Posts by doublelayer

Apple-Intel divorce to be final next year

Re: Is it just me?

In defense of the article, many of the phones that came before the IOS and Android wave needed low power but didn't need or, in many cases, have good performance. Larger mobile OSes, running applications in an environment that allowed them to do more things, meant that there was a substantial increase in the need for CPU power without raising the power consumption very much. Many of the operating systems that came before had limited multitasking, either because they hadn't bothered to write it or because they wanted to have good performance out of relatively restricted hardware. Windows Mobile was to some extent an exception there, but IOS and Android did see an acceleration in resource usage. I'm not entirely sure that's what the article intended to say, but it is the most accurate way I can interpret their statement.

Re: Royalty

Given that I was not talking about IP, but what actually happens out here in the real world when you have some hardware with a RISC-V chip in it, your post is irrelevant. If I was talking about IP law, your post would still be irrelevant, because it's an opinion on what they dislike. Here's when that's relevant: when we're having a discussion about what we want the law to be, what we would write if we had that power, or what we're campaigning for. We are not having that discussion.

Re: Take it or leave it...

I have a feeling OCLP is not going to help Intel machines when Mac OS 27 goes ARM-only. There are only so many things the skilled people there can do. It works for now, but don't count on it lasting.

Re: Royalty

"How much does the *A* in *ARM* pay in IP royalties for its cores?"

Apple isn't the A in ARM. That was "advanced" and before that, it was "Acorn". Apple was there when the corporate version of ARM was created, but they didn't stay with it all the way through. They are a licensee like others, and while they probably got a discount on their license by planning to build so many of them, they got the full-strength license which lets them design their own cores, so the answer to your question is probably a lot plus the cost of doing the design themselves.

"That is the big draw of RISC-V; royalty free designs for all."

You are mistaken. The ISA is royalty-free. The designs are covered by whatever terms the designers put on them. If you want to use a core today, not by designing your own, then you'll be paying royalties to whatever design company you select for that chip design. The difference is that the design company didn't have to pay the RISC-V people to make it.

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

"I don't get why there is a division"

Because in most cases, the alternatives work completely differently. There isn't a single standard that anything can implement and you just drop in the one you prefer. If you mix and match, you'll get things that break in places you don't expect because they were written for or integrated with only one of those. Therefore, almost everything chooses one of the options and makes everything work with that. In principle, you could integrate everything with everything and then let people choose what they wanted to run, but that's an inefficient process that most people don't want to bother with.

It all gets settled eventually; a bunch of projects start to try implementing some part of the system, many crash and burn, the remaining ones fight among themselves until the less popular ones start to lose users and be cannibalized for their useful code, and we find something that pretty much everyone uses. Then someone comes up with something the existing one handles badly and they start another version and this process starts over.

Old but gold: Paper tape and punched cards still getting the job done – just about

Re: digital vs physical

Which is a problem, but the other situation was often not different. The file once was stored in twenty places, but there was no list of twenty URLs. Instead, there were many pages with only one or two of them. And they didn't work, and they didn't work because people who had once stored it somewhere said "there are twenty places where this is stored, nineteen will be just fine" before they deleted it. I have a few pages specifically intended to archive things, and I have designed a few safety mechanisms to try to keep them available for as long as possible. For example, I have built a link shortener and I always give out those addresses, which means that if I ever have to move these to a different URI, for example if the domain name I used to use is no longer available to me*, then I can change the place the shortened link goes without breaking anywhere it is posted (the benefits of running the shortener yourself). Still, if that bus with my name on it comes along, I wouldn't count on the longevity of this system, which is why I manually point archive sites at such pages when I've made them.

* Some of the archives I've made are hosted on someone else's domain because they don't relate to me personally but might relate to them, but that makes it more fragile than if they're on my domain, because I'm a little obsessive about not breaking links even if it means my site's directories are not the cleanest.

Chap claims Atari 2600 'absolutely wrecked' ChatGPT at chess

Re: eight-bit processor

What does your algorithm look like for that, because I had a program that played it which I could beat if I started first, but only because it had what I assume was a hard-coded algorithm rather than matching mine. Thus, if I started with a corner cell, it would take the middle one instead of blocking me with the opposite corner, and it would always obligingly pick one of the remaining corners for its second move, allowing me to guarantee a win. It had two ways to guarantee a stalemate. The only way to win that game is the other side isn't thinking right and you are. Once both players are older than about five, I think that covers most of the games.

Re: Why?

I would guess that many took this sentence:

"Try training your AI model on chess game records and you would have, I suspect, a very different outcome."

And interpreted it as this sentence:

"Try training your AI model large language model on chess game records and you would have, I suspect, a very different outcome."

If you read it like that, then they're probably wrong, because there were chess records in this LLM's training data. Of course, you could train an LLM only on chess records, which might make it a little better, but probably just shoot its language abilities in the foot without helping too much with the chess because words are far less reliable to encode chess position than a chess board data structure. But if you read it the way they actually wrote it, then they're right, because people have used non-LLM machine learning with the goal of having it be good at playing chess and it worked very well. Of course, if they were still thinking of an LLM there, then the interpretation could be correct, but I didn't think that was what they were saying.

Re: Why?

