Posts by doublelayer

DoJ, ByteDance ask court: Hurry up and rule on TikTok ban already

Re: The US Constitution isn't for personal interpretation.

Neither of those statements are correct. Taking them out of order:

"Tik-Toc's main argument seems to be that their servers in the US are too deeply intertwined with the one's in China."

They said nothing of the kind. Their main argument is "that's not legal". Their secondary argument is "splitting this up isn't feasible this quickly". Their tertiary argument is "you can't just split one piece of software into U.S. and non-U.S. versions, no matter where the servers are, because they're still one piece of software working on a global set of content".

"Which means they are implying that their CEO committed perjury before Congress."

The testimony concerned wouldn't even conflict with what you say they're saying. They testified that they have Americans working with American data on American servers without the Chinese employees accessing or using it. That's it. I'm not sure I entirely believe that, but nothing in that conflicts with having a single global network which isn't easy to partition on a whim.

"Congress is setting domestic ownership requirements as they do, for example, for US nuclear weapons makers."

Their ability to do that is limited. Yes, there are some areas where they have that power. Nuclear weapons are a bad example, since the government is the only place buying them so they can set whatever restrictions they want. Radio and television stations might be a better example as they are also forbidden to be foreign owned (sort of). However, they do not have the legal authority to impose that regulation on anything they like whenever they like. I am not a lawyer, but I think you have overestimated how clear this case is.

Big Tech is not much help when fighting a junta, and FOSS doesn't ride to the rescue

Re: Mesh networks

I'm not as concerned with hardware bans; some Chinese company would make cheap Android phones and get them imported. They don't care about any other local regulations, so why would they care about these either? Myanmar might keep them off the cell networks, but that's not an issue if you're using them for a mesh node.

However, mesh networks aren't the silver bullet some people imagine. They're not as resilient as they appear. You've pointed out several major problems with them, and they're also pretty easy to infiltrate and track since, by design, they let any device nearby into the network. You would have to put a lot of effort into such things as trying to insulate people from a device that advertises that it's part of the mesh network, waits for a peer to connect, then triangulates their location. It might not be effective if you only transmit while walking down crowded streets, but people probably don't limit themselves that way.

Pew: Quarter of web pages vanished in past decade

Re: this content sometimes disappears from view

It isn't that hard to keep every link together when you've designed the site, but it becomes much more of a pain when you use intermediate software. I've helped a few websites switch their sites from one backend CMS to another. They never want me or anyone else to hand-code HTML and maintain their structure and I don't want to do it either. In each case, they're looking for something where an untrained employee can log in, click some buttons, type some text, and their site changes. I take a very different approach on sites that I run, but those are easy because nobody except me needs to touch them.

An attorney says she saw her library reading habits reflected in mobile ads. That's not supposed to happen

Re: re: Seems like this might be something AI could usefully be applied to…

The rest of the comment may convince you that I didn't have an LLM write it for me. However, whether I did or not, I used those two phrases to refer to two problems with concerns about novel tracking techniques. Unprovable is a concern because, if you don't try to prove that something works the way you've described, then how do you know that it does? If you accept your theory about how something works when you cannot test it or even demonstrate that something has definitely happened at all, then why should anyone believe it happened rather than making up whatever story they like and believing that without trying to prove it.

The faulty assumptions lead us there and it's something that everyone is vulnerable to. We all have situations where we think something has happened when it has not. Here is an example:

A while ago, I opened Notepad++ on a Windows computer and a window popped up. Well visually it didn't, but I have some software monitoring for invisible windows which noted that it did, and it had a scary name: "Input capture". I've seen that window before, and it most often happens because of a remote desktop connection or a GUI VM connection. What could cause this? I was sure that I hadn't done anything unusual lately, so it clearly couldn't have been me. Maybe I had malware from somewhere. Maybe this was evil Microsoft snooping on me. Maybe someone had infiltrated Notepad++ and given me a poisoned update. Something was being done to me and I was determined to stop it. A full disk scan identified no malware, and a reboot didn't make this go away.

