Posts by doublelayer 11394 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
I think they're mostly talking about companies, and July-to-June fiscal years are somewhat common in my limited experience. But if it is governments, your biggest candidates for each include:
July fiscal year: Australia, Bangladesh, Egypt, Kenya, Pakistan
October fiscal year: United States, Thailand, lots of Caribbean countries
Well, for example, I was recently moving data with a temporary server, which I accessed by IP address because it wasn't going to stick around long enough to need a domain name attached to it. I encrypted my traffic with a self-signed certificate (actually a certificate signed by a separate CA which is also me, so not exactly what the phrase suggests, but the same general idea). Compared to getting one from LE, that is less convenient. I had to do manual work to get the cert installed properly, and mostly to bludgeon everything that interacted with it into not complaining about the CA they didn't know. That's fine because it was just me, but if someone else was doing this, a certificate from someone else would be better.
Or you might do this for something you wanted to access without a trusted DNS system, for example an authentication system or test page for a VPN. Or you're trying to keep a server under the radar or avoid announcing its ownership. With all of these cases, you could still use DNS to do it, with DNSSEC or custom records to deal with the untrustworthy DNS source problem. If someone had any of these use cases in mind, I would probably recommend that they use the DNS method. There are two reasons someone might choose otherwise. First, they might be doing something temporary and don't want to spend much time on their solution, and the DNS version could take longer. Second, I'm a programmer, so it's easier for me to say and implement something like "encrypt a structure with the verification data with a private key, store that in a TXT record, retrieve and verify it with an included public key in your software, have an automatic sync system to change that when you need to using your registrar's API [if they have one]" than for some people who aren't building a custom client and want to do something quickly with a normal browser.
I've found large variance in skills in all types of IT jobs. It's not just devs who don't know how the systems work or sysadmins who don't understand the basics of development (not just how to write software themselves, but anything related to what a dev might need or ask for), but devs who don't know basics and sysadmins who don't know how to run their systems. Filtering out those people is an unending task that we're stuck with.
I doubt it's limited to tech either. At some point, people end up with a level of knowledge just because, if they lacked it, they would have failed sometime before now. That doesn't work for people who have less total experience in the field, where someone might have assumed that they showed promise and could pick something up. However, since tech changes, I've seen the same things with people who had skills that are no longer relevant but have tried to coast with those instead of learning something new, like the sysadmin who probably would do a pretty good job if sysadmining still mostly involved managing fleets of Windows 98 desktops, but couldn't manage a Linux server, nor a Windows server, nor a Mac OS anything, and wasn't too strong on a Windows 7 desktop (that was when I knew him). That part is possibly where tech and some other fields differ, as not all of them move as quickly.
There is a lot of "was" used in that article, so it's really quite unclear what, if any, of that system is still running.
However, going on the scant technical details in that article and obtained in a very quick search, which is all it deserves, these would appear to be ISP DNS filters. That means the answer to your original question is "technically yes but not really in practice", and if you don't already know how to bypass that then this won't help you.
"For some stupid reason they made up their own measurement system that no-one else has ever used."
Wrong. The US's units are stupid, but that gallon they use was the British gallon. It was, in fact, the UK who redefined the gallon in 1824, before which they used the same thing the US uses now. None of that makes the gallon a useful unit, but at least when the US uses it, they can correctly claim to be using the same thing consistently for a long time rather than switching the unit significantly without switching the name like the UK did.
That is not correct. The output is not copyrightable. That means that it's not copyrighted by the LLM creator as you said, but it also means that if you get some code out of an LLM and put the GPL on it, anyone can remove the GPL without constraint because you did not own copyright to the thing you attempted to license. Of course, proving that you had gotten that code from an LLM would be hard to do, but if they could manage it, your license statement is legally void.
"The courts have decided that the "Ai" companies are using books they bought in accordance with the licence associated with the purchase, so that's basically the same thing as conforming to GPL. Isn't it?"
No. The courts have decided that the license on the book, the one that forbids companies from doing what they did to them, actually doesn't apply so long as you bought the book, and it leaves the question open whether you can do that if you stole the book for a later trial. If I comply with the GPL, I actually have to follow its terms, which is why if I don't want to follow its terms, I don't use that code.
