Posts by doublelayer 9408 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
Have you ever seen that happening? I can easily see a cable or port on the adapter getting damaged that way, but I've never seen anyone succeed in damaging a wall socket by tripping, even when the cable was hardwired into something heavy which put a lot more tension on the cable when they did it. Either the device or the tripper got the worst of the damage, and once I've seen it damage a plug by bending a pin as it fell out, but the socket always made it through.
OS bloat is not the biggest part of it. Part of it is that we users generate files. My OSes take up a relatively small part of my disk, whereas the files I've collected take up significantly more. Even if the operating system managed to fit in 128 kilobytes of storage, it wouldn't take people long to fill the rest of the 32 GB drive with other software they want to run and the files on which they're running it. You can, with effort, ruthlessly eliminate files you don't think you'll need, push other files to other systems, external drives, and cloud storage, and compress everything you're not using right this minute. That just makes the experience worse while not at all preventing the drive from still being too small.
What you may not have noticed was that it was comparing two views that most people, including the author, would oppose. Manufacturers viewing old equipment as a burden and institutions seeing old people as a burden are both undervaluing them in a harmful way. The comparison was not arguing for the latter point.
GrapheneOS only supports Google Pixel phones, so I wouldn't expect them to be very good at dealing with Chromebooks. With both Android phones and Chromebooks, you have a bunch of manufacturer and model specific roadblocks, meaning that knowing what is supported relies on knowing the very specific model of hardware you have and hoping that the guides online are similarly detailed.
Correction, the 7 years was a mistake because I was thinking of how many years between the manufacturing (2018) and Windows 10 expiration (2025) and then stated it incorrectly as this year. So I've had it for five years, but the total of twelve remains.
I have a cheap Celeron-based Windows box. It came with Windows 10. Seven years ago. It supports Windows 11. It runs Windows 11 just fine. It will continue having that support until Windows 11 itself is put out, which is at least five years from now and probably quite a few more than that. So minimum twelve years, after which I can either get Windows 12 to run on it, which is probably possible, or simply use the Linux partition which also works without any need to hack the bootloader and can run the latest mainline kernel. If it dies before then, it will be a hardware, not software problem. I don't think I'm telling you something you don't know.
"I read they want to know your AppleId? That’s absolutely between me and apple."
Since you have to log into the iMessage systems with it, how did you expect to do it otherwise? To send a message, you have to have an account. The exploit that let them get around that was blocked for bypassing that requirement. Now, it's akin to being unhappy that a mail client requires your email address and password. Admittedly, I don't know whether I trust this company to treat those credentials well, but I'm not surprised that they need them to make the service work.
They have arguments for why it's not. The two components are the following:
The method used was breaking security measures quite a lot. It allowed any person, unauthenticated, to send a message into the iMessage network. The iMessage network is supposed to verify the sender so that you can't spoof the source of a message, and this bug allowed anyone to spoof. Thus, their patching it was to fix that problem. If they need to, and for the second reason I'm not sure they do, to pretend that they didn't do this to break other services, they have that legitimate security problem to explain the need to prevent the method from working.
The other reason they have is that they can claim that they already interoperate by having SMS, iMessage, and eventually RCS in one application that automatically manages it all. Therefore, if you can use iMessage or not, the only difference is the color of the bubble. The message will still arrive to the same place for any user. Any user can still message any phone number from that app. Therefore, they can claim that their application is already interoperable. They can also claim that they have no need to provide services to people who chose not to enter any agreement or purchase any product from them, so denying service to Android users is not anticompetitive any more than not keeping around Safari for Windows was anticompetitive. This argument is easier to debate, but it still requires us to define exactly what market they're restricting competition in and what responsibilities they have in that market. Restricting competition by breaking things is often an easier case than restricting it by not providing things, so it's not going to be an open and shut case.
"What is competitive about Apple's messaging app?"
It's kind of the point of having one. If they introduce more features, like even more ways to have emojis involved when you don't need them, then maybe someone will want that and buy a device that lets them access it. I'm sure there's also some hope that people will be too afraid of their messages showing up in green bubbles instead of blue ones so they won't leave for Android, but their messages will still show up in the same app for others, so there's not much difficulty with that shift. People have a significantly larger difficulty if I ask them to use Signal to contact me, yet many people on both Android and IOS have managed it.