As it turns out, it was me. I had started a WSL VM in an earlier session and opened a file from that session in Notepad++. Then I rebooted, so WSL wasn't running anymore. When I tried to open Notepad++, it tried to open a path that looks like \\wsl.localhost\Ubuntu-22.04\... and that started some searching processes looking for the remote computer so I could get the file I had requested, but they didn't work because the remote computer was on my computer and I hadn't turned it on. I didn't see that because Notepad++, not getting the file it asked for, helpfully didn't open it and showed me the next one in line. That was not in my list of assumptions.

If you see an advertisement for something, there are lots of reasons it could have gotten there and some of them are simple enough that we don't consider them. We may assume that we never visited a page about this topic, even though we actually did and a tracker tracked us from it. This is logical because visiting one website is a really small action, especially if we just glanced over it before abandoning it as not a useful site, so it got about four seconds of our attention. We don't need to remember every little thing like that, so we forget it, and then when something crops up days later, we have forgotten that easy step. The problem with assuming something we haven't proven is that, if it's related to something we can prove, then we can stop it or at least try to. If we always assume that we have stopped all the basic web trackers, therefore any tracking we see must be due to something else, the chances are high that we haven't stopped all web trackers and we will get more done by finding the ones that slipped through.

"They are well docemented on El Reg for years."

What are. You mean specific programs by specific companies to record your conversations from the devices you already have and use them to target ads? I'd like to see that documentation. But before you cite the other comments here, we're talking documentation that this thing has definitely been made and put into operation, not documentation that they might exist because something that could theoretically come from them has happened.

Proving that something does exist is harder than proving that it could exist. Anecdotes demonstrating that it could exist can be incorrect, and it is sometimes worth considering if they are. I am not saying that Google, Facebook, or any of the other serial abusers of privacy haven't made such a thing, but I am saying that having seen an ad after talking about something related to its content is not enough to prove that they have.

If your work laptop and personal laptop are on the same network, that's not really a surprise. IP addresses make associating activities on two computers very easily done. If your work laptop is on a different network but you've explicitly provided some information (for instance you've logged in to see your personal email or social media on it months ago), it could be due to that. This is the less surprising kind of anecdote.

The problem is that many of these examples tell a tale which can't be explained by the known tracking methods, so the theory is that unknown tracking has occurred. The problem is that most of it is unprovable and may rely on faulty assumptions. I believe that those telling the stories are convinced that they didn't look up something on their device and nobody sharing a network or account did so, but I'm less convinced that they actually didn't. It's easy to fall into confirmation bias. There are so many conversations that don't appear in advertising, but we don't think, let alone talk, about those so it makes the stories more common. For instance, when someone tells a story of a certain ad following them around for months after a conversation, I have to wonder if they didn't have any other conversations in those months, because if it's using recorded conversations to recommend ads, you'd think it would use more than one of them.

Three cuffed for 'helping North Koreans' secure remote IT jobs in America

Re: Laptop Farms?

It's not about how many people use the same IP. As long as they work for different companies, nobody will notice. This is about which IP.

If you track the IP from which I made this comment, it will look like a normal ISP as used by residential or office users, not a datacenter. If I proxied through a cloud service, the IP would identify that I had. You can test this. Get a cloud VM and put a VPN endpoint on it, then try to browse from that endpoint. Some sites won't care and will look the same. Many other ones will identify your range as a dangerous place for traffic to be coming from and will either block you entirely (I think this is a bad idea but some sites do), or more likely just send you tons of captchas. This doesn't even require you to share the IP. When I first wanted to run my own VPN, I did exactly this, and although I used an address that only I had used for over a year, it was still in the Digital Ocean address space. Digital Ocean is well-known as a cheap place to rent servers, meaning that my datacenter neighbors almost certainly included many spammers and criminals, so I was suspected as well. I moved that endpoint.

When you connect to a corporate VPN, it will log the address you use to connect to it. If that address is unusual, it will usually note that and, depending on settings, report it to the company's security team. If it's for a country you're not expected to be in, for instance, that will likely generate a report and some companies will send those to someone for review. The same thing is true if it indicates that you're coming from a datacenter. Therefore, to evade this, you have to come from what looks like an acceptably local ISP.

Re: Its interesting to look at the legal technicalities

Using fake identities is a separate crime, no matter which country they work for. Using stolen identities makes that two crimes.

