Posts by doublelayer

How artists can poison their pics with deadly Nightshade to deter AI scrapers

Re: Unintended consequences?

Image descriptions probably not too much because the processed images will be direct from camera ones. Since they don't contain poisoned pixels, they won't trigger the inaccuracies as often. While it's possible that an image of a purse gets mistaken for a cow, it's a significant enough change that the user will probably know about it. For generated images, it probably would cause some problems, but I'm unaware of a reason for a visually impaired person to generate images that's any different than a sighted person doing so.

Re: How big!?

From their download page:

"After the initial download, the app will download additional ML libraries and resources that will require stable Internet access and approx. 4GB of storage."

So my guess is that they download more stuff at runtime for Mac OS and include more stuff in the installer for Windows, possibly because it aids with signing for binaries. Either way, ML stuff tends to be pretty big. I suppose they assume that anyone with enough processing to run it probably doesn't mind the disk requirement. With the tendency championed by Apple, but unfortunately not limited to them, of including 256 or 512 GB of storage and not letting it be expanded in many of their computers, I would find such large tools constraining if I was running it on a typical hobbyist artist's computer.

Re: Let the AI wars begin!

Both cases have the much harder task of getting the system to react wrong when it takes the picture. IN this case, the pixels in your file are the pixels the model ingests, but in the case of a camera, it captures with some inaccuracy and lots of angle and background choices, so you have no guarantee of it getting whatever interference you try to send at it. Not that doing something to mess with either system isn't possible, but it will be more difficult.

Huawei prepares to split from Android on consumer devices with HarmonyOS Next

Re: Spotify will bend like a reed in the wind

You're rounding a lot to turn 1.4 billion into 2 billion. Yes, it's a lot of people, but you can't just assume that, because there are a lot of people, you will get a lot of them to buy your products. Do I think that Spotify would make a new app for Chinese users? No, and here's why. From Wikipedia:

"It [Spotify] has no presence in mainland China where the market is dominated by QQ Music."

If they haven't entered the market now, when their Android app would run on most devices as it is, why would I expect them to do so when they first have to make something completely new? They have decided so far that the likelihood of success is low enough to focus on other places. The same is true of a lot of companies outside of China.

Re: It’s Linux

The Harmony OS for IoT devices is not at all the same as the one for phones. Maybe the new version will find a way to unite them, but until now, they've been completely separate things with the same name on them. There was no compatibility between the Harmony OS watch and the Harmony OS phone; you could not install an application written for the phone on the watch and not just because the storage was insufficient. This is not really a surprise, as the Harmony OS watch is an embedded system running one program close to bare metal with the embedded Harmony OS providing features. Lots of things like that exist, and they don't tend to run Linux either because they run in environments with insufficient resources to make running Linux possible or desirable.

However, we don't take any of the embedded OSes for low-resource electronics and try to run them as the main OS on a phone or computer because they're missing lots of features and there's no point. The amount of code that can be usefully shared between the two is too low, because the low-resource version will need lots of optimization to fit into the constraints, whereas those optimizations generally just make things worse for the kernel that can use more RAM and should to keep the user experience fast. Can they be united? Definitely, but there's a reason to believe that whatever Huawei is doing, it's not that.

Re: But they could take Linux ...

Hence the "breaks maintainability" part. But phone manufacturers don't tend to get too much PR problems when they never update Android, hold back security updates for a year, for the first two years, then stop entirely, or run out of date kernels. Chinese companies are among the worst for keeping them updated, even nowadays when companies like Samsung have realized that Android support longevity is important to at least some people. Huawei is one of the companies that still has no organized update policy. Do you really think the public perception of them would be much worse if they renamed Linux and were still not updating it?

Re: Outside of China, is there a market for another smartphone ecosystem?

Because some of us like to use our phones as computers, not just web terminals. If that's not you, more power to you. Some of the things I like my phone to do require it to work offline on local files, and the app model manages that pretty well.

Re: It’s Linux

But they could take Linux and do a s:linux:harmonyos:g on it. Not saying they necessarily would or did, but that's basically what they did when they announced the first Harmony OS to run on phones with Android. Sure, they called it version 2 instead of 10 and they had a different format for app packages, but it was Android in every detail. I'll believe they've made a completely new kernel when I see the images and the technical reviews of its contents, not before. I've seen too many people boast that they've invented a completely new OS, UI, browser, whatever which actually turns out to be someone else's whatever with a really minor change on it which breaks maintainability but doesn't do much else.

