Posts by doublelayer

AI models show racial bias based on written dialect, researchers find

Re: Bias that matches society?

I agree with you that the causes are society's responsibility to fix, but the focus on LLMs has a point. If anyone is stupid enough to try to use an LLM to decide on criminal sentences, and although I would like to think that nobody could really want to do that, I am not optimistic, then it is important to know that LLMs will not only fail to help reduce this bias, but will probably make it worse.

The bias reported by an LLM is not necessarily the same degree as that found in general society or the subset who would otherwise be making decisions about criminal justice matters. If the training data contains more input from racists, the result is likely to be more racist, and its input data is checked so little and hidden so well that we would find it difficult to estimate whether that has happened. The other side of it is that society can change and sometimes quickly, but an LLM doesn't adopt that until it's retrained, and possibly not even then. Each individual decision in society can be reviewed, analyzed, and modified, but an LLM does not explain its reasoning and won't change its mind unless it's told to in which case it will simply do what its prompts tell it to. The point of this study isn't that LLMs are particularly biased, but that they are a crap tool for anything where biased output would be harmful.

Re: Broadcaster Presentation / Linguistic Standards

"The problem with this sort of "progressivism" is that it fails to recognize or address an important social function of radio and TV broadcasters: to provide a linguistic standard, and fight against the entropy which fragments language and destroys effective communication between people."

Who said that's what those were supposed to do? My view of media is that it's to provide information, not to show me the rules of language. I have grammar textbooks for that, and I already studied those in school.

Also, I think that having many local dialects will reduce the entropy you speak of. If I have only heard people speaking one dialect of English, it is more difficult for me to understand someone who is using a different one. If I'm exposed to many dialects, it helps me to recognize patterns that are common. I have never lived in the UK, but I understand UK media. When someone came to where I lived and spoke English with a Scottish accent (a somewhat light and generic one), some people I knew had trouble understanding her but I did not. I partially ascribe this to having listened to other Scottish accents on media, something I would not have done if they were suppressed and told to speak received pronunciation or get off the air. Similarly, I had trouble understanding some more isolated UK accents when I was first exposed to them, but having heard them for longer, I am better at following what they're saying. This means that I understand them, and if they are listening to my and other accents, so are they. That reduces entropy, not increasing it, because even if we speak differently, we understand one another. If you want a recipe for linguistic divergence, put up a barrier to people hearing what other people sound like, because then it doesn't matter when they differ so much that they can't understand one another.

Airbnb warns hosts who use indoor security cameras they may face eviction

Re: Easy fix for Register readers

"to be sure you didn't miss one a Flipper Zero can be used to flood all the wifi channels with garbage so his cameras can't communicate"

That might work with 2.4 GHz only WiFi, but trying to flood all the 5 GHz bands is not going to be possible with a small board. You'll need more antennas and more power for that. It also won't stop a camera that records locally and transmits when possible, or in fact one that only records locally to save on power and someone physically collects the card to see what they got. Oh, and people are going to be pretty annoyed when you do it. If you're going to try it, it's useful to know why it won't work.

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

Re: curated app store

"No. When the iPhone was introduced there was no app store (curated or otherwise) and no SDK for third party developers."

That is true, but they did have both of them in a year. While the first iPhone got a lot of discussion and people did buy them, I think its success came after, and because of, those additions in IOS 2. The touch screen, in turn, probably drew the attention of developers when the SDK became available because it enabled them to create interfaces that were harder to accomplish using much smaller screens and keypads instead. Had Apple not made that, the iPhone would probably have done much worse.

Re: Very Different

The problem with your summary is that you stated a lot of supposition as fact and didn't really try to back it up with anything. For example, you describe a plausible OS/2 instead of NT scenario, and that sounds like it could happen. However, you provide no reason why the people who, when Windows was the alternative, chose to buy Macs, wouldn't have done so when OS/2 is the alternative. In my summary, I simplified my guess into "Windows is just bad and OS/2 is just great", but I'm not sure that's objectively true and I also have no reason to think that would be the deciding factor. When you make predictions like that and state them as if they're certain or very likely, we try to understand why you said it. If the answer seems to be that you just made it up, it makes you sound less knowledgeable than I think you are, having seen other articles of yours.