"Here I can't figure out where North Korea comes into it since they don't really have much of a presence on the Internet -- I'd have thought that the network connection would go to China at which point its difficult to tell where its going."

North Korea comes into it because it is their citizens who set up the system and do the work in it. I would have thought that was obvious. They determined this by finding out who coordinated this, not by tracking packets. It is likely that the North Koreans doing this may actually be doing it in China, but that doesn't stop it being a North Korean-run enterprise.

Re: Laptop Farms?

Most cloud services use IP ranges that clearly identify them as datacenters, not residences. Some systems will prevent that kind of address from accessing sensitive systems or will raise it as a security issue. Even if it doesn't do that on the first day, it can be found in a later review and be a problem. A laptop farm may not actually need laptops, but a residential IP address is likely a requirement. They could easily be VMs being run on a server there, but the server should still be in a house or local office where it's harder to tell that it's a proxy.

Re: Brainwashed ... WTF?

That or just greed. If you can act as the representative for multiple tech workers, you can collect a lot more money and do less work than working in a salon. They don't have to believe that they're acting for a good cause if the money's good enough.

How two brothers allegedly swiped $25M in a 12-second Ethereum heist

"Mev boost is open source, so the exploit is a publicly documented way of using it."

That's not how open source works. It is a discoverable way of breaking it, but there is a reason why it's considered a bug. Heartbleed was also a publicly discoverable flaw in open source software, but using it to steal data wouldn't be legal. Your argument appears to say that if it's with open source software, then you are legally allowed to do anything you are able to do. The law doesn't think so. They could try arguing whether this manipulation is an illegal kind or not, but just because open source software was involved won't change it.

Google gives in to Hong Kong, blocks fake national anthem on YouTube

Re: @Tubz - Wait!

Yes, they are. Not the same China though, so maybe the claim got a bit weaker. Maybe you could, I don't know, ask the people of Hong Kong what they wanted and then let them have it? No, that would be... democracy.

Microsoft offers China-based engineers an option to relocate

Re: China is far too big

"Every Belt and Road initiative only drains the target country of it's resources and doesn't provide any form of growth or independence whatsoever, so they're acting more like a parasite than a foster."

That's kind of the goal. Build something useful, get good terms on the loans, and then when the country is unable to pay back the loans, you have leverage to make requests. Forgive the loans and you may be able to set up some more infrastructure there, for instance. A lot of countries are willing to spend to get things like that. When the US wants a military base in another country, they usually don't expect that to return a profit and are willing to spend to get it. Many of China's international ventures accomplish similar goals and aren't that much more expensive. Of course, it also makes it easier for China to import whatever they might want from that country, so there is a small boost to the other countries from export industries.

China has a lot of problems, but it has a government that is in a position to ignore many classes of problems that democratic countries can't ignore and the size to absorb many negative events. It also has many assets it can use to advance. I think you may be counting them out too quickly.

Apple says if you want to ship your own iOS browser engine in EU, you need to be there

Re: I absolutely adored my Mac Classic.

"Can the Pi folk please use their loot when they go public to start selling a works-out-of-the-box, cased, retail Pi PC for the mainstream user. Then we can start having some fun again, 80s style."

What's the point? They kind of already embraced that with the Raspberry Pi 400, which isn't really any more boxed than a normal one other than providing a basic case with a keyboard on it but it certainly looks 1980s-ish. However, using a normal Pi, all they would have to do is to put the board in a case of which there are hundreds of options, preinstall and preimage a card, and ship with whatever set of peripherals you don't want to buy separately. Lots of resellers already do some or all of that. What more do you expect from a retail version and what benefits do you hope will accrue by doing so?

HR expert says biz leaders scared RTO mandates lead to staff attrition

If your contract specified working remotely, then they can't easily change it on a whim, though they can do some things. If, however, you have a contract from before the pandemic which specified the office, then they can tell you that they are enforcing that again, and if they thought about this and put it in the contract, then they also can.

These are the easiest examples, but if the contract doesn't mention it, then it is still usually going to work out that the companies can change your work location. If they move it unreasonably far from where you are, then you might have a case, but not if you chose to move away from it or if you could go in easily enough. The details will depend on the situation, but you can assume that they probably have the right to make that change and be correct most of the time.

