Gb ram ?

Why would they know or care? I'm not sure what the interactive exhibit is, but I'm imagining a thing in a museum. So as long as the computer it's running on fits into the space for it, what does it matter whether the computer's new or old? The professional approach is making sure it's not going to fail, not buying new for the sake of saying so. If you bought a damaged system whose SSD is going to fail any minute, that's a problem, but in the exact same way that it's a problem if you build a Pi-based solution which is going to destroy the cheap SD card you put in it. Use components you don't expect to fail and either can be as professional.

Raspberry Pi leans into semiconductors as sales climb – especially in US and China

Re: Not too worried here.

Not quite. The available subsets I can buy are:

A phone: computing power is great, power consumption is great, software is somewhere between bad (unrestricted Android) and very bad (Android if I can't unlock the bootloader).

Raspberry Pi (also includes everyone else's SBCs): Computing power is pretty good, software is great, power consumption is bad.

Microcontroller-based devices: Power consumption is great, computing power is very limited, software support is adequate (E.G. it took Raspberry Pi years to get Bluetooth working on the RP2040, whereas on a normal Pi, I can use plenty of Bluetooth stacks if I need that).

I have things I'd like to do where a phone-sized device with phone-style battery life would be useful, but the only devices I can get that meet both of those are phones whose software is nothing like the convenience or quality of that of the Raspberry Pi. So far, I don't have a solution to this want, but if someone did build it, I'd like to buy it.

Re: RPi netbook when?

"Of course it’s measured. How else would I know?" Estimation, which is what both your comments suggest with the "seems to be". I get about ten hours off my laptop battery, judged from when I generally have to plug it in again and assuming I've correctly estimated how long each use session was and added them correctly, but if I wanted to actually measure it, it would take recording those start and stop times precisely and likely documenting what I was running on them, the way that the reviewer did in order to precisely report a 5H 59M runtime which I rounded to 6. There's no chance they miscalculated that, whereas if I guess I used the laptop for about two hours but it was actually 83 minutes because I overestimated, my anecdotal value could be off. That's the difference.

"Of course Pi isn’t designed for portable applications, but it really isn’t relevant."

That depends what you want to do with it. It's not relevant for what Raspberry Pi intended people to do with their first SBCs and they still mostly build new ones for the same general types of uses, which is why they built it that way. So from their perspective, it is indeed not relevant. If you choose to use it off a battery, it remains relevant to you because you're trying to accomplish something else and will have a harder challenge doing so. Pointing out that the Raspberry Pi was intended for another purpose so wasn't built with that in mind is one thing. Arguing that enthusiasts can't spend much time away from wall power is weird and pointless.

Re: Not too worried here.

It is not totally correct. James accuses Pete of "just look[ing] at the flagship products and think that's the only product Raspberry Pi make", when Pete's comment makes it clear that they know what other products Raspberry Pi make. Therefore, James is incorrect about what Pete thinks the products are, whether or not we agree with Pete's other opinions (my initial thinking is no, but there's not much clarification of why Pete believes what he does so I don't even know that much).

Re: Not too worried here.

Good ideas, and I'll clarify what I'd like. You can currently power the Pi from a battery, but its power consumption is much higher in all possible states than anything of the same capacity for computation. A phone tends to have a much faster processor, on which it runs a lot more software, and connected to more active peripherals and also runs on less current. That's partially due to optimization in software, partially the use of chips intended for mobile devices rather than chips for mains-powered boxes, and a few smaller factors. That makes sense for SBCs where they intended them to be used as desktops or servers, so a cheap chip from a TV box would do that fine.

I would try to just run the software on a phone except the software limitations make it harder to do many things with one; even a rooted Android device takes a lot of hacking to get anywhere close to the openness or configurability of an SBC. I already know that a device I can program with similar power to a Pi which can fit, battery and all, in my pocket is possible, and I can envision plenty of ways to use that power and portability. Now I'd like to buy that, but am only offered subsets of that in the hardware people sell. Since I couldn't buy it, I tried to build it, but all the SBCs around which I could try were Pi-like in power consumption. That meant either a much larger battery or much more frequent runs to recharge it.

