Posts by doublelayer

The end of free Google storage for education

Re: It's a well-trodden path

I don't think that's the case. Free works just as well as unlimited. If you offer free 100GB storage, a lot of users will take it and use it completely within the bounds you set. That will end the same way.

Take a more obvious example. I had a free Dropbox account a while ago. It gave me 2 GB of free storage. Not a lot. Certainly not very expensive to provide. Yet still, Dropbox eventually decided that it wasn't worth providing that level of service to someone who wasn't going to upgrade for more storage. That's not technically true; I still could access that account, but they limited the number of devices that can sync it in order to encourage me to upgrade to a paid plan. Companies don't like providing people free stuff, but for some reason, they continually offer free things until they figure that out again. As a customer, I expect that they're going to think better of it eventually, and I'll use the free stuff only if I have a plan for what I'll do if I lose it.

Microsoft veteran demystifies Abort, Retry, Fail? DOS error

Re: On Error Resume Next

Which is why every language has some method of detecting a specific error and ignoring it. You can check the error code you want to ignore and do nothing with it. You can catch an exception and drop it. If there is a possible error condition for which you really do nothing, you have lots of ways to deal with that. The key word here is "specific". If you don't want an error to trip up your program because it's not relevant, then look for that one. Don't just assume that any error that comes along will be that one.

Error handling is boring, but critical. I can't count the number of poorly written programs or scripts that can't handle the most basic of unusual cases. Scripts that don't get as many command line arguments as they wanted, but instead of printing an error and exiting, they try to run hundreds of lines printing no such variable errors while trashing the environment they're in. Or libraries that throw exceptions because they frequently mess up and programs that catch and ignore all of them because they don't want to clean up but can't be bothered to find a library that works properly.

Cambodia cans critics of its snoopy Internet Gateway, says every nation has one

Re: Funny

They didn't say it would work tomorrow when they turn it on. However, would you know if there was infrastructure for it? Most likely, it will be a bunch of networking equipment provided by a company that has contracted the dictatorship as a service (DaS) business. That equipment would go into the ISPs' networking facilities and/or on the international communication lines inside Cambodia. Neither location keeps a public log of everything done inside and why. They could take many required steps without it becoming obvious that they have.

Apple tweaks AirTags to be less useful for stalkers, thieves

Re: I'm still trying to understand how Apple failed even to consider this use case

"I fought quite a major battle to stop their app from running without my permission - as I stated elsewhere, they really use every trick in the book to restart their app if you quit it such as notifications and permanent location access)."

Which, although unpleasant, makes a lot of sense for their users. They want the app running so you can use the features of the product, like the send a signal to find your phone feature. You have said this before, and it doesn't make sense any of the times, as if you don't want the app to have the access necessary to use the product, you should probably uninstall the app. AirTags are exactly the same except the tricks to keep it running are baked into IOS. That doesn't make Apple worse, just also doing it. At least Tile can argue that their customers opted into the app as it only does any of that after you install the app, log in, and accept the permission requests. Apple's system has all of the permissions and requires you to opt out in the settings.

Re: One would almost call this planned…

"Kind of surprised Samsung hasn't copied the airtag stuff yet, maybe they will soon."

They have. It only works with Samsung phones, but it exists. It likely has similar issues; there's basically no way to implement reporting through other participant's devices without leaving the tracking option open. At best, you can get a warning about it if your device can recognize this.

Reality check: We should not expect our communications to remain private

Cynicism may be our default, but it's wrong here

This argument effectively boils down to a cynical surrender. Since it's very easy for privacy to be broken, both by deliberate attack and accidental mismanagement, and it's very hard to make those possibilities go away, we shouldn't expect it. I'm a cynical person too, and I frequently make pronouncements of this kind. However, when dealing with problems, even cynics have ideals toward which they work even if they consider success unlikely.