Re: Very Different

I thought the same when I read the paragraph. The really bad part is that Liam didn't even explain why he wrote that, so I just have to guess. My best guess is that his theory goes something like OS/2 is great -> Windows is unnecessary -> everyone buys OS/2 computers, and they like it more than Windows -> nobody buys a Mac, not even those people who in our world did -> Apple actually goes out of business instead of coming close -> Apple isn't around to make other things. Do I believe any of that would happen? No, but that's the most logical way I could go from an OS/2 release to no such thing as an iPhone. I don't think whatever was intended there is accurate, but I also just don't know what was intended there at all.

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

Re: Never

That is absolutely your right, as is trying to block their adverts from your sight. When, for example, advertisers try to ban ad blockers legally, I have a similar problem with the request.

My problem is with those who think that there should be some legal requirement to let them have any service without ads, just because they don't like ads. It's unrealistic, would not work if they got it, and it risks painting real privacy concerns as no more important than wanting something for free. When I'm explaining privacy, I already have to make it clear why my concerns are realistic. It is a similar problem I have had when trying to explain why technologies like DRM are harmful. I raise objections to compatibility or the ability for a customer to use what they've purchased, but if I have people arguing for the same thing whose opinion appears to be that anything digital should be free at all times, it makes it harder for me to make those points and less likely that either group will get what they want.

Re: Never

"My screen, my rules."

That is not how anything works. Their site, their rules. The one who is taking the step to unite them is you: you are visiting their site and displaying its content on your screen, not the other way around. I fully believe you should have the right to block anything you want to not appear on your screen, but not that you should have the legal right for that to always be easy. There is no privacy reason why you should never see an advertisement; how much you see them has no connection to how much tracking the site did to pick which ones to show you. Your desire not to be annoyed is not something that is or should be codified in law with the same vehemence that the right to privacy should be.

You got legal trouble? Better call SauLM-7B

Re: Untestable-Quality LLM-Based Legal Help

And also relevant is that hallucinations that take the form of a completely made up case can be detected, but hallucinations that take the form of saying that a case decided something that it didn't, something irrelevant to this case, or with conditions or in a location that make it invalid can't be algorithmically detected. It's not just missing something that could have helped; the potential to give out incorrect information is still very much there.

Securing open source software: Whose job is it, anyway?

Re: Contributing Back

"GPLis satisfied by open source being freely available to customers/service subscribers, you want a secure supply chain then pay the subscription to be a user of that service."

This sounds a lot like the Red Hat case, which you're probably aware isn't making them or IBM very popular these days. If it's only the supply chain that you're paying for, that will easily work with the specifics of open source licenses, but I don't think you'll get enough people. If you also intend to keep the source available only to those who are paying, you'll need extra measures, like those Red Hat used, to keep that happening. I don't like that. You are free to disagree.

"I think we need to get away from the free beer which many are acustomed to…."

I think most of the methods used to try to get away from it are harmful to the free speech aspect as well. There is a reason why a lot of licenses are not open source, even though I can see the source. If we end up splitting into open source and commercial source-available branches, I will stay on the open source one.

Re: Contributing Back

If you intend commercial to mean that it has the right to require users to pay, it will run into all the problems that other licenses that intend to require payment have. I understand the desire to get revenue, but it does make a large, and in my mind important, change to what open source and free software have meant which has its downsides as well as upsides.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

"what if he hadn't been offered the job? What if the CTO had gone and looked at the code and found the problem and fixed it himself?"

Then he wouldn't have done much work, would he. If I tell you that "looks like someone modified that and broke it", I haven't done a lot of work. It doesn't make it unethical for someone to check on that, and finding that I was correct, do the work to fix it themselves.

If I was asked to look at their code, understand it, and fix it, all as an interview question, that would be a different story. That's a serious amount of work to do and would have taken time and effort they haven't paid for. To suggest what appears to be the most likely cause in broad terms from a quick summary is a very different scale of effort and one that I don't mind being asked for. There is a major difference between describing how you could do something and actually doing it.

"What if they had only offered him the junior position in the end?"

Then he would have the job he was hoping to get when he started the process. His opinion could easily have changed. I know mine would have been if an interviewer had yelled at me, because I would probably right off the company right after that, so there's several reasons he wouldn't have taken it if offered. Still, he entered the interview in order to and with the hope of getting the junior position, and that would have been a completely valid outcome of the process.

