Posts by doublelayer

Guess the company: Takes your DNA, blames you when criminals steal it, can’t spot a cyberattack for 5 months

Exactly. If users deliberately use the same password for lots of services, there's little a service can do to prevent those credentials from being accepted. In my opinion, any safeguards should come after that point, for example asking for additional verification when unfamiliar IP addresses are used, but that comes with tradeoffs, such as including the IP addresses users have used in the past. This service sounds like it could have done some useful things, such as offering MFA, but I doubt that the kind of person who would simply reuse a password would be the type to enable it. I don't think issuing a username will help very much in this situation.

If you do that, then users now have to remember their username. Either they get to set it themselves, in which case they'll pick one reasonably unique one and use it everywhere, or they all get assigned one by the service that makes no sense and they don't bother to remember it. In the latter case, you will have to include mechanisms to recover usernames which are not supposed to be secret information in the first place. You might as well just issue the user a password you generate if you're willing to go to that extent. On the bright side, it makes password stuffing difficult.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Re: Needless!!

I suppose there's also the risk that it looks stable for a while, but the stress on whatever is now taking the weight eventually wears it and causes it to tilt further. I've seen it happen with wood, but it's probably much less likely with harder floor materials.

I'd think that the most obvious step is don't move racks unless you have confirmed that you should, and maybe don't do it late at night unless there's an emergency requiring it.

Or, and this might be wrong but it's possible, the printer is too complicated?

I hate office printers and try to have as little to do with them as I can. This is especially true when the IT people have tried to set up something to make them easier to use, but it doesn't work. I've had the experience of trying to get a printer to recognize my credentials and print my document and it seems very unwilling to do so. I've had the experience of calling in my colleagues, also programmers, and none of us can. Maybe that's because the printer's broken, though it doesn't say so, but maybe we're all too stupid to understand the obvious method IT had in mind for how to turn this on. I start wondering whether I'm supposed to be pressing more buttons or if the server that's controlling print jobs is not working. Sometimes it eventually works. Sometimes it doesn't.

Most of the time, I'm using the office printer because I don't print much at all and I figure they can spare a sheet, so I don't build up the experience to know exactly what you have to do.

If you have a complex printer system, for example one with multiple printers you can send your print job to, some rule about where the printer you need to use will be which don't include some printers, and several steps when you physically get to a printer, and you write none of it down, don't act surprised when some infrequent users find this less than intuitive. Someone can get confused by that, and it's the configuration, not the printer, that caused the problem.

BOFH: Looks like you're writing an email. Fancy telling your colleague to #$%^ off?

Re: cleaning alcohol

Oh, yes, they are. Think of the kind of detail you find in your job which you think is important, but others either don't care about or understand. There's no backup system, perhaps? Every time someone works with the large file, you're making a round trip to a cloud service on another continent and getting charged annoying egress fees, even though everyone who works with that file is in the same building? The code is running a large spaghetti function which will cause a performance bottleneck if you get three times as many requests per second, and usage has been increasing rapidly? Have you ever had to explain this to someone who really didn't want to spend their time understanding you?

The same thing can apply to accountants worried about some detail about tax filing or audits or even thinking that the company could spend less on something that's costing them. It doesn't mean that they're right, but neither is an IT person necessarily right about the things that bother them.

Re: cleaning alcohol

"What is it that makes a man(or woman) become a beancounter? and what sort of courses do they take there? something that removes all emotions and empathy leaving a heart unbrideled by a conscience"

You know some people think similar things about us? Both accountants and techs tend to focus on one area with a lot of complicated and important details which the other people don't understand or care about.

Wait, security courses aren't a requirement to graduate with a computer science degree?

Re: A purely theoretical curriculum

I thought the rest of my comment indicated that I meant "a theoretical curriculum in computer science as an undergraduate". Theology can do whatever it wants, as it usually does anyway.