OpenAI bans long-shot presidential candidate bot for breaking T&Cs

Probably a good thing for that candidate

I don't care what warnings they put around it. If they have a bot intended to mimic someone, somebody will eventually get that bot to print something they don't want it to. At best, that's an embarrassing video which gets shared and causes people to laugh about the AI company. More likely, those people think the candidate being mimicked asked for that and will mock them as well. At worst, some people actually think the statement actually reflects that person's views, which probably won't affect most viewers, but it doesn't have to. If I were the candidate here, I'd be very happy to see this thing taken down, and if I really had no contact with the place that set it up, I'd probably have been the one to send a notice to OpenAI to check for ToS violations.

Wing, Alphabet's drone delivery unit, designs bigger bird to deliver pasta, faster

Re: ingredients for dinner - pasta, marinara sauce, parmesan cheese, canned olives and garlic.

The incremental cost involved in delivering something to me as well as my neighbor from the same starting point is less than the incremental cost of flying separate drone trips to each of us. Most of the journey can be split between the two recipients, and if many of my neighbors are also getting deliveries at the same time, it goes down much faster. The drone, meanwhile, has to keep returning to the base because it is not large enough to carry items from multiple orders.

The aerial aspect doesn't help either. You need to expend a lot of energy to lift things off the ground and keep them up there which is not expended when driving them along the ground. There are some savings with a drone flight, but the energy requirements of flight are not minimal.

Re: ingredients for dinner - pasta, marinara sauce, parmesan cheese, canned olives and garlic.

It depends what we compare it to. The drone's electrical engine may produce less polution because the power plant is more efficient and might even be renewable, but it also exerts a lot more energy to lift the payload which a ground delivery won't have to do, and it has to make a lot more trips than a ground vehicle would have to. If we compare it to someone getting all their food for some period at once, then it's likely to prove less efficient because they'd probably have to get a really large number of drone deliveries for all of their grocery needs.

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

Re: Responsibility

I think that, no matter where they were, the blame could go anywhere the internal politics wanted it to go. It wouldn't be hard for someone to decide to blame either or both of those people. A charitable manager could probably have insulated both from too much blame and reduced it from firing to an unpleasant meeting. It comes down to the question of how high on the organizational chart did it go, how angry was that highest person, and did they want to do something to either of the people involved.

Re: Responsibility

If you read past the first sentence, it would become clear that I was referring to experience with server hardware and racking to know things like the weight of the equipment and the general stability of racks. I have a feeling you did read past that sentence. Thus, your reply fails to make any meaningful point.

Throughout childhood, you also learn that it is not as simple as "heavy thing in high place, always bad". For example, a heavy item placed on a countertop which is elevated usually doesn't cause the wall to topple over because the counter is attached to the wall and floor. A heavy item placed on a sturdy and stable table is also usually fine because the table helps to spread the weight. That's even true if the heavy item is not centered on the table. Of course, there are numerous examples where it would cause a problem. Life would show you that there are cases where that works and ones where it doesn't, but unless you saw server racks in your childhood, it wouldn't tell you which one they would be.

A person who assumed, incorrectly as it happens, that server racks, being designed to hold really heavy things, would be designed more like a counter than a cheap bookshelf in the weight management department is really not that outlandish. If they went the other way, I could easily imagine someone not wanting to install a server in the high part of a rack because that's kind of heavy too, so maybe we should reserve the top slots for if we ever get some lightweight fan array or something. I am asking you to consider what things would be like if you were missing some important information that you have gained through experience. There was a time in your life when you didn't have that experience. We don't know whether this particular person was a new starter who had never worked with a rack before or just clueless, and there's a chance that the correct answer is both. There is also a chance that the answer is only one, and it's less stupid than you make it sound.

Re: Responsibility

Rewind to your first experience and you might not know that it would make the rack so top-heavy and that the rack couldn't handle it. Sure, having a heavy thing at the top is a problem, but not if the thing in the bottom is also heavy. Those big servers are down there. I've never lifted one of them, but I did see someone go get another person when they were going to move one, so they must be heavy as well. This rack is built to hold lots of really heavy things, and it's not even resting those heavy things on the floor or on each other, meaning it was clearly built to take a lot of weight. They built it that high, so presumably they have built it to take weight at the top and it was installed to deal with that, for example being well anchored in the floor or wall, the way you would anchor a shelf if you wanted to put something heavy on it.