I do know this from experience. Early in my career, I was asked to complete a grueling interview process where the company asked for far more than was reasonable and I, knowing little about it, gave them what they asked for. I made sure that, if they wanted to use the code sample they asked for, the license wouldn't let them, but other than that, they got plenty out of me. I don't think that any and all tests are acceptable, but there are some that would be. This type of high-level test seems justifiable to me.

This is where we disagree, I guess. I don't think that spending over a few minutes is screwing myself; I'm at this interview and they're going to ask me questions to try to assess my skills and abilities, and I expect that I'll be tested in a variety of ways. That's why I would do it in an hour-long interview, but not a multi-day project. Nor do I think that talking about a theoretical problem which turns out to be real is that unethical. We all have our limits for what we think acceptable, and I would seem to have a higher tolerance for that than you do. I don't conduct many interviews, but I've taken quite a few, and I rarely felt disrespected because of the technical questions they asked.

My problems with interviews have mostly been in other areas. Usually, my negative reactions were more "that question is stupid" than "that question is trying to take advantage of me". Maybe I simply haven't experienced the questions that you find unethical to ask, so I'm considering something different than you are.

This really depends what the problem is. If it's "our massive codebase which you haven't seen and won't see now is broken, how do we fix it", then there's no way for the interviewee to answer it and no useful information to be gathered. If it is a bug that can be described, and they ask how the candidate would go about debugging it when the cause is unknown, it allows them to give an idea of their thought processes. In fact, in such a situation, the bug's cause being unknown is sometimes an asset. If I describe a bug, and I know that the cause turns out to be a communication problem between the application and the database, I might dismiss any other suggestion they give because I know it's not what happened, even if I tried the same thing back when I didn't know. If I don't know the answer, then I'm probably thinking about what did happen. However, the number of situations where you have a problem that can be a viable interview question are low.

In my experience, interview questions that end up being relevant to work they're doing often involve the design, at least for the primarily programming interviews that I have done. For example, I've been asked how I would design a system that they are also deciding how to design. Maybe the suggestions I make there will be something they didn't consider themselves and get adopted, but I haven't really done much work for them by describing it. They learn about my ability to design something practical, not just theoretical, and any productivity they get out of that is likely to be small. I don't begrudge them using it.

Re: Hypothetical Example

I'm not sure "all are equal" is always correct there. Not that "director always pulls rank" should be either. There are real cases where there is a higher priority involved and a justification for leaving a user's problem unfixed so that something worse can be prevented, but management often thinks there is when there is not.

I have less of a problem with interviewers using real problems as a part of the interview, though it shouldn't be the only part. There's a limit to how much work you would expect an interviewee to do, but hearing how they would solve a problem with an unknown solution is useful because there will be plenty of those for the actual job. I don't particularly mind that the ideas I come up with might be used to solve an actual problem. If I can tell them how to fix their problem in an hour and they can actually use what I said to get the job done, I haven't done something inordinate and they haven't gained a massive advantage. Had it been a multi-day project, I would feel differently.

That said, my typical rules of courtesy don't allow that to get into the shouting match area at all. There is no situation where, as an interviewee or interviewer, I would shout at the other person. If I'm disappointed with their answers, I will either show disappointment, or most likely stay neutral and note it for making the final decision.

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

If there are basically only two sources of flats, and they use that to make conditions that are basically the same, yes that would be a problem. This usually isn't the case because there is more choice in providers of flats, and when there isn't, landlords usually use it to increase the prices rather than add pointless conditions. When that happens, it is something that gets complaints, investigations, and regulations.

Re: the average Apple user spends more than four times as much

True, but what I meant was that they do not have the option to develop that as an alternative if they're planning to keep a Google option at all. It is an all or nothing venture, and that means OEMs are unlikely to try it. Developing a consortium wouldn't work very well unless they all did it in secret and unveiled a mass exodus overnight, since as each manufacturer indicated an interest, Google would call in their contract terms and, since their version wasn't ready for release, their competitors would end up getting business. The chance that a company would take that risk when their competitors have not is very low.

Re: the average Apple user spends more than four times as much

"What about Android? Google gives it away for free,"

No, they don't.

"and if they couldn't make a penny from in app purchases then what's the incentive for them to keep developing Android?"

All the OEM fees and mostly the massive amount of data they steal, and I want to do something about that as well.

"Should they charge OEMs to license the OS"

Already doing it.

"(and see them say "bye Google we'll do like China and use AOSP to create a free version")"

Their contracts forbid that.

"or should they embed ads into the OS itself to fund their development efforts?"