Me: "I don't know of many universities where you can take a purely theoretical curriculum"

Reply: "Oxbridge"

Well, I didn't go there, so let's see what they have. Taking into account the criteria written in my comment, let's take a look at Oxford's computer science course description:

This course in Computer Science aims to produce graduates thoroughly conversant with the principles of modern computing science, who are able to apply those principles in the design and construction of reliable systems. The course at Oxford concentrates on bridging theory and practice, including a wide variety of hardware and software technologies and their applications.

[...]

Practical skills must also be developed, and the majority of subjects within the course are linked with practical work which contributes marks towards the final examination.

[...]

In the second year, Computer Science students are required to take:

- the core courses in Algorithms & Data Structures, Compilers, Concurrent Programming and Models of Computation;

They have many optional courses that offer practical skills. You are not getting through this degree without learning some practical skills in programming.

Let's check Cambridge, just to be complete:

Practical work is undertaken and assessed in all years of the degree programme.

[...]

You take four papers, including three compulsory Computer Science papers - covering topics such as foundations of computer science (taught in OCaml), Java and object-oriented programming, operating systems, digital electronics, graphics, and interaction design - and the Mathematics paper from Part IA of Natural Sciences.

[...]

You take four papers, spanning core topics:

▪ theory – including logic and proof, computation theory

▪ systems – including computer architecture, computer networking

▪ programming – including compiler construction, programming in C/C++

▪ human aspects – including Human Interaction design, Artificial Intelligence

You also undertake a group project which reflects current industrial practice.

[...]

I don't agree, possibly because my experience about what computer science degrees, at least the first degrees before postgraduate, intend to teach. In my experience, they do teach a lot of practical programming skills. It's not a full set of skills needed to be a good programmer in industry, but it's enough skills to be good at learning what you need when you are in that position. That's not the only thing they teach; there's plenty of theory involved as well, but they do teach practical skills and people do take them to learn those. If they are going to do it that way, I think secure design is important enough that it should be part of the requirements, not a separate choice to be trained later. This might be related to what I describe in a comment below that I've rarely seen computer science split into programming and a more theoretical version, so I assume that most other departments work the same.

The reason that I think secure design is required is that it's not really a design methodology. It's not an option to be picked from a set of choices, but a mindset you gain from knowing what can happen and what you should do to minimize the risks. You can design securely along with any other structure you plan to use, and the concepts involved apply equally well whether you're writing a videogame or low-level industrial control software. In either case, it consists of basic lessons like knowing how to look for vulnerabilities, knowing what likely ones are, and learning how to either prevent them from existing or block someone from trying to use them. It's true that it's very easy for people to design without paying attention to these, and there are cases where this can be somewhat excused if I grit my teeth and admit it, but those exceptions are a very small section of software produced and the consequences of ignoring it in all the other areas can be extremely bad. We could fix this with more security courses, or with more attention to it in normal programming courses, and the latter might actually be more efficient, but I do think we should fix it in the education step as well as the corporate one.

I agree that specific product configurations shouldn't be in there, but should be in the IT security course, but there's a lot more to secure coding than the ways the language itself can have vulnerabilities. There is also secure design, which needs to be taught somewhere. Not just memory safety, but that you need to encrypt some data, hash other data, and be certain about the security of wherever you've stored it. They need to know how an attacker works so they can add the basic security precautions to their code. They need to know about information leakage so they can prevent having that vulnerability. Many of these things aren't about the tools they're using, but how they write their code.

I was taught all this stuff. Some of it was in security courses which were not mandatory, but at least some of it was included by professors who wanted to do this well. Still, those designing courses would do well to ensure it is there.

I can't really agree there. There are lots of certifications for safety-critical software, as there should be, but there's a difference between licensing people to build something, licensing their product, and licensing everyone who does anything at all similar to it. Licensing the product is what they should be aiming for, and a certification of the people building that product can be a way of making it more likely that the product itself will be acceptable during that process. Trying to require licensing standards for all of programming is likely to end with a bad certification test which is difficult to pass and nonetheless doesn't tell you much about the capabilities of the student.

