Posts by doublelayer

Apple makes it official: No Home Screen web apps in European Union

Re: No problem

Think less a supervillain laughing uproariously about how the EU will rue the day they tried to meddle, which is not what anyone was saying, and more a boring legal meeting that sounds like the boring technical meetings. I've been in the boring technical meetings where the discussion is how we're going to get around the performance bottleneck without introducing too much technical debt. This one was probably how they're going to get around the new requirements. As with the technical meeting, there's usually a nice option which could be but isn't taken:

Technical: "In order to improve performance, we're going to rewrite the module from scratch to run faster. It will take a month for a few people."

Legal: "We're going to comply with the requirements by doing exactly what the law intends here. It may cost us some control and therefore some money."

And the actual solution:

Technical: "We're going to get around the performance issue by using a solution that's more time efficient but very space inefficient. It will only take a week to write, but every user will find half a gigabyte more RAM used than before and a bunch of cache files so it doesn't have to be recomputed every time. A few months from now, we may have to have another meeting about cleaning those up, but maybe we'll ignore it."

Legal: "We're going to comply with the law, maybe, by just dropping stuff. Either they'll change the law or we'll never have to deal with PWAs again. In a couple months, we may have to have another meeting about what to do about the complaints from business customers who want their PWAs and security updates, but maybe we'll ignore it."

Re: I

This will take a bit of clarification. Let's start with the PWA and update issue. You are correct that there is no contract between Apple and PWA developers. This has no relevance to my point. The reason I pointed out that PWA developers cannot update their applications is because you claimed that Apple isn't deleting data related to PWAs because it's like any other time when an update is incompatible. It is not. If I write a native application that runs on IOS 17 and someone updates to IOS 18 and Apple has made a change meaning they will refuse to run my application, I can fix it by updating my application. The user's files are restored. If I wrote a PWA, I do not have any way to update it to get the user's data back. The article alleges that, even if I could, the files won't exist. Even if they do, I can't write a native app that would access them. Their restriction on those developers, even though there is no contract between them, means that they have effectively deleted the user's data which they used my app to access. The harm is to the developers, but Apple doesn't have to care, but there is also harm to users which they should care about and may be legally required to. Other commenters have suggested this might be a violation of both computer misuse legislation and clauses of the DMA.

Me: “Existing PWAs could run in WebKit because that is what they're already set to run in”

You: "No they shouldn’t, Apple does *not* have that legal freedom. The EU made it a legal requirement that the user be allowed to opt out of using WebKit. This is what that looks like in practice."

No, that is not what it looks like. Opting out does not mean that I will never use WebKit. It's already installed on my phone. I can use it or, and the or is crucial here, something else. That means that I could choose to use a non-WebKit browser as a browser but still use Safari when I want. It means that I could set one PWA to try to open in Firefox, and assuming that it doesn't work properly right now, set it back to Safari until Firefox fixes their bugs. Nowhere in the law does it say that Apple must remove WebKit from availability, and they haven't done so since there will still be a Safari and WebKit in system UI components in all devices. They have complete legal freedom to continue to offer PWA support through WebKit and allow other browser engines to do the same. They have removed that option without a legal or technical need to do so, which is where their other motives become more obvious.

And by the way, intent does tend to matter a lot in whether they're allowed to do that. The law has many parts that explicitly prohibit intentional degradation of features when a user uses something Apple doesn't like. They don't specifically list possible degradations. This is not necessarily going to go Apple's way.

Re: I

App developers cannot release a new version of their PWA which works because Apple has blocked all of them. They cannot make a native app that inherits the data. If the complaint from the article is correct, the data will actually be deleted, not hidden, from the devices because the apps that read it no longer exist, and even if it is incorrect, the data will be unavailable until Apple restores PWAs to their OS, which they have no announced intention to do unless their actions are actually ruled illegal. That is not what you are describing with an app that doesn't start due to changes in an update.