We know that those things are not true, but if you've just started on plugging in servers from working with desktops as a student, would you know all these things? I didn't know the typical weight of rack servers until I lifted my first one; there had been no reason for me to look it up.

University chops students' Microsoft 365 storage to 20GB

Re: "over half of all data stored by organizations not serving a useful purpose"

It doesn't, but fortunately, you can't bypass any controls you want with the cloud. The admins can put their important data storage on cloud-managed disks, their own managed disks, or a combination thereof and have the same controls or lack of controls.

And we ever had that working like clockwork? We moved from "the research data is in those boxes in the corner of the office, or maybe the ones that got moved to a storage shed when the corner was filling up" to "the files are probably on one of these servers that everyone has an account on but there's no organized backup" to "they could be on the servers with backups but maybe the researchers didn't upload them because they stored them on their personal computers" to "they could be in one of the university-provided data storage systems but people have been using OneDrive instead". It's not great now, but it's not like we ever had perfection before.

Archiving is hard, and there are relatively few university archivists for the stuff being generated right now.

Re: If McGills reasons/rationale are being reported accurately...

I agree there. I think it's mostly about managing the storage costs because they realized that promising petabytes of storage was going to get expensive and probably already was for researchers who threw lots of uncompressed raw data into OneDrive instead of something suited to it. I doubt there was much discussion about the electricity usage involved, even though it is technically true. Maybe they thought students would accept an environmental reason more than a budgetary one, because most students wouldn't understand what the costs of storage really are at scale.

"Are they implying that giving 1TB of data to each permanent scholar is too taxing in the long run?"

From their Wikipedia page, it would appear they have about forty six thousand people in the categories of staff and current students. So their theoretical data usage if each of them had a 1 TB cap is 46 PB. Of course, there are many who will not use that cap, but you have to budget for some people deciding that it's kind of handy to have such a big drive and start to use it. If you were hosting this on your own infrastructure, it would be expensive to provide petabytes of hot storage, and it's not cheap when outsourcing that to Microsoft either. So yes, it quite easily could prove too taxing. A 20 GB cap means that they only have about one petabyte among them, which is probably quite expensive as it is.

They have the option to start people with a low cap of 20 GB, then increase it when needed. Researchers who want to store a lot of research data in OneDrive could apply to have a higher cap, which gives the university IT staff an opportunity to find something better than OneDrive to store important data in this case. Many students do not have an academic requirement for more storage than that, so they can handle the exceptions differently without promising a lot more storage than they want to pay for.

Re: OneDriving Me Up The Wall

Not if they pay costs per user or might end up paying to store terabytes of data because hey, free massive cloud drive, don't mind if I do. My university kept several things around for me, but it's all very cheap things. I've still got an account on the computer science systems, well maybe because they reset passwords every six months and I haven't used mine in a couple years at least, but they cut my disk quota quite small and disabled it for the big research machines.

They have slow access storage in Azure, and while I'm not sure if it's implemented with tape or not, it has the profile you describe and there are plenty of ways to move data into and out of it automatically. It is not used for OneDrive because OneDrive is used by lots of people who don't know what they're doing. You can't expect the average student, individual purchaser, or teacher to understand what automatic moving of data between access tiers does or why the prices keep going down but they have to wait longer and longer to get their files back. If they need an old file and they don't know that it's been automatically moved to the archive tier, they're unlikely to be happy with the message asking for their priority which determines how many hours (1-15 depending on priority) it will take before they get access again.

It wouldn't be very hard for the admins to use this system and make their own storage system if they want to host it on Microsoft infrastructure, or to build one of their own. There are a lot of reasons for them to do that when they're holding lots of research data and want to do so cheaply.

IT consultant fined for daring to expose shoddy security

Re: The problem is law is old and tech is new

"Save the research for companies who’ve got a bug bounty or otherwise state publicly that they don’t mind people sticking their heads through the metaphorical window."