A lot of those chess-playing programs were trained in a very similar way that LLMs were trained. Throw a bunch of chess situations at it, have it make moves, reward it for winning, punish it for losing, go home for a while, see how good the thing is eventually. LLMs were trained with a completely different goal (how likely are these words to appear next to each other). In both cases, a lot of thought went into the mathematical aspects of this process, but if you're suggesting that the chess-playing bots are following algorithms written by chess masters that they're merely evaluating, that's not generally what happened. You can make a chess engine that is good at playing chess without being able to play chess well yourself.

Playing chess does not require intelligence. Therefore, I have a feeling we will agree about the intelligence of current software. LLMs are not intelligent. Chess engines are also not intelligent. Neither of these will ever become intelligent as long as they keep training it for the set of goals they have. But a chess engine is capable of playing chess so well that one way to see if people at competition level are cheating is to run some of them and see if the human is getting too close to their moves, and it isn't doing that by having some intelligent human personally tell it how to make the right moves. It is doing it by being able to calculate much faster than the human can.

Ex-NASA Admin pick blames Musk ties for pulled nomination

I have searched for this, and so far, I haven't found it. The closest I came was an article describing a failure to detect life using instruments the rovers have on them, but that means either sending more complicated equipment that can detect it (probably not Mars-certified yet) or bringing the samples back so it can be tested here (exactly what they're talking about).

That doesn't prove that the study you're talking about is incorrect, but to justify the added risk of sending humans and the added complexity of getting them there and back without contaminating Mars or killing them, we should have a clear understanding of what limitations they would face using robots and what limitations they would face while present. They would have the ability to look around more freely, which should help, but most other actions they do would be limited by the need to survive and preserve as much of the original area as possible so, if they failed, someone or something else could try again. If we concluded that the range of vision was the problem, we should ask ourselves whether that problem could be fixed or improved by changing the way the cameras worked before jumping straight to sending humans.

If you want to start paying for the human travel capabilities, go ahead. However, for a government-funded operation whose goal is to get samples, they should decide whether human flight is cheaper (no), better (no), less prone to disaster (no), more likely to succeed (no), or less likely to cause damage to other things (no) than a robotic mission. If several of those things were yes, it would justify the expense, even assuming that the astronauts were just fine with the high chance of death for the spirit of adventure. Which they probably are not, by the way.

This doesn't mean that humans will never leave, but that in our scientific exploration, we're not going to prioritize having humans dig up some rocks at the cost of probably killing the humans who do it and being able to do it once for every ten times we could have done it with robots. Sending robots will also teach us more which will be useful when we want to send humans. Returning rock samples will give us scientific information, whereas landing a human there will just show off that we could or more likely demonstrate that we actually couldn't.

Musk and Trump take slap fight public as bromance ends

Re: No room for two

Weirdly complex. For example, some of the territories have the concept of legislative citizenship, meaning that they are not considered normal citizens, but a law was passed saying they are. This means, theoretically, that if that law is repealed, they would lose their citizenship. If that happened, most likely some courts would have to look at whether that violated the constitution, which it might but it's also unclear. If the territory concerned obtained independence, it could probably work in the same way that most colonies did post independence, but if the territory was still a territory, depriving its inhabitants of citizenship could be considered a violation of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. For the moment, it's a lot like an old server that is running, so nobody wants to try poking at it in case it doesn't come back up.

Citizenship is really complicated. Determining who is a citizen and how can be a much harder process than it appears. That is why my explanations on 18th century US citizenship appear to be quite unpopular. Either people think I'm wrong, but haven't tried to explain why, or they don't like the fact that citizenship was already defined by colonies* and the replacement government attached its definition to those definitions, creating an ugly mess of contradictory definitions that were only cleared away with time and a complete rewrite of the citizenship definition eighty years later, doing plenty of damage to people in the meantime. These things are not limited to that time either. There were confusing aspects to what happened to citizenships when countries divided, for example Pakistan, Czechoslovakia, or Sudan. It was a bit easier when countries like Germany or Yemen united, but not one sentence definition easy.

* And by the way, it wasn't just the US. The same colonial citizenship regulations and need to redefine them for the new country, often inheriting the data from the one thing they had, was true of all the British colonies. And the French colonies. And everyone else's colonies.

Re: No room for two

I get what you're saying, but it is not matched by the way citizenship law worked at the time. I know that the US did not exist at the time of the birth of these people. Theoretically, that means that there were no "natural born citizens" until the first birth post-independence. That was not how it worked. The relevant portion of the Constitution reads:

The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.

Could that be clearer? Yes, but although it later needed to be expanded, it meant that being born in the territories that became the states was enough to make you a citizen, and the laws upheld this. For example, when naturalization laws were passed quite quickly, those laws imposed race and religion restrictions, but those did not apply to people who had been citizens in British America before it became the US, who by law remained citizens. The presidents you are referring to were born in the colonies that became the US.

As I said in another comment, the distinction is mostly irrelevant; they didn't care at the time, and nobody alive has any effect from it now. Citizenship law is a bit more complex to "no country at the time, therefore no citizenship". You can see many more recent examples with countries emerging from colonialism, splitting, or coming under other governments that reset the laws. There are a lot of more complicated parts.

Re: No room for two

Because when the people were writing the rules, they were nervous about foreigners, and nobody's bothered to change them yet. Nothing says that rule is the best one, it's just what's written there and will be the rule until enough people decide to change it. A lot of the rules those guys wrote have aged badly and either been replaced or should be, although some others have worked out well enough, so perhaps this is one of them.