I see the logic, but I have basically never worked anywhere where you could count on thorough documentation or training materials. Some places had good user-facing documentation, some had crap or none, but all of them had patchy internal stuff. Speed was considered more important than documentation of something that frequently changed and could be worked out by reading the code (most of my experience has been with programming teams). In fact, I remember one of the projects I had to modify but wasn't maintained by my team so I hadn't used it before whose documentation basically just said "RTFC".

Businesses will have to consider where their priorities are between speed and thorough training material, and if they decide that they don't want to provide that level, then they have to do training some other way.

Oklahoma saddles up bill of rights for crypto wranglers and miners

Maybe, but it would require them to get funds and give them to scammed people, which brings up two more thorny questions:

1. Should governments refund people who got scammed using money obtained from people who were not?

2. If they do, why should crypto-themed scams receive special treatment?

Re: One notes that ...

Yes. From the details I can find, this is just a bill to let miners mine and users exchange it if they can rather than any legitimization or endorsement. You can't pay your taxes to Oklahoma in cryptocurrency either. The limits on regulating miners is important, but the part that talks about users doesn't seem to change anything because it explicitly allows them to do something they were already able and allowed to do.

You OK, Apple? Seriously, your silicon lineup is … a mess

Re: Fast is Bad? Slow is good??

Oh, they can always stick more stuff on. They've done it before. They could either put something else on the end (this isn't the M4, it's the M3A/M3A Pro), or they could stick on more words (M3 plus ultra). Sure, eventually doing that will result in something that looks stupid (M6B plus ultra max), but it wouldn't be the first time as trying to explain the different versions of iPads, nor would it likely be as hard to understand as what Intel and AMD have sometimes done to their processor numbers.

Re: Not for the Likes of Us

I agree that their assumption of why people buy these is wrong. I'm not really sure why people buy these, other than to know that they do. My guess is that, having decided they want an iPad, they don't consider whether they need a certain level of performance and just assume that the M* version is better than an A* version so they'll get it. I've never heard someone explain the thing they are doing that requires M-series performance.

Re: Users Use Applications.................

That could be true, but the project I speak of has gotten tens of devices to run many releases after Apple dropped support. If there were serious problems, just ones I never encounter, they would know about that. They do, for example using this table of devices with known problems. The issues they report are nearly entirely related to driver issues, and crucially, driver issues that they can't get around but Apple, having the code for them, could.

My laptop wasn't cut off unusually early, either, the way that it might have been if there was a security flaw in it specifically. Unless you're suggesting that all Apple hardware develops unavoidable security flaws after seven or eight years, that's not it.

Re: Users Use Applications.................

Apple's Mac support lifetimes have been shortening. You may be thinking of phones, where an IOS device is virtually guaranteed to have updates for years more than any Android device, though a couple ones have been sold promising to equal it. However, when you compare Macs with Windows, it doesn't end up looking as obvious. I've used this example before, but I have a MacBook from 2013. According to Apple, the latest Mac OS I can run on it is Mac OS 11. They stopped releasing security patches for that some time ago and many of the Apple-developed apps won't run on that. If I installed Windows on the same hardware, I would have Windows 10 security updates for another year and a half.

What I did instead was to use OpenCore Patcher to install Mac OS 14 on it instead. It works perfectly well, demonstrating that, just like Microsoft's dubious claims of technical problems requiring a minimum CPU level for Windows 11, Apple did not have a technical reason to cut off the updates. I am happy to praise them for their phone support, although most of that is simply comparing their adequate numbers to Android's unacceptable ones. That does not extend to everything they do.

Put Rescuezilla 2.5 on a bootable key – before you need it

Re: Alternatively...

Or you could recognize what this tool is useful for, which is not exactly the same as the set of things a backup is useful for. Yes, there are some times where you might use either, such as if the disk gets corrupted. Of course, you might not have a backup that's fully up-to-date. A backup from Tuesday is wonderful and will rescue you from plenty of things, but before you restore it, maybe you want to use a tool to try to recover Wednesday's files. If you back up every night religiously, then substitute 8:30 for Tuesday and noon for Wednesday.