And if Google hadn't made a faked video, they also wouldn't have spent so much time hyping it either. At least The Register did the proper thing, found the admissions that Google had to make, and covered them. It would still have been better if Google hadn't made up the content of their video, even if they did tell the truth elsewhere. In their defense, that's a lot less blatant of lying than several other companies like to do, but it's still not very good.
Isn't that what they're doing here. The article doesn't say "Google faked the video and tried to hide it", it just tells us how Google admitted that what they showed was not representative of what their software actually does. The journalist is correctly reporting on Google's announcements to provide the information that someone viewing the video might not have understood.
"This is just all the more reason it needs to be firmly enshrined in law that only meat sack humans have first amendment rights."
This doesn't seem to be a reason to make that restriction at all, since the case is about fraud. If a particular human makes the same claim as part of an advertisement, it should still be fraud and they should still be punished for doing it. Thus, since it is unrelated to the free speech terms, it doesn't make a good argument about them in either direction.
In fairness, this wasn't a full computer, but an embedded, low-power device. It didn't need a Raspberry Pi, and having one would have caused some problems with power management and OS overhead. We didn't begrudge them having that amount of RAM as much as having that amount of RAM and then writing software that needed, maybe, 12 MB to run. It is a problem that recurs at other levels as well. Manufacturers need to ask themselves whether some spec will cause a problem for their customers a few years from now because otherwise, the customers will probably try to find someone else to provide the equipment next time.
Which is why you include a little more flash so the customer's config can be retained when the battery breaks, and if this thing is networked, you enable some ability to sync the time with NTP. I'm not saying that it has to run without a battery entirely, but that having the battery die should not cause a significant fault. There was a time when flash was too expensive to do that. It is no longer. If you need a particularly large amount of flash such that including it would be expensive, consider having a user-supplied storage method instead. Lots of OEMs have managed to provision their hardware with those chips.
As I said in my previous comment, failing to do this is what makes customers think that this manufacturer is being too cheap to be a reliable supplier. For example, a supplier of equipment who told a friend of mine that the equipment they bought would not get the feature update they were releasing because it only had 8 MB of RAM and that really wasn't enough to run this software. While that was probably true, my friend was right to ask why the equipment they designed in 2017 only had 8 MB of RAM, as this made it look like they had planned to cut off updates quickly.
"As I tell the PFY, you can learn the easy way by listening to other people's experience, or you can learn the hard way.... we picked the hard way with those batteries...."
I hope that, if you're building these robots, you learned that the price of flash is not that high and certainly beats any device where you need a battery to keep it from bricking itself. And if you don't build them, I hope you still learned that and will choose robots accordingly next time you have to buy some, because maybe that will convince manufacturers not to skimp on what's probably 0.002% of the manufacturing price. As I commented to a friend who was choosing how much room for expansion to put in a hardware design (that was intended to receive software updates going forward), it's much more expensive to try to convince customers to buy version 2 of the hardware when version 1 was clearly underpowered from the start than to make version 1 good enough that, by the time there is a version 2, the customers were happy with what they got.
"Would it hurt to go to where they are dealing with it and ask for a time estimate?"
Yes. I can't give you a time estimate until I have at least some idea of what went wrong. No, not the symptoms, the causes. It takes a while to figure out the causes, but sometimes after identifying the causes, the fix is thirty seconds and a reboot. The nontechnical always manage to assume that their statement of the problem is all the technician needs to know how hard fixing that problem is.
"Say four roles that get an annual calendar reminder to replace the batteries and ensure the other three roles still exist and were not vacant."
That will just lead to Alice replacing the batteries on Monday, Bob taking them out and putting in a new set on Tuesday, Carol removing the batteries but not finding a new set, so putting the old set on her desk to remind her to go get a new set, and David putting in the batteries that were dead in the first place because Bob put Alice's set somewhere else and Alice forgot to charge the old ones after taking them out. A proper procedure includes some way to verify that it has happened, but that introduces more overhead like finding a place to store that information and making sure everyone checks it.
Almost certainly, they would recognize the difference, but when your brain is in reading mode, it has a very efficient pipeline for reading and speaking which is not always delayed enough for the rest of it to stop you. "It's just coming up to ten no wait a minute how could it be" is not really much better than stating the incorrect time.
"When there are only two main players in a major marketplace, and the vastly bigger of the two, owned by a company with almost infinitely-deep pockets, deliberately operates at a loss, isn't that called anticompetitive?"