I do wonder whether it is actually over-represented among IT. I hear about it mostly when it's IT, but that's not surprising; I work a tech job at a tech company, so I interact with a lot of tech people, and then I come home and read sites like El Reg which also focus on tech. Other news that I read doesn't tend to bother with stories of individuals doing minor crimes, so if someone in a different field also chose to break a lot of stuff on the way out, I wouldn't see it except by chance.
I also posited that the tech might be the cause, but that presumes that it's less common. I wonder how often people in other areas also choose to break something in revenge for losing a job. Does anyone have stories about non-IT people trying it?
I wonder to what extent the IT might be responsible. Someone who would have to go physically smash some stuff in order to damage their employer might not do that, either because it's harder to do it without getting caught, or because it's a different experience than logging in and running some commands which feels much more direct and risky. Basically, the same theory of why people find it easier to be nasty or uninhibited online compared to normal in-person interaction, assuming that itself is true.
This will likely always just be speculation. It would be hard to get enough data on this to make a comparison, and that's before listing all the other variables we would want to control for.
No, that was the old thing. People who already signed up still get that massive Azure credit. People who hadn't signed up yet but counted on that always being an option when they were ready are the ones who lost out, and they never got to experience the "gateway drug"*. Your analogy is closer to what they used to be doing: give companies a lot of free credits in the hope that they'll need to spend even more than that and continue to do it with Azure. They're probably canceling that as investors no longer provide towers of cash to burn on AI training, so there's less return on that investment for Microsoft.
* As far as I know, that's also not what "gateway drug" means. A gateway drug is one that people use first, but then abandon in favor of something stronger. This would be more of a free sample or even a bait and switch if it worked the way you described.
Given the number of computers I had to clean out or completely reinstall after someone did that back in the day, I'm not sure that's a new thing. I think malware writers have long recognized the benefits of attaching their code to something illegal that nobody complains about for their own sake and doesn't even require your own servers to distribute.
I knew something like that existed for volume-licensed versions, but I didn't know whether you could use that on single licenses on personal machines. In fact, after a little searching, I'm still not entirely sure whether you can. It doesn't matter too much to me as I don't have it installed, but I would prefer that activation method to logging into a Microsoft account if I had to have MS Office.
I have a different explanation for this. I think a lot of software that people used to use was made more difficult to pirate and easier to afford, although the methods used to get that were ones I don't quite like. Someone who used to pirate Microsoft Office will now find that harder because even the perpetual licenses* are linked to a Microsoft account and authorized by server. It probably isn't impossible to pirate it, but it's not as simple as having a simple crack file patch an executable or copying a license key string. Meanwhile, for anyone who would find the perpetual license too expensive, there are subscription plans which are cheaper. That's especially common for users of more expensive software, for example Adobe software, where everyone I know who uses it has decided to use a subscription instead of buying it outright. For context, I don't use Adobe software and I use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office.
MY experience with other software indicates that piracy is still quite common. I've worked with people who tried to write consumer software and failed because their products were heavily pirated, and this was in relatively modern times. The way they know that it was pirated rather than nobody buying it is that, although they did not use servers for license checks, they did have servers for downloading optional components that didn't need to be in everyone's installation to save disk space. Based on the usage of those servers, if they only had paying users, each paying user was running the software on a couple hundred machines. In fact, I've tried recently to find a way of workable copy protection that doesn't, in my opinion, bind the user unreasonably or cause too many problems if the server goes down for another possible project. I wouldn't be surprised that many people are still pirating those bigger names I mentioned, but just fewer because it's more feasible for people to obtain it legally in some way.
* Perpetual licenses for Microsoft Office: yes, they have modern ones. I wouldn't suggest buying them directly from Microsoft because resellers can often offer much better prices. They are out there and work quite well. I know this because people often ask me to find them. No matter how often I suggest that they try LibreOffice to see if it can do what they need, which it can because these are personal users, they prefer paying for an MS Office license rather than even trying it.
The changing the clock trick has been defeated in most cases by now, but not everyone who used to design limited time trials knew that, so it did once work and might work again depending on how much the writers of the mechanism thought this through.