Lots of things are very hard. Some things we do seem impossible when first attempted or may actually be so. However, we don't let that force us into apathy, which is how we have solved lots of hard problems throughout history. We don't have to assume that the next advance will solve everything for it to still be worth making that advance. So the real question is whether privacy should, ideally, be present or not. On this, I and the article writer agree that it definitely should. Since that's the goal, we should expect it. Where we don't get it, we should work to advance that goal, whether that be by making stronger cryptography, making it easier for nontechnical users to properly employ it, putting penalties on those who infringe our privacy, or new methods yet to be considered. If we try but fail to do this in the next decade, we can hope that the one after will improve it. If we give up and do nothing this decade, then the next will be worse and it will be our fault.

Raspberry Pis gain power to flash their own OSes with new network install function

Re: Damned useful!

I don't think any typical OS did a 32-bit to 64-bit switch with an OTA update. Usually, that kind of thing was done with a new edition that you installed manually. The chances of messing something up with your config would be quite high otherwise. Since they are compatible, you can load in the package repositories for the 64-bit version, update the bootloader and kernel from the packages or by extracting them from the image, and perform a no-reimage upgrade. If you break something, that's why they didn't do it that way when it's already pretty easy to write a fresh OS image to a card and transfer your config over instead.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Re: Return code ignored

Or, perhaps, a programmer and developer are the same, and they do the quality they're used to providing. I'm too tired of the people who argue about "software engineer" to start a programmer vs developer fight as well.

Re: There is a solution ..... sort of :)

And they switch to enter, or space, or the mouse. If you time out all the ways to close a box, then people will be annoyed if this program ever has messages they do want to close quickly. Yes, you could apply your time out mechanism only to important boxes, but users may disagree which boxes are important. And of course, this is all in order to work around a user who won't read an error message.

Re: Return code ignored

"Or at least makes it do what the product specification says it should do under conditions X, Y or Z - it's up to whoever puts the spec together to consider the non-ideal conditions and include those as part of the spec"

I do not like this philosophy. It leads to programs that have a thousand pages of spec where the spec writer might as well just write the code; there's nothing left for the programmer to do and no room for them to make improvements. Who am I kidding? That's what it would lead to if anyone actually did that. Since nobody does, it leads to programmers saying "How should I have expected that I would have to handle errors?"

The spec theory effectively treats the programmers as translators from badly-expressed pseudocode to the language in use, rather than the problem solvers they often are. Specs are useful when describing protocols, formats, or interfaces where multiple programs use a standard which can be specified clearly so they can follow it. Each program implements that spec, but the programmers have to handle the errors appropriately for their situation. This includes following any spec-specified behavior for dealing with them, but also enabling other functionality, such as automatic recovery or informational messages to the user. This is why all the real world specs have lots of statements about what programs implementing it "may" or "should" do.

"A big message saying "There is no more room on this disc. Please select one of these options to continue". with a list, might have saved a bit of angst."

Ah, so a big box that said exactly what the real box said? If someone is stupid enough to press escape for every window that shows up, I think the content or size of the box isn't the problem.

Apart from making every message hideously annoying to get rid of, there's no programmatic way out of this. Getting people to read what boxes say before they take actions would be better.

12-year-old revives Unity desktop, develops software repo client, builds gaming environment for Ubuntu...

Re: What is there to say?

You assume that he knows all the things a university wants their applicants to know. Tremendous skill at computers doesn't necessarily also come with, for example, ability to write a document well. I'm sure he's good at that at his level, and he might already be good at doing it, but that's one of the skills that is taught in secondary education, expected by universities, and important in the rest of life. Many other subjects fall into that. Before you decide that the right approach is to yank away all the things a typical education is intended to provide, it might be worth considering why they're there and which ones are actually important.

Working in Arm's engineering team? You're probably happy with your pay rise

Re: "our people are core to our success"

"Why not get rid of HR, Sales, Maintenance, Purchasing, Testing, Security, Payroll and every other hanger on'er then ?"

You will find that people suggest getting rid of many of those frequently in these forums. Here's a short list of the stereotypical complaints that are used to justify their removal. These are sometimes simplistic, but not always incorrect.

HR: Fails to understand job requirements, thus consuming resources while weakening the quality of hires.

Sales: Adds unreasonable promises to the product resulting in disappointment for the customers when it doesn't do everything.

Purchasing: Restricts what can be purchased, either adding friction to obtaining what is needed or even forcing people to buy more expensive versions of things because it's the only thing that falls into the purchasing policy.