This is possibly a somewhat minority interest. I've seen a few attempts and tried a couple myself, almost all built around the Pi itself or the compute modules, and all of them alluring but nonetheless limited by the same lack of power management. You can obtain something with long battery life if it uses a microcontroller, but of course that comes with limitations on what can run in that lower level of resources. I'm sure others have different revolutionary concepts, some of which would open other opportunities if they could be achieved. It strikes me that there was almost no revolution in the hardware of a Raspberry Pi SBC - the chips were common and used all over the place and the software wasn't new - except that they actually made, sold, and supported it to great effect when others didn't bother. That's kind of what I want here in a slightly different area.

Re: RPi netbook when?

That's cool. I don't have one, so I had to use the numbers from the review, but just to check, is that 7-8 figure your guess or measurement, because the review's number was measurement so I consider it far more useful than an anecdote.

Even if it is correct, presumably from better power management in newer software, it is still not the kind of impressive low-power operation the original comment was hoping for. A normal laptop can run for longer on the same size of battery, and modern ARM laptops with processors optimized for it can significantly exceed that. The Raspberry Pi's hardware and software were not designed for battery operation and it shows. I've used and made battery-powered devices out of Raspberry Pis from the first model B to the CM4, and one thing they all have in common is that you need a lot more battery for them to work than a comparison to other computing devices would suggest.

Re: Not too worried here.

It's also amazing how many people seeking to defend the Raspberry Pi don't notice that the person you're accusing of just looking at the flagship knew and mentioned the existence of the other models in their own post: "For those who want to build simple household devices the ESP32 covers the requirements for $5 instead of $100. As does a pi zero 2 or its many clones."

That doesn't make them right. I don't entirely know what they think Raspberry Pi should do or have done to avoid the "lost impetus and direction" they're complaining about. Your response to them, though, argues they're not looking at things they did and is therefore incorrect.

Re: RPi netbook when?

I don't think you're going to like it, but it exists. It gets 6 hours of battery life under low load with a fresh battery because the Raspberry Pi is not actually a "low power mobile device". Sure, I kind of want one, but not for any valid reason.

Re: Not too worried here.

I would like people to try for a revolution if it could be achieved, and so should you because it doesn't mean the old thing ceases to exist. If they invented a new form of computer the way they can get a significant chunk of the credit for the low-cost SBC, but that new form wasn't useful to you, you could still use the SBC.

To be more specific, something I want might count as a revolution or just evolution in another direction: I'd like an SBC that can run off a battery productively. Pis have been evolving in the direction of a lot more power consumption, and even the first ones consumed lots of power. Back when people were trying to put a Pi in a laptop, it would get two hours of battery life on a battery that could run a low-end Intel processor for eight, and a laptop is far from the most constraining environment for batteries. I think portability would be a useful addition to this area, but the point is that any innovation, whether in that direction or any other, has the chance to be very useful to a lot of people and reproducing Raspberry Pi's success when they invented something quite new.

Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow

Re: Bus slots

Someone needs all of that, but so few need most of it that it's not very likely. A bigger machine with HDMI, ethernet, separate audio in and out, yes, people need that and enough of them that you can actually buy it. Parallel ports on a laptop? So rare that someone wants to buy that that nobody makes it anymore. Same with PCMCIA because nobody makes anything even slightly new that uses it so, unless you absolutely need something old which used that method, it's a completely useless slot which takes lots of space and internal components. You can hope for that all you want, but it's not surprising that you'll never get it.

Re: So, Apple Silicon

I argue that, if the internal disk is broken or inadequate, then an upgraded internal disk is, unless it has to cost a lot more for some reason, better for every case. There are some people for whom an external one is acceptable and some for whom it's not, but I don't think you can find anyone for whom it's better. The cost example does come up, for example someone who uses a cheaper spinning external drive and doesn't need all that space inside their laptop, but that's as close as you can get.

For example, let's take that person who bought a new machine because her soldered disk was too small. She needs more storage to store large scientific software packages. A network disk isn't going to be good there; pulling 6 GB of code and resources across a campus network or occasionally an ocean whenever she wants to open some research data isn't going to be enjoyable. Fine, an external SSD then. And loading that example would work for that, but not so well for another piece of software which isn't a self-contained application bundle. That one wants to put some stuff in a hard-coded path on the root volume, some things in /Applications, many things in /Library, and a few things in ~/Library. External disks don't hold any of those. I could try to set up something with symbolic links for this application, but that would be tricky, it would be fragile, and neither I nor she wants to have her run to me when something breaks one of those and important work can't be done and she doesn't know a lot about filesystems and symbolic links. That's why people benefit when disks can be upgraded.