Maybe, though, you are doing something else. For example, helping someone else who doesn't have backups. Then you might prefer these tools over a backup of your computer. Or maybe you want to restore your backups, and you need some software to make that fast. Or you don't need to restore a disk, but just fix a file, and rather than spending hours restoring your full disk backup then a bit longer catching things up, you just fix the file and go on your way.

Samsung takes bite out of Apple over its mega marketing misstep

Re: Synonym

Meanwhile you took people expressing derision at best and assumed that they were a lot more upset than they really were. You somehow think that people were distraught after seeing that advertisement, when reading what they said demonstrates that they were not. Most responses I saw in these forums were of people expressing one of two thoughts:

1. This advertisement is stupid (that was my view).

2. This advertisement is insulting (not really my view).

But you will have a harder time trying to argue why the ad was actually a good idea, so since you can't argue against what people actually said, you had to exaggerate their reaction to have something you can contest.

Nvidia chief Huang given 60% pay increase amid AI hysteria

Because, when something is successful, everyone did exactly the same amount to get that to happen? That's not how it works. That doesn't necessarily mean that he deserves to be paid more, because I don't know what, if anything, he actually did to help here. Still, when a success happens, it doesn't automatically follow that everyone who did something to contribute deserves the same payments as a result.

When AI helps you code, who owns the finished product?

Why do people insist on coming up with these irrelevant questions they know the answer to. You clearly know the ways to answer the questions in all your examples, and you should also know by now that this does not mean that you own the output of an LLM you use. You should know that using someone else's code from a book does not mean you own their code but that the book likely gives you permission to use it, and you do own the code you wrote around them. Using a tool to get things from your brain onto the computer or paper in this case are completely different.

Re: Is any of that code copyrightable?

A lot of code uses the same structures, but that is not the same as boiler plate. My for loop may look a lot like your for loop, but that does not make them the same. The loop condition line is not distinctive. The loop body easily could be. Even if it isn't, the function that contains the loop may be distinctive. Even if that isn't, the class the function in may be. Even if it isn't, [loop continues ten more times].

This is why companies have to hire programmers to build things for them. If it was all boiler plate, then they could use one of the low-code tools where you drag some blocks together and out pops an application. Many people do successfully build systems around that kind of thing. Many others try to and find that there is a situation where they need original code written. Just as each sentence in a book is not particularly special but the book ends up containing things that were not previously available, programs are made up of a small set of familiar functions and are still quite original.

Re: A goldmine for professors

"Should your current employer, who sends you on various training courses, get a slice of your future income after you have left for a new job ?"

This is why some of them will, if they pay for training, require you to either stay for a certain period or reimburse them for the training. There are some situations where this makes sense and many others where it doesn't, but just like the teachers, this is already handled and does not make a good parallel to use of LLMs.

Re: Licenses

"Does the AI understand and respect the licenses of the code that it bases its suggestions on?"

No, for two reasons. A) the software is not intelligent and does not automatically discover and enforce licenses, and B) the companies that build it want to have as much training data as they can, so even if it could, they would prevent it from doing so for the same reason and in the same way that they knowingly use lots of data they don't have the rights to use.

But you do know what rights you have to it before you use it. If I go online and find that there is a library, but it is commercial and I don't want to buy it, I can write my own or keep searching. I can do that because I know the terms. If I do not know the terms before using something, then it becomes harder to decide whether to use something or not.

Google thinks AI can Google better than you can

Re: We are well aware

If you think that you not liking something means it's in its decline, I can only conclude that you haven't been around for most of that "wasn't so long" period of Microsoft and Google dominance. Some person making a statement about security isn't going to tank a company that is valued by investors at trillions of dollars and actually has tens of billions of dollars in cash just in case they need it. Neither is my using DDG as my search engine, which I've been doing for about a decade now, going to prevent Google from existing. They have lots of extra mechanisms to continue to exist, including their powerful position in mobile operating systems; the second most popular office suite after Microsoft's; and the fact that, by inertia, paying for default placement, or people actually thinking their search is better, they still have 90% of the search volume.

As one Apple Store votes against forming union, another may go on strike

"we both now that the average store does not have a 100 employees."

Why do we know that? The two stores that do are in suburban New Jersey and Maryland. They are not flagship stores. Why should we assume that these are much larger than normal?

"In AU no Apple store has anywhere near 100 employees and im talking downtown Sydney."