Similarly, many limited-time trials today are implemented purely locally, by storing a file or registry key somewhere that stores that they've already been installed. If you can find it, then deleting that file and reinstalling the trial gets you another trial period. If enough people do that, the software writers can easily make the trial check something against a server before unlocking, but it hasn't proven necessary enough for everyone to do it. It's not that the problem has no solution but that some of the people involved haven't bothered to implement it.
On Mac OS, you can sideload applications. Apple does make it tricky if they're not signed through intentionally misleading error messages, but even that works if you're willing to talk people through it. On IOS, you can only install apps using a few methods:
1. The App Store with an Apple account.
2. A corporate profile giving the creator of the profile, who pays Apple in order to create it, various abilities to mess with your device and requires manual installation.
3. Manually uploading a package specifically built for your device by hidden serial number from a Mac which can time out and require re-uploading after not very long.
Or in other words, in practice Apple's store is the only method.
Let's think about that:
"- app hosting, - distribution and download"
You do know those are the same thing, right? Apple isn't hosting Proton's services, just a copy of their mobile binary. Proton has tons of servers. I think they really could handle having users download the files from them.
"billing and payment processing, VAT collection, multi country access"
Proton already has implementations for all of those things. Credit card processors do not charge anything close to that. So in fact, that is way higher than the price anyone else would charge for that part.
"additional in-app purchases should you require them"
What does that mean? They allow you to sell in-app things and collect 30% on each of them, nothing else. Was this written to pad the list?
"in-app advertising (not that I am a fan)"
Proton doesn't use it. Also, that is not included in app payments. That's an additional thing which Apple and others provide and there's a separate financial arrangement with it. So it's irrelevant for two separate reasons.
"Try working in retail"
I hope you recognize the difference between shipping physical things, keeping inventories, having salespeople, handling customer complaints, and all the things that retail does versus sending a file when requested. Yes, it's more expensive. That's because it does useful things, rather than Apple who get that by selling access to IOS users only. If a store near me was making its money because I was only allowed to shop there, that would indeed be a problem.
It's not that simple. They're arguing that it violates US law, and they cite that the EU has already concluded that it violates EU law which has many similarities in spirit and letter to US law. A court would often take that into account, although they would need to prove that the US law doesn't have an important difference. I say "would" because the US courts have already considered a lot of this in the Epic Games lawsuits and they mostly decided that it didn't violate US law. This means that, for Proton to succeed, they'll have to convince a US court that the last US court got things wrong, and an EU decision won't help much with that. Still, a lot of legal stuff involves throwing any argument at the court in the hope they find one of them convincing.
Probably not unless that malware harms Apple in some direct way, E.G. if it thrashes Apple's update servers or something. Those with the malware on their phones can sue the stores though. If Apple wants to take down one of them, they can probably provide some assistance to that legal action. It wouldn't do much to the normal ones that aren't full of malware.
Well, one reason that comes to mind is that Mac support lives appear to be about the same as Windows 10's unextended support life... if I specifically choose a machine that was released right before the supported CPU cutoff. If I intend to keep a machine around for a decade or more, I expect that Apple will cut off my Mac OS updates, which they did to my last Mac less than eight years from its release. Fortunately for me, the model in question is well supported by OCLP. Do I expect that that will continue working on ARM machines? Given that they mess around with the firmware, which used to be standard and now isn't, no, I'm not.
If you didn't care about Windows's support life, then the rest of your argument might make sense. Since you've chosen to compare them, you either don't know how comparable they are or you were hoping we wouldn't know so your attempt to praise Apple didn't fall as flat as it did.
I think they're doing this for two reasons. They have always cut off operating systems at some point, but usually, the equipment that shipped with the old one either was quite old at the time (XP) or it could easily support the newer option (7). We've been complaining ever since they announced the Windows 11 hardware requirements that they're too strict and leave behind working equipment. Microsoft may have hoped that enough of that would be replaced by their deadline, but they may want to avoid bad press for a few more years so that when they do cut off those machines, they'll look older.
The second reason is simple. They're already building those patches for businesses who want to pay more, so why not charge individuals who also want them? And for those who would complain too much about the price, they'll let them use rewards points which, although I don't have them, seem easy enough to get if this is a big deal. I wouldn't be surprised if there turns out to be a registry key somewhere which also enables these, though no guarantees it will stay working. Of course, after a few years, we'll be back to the same place we are now.