And what "natural born citizen" means is that you have to have been a citizen at the time of your birth. That means that being born in the country or to citizens counts, everything else doesn't. The complexities of 18th century US citizenship law which decided who was a citizen when the country was founded are not very important nowadays since they no longer affect anyone alive.

Re: No room for two

"It's how George Washington became president - he was born outside of the US at the time."

Not quite. Washington was born inside Virginia, which meant he was considered a native-born American as Virginia was part of the US. The same is true of all the presidents who were elected. There were some people who were possible candidates under that rule, though, most famously Alexander Hamilton, who didn't run for election but considered doing so. He was actually born outside of the land that became the US but qualified under that rule.

Your ransomware nightmare just came true – now what?

Re: Stop paying. Stop making excuses for piss-poor IT.

I definitely expect some will do that. I think it's more likely that will happen if you just have to use a method other than cryptocurrency than if it's always illegal, but either way, there will be those who ignore the law and pay anyway. The hope is that there will be enough who don't pay because it's illegal that ransomware operators find a different thing to do, hopefully not crime, though I wouldn't hold my breath. I think that's the only chance we have to accomplish that goal, and although it won't be fast or easy, nothing else we have will work at all.

Re: Stop paying. Stop making excuses for piss-poor IT.

I'm not sure I agree, but even if I did, it doesn't matter. There are lots of dishonest ways of slipping out of responsibility and people in power are great at using them.

Responsibility is a complicated thing and dangerous when used improperly. Even if you decide that it can always climb the corporate org chart without dissipating at all, it would still extend back down. So we'll fire and fine the CEO, but why not also do so to the CSO, the middle manager, the line manager, and the team that were supposed to have backups but did not? It was the lack of backups that was the problem, no? Well, we could do the same to those who designed the security systems between the machines which allowed it to spread. And to that user who clicked on the phishing email and entered their credentials. And to that guy who used the USB drive which spread it onto a different network. And to that IT person who could have blocked USB drives but didn't. Do any of these people have no responsibility?

In my experience, a lot of people have some responsibility, but no single one deserves all of it. I prefer to focus on solutions rather than punishments, and one of the reasons I prefer that is that the punishments always seem to go to someone who probably does have a little responsibility, but certainly not close enough to all of it to deserve the consequences they get. Hard-coding that to the CEO isn't going to fix that, because it gives everyone who isn't the CEO carte blanche to act as incompetently as they like on the theory that the CEO is supposed to identify that they have and prevent it from causing any problem. In my company, the CEO has no clue what I'm doing. Expecting enough information about that to rise through the management chain and go to them is not logical. If they specifically decide to cut programs we need and that causes the problem, then by all means punish them. If I am the one who broke everything, then I should face the consequences instead.

Re: Stop paying. Stop making excuses for piss-poor IT.

I prefer banning payments to banning cryptocurrency for three independent reasons:

1. Banning payments is much more practical. Banning cryptocurrency is going to run you up against a lot of people who want to keep making money from normal cryptocurrency trading, assuming you're doing it globally, and if you only do it in your country, it makes little difference; the company can pay someone in another country to do the transaction for them and that would be legal.

2. I'm not convinced that a company willing to pay an illegal ransom under the table will somehow balk at making an illegal crypto exchange under the table, so it doesn't sound like your alternative fixes any problem you were referring to.

3. If cryptocurrency was eliminated entirely as an option, but it was still legal to pay ransoms, then as long as the ransomware people can think of an alternative, they continue. They're getting payments measured in millions. That's a lot of incentive to find some other way of transferring money around, and this was possible before Bitcoin came into existence. If paying ransoms was illegal, then no matter how the companies did it, they'd still be breaking that law. I fully expect that some would continue to pay, violating the law, but I think there would be a significant decline and I'm not convinced anything else would make such a similar dent. Banning cryptocurrency might be the second largest thing we could do, but because of option 1, I don't think you can.

Re: Stop paying. Stop making excuses for piss-poor IT.

I'm probably close to being one of those security people that annoy you, and I will say that, because no matter how much I might want to do all of the things you want (very much yes on most, but not all), I don't get to. I can't make ransom payments illegal, even though I think that doing so would be the biggest and only thing we could do to make a dent in ransomware. I'll continue suggesting it, as I have been doing for at least five years, and until that ends up convincing politicians, I have to deal with the situation where it isn't illegal and I can't make it.

That applies to anything about who is liable; it's also a legal thing I can't do anything about, but there is a reason I'd be cautious. Any time the suggestion is to find someone, the CEO or otherwise, and drop a load of bricks on them when something goes wrong, there is potential for that to backfire. No law would ever be that extreme, if only for the situation where the CEO approved a massive budget and some incompetent or malicious IT person failed to use it. Which means that there's always some chance that the person who gets all the blame and suffers the worst consequences won't be the CEO, but whoever the CEO's assistants can best pick as the scapegoat, which will be much easier for them than it will be for the scapegoat to turn around. The people I've seen suggesting it always manage to phrase it so they won't be in the crosshairs, which is unjust as they might actually have some responsibility for it, and even if we decided that was the best of the bad options, you can't successfully enact the "CEO is always responsible, IT never is" law. There are many risks in an enthusiastic blame game and so, even if I could pass that law just by saying it, I wouldn't suggest doing it with that severity.