Maybe, but the attempt to prove it in court will have to jump through some smaller hoops and GitHub might not fit those limited requirements. The part of GitHub that operates at a loss is all the open source projects that are hosted there. It's expensive to provide that free hosting and bandwidth, but Microsoft covers it. GitLab might not really want all that coming to them given how expensive the open source hosting they do is for them.
In order to prove that their competition is harming GitLab's business, GitLab would have to prove that their revenue collection is at risk by comparing their paid business products to GitHub's. As it happens, GitHub's business plans are probably not operating at a loss. They're really quite expensive, especially as you add the features that software businesses care about. As such, the easiest argument, that GitHub's cheap business plans are taking customers from GitLab, probably won't prove true. They'll have to use a more convoluted argument about GitHub's free services to open source serving as a lot of marketing of GitHub's services that causes people to pay for its business services over GitLab's, but Microsoft can respond that they're giving that free service away as a service to the community and thus it should count as a donation, and their accountants are happy to calculate exactly how much of a donation it is if the court agrees, then declare it on next year's tax. So in reality, GitLab will likely be unable to prove the allegation of anticompetitive behavior to the extent they need to to make anything happen.
"The regualtory complaints came in early and resulted in a variety of regulations to 'preserve' 'Net Neutrality, rather than introducting any cost-based settlement or interconnect regulations."
Leaving the ISPs free to figure out how they'll implement the service rather than mandating that sounds fine to me. There is a reason for the regulatory complaints, namely the monopoly positions of many ISPs. People do not like being charged unreasonably by companies in such positions, especially when they have often received massive amounts of government funding, so they regulate them from the start to prevent them from causing harm. It's going to happen, so it is in the ISPs' interest to try not to anger the customers badly enough that the regulations become more extreme. If the regulators want to mandate even more, it is in their power based on the ISPs' use of public funds and market competition law.
"It's also somewhat ironic that mobile kind of relies on user uncertainty or ignorance to generate lots of money in overage charges."
Yes, many do, including mine. However, mobile companies have realized that people don't like that, meaning that most providers I know have an unlimited package available at some price and it's covering more and more customers who don't want to get overage charges. There is also a very big difference between charging me based on how much data I used altogether, something I can track and manage, and charging me and various others based on individual flows that I couldn't predict. Users would hate both, but they would hate the latter much more.
"Again it's really simple, either content providers pay some of the costs, or all those costs will fall on the subscribers."
And the solution should be simple: each party pays for their connection to the internet, as both the individual consumer and the large service provider do, and the ISPs figure out how much they need to charge to deliver the promised service. If they need more, they charge more. If there are competitors, charging more might deliver some business to a competitor who has not. Having ISPs charge both ends breaks this model and, as we all know, there's no way that my ISP will charge me less even if they manage to get the servers I connect to to pay as well.
Yes, the postal service has not promised to deliver any package for the same price. The ISP, in most residential cases, has done exactly that by deciding to charge one price for however many packets I choose to receive or send. If they don't want to do that, they are free to charge me by how much traffic I use, like they do for many commercial customers, or even introduce a complex setup for different destinations. They don't do that because they know that, if there are multiple options, customers will not choose the one where they need to do a lot of calculations to estimate what their bill will be and if there is not another option, doing anything too egregious is likely to result in regulatory complaints. It is not my fault that their business model doesn't let them charge people who use more, and it is not my responsibility to compensate them for that reality. If they don't like that, they are free to think up an alternative or to find a manager who understands the market they're in.
I think the theory is that you could use cheaper laptops that would be like thin clients. However, I don't see why you would want to. A desktop running in Azure only really makes sense if you need fast access to other resources that are also in Azure. If you need a desktop to quickly retrieve gigabytes from a database running in Azure, perform some operation on that data, and send the result to another server up there, then it makes some sense to run the desktop in the cloud so those large transfers don't have to go through the user's ISP. If the user is reading emails and writing documents, having a desktop in a datacenter somewhere does nothing for them. Neither is the cloud desktop good from a cost perspective. I really don't see the selling point for most users, no matter how easy they make it to log into one.
