Posts by doublelayer

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

Re: The Singer not the Song

I don't think that filter makes much sense because just having the term Wikipedia in a search doesn't mean that the user wants Wikipedia articles. For example, if I search for "Wikipedia funding", I probably don't want Wikipedia's article on the concept of funding. I might want the page on how to donate to Wikipedia, which isn't on wikipedia.org because it's on wikimedia.org. I might want Wikimedia's charitable tax filing. I might want one of the numerous news or opinion articles about donations to Wikipedia. By interpreting all uses of Wikipedia as preferring searches on it, I'm likely to produce worse results for any meta search like that.

The same is true of many other terms. For example, if I look up "Google data collection opt out", I'm more likely to get useful information if news articles or pages about privacy than if it sorts by site and gives me twenty Google corporate pages first. Substitute any other company and I think you'll quickly find examples where you may want information about them rather than information from them. If you really want to limit your search in that way, the site: tag is available to make that filter explicit, so rather than assume for you, something that usually gets worse results, it would make more sense to make sure people know the option exists and can use it when it gives the desired behavior.

Re: The Singer not the Song

Mediawiki's search function isn't that great when compared to search engines because it doesn't index the content of articles as well. If you're looking for a certain topic, you can usually enter a term related to the title and get there. If you're looking for articles that, somewhere in them, mention something, using a different search engine limited to the site can produce better results. I've found this more often with smaller wikis, where using a DDG search with a site limit produces better results than the search box on that site. Perhaps Wikipedia's search feature works better than that, but when I'm using Wikipedia, I usually don't have to search because I already know what article topic I'm likely to find my result in and can go there directly instead.

Re: The Singer not the Song

Why shouldn't you need to? If you are using a search engine to search for a phrase including the word Wikipedia, why should another site that mentions Wikipedia be excluded from those results? It would be trivial for the search engine to add a filter that replaces that for you, but it shouldn't do it because you might be looking for information about a site rather than information on the site. It makes a lot of sense for limitations on possible search results to be an option, not a guarantee.

Re: The Singer not the Song

If you want Wikipedia search results, use site:wikipedia.org That will actually limit it to Wikipedia, not just pages that mention Wikipedia.

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

Re: Backwards

Netboot is now supported on the 3B+ and 4, and maybe the version of the Zero they've released recently but I don't know for sure. I haven't used it, but I know people who have and at least one place that uses it to use Pis as rentable cloud servers without having to bother with the SD cards.

There has been another option for schools since the Pi was relatively new, which was to create a minimal image that would boot, connect to the network, then run the image from the server. It still required SD cards to work, but you could use really tiny ones and wouldn't have to worry much about wearing them out through lots of writing. There's some work involved in either option, but it's not too difficult to get going.

Re: In that sense the cheap smartphone has already taken the role of the desktop computer.

Except that still fits my analogy. You may not be able to buy a truck because they're too expensive, but the bicycle is cheap and functional. It is similar to the phones, because they are cheap and quite capable even if they typically have specs we would be pretty unhappy with today. A retro computer would probably be analogous to an ancient vehicle which only accepted leaded fuel or something similarly uncommon and wasn't much cheaper or easier to maintain.

Re: Backwards

Installing those libraries is abstracting it out. Eventually, they'll learn what calling requests.get is really sending to the HTTP server, and they'll also eventually learn how those servers talk to each other, but for the start, they can retrieve some data from a server in their programs.

That was, however, not what I was saying. I was saying that, if you give me a ZX81 today, it won't be able to retrieve from an HTTP server no matter how much code I write. Eventually, I might want to do that. When I find that the computer I'm supposed to learn on does not let me do something I know my normal computer can do, I'm not going to be motivated to use the limited one.