I'm not exactly sure what "wage decimation" you're referring to, but if the company has decided to outsource, then I don't get to tell them not to, and if I fail to convince them that there's a risk big enough that they choose to do it voluntarily, then what do you suggest I do? I can either do my job: secure the outsourced workers as best I can, or I can refuse to do that and quit, but I can't make them not outsource, and in many cases, this isn't a security problem, so I wouldn't be consulted in the first place.

X's new 'encrypted' XChat feature seems no more secure than the failure that came before it

Re: E2E not a means to this end

While any company can try that in court, they are not guaranteed to win. That's why Musk isn't claiming E2E on his thing; he isn't offering it, and if he lied about having it, he might get a big lawsuit like Zoom did when they lied about offering it. A vague "Bitcoin-style encryption" which means nothing is much easier to defend and hopefully sounds good to the kind of people he wants to start trusting it.

Re: E2E not a means to this end

"A US tech company offering E2E is anathem, because the messages are still exposed, just only to the company."

No. By definition, a US company offering E2E doesn't see the messages, because there is E2E. If they can see them, then they are lying about offering E2E, and their nationality has nothing to do with it because the lying, which is criminal fraud, is the problem.

Of course, there are limitations to what E2E provides, but from your comment, you are not giving it credit for those things it actually can do. You're also misinterpreting the point of Signalgate. That was not people concerned about the use of Signal because there's a problem with the app. It was people concerned about the use of tools other than the ones that are supposed to be used because using other tools makes it a little too easy to accidentally add in someone who shouldn't be added in or, as in one case, it makes it really easy to deliberately include someone who shouldn't be included. It was about their actions, not the app itself.

Re: WhatsApp

I don't use WhatsApp, but as I understand the mechanism, you can only recover your messages if you transfer them and the key used to decrypt them from your old device to your new device. If your old device gets smashed before you get a new device, I think all you can do is regain control of the account so you can send new messages, but the old ones are lost. That is how proper E2E encryption would look. Of course, as you say, it doesn't prove that WhatsApp doesn't have a copy of the messages and a way to decrypt them, but there would be no way to know that unless you had and read the source to everything. You have to choose whether to trust the people who made it, and while I don't think they're lying about that part, I have other trust problems with them so I don't use their app anyway.

Cops want Apple, Google to kill stolen phones remotely – so why won't they?

Re: Just legislate

Of course, they could do that. Pointing out that we already have that, the replacement would be less convenient all round*, and that there's no need to legislate, would perhaps indicate that you could skip that part. Unless you disagree with that, in which case you could explain why that legislation makes any sense.

* Current way to disable the lock: you authenticate with the account you used to lock it. Your proposed methods:

"getting a GPS reading from it": Spoofable.

"knowing other local device MAC addresses": You could try to harvest those, but the bigger problem is that most users wouldn't know them and they change, so the phone's accepted set would be small and possibly out of date by the time you got it back.

"showing up at a DMV or other government facility with sufficient ID": And this is all you're left with. So instead of authenticating normally, we're going to waste the time of multiple people to do a less reliable version of the same thing.

They can be reset, and therefore erased, but you still won't be able to use them because they won't finish setup without being connected to the internet, authenticated to the old account, and disassociated from that account. You can erase an iPhone too by using the firmware reset option that exists for cases where the phone is otherwise bricked, but again, that just lets you erase the original user's content, not take over the device.

Re: Not sure what the cops want from Apple here

Activation lock is more severe than that. You can't set it up, meaning no access to the internal apps either. Theoretically you can make an emergency call from it without going through the setup process, and I'm not even sure that works. An activation-locked iPhone is restricted enough that you can't use it as a burner phone either. The same goes for Android; a locked phone will require an internet connection and an account check before you can use any of the built in features.

I expect that several implementations of this can be bypassed, but that is true of almost anything you can do. It can't be bypassed easily.

Re: Nice non sequitur there...

They definitely could do this, but I think it is worth asking why they should. They already have the locking mechanisms. They work. Users can activate them. Why do they need a new way to activate it when they already have existing ones, and the IMEI version will be more fragile and problematic than the your account version?

Re: Do the opposite

There is already a remote lock procedure on both IOS and Android. The difference is that it's initiated by the user, logging into the account they set up, and locking the device. They both have locks on phones which mean that you can't just reset them and use your own account because, if a device has previously been attached to one account, it won't attach to a new account until released by the old account. This means that the level of bricking they recommend is already available, and that method has several advantages because, unlike the IMEI locking option, it's easily reversible if you find that you actually lost the thing and found it again, it doesn't take a police report to start the process, and it comes with several options of how severe you want to get (just lock it versus erase the whole thing).

Datacenters have a public image problem, industry confesses to The Reg

Re: Cry me a river.