This sounds like the "programmers aren't engineers" cliche all over again, a cliche I believe to be flawed. It assumes that all engineers are like civil engineers when this is obviously not the case. The engineers building your consumer electronics don't need to have any more certifications than the programmers writing the code running on those devices or software with a similar level of criticality. They may be held to standards about security for the programmers or not spewing too much radio interference for engineers, but that's checked on the product and, unless it's quite extreme, only when it causes a problem.

I don't mean by this that security shouldn't get more importance in this. I think having security courses is a good idea, if only because I work in security and if I can stop dealing with the basic things people get wrong, that would let me work on more complicated and useful things. We also need to somehow stop people from ignoring all the lessons that get taught in good courses, whether those are about security, maintainability, or efficiency. I just think that adding a certification to this process won't make that happen.

That's not the structure used by most universities. Usually, there is computer science, which teaches both theoretical and practical programming, and there is IT, which is separate. You don't often get to skip the practical parts when taking computer science, even if you do decide to become a theorist, and if you are pursuing that approach, you'll still find that most of your classmates intend to become programmers. Those are generally the two options. Sometimes, there is a split in computer science where some students take a mostly software approach and some others do a combination of electrical engineering and low-level software, but not always.

I don't know of many universities where you can take a purely theoretical curriculum, nor am I convinced that any of them should run such a program.

Wanna run Windows on an M-series Mac? Fine, buy a license, but no baremetal

No, wrong again. I was saying that your statement, this one:

"Google will charge you 30% for apps and in-app products across the board. What do Play Store users put on their toast? :D"

Is factually incorrect. I then posted the evidence indicating that it has been wrong for over two years.

Nowhere in that did I say Google was good in all of this. I think Apple and Google are intentionally charging the same amounts and tacitly supporting one another's App Store monopolies (monopoly for Apple, near monopoly for Google). I would like to see both lose cases about this and be required to change their ways, and since Apple has more ways to change than Google does, for example offering third-party app installation at all, that's the one I think deserves it more.

The legal agreements on that software are not at all ambiguous about you needing a legally purchased Apple computer to be allowed to run it. You may be able to break those agreements with sufficient effort, but it is not what you're supposed to do any more than I'm supposed to break the Windows license check system. So no, it is not free as in beer or in speech.

Try again. First, you know Apple reduced to 15% relatively recently to try to counter accusations of monopoly behavior, right? And you know that Google followed suit very quickly. From 2021:

Google is lowering commissions on all subscription-based businesses on the Google Play Store, the company announced today. Previously, the company had followed Apple’s move by reducing commissions from 30% to 15% on the first $1 million of developer earnings. Now, it will lower the fees specifically for app makers who generate revenue through recurring subscriptions. Instead of charging them 30% in the first year, which lowers to 15% in year two and beyond, Google says developers will only be charged 15% from day one.

The company says 99% of developers will qualify for a service fee of 15% or less, as Google is also further reducing fees for specific vertical apps in the Play Media Experience Program. These will be adjusted to as low as 10%, it says.

Source

Re: Windows is no longer a necessity...

By definition? Definition of what? Software, in order to be scientific, must run on Linux? I don't understand what you're trying to say, but I'm pretty sure whatever it is is wrong.

Re: applications that aren't easily replaceable on Linux or the MAC

However, emulation of X86 Windows is a bit easier on ARM Windows that has all the same calls as X86 Windows, rather than running through Wine which has some gaps. If the emulation continues to exist, a lot of things can be used if X86 dies. Of course, given the performance differences between current X86 and ARM chips, I wouldn't expect X86 to be dying any time soon.

Re: It isn't Microsoft not "allowing" users to run on bare metal

The same reason that people try to run Linux on them: they want to do some Mac OS stuff and some stuff in a different OS, and they don't see why they should need two computers to accomplish it. It works for my laptop which runs Linux, multiple versions thereof, and Windows and I can pick whichever I want at the time.