Nobody said that IT should just be chopped as unnecessary. However, as with the other areas, you have to balance the benefits it provides with the costs to replace it. IT is very important to a business, but it doesn't make the employees in the department perfect or irreplaceable. Every department in a business thinks of itself as irreplaceable, and most of the time, it's not true. Just look at what management thinks of itself.

Re: "our people are core to our success"

"the truth is : if engineers stop working, you can still make and sell what you've got. If IT stops working, you're not making or selling anything any more."

Oh come on. If IT stops working, you have problems and you need to find someone to fix them, but it doesn't suddenly prevent everything the company does from working. Only if all of IT leaves and decides to sabotage the systems on the way out would you get that. When your product is chip designs, you really need engineers. You need them to make new designs, but you also need them for any engineering problems found that those buying contracts expect help with. If engineering stops working, it could result in lots of lost sales, and that's just in the short term. As this goes on, that becomes a guarantee.

Have you tried restarting? Reinstalling? Upgrading? Moving house and changing your identity?

They can sell a subscription product. It's unethical, annoying, and worthless, but if they tell you that's what you're buying when you buy it, it is legal.

Their stats imply it's much better than geosynchronous which does have some latency issues. However, it will end up depending heavily on where they have downlink and whether they start doing satellite-to-satellite paths as well. The latency observed in the U.S. where they have a higher concentration of downlink facilities may be better than in other regions. Statistics reported by the providers in Portugal are likely to be more usable than those reported in other countries. You may also want to check the delay in getting signed up as they only started their beta service for Portugal in August.

Execs keep flinging money at us instead of understanding security, moan infosec pros

I agree about the typical pattern, and in that pattern, I do not object to the CEO being held accountable. In most cases, I encourage it. Where I'm less comfortable doing it is the situation described in the article. In your situation, they likely didn't give you an unrestricted massive budget for the expressed purpose of improving security. If they did, they've already taken the step most other companies have neglected. It still depends on the specific situation, but unless the security team has identified something necessary that management refused, they seem less responsible.

As much as I like blaming management for things they certainly would do wrong if they had the chance, this is something that requires more analysis. When is the CEO responsible directly for something going wrong? I think we all agree that, if it's something known by them or the managers that frequently meet, it's something the CEO should be working on. Similarly, if one guy leaves something unsafe in a lab and starts a fire, we don't consider them responsible. Every issue falls along this scale.

Where does security fall into this? Usually, I think it depends on the level of obstruction management has placed on the people concerned. For example, if the CEO refuses to budget for backups and the company has an event that backups would fix, that can be management's fault. If they do budget for backups but the tech department fails to set them up, they're not. In that situation, and assuming the article's conclusions are accurate, I have less sympathy for the techs in this survey. If you have lots of money, unless there's some restriction on how you can use it, it sounds like management is agreeing that the problem is important and providing resources to get it solved. If they're still responsible for a problem, there should be a clear answer to the question "what should management have done that they did not do", and it's less clear what that is.

Russia's naval exercise near Ireland unlikely to involve cable-tapping shenanigans

Re: re. the EU wouldn't be able to agree on how or even whether to use it

"well, what about it ? Why would I – or you – care ?"

I care because I don't like to see people forced to live under a dictator by military violence or to have a power that will probably use military violence on someone else after a successful go which might be someone closer to me. You clearly don't care.

"The Russians did already conquer part of Ukraine (Crimea) and the world didn't go under. Actually, nothing happened, and I'm pretty sure the Crimeans are quite happy that Russia did annex them."

Oh, yes. The people who didn't have any choice about it are all celebrating. Some of them are, and we can debate whether those who are have good reasons or simply bought lies told to them, but there are many who do not like it at all. Democracy has this aspect where we can at least find out whether people want something to happen, but that didn't happen there.

Re: VPN?

By "VPN endpoints", do you mean that the data is always encrypted by either end of a cable? In that case, no. However, a lot of users of the cable do encrypt their traffic from each point of their network, and therefore their data along the cable is encrypted.

India to adopt digital rupee and slap a 30 per cent tax on cryptocurrency income

Re: How do you ensure it stays viable

This assumes that we will all operate as we did before electronic payments become common, but we probably won't. Some of your reasoning no longer applies.