Using your sausage analogy, it is not simply that the sausage maker chose to go vegan only. It is that they have also entered the houses of everyone who bought their sausages and removed them, even though they had no need to do so. They aren't doing that because the sausages are too expensive to make. They are doing that to try to punish the regulators for having made the change that they don't like. This is not supposition no matter how you intend to characterize it. It is clear that Apple doesn't like the law given how much they have fought against it specifically and every other similar law or legal dispute. It is also clear that they were not required to make this specific action. Your incorrect characterization of the law suggests you are unwilling to accept these statements. The complaint is not about system design (slice the architecture the same as Android). It is about their arbitrary restrictions on what they allow users to run. They could have allowed other browser engines, and those engines are capable of running PWAs inside themselves. Those engines probably would need to have code added to interact with some of the hardware, but that's the job of the people writing those engines, not Apple. Existing PWAs could run in WebKit because that is what they're already set to run in, and the other engines could be used when a user chooses to do so. This does not require significant changes from Apple.

Re: Yes, you really are the product

Ah, so you don't need to replace your Mac but the Windows one has lost support? So what version of Mac OS are you stuck on? No 2012 model has software support. Just to let you know, pretty much all computers from 2012, including your 2012-era Mac, are supported using Windows 10 until 2025. So I'm curious if you could name a single "drop off" that actually exists. It might be that your corporate laptop is replaced more often than necessary or that they buy underpowered equipment that needs faster replacement, but neither speaks badly of Windows, but instead your employer's equipment acquisition plan.

Re: I

I disagree with two of your points. The first is that there's no moral angle to it, although that's not the way I'd deal with it. One aspect to this is that data associated with those applications is to be automatically deleted from users' devices. That's a pretty immoral act in my mind. It is not Apple's data to delete. It is not Apple's device to delete it from. Someone has already argued that it could be criminal to delete it, and whether it is or not, I don't think that's a moral stance at all.

The second is with this bit:

"In fact, it falls under “ensuring that groups who took a decision, suffer the consequences of their own decision”, which is a highly moral position. It’s the opposite of Moral Hazard. Unless you enforce that, the world becomes a worse place, and surprisingly fast. Cf Banks being rescued in 2008."

It is not the inexorable result of the regulations. It is the result that Apple prefers. They are capable of allowing PWAs to use other engines, but they don't want to do the work. They are capable of asking for an exception to give them time to add that, but they don't want to. They are intentionally trying to break things because they don't like the law. Since intentionally breaking things is specifically named in the law as something you're not supposed to do, that's already legally risky. Even if it were not, it should be obvious that having multiple choices and intentionally picking the one likely to anger someone is not making them "suffer the consequences of their own decision". It is making them suffer the consequences of your decision.

For example, let's say that someone who asked for a reference from me has annoyed me. I might choose in that case to decline to give them a reference, or I might choose to describe during the reference why they annoyed me. I might decide that, even though they annoyed me, I will give an honest reference. Or I might take the petty route and lie that they were guilty of misconduct so severe that I was going to call the police but they had successfully hidden the evidence even when none of that was true. All of those things are things I could say, but the choice to harm them by lies is not a consequence of them annoying me, but is my deliberate act to punish them. Apple is trying to punish EU users for EU regulations.

Re: I

You are welcome to that opinion. I do not share it. As things stand now, however, the law has already been passed and the question is whether their actions comply with it or not. You can try to convince the EU to repeal the law and I'm sure Apple will be happy to add their voice there. For now, though, we're discussing what their requirements are under that law, not what the law would ideally be.

Google open sources file-identifying Magika AI for malware hunters and others

If you don't publish your defense tool, it becomes less useful at defending anybody except you. It's also not something you'd use as a single line of defense, but one part of it. Someone who knows why to use this is probably using a variety of tools with this serving to improve performance and results but not necessarily bypassing their other tools.

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

Re: Chilling Effects

A flip phone (yes, they still exist, they still work, they're pretty cheap) can also be used to just call and send messages. I don't see many parents equipping their children with those nowadays. Maybe they actually don't mind that they can run other applications.

As for updates, they bring security fixes. If you're intent on tracking your children now that the technology can manage it, you might value not having, for example, one of the many devices covered here where "you can track your kids" turns into "anyone can track your kids and listen to them at all hours". So by all means be one of the people who uses an insecure system to creepily track your children, after all there must be someone or even the weird brands wouldn't exist, but that's your choice to make for you, not for anyone else.