Missed expectations, zero guidance: Tesla's 'great year' was anything but

Re: Right

If you don't care about breaking rules and any objective reason to keep it alive, why should anyone outside the region care about breaking rules and any objective standard that would harm you? Why shouldn't, for example, large tech companies continue to ignore increasingly strong European attempts to regulate, tax, and restrain them on the basis of "you probably need Google here, so what are you going to do"? Of course, they're already taking some attitudes that look like that, but not officially and when regulators put their foot down, they respond.

Those rules exist for a reason. If you're going to defend them, you might want to be careful and make rules that at least appear to work with the rest of them because otherwise, people will toss out all the rules that help you. An environmental regulation that happens to make things more expensive for Chinese manufacturers is doable. One that just bans them is likely to have negative effects you're not paying attention to.

Russia takes $13.5M bite out of Apple over in-app purchases

We have a fundamental difference. Your article demonstrates that Russia could do this badly in the way you describe. It does not demonstrate that they have done it badly, or that they responded to that mismanagement using personal phones as a method. It does not respond to the technical objections that I raised to the method. Clearly, you find one of their failures convincing enough to assume that they have similar mismanagement elsewhere and to come to the conclusion you have. This is not sufficient evidence to convince me that they use the systems you say they do, any more than I would be convinced that this mismanagement means they are now attacking Ukrainians with golf clubs because they ran out of guns. I don't think we will reach an agreement on this one.

"They could buy radios from the chinese, but hey what makes you think they actually care ?"

The fact that using personal phones would a) not work, b) introduce several security problems, c) cause chaos for the commanding people and therefore d) slow their ability to invade the place they're trying to invade. They don't have to buy radios because they care about the soldiers. They need to buy radios because, if they don't have them, they can't run their war as well as they want to.

Our differences come down to one central point. You think they are using personal iPhones for battlefield communication as the only option, but I have not seen any evidence indicating this. Just because the Russian military have done some things badly doesn't mean they will do everything badly, and even if they did do everything badly, it doesn't mean they'd necessarily do it badly this way. Your suggestions also don't fit very well with the way they've used military equipment. So far, they have had a lot of equipment, but it hasn't been great because a lot of it is old. At one point, Russia built and stockpiled a lot of stuff, and I don't see many reasons why communications equipment wouldn't have been included. Radios don't get used up like drones do, so if they once had them, they probably still have most of them.

Do you have a source for the Russian military not having any communications equipment? It doesn't seem that plausible since they have a lot of equipment they've been burning through. Radios are not that expensive to make and don't get used up as quickly as weapons. Meanwhile, they keep blowing up infrastructure including electricity and communications systems, so if they were using their own phones, they'd frequently drop out. They can also buy radios from any number of Chinese manufacturers who make radio equipment all the time.

And, even if it were true, Russia could also get a lot of cheap Android phones for their military if they needed them. I'm not seeing facts here, but supposition and wishful thinking. It would be great if Apple could push a button and throw the Russian invasion into chaos, but they can't.

I'm not sure that bricking iPhones would have much effect on the war. Paying the fine will, but most iPhones are in the hands of consumers, not government leaders who have their own phone system, at least purportedly, and could easily switch them out at little cost. There's a good reason for them to refuse to pay the fine. There's not a great one for breaking phones that have already been sold.

'Birthplace of Amazon' on the market for $2.28M

Re: Housing

I'm not sure which two people you're referring to, but I assume I'm one of them. If so, I'm not sure it makes sense. There are lots of problems that living a hard life would have on someone wanting to get into electronics. The most obvious one is that, when you start to work on electronics, you'll break a lot of things. It's one reason I am mostly a software person, not a hardware one. When I was a child, when I messed up a program, at worst I had to restart the computer before I could get to fixing it. I never had to buy anything as a result of messing up. Just working on electronics requires you to have tools and parts that cost money, and each mistake will be more costly still. Another big one is access to guidance, which is much easier if you can find someone to teach you, and you're more likely to have such a person in a well-resourced school than if you don't have that. These are all major problems. House size, however, is less of a problem. I wasn't saying that anyone can get into electronics, but that as hobbies go, it's less limited by available space.