"If the power goes out & you can't use an ATM, you can still go manually visit the bank, walk up to a teller, and pull your money."

You can, but only if the bank knows how much money you have. Nowadays, they use computers for that, because if they kept it on paper, you could go to each branch you can get to, withdraw all your money, then leg it with a multiple of your savings before they exchange ledgers. You could change things so that you only have one bank with your money in it and you must go there to get it, but people like the convenience of not being restricted to one place. If there's a blackout, banks continue to use backup power for their communications and computing. If you manage to black them out for long enough that they can't, they'll likely delay teller service until they have something they can rely on.

"Your credit card is normally used in a purely electronic form (EG: swiping at a terminal to pay for stuff) but can also be run through a manual card imprinter, a physical receipt made, & copies kept by both customer & merchant to later prove of the transaction."

Not necessarily, as they have been changing the design of the cards to make it harder. It also lacks many of the security features that physical card use tends to have. I'll concede it's an option, but as I say below, it's an option with cryptocurrency as well.

"But how can you do any of that if your funds only exist in an electronic form that can't be used/generated/maintained without power to the infrastructure?"

You can't, as I said. I'm not a cryptocurrency supporter here. I'm just pointing out that the level of damage you would need to make it stop working is severe, and that similarly severe damage to other systems would have similarly destructive effects on most payment methods other than cash.

"But crypto currencies can't be used at all if both the customer & merchant don't have power to the various devices (SmartPhone, cash register, etc) & infrastructure (cell network, ISP, online digital wallet, etc) through which such a transaction requires to become official."

This is not the case, really. It would work like a credit card would. If you copy the card for use in the transaction, you keep the details until the power comes back and then transmit them to the card provider. The customer could similarly sign their payment and you could copy that. The only device that needs to be powered during the transaction is the customer's wallet device (possibly a phone). If you use a dedicated device, it's likely to last quite a long time on a battery as it won't have radios draining the battery. You can recharge it in a number of ways. In both cases, however, it's possible that what you copied at the time either was fake then or has become invalid by the time you send it off, which is why most places don't accept card payments when the machine is down.

Re: "cryptocurrency"

"currency does not, and never WILL have, an intrinsic value that increases just by existing."

Nothing does. It only increases in value due to the change in exchange value. And during a deflationary environment, people did hold currency for its increase in value. That's why we don't do the gold standard anymore, because deflation caused some problems.

I agree that cryptocurrency isn't currency, but not for the reasons you state. People invest in currency all the time to play with the various exchanges. Most cryptocurrencies fail at one or more of the purposes of currency, usually the ability to make exchanges feasibly (without massive delays or additional fees at the scale of an average personal transaction).

Also, both points are irrelevant about this attempt, which is fixed to the value of a rupee, which is a currency. I think this digital rupee is a bad idea for a bunch of reasons, but it certainly would be a currency.

Re: How do you ensure it stays viable

You could say the same thing of any electronic payment system. Credit cards don't work any better than cryptocurrency or non-cryptographic digital currency like this if the systems are all down. You could deal with this by only using physical currency, which would work, but most countries are not going that way in policy or in practice. The method most have decided to use is trying not to have any week-long blackouts and panicking if they get one.

America's EARN IT Act attacking Section 230 is back – and once again threatening the internet, critics say

Re: Why CSAM?

Some may sell to criminals, but that's not surprising. The question is how they react when they know the users are committing crimes. Usually, that's a very different situation. Selling a general-purpose cloud VM means you're going to get someone using it for malicious purposes, probably in the first hour of the product being out there. That's really not the same. There are some bulletproof hosting outfits who do make the products with criminals in mind, but it's a much smaller section of the market and they can also be prosecuted if they do it egregiously.

"They will peer with openly criminal networks too - no problem."

What is an openly criminal network, may I ask? Do they have something like the evil bit, maybe somewhere in the routing table, BGP announcements, or maintained by the ASN databases? A company who doesn't act fast enough to take down reported malicious users isn't openly criminal. Even things like North Korea's public IP block aren't openly criminal.