Re: The law is not everything

You are right that there is no parental control that can't be bypassed if you assume the child trying to bypass it is perfectly knowledgeable and has unlimited resources, but they usually are not. You can try to parent in a number of ways, and one of the ones you can choose is to only provide hardware that you have first configured to restrict the access provided to the child. There are lots of options out there for how to do it, from the manufacturers and from third party companies you can pay. Or you can try telling the child not to do something even though they have the ability to, which can work but not always. Or you can try explaining to the child why they should not do something they have the ability to and relying on them not to do it. Each has its positives and negatives and none is perfect. There is a reason why being a parent is hard. The best approach probably combines multiple options, but expecting that there is a perfect answer that will prevent anything bad from happening if only all of technology and society were bent to your will is not going to work and is going to cause more problems.

Re: Root causes?

I wasn't referring to violence in media. I was referring to this:

"The fundamental question we need to answer is "why are torture and murder sites interesting to kids?", and then find a fix for that."

There is a difference between a crime show where somebody gets murdered in the first scene and then the rest of the episode involves finding the one who did it, conveniently ending in their capture after forty minutes of magical computers, and a site that shows actual or realistic torture. A lot more people watch the former. You cannot assume that people liking the former leads to people liking the latter, nor that the existence of the former makes the latter anything near a widespread phenomenon. Nor have you really demonstrated any change, given that entertainment depicting violence is not at all new.

Re: Chilling Effects

Of course, there are already phones intended specifically for children out there. I wouldn't recommend you buy one. The ones I've seen are cheap Android devices that have been locked down with some unverified tracking and blocking software, never get updates, and have terrible specs. They're locked down so installing applications is either difficult or impossible (without bypassing their protection which isn't always hard if you know how Android images are built). Maybe one reason they're all sold by companies nobody's ever heard of is that nobody actually buys them.

It is up to parents to decide whether they'll buy something of the kind, not the rest of us to either make them better or add software to everything else so they can be switched into that locked mode. If parents don't take action, then I have no reason to do it for them.

Re: Root causes?

The fundamental assumption in your statement is that torture and murder sites are interesting to a lot of kids. While there are undoubtedly some, you and the campaigners here are alleging that it's a large group, whereas I've seen evidence so far that it was what, three of them? There are certainly more, but you can't paint this as an epidemic from one data point. Before we declare something a societal scourge that needs tremendous effort, significant changes, and plenty of side-effects to resolve, it is fair to ask how widespread the problem we're trying to solve really is.

FTC asks normal folks if they'd like AI impersonation scam protection, too

Re: Trust someone to turn a problem into a business opportunity

"Apart from buying groceries and the like there is absolutely no need for any payments to be Right Now."

Depending on what can happen between right now and when the payment does complete, there can be a good reason to want it to be fast, and not just so that we don't have to wait forever for things to complete. The reason is to avoid scams of another type. For example, if I am buying something from you online, send you a payment, and ask you to send the item, you probably want to be pretty sure that the payment is going to be available before you ship it and I probably don't want to wait a long time for you to start the delivery process until you're sure. Both of us have the possibility that, during that waiting process, either I will find a way to take back the money after you have sent me the item or you end up not sending the item.

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

Re: What happened to the server?

If the company knew where it was, it would not have been a selling situation. I wouldn't be surprised if the negotiation went something like "You give us that right now, and you tell us anything you know related to it, and we leave here and conveniently forget your address". That's if they didn't just call the police to retrieve the server and let the police deal with any other aspects.

Re: So, he was just fired ?

"The owner of the other company will most likely feel sorry for the uncle."

While I agree with many of your points, this conclusion is not something I would rely on. A lot of people would take a mistake like this much harder, whether it was about the risk to business data, the delay in getting their equipment, or someone's opinion, justified or not, that the situation should have been predicted. I wouldn't guarantee that clients will always take the "nothing too bad happened, so it's all good" route. I'm not even convinced that they should always do so.

