Posts by doublelayer

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

As the article said, one possibility is to fund this by voluntary contributions from companies. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that happened because this is commonly used, though let's remember that sometimes, companies that do something like this try to exert some control over it, for example Google's version where you had to register with them for the privilege of reading it. If some other government wants to fund it, those of us who work in security will be happy to see their funding used to keep the service alive. The general utility of it is why it made sense to fund it as a public good, but I don't remember too many governments volunteering to help with the bill.

As for shouldn't non-Americans be paid for it, until now, the funding was coming from the US government. Is it that surprising that they chose a US institution to manage it? You can complain about it being US-run or you can complain about the US having to pay for all of it, but trying to complain about both simultaneously makes you sound like you just want to complain and are using all available paths to do so. The contract isn't clear about the amounts. From my reading, Mitre received $29 million for two years, but I'm not sure that all the $14.5 million annually went to the various databases listed. Mitre does various other things, and I don't know if any of those were also included in the contract.

Team Trump readies national security card to justify taxing Americans for foreign chips

Re: ARM?

Right now, probably not. The IP license is not physical and won't appear on an import docket, so no tax. That may change whenever the US wants to charge more to the UK, for example if the UK were to put a retaliatory tariff on the US, but for now, it should be free from that.

The major limitation though is the lack of fabs in the US, not where the IP comes from.

Trump's tariff turmoil leaves IT projects in deep freeze

Re: Shipments

That's true for laptops perhaps, but smartphones usually don't have different hardware between the US and Canada and often are the same for Latin America as well. Quite often, even when there are different region models, those two countries get lumped together, often with several others. I'm not sure how different the boxes might be, but the expensive things inside the boxes are almost certainly identical.

Re: Shipments

Yes, but having them available where you can sell them is more convenient than having them in a country where you can't because it's too expensive, hence why having extra stock in Canada where you can sell some of it might be more convenient than having extra stock stuck in a warehouse such that, if you decide you want to sell it in Canada, you still have to move it there first.

Re: Exemptions

Sort of. As I understand it, which is not the best measure but probably about the same amount that most people do, the electronics that were exempted are exempted from the reciprocal tariff on China but not the other tariffs on China with the stated explanation that these are semiconductor products, including the things that aren't directly but contain them (E.G. laptops), not including other things that don't contain them directly (E.G. appliances), but they are not exempted from other flat or global tariffs, so the tariff is still higher than it was two weeks ago, and this is planned to change when a blanket tariff on semiconductors is announced at a future time. If this didn't make any sense, that's why nobody has a plan for how to react to it.

Re: Shipments

It depends how expensive it is to leave them there versus either leaving them at your typical shipping port or sending them to a different place. You could also send them to a different market without tariffs, for example Canada, and import them from there when US tariffs are nicer, because in the meantime they can be sold to Canadians which makes them a little more flexible. I've also heard rumors that, in preparation for tariffs, companies were attempting to stockpile as much inside the US as they could so they'd have un-tariffed stock for a while. When you don't know when or if conditions could change, and it could be a week from now or several months, and it could be a dramatic increase or decrease, it's hard to plan what action you can take to not get harmed as much by that volatility.

It's fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with ChatGPT – but intellectual property is no laughing matter

Re: Cunning move...

The music sites weren't the villains there because they wanted to stop people from copying the music they paid to produce. They were villains because how they went about it. When they took actions that were or should have been illegal, like installing malware on people's computers, that made them villains. In my mind, the people who shouted about wanting their music for free weren't heroes. They were selfish people who were getting me into this fight I didn't want to be in, a fight I'm still in any time someone makes me use DRM on something I bought legally. I did not support either side. When the copyright companies tried to sue over knowledge of a number, I sided against them. When they tried to take down obvious piracy sites, I sided against the pirates.

Re: Intellectual perhaps, property no.

It always does for them. I'll do them a favor and rephrase it in English:

"Nobody owns a specific art style. You can't blame someone for making something else in a style similar to that someone else used. I hate copyright, so I'm going to claim that's what happened here so you'll agree with my main point. Every piece of data should be freely available whenever I want it. Who cares about any of the people who spent time or effort making that."

Tech tariff turmoil continues as Trump admin exempts some electronics, then promises to bring taxes back

I think they added instead of subtracting, giving us UTC+4 instead of UTC-4 EDT.

Hacktivism resurges – but don't be fooled, it's often state-backed goons in masks

In many cases, they realized that hactivism isn't a great tool for activism. Most sincere attempts were ineffective because they were causing minor damage and not getting much attention or support. We don't like that the NSA's spying on us? Okay, let's knock out access to their website. Having succeeded at this, what do you get? Is the NSA unable to spy? No, they're not degraded at all. All you get is one news story which most people ignore. Similarly with pro-Russia groups that took out the public-facing websites of airports in Europe and the US, which didn't stop flights from taking off like clockwork, nor did they inconvenience most travelers who would use airline websites instead. People who did that three decades ago often determined that there were more effective and less risky things they could do instead. A physical and vocal protest will probably get as much if not more attention and it has the benefit of being legal if you're identified.