There are lots of ones that are more limited in that respect. Woodworking, for example, will not work very well if you don't have somewhere relatively large in which to store things. The tools are quite large, the stuff you're working is as well, it generates a lot of byproducts that you don't want to have inside. Or car repair and maintenance. You can't do either of those on a bedroom desk. You can do electronics work there. Living a hard life is an obstacle to all of these. Living in a small place is an obstacle to only some of them.

Re: Bezos' parents invested nearly $250,000

I have lots of ideas that could be worth trillions if I can develop them well and everyone turns out to love them. Having those ideas does not necessarily mean it's a viable business. This example is one where it worked out, but you act like that was obvious before it started, something the numerous failed attempts would debunk quickly. The comment was not being jealous about their success. You can maybe argue that it was being jealous about access to seed funding, but it could have just pointed out that Amazon had a larger starting fund than most startups could get when it was one person.

Re: Housing

It is certainly an issue, although your example doesn't work very well:

"Imagine being a teen interested in electronics, but not even having space to store cereal away properly."

Electronics isn't too space-intensive as hobbies go. The person who doesn't have extra space will have to pack up their tools, which is a bit more annoying than keeping them ready for use, but they'll still be able to take them out, do some experimentation, and put them away. There are several hobbies that are much harder than electronics to fit into a couple drawers and a box which might have suited your argument better.

Wait, hold on, everyone – Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair

Re: zero cost

A lot of things don't float on the stock market or incur tax and are still a market. If I trade items with friends, we won't be filing any paperwork and there is no tax to be paid as we didn't exchange things with a monetary value. Yet, there is still a market going on, with all participants valuing and exchanging items. This doesn't change when those items become intangible, such as code I can run and the value of a larger user base.

And it's still not relevant. "Market share" means "the proportion of all users, customers, consumers, etc of a type of thing that use this specific thing", without having to specify other details about how they choose or what the alternatives do. If you won't give up on the idea that without money, there is no market, then I know there are some browsers that do cost money. They are in a market, and they are competing with free browsers, so those free browsers are in the market as well. It so happens that basically nobody uses those paid browsers, but they do exist.

Re: You're asking me to quantify Mozilla's market strategy.

I am a trader. I choose which browser to run, paying indirectly by benefiting the organization that makes it. If I use Firefox, I benefit Mozilla by being part of their user base which they monetize in a few different ways. If I use Chrome, I'm benefiting Google by letting them control web standards. If I use Safari, I'm benefiting Apple by having bought one of their products because Safari doesn't run on anything else.

The browser makers are also traders. They provide me a service of value and compete with other browsers to offer useful features. Google provided automatic builtin translation with Google Translate. Firefox provides automatic builtin translation in fewer languages but it runs on my device and doesn't require me to send any data to Google. They are competing.

Re: zero cost

It has all of those things.

"a 'market' implies":

"a forum for trade,": The set of browsers and the set of browser users, and the users pick their browsers.

"a benefit passing between people,": Yes, I get a browser, Mozilla gets another user which contributes to their licensing fees from Google and someone they can advertise Mozilla VPN and other commercial products to, even if I have ignored them when they do.

"a benefit that can then be traded on in other contacts of kind/money.": They can trade the money they got from Google because their user count was X for other things, and I can benefit from my having a browser. I am not required to be able to trade my browser for it to be a market. If, for example, you buy a haircut, you cannot trade it to someone else but you have still received value.

"I could go next door and get a better deal": Yes. While you aren't paying in any case, you can get one that has more control over your data, or you could stick with the Google version that prevents you from doing so. Better deals are available. My opinion on the best one may differ from yours.

But whether you understand or agree with these distinctions or not, it's still a mostly irrelevant point. Whether it's a market or not, it's still something that can be divided based on how many users each thing has, and that's what we were talking about. I think you're incorrect about this not being a market, but even if I assume you are right, what difference does it make to anything?