And for everybody else, report anonymously and make it clear you'll go public after two months, then go public anonymously. The problem with this logic is that companies that have real problems try to hide them by saying that they didn't invite in the researchers, so it's an attack and the researcher should be punished. The people who suffer as a result are the users whose data or purchases were compromised by that, and somehow we're letting the company responsible off the hook if they don't invite it. Analogies to locks and doors are fine, but when the door that is wide open is in front of my data, the person who left the door open doesn't get to blame the person who found out, hopefully the first such person although there's no guarantee.

Cases can also be raised again if the original court is believed to have erred when dropping it. Double jeopardy more often refers to being found innocent by a trial then tried again, because an acquittal is considered more indicative than a dismissal. Even in that case, the case can be brought again if new evidence is discovered, though that evidence will be subject to scrutiny. If the court dismissed before a trial, someone can point out problems with that action and have that decision reviewed and possibly reversed.

US agencies warn made-in-China drones might help Beijing snoop on the world

Re: Compromising the Drone-Controlling SoC

Querying that much video wouldn't be too hard if you just through lots of computers at the problem. It's very parallelizable and China has some large cloud providers that people don't much use. Send a notice to one of them that you'll be taking all of their spot instances for the next two days and if they forget to send you the bill, their CEO won't be arrested this year, and you can run even quite inefficient searches.

That doesn't mean they're actually doing this, but just that if they were going to, they could.

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

Re: Qui bono?

My guess is that you underestimate how many people don't have adblockers and how much they can keep you on a site. I've ended up on sites like that that are clearly attempting to look like tech support advice. For example, they can write an article about general troubleshooting and then post it with every possible combination of names so that it looks like it's relevant to your situation. Someone who doesn't immediately notice that the advice will be useless could end up spending some time on the site, restarting their phone, checking for software updates, updating the installed apps and restarting their phone again, trying to take out the battery for thirty seconds even though their phone's battery is glued in, all while the site cycles through advertisements and collects the revenue.

Then again, some of them exist to push a product. For example, the sites that solve a Windows problem via the following steps: 1) Restart computer, 2) use the network troubleshooting assistant that never does anything, 3) consider buying our PC Protect and Clean software license for $49.99 per year* (first year only). That might just be a scam, it might be a real though very dodgy tech support company, or it might be malware. Who knows?

I realize I'm focusing on tech-themed junk sites, but there are probably similar ones for other topics I'm less familiar with. The main other category I've seen are sites that pretend to have reviews of something but mostly just have links to buy stuff, but the profitable part of that is more obvious.

Re: The Singer not the Song

I don't think that filter makes much sense because just having the term Wikipedia in a search doesn't mean that the user wants Wikipedia articles. For example, if I search for "Wikipedia funding", I probably don't want Wikipedia's article on the concept of funding. I might want the page on how to donate to Wikipedia, which isn't on wikipedia.org because it's on wikimedia.org. I might want Wikimedia's charitable tax filing. I might want one of the numerous news or opinion articles about donations to Wikipedia. By interpreting all uses of Wikipedia as preferring searches on it, I'm likely to produce worse results for any meta search like that.

The same is true of many other terms. For example, if I look up "Google data collection opt out", I'm more likely to get useful information if news articles or pages about privacy than if it sorts by site and gives me twenty Google corporate pages first. Substitute any other company and I think you'll quickly find examples where you may want information about them rather than information from them. If you really want to limit your search in that way, the site: tag is available to make that filter explicit, so rather than assume for you, something that usually gets worse results, it would make more sense to make sure people know the option exists and can use it when it gives the desired behavior.

Re: The Singer not the Song

Mediawiki's search function isn't that great when compared to search engines because it doesn't index the content of articles as well. If you're looking for a certain topic, you can usually enter a term related to the title and get there. If you're looking for articles that, somewhere in them, mention something, using a different search engine limited to the site can produce better results. I've found this more often with smaller wikis, where using a DDG search with a site limit produces better results than the search box on that site. Perhaps Wikipedia's search feature works better than that, but when I'm using Wikipedia, I usually don't have to search because I already know what article topic I'm likely to find my result in and can go there directly instead.