I can think of only a few hactivist groups that obtained real results. The Guacamaya group, for example, which specializes in obtaining access to private information of governments and publishing it, has gotten more sustained attention to things they are trying to promote. Most others are either government-backed or acting like they are, going for destructive campaigns intended to back up wars rather than activist campaigns designed to change behavior or get attention.

China ups tariffs on US goods to 125%, calls Trump's war a 'joke'

Re: Tariffs and the cloud.....

"let's not forget that the manufacture and make-up of physical goods is often more complicated than it would first appear too."

Of course, and there are probably a lot of inaccurate parts of that calculation. It is relatively easy to do that calculation, however. A lot of metrics exist because they're easy to calculate. GDP is a prime example. Its creators said it was not the best metric, just a simple one that could provide some information, and yet it's been used for a long time precisely because it's not hard to calculate. A lot of other metrics have derived from GDP, not fixing any of its deficiencies, but trying to add or remove things so the numbers go in the direction the person changing it wants them to go. When given the choice between something useful that they might not be able to evaluate or something less useful that they can easily do, statisticians sometimes choose the latter and politicians nearly always prefer the latter.

"However, when it comes to things like 'the IP is owned by a subsidiary in Ireland for tax purposes', this is an obvious- but currently tolerated- legal fiction."

Sort of, but again, there's a lot of complication to it. Let's say that our company is California-based Calsoft and it forms Hidesoft, a subsidiary in Ireland to store some programs it created beforehand. Meanwhile, it buys Irishsoft, a company that was founded in Ireland which wrote other software. What is the legal difference between these two companies? What makes an originally Irishsoft product different from one held by Hidesoft? If we say it's a simple layer that can be pierced by the US tax authorities, why can't they decide that all subsidiaries, no matter where they are based, are US corporations and subject to that tax, meaning that any company operating in a country can be taxed on global revenue from that country? That wouldn't make sense and would break a lot of things if tried. It would also mean that the two Irish companies would probably cease paying tax to Ireland because, according to the US, they're US companies now. Ireland wouldn't like that, so why don't they pierce the veil going the other way and deem Calsoft to be an Irish company, since it is clearly operating Irish companies. International tax law has a lot of loopholes, but they often exist because there is logic in the situation that originally created them.

Re: Trump May Blow Up U.S. Defense Sales to Europe

"I would have said to let the Soviets "win" and then see what. It's like a dog that chases cars, what would they do if they caught one?"

The Soviets caught quite a few countries. They had things to do with them. Those things weren't pleasant. You might be correct if you mean that they would fail to catch Afghanistan specifically, as in practice they lost a lot of lives and money that they could not replace by doing that, but if you really think that they wouldn't have found ways to abuse the people in and near Afghanistan if they had controlled it, history suggests they could find ways to do that. We don't even have to refer to all the examples of countries they ruled from Moscow or named a friendly dictator for. They gave us plenty of evidence in their years of partial rule what they liked doing.

That doesn't mean you're wrong about what should have been the response to that, but if you're using the logic I think you are, it's the wrong way to decide.

Re: Tariffs and the cloud.....

I think the difficulty to calculate national value is a major part of it. When someone in Brazil buys a license for $software which was written by a company headquartered in the US, but the IP is owned by a subsidiary in Ireland for tax purposes, and the programmers who wrote the thing were located in, in order of count, Canada, India, the US, Ukraine, and the UK, and there were translators from eighteen countries but the person who bought it is probably either using the Portuguese (translators in Brazil) or English (verified in Canada) version, and the team running the servers this connected to is located in the US and Australia, and the security people are in Germany, Canada and South Korea, then how much of the purchase price is an export from the US and an import to Brazil?

Nobody knows. Any attempt to make a formula would be debated forever, especially if any tariff was connected to it. Evaluating that formula would be time-intensive. I think that's why it gets left off a lot of calculations, and the people deciding what tariffs should be right now are not interested in trying to fix this. They do some random calculations and decide that is good enough. In many cases, nobody cares about the numbers even if you could calculate them. Meanwhile, calculating the value of exported and imported goods is comparatively easy because you just put all the numbers from the forms into a big spreadsheet.

Re: Tariffs and the cloud.....

Generally, the answer is no. Most services or software are not counted even if you do pay across borders, and most of the time, payments for those services are made to the local version and not counted as exports in the first place. It's weird to try to figure out what counts as an import when the product was partially made anywhere they hired someone. Maybe Trump would be happier if they had tried to do so as it would make some of the US's trade deficits smaller as it is often a net exporter of services and intangible things, and you could easily define those flows as much larger than they are if you wanted the deficits to seem smaller or turn into surpluses.

I have a feeling someone is going to make a law attempting to define these things in order to put a tariff on services. The only question is whether it will be someone retaliating against the US's tariffs or the US themselves trying to exacerbate their own because they think that a high enough number will miraculously change reality to match what they want it to be.

Satellite phone tech coming to your mobe this year – but who pays for it?