Not in my experience. I frequently take Windows laptops and run Linux on them. Booting it is a matter of plugging in my USB disk and figuring which of the function keys opens the boot menu on this model. I haven't had a problem booting it on any machine in many years. Once it's booted, there can be some more problems like lack of WiFi drivers or similar, but not only is that usually fixable without too much effort, but I can fix it inside a running Linux rather than fighting with the bootloader to get that far. Admittedly, I have not had Chromebooks to test that on, but the instructions for getting it started often include a significantly more involved process to get it to boot to my drive in the first place, whatever may happen after that.
"Even in your best case scenario (i.e., with overriding Windows 11 hardware checks) that's 12 years"
No, you misread that. That's the support lifetimes for machines released with hardware support for Windows 11, at least, with no bypasses required. If you allow hardware bypasses, the number goes up quite a lot from there.
And your opinion of the quality of Windows is not the issue here any more than my complaints about the content of Chrome OS are. You'll note that I didn't even state those in my comparison. People who accept running Windows get a certain number of years of support, and it is not the number that was made up.
My attitude is not only for personal use, where I do not replace my laptops after 3, 5, or 8 years. It is also based on places with which I have worked or volunteered which don't replace machines that frequently either. I have seen some businesses replacing computers on a 4-year cycle, and although they decided to do it, it never made sense to me as the machines they were discarding were all completely fine, whether they were Windows, Mac, or Linux devices (I have never worked anywhere that used Chromebooks). It always struck me as completely wasteful. Everywhere else I have been involved with tends to let the hardware continue running until there's a problem with it. Many of those use devices in a relatively stationary way, meaning mechanical damage is rarely the cause, with component failure and software support being the most likely reasons for disposal.
From your own source:
Buying any Chromebook with the intention of running Windows or Linux is not a great idea. Many can't boot anything other than ChromeOS; Those that can boot Linux (or Windows) often have functional deficiencies -- DO NOT EXPECT EVERYTHING TO WORK OUT OF THE BOX. Older models may fair better compatibility wise, but there are still lots of caveats, and it's not recommended to buy a Chromebook as a cheap Linux device.
Ringing endorsement there.
"a Windows laptop which lasts 3-5"
And you pulled that range from where exactly? If we compare your software support lifetimes, then the minimum Windows support lifetime recently was about 8 years (if you bought a computer in 2017 that can't update to Windows 11), assuming you don't bypass the restriction and update it anyway, assuming you don't pay for the extended support, assuming you don't just install something else on it. For most other machines, including those released a year later, the software support lifespan is quite a bit longer, probably at least 12 years, again with multiple options to extend that. Meanwhile, the increase to ten years from Google is only as of a couple months ago, before which it was 6-8 years, and all the numbers, including the recent 10, start counting from a random date of the manufacturer's choosing which is well before anyone could buy one. In order to defend a Chromebook, you're just making up a number to suggest that other devices expire long before we all know they do.
Well, it annoys me when we treat those who don't have technical knowledge like they're unthinking morons at the whim of software writers. They have the option to learn how their equipment works, the same way that we did, and they don't get to avoid responsibility for doing that with anything else. For example, if one of them was recording analog video onto cassettes, they might want to know which format they were using, what players supported it, which televisions supported the video format their camera was writing to the tape, etc. That information was right there in the instructions, and the file format choices are right there in the save box. It does not take expert knowledge to try to use those things.
The major benefit of computers is that, even if they chose a format they now regret, they have a pretty good chance of being able to recover it, even decades later.
I have some schoolwork, on paper, stored somewhere at my parents' house. Well, actually I don't, because they threw it away. It probably wasn't in great condition when they did that. If I complained that I had lost my precious writing, the answer would not be to ask for paper that never degrades or that my parents run a great museum of my work, but to tell me that, if I want that paper to last, then I have to take care of it, store it safely, maybe make copies so it doesn't come down to the existence of one sheet, and don't leave the only copy in the care of people who don't find it worth anything. Had I cared about the paper, I would have done those things. Computer files are not different. Some effort is needed to keep it, and people do not always care enough to go to that effort.
In some of those cases, the authors didn't decide to stop caring about the format, they stopped existing. But yes, it is your responsibility to export your data from formats if you decide you want to keep it in a modern one. You don't have to buy lots of new versions, because if you were able to generate the file, you can export it to a format supported by the version you already have. For example, you could open a file in the old version of Word and save the text as plain text, and you could probably have exported all of it as the pretty easily parsed RTF format. I am not asking anyone to buy new versions of anything, at the time or now, but I am asking them to go through the necessary steps if they decide they want to open old files in modern software. People posting here know perfectly well which formats are open or not and they knew that when they created those files.