Apple Mac sales break records amid ex-86-odus to Arm-compatible M1 silicon

"I accidentally activated iCloud which has now filled up. But I have no idea how to pull data off iCloud onto the HDD so I can shut off the noise."

You could use the magic tech support system (XKCD), but this time, I'll tell you the answer.

1. Settings -> Photos -> iCloud Photo Library, switch to on (probably already on). This syncs your photos down to your phone.

2. Still in there, turn it off. Now it stops syncing.

3. Settings -> iCloud -> Photo library -> Delete. This clears the photos from the iCloud storage.

"the iOS is built on a Ransomware foundation."

Because you turned on a feature that you have to pay for? It wasn't on before you did that. You have your data, you have the choice not to pay, you have the choice not to hear about the service. Hyperbole doesn't help arguments.

Re: Count me in...eventually

I think their attitude is supported by history. When Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel processors, they had a similar situation. The first range to use Intel chips had support lifetimes shorter than the models that followed. Some of those were due to using 32-bit processors which didn't stay in the range for long, but some ones just stopped supporting OS X releases at 10.6 without that excuse. The ranges that followed got 10.7 at least, and those that had enough memory by default usually got to run many more versions after the original release. This, too, is just switching a component in an otherwise similar product, except that the component concerned is a really important one and requires a lot of effort to switch correctly. They ran the Intel-to-ARM transition very well, and they could easily subvert the expectations, but those things aren't necessarily connected and they have sometimes chosen not to in similar situations.

Re: Count me in...eventually

Would it hurt you too badly to read what they said?

"Blimey, so your iPad is 12 years old and not supported with new updates anymore..."

They weren't complaining that their 2010 product wasn't updated in 2022. They were complaining that their 2010 product was out of updates by 2012. That's very different.

"And you are calling it a "first generation" product. Well, there was the A4, then the A5, then the A6, then the A7 (that's the first 64 bit processor), then the A8, then the A9, then the A10, then the A11, then the A12, then the A13, and then the M1 - renamed because they stick it into Macs."

And the one they were talking about is the A4 model, so it really was the first generation of iPad there was. Since Macs with M1 are a big change, they're predicting similar things for the M1 Macs as the A4 iPads.

Re: I don't understand the draw of windows....

I don't understand what problem you encounter.

On Windows, Python isn't installed by default. So if you want it, you install it. You can go to python.org and download the installer. Or you can type "python3" at the command line and they will open the Windows store page for it. I suggest the former, but either works. Then scripts run. Pip runs (it's installed at the same time unless you change the settings). Virtual envs run. So, is your complaint just that Windows doesn't come with Python installed by default?

Why is the little guy getting rinsed for hardware? Because top OEMs had to spend 25% more on chips in 2021

Re: At least Sony didn't

You could try it, but most likely, the people doing the arbitrage would move to a country where it remains legal, as it's pervasive in most markets. If you made it illegal in the EU, arbitragers could still sell from China. If you somehow managed to have China make it illegal, they could all decamp to India and start buying from there. You could theoretically ban buying from one of these people, but it would be a tricky law to write, let alone pass.

Re: At least Sony didn't

Those are unusual questions, but here are answers.

"If my company tells another company to buy up all of a product I need and not to sell it to me immediately,"

Definitional thing first. Are they doing this because they're building the stuff they just bought to make a product, in which case you can't have it because they're not done making it (option A), or are they arbitraging the component by planning to sell it unmodified to someone else (option B)?

"is my company suffering 'shortages'"

Option A: probably, or they're preparing for when they will. Option B: no, they're building the arbitrage on them.

"and is it legal?"

Yes. You are allowed to buy stuff and be slow about using it or not use it at all.

Happy birthday, Windows Vista: Troubled teen hits 15

Re: 512MB ram minimum memory requirement

I'm guessing you have more than 4 GB in your machine. Run on a device that only has 4 GB and it won't cache so much. Run memory-heavy stuff on a machine with 4 and it will quickly evict down to make room. It really can run in 4 GB. It can even run in 2 GB without becoming unusable, though it will get slower.