I'm not sure I understand your question. There's no reason why you need to update unless you need something they're not including in the old thing, and most of the time, the thing they're not including is security updates. If you don't pay, they stop including them in October. If you do, they'll stop in three years. Either way, they could keep writing security updates forever. Nothing would stop them from writing patches to Windows 10 until 2100. They could have provided unlimited patches for XP too. They're just choosing not to.
What counts as a "hard and fast rule/reason" to update anything? The closest I can think of is if the old thing was guaranteed to break at some point which the new one prevents, but in the case of software, any change to fix such a thing can be released as a patch to the old thing.
"Which one has disabled drivers / HW or refused to boot after upgrades or updates?"
In my experience, both of them, and both because of mistakes, not intentional actions. I've had Linux updates break things even to the point of the machine not booting. They clearly weren't going for that, and it isn't common, but if I told you I hadn't experienced it, I would be lying. The same is true with Windows.
The last article explained this: they will probably use more than the free storage limit, so you'll probably end up buying more OneDrive space or an Office365 membership which comes with that, and then they get paid. It's not about the data, which we both know is nearly useless to them. And yes, this is Microsoft trying to make money from people who aren't updating. Whatever our opinions on the ethics of that, we should stop acting surprised that they're doing it since they've had paid extra support for old Windows versions lots of times before.
In practice, even if your legal interpretation was correct, and you'll have to make some changes if you take it to court, nothing will happen. If something was going to happen, it would happen to Meta first. It hasn't, and there has been years in which it could have. Either that means this isn't actually illegal under GDPR or it means regulators don't care to enforce it, but either way, there's little reason for individual users to fear.
WhatsApp claims not to be collecting everything in plaintext for Facebook's advertising. You may not believe them. I don't know whether I would either, which is one reason I don't use WhatsApp. However, unless you can disprove it, that can be used as a defense as they suggest that they aren't processing the data, which is what your GDPR argument is based around. If you have an eye to creating another NOYB, you'll want to check these things to ensure your cases are valid. NOYB has the record it does of consistently winning these cases because they're very knowledgeable about the law and what companies are doing rather than assuming what happens and the ways it is justified.
I don't have any problem believing that's a coincidence. The evidence of linking is that two posts about someone dying appeared on the same day. One of them you had to receive because it was directly relevant to you. That means we're building this entire thing on LinkedIn choosing to send you a thing involving death on that day. A lot of people die every day, and from the sound of it, the person who died in the second case was Linkedin-close to you, meaning you never knew them and wouldn't have any reason to but LinkedIn doesn't care.
In my experience, LinkedIn will spam you as frequently as you let it and it assumes that anyone who is connected to someone you're connected to is a valid source for those messages. Since this was a third-order person who died, that means anyone within a three-generation community of interest dying is enough to do that. It seems quite easy to have that happen by random chance.
Do you mean private browsing mode? Because if you do, it shouldn't keep a session cookie, and mine doesn't. I can log into office.com in a private browsing window, close the session, and next time, I have to log in again.
If you mean tracker blocking, that isn't intended to delete all cookies. Ones to remember logins are intentionally kept because they think you might want them, but you can change the settings to disable that.
Perhaps we're talking about different things?
Yes, they probably do. They will be able to see the traffic going through, but they don't know where it is going. If that traffic is encrypted, then they'll have much less to go on, though of course there is still some information about what server you're talking to and how much which can be used to spy on you. There is basically no way of avoiding that because the traffic has to arrive at the server from somewhere which can look at it, that is unless the site itself implements better encryption, for example the BBC news Tor site*. I'm guessing that doesn't have what you wanted though because they don't feel the need to help encrypt traffic to their more UK-focused sites. You can also choose specific exit nodes to forbid and try to find a subset you trust more, though how you do that is up to you.