On that topic, we have your complaint about lack of backward compatibility in new versions. Yes, this annoys me, but not as much as it seems to annoy you. I do not particularly want to pay writers of modern software to implement compatibility with file formats that never show up. This is often involved in my choice of software or file format. If some software, for example, only supports a proprietary format, then I may decide not to use it. It is one reason why I dislike Apple's iWork set of Office software. While it supports exporting documents to formats that others can use, it will only let you edit files saved in Apple's proprietary formats. So I moved those icons away and used LibreOffice instead. People here know everything I knew when I made that decision, and I trust them to make a similar decision based on their own tolerance for having to convert files later.
"what DO we do once, for example, MP4 for my movies is hosed, how then are we expected to access our memories ?"
Download ffmpeg and use it to convert that to whatever format you like instead. It's a marvelous collection of codecs for AV formats. In reality, though, you tend not to even need that unless the format is particularly obscure, because your media player software likely natively supports thirty formats or so, unless it's already implemented its format system by baking ffmpeg into it which is quite common. Software doesn't expire; it gets old. People stop using it because something better is available, but it's usually there for you to get your data out if you want to go to the effort to do it.
When data is stuck in an old format, it's usually so unimportant that nobody's done anything to get at it, not locked away from them for lack of a tool. There are exceptions for particularly proprietary formats or ones specifically built to keep the user from accessing it outside the provider's DRM, but you know that when you first start using that format, and there's usually some option you can take when you have the software to keep at least some of it.
Yes, that will happen, but you have the option to retrieve their contents using a number of tools, including many open source tools for opening some file formats. If you cared about the content of those files, you could download Micrographx Designer, Microsoft Word from 1993, and Word Star, along with an old OS to run them on. With those, you can retrieve the content you're interested in. If you cared about the content, you could have done that at the time as well.
Yes, I've seen that. That shows you that you can destroy digital data if you're careless and let lots of others archive it for you, and they end up doing that lazily, rather than doing it yourself. However, even compared to that, paper ends up the worse for it. Which is more likely to exist fifty years from now: a picture that was uploaded to Facebook or the photograph from one of my grandparents' houses that I collected after they died. I'll tell you: the former, because I have not digitized this bit of paper and am not planning to, and I'm pretty sure that if I die, it's going into the recycling bin. I'm not convinced that it will stay out of it when I'm alive. The picture will probably be in archives even if Facebook no longer exists.
A researcher from that time would have the following options:
Digital photograph: Okay, here's the best we have. People from the time would have been able to see a clear picture, but this one has been compressed and shrunk, so we'll have to analyze it more closely.
Paper photograph: You see that mud? Part of that contains some fibers which came from a cardboard box. If you could retrieve that, some of the box was made from the paper of the photograph. The pigments on the paper were removed from it during the recycling process.
Of course, who cares about a researcher from fifty years from now? They'll not need any of this. The fact remains, though, that the data must exist at that time in order to exist later, and it has to be preserved at all times. Copying the old social media photos archive to new media will probably be pretty easy in 2073, assuming disk sizes continue to grow. Storing all that paper is not very likely.
With the size of the trove we're likely to give them already, it's a bit egotistical to assume that any person's data is likely to be of much interest. If we destroy 99.9% of the photos taken since 2000, we're still going to have orders of magnitude more of them than we had photos from any time before that. It really isn't the same as researchers looking at things from millennia ago, when creation of records was expensive even to generate a fragile, irreplaceable version. Nowadays, it's easy for one person to generate a hundred photos of daily life and to have copies on three continents in an hour. Researchers will have more of a problem digging through photographs to find useful photographs than they did digging through dirt to find objects.
That is if they're still humans looking for something they didn't already know. The depiction of researchers in this forum makes them sound a lot more like aliens digging through the ruins of a planet we destroyed looking to understand how our civilization worked. That picture might approximate what modern archaeologists are doing to understand neolithic society, but I really think it's incorrect to imagine that future archaeologists tactics with our society would look identical.