Re: The Singer not the Song

Why shouldn't you need to? If you are using a search engine to search for a phrase including the word Wikipedia, why should another site that mentions Wikipedia be excluded from those results? It would be trivial for the search engine to add a filter that replaces that for you, but it shouldn't do it because you might be looking for information about a site rather than information on the site. It makes a lot of sense for limitations on possible search results to be an option, not a guarantee.

Re: The Singer not the Song

If you want Wikipedia search results, use site:wikipedia.org That will actually limit it to Wikipedia, not just pages that mention Wikipedia.

JPMorgan exec claims bank repels '45 billion' cyberattack attempts per day

It's not that portscans are completely safe, but that they're common. Every public IP receives them constantly, so if you're trying to make a point about volume, it doesn't make that point very well.

Consider how you would feel if I told you that I live in an environment where I face the risk of death by disease every day, subject to billions of viruses alone trying to infect me. It makes me sound like I'm an Ebola researcher or something like that, when what I'm really saying is that I live on a world where there are tons of viruses on everything, even though many of them cannot infect me and will be killed before they get a chance to do any damage at all. Some of those viruses are indeed quite dangerous, and one of them might eventually kill me, but I'm making reality sound more exciting than it is. My personal servers face scans at all hours. There is virtually always someone trying to log into public services with brute force password attacks who will be banned by the automatic rules soon. That's work you have to do, but it's not the interesting thing. I don't have people specifically targeting my systems. They do. That's where they have a more complex security situation than I do.

Re: Bloated headcount

Part of the count is probably the employees of subsidiary companies that have some connection to them. If they have a contract with company X which provides a product to do vulnerability detection and tailors it for their big clients, then why not count every employee of that company. And if there's a contract with company Y to provide emergency technical assistance if an important system goes down, then theoretically anybody employed by company Y could be assigned, so count all of them as well.

What's worse than paying an extortion bot that auto-pwned your database?

Re: Excellent news, this

I wouldn't claim that nobody paying ransoms would completely stop ransomware, but you act like the bot is independently trying to encrypt systems because it finds it fun. It's only there because someone wrote it and is prepared to operate it. If they are not able to make money, they don't need to operate it anymore unless they have another goal. Attacks intended to destroy something masquerading as ransomware would be unaffected, but people who are in it for the money would start to find other ways to get money with the willingness and ability to write malicious software.

They've provided all the tools a good administrator needs to have a really strong permissions setup, including lots of integrations with other authentication systems. At some point, the administrators need to start to use them and the writers of the engines can do little to change it. The only change I see is requiring the user to enter a password at the start, rather than having a typical default, although many packages for the database engines already do that.

Walking people through the process of creating limited roles will probably not work because anyone who doesn't understand to do it on their own will probably just create one user and grant everything to them, then exit the setup. I might even do that, because even though I really like having particularly limited access roles, I tend to set them up when the program that's going to use them is created rather than at the time of database creation. I'm not sure there are a lot of options that have the program prevent stupid administrators from doing stupid things.

This again? The main reason this is happening is - drum-roll - admins leaving stuff with open ports to the internet. People do that on networks where they control the hardware all the time. In fact, they do it more often there because the cloud providers usually have a default configuration that includes firewall rules and, when they can, doesn't assign a public IP address because those are expensive. You can really easily open it back up in the cloud, but you can also really easily open it up on your own network, and I'm sure we've both seen people who have done it and need to be corrected. Blaming cloud providers for admins not understanding the basics of security (don't have an internet-facing database unless you really have to, if you're not sure you don't really have to, if someone else thinks you don't need it then you probably don't need it, and the password should never be the default especially when it's internet-facing) is not helpful. Not only is it not helpful because it lets the ones who caused this off the hook, but because it makes it look like you're biased against and don't understand cloud hosting, so when you have real complaints about cloud, people won't believe them.

Re: private investigators and a hitman

You can't just confiscate a wallet. You know the identifier that it's going to, but the only thing you can really do without the private key is to shout loudly that whoever has this is evil and you shouldn't exchange with them. If people listen to you, then they'll be less able to exchange their funds for money they can actually use. If people don't, you're mostly out of luck.