Already doing that too, or at least data collection and a lot of their apps which are required to be installed by OEMs have places for the resulting ads to appear.

Of all these choices, the one I'm happiest with is OEM fees. I give them money to buy the device, they license the software to run on it, that works for me. Admittedly, it's probably one of the reasons why Google talks about but never actually does much to increase software update timelines, because if my phone stops getting updates, there's a higher chance that I buy a new one, but I don't see their Play Store tax or their data collection causing them to release any security fixes.

Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort

Re: Reference

What gave you that idea? A company can be involved in politics in most ways, and the bigger they are, the more likely they are to be involved. They are certainly allowed and able to lobby politicians. There are sometimes restrictions on a few matters to make it harder for companies to bribe politicians, but otherwise, they're allowed to do pretty much what any person does. For that matter, you don't have to be a citizen either. I am not a citizen of the UK, but if I want to start writing up election posters campaigning for the general election that's coming this year, I can do it, put them online, send them over to the UK, and many other political activities, perfectly legally. I just can't vote in it.

The S in IoT stands for security. You'll never secure all the Things

Re: Some smart devices have strong security

Admittedly, some of the most successful locked-in devices are also quite secure as a result because the manufacturers go to a lot of effort to make sure that I can't break in if I bought it which also keeps out most others. It just means there's a different reason that I'm not buying it.

Tesla Berlin gigafactory to take week-long nap after suspected arson

Re: Typical Elon argument

You can't use that logic. Just because a comment doesn't criticize something doesn't mean that the writer supports that. If that were the case, you have, by omission, announced support for murdering anyone on the planet, simply because you didn't specifically say you opposed doing so.

The comment to which you replied was about two things: the comparison of pollution output from a factory and the actions to recover from the damage caused. While the former is negative toward Tesla, it doesn't say anything at all about the arson being justified. Nor does stating a negative opinion imply that. Someone can say that they don't like Tesla and still have an even larger problem and greater opposition to arson. There are clearly a large group of people who think Tesla's factory is causing pollution problems, hence many protesters who didn't burn it down, but that doesn't mean they all looked on as the sabotage occurred, totally supporting it.

US politicians want ByteDance to sell off TikTok or face ban

Re: Choice

It's just taking a leaf out of Apple supporters' books. It's a choice to not have a choice, and that is more important than anyone who wanted a choice to have a choice. Those politicians should try the relatively basic tactic of imagining what they would say if someone did the same thing to them:

The government of [some country, I don't know, let's just say it's the entire EU and they now have any authority necessary to make this hypothetical work] has announced that Google must sell its platform to a local subsidiary or be banned. The president of the EU has the ability to, without even passing another law, apply the same rules to any other company, effectively at will.

There are some legitimate worries about ByteDance's operations and control, but this law is not a valid way to deal with it. Laws intended to counter concerning actions should be directed at the actions concerned, not a specific company. Politicians shouldn't need this pointed out.

Re: "the app was banned on UK government devices"

This is usually my philosophy. When I start to work somewhere, my employer provides me with any hardware they want me to use. That stuff is theirs and they can do almost anything with it. My stuff is mine and they can do almost nothing with it. They can call my phone to contact me, and that's mostly it. If they want to attach that to a paging system, that works for me. If they want more than that, they can buy another phone and hand it to me. The same goes for laptops, although I've rarely seen a BYOD policy that applies to desktops and laptops.

Spam crusade lands charity in hot water with data watchdog

Re: RNLI vs chuggers

The comparison would appear to be that canceling or restricting a humanitarian service for a political goal is something they consider immoral. Theoretically, fewer attacks would have been committed by the IRA if ambulances would not come to help the victim, and theoretically, fewer illegal migrants would be sent if they were more likely to die at sea. Both would require allowing someone to be harmed when you have the ability to help them, and neither would necessarily result in the outcome you prefer.

This is why I mentioned the question in the first place. Whatever my personal opinions might be, and they are not relevant so I will not state them here, there are people who oppose sea rescue resources because they can be used to help migrants and those who want to restrict their actions to prevent them from helping migrants. If you can't change everyone's mind on that, and they are successfully reducing or restricting the sea rescue facilities, you can patch the problem you see by providing other resources that are not restricted by political decisions because their funding comes from other sources. Your opinion is probably that the government should be paying for whatever subset of services you prefer to exist, but if you can't convince the government to do it, then an external charity is a method of obtaining the goal anyway. This is true for the subset of charities that do something that a government also does, but there are also charities that do something that a government typically should not be funding.