There is another aspect to this as well, specifically that skills you learn writing a program on the Raspberry Pi's Linux can be easily transferred to other computers. The code a student writes on a Pi will also probably run on their university's Linux servers, and if it doesn't the change needed will be small and easily understood. If they want to run their code on Windows, they'll have some more changes to make such as running their shell scripts in Cygwin or something like it, but their Python scripts will probably be fine and most of their CLI programs will compile and run without a hitch. If they learned how to write Z80 assembly or whatever archaic basic you put on the machine, it won't run anywhere else except for an emulator running on it. The skills will not transfer, and they'll have to throw away their experience and relearn another language. While it will probably be much easier for them to learn that language than someone who didn't have any experience, it can be nice to start them out with a tool that actually works in the modern day.

Re: Backwards

Speaking of my 12-year-old self, this would not have been a problem, and a more limited computer in a world like ours would have been. With a Linux machine, the user can start at the desktop level, with a bunch of developer tools and useful programs on it, and eventually start to do more and more with it. Maybe at first the student just plays around with the included game thing that's supposed to teach developer skills*, but eventually, they want to do something else and end up running their first command in the terminal, which introduces them to more commands, which introduces them to understanding how those commands work. This is useful education.

If, instead, I was faced with a computer which did nothing unless I wrote in a program every time, I wouldn't be drawn in from the start because I already have another computer which can do a lot of interesting things, so why don't I program that one? I'd also end up getting annoyed at limitations. For example, if I have a computer which has an internet connection, I will eventually want to write a program that sends or receives some data over the internet. If I've been learning to program on a computer that doesn't have any concept of that, then I'll find it annoying and want to stop. In my opinion, the worst thing to hear while getting students interested in computers is "it can't do that". "It can do that, but it's hard" gives them motivation to learn enough to do it. "It can do it and it's easy" lets them do what they want. "It can't do that" makes them ask what the point is. Therefore, the computer on which they're learning should be able to do most common things, something the Raspberry Pi's Linux system enabled.

Had I grown up in the 1980s, this situation would have been different. Sure, the set of things I could do with a disconnected, no persistent memory machine would have been limited, but there weren't boxes that could do orders of magnitude more all over the place. As the most advanced devices available to me as a child, I'd have been interested in those computers instead. It's when I compare a ZX81 to a modern laptop that it comes up short.

* I've never used it, but I understand that the Pi's version of Minecraft actually does involve a coding area and that some children have learned by starting with it. That's a convincing education purpose, given that no organized educational programs using the Pi are generally available.

Re: Backwards

"I rather think that's his to determine."

Not really. He can determine what they do, and what their goals are now, but he can't retroactively change what the Raspberry Pi used to do, what they said their reasons were, or the goals they were using. Legacy usually refers to those past attributes. Their goals from before were not focused on retro computing, but on cheap modern computing and education. Hence using modern kernels, open source components rather than stuff that's probably not being protected by an IP law team, and modern standards such as having good networking support and using more common languages like Python and Java. A computer that's intended to focus on running old software will have to change most or all of that, which would be changing the legacy. Whether to do that is his decision. Whether it is a change in direction is not.

Re: In that sense the cheap smartphone has already taken the role of the desktop computer.

It's not about being a hackable platform, but being the available platform. The comments in the article spoke of people who don't have access to computers, with the idea that giving them a 1980s-style computer will fix this. It won't, because when compared to a phone, the old computer loses every time.

Power requirement: Phone has a battery. Retro computer doesn't.

Screen requirement: Phone has full-color, video-capable screen. Retro computer didn't, the screen it's connected to now probably does, but the software can't drive it that way.

Communication: Phone has WiFi, Bluetooth, and can connect to local mobile infrastructure. And it has a USB port in case you find something to connect to that. Retro computer probably has a USB port of some kind and who knows what you can even do with that.

Peripherals: Phone has screen, camera, microphone, speaker, assorted sensors, touch input. Retro computer has: beeping thing, external keyboard, external screen.