Re: It's a shame

Obviously, that wouldn't have been better. I think they're opining on whether that was likely to happen without an addiction, although as a hypothetical there's no certain answer.

Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it

Re: So, even Apple can't get it right

I'll confess. Though I wasn't posting here at the time, I was unimpressed when the iPad was released. Admittedly, I'm still not that impressed and don't use one myself, but I expected that others would not either and they do. Tablets are still not for me, but I've been shown that there are people for which they are the preferred option.

Re: Killer App & Price

When they're going for the consumer market, a lot of those apps aren't worth the effort of Apple writing them. Someone else writing them, sure, but not for Apple to do the work before launch as an advertisement. For example:

"Link up with Boeing or Airbus and have an app that shows all of the parts & part numbers of, say, a fuselage listed in front of you as you look at it, along with possible diagnostics, numbers of spares in local warehouse?"

To the typical user, this is something they'll think about for about ten seconds: "Cool, an aircraft mechanic is using these", then ignore. It could be useful to the aircraft maintenance industry, but there's no reason for Apple to write that instead of providing encouragement and support to that industry to do it.

"Or an app for a surgeon that lists detailed anatomy of a patient opened up for surgery along with possible noteworthy points about what is on screen?"

I don't think that's going to work with current technology. It isn't a part that has a deterministic appearance which can be identified quickly. And if anything goes wrong, the press will be a lot worse than any benefit from advertising it in the first place.

"Or an app that shows you, step by step iFixit-style how to repair, say, a bike, a dishwasher and the like?"

If they could get this one, that would actually be a great advertisement. The trouble is that they can't, nobody can, and I think you know that. They don't have the software to identify automatically which model of bicycle I have when that model could easily be decades old from any country and then identify the problem with it from a glance, then automatically provide me a useful solution when one might not exist. They don't have anywhere near the staff necessary to manually accumulate that data either. There is a reason why there are only iFixit guides for the most common devices. If you bought a cheap phone instead of a flagship, you likely have to do the dismantling yourself to figure out what's in there and whether you can fix it.

"Or an app that shows you how to cook an elaborate meal along with hints, suggestions and instructions while you are doing it'"

I suppose that one is a bit more realistic, but it's not really any more than a video that starts and stops. Watching you do it and determining whether you've made mistakes is trickier and not very useful, since anyone who wants to do this can probably follow along with a video unless they're intentionally trying to test the error recognition system.

"Or an app that explains how to solve, say, the maths problem in front of you using a variety of different ways?"

Why do they need this? There are already programs out there for teaching and solving mathematics and they don't really benefit from AR.

"Or an app for farmers looking to buy cattle at a cattle mart: display details of the animal in front of you, [...]"

Again, something a small set of users would use and everyone else wouldn't care about, and in order to build it, they would need to get access to all that data. Every place with livestock displayed would need to put those details somewhere the app could get it and tag things so the equipment could pick it up. I'm sure there are multiple competing databases where some of that is stored while some others simply write it down or have someone tell you with words. Apple trying to produce an iTunes livestock store and get everyone to use it doesn't seem worth it.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Re: We need a new Unix

I'll have to read what they want to do instead, but while DLLs can cause a lot of problems, there's a reason they're often used. Nobody has to use one. You can statically link everything, or you can implement every library as its own program and communicate between it and something else. Each approach fixes some problems introduced by the concept, although usually opposing ones. They introduce new problems instead. Maybe those problems are easier to deal with or just better, but that is not guaranteed and it depends a lot on how you use your computer.

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

Re: THIS!!!

You know that a lot of instructions are burned waiting for data to get to the CPU just from RAM, and that you have to put a lot of data into RAM from the disk which takes even more instructions, and that read speeds are reported for large, continuous reads, not reads of small files? I don't want to state the obvious if I'm missing a rhetorical question here.

Re: Swings and roundabouts.

"This removes a reliable, in situ communications network that could easily have been developed and repurposed - perhaps as an internet for kids with whitelisted content."