Re: just stop it

Am I failing to express myself correctly? I said that, if you think the government is not paying enough, you can campaign for it to change. It doesn't matter what you think they should be spending the money on, because you can campaign for anything. You are taking a general point about what charities can be used for and deciding that I meant that charities should be buying everything the government should. I did not say it, nor do I intend that. If you think the government is breaking its promises, you can join everyone else in the world who also thinks so, and you have a few options about what you'll do about it.

Re: RNLI vs chuggers

You and I have a different idea about what state-sanctioned murder would involve. Someone dying of accidental causes may well be something the government should prevent, but is not murder. The UK could pay for many more sea rescue facilities than they have. Maybe you think that number should be higher. I defer to your experience, as I do not live or pay taxes in the UK and I don't know what facilities exist. That is not my point. My point is that, whatever that number ends up being, even if they allow you to pick the number you think is optimal, there is a valid reason for a charity to decide to provide more than that, or similar facilities put to a different purpose, using voluntary donations.

For example, let's say that I choose to move to the UK and set up the Non-royal I Bought Some Lifeboats Organization. Because you increased the number of UK-controled boats, I find that mine are not that much needed in British waters, so I choose to sail them over to Ireland, France, Spain, and Norway for a while. I can do that, and people in the UK can choose to donate to it, even though it would probably be pretty difficult to convince either the UK government or UK voters to pay for sea rescue in other countries. That is a case where a charity can obtain a good goal through acceptable means where a government probably will not, and in the opinions of many should not, be paying for the activity. Sea rescue is far from the only example of that, and many of the things that charities do are probably not things you think should be public services.

Re: RNLI vs chuggers

"What if the RNLI charity can't rescue everyone that needs it because of funding constraints?"

Then that's unfortunate. They're probably happy that they were able to save some people, which wouldn't have happened if their funding was zero.

"Completely different matter. It's a UK-based organisation. It does sterling work in UK waters. Are you proposing that a UK charity should be patrolling the oceans?"

As I stated, I am not that familiar with the RNLI specifically. Some charities that do sea rescue do extend past their nation's national waters, whether that be patrolling the open ocean, or more likely, rescuing people who are sort of near national waters but far enough out that it becomes international. Whether the RNLI specifically chooses to do so isn't relevant to my point, which is that an organization that receives voluntary funding can choose whether to operate outside the country more easily than government-funded bodies.

There are charities that do things that governments choose not to do. The benefit is that, instead of needing public support, because you are taking the public's money to fund it, you can have the subset of the public who care contribute the money. If you rely on convincing the government to fund all of the different things that people want done, you'll create a lot of pointless political fights instead. The good news is that this isn't a binary thing. You can easily have government funding for some charitable activities and allow a different charity to use voluntary donations. This also doesn't affect you personally, because if you don't want to donate to some charity, you simply don't. None of that exonerates a charity violating the law like this one has done, but just because one has doesn't mean that all do.

Re: RNLI vs chuggers

"Shouldn't sea rescue be a publicly funded service, like ambulances?"

There probably is some government-funded rescue activity, and as a non-UK resident, I don't know what the RNLI do. However, you start getting into areas like this:

1. What if the government's ideas of how much sea rescue is needed is less than the amount you wish to see?

2. What happens outside their national waters?

3. What happens if the people needing rescue are not citizens?

4. Since it's often a major political issue, what happens if the people needing rescue are attempting to migrate illegally?

If your answers to the above questions suggest that the government is doing less than you want it to, you can have something to add to the available resources. If the government is specifically acting in a way you don't think is right, your additional resources can be used in the way that you think is better.

Re: just stop it

If you want to campaign for government to pay for that, you can. People can vote for it. Your attempts to do that lobbying would likely themselves be considered charitable, though you have to be careful as ones that get too political often require more paperwork. That is not the only kind of charitable activity, however. If, for example, I want to see more medical programs in another country, my government is unlikely to raise local taxes for all of the programs that could theoretically be useful because there is a nearly unlimited number of projects that could use funding and a lot of people don't think their taxes should be primarily directed at other countries. That's when voluntary donations start to make a lot of sense. There are places to which I donate that aren't covered by taxation, and most of them are ones where people probably don't think they should be covered by taxation.