* I tried to post a link to it, but either El Reg doesn't want to post Tor links or I somehow broke something, because it started reporting any attempt at HTML as invalid. I can still post the domain though:
https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccijh7745uqd.onion
Well, let's consider one example where I decided to pay. The software concerned cost about £40. I considered writing something myself to accomplish a similar goal. I decided that doing this would likely take me about two hundred hours of work and some time training something on a GPU, for which I'd be paying the power bills. Even if I have limitless free energy for the training, I'd have to value my time at less than £0.20 per hour. I didn't. Of course, had I done that, I'd now be free to modify and distribute the source, but I haven't ever felt the desire to modify the software I bought (it's complicated because part of it actually can be modified, but part of it is compiled and not available for modification). So yes, I suppose I do.
On other occasions, I take an approach more to your liking. One time, I was told that simple software to do a basic task would cost an inordinate amount to purchase. They later decided that this would be included for me free of cost, since I, or in this case a place I was working with, had bought something else from them. I was so offended by the original price they intended to charge for what I saw as a tiny utility that, instead of running the proprietary version they gave me for free, I reimplemented it over a weekend and published it as open source. So in that case, I did value my time quite low.
I think the difference between us is that I see the ability to modify software as useful and something I'd prefer to have, but not something I can't do without. There is software I don't want to modify, and there is software I can't write on my own and organized open source projects haven't matched. I don't mind paying a reasonable price and not modifying it in order to get access to something useful, and while there's a lot of software I won't buy, it not being useful or the price being excessive are bigger factors than not getting unlimited access to the source code.
"And how do we overcome said inertia and get corporates to, at least consider, changing?"
I think the biggest, most important thing that we need to and haven't been doing is having a reason which makes sense to the nontechnical. The recent changes have been happening because they finally have something they can understand as an advantage: maybe Trump makes the US do something which makes Microsoft do something which breaks your stuff. That's understandable. I don't think that will work for long, because while I expect the US to do lots of crazy things, turning off Denmark's government computers is not one I expect, and if I'm correct, that argument will lose its influence after a while and we'll be back to the situation we were in before.
The most common arguments I've seen tend to be limited or incorrect, including ideological opposition to Microsoft (managers don't care), financial arguments that haven't been thought through and end up positing incomplete numbers, and the prospect of modifying the source code which most companies will never do and thus they don't care that they can. There are three broad approaches that any successful migration needs to take:
1. Providing an easily understood and well thought out reason why the business will benefit from making the change and why the benefit is greater than the costs, both financial and in time and opportunity cost. It needs to convince people so that they can be shown it when they're annoyed at things that don't interact well or new things they don't know how to use yet. This is hard, but people who rush through it often fail. Yes, I know that the managers never come up with that good a reason when they want to change things, but unfortunately, they have the money and power and IT does not.
2. Doing so much work inside the IT department that most people don't notice that things are changing. Slowly move things that wouldn't work on Linux to things that do so that, when you do switch people to Linux, they don't have to change their entire workflow. This tends to work well, but it takes longer and is more work and, to someone who really wants things changed over tomorrow, it takes longer to get there.
3. Take over the company so you can dictate to everyone what they'll use and tell anyone who complains that you don't care. If it's your company, this will be an option. If it's not, chances are you'll never be able to do it and acting like you can will have disastrous effects on the change and your career.
If you say so, but I'm still seeing a combination of wishful thinking coupled with finding reasons why politicians will treat the thing you want to happen a lot more seriously than they treat most things.
You originally told me about "change being driven by politicians of all levels", but now, you've reduced this to Denmark. Even if I accept your theory, that doesn't explain why I should have confidence in German and French politicians, and I don't, although I do have some confidence in German and French government IT employees.
It also assumes that all Danish politicians view the Greenland situation in the same way you do. Some of them might not think that the US is about to invade them because that would be ridiculous and stupid. Of course, the US has demonstrated that something being ridiculous and stupid isn't necessarily a reason not to do it, but that's far from proof that they would start an invasion, which would theoretically require all NATO members to declare war on them. They also have a lot of examples of Trump's negotiation style (start with something ridiculous in the hope of getting something large but having people think it's smaller because it's not the ridiculous thing), which would suggest that the risk of military invasion is not the one they need to worry about, with economic or diplomatic coercion being more likely attempts.
And, if the US did invade Greenland, shutting off Microsoft products to Denmark wouldn't be a very important tactic. Doing it would cause chaos, but they don't need to. The US has lots of soldiers they can drop onto the parts of Greenland that they care about. They have lots of ships and aircraft they can place near Greenland to look for reinforcements. A lot of those things are already in Greenland.