Re: meanwhile in idiot Oz

You could probably stream one 1080P connection with 5 Mbps, but if you had more than one person trying to do that simultaneously, one or both of those videos would probably stream badly. If you have to have a videoconference and care that your video was not jittery, increase that number a bit. In many cases, I could have a 5 Mbps connection and not notice for quite a while. I've had much lower numbers in the past. However, with the availability of faster networks, I will use them and benefit from it, for example, when a gigabyte file downloads in a minute and a half instead of twenty seven, I notice that. I was recently uploading about twelve gigabytes of created system images (compressed on my end, naturally), and having that done in an hour while I could easily use other services was a lot better than doing it overnight. If the images I created were a lot larger, that could have made an even bigger difference. Some people move large files in either direction a lot more often than I do, and from the sound of it, I do that more often than you do.

Re: What matters is how Starlink bills them

That is one important factor, and the other is how they bill the users. If I'm a T-Mobile customer, what do I get by paying them the extra amount every month? Do I get to send unlimited messages, or is there a cap? Do my messages go through immediately or do I need to fiddle around for a long time to get them to send? Do received messages come back through the satellite reliably or do I have to do strange things periodically in the hope that someone has sent a message to receive? Theoretically, some of that should be knowable by people who have tried the beta, but I don't know and I expect that whatever it is now, it will change both for the better (quality and speed will probably improve) and for the worse (they will want lots of money for it). the two sides of how much someone pays and what service they get in return will determine how many people even consider buying it.

Tech CEO: Four-day work week didn't hurt or help productivity

Re: Office vs making stuff

And you have now demonstrated exactly what the original poster said. Pedantic or not, obvious or not, their comment was simply that these things do not "work better for everyone" because everyone means everyone. Or, as you put it: "something isn't a Universal Solvent of Magic Bullet that works for every situation". Neither they nor I said that remote working was bad or shouldn't be done when it is possible. We don't have enough information to know whether they think it doesn't work in situations where you or I think it does.

Re: Experience a friend had with 4 day week

Not in my experience. I'm sure that can also generate useless meetings, but the ones I'm most familiar with are ostensibly related to work. For example, the primary mainstay is the team meeting, where you and your colleagues meet to go over what you're working on. That can be a short update meeting where you give short progress updates and talk over things where team coordination can be helpful, and if you're frequently having useless ones you reduce the frequency. That's it being done well. Or you can have meetings every day because it's a daily meeting and you shall not question its dailiness and, to fill in time, you slowly step through the task board even though people either already know about things or don't have any reason to care. That could easily be a four hour per week difference. Or you have inter-team meetings which are regularly scheduled even though it doesn't seem to serve a purpose. Or there can be meetings that have a purpose but are much longer than they need to be. Or there can be meetings that have a purpose, are much longer than they need to be, and are mismanaged so much that the purpose isn't achieved in the first place.

Enrolling everyone in a course they don't need wastes time, but that eventually ends after everyone has done that course. The course probably lasts a couple hours and the reviews you mention might double that. Bad meetings that seem related to the job are harder to end because they seem like they should be helping and they occur on a schedule, reliably wasting more time. Fortunately, I've experienced only bad and good jobs for meeting wastage; I know people who have gotten terrible ones that waste a lot more time on pointless meetings than the worst places I've ever worked.

Re: Experience a friend had with 4 day week

Depending on what you're doing with the extra hours, shortening the week may not really do anything. That's why it's so important to understand whether they went from 5days/40hours to 4/32 or 4/40.* If you find that you're having to work extra hours to achieve the results they set and they shorten the week but don't adjust timelines, you might end up having longer days anyway. It'd be nice if having an extra day off would improve my productivity so I could achieve the same thing on 80% of the working time, and that might actually happen for me from time to time, but I don't think I can count on that. It's not as simple as counting worker hours to determine how much I'll get done, but there are things I have to do which will only get done if there is time to do it in, and if I'm expected to do it and work fewer hours, something will have to break. In my experience, what breaks is that I end up working longer hours anyway but I don't want to, which isn't a good thing to do routinely.

In other four-day pilots I've seen, improvements in productivity have often been ascribed to reducing inefficiencies like unnecessary meetings, and those would certainly help. However, if they aren't willing to do that or if you're in a job that already manages meetings well**, that won't show any improvement to contribute to it. I also have my doubts that a company that temporarily cancelled unnecessary meetings will stay with that policy because it's a clear indication that they started unnecessary meetings before.

* Or whatever normal weekly hours they were using before. The question is whether they're reducing the hours or just rearranging them, and if they are reducing them, do they adjust any timelines accordingly?

** There are at least some jobs like that. I've worked at places that managed to keep the meeting count and duration low and make most of them relevant to the job. Certainly not all of them, but it happens. This is definitely more enjoyable, but it's hard to improve efficiency because there is less wasted time that is easily freed.

Re: Office vs making stuff

"everyone who isn't making something physical with their hands isn't doing anything" is a hilariously daft and easily disproven argument.