Re: zero cost

Yes, it does make a market. A really small one, and one that won't last, but it is one. You provide value: the stuff you don't like but someone else does. They provide value: they take the stuff you don't want so you don't have to do the work of disposing of it. They would choose between the available discarded items and select which ones they want to take. In this case, it's a market you and everyone else doesn't care about, but that doesn't stop it being one. I'm not sure what the point is of arguing this academic point. If we had said "usage share" instead of "market share", would you have been happier?

Musk lashes out at Biden administration over rural broadband

Re: Just no

Too late, they've already tapped into normal taxes, allocated funds, and now intend to use them to spread into rural areas. They've got the money, and the only question now is how to spend it in order to provide the connections. It wasn't on your bill, but in your standard taxation, but the effect is the same.

Re: Let's go Brandon.

As someone who didn't downvote you, or upvote you, the title suggestion is a distinct possibility, as it's unrelated to the issue and people disagree with that sentiment too, but it's probably not the only reason. Another one is that there are some places that are truly disconnected from all grids, generate their own power, have no old copper phone cabling, etc. It is not most of these places. Most of them do have some infrastructure connected to a house, but good internet is not one of them.

There are some locations that are so disconnected from everything around them that it really doesn't make sense to provide a cable to them, but most of the people they're talking about live in small rural communities that don't have good service, where there are already cables for power and where a local hub could connect many people relatively cheaply if the work of installing that hub is done. The existence of completely off-grid houses doesn't make them the majority. Nor are those the priority for this program, as the program is intended to lower prices for areas where the poorest live. Chances are that if you're using a bunch of solar panels to power your off-grid house, you've probably got more ability to pay for your own Starlink connection than most of the people who don't have broadband.

Apple's on-device gen AI for the iPhone should surprise no-one. The way it does it might

Re: While I'm very skeptical of the AI hype compared to the reality

Whenever I've run models, which admittedly is not often, it writes to memory a lot. It loads a lot of assets into memory, runs conversions on them, and then thrashes the RAM for a while. That's fine when it's RAM it's using, but not so much if it's flash. I agree with you that people don't tend to wear that out now, but that could easily change if that's what the software is doing.

It's not entirely new, either. Some Android phone manufacturers have started advertising massive amounts of RAM, for example 24 GB, which consists of a moderate 8 GB of real RAM, and then 16 GB of swap. There have been some reports of this causing flash-related failures, but that is much more limited use than running a model actively in it, since the swap space isn't constantly being loaded and rewritten. Just because it isn't a problem now doesn't mean it will never be one, especially if we change the reasons why it's not been a problem now.

Re: Memory

They don't have much choice for iPhones either. Each model only has one amount of RAM. The current models range from 4 GB (SE 2022) to 8 GB (iPhone 15 Pro/Max).

I think this is only the case when computers can actually do the things you're asking for. In short, the problem is a backend rather than a frontend one. People have been able to talk to their computers and ask natural language queries for some time, but it hasn't been very popular because they can only make it do a few things. People eventually run out of times when they want to ask about the weather, search for music, or have their emails read out to them.

By bolting on an LLM, they can make the frontend more conversational and they've added one more command they can give: write something for me. However, none of the other functions of a computer will be available just because it sounds more like a person when you talk to it. I think it won't be popular for the same reason that existing voice assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, and Cortana haven't proven massively popular. After a bit of novelty value, you realize that they can't actually do almost anything you want. I still use the one on my phone, but basically two commands "set a timer for x minutes" and "call y".

Re: While I'm very skeptical of the AI hype compared to the reality

I'm worried about the wear that might cause the flash. Lots of people have decided to use the SSD when there isn't enough RAM, and in addition to slowing things down, it also starts using something that can't take that much writing and is required for the phone to function. It isn't going to bother Apple if using their software means phones start dying of SSD failures a bit faster, since they don't happen enough now to be much of a warranty issue and, when they do happen, most customers will just buy another iPhone to replace it. It does bother me.