Re: will someone explain in simple words!

So this is a "Macs don't get viruses" again? I assume that's what you're trying to say, although technically, "I have yet to see an Apple product unless with a Ransomware Message on the screen!" means the exact opposite. And in fact Mac OS is as possible to install ransomware on as any other operating system. Both LockBit (because they were big and targeted lots of things) and North Korea (because they focus on cryptocurrency researchers and operators with whom Mac OS is popular) are well-known for building Mac OS versions of their ransomware.

Re: So, Apple Silicon

We've got those. They're called external hard drives, external SSDs, or NAS. None of these are new, and they all work. There are problems with them in the cases I mention.

Let's take only the failed SSD example. I've had them fail before. One failed outright, the other started sending SMART errors at me so I replaced it out of caution. If these had been soldered in, then I'd have to use my laptop with something dangling off it for the rest of its life. If I forget that one day or the USB cable fails, the laptop is unusable until I get it back. If I drop the laptop, the external storage device is likely to be more damaged than the laptop itself would be. This isn't good. With a modern Mac, it's worse, because the internal SSD needs to function for the machine to boot. I can no longer use it with an external device if the SSD failed. If I ask Apple to replace the disk, they'll ask to replace the logic board, meaning I have to buy a whole new expensive M* processor and unified RAM even though both of those are still working. That's why, since I consider the SSD a potential failure component, I do not accept it being soldered in unless there's another place for me to install one internal to the machine.

Re: So, Apple Silicon

I can accept soldered RAM, though grudgingly so. I can't accept soldered storage. Perhaps it's just my bad luck, but I've seen two SSDs fail on my own machines and, in my role as volunteer IT for some charities, storage is by far the most failure-prone component. It's also about neck and neck with the battery for the component that users most often want to upgrade when the rest of the computer is perfectly fine. For example, I was recently helping a user pick out a replacement for a Mac which, though some would probably consider it too old, the user didn't mind using except for the 128 GB of internal storage which was unsurprisingly confining, and if I could have offered her the option to continue using that as the main machine with a much larger disk, she would have taken that.

There are two problems with this theory. Problem 1 is that that's almost entirely back to the thing that we're theoretically replacing. A replaceable CPU on a board that has the connectivity to peripherals in a box designed to contain them sounds a lot like a desktop computer with cards and a CPU on a motherboard. The connectivity might go through different types of ports, but otherwise, it's the same concept.

The second problem is that this is less common than we'd want for similar reasons why it's less common in the desktop form. Manufacturers don't often want to do it, because it reduces the sales value of new hardware. Apple could easily stop soldering their storage in, in fact they have on some models, and put the necessary firmware on a separate storage device so that you could replace it with someone else's storage, which is still a problem on those models. Unlike with the RAM, there's not a speed difference involved. They don't want to, so they don't.

But even in the Raspberry Pi world, there's a problem. The Raspberry Pi CM5 doesn't work in the same devices designed to take a CM4, and that doesn't work in something designed to take a CM3. Every time they've released a new module, it requires new carrier boards. That's not really a surprise because the new processor tends to have more and faster peripheral interfaces and require more power, but it means that the idea of replacing one CPU with a faster one without ripping out the rest of the hardware is not an option and hasn't been except for the one time when you could replace the original compute module with the CM3. The Raspberry Pi module doesn't work much for forward compatibility and is only popular because it speeds up testing for manufacturers.

Don't open that WhatsApp message, Microsoft warns

It won't work unless you've first set up one of the mobile versions, but you can use it from the desktop clients as well. It's surprisingly common for business communication internationally, and I'm guessing that's why the desktop version is used so much.

Re: Employee training tops the list ????

What "flaw of directly running programs arriving by email" are you on about? There isn't one. The sender has to trick the user into running them manually.

And options to prevent people executing them manually? Yes, the IT department can do that and have been able to for years. Not Microsoft, the local admins who have the control over what users are allowed to do. Either they haven't because users sometimes need to execute unknown things, in which case you have to train users, or they haven't but have no reason not to, in which case you have to train IT employees.