So the retro computer has a basic interpreter which lets you write your own software, but if it's worse at everything else, people will not want to buy it when a phone which is less open but much more useful is available. A person who buys a phone can write a message, send it to someone else, and if they can get a connection, look up information online. A person who has a retro computer can write a document in an ancient text editor which probably has a limit on the size of ASCII text file it can use, then send it to a printer, which they don't have. If you could only buy one, which would you pick?

Re: Backwards

He isn't getting the reasons why people who don't have computers don't have computers. Making the computer part even cheaper won't fix it. You can buy a Raspberry Pi Zero for $5 or local equivalent (sort of). That's plenty cheap for people to buy. That computer won't have an internet connection, but none of the retro computers he's talking about had one and none of the ancient software he thinks someone might run could use it, so who cares. Take an original Zero, 32 GB SD card which are pretty cheap when bought in bulk these days, and an image that includes lots of emulators, and you have what he's talking about possibly building.

People won't buy it because of the rest of the parts. When the first Pis were released with an educational goal, they'd be pretty cheap to buy for a student by a parent: just buy the board and an SD card. The child can plug it into the existing television and there's bound to be a USB keyboard and mouse somewhere in the house, and if not come to my house because I somehow have more than I can ever use even though I don't keep them around when others ask me to get rid of them. If you've never had a computer before, though, you won't have a keyboard, and if you didn't have a computer because it was too expensive, there's quite a good chance that you don't have a television. If you didn't have a computer because electricity is limited, you won't be very happy even if you did get all these things. The computery part in the middle can be a little cheaper and much less powerful, and all those problems still exist. Phones get around this problem because they include all the peripherals you need for a basic setup in the device, including a battery so you can use them frequently.

YouTube video lag wrongly blamed on its ad-blocking animus

Re: I can smell something... smells a lot like bullshit

You can't know what people had as their reasons for voting on your posts. Before I continue, I have not voted on any posts in this topic in either direction. For example, someone who downvoted a post talking about Google's data collection, to what extent they do it, to what extent they used to do it, and to what extent you can prevent them doing it may have a very different perspective than someone who downvotes a post about advertising practices. If you attempt to describe them all the same way, you will undoubtedly be annoying some of them by misinterpreting their views, so expect to receive downvotes on that sentiment.

Based on my own views, I think we agree about some things and disagree about others. You can see a summary of my opinion in my other post here if you're interested, but it's not very important to this discussion of why people voted and whether it speaks well or badly of them.

Re: Google should just refuse to run with an adblocker

So the technical review from a person who develops another blocker, one that Google's been trying to break for a while, didn't convince you? If lots of people identify that it's a feature of a particular piece of software, it still must be deliberate? Is there anything you could hear that would convince you that it wasn't Google doing it?

Re: it will run fine

Google are not violating your rights by inserting ads any more than we are violating their rights by running code to strip out stuff we don't want to run. The issue of data collection is a separate one, and that one does come under data protection law, but that law governs whether and when they are allowed to collect data about you, not whether they can put in advertisements or whether they can change their code to make it more likely for you to see them. Like you, I dislike Google's data collection and I think they should face penalties for what they have done and continue to do, but I also recognize that, if I get everything I asked for and they stop collecting data except if they get true informed consent, there will still be ads on YouTube and they'll still want me to and take actions to try to make me watch them. They'll have to fight with my ad blockers to do so, but it will not be illegal for them to do that.

US Supreme Court doesn't want to hear Apple, Epic's gripes about in-app purchases

Re: While a 27% hosting fee may seem excessive

In the days where retail software purchases were more common, you still had the choice to sell your software elsewhere and handle payments yourself. Whether that meant mailing floppy disks and having a phone number for purchases, mailing CDs and having a website and presence on chat systems, or having downloadable programs and a license server, it's always been an option. Microsoft could have made their computers such that you can only install software when purchased at a set of allowed retailers, but if they had, it would have been investigated as an anticompetitive action. Apple is doing that by not having any alternatives. They are not providing an option which developers can accept and pay for or reject and build their own. The analogy is flawed.