Re: Alibi

I considered it, but the sarcasm didn't make any more sense than the literal message did. Most ways the message could be reversed didn't make any more sense.

Re: Alibi

Is this supposed to be a joke? I'm really not getting it.

Imagine burglar goes on the usual sweep. Now they can take a selfie at someone's house, then use AI feature to remove themselves from the selfie.

Then when Police catches them, they can show them the picture "Look guv, I wasn't there!"

Look, you have a picture of the crime scene at the time of the crime, on my phone. I feel like there's something in your proposal that I'm missing. I'm going to need more explanation.

Firefox 122 gets even more competitive with Chrome on translation

Re: platform identification

That is exactly the problem. If you don't want it to claim you're on Android, what do you want to claim to be? You can easily use a desktop user agent, but lots of indicators about your device point to it being a phone and a misbehaving site that's actually looking for them will not have much trouble finding them out. I suppose you could pretend to be an iPhone running Safari.

In my experience, sites that send data specific to the browser and device can either be fooled by presenting the user agent of a browser you would like to use or it's really not worth trying to get anything past them. A site that refuses to show the desktop version even though you're presenting a desktop user agent might be tricked if you patch enough things to not look like a desktop, but it's usually more effort than it's worth, and any site that's bad enough to do that is likely to have something else that makes it unusable should you succeed.

Re: platform identification

You can forge the user agent to say that you're running any browser you like or to exclude it entirely. The reason not to do that is that you're presumably trying to blend in with a crowd, and so you want to look like as many people as you can. If you say you're running Chrome on Windows, probably the largest user agent out there, other fingerprinting techniques can determine that you're lying about that. If you say it's Firefox on Android, but all the users are identified the same way, then it makes it harder to fingerprint you.

Datacenters could account for a third of Ireland's electricity by 2026

Re: when the boom ends?

Then renting computers will just be cheaper and people will still want to. The owners of datacenters have the asset that their equipment can be used by people seeking fads or normal users and either way, they get paid. Even when bubbles burst, there will be demand for servers, even if it dips for a while.

Amazon Ring sounds death knell for surveillance as a service

Re: Are these pervy doorbells mandatory?

There are two aspects. One is what benefit they get, or think they get, from having them. I think others have covered this. The other is why they use these in particular, and the answer is that, like most hardware, there is not an available option that includes privacy by default and doesn't require technical knowledge the average consumer doesn't have.

If I decide I would like a camera on my door or a remote intercom, I can buy some stuff to build one myself, host the server on my own infrastructure, and set up the networking. Even then, I'm likely to have to deal with hardware that's not built to take the conditions that the consumer stuff is, for example how much weatherproofing the case has. Still, I can do it and I know many people here who have, often involving a Raspberry Pi. If someone who has less knowledge than I do wants to set that up, it's quite difficult for them. Self-host on your own Linux server is not a convincing selling point for most people who don't have any servers and don't really want to learn how to use them. Activate by installing this app on your phone and holding your phone and the camera near each other makes setup really simple. However, all of the places that have such a thing have fifty pages of privacy documents that have lots of holes through which data can be taken. I'm not sure whether you could successfully make a business selling privacy-respecting devices with ease of use, but I am sure it's not been tried much.

US judge rejects spyware slinger NSO's attempt to bin Apple lawsuit

Re: Interesting argument from Apple

You already know what they're arguing and that they're going to patch holes whether NSO found them or not, because if NSO hadn't found them, the people who did would have used them to jailbreak and Apple hates that. That doesn't change the fact that it does cost Apple to respond, that they respond more quickly when it's an active attacker, and that you also know full well why Apple is doing this. Apple is doing this because what NSO is doing is wrong and is causing harm to them and their users, and this is an argument that allows Apple to do something about it. It happens to be true, but you don't need to look for weird interpretations to understand why it's being used.