I can't say I like that idea. You want an internet for kids, you build one, but you don't need your own wires for it. What would be the point of that? Just to make your new internet tremendously more expensive and unavailable than using the same wires the normal internet uses? Don't expect me to embrace any part of the idea, either. I don't see trying to slice the network into pieces as going anywhere useful.

Re: THIS!!!

"If CPU's are so fast why does it take 10 mins to log into windows 10? What is it doing? Nothing useful, trust me I've looked into it."

Probably nothing useful, because my computer can manage it in about two seconds. My really cheap computer can manage it in about two seconds. My old computer that shouldn't be running Windows 11 according to Microsoft can manage it in about...2.5 seconds. So if your computer takes ten minutes, one of two things is the case:

1. It's not Windows. It's something that's starting at login and doing so badly, which might be something you intend to start or a big stack of malware.

2. Your computer has a problem, probably a disk problem.

Look into those.

Re: THIS!!!

They did not say that and you just made that up. The point of increasing CPU speed is to get the right answer faster, not any answer faster. If the code is producing incorrect answers, nothing about the CPU's speed will fix it.

'Scandal-plagued' data broker tracked visits to '600 Planned Parenthood locations'

Re: altars of greed and pridefulness

Of course they do. At a basic level, who you're supposed to pray to and what kinds of praying are really bad. The Greek gods said that killing a cow in their name was a great thing to do. Hindu gods take that very differently. If you're going to interact with cattle, figure out which if either of those sets you're dealing with, or more likely which set of believers are watching you, because if either set of gods exist, they don't seem to be doing anything about the issue.

I don't think those advertisements were about buying things. For example, this paper and others have frequently described how they intentionally put in ads claiming to offer services they oppose so that people seeking those services get confused and go to them. What happens after that may depend on the group, but at the very least, they have the name of the person and they've wasted the person's time. There are worse options available.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Re: Question is...

The advertisers probably don't care that 3% of the visitors don't see their ads because they won't end up paying much if anything for those people, so it's all the same to them. The publisher sees 3% of the people using their service with the costs associated with delivering it and would like to try getting that revenue back, because what do they care if none of those people buy the advertised stuff? From the publisher's perspective, either that person starts earning them some revenue or that person goes away and they no longer have the costs of providing the service to them. This makes more sense when it's something like YouTube because it's a lot more expensive to send videos to people than to send a text article. That's from the perspective of a person who has done neither, but I'm pretty sure that is what they're thinking.

Re: Question is...

That looks like the limit for those who don't have a Prime subscription, so that wouldn't be unlimited. If you do have one, maybe their UI is bad and it just won't count up if you upload stuff. Either way, that's not an intentional limit on Prime users.

Re: Question is...

The question is how large the group of advert-antagonistic are and how strong their antagonistic reaction is. I am probably in the group, but through a combination of blocking most ads and being able to ignore them more than some people I know, an ad really has to work at it to annoy me enough to get me to dislike its origin. I doubt you're keeping a full list of all the ads you've seen so you can avoid the businesses, especially as many of those would probably either be something you were never going to buy or something you have no choice about because it's the only supplier that offers an acceptable choice when you need the thing they're selling. So if the group is relatively small, those who push the adverts may view it as unimportant, and if the group is small enough, they could even be right that annoying those people and losing their business is cheaper than figuring out who they are and leaving them alone.

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

Re: Well if Meta are going to get roasted for this one

And, with a protocol like TOTP, you don't have to. Do you think Google and Microsoft are doing something nefarious in their apps? Okay, use a different one. It even works to use a non-Microsoft authenticator on your Microsoft accounts and a non-Google one on your Google accounts. The recommendations of these are because they're available, likely to be supported for some time, known to come from secure sources, and believed to be trustworthy. You are free to disagree with these assumptions, although I don't, and having an open protocol means you can manage with that easily.

Re: > Hanff, in a LinkedIn post, argued this is unacceptable.

The law does not say "using phone numbers for login is forbidden". You probably have a point if, as I understand your report, the phone number alone can reset all other factors and allow taking over the account. However, you're going a lot further than that by claiming that the law forbids them using phone numbers as an identifier or security method at all, and it clearly doesn't. Lots of services use a phone number as a true second factor, where it AND something else are required to make changes, and that has never been the subject of any GDPR penalty. Nor is there necessarily a reason why it should. Using a phone for MFA isn't great, but it is more secure than not using it, and GDPR does not say that not having MFA is forbidden either. I'm not sure the valid point is going to be accepted, but your other one certainly will not.