That is correct, but not very relevant because that wasn't their argument. They were saying that remote working, and to a lesser extent flexible schedules, don't work better for everyone because some jobs can't be done that way at all. Physical jobs are an example of things that can't be done remotely, and some that involve everyone being present simultaneously don't really work with flexible schedules where different subsets of people are present from one day to another.

It would be easy to argue that this point from them was somewhat obvious, because in a discussion of whether remote working is a good idea, the "unless remote working is impossible in this case in which case this argument does not apply" could be reasonably assumed. Or you could simply acknowledge it and put a limit on the "everyone" you are referring to. Or you could disagree with it and explain how they are more practical in those use cases than the statement suggests. However, you chose not to make any of those arguments. You chose to put words in their mouth which they did not say and argue against it on that incorrect basis. You've also got a contradiction in your argument, simultaneously accusing them of saying that people who don't do physical work are not doing anything and looking down on those who do physical work. They said neither of those things.

Self-driving car maker Musk's DOGE rocks up at self-driving car watchdog, cuts staff

Re: Self-driving is a fallacy

Less than it costs to have a human do it, which is why I don't have a driver on standby. Cost can certainly be a problem with it. I did say that the answer that it's financially impractical "may be correct after all". There are several reasons that someone might want a car that could drive itself, and they would reduce the financial cost of having the tech. Assume for a moment that the tech could be created and we were only considering the value. Here are a few situations where people might find the costs were lower than the simple calculation looks.

Scenario 1: A family currently has two cars because they need to commute to different places. They don't need to commute at the same times. If they could share a car, which could drive unattended between their two locations, they could spend more on the single car but less on cars in total. Financial cost: negative.

Scenario 2: A worker needs to be in an office, either because they do something physical that can't be done remotely or because their boss said so and refused to let them work remotely. They are able to do some tasks remotely though. If they work from their car during the commute while the car drives to the office, they can count their commute time as work time.

Or the even more likely scenario 3: companies that want to deliver something and don't want to hire a driver may find that it's cheap to have the computer do it because it lets them operate the same vehicles more constantly and cut out some wages.

If the technology was possible, use cases like this would provide more funding than the original post infers. That's why so many companies have invested in trying to build it already. They would also allow for the manufacturers to scale up production, further reducing the costs. We don't know for sure that their attempts will ever prove good enough to do the job. There are many things that I didn't find useful that enough other people wanted that they were created, and there are many reasons why self-driving cars could follow that pattern. If it doesn't happen, I think the reasons will be technological, not financial.

Re: Self-driving is a fallacy

I think you've mixed three points there. I agree that current tech is dangerous, which is why we don't allow it to be used except in testing and why Tesla has several safety lawsuits against it. However, just because you find the feature worthless doesn't mean everyone does. I would, in fact, value having a driver so that I could spend the time doing something else. There are plenty of situations where having the capability would be useful to many people, even if you aren't one of them. I think the combination of those two points means that you may have jumped to an answer about whether this will ever be possible which may be correct after all but is poorly reasoned. It might turn out that our tech never becomes good enough to drive sufficiently safely, but it won't be because nobody wants it. There's a very big gap between "it doesn't work" and "it can't work", and "I don't want it" doesn't prove where something falls between them.

Infosec experts fear China could retaliate against tariffs with a Typhoon attack

Re: China only needs to wait a few days.

I think the concept makes some sense, but the level the US set on it was a lot higher than it needed to be. There are small deliveries where the funds earned from the tariff are lower than the cost to calculate and assess them even if you value the time spent slogging through the tariff code system to find the category the thing should fall in at zero because a government employee isn't doing it. Delivery companies have often dealt with this by adding a healthy multiplier and, in some cases, not telling you what the fee they're going to charge you is until the package has already almost arrived. Improving the tariff system so it can be realistically navigated by an individual consumer would be the best solution to that, but since I don't think it is going to happen, I accept a low exemption where it is skipped as a reasonable alternative.

I don't think the difficulty faced by retailers is particularly related to this, though. Those who are actually retailing tend to import in bulk, saving a lot more per item than they pay in tariffs, at least they did in most countries before the US decided to change that. Individuals buying items one at a time pay more for that one item. There are a lot of retailers who mark up items they import significantly in return for basically nothing except being located in the country, and that's not a great business model. A lot of the other packages being sent are for niche items that most retailers don't import because only a few people want to buy one, and retailers who try tend to effectively be drop shippers, importing one item from the manufacturer, having it shipped to them, applying a new label before sending to the customer, and charging a lot for the privilege. I don't care much about the survival of those companies because, from my perspective, they don't do anything.

AI entrepreneur sent avatar to argue in court – and the judge shut it down fast

I'm not sure this article will work well as proof of the fallibility of AI. Lots of other cases that this might be responses to prove that point, but this just shows a judge rejecting it. In comparison to all the cases where AI made up information and lawyers were fined, this one has few consequences. It also involves a very different tool, because instead of trying to have an AI lawyer, this was someone trying to use a video avatar read a statement rather than reading it manually with an excuse to match, and while I don't know whether he was being honest when he indicated that his illness made it hard to speak for long periods, it is plausible and at least a little sympathetic. If I was looking for articles to demonstrate why you don't want AI used for your legal defense, I'd have a large set of better ones and I'd leave this one off the list.