Facial recognition tech has outpaced US law – and don't expect the Feds to catch up

Re: But its already widely used -- even by the government

I oppose it whether it works or doesn't. I focus on its inaccuracy, not just because I want it to be taken down, but because that's one convincing reason why we shouldn't have it. There are some people who don't understand why a perfect facial recognition system is a problem who can understand why a ridiculously biased one is a problem. And it is biased as frequently demonstrated by every experiment they run with it. That bias looks bad when it's the police using it to scan a crowd and stopping anyone identified for questioning. That bias may look more benign when it's more people from a certain group that get double-checked at an airport, but the cause is the same and the problem should not be ignored.

The verification of identity is just the first use of it, possibly intended to ease people into the idea that facial recognition is common. Even there, there are serious problems both with privacy and with inaccuracy. Meanwhile, there is no good argument for having it there when the task can be better performed with previous methods and could likely be skipped entirely.

Ban on Apple watches with blood oxygen sensors confirmed after failed appeal

Re: Opportunity for people to personally export to the US ?

The law says that buying outside the US and importing them is illegal. In practice, if you're doing it for yourself or some friends, nobody is going to find out and nobody will even try to check because they don't care. If you sell them at a shop or you're importing a large batch of them, you can expect someone to find out and to receive a nasty fine. Whether Apple will disable the feature in watches that were sold with it enabled is a better question, because that mechanism could affect your imported version as well depending on what the if statement condition is.

Will AI take our jobs? That's what everyone is talking about at Davos right now

Re: Will a thing that doesn't exist take our jobs?

Oh, I think customer service is likely to get hit with it. I'd like it not to, but the bot is capable of being polite and not sounding too formulaic when responding to a customer request, even though what it says isn't likely to be very useful. I think some jobs will be lost, at least until more cars sold for $1 situations start cropping up, or more likely some customer demonstrates that following the customer service bot's instructions destroyed their product.

I'm not sure your interpretation really fits the situation. Sure, an agricultural worker would have plenty of time where there was no ability to do agricultural work, for example in the middle of the winter, but then they would have to do other things, such as getting stuff to burn because it was the winter. When things were busier, such as harvest time, you would probably have to work extremely long hours whether you had good light or not because, if you didn't get that harvest done, that would be a problem for you during the winter. It's not as equal as X hours per day, Y days per week, winter or summer, but it's still a lot of working and the downtime, when there is some, isn't organized and may be more "I can't work now" rather than "I don't have to work now". It really depends when and where we're talking about, though.

US Supreme Court doesn't want to hear Apple, Epic's gripes about in-app purchases

Re: While a 27% hosting fee may seem excessive

Even if I accept all of those things as fact, which I'll get to in a bit, it doesn't matter. You could do it then, and the option has been taken away now. That decreases choice and, since Apple and Google have such a large chunk of the market, that's legally risky. If the Apple store is so useful to developers, why not let others run one; it shouldn't hurt them very much if nobody wants to use another one. The existence of FDroid and the Amazon app store doesn't seem to have caused Google much concern.

I also disagree that Apple's store provides anything like the services that a retail store did. It doesn't cause people to promote the app. It doesn't provide the average customer with some staff to ask questions about the product who have at least some knowledge about what it can do and what you need. It doesn't give you customer support assistance. It does two things: it makes it so that a user can probably find your app if they type its name in a search box, although no guarantees, and it means Apple can handle distributing the app package. As a developer, though mostly not of mobile apps, I'm not at all concerned about my downloads. If I needed to start handling all the bandwidth of users downloading my binaries, I could do that with ease.

Re: While a 27% hosting fee may seem excessive

In the days where retail software purchases were more common, you still had the choice to sell your software elsewhere and handle payments yourself. Whether that meant mailing floppy disks and having a phone number for purchases, mailing CDs and having a website and presence on chat systems, or having downloadable programs and a license server, it's always been an option. Microsoft could have made their computers such that you can only install software when purchased at a set of allowed retailers, but if they had, it would have been investigated as an anticompetitive action. Apple is doing that by not having any alternatives. They are not providing an option which developers can accept and pay for or reject and build their own. The analogy is flawed.

I think it means that your app can't accept payment for in-app items without going through Apple and paying Apple's fees, but it can link to a different thing, your website most likely, which can. You still have to redirect the user outside your app to be allowed to use something else, but the restriction that formerly prevented you from doing that has been removed, until Apple finds a way to put it back that is.