Re: Well if Meta are going to get roasted for this one

That's why most services offering TOTP either built their own app to issue the codes or recommend one specific, reputable authenticator app, usually either Microsoft's or Google's. The benefit of something like it is that it is open. While email may have gotten some "value reduction" as you call it by being an open standard, it is still better than alternatives because it can be used nearly anywhere. I prefer TOTP to a mandated single provider because I get to decide where the authenticator is. I don't need to install their app on my phone if I'm not using the service there and I can move keys to a different one as I choose. If I want to use an authenticator that has more security precautions, I can do it without begging them to support it.

Re: I can't understand why WhatsApp is tolerated

I'm not really sure why this is relevant, but I'm willing to discuss it anyway. Mobile providers don't have to allow it; they offer a network and this is a thing you can use on a network. They don't really get a choice to permit or forbid such things. If they took actions to block communications methods like this, they would likely be punished by the law because it would be considered an anticompetitive action, an abuse of monopoly powers, and, where common carrier status is part of the law, it would violate the regulations on them and risk stripping them of that status.

They also have no reason to do so. Users of such applications are still using the mobile providers to send their traffic. When they choose to do so, they must pay the mobile providers for the network traffic they send. It doesn't matter that the providers can no longer read the messages because they agreed to provide a service delivering bytes and the user has purchased and used that service. Your analogies are mostly if not entirely flawed; the sender and recipient know well that SMS and WhatsApp messages are not the same, the deliveries use the same network rather than an alternative, and there is no cost to whatever telegraph forms were supposed to be (they both construct their own message packets and making packets is effectively free and the costs are borne by the user's device anyway).

The latter is a valid concern and Facebook should have to change their system so that just having the second factor is not sufficient to gain access to the account. I'm not entirely sure how this process works as I do not have any accounts at Meta, but it sounds like there is a significant design fault in it if just having a phone is enough to reset the password (that's where you make someone use all the factors).

The former is the user's problem: if you change your phone number voluntarily, you remove it from accounts before relinquishing it, not hoping to do so afterward. The same applies to literally any other contact mechanism. If you stop using an email address, physical address, domain name, private key, or any other thing that is used to identify or authenticate you, you should activate the new one before deactivating the old one or risk getting locked out and you should deactivate the old one so it can't be used to compromise the account.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

You might want to reconsider this site then. This is for profit, after all. Not all sites intended to make money are the same. I block ads as well, but I don't object to sites that exist to make money for their writers, including ones that require payment to use them. I only pay if I know I value the site that much, but it's a perfectly normal way to run a business.

Re: I see a serious issue with the idea

The protocol isn't as simple as load page, send money automatically. There are manual controls on this and it's being run in the browser, meaning there will be even more settings. Most of it is probably manually pressing a button, so loading a hundred times will do nothing. The people writing this aren't complete idiots, so they'll also know to put some kind of cap on it to prevent the headlines of a massive macropayment. That won't prevent there being other problems with it, but it won't be something that basic.

Re: What's the first word you think of when someone says "Amazon"?

Books are one of the main things I think of, not because Amazon's still mostly books, but that's one of the things I used it for. When I was a student and needed textbooks, I could buy them new from my university for way too much or buy used copies, and those copies were usually easiest to find on Amazon. A typical book shop wouldn't have them, other online sites would make it hard to determine whether I was getting the right thing and wouldn't necessarily have what I was looking for. Amazon was a reliable source. And when I was done with them and the new ones I had to purchase, I could sell them back on Amazon to next year's students. I'm not sure either works well anymore, but this was well after they expanded into a market with things other than books. Amazon still recommends textbooks to me on occasion, so you can see how much I used that.

The theory of micropayments is not a method of charging people for subscriptions, but quite literally "people being nice and tossing a few pennies to sites they like". That's why it doesn't work. Still, if that's what they're building, then it will be the not working version rather than the empty your wallet automatically version.