Re: So does he own this SW or is he using it?

My understanding is that his service is another AI lawyer that will make up stuff, but he didn't get to use it because it doesn't work. The service he used instead was just making a video of a pre-written statement, which he generated with someone else's LLM.

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Re: Optical media stable?

I don't, and for two, very good reasons. Tape drives are expensive. If you want to buy an LTO drive and use it to write like three tapes, you end up spending a lot more for that than buying hard drives or even SSDs to store the same information. If you want to buy one drive and read thirty tapes, the numbers start comparing better. So when you have massive amounts of data to store like decades of government records, tape starts making sense again. The other problem is that it's not random access, so retrieving the data from the tape takes longer. Also not a problem for their use case, but not so useful for me.

Re: Minor correction

That only matters if I'm doing this inside the US, and I don't know who makes DVDs but I wouldn't want to bet on the US not having tariffs on those too.

Re: Minor correction

I think I'd have a better chance getting a robotic loader for disks rather than DVDs. I can't say I've had to do either, but I'm aware of the disk-loading libraries you refer to, whereas I'm unaware of anything that could store and load the 218 DVDs I need for nonredundant storage of a terabyte. I imagine that those five-disk CD changers will need a bit of an update to be adequate to this task. If we don't have either, then I would much rather have to load 43 hard drives into a bay, of which there are many hotswap-capable ones, than to load 218 DVDs into a slot, wait for them to be written, and keep track of their order later. Neither would be fun, but one is faster, more parallel if I've got a few free bays, and I don't have to worry too much about ordering.

Re: Minor correction

That is true, but I don't give them a lot of credit for that as a lot of systems can apply compression before sending the data to the media. I could compress something before writing it to optical or other media too, and although that would increase the CPU load because I'm making the original source of data do the compression rather than being able to outsource it to the drive, it generally wouldn't increase it enough to change the speed with which the data is written or read. It's also more adaptable to other types of data. If I have data that I can compress better than 2.5X, then I'll be able to store even more per cartridge, and if I'm storing data that's already been compressed, chances are that the LTO compression algorithm will not further compress it. I think it's most honest to compare like with like, which means raw capacities.

Re: Nothing to beat it on $/Gb basis.

It seems that, if that happens once a month, having a single hard drive with a hundred thousand scans on it might still have a lot of efficiency benefits compared to loading a hundred thousand tapes. If it's fewer scans, then you don't even need a reserved hard drive for it. How expensive must it be to either manually cycle the tapes through a drive or to buy and maintain robots to do it, and how much tape reading overhead must that add to the process of testing the new scanning step?

"has no one had an LTO tape go bad before? Or had one broken / mangled by a bad drive?"

I've had lots of things fail. I've had optical degrade to unreadability. I've had spinning disks fail without warning. I've had SSDs that were treated completely normally and started throwing SMART errors when they were really not that old. None of those prove that the technology is bad. DOGE claimed that tape was outdated simply because it is tape, which it isn't, and did not specify what they replaced it with. Maybe if they had an actual technical argument with details about why what they did made an improvement, it might convince us. Since they frequently claim credit for fixing things that weren't broken or where they didn't actually change anything, we tend not to assume that they have a good argument when the only statement they made is incorrect.

"And without details, why is “a service run by disabled vets” important?"

We don't know whether or not it was important. What we do know was that the money they claimed to have saved they didn't actually save, thus they were lying. The providers being disabled vets doesn't prove whether the service was good or not, and you can dismiss that as an emotional argument. However, it's an emotional argument that some agree with, which could be countered with information about why the service should be canceled, which DOGE chose not to do. You can't prove that the service was bad any more than someone opposed to its being cut can prove that it was good, meaning we're back to the one thing that is provable: the money that wasn't actually saved.

Re: Minor correction

That's why you have more than one of them. If you're comparing to DVDs, the price comparison lets you have a lot more copies on hard drives than it would take to store the lot on archival DVDs. Let's see exactly how much, storing exactly one terabyte. At $8 per archival DVD, a terabyte is $1,743. I can buy 1 TB hard drives, if using US dollars, for $40, probably lower if I searched for more than thirty seconds or was buying in bulk, and buying in bulk is exactly what I'm going to do because, for my $1,743, I can store 43 copies. Which do you think is more likely to survive? 43 redundant versions of which only one needs to work or 218 disks, the failure of one of which is sufficient to break everything?

Re: Minor correction

What optical format do you prefer? There's Archival Disk, which is indeed designed to last fifty years and it holds a grand total of 1 TB per disk. Compared to the 18 TB per LTO9 cartridge, or even the 6 TB per cartridge if they're still using LTO7 from 2015, that's not a lot of bytes. It has one other problem though: it's been discontinued and it wasn't replaced with something newer. Other optical media I'm aware of has significantly lower per-disk capacity. So what specific optical disk do you want to use, and how do you expect it will handle the efficiency problems that tape libraries are designed to respond to?