And, by the way, that doesn't have to be true for it to have an effect. The US could have a Greenland Invasion Bureau in Washington right now, and as long as some Danish politicians don't think that's realistic, they can easily not share your assumption about how urgent it is to switch away from Microsoft products. This cannot be the first time when you've seen a politician ignore something that you think is a serious problem because they either don't seem to recognize it as the threat that you do or because they don't like what they'd have to do if it was so they're choosing not to look at it to avoid having to make the hard choices. You seem quite pleased that politicians have made this choice. That they seem to have done so doesn't prove that they will stick with it or that they have technical understanding of what it is.
Web apps do make switching the desktop OS easier. The places I've worked that either had adopted Linux desktops or had a mix have usually been heavier users of web apps. It really comes down to what applications they need to do their job and what each one's compatibility is, which differs too much from organization to organization to make any generalizations about how easy it is. Also, in a large enough unit, the change can be implemented in stages. For example, if an entire local government switches, the general administration might be able to switch while the police department stays on the old system longer as they likely have separate IT departments in any case, as long as the intersection of core software supports both systems. That makes a transition easier because lessons learned by one department can be used to make the implementation elsewhere easier.
I fear you may be putting too much confidence into the statements of politicians, probably because you'd like what they're currently saying to happen. We all do it from time to time, assuming that what a politician says they care about today will match their actions later on. Unfortunately, they, and many other people, are great at sounding interested before completely changing their stance.
I don't necessarily mean that they'll be full-throated Windows supporters in a month, although some might. I mean that when difficulties start to arise, for example they're asked for some funds to build some piece of software which the system needs, doesn't run well under Linux, but can be reimplemented with two years of work from a small team, they might suddenly discover that they're not motivated to obtain that funding, so they tell the IT department to figure something else out. Or they are replaced by different politicians who decide this thing sounds like a waste of time or money and tries to cancel it. Or they're replaced by someone who is totally fine with that Linis thing, whatever computery nonsense they're on about, but won't do any work to help it along. Or they're really into technology and insist on adding some AI to the system because after all, they're building it from scratch, so why stick with something old when we could be innovating LLM governance.
Just because a politician announces that they're willing to do something doesn't mean they know what it is, why they're doing it, what they need to do to do it successfully, or anything else. The IT departments involved have the capability to do a lot of this on their own, but if you think they'll get support from politicians if they need it, I think you are being dangerously overoptimistic.
I don't know why some might have downvoted you, but I've seen this argument lots of times. Maybe eventually it will be true. It hasn't been any of the times I've seen it in the past, and I doubt it will be this time. Various groups deciding to adopt Linux have been heralded as the tipping point that was going to make Microsoft take notice, whether it was Dell shipping some computers with Ubuntu, various large companies with Linux desktops, or the ever-popular Munich switching some, no all, no none, no some again machines to something open source. All of those things happened, but it hasn't changed much.
I am not going to predict that happening again, and I tend to see most predictions as ideologically motivated. That goes in both directions. Although most of the ones I see are people who would really like Linux to take over predicting that Linux will take over, I see others predicting that any attempt to migrate will fail utterly based on almost no information other than that they assume that nobody can transition to Linux, when the major limiting factor is how much you want to make that change. A motivated organization can switch to whatever they want if they are willing to be consistent in migrating things, and it's worked in the past. I doubt every announced effort will get that far, but some of them will. I don't think that's going to make everyone else do it.
Nice try, but that's not how that works. Reporting errors that get fixed in hours don't get upheld in court or have penalties assigned unless you can very convincingly prove that someone deliberately did it. The contracts that lottery gamblers signed would not say "whatever the computer says, you get paid", but probably do have legally required figures for how the prizes are calculated which would prove the announced figures wrong. By the way, it also wouldn't work that way if the reported figures were dramatically lower than they should have been. The company wouldn't be able to pay the reported amounts and collect the difference. The only way a court would care is if the error wasn't corrected, and what they would do is mandate that the company correct their error and deal with any payment differences involved. Since the error was corrected before payments were dispersed, that's not going to happen either.