Idea of downloading memories far-fetched say experts after Musk claim resurfaces in latest Neuralink development

Re: Let's start with the obvious

As we don't read in binary data, no we don't. But if we're encoding the brain's state to binary data on storage mediums, then the storage medium is going to have to. If we accept the neuroscientist's numbers, the data read from the brain will consist of 10^15 bits at least for each moment, which can probably be compressed later. Even if it can, the system that compresses it will need to load that data for compression, which requires memory that can load a petabyte per instant and store it until it's been compressed. We don't have that yet and it requires more advancement than simply getting storage efficiency up.

Re: Nice one Adam Rutherford

"Star Trek also had a "magic" body scanner that was pure fiction at the time. However it was the inspiration for the invention of the MRI body scanners we have today."

Rubbish. The physics used for MRI was somewhat understood before that, and like other physical discoveries, the idea to use it for medical purposes was kind of obvious. Just as when x-rays were fashioned into a scanner, the idea to see if this thing can tell us about the insides of the thing we don't want to take apart wasn't hard to come up with. Nobody needed to have a popular science fiction show to show them that medical scanning was useful, especially as existing medical scanners using different imaging technology already existed in real life.

Mostly irrelevant pedantry, but:

"Saying that you're walking to the sun after lunch is just another way of saying you're walking West."

No it isn't. If you say you're walking to the sun, it means that you intend your destination to be the sun. If you're walking west, you can call it walking toward the sun, or marginally closer to the sun. If I choose to walk to France, then I must either set foot in France or admit that I've changed my goal.

Re: Let's start with the obvious

"I'm sorry but in the 1970s with my "huge" minicomputer systems with 10^3B RAM I would have laughed is anyone had suggested the ability to hold a phone in my hand with 10^11 bytes of ram on it ..."

Both of those are misstating the reality a bit, though. 10^11 bytes of RAM in a phone, no. That's 93 GiB. They don't have that much RAM until you get to desktops. I admit, it can be purchased by a single person, but you're overstating how cheap it is. Similarly, 1k of RAM in the 1970s wasn't a ton. The Apple I had 4k already, and that could be afforded by individuals. I'll grant there has been a significant increase, and there's likely to be more of them (though not coming as quickly).

However, even if we assume the ready availability of petabyte hard drives, two issues make that not enough, in addition to the lack of connection technology you already acknowledged. The first is that you need to read and write that data really fast We may have massive storage, but we can't read in a petabyte in a second. If we can't compress the data well, we're going to have to read a lot more faster than we can. A thousandfold increase in storage efficiency is already hard. A millionfold increase in transfer speeds is going to take quite a bit longer. Second, you don't need one of those drives, you need a large set of them. Even if most of the synaptic data can be compressed or discarded, they change a lot. There's also no frame rate for the brain. And you'll need sufficient computing to compress the data in real time or enough extra storage to cache uncompressed data until the memory recording is done.

Even without the biological interface, it's a herculean task. Musk can fantasize all he wants, but he should be careful to make sure people know he can't actually do this any time soon. I also must admit that people who fantasize too much lose my respect unless they're doing it to write fiction.

Chromebook sales in recession: Market saturation blamed as shipments collapse more than 63% in Q4

I can't say from experience, however, I can make two points. First, if they were so good, there wouldn't be so much demand for 11th-series I5 and sometimes I7 processors, usually with 8/16GB of RAM in Chromebooks, and yet every manufacturer has several of those. I would understand the more expensive ones with a better screen, but when they share all the same details with other laptops from the same manufacturers, it makes less sense.

Second, I have used Atom/4GB laptops before, running Linux and Windows, and they're fine. They're fine as long as you are aware of the limitations and don't try to run too many things simultaneously. I wouldn't recommend people buy them, but they can run browsers, mail clients, office programs, and plenty of other stuff on them without having problems provided they don't do what a lot of people like to do and have many of them open simultaneously. I'm expecting therefore that your similarly-spec Chromebook is also fine as long as you don't open too many tabs. Or in other words, it's just as fine as the other systems that could run on the hardware while doing less. The initial claim was that Chrome OS would, in return for not doing anything when offline, enable a world of more efficient machines. They would cost less and run for a lot longer on battery. Because they lied, we just have a different operating system with efficiency similar to the ones we already had, but some new limitations.