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Differently-competent developer

Not unless you're being very broad by your definition. Object orientation does not require exceptions. They do often come together, but there is no requirement to do it. Nor do either objects or exceptions require interpretation the way it's generally used; a different process which must be present in order to execute the program.

What you appear to be going for, assuming I understand you, is the runtime which directs program flow when an exception occurs, considering that an interpreter. It isn't what most people call an interpreter. I don't think it counts at all; it's completely static and can be implemented as a very basic stack climber. On that basis, something with functions that maintain a call stack is interpreted, since that is also implemented by the runtime and is about as complex.

Re: I'm not

It shouldn't be the job of team members to identify when a colleague is holding everyone back. That should be the manager's job. If the manager is not doing that and the team is being held back, then maybe you take on that job anyway. And if it turns out that one person is repeatedly trying to do that to others, the suspicion from their colleagues and management will be real and justified. It generally isn't the job of an average programmer to coach their colleagues either, but we do it when needed because it makes the team run better.

From the sound of the story, the colleague who wasn't completing the task wouldn't have accepted being pointed in a different direction, even assuming that their problem was lack of knowledge rather than not caring or choosing to do something different. Of course, this is if we accept the facts alleged in the article, but if we don't, we could make up many different scenarios and point blame at almost anyone involved.

Re: Poorly defined task

The version from the article is indeed vague, but if we assume the storyteller wasn't just making it up, the problem with its constraints was solvable in two hours. We can assume hostile management only as easily as we can assume anything else that the story does not require, such as the older colleague being unable to complete the project because their computer was shutting down every three minutes but they didn't report it. I think the vagueness probably comes from it being boring to try to include enough details in the article; we don't want to read about the structure of the file and whether they already had reader code for it and exactly how the value retrieved had to be reported.

I've also dealt with the moving goalposts problem in completing a task, either because the people who created the task couldn't be bothered to write down all the information they had or didn't know something important when they wrote it. It's caused most of the worst preventable problems I've dealt with.

Re: Differently-competent developer

Most interpreted languages are hybrids that compile to a bytecode and then interpret that. Thus, it can be completely accurate to say that Perl or Python or various other languages didn't compile. It couldn't make it to the part where the first expression is actually executed. If it did start executing, but then failed out, that would be a different level of problem, and possibly more acceptable, although if that was expression number 3, probably not much better.

Signalgate solved? Report claims journalist’s phone number accidentally saved under name of Trump official

Re: An authentic failure

"I've never used Signal, but if it doesn't provide any trust model for participants, then it's not very secure."

Signal's trust model is that they verify phone numbers. Therefore, if you send a message to a phone number, it should be encrypted for and readable by the person who controls that phone number alone. They don't verify that you entered the right phone number. Contact selection is up to you. This is the same trust model used in most other communications, where encryption is based on the identifier, whether that's an email address, username, or phone number, and selecting the identifiers they want to communicate with is the user's responsibility.

Phone number verification has its own weaknesses and you could argue that Signal has some gaps there, but that's not relevant in this case anyway.

Re: An authentic failure

You can set a username in Signal. There are two things you can do with that:

1. You can associate your real name with your number, which makes it easier to link those than you probably want.

2. You can associate a pseudonym with your number, which may help if you don't want to give out your number, but not very much.

If you do neither of those, then you just appear as your number, and it is up to the user to associate that number with something to identify it, the way everything else with a phone number works. Signal does not try to compare the contact name with something remote to verify the number. That wouldn't really work anyway. For example, people sometimes write reminders in name fields for people they rarely contact, and Signal isn't able to determine whether they did that or got the name wrong. It's also just not part of what they were intending. This is not something Signal does or will fix for you.

Re: A campaign staffer

The article says: "a campaign staffer who later took a job at the US National Security Council official".

Typo in the sentence aside, you'd have to know what exactly this person was doing at the NSC to know how plausible the story is, but they would be included on the basis of their current job, not what they did last year. One might also question whether the kind of things done by a campaign staffer are sufficient to be a good employee in national security areas, but since we have little information about what actions they took in either place or what other experience they might have had, we don't have enough data. Of course, that story could also be false, but it isn't as unrealistic as your comment suggests.

Re: Bugs and Blackhats

It's not ideal, but in many cases, it can be enough just to make it clear that you accept vulnerabilities and provide a way for the reports to get to someone who will read them and has a clue what they're looking at. I've had to report vulns to companies before, never received a bounty of any size for them, but knowing that there is a way to send them to the security team rather than sending something to customer support and hoping they can direct it from there really helps with my confidence and, in my experience, the chance that anything will happen.