Re: Good luck

I agree on the first, disagree on the second. I have a few places on YouTube which I enjoy, although not very frequently, but most other times I end up there or get links to it, I'm disappointed. Whenever I do a search for something and get YouTube links, I mentally sigh because I know the chances are high that this video will take five minutes, even at the fastest speed, for me to realize that they know nothing more than I did before I did the web search. I've been recommended videos when watching one that was interesting to me, but those recommendations have rarely if ever proven even slightly as interesting. So I agree that there's plenty to like, but I don't think it's that easy to avoid the rest.

Re: Good luck

Sure, you can try that, but nobody will do it. In return for watching ads, you get whatever site you chose to visit that has the ads. That's their theory, anyway, and it works for most people, so they'll keep using it for you as well.

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

Re: Linux's moment

As fun as watching your vote tennis game promises to be, you clearly think the original post is stupid and they clearly don't know why you think that. You could explain it.

Re: October 14, 2025 - Bring it on!!!

Except if it's seven years old, it's got POPCNT. It's going to have to be about fifteen if it lacks it. I'd prefer if they hadn't done it as well, but while the restriction on 7th-gen Intel parts is a problem, restrictions affecting Core 2s are less concerning to me. In my experience, people with hardware that old have to be dragged to update their operating system anyway, and they're going to need a new computer when something breaks in their old one and isn't economical to bother repairing.

I'm not sure what this was meant to tell me. Its number is similar to mine if we let them use the generalizations that don't fit the situation: their algorithm assumes one iteration per bit, and their loop will need more instructions. If the loop is not unrolled, there will be jumping. Even if it is unrolled, they need two instructions per cycle. One to shift and one to add. That comes to 128 instructions for a 64-bit register or 64 for a 32-bit one, which is close to the 70 I estimated. I'll stick to 64-bit ones for the other approaches.

Their alternatives aren't necessarily better. The lookup table cuts it to eight cycles containing three instructions (assuming my mental compiler isn't as rusty as it probably is) but it uses 256 bytes of memory which will need to be cached and originally calculated.

The third method loops through each set bit and performs three operations (subtract, and, add). So for a value that's mostly zeros, it's great, but for all 1s, it's 192 instructions.

All of these are also destructive to v (the value being checked), so budget in time to replace the original value from cache. Of course, actually telling how fast these are will require figuring out how fast the instructions are and how fast POPCNT in hardware is. I only estimated instruction count, not running time, but I'm guessing the hardware one is faster or they wouldn't have added it.

Not at all. You can implement POPCNT using some shifting and adding. It doesn't rely on any peculiar aspect of the processor. Yet, if you do implement it in software, it will turn one instruction into about seventy, so if you find yourself wanting to do that frequently, you might benefit from the CPU doing it for you.

Re: Linux's moment

It depends what VM software you use, but usually it doesn't if you're already running on X64. However, I really doubt you're trying to run modern VMs on a computer with an X86 processor that's old enough to lack this instruction. While there are boxes with older CPUs in production out there, they usually don't run the latest software versions whether Windows, Linux, or something else, so this doesn't affect you. If you are trying to run latest OSes on a computer that old, there are emulation options that will run those instructions, though expect there to be slower performance if you run those instructions a lot.

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

Having more addresses than we could use up sounds like a bad thing to you? The problem we have now is that we're running out, and if we made it a bit larger so that we wouldn't run out for a while, that would be more fragile than just doing it right and pushing the limit far, far away. It's what we've done with most of the limits in our systems when we increase them.

When you're using someone else's network, you can't guarantee they'll all be 192.168.1.1. I've frequently seen 192.168.0.1, 172.16.0.1, 10.0.0.1, and various other /24s in those ranges. It doesn't matter, because if I want to access their gateway, I query my network to get the gateway address and it tells me. I do not need to try any of these when my computer already knows the address. It knows the V6 one too. Open that, copy it into your browser, and pull it up. The same steps you probably already use will still work here.