Surprise! Big Tech has been a bit rubbish at enforcing Australia’s kids social media ban

Re: Who’s your Daddy?

One thing that doesn't help with that is no information about what counts. It's all down to whether a regulator decides at a later point that whatever they did was reasonable or not. If companies are supposed to guess at how to do this and aren't given acceptable methods, then you give ones with good intentions many opportunities to mess up and ones with bad intentions lots of opportunities to hide, especially as any claim of unreasonable is subject to extra appeal in the courts if they want.

The article provides a few examples of things the regulator didn't like which are, at least in my opinion, completely reasonable. For example, when someone claims an account from a third party is of a child, I think it's reasonable that you ask the claimant to prove their qualifications to say so. The alternative is that anyone can take down any account by making an accusation without being asked to demonstrate either that what they claim is true or that they have a reason to make the request. That is far too easy to abuse. If Australia wants this locked down, they need to decide how, and they likely haven't yet because they know the truth, identifying every user of any covered account, will be unpopular.

The first thing vibe coding builds is confidence it will help you succeed

I like Python for many things I write, but for something I was going to use an LLM to do, I'd want as much compile-time checking as I could get. The reason I like Python for some things is that it saves me implementation time for many problems at the cost of removing safeguards against me doing them wrong, and since I expect the LLM to do it wrong and it can write stuff much faster, those are both disadvantages with it.

So you chose to vibe-read this article? Read the first couple paragraphs then predict using your mental model what it was going to say, thereby missing sentences like "Is it disruptive in the sense of spelling the end of developers? Not at all." and "It worked … until it didn't."? The result being about the same that vibe-coding tends to give: a comment that looks like it responds to what the article says, but in fact does not. If you want to argue the author is a halfwit, read more than half the article and then you might be able to do so. I see plenty of actual arguments in here that I partially or totally disagree with and predict you might as well. They're all after you couldn't be bothered, and they're all more important than the initial version of the Norwegian example which gets more details later on in the same direction.

Re: Be careful what you wish for

Are you aware that the lint program, after which all linters are named, was first written in and to analyze C code? Linting is distinct from compiling, whether it takes the original form of looking for problems in the program flow or the more common modern form of enforcing formatting or style, and it exists and has whatever use you ascribe to the rules you enable whether or not the language it's processing is compiled. Where a language isn't compiled and that causes problems, linters usually don't detect those things anyway.

BOFH: Are you ready to raise our expense account limits now?

Re: Tip yourself - on a Friday

They don't want incrimination except as a backup, since if this guy goes down, it would be because his actions were detected and that would mean their extra access would be reset. No, the little bribe is useful both to make sure he won't tell anyone and that, if they need anything else, he will have more of a reason to provide it so they won't have to go through the whole blackmail thing.

Senators want datacenters to come clean on power consumption

Re: slightly off-topic...

Essentially, you seem to be describing a nonprofit organization setup, possibly with even more restrictions. That could work, but at that point, why do you expect it to be much different than a government doing it? Either way, there are people employed at a fixed salary told to make this thing work. It can also still go wrong in a combination of the ways government-run and privatized systems go wrong. The leaders can't increase their pay or sell something off and pocket the proceeds, but they can still be treated to nice things from potential suppliers or find reasons that something they want is valid expenses. The only benefit I can see in this structure so far is that, if the water service is profitable, the profit remains earmarked for the water system and can't be easily taken for other purposes.

Re: Don't they have smart meters?

It's an easy number for the DC operators to measure, but the suggestion being countered was collecting some of it from the power providers instead or while waiting, which is where total consumption becomes impossible to measure and rough consumption becomes harder.

I'm not sure the number helps a lot because, if it grows for some reason, the report will come after the additional load starts increasing prices. It would make guessing where that might happen more reliable, but unless there's a plan to do something with that guess, that's not of much help. Currently, not only is the pledge voluntary and unenforced, but it also only covers theoretical use and spending which will get changed whenever profitable.

US foreign router ban criticized for being ‘industrial policy disguised as cybersecurity’

Re: Nobody believed for a second this is security...