While there are politicians who don't get it, a lot of people will try to see if they can get someone else to pay for their new building with bad promises. We should reject those applications if we get a chance. Keep in mind that many of these arguments aren't about government-funding, or that would be the first, most convincing, and likely only argument. They're about not wanting the buildings there at all, even when they're privately funded. There are some valid reasons not to want them there, but as long as the people making those arguments stick in the "I don't benefit from datacenters" argument, they're hurting their own point because they benefit from many, and this might be one of them. It's not only the CDN nodes that send static content, either. Plenty of DCs that have more processing capacity are important for many people, and if it's not you, it is your neighbors. I may not use TikTok, but a lot of people do and they want their videos chopped up and filtered and distributed, and that takes servers. If my neighbors switched the script, they could name things I use servers for that they don't. The argument of benefit is never going to work well. Those who would prefer for the DCs not to be built would do better to focus on the harms they cause rather than the benefits they think they're not getting.

Re: "Because they don't quite connect the fact that their entire life runs through datacenters."

Yes, both of those things use datacenters too. However, the servers we're getting the article and forums from are almost certainly in a datacenter. So are the ones that provide any other website we've visited today. If we eliminated both advertising and AI, we'd still need a bunch of datacenters, and the only reason our need for them would decrease is if the loss of advertising killed off most websites. You already know this, I'm sure. So much of what we do involves sending data through the internet, and almost all of that traffic goes to some datacenter. It might be a private one, only operated for one company. It might be a colo. It might be a cloud one where lots of people rent space. But it's almost always one of those. That is not going to change.

Re: Cry me a river.

You could have a nonprofit datacenter, but you've basically just reinvented the colo. We have private colos already and they work fine. In many cases, there's not a lot that a nonprofit one would do that a private one wouldn't also do. The only possibility, cutting costs by eliminating normal utilities like UPS or inter-user security so they could cut prices, could easily be done by private ones but it's probably good that it hasn't.

Re: Cry me a river.

Your description may work for AI datacenters, but your more expansive phrasing makes that the one argument the people from the article actually countered. Before AI, a lot of those datacenters did, in fact, provide services to the general public. Not a public service as in something without a profit motive, but people who like using the internet were often getting a lot of what they chose to download out of one of those buildings.

That's a pretty good reason not to subsidize them; the private companies will be able to afford them otherwise. It's a good reason not to fight about where they go; they're not actually creating waves of jobs. It's a good reason to make them handle their own additional power and water needs by paying for the increased infrastructure, which they often already do. But as with a lot of other private infrastructure, the average person benefits from its existence more than they know, and any statement as broad as "people don’t want datacenters because they don’t benefit from them" is wrong about any person who uses the internet.

KDE targets Windows 10 'exiles' claiming 'your computer is toast'

Re: RE: technical expertise required

Come on. A lot of those are overblown or so generic that they could apply to anything. For example, what "filesystem problems" are you referring to? Because I don't see filesystems failing routinely on any OS, but when I have broken them, I have done it on Linux. But that doesn't work as ammunition against Linux either, because almost universally, when I have broken them, it was because I chose to monkey around with something I didn't fully understand, something the average user wouldn't do, and so it's my fault.

Many of the other categories you have there ("driver problems" and "configuration problems", for example) apply to Linux as much as they do to Windows. Others ("BSODs") apply to Windows, but far less than they did to Windows 95, and if I wanted to be anti-Linux, I'd just replace it with "kernel panics" and pretend that the average user actually sees those routinely even though most people probably haven't. Others ("infinite reboots") pretty much don't apply to anything, although you could break either thing enough to have that happen. The rest ("application problems") are so vague that they might as well say nothing. I've seen similar scare lists of why Linux is awful and you should just not try it, most of them completely unconvincing for similar reasons, such as mentioning the need to manually recompile kernels which almost no normal user would ever need to do, but if you tell someone who doesn't know that, it looks terrible.

Re: KDE is Acting Like a Leader

I disagree on most of that, but agree about the likely results. I think this window is much better for Linux's chances than any previous one set up by Microsoft. When older versions of Windows went out of support, you could try to update any hardware you had to something later. Most of the time, that hardware was sufficiently out of date that it wouldn't matter. For instance, if you tried to update something that came with XP when XP went out of support in 2014, chances are it wouldn't run it well, but you could still do it and find out why 2002-era computers were considered obsolete. Some other times didn't even have that; Windows 10 was often more efficient than Windows 7 and so upgrading those generally went just fine. Either way, you had the choice to run something patched on your old hardware without having to work too hard to bypass requirements. Windows 11 won't install by default without meeting the arbitrary requirements, meaning that there will be people who would have updated but will be unable. That wasn't present before, so I think more people will be in the situation of trying to find a way to make use of the hardware they still find useful. Linux has the ability to meet that need, so I think it is an opportunity.

And, like the previous opportunities, I expect this one will have such a tiny effect that nobody notices. Many will run unpatched. Many others will see the warnings and decide that, regrettably, they have to buy new hardware. Many of those who have heard of Linux will Google it, read some web pages that talk about things they don't understand and provide CLI instructions they don't know how to use, and give up. For those who want Linux to be more successful, there are, unfortunately, no massive problems in the way. Massive problems could at least be focused on and tackled by a concerted effort. There are, instead, lots of little stumbling blocks. One person can often guide a few users around those to a successful result, but it takes manual effort, and the people who can remove one block often don't bother because it's such a small problem they don't think it will matter.

Re: Terminator: [Breaks down door] I still love Vista, baby.!