To be fair to them, that is more accurately translated as "partial credit for partially completed jobs". The "extra" is just added to the score they get where any partially completed job gets zero points, just like a job that gets completely messed up. Anyone who's analyzing this for viable use should get that information and should be able to recognize that 8% partially completed isn't really helping the usefulness. People who don't understand that probably aren't doing this kind of testing in the first place.
It's about addresses that are used by Tuvalu residents, not people who bought domains from Tuvalu. Technically, they probably are counting any address registered to Tuvalu, so if Tuvalu's operating some of them for their own servers marketing .tv domains, those probably count, but if you buy a .tv address and put a server on the other end, that address won't count unless you bought the IP address from Tuvalu and you didn't.
Except we do, in fact, have tons of audio codecs and, as long as you use an open one, what actually happens in the real world is the software looks at what it is and picks the right decoder to play the file. People who work on compression can make a new one, like when Opus was created, with almost no visible effect on users except the benefits of better audio quality and smaller file sizes. If we decided that we needed to mandate that audio formats needed to be interoperable, then you could only make minor patches and we'd still be stuck with the first allowed ones, which were much less efficient than what we count on today.
Standards in software define what you can do. A radio standard defines what kind of data you get on the signal, and when you want to transmit pictures as well as audio, you need a new method. Most of the time, the benefits of standards are so obvious that people use them without being forced. I use HTTP to exchange data, not because someone told me that's the only allowed way to send API requests, but because it's easy for many things to use it. If I felt like it, I could implement a different protocol atop TCP and standardize only on that, or I could use only IP and do my own stream control, or I could eschew IP and build my own routing system. If I had a reason to think I could do those things better, then maybe I would.
There are a few cases where mandating a standard makes sense. Your radio example is a good one, but not because of user annoyance. It is a good one because the radio spectrum is a common resource which should be managed for the public benefit, not monopolized by any particular user. What I oppose in many cases is not standards, which are great, but mandated standards which makes it very hard to change anything no matter how better the new version might be. I especially oppose this when the environment makes it really easy to choose between standards. Mandating a standard on the phone network made sense because there's only one network, so it needs to work for everyone. I have a feeling that would have happened anyway because it's less work that way, but fine, mandate it. On the internet, it's easy to have as many different communication apps as you can fit on a phone, and they can have different purposes. You can have encrypted ones, ones that do file transfer, ones that are entirely decentralized, ones that are anonymous, ones with mesh networks, and if I don't like the idea of one, then I just don't use it. If they all have to be interoperable, then I either get none of that because you can't plug an anonymous mesh network app into one run by Facebook and expect them to understand one another, or I have to take all the features together even if I'd prefer not to.
When did "don't mandate total compatibility" turn into "mandate different implementations of everything"? Nothing says you can't have interoperability, but that mandating that everything be interoperable makes it really hard to build anything new because the new thing won't be supported by anything else yet. We have the standards we do because they're useful, not because they're mandated. If we decided that any short-range wireless transmission system had to be interoperable with WiFi, then we couldn't have Bluetooth or those custom 2.4 GHz autoconnect protocols for wireless keyboards or LoRa or the many incompatible things that are nonetheless useful for other purposes. Without that mandate, any number of people can still use WiFi, and it can be standardized so that people can trust that WiFi-enabled equipment will be able to use it.
The problem with option A, which is probably why they didn't do it, is that it's not easy or cheap to bring a bunch of representatives from small companies in lots of countries in for a vote. Proxy voting has a purpose, and I'd note that you could get the same result with a one representative one vote system. Specifically, some group that stands to benefit and has enough money to arrange bulk flights to Mauritius submits fake documents saying that each one of their passengers is the single accepted representative of one voter in this election. More expensive on them, but still within their capabilities. Remember that these people were submitting fake powers of attorney, which are not minor documents to forge, so they're not trying a small crime here.
Theoretically, there is no reason this has to touch a Chinese court. China doesn't control the routing systems. It would be easy for the rest of the world to see that Afrinic has withdrawn the addresses and no longer honor the previous users' routing announcements. It might not happen that way for fear that China would decide to continue using those and we'd get some fracturing of the IP system, but it could be implemented that way.