Your comparison doesn't really work. The paper records you're extolling only exist because they were significant enough to be kept or because someone left a copy and someone was lucky enough to find it. If you want any records that weren't in that book, they're not hidden in an archive for you to eventually find them with enough effort, nor are they in an old file format you could eventually access with some effort, they are gone. Gone in the sense that the paper you were written on was used as fuel, or it was never written down in the first place. It's not that bad if insignificant records are hard to find because Google doesn't think anyone wants to find them. In all previous times, they were also insignificant and nobody wanted to find them, and that usually meant that if someone did want to find them, they had a much poorer chance than they do today.
"Clearly neither digital nor material media are now intended to last, so there's a great danger of our period of history appearing as a 'dark age' to future generations."
Rubbish. Our modern media is going to last much better than did old media. A while ago, there might be a couple archives of issues of a certain newspaper. If a fire broke out in one of them and the other one got flooded, that might be it for some historical issues. Nowadays, when a university wants to make an archive of a paper, they don't have to budget for a large room and then hope that their administrators will continue to budget for keeping it watertight and not on fire, but some space on a disk. And the next librarian will make a budget request for newer disks and copy the lot over, since the new disks are bigger than the old disks and that data might be useful sometimes. Such archives exist on all continents.
That's just the deliberate archiving. I have documents of no significance from decades ago because they can be stored easily. Had they been on paper, it is certain that they would have been pulped at some point, probably as I moved from place to place. I've watched many others do the same thing. They'll take physical photographs with them, but the rest of the material is discarded as useless, which it probably is. If it turns out that some of it is useful, it is much more likely to exist because it was easy to keep it by inaction. As more people adopt cloud storage, that will only increase as it gets copied onto more resilient infrastructure.
Lots of data is lost nowadays, but so much more is kept than ever was in the past.
You can't buy the replacement motherboard now. That may be because they just released the devices, so the motherboards they have are all going into new units. It may be because I've never seen anyone who actually broke a motherboard, so they're probably not that in demand. However, if we had these phones and decided motherboard replacements were important, we could probably contact the company and find a way to obtain one, and if enough people asked for it, nothing prevents them from putting them on the parts list and a user replacing them.
The major difference is that that device is, as far as I can determine from the internet, still running the Android 8.1 it shipped with. I don't have any data about the security patch level, but I'm guessing that's not much better. Maybe you don't care about those things, but they do matter to me.
You can't even buy individual parts
Hmm... this page must be a figment of my imagination. My imagination's integration with my web browser surprises me sometimes.
I did. Did it say that having a motherboard meant you couldn't replace it? It said that the design wasn't as good, not that repair of that part was impossible, and given that you can disconnect basically everything that connects to the motherboard, it shouldn't be hard. More expensive, more time, but still possible in a world where it's generally impossible on anything else.
That isn't much different from what is supposed to happen now. Bluetooth, when implemented properly, doesn't let a HID device just decide to start sending commands to a computer. The computer has to initiate the pairing, and it won't do that unless the user selects that device in the list using the existing input systems. Similarly, most HID device stacks will require a pin be entered on the device in question to confirm that it's the one the user expects. The reason this bug works is that it bypasses those measures, not because those measures don't exist. Introducing more warning screens won't fix that problem.
Your statements are contradictory:
"I am very trailing-edge, yet I looked around and my only 'fone with <=10 is the one I have not used in months, have not powered-up in weeks," and "you are using an outdated version of Android [confirmed as Android 10 or earlier]". Unless the school's systems are just wrong, you would appear to have one. In addition, if you have multiple devices running Android versions after 10, I don't think you really fall into the trailing edge category. How frequently are you replacing your phone?
However, it's not just having Android 11 or later. It's having Android 11 or later and getting security patches from your OEM. That's not as common. I have at least one device that is in the required OS level but won't get that patch, probably ever, but certainly not for several months.
Either that, the companies are wrong about what the regulations mean, or the companies made it up as a reason why they didn't have to provide any data. I note that the request is to repeal any regulations that would have that affect, not to repeal this specific list of regulations that we know have the effect. Maybe either the companies interpreted a regulation as embargoing that that actually doesn't or they decided they didn't want to create a report and just said they couldn't.
"I was programing neural nets to classify crops from SPOT satellite images in the mid 90s and I have always been of the opinion, that neural nets and LLMs learn there is no memorization"
I'm guessing you've still seen it. Even without doing it very often, when I've trained neural networks, I've managed to get them to overfit the training data and start memorizing things. I'm thinking of a model that ended up simply memorizing the training data and expected answers, meaning it would score very highly while training and then fail all the other tests. Of course, something that blatant is rejected as a bad model, but that's when it's small enough that the overfit is obvious and causes problems for intended use. This model is much larger, so whether the pictures are stored in their entirety or not is harder to prove.