I doubt it. Netbooks running Linux may have been a little faster, but they wouldn't be if people tried to do Linuxy things with them. For the nontechnical user, the Netbook was essentially the forerunner of the Chromebook, a computer designed mostly for remote applications with specs to match. The 2-8 GB storage on the first EEE PC, for example, wouldn't have worked very well if people tried to run much local software. It was snappy as an SSD though, so as long as you didn't get close to filling it up, what it did would go quickly.

The situation is very different for those of us who were at home with Linux, though I knew many people who were big fans of Linux and hated netbooks nonetheless because they considered them underpowered and lacking important features. Still, our technical knowledge means we're better at fitting things into constrained areas and knowing when we can't accomplish that. Nontechnical users are less aware when the hardware they have is going to be incapable of doing something well enough and, when it is but you need to work at it to succeed, they don't have all the tools we have.

Re: Alarmist?

I don't think "alarmist" means dishonest. You can tell only the truth and still be alarmist if you describe things as more serious than they are. As long as the things you're describing are all real, you're view on their seriousness is only your opinion. I don't have much of a problem with KDE's phrasing of the situation. There will be vulnerabilities in an unpatched Windows 10 system, Microsoft would make similar claims if anyone was reading them to encourage people to update, and so I accept them. I do find the phrasing a bit more strident than I'd have written it, but that isn't a thing they need to do anything about.

Trump tariff turmoil hurting global smartphone market, but hitting US hardest

Re: AI May Be A Factor

Which isn't very useful, is it. We have two different guesses about how the market will respond, guesses that are contradictory. Since neither of us will be able to prove them until we have another year at least of data, and we probably won't be able to then either*, speculation is all any of us will be able to do.

* Let's say that, a year from now, there has been a substantial drop in number of phones sold. Was that drop due to AI features being unwanted? Was it due to tariffs? Was it due to phones not having usable updates? The answer is almost certainly all three, but to attribute it to any of those, we'd need to know how much effect each had. That's something manufacturers, with very specific data about which devices people bought, when, and for how much would find tricky to confidently determine. The data the rest of us get, total number of units by company, won't be enough to answer it then. Unless we find better sources, we'll still only be able to speculate then too.

Re: AI May Be A Factor

I haven't found it very hard to disable AI stuff that manufacturers of things thought I'd want. The reason: it costs them money to run the queries through their servers (the models are too big to run locally). I already paid for the hardware. That I don't want to use the expensive thing they built into their price is a benefit to them. It's not like advertising, which does earn them money and is therefore harder to get rid of. Of course, they can always change this.

Re: AI May Be A Factor

I doubt it. I am not put off by the inclusion of AI in a new device. I'll turn it off, and I'm pretty sure it will let me, and that will be the end of it. I think AI is just another thing the manufacturers think should add to the price that most buyers don't want to pay more for. That's not new. Manufacturers have been sticking useless things into their phones for a while now because there's basically two differences between low-end and high-end phones nowadays: more internal storage, which does matter a little to almost anyone*, and how many types of cameras there are on the back and how many pixels the non-main ones capture which probably matters to somebody, but not me.

When smartphones were new, there were basically no cheap options. For many of the years after that, the cheap ones were terrible. Now, although you can still find a terrible cheap Android phone if you work hard, the low-end devices are often reasonably capable and, for many users, hard to distinguish from the expensive ones. Phone manufacturers are still looking for the new advance that will cause massive demand, but none of them have found it. The same thing is why people don't replace their computers frequently anymore, and unless some heretofore unimagined feature is invented which revolutionizes the product again, it will probably happen to phones. Add in random price increases from tariffs and I'm not surprised that people aren't jumping to buy something.

* Internal storage matters even if you have an SD card slot. Most low-end phones still come with one, but only some types of data work well on it. You can store photos and music on an SD card, but apps often like to store their data on the internal memory and either don't let you move it, act oddly if you do, or benefit from the faster internal storage. I think a lot of Android manufacturers are deliberately capping the storage options for their cheaper devices because offering a low-end phone with more would compete too much with their high-end ones.

Windows 11 market share stalls ahead of Windows 10 cutoff

I'll take the other side of the bet. I think they will end normal support just as planned. Companies can buy extended support and they can update. Microsoft doesn't have to care about those who choose the neither option.

Re: Forced to Windows 11

Since they're all doing something very similar, they might find the hypocrisy hard to get over. Normally, that doesn't affect advertisement writers, but it could always happen. Apple could point out how terrible it is that Microsoft is cutting off support for perfectly functional hardware, but they would have to admit or hide the fact that any Mac of an age that couldn't update to Windows 11 also can't update to the latest Mac OS either. Chromebooks, meanwhile, are those things that come with a death date somewhere which you absolutely need to know before you buy one.

But why would you expect any of those companies to make a Linux distro? We've eliminated Apple and Google already, but why would Bezos personally or Amazon as a company try to do anything against Microsoft? They don't have a product to push. Unless they've looked at the market of desktop operating systems and decided they want to jump in, there's no reason for them to try. If they have looked at that market, they've probably decided not to jump in because it's an expensive market and not the best suited for new entrants. They use Linux all the time themselves, and they have their distro for server usage, but both of those things make them money whereas trying to make a desktop Linux would not.

Re: Landfill

I didn't say ignoring the updates was a good idea. I just said I expected people to do it. When people decided not to update from XP, Vista, etc, that was also not a good idea and people did it. I have been helping people to update their computers to whatever they want, whether that's Windows 11 or Linux, to avoid having exactly this happen to them. My small area of influence isn't going to change the statistics very much though. I predict that there will be many who don't bother to update and some of them will regret that decision eventually.