This appears to be incorrect as one Australian store managed to have 150 people on strike from it.

Using which states numbers from 2021 of 70,000 retail employees across 510 stores, that makes for an average of 137 employees per store and a Cook-to-retail-employee per worker budget of a nice, even $900 per year, which at $15 per hour makes 60 hours per year. I don't care how part-time they are. That's not what they earn.

"According to Google there are 271 Apple stores in USA. Im going to guess that uncle Tim's compensation is MORE than all the employees in all the apple stores around the world..."

You would guess wrong. Cook's 2023 compensation was $63 million. Even if we only consider the 271 stores in the US, that leaves an annual budget for employees per store of $232,472. Both stores mentioned in the article have about 100 employees. Let's assume that they're larger than normal and that the average store has 50 employees. This makes a per-employee compensation budget of $4,649. This is obviously less than any Apple store employee in the United States would be paid.

In the scheme of things, this doesn't matter. Apple has a lot more cash in the bank than they pay their CEO, and they could easily afford to pay store workers more or to do almost anything else. However, if you make a claim like that, it may be useful not to get it wrong by an order of magnitude, which if we figure out the actual number of workers per store or account for stores outside the United States, you clearly would be.

Re: Target based bonuses

Because it's not illegal. You may not like it. A lot of people may not like it. However, there is nothing that prevents a company from deciding that someone is worth paying massive amounts and another person isn't. That makes lawsuits based on the argument that we don't like how this works die quickly.

Nix forked, but over politics instead of progress

Re: A directory tree managed by software ? No.

As I understand it, it's not your data that goes in those directories. It's installed programs and system configuration that they organize that way. You could put the programs folder on a second disk from the system disk, although you need to sync the main file in /etc which is used to build that program disk somewhere in case the system disk fails. Otherwise, as long as you're comfortable for programs to be in opaque directories, it sounds like this does what you asked for.

Ransomware negotiator weighs in on the extortion payment debate with El Reg

No, it's not. Negotiation with criminals isn't forbidden basically anywhere. Paying ransoms is illegal in more places, but you can still negotiate with the people demanding one. There are some groups that have laws that specifically forbid paying ransoms to. The most common such group is officially designated terrorist organizations, which do not include ransomware groups. You could make it illegal and I think doing so would help, but it isn't illegal yet.

Re: Why does El Reg keep supporting this narrative?

I think a ban is a good idea and we should implement one, but it is not going to make this simple. People break laws. They do it all the time, even when there is a chance there will be fines or prison time. It only looks as simple as you've painted it if you get to take full control over a government, and even then, there is more complexity.

Consider a parallel. 4% of global turnover is a lot of money for every company. That's the fine that GDPR violations can bring down around a company. They don't act that nervous about it, though, because people don't get charged 4% when they're convicted and they often don't get convicted at all. You and I might think that this is all down to regulators not doing their job, and I think that is somewhat true, but we also have to recognize that actually fining companies that much would likely result in the law being changed. If you, for example, fine a company 100% of a year's revenue, then that company will either go out of business or go into major financial panic mode. People will lose their jobs, and then politicians will start to wonder whether the pain was worth it. You can only deal with this complexity if you have the position to ignore that concern, even when the employees are blaming your law for their problems because that seems more simple than trying to assign blame to the people who didn't have a backup policy.

This is one aspect that is unavoidably complex. There are dozens more. We should definitely institute a ban, and I think that by doing so, we will significantly decrease the number of people paying which will eventually change the way the criminals work. It will not eliminate it entirely, though, so saying it will will make your prediction look incorrect.

Re: It is better to avoid a problem than have to fix it.

"If you physically locate them, send in a covert team to erase them. Naming and shaming is for wimps."

No problem. The name is Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev. The location is Voronezh. Have at it.

I'm guessing that at least one of the following two things apply:

1. You don't have a covert team of assassins to do this job.

2. You don't really want to go to prison for using your covert team of assassins, although this does raise the question of why you have such a team.

Maybe I'll be wrong. I will wait for Mr. Khoroshev's obituary and take it as read that you did it. After all, if you don't, you're a wimp by your own definitions.

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

Re: Is El Reg a support site for irritated creatives now?