I've also been on the other side of the bug bounty report system, and maybe having a lower payout will somewhat reduce the number of incorrect or junk submissions sent in. That is probably optimistic, but I can hope. In my experience, a lot of people who find vulnerabilities want to see them fixed more than just getting a payment. Even the highest offers, except cartoonish ones that are probably never going to get granted to anyone, exist, they're usually for bugs so bad that you could still theoretically make more by selling them to someone malicious. For example, that one that Apple gave $100k for, that would probably have sold for a bit more than that as a zero-day. But a lot of people would be unwilling to sell it as such and many who would be willing don't know how to find the people who buy such things. You also have to add a premium to the price you receive for hiding your illegal actions. Hoping to outbid criminals is difficult for people who don't have an Apple-sized bank account, but you may not need to.

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

Re: Importing more than exporting?

What you missed while defending it is that, when the population is low, you import less because you need less stuff. You might have a higher proportion of imports compared to your economy (26.5% for Canada and 13.1% for US) or a higher value of imports per person, but your total imports is lower because your population is low. Meanwhile, when you have a lot of resources, a country that needs them and has a population ten times the size of yours is likely to import them from you, making your total exports high, especially as your small population won't need to buy and may not be able to process it all locally, for example Canadian petroleum getting processed in the US because the US already had refineries that worked well with it. Trade deficits, which is what these tariffs were based on, is total exports minus total imports, and does not take into account the relative size of populations or economies. Your statement is correct, but it doesn't work as a defense because you're comparing two different things. The statement only looks reasonable because you misunderstood it and used different metrics.

EU may target US tech giants in tariff response

Re: Hmm

Retaliatory tariffs were a logical method in previous rounds of this. Essentially, the workflow goes like this:

1. Country A applies 20% tariffs on Country B because they think that will help them.

2. Country B applies 20% tariffs on country A.

3. Country B to country A: "You don't like these after all, do you? We don't like yours. Could we call the whole thing off?"

4. Country A, getting unhappy with their citizens reactions to both sets of tariffs, does so.

5. Both tariffs are removed.

This is probably not going to work the same way this time. However, since it has worked before, it is being tried. It's also being tried because there aren't a lot of other methods available to respond to a move like this.

Amazon's Project Kuiper satellites now boarding the rocket to relevance

Re: Amazon subsidised satellite comms: A loss leader?

You don't need to sell it as a loss leader to sell it to those sectors, and in fact doing so would be counterproductive. To make sense as a loss leader, there has to be a plan to make money on some other service to equal or exceed the amount you're not getting from sale of the service directly. I fully expect that they'll sell to air and sea users, but they can afford to price that high as competitors, both in LEO and geosync, have been doing for quite a while.

If you are in agreement with the creator of this thread that a loss leader position makes sense, the closest thing I could come up with that works with both the posts is that traffic to AWS could be charged at a low rate while traffic to other places on the internet could be charged as a high rate, thus giving people reason to buy more AWS resources for things they intend to contact from remote sources. I'm not sure how much that counts as a loss leader, but it has a similar spirit, so we can go with it. It might work, but not for consumers, and it may not have as much an effect on businesses either. If the base service price is not competitive with other companies, it probably won't sell unless everything already runs on AWS. The more predictable price which can also contact AWS will probably be preferred. So if they went with that price, they might find that they're doing nothing but subsidizing existing AWS users with relatively cheap connectivity and not making their money back. I therefore doubt that they are planning to do that. I think they'll price it to earn a profit on direct sales, both to remote industrial customers and to rural customers, especially in North America, who don't have good terrestrial options.

Wikipedia's overlords bemoan AI bot bandwidth burden

Re: If you can't beat `em. . .

Oh, what an excellent idea. We really must get on to Wikimedia and tell them to make that. It could look something like this. But you know what would be even better, how about they make a version that can be accessed like a web server so you don't have to change your code at all to scrape it, and it can all be done on a local computer. To make downloading as cheap as possible, they could use mirrors and individuals. That could look something lie this.

This is not like the copyright problems LLM creators also have. Wikipedia doesn't mind having bots access their content. They mind having so much bandwidth usage on their servers when any bot creator who put about five minutes into researching this could use either of the solutions I linked to. Those files include the images and video as well as the text, although if you just want the text, they both have already split that out for you.

I don't know about that. LLM companies waste a ton of power on a lot of computers. They could afford to do small proof of work puzzles for their page views. Especially as any challenge a site uses has to be quickly solvable by a low-end, several years old consumer machine. It would help, but I'm not sure it would help enough unless the puzzles were large enough that individual users were suffering slow load times and high heat and power output from their general application. In turn, that would embolden people who lock access to their services behind apps, because if you use that, at least you don't have to do a puzzle for every image on the Wikipedia article you loaded.

Both. Wikipedia doesn't use them because it is intentionally open to requests from all types of systems, and bot defense blocks plenty of humans who do something slightly unusual, hence why using a browser other than the big four or one of those that's not the right version will get CloudFlare to complain. And yet, CloudFlare's protection mechanisms are fragile and not that hard to bypass. It's annoying if you are a small bot creator who just wants to attack one site, so it sometimes works, but if your business is scraping the entire internet because you think you own it, you can bypass those protections relatively easily if you put your mind to it. I've bypassed CloudFlare's blocks with a bot before and it didn't take very long. They have multiple levels, my code probably wouldn't have done well against any one but the one the site I wanted to access was set to, and that was a few years ago so if I dug out the code and tried it, it probably wouldn't work anymore, but it worked then and I could act in a very bot-like manner without being blocked.