Re: Apple spokesperson speak to The Register

I think Apple will respond whenever there's a statement that's already been written for the situation. They can just send the same block to anybody who asks. When there's a specific question, that's when El Reg gets ignored.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

Re: Efficient interface

That's actually a feature I value a lot, but I value it in Notepad++. One of the major reasons I like that editor when I'm on Windows is that it has a good regex system in its find and replace system. The GUI is still helpful, but I like those facilities as well.

Re: GUI Standards?

It's about what you can do after learning to use one tool. If everything is different, you know how to do the one task that tool is for. If things are standard, then you can probably figure out how to use other ones. So, for example, if you need to use a new piece of software for a bit, you already know the basics of how to open it, how to close it, where the settings are, what stuff you can click on and what stuff you can't, and you skip right to figuring out what you need to do inside it. If you might have to relearn the concepts, it's a lot more frustrating. For example, if you're used to ctrl+c copying and ctrl+v pasting and you also have options in the edit menu for those functions, but your new program has no keyboard shortcuts and the buttons are revealed by clicking a toolbar button with an unfamiliar icon, you spend more time learning that.

People who frequently have to pick up new applications will find this annoying. I imagine you've experienced it at least a couple times yourself. The worse situation is for those who don't do this frequently. How many people have you met who resist any change. An update might move one button and they panic? That's often because they've experienced something which completely changes their workflow and they need to spend a while re-learning things for no reason. There are times when that is necessary, but generally, if people already know some paradigm and yours doesn't offer a specific benefit that you can concisely explain and prove correct, it's best to stick with the working one. This is a lesson that many companies, especially Microsoft, would do well to follow. I wonder whether people would stick less to old Windows versions, even as they go out of support, if the next one looked familiar.

Re: Efficient interface

That claim requires some evidence. I'm sure you can use vi quite efficiently, but is it automatically the case that it's more efficient than an experienced user in a different editor? I think that depends a lot on what the user is trying to edit with it.

I know the basics of using vi for systems that have nothing else, but I came along when text editors could do more things and so I've never taken the time to use vi instinctively rather than deliberately. It's perhaps unsurprising that I find it to be slower to use than editors I've spent lots of time in. However, I also think that may be true if people find certain features to be useful. A typical GUI editor tends to have more builtin features than vi does, partially because there are other programs that can be used to get the same effect on the CLI. The more of those the user finds useful, the faster the editor with them included will be to them.

Burnout epidemic proves there's too much Rust on the gears of open source

Re: Rust and Mozilla

It is at least partially the other way around: Mozilla wanted to have better tools, so they made one. Others then took it over. It's embodied the successful aspect of open source, because people improving Rust also improve a tool that Mozilla relies on. Unfortunately, it doesn't make the negative aspects of a lot of people burning out go away.

Think tank warns North Korea uses AI for battle planning, maybe using cloudy resources

Re: Tough calculation, even for the best

They don't have very much experience, but what they do have is a lot of people, a willingness to see them die, and a lot of organized training. Most of the population is either in a long period of military service or has already gone through it, and while that service mostly included being used as really cheap construction and agricultural labor, it also included training on how to attack things. I'm sure they'd lose many of those people if they started to use them to attack, but they won't be too worried just because thousands are dying unnecessarily. They also have some more powerful weapons to resort to when they inevitably start failing. Those weapons may not be plentiful, but they are serious. So it's really best for everyone if we can somehow prevent them from starting a war at all, even if we would eventually win.

CISA boss swatted: 'While my own experience was certainly harrowing, it was unfortunately not unique'

They probably aren't using one directly, but a local VOIP provider. It might be a giveaway if it's all coming from international numbers, but if it's a number from that country, there's less that can be done to identify whether it's being proxied for an international origin. In addition, it's probably not being proxied in this or many other cases. The people who want to attack a US election official are probably in the US to begin with, so wherever they're calling from, it's in the country. You would have to use geolocation data to identify where the caller was, and I don't think the systems for collecting and reporting it are fast enough to let them filter it. With all of these obstacles, they probably send the calls to the local authorities rather than deal with the risk that someone actually has an emergency and they ignored it.