Re: just stop it

"If a cause is good enough it ought to be paid for out of general taxation."

And if you think it is good enough but a lot of others don't, then it won't be. That's why charities exist. Some of them are fraudulent, and some are honest but bad at their jobs, but that doesn't mean that all of them fall into those two groups. You can look at charities that do something you think is worthwhile that isn't being covered by government budgets, and if you think they deserve your donations, donate. Or you can decide that nothing is and not donate. Your understandable decision not to donate does not mean that others should not do it or the systems that charities use should not exist.

Lawsuit claims gift card fraud is the gift that keeps on giving, to Google

Re: To sum up ...

It often doesn't work like that. Let's say that I am a criminal and I convince you to give me some cash. That crime I just committed was more likely to be fraud (I lied to you to get you to willingly hand over money) than theft (I took money from you against your will). Either way, though, that money is the proceeds of crime and you should have it back. If I get caught, they'll try to take it off me and give it back to you. If I spend it somewhere, you don't automatically have a claim against wherever I spent it. Frequently, you still have to try to recover the money from me directly. The exception to this is when the place I spent it knows that they are receiving something I have no right to give them, but most merchants are not accessories to the crime.

This is where the law is unclear and where the ethical question is even less clear. It is not as simple as you have painted it, and attempting to implement a law that works as simply as you have described it will break things.

Re: To sum up ...

Not a very good summary, really. It comes to the difficult question of, when someone has been scammed out of money and the scam has succeeded in sending money to the scammer, then who should pay the cost for money that cannot be recovered from the scammer. There are a few other situations involved which are more clear, but the tricky one is the one I list above. Google is not the only place that has instruments that can be abused in such a way.

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

"I think you're missing the points here."

I think I'm entirely understanding the points you're making, I just think they're meaningless or useless. For example:

"1. It's already won, on sheer numbers, or by unit sales, or by value of sales, or by number of users, or by almost any other metric you can suggest."

Except the metrics I mentioned above, the ones I actually care about: system openness, user choice, and hardware and software longevity. All of your things really do boil down to "number of kernel installs on [some market segment]". I don't care about that. You clearly do, but that just demonstrates that we have differing goals.

"2. [...] The desktop is one battle in a war, which is arguably for user eyeballs, or bums on seats."

As I see that war, Linux is losing it. Linux may be beneath Android, but nobody says "I'm running a Linux phone". They say they're running Android, and that's what they have. Linux does not get user attention, doesn't convince the average user to do anything, and matters little to them. If their phone switched to Android on Fuchsia but looked the same, they wouldn't care. If it switched to any mobile Linux, they would be incensed.

"3. The real success story is FOSS over proprietary software."

Chrome OS and Android do not prove that. Large chunks are proprietary, the open chunks are frequently violating the spirit and sometimes the letter of the GPL, bootloaders are often closed source and locked down. But it is Linux, so we can call the entire thing FOSS when it doesn't bring much of the freedom or openness.

Re: Repeat after me:

I know the annoyance of a new Teams release, but generally, that is not considered much of a cost by the people you need to convince. When you're pitching hiring people to build management tools and infrastructure, training everyone to use Linux, and replacing any software that isn't compatible, you have to go to various meetings where you'll be asked what benefit you expect, measured in currency. You can sometimes measure it in time, which they will mentally change to currency, but either way, you will be asked for that justification.

Avoiding updates you don't like is not very convincing to those people. If they're nontechnical, they ask how much money not updating Windows will save. If they're technical, they point out that you already can block most types of updates and that you usually choose not to so you avoid being one of those people for whom EternalBlue malware still worked. Either way, they're looking for something that's either more obvious or just larger. I listed some examples above, most of which are larger, and even those tend not to convince them. If you want them to change to Linux, you need to understand why they're not convinced, and it isn't a Microsoft employee skulking outside the door with brown envelopes. There are a lot of parts to it, but one of them can be that they don't understand what the benefit is and we are not doing a good job of explaining it.

The author made that point, as well as bringing the old classic that Android is Linux. To me, these are weird things to be proud about, but I've argued against the celebrations of Linux's success on the backs of Android and Chrome OS and it doesn't change the minds of Liam or others like him. To me, the number of Linux kernels running isn't the goal, but the benefits that Linux tends to provide in the areas of system openness, user choice, and hardware and software longevity. Three goals that Chrome OS and Android don't share and deliver badly.