Re: Landfill

They've been pushing Windows 11 for years now. I don't think they'll manage to make that more annoying than it already is. Of course, they could try, but I don't think they'll succeed. I know people who have been ignoring those update notifications* for years. They can ignore anything. I don't think scarier text in the notification they're ignoring is going to sway those people. I don't think Microsoft will actively stop the Windows 10 systems from operating, and I think you'd have to to have a difference compared to the other Windows versions, none of which did that either.

* There is a class of people I know who are capable of clicking an ignore button like clockwork every day but never look for the way to make the notification go away. I know that, if you ignore the Windows 11 update notification, it probably comes back eventually, but it won't come back in hours like it does if you just press the remind me later button. It's not just updates. I knew someone who, on my recommendation, set up Time Machine backups on their Mac and cheerfully dismissed the "you haven't backed up for X days" button for multiple years, which was easy to recognize because the message had a day counter. In their position, I would have either disabled the notifications, plugged in the backup drive to shut the thing up, or at an extreme disabled the backups I wasn't bothering to use, but they evidently never felt motivated to do any of those things.

Re: Landfill

It didn't happen any other time. I doubt it will happen this time. People continued to use XP, Vista, 7, and somehow 8 after those were replaced, and some still do use these to this day. People can continue to use Windows 10 machines even when there are no patches and I think a lot of home users will. Larger companies tend to replace their computers a little faster, and since anything released in the last seven years is almost certain to support 11, they're mostly going to be running compatible equipment for all their user desktops. Some of those companies may have intentionally stuck with 10 for ease of maintenance, and their waves of upgrades will push the number up a bit. Smaller companies act a lot like home users.

I don't think we'll see a big spike in Linux or Chrome OS use, and only a small one in availability of used computers.

What will UK government workers do with an extra 26 minutes a day?

Re: 26 mins per person, per day?

Or, to use the number next to it, an average wait time of over 23 minutes. Which isn't good, certainly, and we should try to do something about that. However, it's not surprising that a department where people call with complicated questions and thus probably take a lot of the time of the people answering calls has high wait times. The way to speed that up is to have more customer service people or fewer callers, and since the set of potential callers are everyone who pays tax, that's not likely to be an easy option. Still, I've had a lot longer hold times with many places. I have a feeling that, if the average hold time was brought down to a number everyone would be happy with (three minutes work for everyone?), there'd be complaints about the people who were employed to answer calls but didn't have any and were just sitting around.

Regulator sues product comparison site alleged to only compare products on which it earned commission

Re: Just as bad as "independent reviewers"

I disagree. I think it's worse than independent reviewers, because some exist who are actually doing reviews. And no, they don't have a certification of review trustworthiness. You have to evaluate that yourself. However, some of them are just interested in a certain type of product and enjoy publishing their views, and if you're interested in that kind of product as well, their views may be quite useful. I have several independent reviewers that I trust because they provide a lot of useful information, sometimes obsessively so. This means that I can avoid either collecting it manually from companies' websites or, more likely, I get information that wasn't in their product descriptions or spec sheets but I care about.

Of course, there are reviewers who simply publish a "buy this" review of whoever gives them a commission. In my experience, they're usually obvious and easily rejected before I've read two paragraphs of their output. A fraudulent comparison website that didn't compare things is probably worse than those reviewers as well if it put effort into pretending to compare to others. Perhaps not worse from an ethical perspective, but worse from the user's annoyance level and likeliness to get scammed by it.

Lenovo thought it could surf geopolitics, until Trump's sudden tariff changes

Re: It would have worked fine for Amazon

"PLEASE EXPLAIN HOW ONE HAS 145 PARTS PER HUNDRED? Or is what % means? Use correct thermology please'"

I'm sure your mangled English has some point here, but I'm not getting it. 145% means 145 parts per hundred, yes. In fact, when calculating costs, it means 245 parts per hundred since the original hundred parts are still there. So something that costs $500 to import would now cost $500 in the same costs as before and an additional $725 in tariffs, making for a total price of $1225. Now you know how percents work.

Anthropic CEO frets about 20% unemployment from AI, but economists are doubtful

And why do you believe any of that? Because it would be easy for car manufacturers to do that now: not sell any of their cars, but merely lease them, or in fact operate a system where, when you need a car, you go pick up the nearest one with an electronic unlocking system, drive it to your destination, and leave it. They're not doing that. They're not doing that for a reason: people are willing to pay more to own a car than they are to temporarily use one. If the cars drive themselves, the benefit of owning one is not reduced, and many of the biggest problems are not solved. You might be able to get one if your driveway is located in a sufficiently dense city, but people who don't might value having one near their house, guaranteed, rather than hoping that one will eventually arrive. While it makes the system of operating them as a fleet a little easier, and I'm sure someone would try it, there's no reason to expect they would try to end the concept of ownership, especially when the revenue from repairing old ones is so nice.

Also, what does that have to do with any of this? The problem is with safety or user perception of safety, and the specific part you replied to was about what happens if people become concerned that improper development has caused automatic driving systems to operate unsafely too near to their bodies for comfort. What happens is they get angry and ban them, and then they don't operate, whether owned, leased, or fleeted out. So whether you want automatic driving or you plan to eliminate your driveway, you want to be careful to not sell incomplete automatic driving as more functional than it is.