I think it means that your app can't accept payment for in-app items without going through Apple and paying Apple's fees, but it can link to a different thing, your website most likely, which can. You still have to redirect the user outside your app to be allowed to use something else, but the restriction that formerly prevented you from doing that has been removed, until Apple finds a way to put it back that is.

It probably won't work that easily. They will be required to keep accounting data, saying where money came from so they can report it to the tax authorities. That is enough to indicate that money was paid in return for their applications. They could try messing with their accounting so that it theoretically could have come from anything connected to the applications, then try to claim that it was only from Android users, but that's a lot of work to set up and requires that everything have some alternative pathway that could have avoided IOS.

Even then, Apple's lawyers can ask employees of the company in court to demonstrate where the funds came from, and unless they're being very careful, they can end up committing perjury if they say that it was from Android users, or even if they say that they don't know if they know that some data still exists to prove it. This is the kind of thing that makes lawyers very nervous, not that that necessarily prevents companies doing it anyway.

Apple: You signed a contract saying you would. We are suing you for that, and then we get to look at your files. We will prove it for you.

That's what they would try, anyway. I don't think they should be permitted to do that, and there's some chance that, if they try it like that, a judge will recognize what they're doing there.

Combination of cheap .cloud domains and fake Shark Tank news fuel unhealthy wellness scams

Re: People unfortunately fall for this

Why not both? If I was a criminal running stuff like this, I'd probably not only steal the details but sell some cheap thing to see if I can get some placebo-affected customers to keep buying it. As a kind criminal, I'll make sure that the product I send is actually neutral, for example water or inert pills, but others may go with something even worse. Maybe I should spend less time thinking about what I'd do if I were a criminal.

What's worse than paying an extortion bot that auto-pwned your database?

This again? The main reason this is happening is - drum-roll - admins leaving stuff with open ports to the internet. People do that on networks where they control the hardware all the time. In fact, they do it more often there because the cloud providers usually have a default configuration that includes firewall rules and, when they can, doesn't assign a public IP address because those are expensive. You can really easily open it back up in the cloud, but you can also really easily open it up on your own network, and I'm sure we've both seen people who have done it and need to be corrected. Blaming cloud providers for admins not understanding the basics of security (don't have an internet-facing database unless you really have to, if you're not sure you don't really have to, if someone else thinks you don't need it then you probably don't need it, and the password should never be the default especially when it's internet-facing) is not helpful. Not only is it not helpful because it lets the ones who caused this off the hook, but because it makes it look like you're biased against and don't understand cloud hosting, so when you have real complaints about cloud, people won't believe them.

Re: private investigators and a hitman

You can't just confiscate a wallet. You know the identifier that it's going to, but the only thing you can really do without the private key is to shout loudly that whoever has this is evil and you shouldn't exchange with them. If people listen to you, then they'll be less able to exchange their funds for money they can actually use. If people don't, you're mostly out of luck.

BOFH: Nice air conditioning system. Would be a shame if anything happened to it

Re: So the PFY's name is...

Yes, that is true. The name was first mentioned, as far as I know, back in 2007. Still, we managed to go for many years without mentioning it.

Re: Hilarious episode, once more!

True, but you never go down or up. If you enter on the ground floor, you must stay there. You probably can't enter on the other floors, so those are out. If you need to use the stairs or the lifts to exit the building, then there's a guaranteed path for an injury. The BOFH will still get to you on the ground floor, but he'll have to use something other than the old standbys and that would at least make it entertaining for us to watch.

Re: Hilarious episode, once more!

If you're working in the BOFH's company, you must have an office on the ground floor and everyone should come to you for meetings. Vertical movement just isn't acceptable.

Re: Tea and coffee

I'm guessing you have enough knowledge to put something in the line to replace the IDs of your adapter with the ID of a keyboard it already likes. Just plug in some USB keyboards you have in your house or office until you find one it accepts, then use the same IDs as that one.