Re: "Statcounter says"

Its effect on the results could be changing frequently. For example, there is probably some attempt at deduplication effort here, but we don't know how they're doing it. If I run a bot that uses a Linux user agent and retrieves a couple thousand pages, whereas the normal user only retrieves three to five, then my bot should probably not be counted as four hundred users. Yet you can't just do it by IP address, because those are shared between multiple devices. That makes it difficult to decide how to count OSes, and the formulas are probably changed from time to time. Add in problems of sample size and you get a dataset that is not that easy to draw useful conclusions from.

Re: Repeat after me:

"Now, this was not cheap - at least in terms of man-hours spent getting the thing to that state."

This is the very important point. I have something sort of similar which only manages a few personal devices, and it's great, but I can't put a company on it. I can't find them a turnkey solution either. I could improve my version to be at least somewhat production capable (the spec for my version is that if I totally screw something up, it is okay if I have to go to it and physically fix it, but that's not going to work for even a small business).

Usually, when some company isn't choosing Linux, it isn't because it would really be impossible to do, or even prohibitively difficult, but that it would take a lot of effort. Whenever you have to justify spending that amount of time, both as a setup cost and an ongoing maintenance cost, someone will ask what you get out of it, and the reduction in Windows licensing is usually not enough to justify it. Freedom to modify the software is almost never even considered a benefit at all, since most businesses don't plan on changing either the Windows or Linux source. Other claims, like Linux failing less or stretching hardware support lifetimes, are difficult to prove or estimate for that viability meeting, and even if you could, might turn out to be rather small savings.

Dutch government in panic mode over keeping ASML in the country

Re: Blind to the US?

That's because most of this isn't related to the US. How hard it is to get workers is not related to the US. Whether to hire them in the Netherlands, france, Germany, or somewhere else is not related to the US. Whether there are tax incentives or not is not related to the US.

There is a separate situation regarding export controls that the US has put on ASML's technology, and other comments have clarified why this is the case, and that affects ASML's ability to export to China, but that isn't the major issue here unless ASML is considering actually building their new manufacturing location in China. I'm pretty sure they weren't going to do that even if they were still selling there. Now if you want to argue that the US's export regulations shouldn't apply, that ASML should ignore them (they have the choice to do so, but it would probably require them to move all of their assets outside the United States and they might not be able to sell there anymore), or that there should be an international dispute about that, feel free to make that argument. Don't pretend that it is an important factor to the thing this article is about, though.

Re: This may seem like

Yes, that would work, and they can and do try it, but it is expensive and there is usually a long lead time between starting the program and having someone who can contribute. If your situation is that there are no or few qualified people, then it makes sense. If the situation is that there are many qualified people, just not here, then they often investigate either bringing some of those people here or going where those people want to be instead. It's not that crazy an idea to try that if there are people who could do the job.

What a surprise! Apple found a way to deliver browser engine and app store choice

Re: I welcome that walled garden... have you seen the mess outside?

Because OS security is on OS writers, because people will probably buy their phones less if Apple intentionally weakens OS security, and because there are provisions in the DMA that forbid degradation, including security degradation. The result of this is that the sandboxing on apps will hold for ones installed outside Apple's store just as they do for ones installed from it. The doomsday scenarios, where an app outside the store instantly obtains root access and gathers every bit of information ever entered into the device are hyperbole.

"you now need to worry that your kids might install a 3rd party app store to bypass parental controls"

The parental controls can lock down some settings. It can already be used to restrict people from installing things from Apple's store. If they haven't let it block enabling other stores, it's deliberate. My guess, not having tried, is that parental controls can be used to block that setting equally well.

"or your elderly mother might click on a disguised advert and follow the instructions to install malware"

Sort of a worry, but I'm already worried that my elderly friends* might click on a disguised advert and follow the instructions to hand over their banking details, which they already can do, and that seems to be the more common request of such things. I guess we're back to trying to teach them not to, but maybe this will actually be a benefit to your relatives because you won't assume they're secure when they never were.

* My mother, on the other hand, generally knows what she's doing and has a good level of suspicion, at least partly because I've given out lots of warnings about scams. If your warnings about how they work are not a) detailed and with examples and b) common enough that people would like you to stop, you may get better results by improving them.

Microsoft drags Windows Subsystem for Android into the trash

Re: Any particular Android apps?