You've oversold the state of FSD, unless you're referring specifically to Tesla's FSD (we should probably use a different term for anyone else's as FSD is specifically Tesla's name for it and they're lying). If you are including Tesla's, you're just wrong.

The reason it isn't trusted is the same reason people do trust amusement park rides. Random stuff isn't supposed to happen in front of the rides, and the tracks are designed to make sure they follow the path set for them, which has been tested, and that nothing suddenly appears in front of them. On normal roads, you don't have that certainty. Therefore, if you're going to operate a machine on those roads, you want one that can handle it when cars do things that are unexpected. If we had a parallel network of roads where no humans were operating, maybe more automation could work. We don't have one, which means that you have three choices:

1. Automatic driving has to handle cars driven by humans. People in the automated cars prefer living to dying, but the car has someone else to blame for their death. If that's what's happening, people won't use the cars.

2. Automatic driving isn't allowed because nobody's figured out the liability involved in machines that can't handle the randomness of road travel being placed in the midst of the randomness of road travel.

3. You need to convince somebody to build a parallel road network. Good luck.

I support option 1, and I think we can get there. We will never get there if you insist that it already works. People will see that it doesn't, and if you're not careful, fearful people will force you into option 2. Smart people are working hard to try to accomplish option 1. Don't let them down with arguments like this.

Feds arrest DoD techie, claim he dumped top secret files in park for foreign spies to find

Re: Let me spy, make me a citizen?

It's not like he suggested becoming an employee of their secret services. I think we have very different concepts of treachery. I do not owe my country loyalty. I am loyal to things I find moral, some of which, such as democracy and human rights, my country represents. If they stopped doing those things, my loyalty to them has expired utterly as they have violated it first. Therefore, I don't expect someone wishing to become a citizen of my country to show it any more than that. They wish to live there, pay taxes there, vote there, and be subject to its laws. If they meet the conditions for citizenship, how fervently they love the country is irrelevant to me.

Your comment reminds me of a book set in World War II which always confused me when I first read it as a child. A Nazi spy ring in the UK, planning to assist a German invasion, was successfully defused by the British counterspies. One of them described their feelings toward the German members of the ring as respect for their daring, while their view of the British members was contempt for their treachery. To me, both groups would be equally despicable for supporting the Nazis. Had there been a similar ring in Germany, the Germans doing whatever they could to unseat Hitler would be equally admirable as the foreigners helping to do it, and I would find their treachery to their country commendable and honorable.

This isn't very important to how I'd consider this guy's attempt to spy. If I were a country in receipt of that message, probably the only considerations would be how much I wanted whatever information he had access to and whether I trusted he would actually provide it. From the description, the country wasn't named but was probably an ally of the US, so it probably had little interest in the information. This suggests the aspiring spy wasn't very good at his job, since a core part of spying is finding out what information someone cares enough about to compensate you for getting it, and adversaries are much more likely to want something than allies. If I had access to all the US information and I wanted to spy for the UK, I'd have to be very selective to find things the UK would care enough about to risk diplomatic consequences from the US over, but China would probably want plenty of things and therefore be easier to negotiate with. Of course, the choice to approach an ally may suggest that the aspiring spy has political preferences in what countries he's willing to work for, but it's hard to be a successful spy that way.

Aussie businesses now have to fess up when they pay off ransomware crims

Re: Turnover of AUD3 million... Large companies?

The difference is that "pig butchering" is a specific type of attack which has the capacity to go after all the assets someone has. One wealthy person can end up providing a lot of funding if they end up bankrupt or even in debt at the end of the process. For a small company (using your scale of two employees) and ransomware, the economics are very different. If you request a ransom so high that it would bankrupt the company, the company is not going to pay it; it's as bad or probably worse than having to rebuild manually.

There's a technical problem as well. Ransomware has an inverse U-shaped viability curve. The best victim for a ransomware attack, speaking only technically, is something large enough where there is tech gluing things together, since that makes it easy to spread, but not something large enough that people have gone through to harden it. The example you provide of the two-person company is likely not to have good defenses, but neither are they likely to have systems that are easy to attack. The people may be using personal laptops, and if they have separate work machines, they may still be administered like personal ones. Those don't tend to have many openings to the outside world, there are fewer people to try to phish, and if you get your software onto one of them, you might not have a great way to spread it onto the other one, but that other one may likely have a copy of many of the important files. Meanwhile, if you succeed, your likely payment is quite tiny in comparison to the schools, utilities, and large companies that neglected their IT security which most ransomware targets.

This has been tried. Early ransomware targeted personal machines in droves. Have you seen any of that in the last few years? I haven't, and it's mostly died because the ransomware operators realized that targeting individuals sucks. It's hard to show people how to navigate your Tor ransom request system, coach them through getting cryptocurrency, convince them that the files which have value to them but aren't going to kill them if they're lost are worth the ransom, get them a working decryptor if you're the kind that has one, and the kind of ransom you can request and reasonably expect to receive is just too small. Larger businesses may take more effort to crack into, but they have more ability to pay, they have enough insulation between the people paying and the source of the money that they're more willing to pay, and they often have a lot more riding on having access to those files.