Introducing Windows on arm. And by arm, we mean wrist

Re: Windows on Arm has been around since the Surface RT

Windows Phone may have improved significantly, but that doesn't mean that it had what was needed to last in the market. By repeatedly changing things and breaking compatibility, they annoyed users and developers, most of whom would never return. That might also have improved their software, but without sufficient developers, they'd never get the third-party software that users wanted, and without enough users, they wouldn't turn that around. At some point, they had to give up on a failing product, even if that product had a better interface and design.

I'd be interested if you think they had a reason to expect that it would have grown in popularity had they continued. I never used Windows Phone myself because of those above factors. By the time that I heard praise for its interface, Microsoft was fresh off abandoning users of Windows Phone 7 and 8, and I didn't want to buy something for it to be abandoned again. Update lifespan had been annoying me about Android, and Windows Phone seemed worse. I probably missed quite a bit about it, but as a fan, did you see things that could have been helpful to its longevity other than a nice UI?

China hits back at America with retaliatory tariffs, export controls on rare earth minerals

Re: Some time ago I made a few posts about the USA being 'number 1'

Why do you assume that this article or this paper is painting US tariffs in a good light? While this article only uses the word "weaponize" for China's actions, do you see them praising the US's? How about the many other articles describing how damaging those tariffs are expected to be and demonstrating that the US is also using their tariffs as a weapon. I think you are mistaken in ascribing that opinion to The Register or to this author.

Not that you need to work hard to show how the US is weaponizing tariffs; the announcements by the people putting in the tariffs make it very clear that they are intended as offensive actions against people seen as competitors at best, enemies at worst. Nearly every discussion of relations between the US and another country involves a tariff threat to make that country do something desired. Admittedly, that's just one of about four things the US appears to think a tariff can do, and tariffs are not great tools for any of them, but they're really not hiding the intent to use them as a punishment. In fact, even when they consider a use of tariffs that's less often seem as a punishment, they still phrase it like that. One could make a pro-tariff speech about the self-sufficiency and local prosperity they are intended to create, and many who support them have made such an argument before because it sounds the most optimistic, but the US isn't making those statements central to their announcements, instead focusing on all the bad things bad countries have been doing to them, mostly without clarification. They have made it ridiculously obvious how they see tariffs and the people on which they are placed. While some journalists will probably defend these or change the arguments to look more sympathetic, I have not seen any on The Register fail to note the statements made or the likely results.

On the issue of AI copyright, Blair Institute favors tech bros over Cool Britannia

Re: "text and data mining"...

I've been in your position, and I do wish that companies would be more accepting when people offer to help improve their services. I would also wish to weaken copyright protection for some types of compilations. For example, when Oracle and Google were arguing over the copyright to function definitions in an API (rather than their implementations), I was firmly on the Google (they should not be copyrightable) side of that argument. It sounds like I would want what you copied to be freely available as well, but that would be a blanket policy, not one triggered by their action or inaction, and if my assumption is incorrect about what the data entails, if the publicly-available sets contained more original work for instance, I would have the opposite opinion. The challenge is that I cannot bring myself to accept that their decision not to is severe enough to cancel copyright over it. I derive this unwillingness from two mostly independent reasons.

The first one is that, there are a lot of complications whenever an external person offers to help with things. I find your descriptions believable and I stand corrected that you had no commercial motives, but I've had experience with the alternative. I work in security, which means that my employers are frequently open to submission of security problem reports from the public, and I have reviewed these. They occasionally turn up useful things, which is why we do them and offer to pay people, but I've also had to deal with many people who offer things that are not security problems either because they are attempting to get a payout or because they don't understand how systems work well enough to know what we could fix and what things have a security-related outcome. This means that I've frequently had to decline submissions. And no, I'm not the guy who declines real security issues because I don't want to fix them; those companies don't have bug bounty emails in the first place. I have submitted problems to those people before, though. Using anything where declining an offer of help is sufficient evidence would require a lot of work to filter out unreasonable submissions, and I am not comfortable assuming that would happen.

The second is that I generally oppose restrictions on copyright which are about an action. Something should be covered or not based on simple rules, rather than attempting to control what the creator does with it at all times. Many such regulations have been suggested, usually by people who would really prefer that copyright would be eliminated but they don't find many to agree with them. If you don't update your website, that doesn't make your work less valuable. It's quite possible that if you did update it, your work would be more valuable, but copyright protects work because of its original value, not to mandate the creation of any available additional value later. I may be annoyed by people squatting on things they have, but I don't think that qualifies me to punish those who do; it certainly doesn't for people who do that with physical or financial things, so I don't see why it should if those happen to be copyrighted works.