To get around this, two methods have been used. First, Google has decided to let security updates expire on specific dates, not due to any technical limitation. All Chromebooks have a support death date on manufacture. Second, they have increased the resource requirements of the software that runs on the devices. When they were new, the theory was that you could put a budget processor and 16 GB flash chip into the devices because, as long as you had sufficient RAM, everything would run fine on the remote server. That's no longer the case. Modern Chromebooks frequently have similar processors to modern Windows laptops and storage too has increased. The low-spec models have been rendered obsolete long ago. This also has the effect that the prices of Chromebooks are also comparable with low-to-mid range Windows laptops again.

Machine needs more Learning: Google Drive dings single-character files for copyright infringement

Patents aren't perpetual. You apply for a patent, and you can use it to confirm your ownership until that provision expires, which is at least twenty years though may be longer in some countries. Then it expires. You still have the patent for the record that you invented something, but you can't use it to prevent others from developing your thing anymore. The protection rights entailed in a patent are time limited.

Re: Separate issue

"Indeed but a university may not want the security risks involved in allowing random students access to their network from random devices in random locations (aka setting themselves up as a private cloud provider)"

You may need to look at what a cloud provider does. Hosting your own website with files uploaded by your employees is not being a cloud provider. The students don't need to have upload access to the system (although many universities give them that and it's just fine). If the access needs to be restricted, put a login page in front of the files. If you only want logins from inside the university network, put a firewall rule on it. If you want authenticated access from outside the network, give the students a VPN option. These things are really basic and the university already has the infrastructure to do it.

Separate issue

Google's system is clearly unfit and a problem, but there's another one. Why can't a university provide sufficient storage for class materials, thus making professors resort to Google Drive? Google Drive is a terrible distribution system as it requires the user to click through to download files, either using an unnecessary web rendering page or presenting a page saying that the web rendering page won't work for this file. It's functional for people who don't want to pay for the bandwidth usage, but a university already has servers that can store some small text files.

Because, given the quality of this, every encrypted zip file (which has a distinct signature) will become copyright-infringing overnight. If they're using machine learning rather than a big list of hashes, this wouldn't even be surprising as it's exactly the correlation such models tend to identify.

Hands up who ISN'T piling in to help Epic Games appeal Apple App Store ruling

Re: "allow an Office competitor to exist that users didn’t need to install"

"Everyone seems to forget that Epic willingly signed a contract agreeing to Apple's terms and conditions. And now they want to get out of it for free."

Nobody forgot that. They didn't get to choose the contract, and you have to be in the contract to use the system. In addition, you have to be in a contract to challenge it in court. If they think the contract is unfair, the only way for them to make the claim is to be in the contract.

"Using the same argument should I now stop paying my Barclaycard because I have decided they are wrong for charging me so much interest? And they should maybe lend me money for, preferably, free or at least a much lower rate?"

Not yet, but maybe. First, you should go to other cards and see if they offer you better services. You can switch to them. In Apple's case, they don't allow any other options. If you were to find that all competing cards have agreed to overcharge you, you could in fact sue them for collusion or monopolistic behavior depending on how many there are. If you can prove that they are intentionally harming you through illegal market domination, the court would decide in your favor and force them to improve. The only problem in your case is that it's harder to prove for payment cards than for one software supply system.

Re: Apple is getting shafted by very guilty parties

I agree; it set off my possible lie sensor as well. I didn't bother to check the reality though, because in addition to being less plausible, it's also pointless for them to bring it up.

Re: Next up, Google

Me: "sideloading option is available on all Android devices"

Reply: "That is an unrealistic assertion."

I'm not sure I see your points. Taking them one at a time:

"Firstly, the technical difficulty."

The steps are \1) tap on the .apk file, 2) the box tells you it's not allowed, 3) tap to enable it, 4), tap on the .apk again. A lot of users are not confident when they see the warning box in step 2, but it's not technically difficult to do.

"Secondly the security risk."

Granted, but irrelevant. That's also the argument Apple uses, and you can't win there. If you agree with me that there should be a mechanism of installing software which is not controlled by Google, then this is going to bring some chance of malware. Users decide whether they will use that mechanism given the risks.