Yes, at least in the Huawei case, they had a specific government and law they were targeting, and the hardware was in much more significant areas. It still wasn't convincing, but the surface argument was much closer to plausible. A blanket ban on all companies from all countries doesn't let you tell that surface story.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Re: Not the same, but ...

Who says they were essential? I don't see that in the original comment, just that messing with them eventually was a problem. Even if it was just getting called in to reconnect everything and waiting through a boot process by someone who needed them for something, that can be a problem if it happens a lot.

Also, I think IT has somehow gained a curse of people thinking that it's responsible for any action anyone performs near a computer. How did IT get the responsibility to make it impossible for people, no matter how stupid or malicious, to cause a problem? Most other departments aren't similarly castigated for that. Nobody asks the transportation staff how it was possible for their company car to be damaged when another car collided with it or why there weren't five backups ready to take over for it in the same area. Except in particularly secure facilities, building access isn't asked why it was possible for me to steal things in an environment where it's expected that I can take my own laptop home so taking other stuff involves picking it up.

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right

That is sometimes what happens, but vociferous and clear approval is also quite common. "That's a great question" is probably the most frequent phrase I've seen, but it can go far further than that. This is a thing that some LLM creators have been trying to do something about because, while some people like it, it drives other people to intense annoyance, myself included. OpenAI made a big point about having done something to reduce the frequency and level of effusiveness when they released GPT 5, which appeared to be true although it came with side effects, but it also caused a massive protest campaign from people who were unhappy at the loss of the sycophancy who demanded they get their old model back.

Re: I have a solution.

It sometimes does that. In that case, assuming that the person who reported it didn't make up the transcript and was honest about their reaction, the negative response didn't produce displeasure with the useless text but terror that it had magic powers and would attack him. I'm not sure if that's better.

AWS would prefer to forget March ever happened in its UAE region

Re: "No disaster recovery runbook in the world has a section titled "Regional Armed Conflict."

And did your company have a plan for how, after the nuclear conflict, they were going to provide access to the backups, identify authorized people when their identifying documents had been nuked and you couldn't call to authorize them because there was no phones, provide facilities for the skeleton staff that was doing all this because the primary staff had been killed in their homes, etc? There's far more to a disaster recovery book than "maybe people want our services because of disasters".

Many of the runbooks I've seen tend to gloss over parts like this, which in some ways makes sense because in a war, how they operate is going to depend on exactly what they have left and it's difficult to predict that. Stuff they never thought would be destroyed will have been whereas luck will have preserved several important things. That's not ideal, but things rarely are when people are intentionally trying to make them as less ideal as possible. Preparation is always useful, but a lot of people pretend they've done more than they actually have or think that writing down a plan is all they need to do.

AMD's new desktop CPU oozes cache out of all 16 cores

Re: Its about freaking time...

I suppose some people might have a low-end CPU from 2023 which also used the AM5 socket and it would be a more substantial update for them, but so would any other high-end modern chip and, depending on their system, it might need other changes to accommodate that. The most important factor is when the cores need to be parked and how much control you have over that, and I don't know either of those answers. The article basically tells me that there's a significant speed boost except some times it's a little worse than before, and without clarification of which times that is and whether I'll be in them, that makes any decision very difficult.

The P/E complexity does make it harder to select a chip, but in my experience, it comes with substantial benefits. A lot of uses either need one or two fast cores but don't benefit from more parallelism or can use as many cores as you have and therefore benefit from having as many non-HT ones as possible with 4 fast and 8 slow cores often being faster than 8 fast cores. The P/E setup works for both of those. Buying a chip based only on clock rate, core count, and price was already missing some important aspects like power levels and cache sizes, which is why people often end up buying on benchmarks which aren't perfect but at least compare more direct information about performance.

Brit lawmaker targeted by AI deepfake fails to get answers from US Big Tech

Re: A dfifferent approach

We may need it, but there's a lot more difficulty trying to specify that let alone implement it. There is far too much promise in being able to control what people say online, who says things, and where they say it. Mandatory removal is a powerful tool for silencing people, so you need strong restrictions on it because there will be people whose entire job is finding ways around that.* Big platforms tend to quite like risks that apply to everyone because it makes it harder for anything small to compete with them because they don't yet have the cash to have a big team of lawyers whose job is not to comply with the law but to delay or redirect any accusation that they haven't. Mandatory reporting of source user data already exists, but it either still means a full investigation as when police get the data that exists or mandatory collection of much more useful data so the authorities have an easier time with resulting losses in privacy.