Everyone can have an opinion on whether the ad was stupid or not. I've seen a few people who act like everyone else wants to burn the people who wrote this for their crimes, but most of the people complaining appear to be saying that the ad was a bad one. The same way that I can think that a book was badly written without wanting to punish the author, I can think this advertisement was a bad idea without needing a "support site".

To argue why I think it was a bad one, they used the wrong images. People in other comments have explained how they could try to paint the idea that these things were becoming part of an iPad. A big crushing machine is never used to make something new out of old stuff. It is used to turn old stuff into more manageable garbage blocks. So when a viewer sees someone using a crusher, they're going to think of destruction, not amalgamation. If the creators of the advert wanted people to think of amalgamation, they chose the wrong image. If they wanted them to think of destruction, they chose the wrong attitude.

The other problem is that, even if we assume that they were trying to say that these things were being formed together into an iPad, an iPad does very little of that stuff. I'll accept metronome because I have a metronome app on my phone, and I'll accept drawing board because they have that pencil. The camera and music equipment may be overstating the quality differences, but at least the same function can be performed by both of them to some extent. Try using your iPad as a trumpet or guitar. You can't. Try making a sculpture out of it. You'll get cut from the broken screen and the iPad won't work when you're done reshaping it. If they want to show things being forged into an iPad, it might help if they chose things that an iPad could actually do.

I think they were using the crusher for a different reason than you think they did. It's not surprising to see destruction used to sell something new. When your new product means that your customers don't have to put up with the annoying thing they previously used, then it's not a problem to show the destruction of the annoying thing. Their problem was that they used this for things that people either aren't annoyed by or don't have, so the picture they painted didn't bring the same emotions.

Can you be bothered to read and understand what people write before you get angry at them for it? You're hammering the "Jobs/Cook didn't do everything" point in response to someone who specifically said that they didn't do everything. You should know that because you quoted them saying it.

Them: he certainly *didn't* do the hard work on the products he's often credited with

Your reply: DO you really believe he did everything for those products ?

No, they really don't think he did all the work on those, hence why they said that. You get very hostile at points even when those points agree with your original comment.

Where they may have disagreed with you is how much the Jobs adherents feel the same way about Cook. You may have a different opinion, but by challenging them on the things you agree on, you make it harder to make a case for your view because we've all seen that you view your opinion as so important that you ignore what they're saying in a rush to defend something nobody asked you to defend.

Re: Opinon: A reflection of modern society

Why does a more utilitarian design limit creativity? Was the translucent design important? What I remember about stuff designed like that was that, aesthetics aside, they usually used plastic that broke easily. I've seen laptops with cracked cases even without it being subjected to unusual physical abuse. That is far from the only time where focusing on the aesthetics made the product worse, something that Apple repeatedly did wrong. Surely the creativity is in what you can do with it, not what box it's in?

Of course, there are many designers who will tell you that the latest iPhone casing was inspired by a rich tradition of art and evokes the spirit of discovery. They'll say more things but this is about the point where I switch off the video.

Re: Opinon: A reflection of modern society

That really depends what the general attitude was. If they were offended, I'll agree with you. I haven't looked in many places, but I have seen no offended people although Apple's response is the kind of thing they'd say if there were. If, however, those complaining just thought it was really stupid and counterproductive, then they're right. Not offensive, but I can find few ways to make a worse advertisement that wouldn't be.

Did IBM make a $6.4B blunder by buying HashiCorp?

Your analogy is bad. Terraform, for all its faults, works. You can build lots of things successfully with it. Do I wish it was different, having had to use it? Yes, I do. It might be nice if I could define my own functions, because it's a functional language and trying to use one when you can't use the central part of the philosophy is a pain. Still, it is capable of doing the job that people want done.

Could it be built with better syntax and semantics? Again, yes. Probably many people have. Their versions, though, don't get adopted as much because they don't have the premade structures that Terraform and OpenTofu can rely on, so if you're using systems that the original author wasn't using, you have to do the foundational work. Meanwhile, Terraform has the network effects meaning that most companies will build the necessary components for their own stuff rather than expecting their users to do it. Terraform is often used by people who aren't programmers in their own right and would find it difficult to write that stuff themselves.