It probably won't work that easily. They will be required to keep accounting data, saying where money came from so they can report it to the tax authorities. That is enough to indicate that money was paid in return for their applications. They could try messing with their accounting so that it theoretically could have come from anything connected to the applications, then try to claim that it was only from Android users, but that's a lot of work to set up and requires that everything have some alternative pathway that could have avoided IOS.

Even then, Apple's lawyers can ask employees of the company in court to demonstrate where the funds came from, and unless they're being very careful, they can end up committing perjury if they say that it was from Android users, or even if they say that they don't know if they know that some data still exists to prove it. This is the kind of thing that makes lawyers very nervous, not that that necessarily prevents companies doing it anyway.

YouTube video lag wrongly blamed on its ad-blocking animus

Re: I can smell something... smells a lot like bullshit

I'm not sure you're fully understanding their complaint. You've linked to a page called "Sign out of devices you no longer use". They're quite clearly saying that they do continue to use the device, and they want to continue using the device, but they don't want their account which is used for one purpose on the device to collect information from different parts of the device. One of those parts is a system function: backing up data. One part is an application function: web browser activity. They wish the data collection for those parts to be turned off while continuing to use the account for app installation. Your page is not relevant to their problem.

Re: I can smell something... smells a lot like bullshit

You can't know what people had as their reasons for voting on your posts. Before I continue, I have not voted on any posts in this topic in either direction. For example, someone who downvoted a post talking about Google's data collection, to what extent they do it, to what extent they used to do it, and to what extent you can prevent them doing it may have a very different perspective than someone who downvotes a post about advertising practices. If you attempt to describe them all the same way, you will undoubtedly be annoying some of them by misinterpreting their views, so expect to receive downvotes on that sentiment.

Based on my own views, I think we agree about some things and disagree about others. You can see a summary of my opinion in my other post here if you're interested, but it's not very important to this discussion of why people voted and whether it speaks well or badly of them.

Re: Google should just refuse to run with an adblocker

So the technical review from a person who develops another blocker, one that Google's been trying to break for a while, didn't convince you? If lots of people identify that it's a feature of a particular piece of software, it still must be deliberate? Is there anything you could hear that would convince you that it wasn't Google doing it?

Re: it will run fine

Google are not violating your rights by inserting ads any more than we are violating their rights by running code to strip out stuff we don't want to run. The issue of data collection is a separate one, and that one does come under data protection law, but that law governs whether and when they are allowed to collect data about you, not whether they can put in advertisements or whether they can change their code to make it more likely for you to see them. Like you, I dislike Google's data collection and I think they should face penalties for what they have done and continue to do, but I also recognize that, if I get everything I asked for and they stop collecting data except if they get true informed consent, there will still be ads on YouTube and they'll still want me to and take actions to try to make me watch them. They'll have to fight with my ad blockers to do so, but it will not be illegal for them to do that.

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

Re: Backwards

Netboot is now supported on the 3B+ and 4, and maybe the version of the Zero they've released recently but I don't know for sure. I haven't used it, but I know people who have and at least one place that uses it to use Pis as rentable cloud servers without having to bother with the SD cards.

There has been another option for schools since the Pi was relatively new, which was to create a minimal image that would boot, connect to the network, then run the image from the server. It still required SD cards to work, but you could use really tiny ones and wouldn't have to worry much about wearing them out through lots of writing. There's some work involved in either option, but it's not too difficult to get going.

Combination of cheap .cloud domains and fake Shark Tank news fuel unhealthy wellness scams

Re: People unfortunately fall for this

Why not both? If I was a criminal running stuff like this, I'd probably not only steal the details but sell some cheap thing to see if I can get some placebo-affected customers to keep buying it. As a kind criminal, I'll make sure that the product I send is actually neutral, for example water or inert pills, but others may go with something even worse. Maybe I should spend less time thinking about what I'd do if I were a criminal.

BOFH: Nice air conditioning system. Would be a shame if anything happened to it

Re: So the PFY's name is...

Yes, that is true. The name was first mentioned, as far as I know, back in 2007. Still, we managed to go for many years without mentioning it.

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

Re: Building software is hard...

That's worth discussing, but it is not relevant to the question of speed. Whether it is our standards that are too high or their standards that are too low, or even if both are the case in some area, it still isn't a valid comparison. We can't say that China builds faster than we do for some organizational reason if what they did faster is not what we would have done.