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

Re: Building software is hard...

That's worth discussing, but it is not relevant to the question of speed. Whether it is our standards that are too high or their standards that are too low, or even if both are the case in some area, it still isn't a valid comparison. We can't say that China builds faster than we do for some organizational reason if what they did faster is not what we would have done.

Re: Building software is hard...

If functionality of browsers had stuck at Mosaic level then somebody would have come along with a way of making internet resources that could do more things and that would have taken over because people don't want to deal with exclusively static documents. I don't like JavaScript much, but a JavaScript that's a mostly open standard is a lot better than Microsoft-brand language that only works in one browser and a lot of sites use it, which is what you would have gotten in the 1990s. What you got in the 1990s, in turn, would have carried over to the 2000s, just like JS did, because that worked in old and new browsers. You can't prevent people wanting new features just because you don't need them, and if you refuse to implement them, you'll just end up with someone else's version.

Re: Building software is hard...

It might, however, be related to the issue under discussion, namely why they can do them so quickly. Failing to follow safety standards might be another reason for completing it faster, and that works for code as well.

For example, I've just finished writing some code to do a job. It's a smallish script that handles a file in a certain format. I've done the interesting bit where I implemented the logic needed to process the file as expected. It comes to about 150 lines. I am not done, because I need to write the probably about 400 lines of stuff that never touches the file's contents nor the structures I built, but is necessary for this code to be worthy of sending to others. For example, if the file isn't write, it is not sufficient for it to print "Unexpected value in header at 158: 0x16" and exit, but that's what it will do right now. I need to catch classes of errors and report them to a user with a message they understand. I need a method for them to tell it to ignore those errors that aren't fatal and try anyway and documentation telling them not to use it because it's likely to get something wrong eventually. I might even need a way for them to send me the file that broke it so I can improve the code. If all you need is a piece of code to do a job, I can write one quickly. The same is true if you just want a building up quickly. If you want that code to be solid and easy to use or that building to last a long time through whatever typical nature will do to it, you need to spend more time. If standards are different, you can't compare the processes accurately.

Asahi Linux team issues promising update on efforts to conquer Apple Silicon

Re: Congratulations

I don't need commercial support. I can run Linux on my laptop with support for basically everything. I am not worried about the manufacturer releasing some new firmware that breaks things, nor do I often need to be concerned that the next laptop I get won't be capable of running it. Maybe I have to work a bit to get a driver working, but it's usually mostly functional out of the box. That is currently not the case for Apple silicon.

Re: Congratulations

The battery life and the ability to run Mac OS and Linux on the same machine would be pretty convincing reasons for someone who uses some Mac OS stuff but prefers Linux to buy one. That is if they didn't still have bugs. What this project has accomplished is impressive, but unfortunately I'd be pretty worried about stuff breaking or simply not being available for years to rely on it for something important.

Daughter of George Carlin horrified someone cloned her dad with AI for hour special

The training data was used without permission, which is one cause. Parts of it were used in the final work, another cause. You don't have to copy the entire thing for copyright to matter. For example, if I like the sound of one hit of a drum in a song you recorded, it is copyright infringement if I cut out that sample and use it in mine, even if literally every other note and sound wave in the song is my original creation. You have to license this stuff if someone else owns it.

Oh, really? I'm about to be rich. Someone get me the top hundred best selling books and a thesaurus. I'll find an adjective in a boring part, change it to a synonym, and redistribute. Who wants in?

You need to learn how copyright works.

That would be nice, but I don't think you'll get it. Some people suffer when an incorrect rumor comes out. It doesn't matter how much they deny it if people are still spreading it around, and having a video, real or generated, will just enhance that.

Re: It's going to be an interesting set of lawsuits.

They both store and retrieve data, just badly. It doesn't matter whether it comes back mangled a bit when we all know what you put in and what you got out. By that logic, I can record music onto a cassette, read that into a file, and it's a completely new work because listen, you can hear some static and annoying degradation, so it's not the same as what was put in.