For context, I think this is the company that produced the model that started to introduce Getty Images watermarks into generated pictures. They weren't pixel-for-pixel correct watermarks, but you don't have to copy every pixel to commit a copyright violation. If the model did what it did to the rest of the picture as well as to the watermark, would you decide that doesn't count as storing the image in the model?
I'd like to see your attempt at a regular expression that determines evil search terms versus normal ones. For example, I recently performed a few search terms for audio recorders that had to be very small, changing my wording of small over and over because the product listings kept giving me larger ones. That easily could have been to have a covert recorder, but that was not my intent. A filter would not know that, and dealing with false positives if it sounded an alarm on that would have wasted people's time. If Amazon is to blame here, it's for allowing that product, which is already not a definite victory. Also arguing that they should have detected abuse from a search string and done ... I'm not really sure what they were supposed to have done with that is a pretty ridiculous request.
"Shouldn't there be some kind of checks or records for who buys these?"
If you mean that there ought to be some checks, then you are free to propose that, but if you mean that those checks should exist already, I'm curious who you think would be doing that and what they would be doing specifically? The devices are not illegal. Their most popular uses probably are, and other uses may be limited, but they're not checking up on buyers because buyers haven't broken any law just by buying them.
Section 230 is a part of an American law exempting online platforms from liability for user-published content. It's not clear whether this already doesn't apply to a marketplace, especially one where you can list things without getting specific approval from the administrators of the marketplace, nor is it necessarily Amazon's defense here. However, they're clearly assuming that it will be and don't think it should apply. I'm not sure it would apply anyway and am more confident that Amazon's argument will be unrelated, so it doesn't seem very relevant to me.
I'm not sure how you tightly control or monitor use of that. You probably have to either forbid it entirely and ban the sale of such devices or accept that you can't prevent abuse of them. The most logical non-abusive use I can think of is installing the hook in an entrance, as if designed to hold a jacket, as part of a covert security system, but you have no way of knowing if I'm going to do that or something more abusive when I buy one and no real way to check what I've done with it afterward.
It certainly is a good way to use my extra liquid nitrogen. Eventually, you get tired of flash freezing things, but who doesn't have some LN2 just lying around? Okay, you probably don't ever really get tired of flash freezing things, you just have to keep switching up which things you're doing it to.
"Workers are entitled to a minimum wage for their time, at very least if they work at a for profit business."
And independent musicians should receive that wage from ... whom exactly? I ask because I write music. Not for sale, just because I get enjoyment from it. In fact, I mostly leave the completed work on my hard drive to tinker with later, since I'm never completely satisfied with it and I wasn't going to sell it anyway. Some of it's available on the internet though. Where should I pick up my check?
When you do things on your own, because you wanted to, you aren't automatically owed a paycheck. Sometimes, such things can prove to be quite profitable, but if they don't, the risk is yours. If I tried to sell my music and thought that Spotify was underpaying, as they almost certainly would be, then I can choose not to sign with Spotify and try to find somewhere else to put my music. If my music proves very popular, that can work out. If it doesn't, and chances are it won't, then that's on me.
Some people write the app. Some people write the software for the servers the app contacts. Some people make sure those servers don't break. Some people make sure the servers have good network connections so the users can use them. A lot of people aren't in the tech part, though, and somehow I think you're not thinking about all of those. For example, people to deal with licensing music from all the people who make it, because the way Spotify has built its business is having most music you can think of, and that requires a lot of licensing even if the terms aren't very nice to the creators. They also have a podcasting business, since that's another set of audio that people like to consume, so they have people commissioning, reviewing, and publishing podcasts if they don't count some of the people actively making them (those are probably considered external contractors, but I don't know). Then they have to make some money off this, so they have an advertising department, and since they're running an audio streaming platform, they can't do like a lot of ad-supported internet companies and just have a bunch of Google ads. They have to run that themselves. They do many of these things in lots of countries, so budget for running multiple advertising teams for the different markets and languages. I'm not surprised that the nine thousand is too many, but it's not like they could do this well with a hundred.
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