"Being able to Install a different OS might be a better claim."

No, it really isn't. That's a case where Google can more easily be charged with anticompetetive actions, because their licensing for Play Services restricts manufacturers from offering other forks of Android. Most devices do not support any variant, creating one requires significant effort, and Google keeps taking more functionality out of AOSP and into their frameworks to weaken it. Sideloading can be activated on any device using the standard UI. Different OSes cannot be installed without at best playing with the bootloader and using a command line tool with many opportunities to break something, and often not even then.

Re: Next up, Google

I generally agree, and there are many obvious targets around the Android ecosystem. However, in the specific case of app distribution, I think Google's case is stronger as the sideloading option is available on all Android devices. That doesn't mean it's impossible, but it gives Google an argument Apple cannot use, which might cause it to win even if Apple's dominance is recognized.

Re: Apple is getting shafted by very guilty parties

Well, this was nice and rambly. I'll take a few of the points that are clearer.

"Yes but they did build this house a brick at a time and now they reap a decade of very solid marketing and engineering."

They have the right to reap a profit from that. They don't have a right to use that as a club to beat profit out of other companies. They reap that profit all the time when they sell phones with massive profit margins, and in that case, there's no legal argument against it. Their effort doesn't entitle them to control others' businesses any more than the author of some code they used could come to them and insist that they give them a cut of their hardware sales.

"Just look at Amazon. And try not to think of what became of all the Malls across the country, or the many bookstores that used to exist that are long gone."

So? Just because their competition caused a different business to fail doesn't make them wrong, but when they use unfair market power to cause that harm, they can be penalized for it. There are indeed antitrust actions being pursued or suggested in Amazon's case, and they make sense too.

"Then we have Epic, the very founding "poor puppy". Epic hasn't operated a profitable enterprise in its entire history of existence! [...] Let Epic make and sell a profitable business, prove they are operating on a fair basis with ALL their competitors and then, let them come back and make claims."

I'm not going to bother checking whether this is true. I'll assume you're correct. In which case, it is meaningless or actively harmful to your point. You do not need to be profitable to sue someone and win if they're harming you. Also, Epic's complaint is that Apple is charging them too much, so if they're correct, Apple's charges might be the reason they're unprofitable. Somehow, you seem to think that profitability should be required to contest a contract's legality. Fortunately for everybody, it doesn't work that way.

When forgetting to set a password for root is the least of your woes

Re: Back in day with Unix NFS auto-mount

When you have root access, it means you have ... root access. And you can do all the things that root can do, including reading users' files. If you are supposed to have access to run some commands as root but not to read others' files, then the admins should not give you full root access.

Re: Remember - CLOUD COMPUTING is NOTHING MORE THAN ..

Was that relevant? They weren't using cloud systems in the article. The comments haven't been talking about them. If they were, nothing would have been different. Why did you feel the need to say this?

BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves

Re: I'm not sure about the key stuck to the phone at the end?

My guess is that key is another copy to the shed, and that there's a third one hidden in the other guy's house. That way, either of them could be investigated for the purchase. The papers describe the purchase of the fertilizer and what the reports about the purchase will look like. Most likely, the rest of it takes one of two forms:

1. The documents simply indicate that the higher-level guy is going to be investigated, causing him to rush home to search for and hide evidence, thus making more for the investigators who have already started.

2. The BOFH doesn't really want to do the full investigation, and the papers indicate what the guy needs to do to get it shut down and what will happen if he doesn't.

Linux distros haunted by Polkit-geist for 12+ years: Bug grants root access to any user

Re: Eyes

"I doubt any business allows any old user to connect to a Linux terminal, and even if they did that person still has to have the knowledge to manipulate it to get root."

Businesses do allow users to connect to terminals. True, few of them are still using the one big computer that does everything and everyone's accounts are launched on it, paradigm, but root on one server can be used to collect data useful in breaking into others.

The other side of this is that it might not be someone using this to attack a system that they've already been granted non-root access to. If an external attacker manages to get into a system through some other exploit, but they only have access to a particular user's area, they could use a bug like this to get somewhere else.