Be honest. Would you pay off a ransomware crew?

Re: Doesn't anyone do backups anymore?

You have a binary extract the file to a temporary location and execute it there. I'm not sure I understand why you're asking this, though. The malware that encrypts backups isn't running inside the backups, but interceding between the backup process and the storage media and writing something different to the media. That program is not in the tar file, but gets to write its own tar file, possibly including a copy of itself in case the operators simply restore everything in there to the server.

OpenAI tweaks its fine print, removes explicit ban on 'military and warfare' use

Re: Am I mistaken...

There are laws that allow them to take things and to use them for defense, but it's neither as broad nor as vague as your summary. You might be thinking of the Defense Production Act, which can allow the U.S. government to require that a business prioritize a military-related contract and do so at terms they don't like. It doesn't allow them to simply take property, although it once did, nor does it give the government the right to invent new terms of use unilaterally. In practice, though, if the U.S. government asks for something so the military can use it, they won't use legal means to get it when they could spend a bunch of money on it. OpenAI is likely hoping that someone in the military will decide that what they really need right now is LLMs, because if they end up paying massive amounts for them, it's virtually guaranteed to sail through the "should we really be buying this" process.

'Technical glitch' in payroll software sparks riots in Papua New Guinea

Re: "some workers, including Police, went on strike"

When you have an emergency situation and your emergency workers are not available to deal with it, then you sometimes have to respond somehow. We can argue whether the police were justified in striking or not, but, short of getting them to all come back using the negotiation tactic of "we screwed up but it wasn't intentional and we will fix it", an approach that I'm guessing was the first thing they tried, what alternative do you propose?

Media experts cry foul over AI's free lunch of copyrighted content

What my brain does and what an LLM does are different. I know it. You know it. Everyone posting here knows it. Stop trying to pretend that they're the same in order to get a different result.

The point is that deleting the data for future training runs is not enough. I don't get to have free copies of your copyrighted data until you complain, then it's just fine. I'm supposed to not do that in the first place. The only acceptable option is getting the legal right to stuff you use before you use it.

"The ability for a site to opt out, and have their data deleted from the AI's training data within a set, but short, timeframe (say 48 hours) must be included in this,"

It wouldn't work. Once they start training their model, the content is baked in there if the software chooses to retain it. You can't strip it out afterward. Nor am I comfortable making this opt out. Here is my suggestion.

When you want to train an AI model, you get an explicit license for everything you throw in. If you want this book, you find out who owns the rights to that book and ask them for a license to train your AI on it. If it's in the public domain, you're good and can use it. If it's under a license that permits you to use it for your commercial purposes, you're also good. If they give it to you for free, great for you. If they want money, negotiate with them for how much. If you find it's too expensive to negotiate with individual authors for individual books, feel free to try to negotiate with a group of them en masse. Some authors might not agree to that. Too bad for you, you can't use those books until those authors die and the copyright period after death has lapsed, or you can always come back and try to negotiate some more. Find someone else's book. Replace book with site, song, or any other thing that can be copyrighted.

GitHub Copilot copyright case narrowed but not neutered

Re: Yeah?

The provision that talks about keeping the information is pretty important. That information, for example, is the way that licenses make it clear they apply to the file. Changing the file does not remove that requirement, since most if not all open source licenses explicitly state that the license must remain with the file. If changing the file even slightly means that they can get out of that provision, then why can't they invalidate other ones on the same basis? The clauses concerned state that removing that data is illegal when it is linked to a violation, which is very similar language to most other clauses in the law. If you can mentally add "unless the file is even slightly different" to the end of that sentence, why can't I add it to all similar sentences that use the same conditions?

Obviously, this should not be the case. I think this judgement is clearly misinterpreting both the intent and the literal meaning of the legislation as written. You do not invalidate copyright when you change a file slightly. You do not cancel the requirement of the license to retain the license information with that file. You do not invalidate the law that ensures that you do not do so. This should be overturned.