* There are already companies whose entire job is dealing with stuff online you don't want to appear. Some of their biggest tools are using SEO to try to prevent people from finding it, but they have innovators who try things like arguing that quoting someone by showing a clip of a video is illegal because of how the video was copied off YouTube and suing them for this. Any mechanism you set up that gives them a "delete this because I don't like it" button is going to be heavily abused and no website has much motivation to resist, the same way that they don't have a motivation to investigate right now.

Re: The UK is not the USA

A member of the US's lower house isn't called a lawmaker either. They would be a "representative". Lawmaker, however, is a generic term for a person who can make laws, which does include MPs, including the one in this article whose proposed solution is for them to make a law.

UK wants to know if banning under-16s from social media does anything useful

I'm not sure that distinction is true. At that age, I could easily have found ways to stay up nearly every night. If it wasn't that book sitting there on the shelf telling me that I could find out what happened next if I just took it down again, it could be and at times was any of a number of other distractions. Those things were fun, the class I needed to do in the morning was boring and out of mind at the moment, so temptation was in the anti-sleep camp. I needed to learn how to predict that and accept that I was going to defer the fun thing so the thing I didn't care about went better because it was going to be important later, and that's a really important skill to learn.

The point though is that, if they're only looking for an absolute effect on sleep, it's obvious that there will be one but not obvious whether that's a problem. Let's say that we did the full analysis it would take to prove that social media's alerts mean most children find it more alluring than books, television, or other distractions. That's not what this study can or is trying to do, but another study could. Would that justify banning children from it? Or might we need a better reason than "more children are refraining from sleep to use this than are doing so for other reasons"? I don't think that reason is good enough for any global action, though parents stopping children from doing so either by using parental control software or taking the phone at some point would be logical. I'd need to see more substantial harm than that, and given the design of social media, it's likely that more substantial harm could be demonstrated.

There are a lot of problems. Some basic ones include the self-selection and the small sample size (300 families means likely 300 test subjects, but maybe a few more for families with multiple children in the target age range). There are bigger problems though.

One of the problems is that what they're studying is not a good reason to ban something. They're studying whether social media use has an effect on sleep. We know that answer, yes, for some people it does. But that's not a good reason to ban something since there's a lot of things that have that effect especially on adolescents. In my case, it was books. I'd read them late at night, and sometimes I'd be in a good one so I'd keep reading far too late, so I'd be tired the next day with related negative effects. That would not be a good reason to ban books even though I have a feeling I'm not the only person who did that. If it was a problem that was going to have a big effect on me, my parents could have taken away my books, but another important part of growing up is learning how to manage time, sleep, and delayed gratification because that problem specifically and many like it continue through adulthood and if I get interested in something and don't sleep, there's nobody to take it away from me now and the possible negative consequences are worse.

If a social media ban is justified, it has to be for better reasons. Those better reasons exist and may be severe enough to justify banning or restricting it depending on opinion. They won't find them if they're looking at short-term (six weeks is not a lot of weeks) outcomes in a couple basic areas where the answers are likely predetermined.

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

That was already a big part of the article, but I think Doctor Syntax has it right. In my case, I'm not too afraid of losing my job to AI, but when pushed to use it, I am afraid that I'll be expected to speed up by using it but, if it makes mistakes, I'll be blamed for them. I can't automate something without taking the risk of consequences if the AI doesn't work, but if I automate it but still check the results to prevent that, they'll be disappointed with the lack of benefits from having automated it. This is especially true of AI stuff implemented by someone else who I don't trust to have tested how well their thing works because, at least when I write it, I have seen what its deficiencies are and can make some plans around them. This probably doesn't apply to everyone since I'm coming from a very programming-based background which also allows me to customize any AI tools I develop, but I think it's likely another of the reasons why people are averse to using this untested and mostly untestable software.

Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

Re: Development != Distribution

When people choose to pull in things is both not something you can change easily and not what your point argues against. Nobody at NPM or Pypi tells everyone to grab all their packages when the application is built; both things include caching specifically intended not to have them do that and easily store a single version until told by the user to fetch updates. It fetches dependencies every time when users specifically create blank environments and tell it to, nor do those environments have to pull the latest versions, though as bad as that can be, ones that pin versions of everything can be worse. Package repositories are not to blame for that user decision.

Nor do they enable that. A while ago, the GMP project's website started having problems from GitHub users. They distributed their library through traditional download-a-tarball methods and some idiots using GitHub actions decided to pull a fresh copy fifty times during each build. That caused exactly the same problem. Fortunately, since they were all using the same platform, GMP could handle it by blocking access to GitHub, but otherwise, they'd have the same kind of distributed unmanageable load that package repositories have.

Re: Won't work

And what is that? The two options we currently have are government and charitable support. Those are options that are currently available to open source, and they both help, but this entire article is about times when they don't help enough. The question is whether we can get more of those so we don't need anything else or whether that isn't enough and we need to find something else. Your comment suggests there's something we haven't thought of. And it is?

Re: Why not take the WinRAR model?

"The GPL and almost all other "open source" licenses do not say that anyone can use it for any purpose, they all impose conditions under which people can use the software,"

You are misinformed:

GPL version 3, section 2 Basic Permissions: "This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program."

The FSF calls this Freedom Zero. The OSI implements it in several parts of their definition. You are free to decide you disagree with both of them, but two things apply:

1. Don't tell us they didn't say or intend it when they clearly did.

2. There's a reason why, if you change that, it's not considered free software or open source. Open source does not just mean that you can see the source code. It's meant far more for a long time.

Re: Shall 'AI' define the playing field?

This is not correct. The contract defines the terms, but it only has power because the code is copyrighted. If the code entered the public domain, then I would be allowed to do what I please with the code regardless of the contract. When stuff enters the public domain now, people can and do ignore all terms set by the previous copyright holders. To continue allowing those restrictions if copyright was abolished, you would need to create a new legal structure to allow it. Contract law is not sufficient.

Re: How about a fund for taking large users to court for non-payment

Since we're talking about open source, there's nobody required to pay and no legal method to force them to. You have no method to bring people to court for this and certainly no way to win there. If they had a license allowing that, they would have been commercial software which has always been able to do that.

Re: Shall 'AI' define the playing field?

This article points out the problem with your death of copyright dream. Open source software is copyrighted too, but in such a way that most uses are permitted and those uses that aren't permitted you can get away with anyway because people don't protect them. This produces a lot of public benefits, but it also produces funding crises, maintainers who get very little for all the good they do, and arguments of who should be paying and how to make that happen when there's no responsibility for them to do so. Your plan to abolish copyright just extends that problem from those who voluntarily chose to take that risk to everyone who produces anything digital. Thank you for the suggestion, but something whose only result is to make the problem we're trying to solve a lot bigger isn't going to be very useful.

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

Re: systemd-free distros

"This is not true, age ranges are reported and not to everyone who asks."

Just software and websites who are mandated to ask for it if they do anything that might be restricted in age (undefined). Anyone who has another reason to want that value can get it too because there's no registration system for the API, not that one would help with anything. Or in other words, anyone who asks. I concede the age range point if we assume that everything works perfectly. And it's true that the penalties aren't on the parents or children, just the people who write software, possibly including contributors to anything open source, and websites and applications that might allow some child to see something that maybe is a problem. Nothing dangerous there.

"That's all the major commercial OSes for most commercial devices and all require more PII than this law."

I may not have been sufficiently clear. If you've got a Windows device, you can get parental control software from people other than Microsoft. If you've got an Android device, you have options other than Google. Both allow you to avoid the login requirements and both have been available for a decade or three. If you have an Apple device, that's where you've overstated the requirements since those restrictions can be implemented without any account if a parent spends about five minutes trying and, on Mac OS, you still have third-party options. These are also bad comparisons because the restrictions from every one of those companies, with their additional requirements, offer specific control over what is allowed whereas age indication does not. Any one of those parental control options lets the parent decide to deny access in hours they don't like along with a dashboard of other locks they can activate. A birth date in a box does ... nothing until another law forces it to. If the parent wants to shut off access at night let alone anything more complex, they still have to use the tools they already had.