It's not a lack of demand. It's a lack of funds. ISPs in Africa are often more starved than most other countries for IPV4 space, and it means it's hard for things like local hosting to obtain the blocks they need, with consumers often relegated to horrendous CGNAT setups. But they also have low budgets, so they can't get those addresses in a bidding war. That's one reason why they have their own RIR in the first place. Sadly, if the people running the RIR are willing to sell those outside the region they're supposed to be in, it breaks down just as much.
It's a very good thing they didn't use that method this time. The people who showed up in person didn't submit their proxy vote and decide they could go to Mauritius after all. Their proxy vote was fraudulently submitted by other people. In a similar way, people who chose not to go but went to the effort of submitting a real proxy vote ended up with two votes, and since they weren't there, there was no way to verify which one was correct. This was more than a last-minute vote change and it needs to be handled more severely.
The article covered this: because you have to pay them monthly to have enough space to store your backup, and the easiest way to get that is to buy Office365, and if you do that, maybe you'll use Office365 and then you'll want to keep having it even after you replace your computer, and that would mean plenty of cash going directly to Microsoft's bank accounts. Or maybe some people will forget they have it or not remember why and keep paying for that OneDrive forever, the way I see some people with Apple devices who have higher storage subscriptions for iCloud but don't know why or for how long. No, it's not about AI training. Sometimes, the secret profit plan is less devious and more obvious than the theories.
"I mean they produce more cars than Waymos fleet every few days."
And, if this was a question of how many cars they could put on the streets, that might be relevant. They're only operating ten. That doesn't seem to be their problem right now. When Waymo wants to scale up, they can buy more of the cars they attach stuff to and step up the manufacturing of the hardware they attach as well, and yes, that would take lots of money, but if they have a reason to make so many, they'd probably have the money to spend on doing it.
And, if the problem is with driving quality, manufacturing capacity is completely unimportant until that's fixed. For both of them.
Not all of that is related to privacy legislation, and some of it is not correct. For example, the existing laws that forbid you from using pictures is related to restrictions on what can be done with a "likeness" which is much more similar to the "property right" the EFF is complaining about than privacy, since privacy would forbid the taking of the picture in the first place rather than just some possible uses of the content of the picture later on.
And Facebook not using user posts in the EU... that ended and the regulators are fine with that. There may be a chance that NOYB will get a judge to block that, but it's not looking great so far. Maybe a better privacy law could do what GDPR is failing to do, but this is the US which has nothing other than a few patchwork laws in a couple states that have large carve-outs and are not well-enforced in the first place. If they had privacy legislation that covered this or even required similar permission as you'd need for a model release, then the EFF would have a point that existing laws covered it. Since those don't cover it, the EFF's argument has a hole in it, and I wonder if it might work better if they suggested to remove the dangerous parts of the law rather than abandon it entirely. The protection that law is written to provide is necessary and not available elsewhere.
That goes for other countries as well, where existing privacy legislation will probably not be sufficient to deal with AI training on personal data. The logic that Facebook's successfully used to get training on text allowed under the GDPR is the same logic that would be used to train on images. We can hope that a court decides that's a big enough problem that they'll block it, or we could make it official and not gamble on the result.
"My understanding being the US hit the nuclear sites."
Places where they make nuclear weapons are military things. That's especially true when they're run by the military as well, so there are military members there, but even if it only employs civilians, that's a target. But if you don't think that is correct organization, basically any time one country deliberately bombs another one, it's a war. The place in Qatar that Iran bombed had US soldiers in it. They are at war and have been at least since that first bomb fell. Of course, since this isn't a neatly organized declared war, they can stop being in a war unofficially by just no longer dropping any bombs on each other; you don't need a formal peace treaty to end a war if both sides decide they're through. Maybe that will happen. It won't have stopped this thing having been a war.
And even though it's definitely a war, you can still support it. Nothing says that you can't support a war. Nothing says you can't support the aggressor in a war, although since it's usually the less popular choice, there are numerous ways to describe things such that the other side is the aggressor and you could do that with the US-Iran war, and actually quite a bit more easily than with some others. You can have and defend the point of view that war was a reasonable and appropriate reaction to previous events if you feel that way. Just know that you will have to have that argument if you support this, because war is what they did.