My idea, which I admittedly didn't actually do, was apps for controlling Bluetooth devices. I have seen several devices that intend to connect to a phone app for updates and configuration, but I don't always want to run them from that. When WSA came out, I downloaded it to see if I could link with a device like that, which didn't appear to be supported at the time, and then I didn't try again. From some posts here, it sounds like that still isn't supported, but I do not know that from experience.

I did not go through the Amazon store to install things. I sideloaded FDroid with ADB, then installed apps from that, including Aurora for accessing things from the Play Store. I did not install Play Services, but theoretically you can with some effort. Most applications I tried worked correctly, but I already have a phone, so there were few that I was very interested in trying. One that I did use was a mapping application I've already used on my phone, which allows me to view map data using a familiar interface and with access to the same data as the app I would later use when traveling.

Air National Guardsman Teixeira to admit he was Pentagon files leaker

Re: lets move forward

That's when they know the spy is a spy, but everyone else doesn't. If they've already publicly caught the spy and imprisoned them, it generally doesn't work to let them out, say "we were wrong, sorry about that" and expect that everyone will believe the spy just managed to escape and retain their clearance. By the time that you publicly indicate that someone has specifically investigated this person on suspicion of espionage, their trustworthiness has been significantly reduced.

Re: Well there's your problem

However, the initial statement implied that using that at all was an indicator of a failure in design. I don't know what their system did look like, and it is quite possible that it has multiple severe security design failures. That websites were involved does not prove it.

EU-turn! Now Apple says it won't banish Home Screen web apps in Europe

Re: Illegal under the DMA

"For employers that give their staff locked-in laptops, who have an IT policy as to what programs they can install…..how impressed do you think they would be, if a user decided to install a “sandbox” on their laptop?"

Sandbox or something else, the problem is breaking the policy that says that they're not supposed to install anything. The problem is breaking that policy, not the specific thing they choose to break it with. By the way, there are some people in some companies that do in fact install sandboxes on their employer's equipment, with permission, to do exactly that. I have been one of them. My employer was fine with it because the sandbox was the tool to get my job done.

"Right. And I own *my* iPhone. *I* should have the right to install whatever *policies* I like to ensure my own security. And I’ve chosen to outsource hire Apple as my IT department, to vet the security for stuff I don’t want to waste my time with. What business is that of yours, to decide that I’m not allowed to do that?"

It is none of my business. I support your right not to install anything that Apple hasn't stamped approval on. If the regulation said that Apple is forbidden from making Safari anymore and must preinstall every browser, I would oppose it. It does not say that. There are many things that I will not have on my devices, and whenever a regulation is written to require that they be installed, that is a problem. When the regulation simply gives me the choice to have it or not, I will choose the "choose not to" option and go on my way. You should have the right to keep Safari as your only browser, and you have that right.

Judge orders NSO to cough up Pegasus super-spyware source code

Re: OTOH

This analogy is not very exact. If I try to work with it anyway, the recall of a faulty part is equivalent to fixing the software vulnerability, which Facebook did. It does not follow either that Facebook has additional liability for the existence of the vulnerability, nor that responsibility for abusing it has decreased in any way.

Re: Does Pegasus still work on current Apple phones

Right. Apple, who also sued NSO and asked for a legal ruling that NSO is not permitted to own or use Apple's devices, just gave them a backdoor. That's logical, isn't it.

Re: Does Pegasus still work on current Apple phones

The vuln that was used has been fixed and does not work if you have updated. One of two situations are true now, but we don't know which one:

1. The Pegasus developers have found new vulns, are using them, but we don't know what they are so we can't fix them.

2. The Pegasus developers have been locked out of all the ones they've found and are busy looking for more.

Either way, don't count on option 2 lasting for very long. NSO earns a lot from finding new vulnerabilities and putting them to use. They probably keep a long list of possibilities so they don't have to tell their customers that someone is immune for the moment.

Re: OTOH

As I said, that would probably come under the heading of negligence, and you can charge Facebook with that. However, you generally have to prove that it should have been predicted and prevented, not just that it was a problem. If everyone's steering wheels are coming off in the first month, you're likely to win that one. If your steering wheel came off after six years and nobody else's did, almost certainly not. The complicated stuff comes in the middle where some wheels came off but there is some chance it's related to your actions more than their design, or the design that caused the wheel to come off didn't seem all that faulty when they tested it. So you can try, but there is no law saying that any fault qualifies.