Can you fix this and produce a better tool that also has broad platform support? Brilliant. People will enjoy that. If you can't build that and all you can do is complain, you may not get anywhere. If you can't even understand the thing well enough to understand why your complaints aren't someone's main focus, you definitely won't get anywhere.

Selling stuff to people and putting the money in the bank, or using that money to buy things that can be used as collateral for loans? Did you expect they had run out?

They are good only in comparison. I have many complaints about Terraform, but I also have many complaints about Cloud Formation, and that one only runs on AWS anyway and sometimes I don't want to lock myself into Amazon. I started out with the servers as pets paradigm and I still have a lot of them managed that way, but there is a reason to use IaC tools. When doing so, support for a lot of components often gives one tool the advantage over another one with better syntax. Hence, Terraform and OpenTofu are the ones that tend to get used just because they are generally capable.

UK's National Cyber Security Centre entry code cracks up critics

Re: PINs on mobile 'phones

I wonder how much improvement came when IOS changed the default 4-digit pins to a 6-digit pin. You can still go and set the pin length to anything you want, but the one they start with requires six.

US faith-based healthcare org Ascension says 'cybersecurity event' disrupted clinical ops

Re: Because that's where the money is...

It won't do anything about the hacking. It is a lucrative hacking target because, if the systems aren't up, people get hurt. That is not changed if the government is paying for the medical services; the patients will still get hurt if important systems are unavailable. It is worth considering that another popular target of ransomware has been education, including a bunch of publicly funded schools.

The only reason it might decrease is if the ban on governments paying ransoms applies to them. The problem is that it probably won't because, even if the government is paying the hospitals, the hospitals themselves are run independently. If it would help, the problem could also be solved just by banning private organizations from paying, which I think would be somewhat helpful though not perfect.

Stack Overflow simply bans folks who don't want their advice used to train AI

Re: (What kind of person is turned on by silly little badges? Dumb scores?)

That depends on what you were doing with it. If it was something where they were answering people's questions, and you were hiring for a teaching position, that could prove that they have a passion for teaching and, if you read the posts, you could get an idea of how well they teach. As jobs go, a teaching position is probably one of the ones where SO posts are most relevant. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily useful enough to consider, but including it may not be as daft as you imply.

Re: Is it time to just get out? Past time?

"You would have gone through the same process before posting on this site. Would you be pleased if the Reg decided it owned your posts, and could do with them what they wanted?"

I wouldn't really mind. They don't, by the way, because the operative part of the terms (specifically 8.2) is a lot tighter on El Reg than Stack Overflow's terms. However, I've already decided to write the posts I make here and give them away for free, to the extent that anyone values them anyway. My feelings on how much I should own them are very different from something I've written elsewhere. While I have defended and will continue to defend copyright owners against LLM companies beliefs that their business model supersedes the law, I am less concerned when a real legal agreement exists and is valid at all levels. Those who posted on Stack Overflow did so for a reason and knew they weren't going to be paid for making those posts. They can have and express any views they have about the decision, but I won't mind my few answers before I abandoned the site being used for this purpose.

Baidu's PR head has a PR problem after workaholic social media posts

Re: 996?

They also get to choose. I have a feeling you're overestimating how common it is, but it certainly happens. The point, however, is that they are doing that because the business they decided to run will do better with it and they're willing to make that sacrifice. It is very different when I'm willing to sacrifice your time.

There are situations where I'm willing to work long and stressful hours, but I need to have a reason. Because you want me to is not an acceptable reason. Because you will earn more money if I do is also not an acceptable reason. It is time that they realize two important facts:

1. That kind of schedule is not going to help them in the long term and is probably not as useful in the short term as they think it is. It's one thing when people are doing a mechanical job and working them harder means a linear-ish increase in output. At least in that situation, it does something; it's cruel and unacceptable, but you can see why they do it. With knowledge workers, you're likely reducing their productivity to the extent that you get worse results out of them. This is even true if they're voluntarily doing it, but when it is forced, that decline is fast and extreme.

2. People won't take it. I think they are slowly learning this. A lot of corporate culture things have changed slowly but in this general direction. Employers have learned a lot that treating employees as humans helps, failing to do so is harmful to the business at first, and failing to do it for long enough results in some severe backlash.