As for wasting bits in a packet, there are a ton of bytes in many protocols already, but I'm guessing you don't consider them wasted. If you're using WiFi or Ethernet, your network controller is already using and storing plenty of extra data in order to work with them. If storing 128 bits instead of 32 is really causing a problem for your hardware, you likely need to spend a couple pennies on better hardware, because we no longer work in dates where 512 bytes on chip is expected. There are embedded controllers that have small amounts, but they usually aren't running full network stacks and trying to communicate that way.

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

Re: Deliberate

Not quite. Diffie-Hellman allows you to exchange keys with someone in a public channel, but does not let you prove while doing so that the person you're exchanging keys with is the person you want to. The benefit of it if it's done well, which is not easy but possible, is that if I am watching your communications, I should find it hard to determine your shared key. If I can successfully interpose myself in your conversation, providing my own keys and preventing the person to whom you think you're talking from providing theirs, then I can still impersonate them. If I can simultaneously do that to both of you, then I can impersonate each of you to one another and both eavesdrop on the communication and modify it as desired. An electronic device physically between the chips is capable of doing that, so if they don't start out encrypted, the communication is weak.

Cloudflare defeats another patent troll with crowd-sourced prior-art army

Re: More companies should do this

When a system is broken because incentives are bad, you usually can't fix it by flipping the bad incentives to go the other way. If you made fees higher for rejecting patents than accepting them, the incentive is now to reject them. Prior art involves citing something, so it's a little harder, but the patent office has other reasons to reject a patent application, including the obvious idea standard. It would be easy for them to simply stamp every application obvious and wait for someone to challenge them. They won't have a major budget for dealing with challenges, so they'll probably settle with anyone who challenges meaning that your patent is now accepted if you are willing and able to pay a lawyer to file a challenge and rejected otherwise.

That's going to give you no useful patents until you try to patch another bad incentive on top to get rid of that. Usually, something that ends up being a stack of patches to fix the problems of the last patch is not a great option and, if we can redesign it from scratch, we'll get a better result.

Forcing AI on developers is a bad idea that is going to happen

Re: Software Development != Coding

There are various levels of this, and it doesn't always sail under that exact flag. For example, though I've managed to avoid the worst of it (see the comment below this thread for an example of that, I have had to work in a place like this. The way it worked there: the people who wrote the tasks would write a summary of what they intended which would usually be one to four sentences. It was assumed that the design summarized, if I'm being very charitable, there was what needed to be written, and it was then assigned to someone. If it was the original creator of the idea, no problem, as they already knew what and why. If that person was busy and it landed on you, who knows. You were permitted two hours to ask questions and encouraged to do so, but sometimes those questions would be directed to a different team and would sound too much like "I see you'd like to do X. Why do you want that" and the answers sometimes started with "I didn't suggest it and I don't know why". If you were still trying to figure this out later, then you would get questions about why you hadn't just written it yet.

Sam Altman's chip ambitions may be loonier than feared

Re: ... quantum computing hardware and software

Useful to who? Some people have performed a computation on them that they think is useful. I may not agree, but I might not think that what you do with your computers is useful and that doesn't stop it actually being useful. Worth the resources expended and the collateral damage, probably not. Useful to someone, yes, I'm afraid it has been.

Re: I support him

You are asking them to prove a hypothetical and refusing to prove your own. Neither is going to be possible. They cannot prove that a computer can think by going and building you one, and even if they could manage it, you probably wouldn't accept that they had. Similarly, from what you've said, you don't have any reason to think that such a thing is impossible, you just state it as an axiom. I agree that nobody has built one, and the way we are going, nobody will, but that is not sufficient evidence to prove that it can't exist.

If you think you have a proof that machines could never be made to think, you could post it, but simply saying to show you is not a valid argument. For example, if I told you that it is impossible for a rock to exist on the ocean floor at 3 km, you would be correct to tell me that my statement is incorrect, but you probably don't have a machine capable of retrieving one of the rocks that are down there to show me that it really is a rock. I cannot take your inability to retrieve a rock from a location as proof that no rock can exist in that location, and you can't treat someone's inability to produce a thinking computer on command as proof that one can never exist.