Re: Yeah?

I'm looking forward to OpenAI's code leaking so I can perform these changes and make as much money as I want from it without paying them anything. Do you think they'll be happy when that happens?

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

I guess a competent person who was also a bit unstable. For example, building a real backup location on the cheap could have been useful to a company that wasn't going to build a proper one, but you never do that without permission. I could see a scenario under which an employee could do good work and still have to go quickly.

Your pacemaker should be running open source software

Re: Why Would "Open Source" Need to be "Disassembled"?! / Lack of Effective Crypto Verification

Don't even get me started on projects for which the installation procedure is, "Download and run our magic CMD file/PowerShell script/BASH script -- as Administrator/root."

In virtually all cases, you can clone and build yourself just fine. The script is there to make that easier, and it needs root for the same reason that most installers ask for it: it's going to be installing the program in the typical places, for example /usr/bin, and your user does not have permission to write to that. This is especially true if it's also installing a service, cron jobs, manual entries, modifications to a linked configuration, etc. You can usually replace that instruction with clone, configure, make, and manually move files where you want them, but since that's not what most users are doing, it's not the script they write.

What do you think they should be doing instead?

So, are we going to talk about how GitHub is an absolute boon for malware, or nah?

Re: Far too many developers don't help matters either

Does curl have markedly worse performance than wget does? I haven't noticed any problem with that, so it supporting more protocols doesn't hurt me if I'm only using HTTPS. If I am using something else, curl probably has that, so that's handy. Wget is fine, but unless it does something that curl doesn't or does something better than curl does, I don't see why using curl is a problem.

Adios, dead zones: Starlink relays SMS in space for unmodified phones on Earth

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

"Why let the latter die because you can't help the former?"

That is not what they were saying. They were saying that, until the network is capable of sending a message at any time, it won't be good. It will be capable of eventually being good, but while there are gaps and some hack to try to deal with it, the system is worse. If you're in an emergency, you use whatever is out there, and a system with holes is a lot better than no system. From the perspective of someone who needs help, give me whatever you have and I'll use it. From the perspective of someone who could get into an emergency sometime but not now, it is useful to consider what is good enough so we can make sure that is the target. From the perspective of someone who thinks an emergency could happen to them in the short term, for example if I have decided to go out into the wilderness next week, I will want something more reliable because this system is not sufficiently advanced for my purposes*.

* Yes, at the moment, it's not available at all, but if it was only partially available and I was doing something risky outside of mobile range, I'd want to have a more useful contingency method than relying on partially-implemented Starlink.

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

I understand that, but it has to wake the phone up before that window to alert the user. If the user has sought cover, they will need enough time to leave their location for somewhere where the satellite has a good chance of connecting. If it tells them too late, they will either miss the window or end up trying to rush to a good location, which could have safety risks. They need to know that is happening unless this system is capable of broadcasting from an enclosed area, inside a bag.

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

They don't last very long, and several of them have already been decommissioned because something broke them. For example, there appear to currently be 32 broken satellites, out of approximately 4500, still in orbit. As they get more of them up, they will also have older units which need to deorbit (with the first generation alone, this is expected to be on average 2000 kg of satellites or about 7.5 deorbiting every day) and a higher likelihood of damage. So yes, they will be coming down and thus unavailable for use, though how long it will take to get there depends on which models support it and how long they've been up at the time we're discussing.

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

You could do that with two major problems. First, they send satellites up and down all the time since they're in LEO and they're in the building mode. You can put the satellites that exist today in an almanac, but not the ones launching next week. If it's not updated, you'll miss most of them and if it's not updated for long enough, the one they recommend won't be working anymore. They sometimes have to move those satellites as well, which will not be reflected in the almanac.

The second problem is with the workflow. If the user is supposed to wait until the time to broadcast, they will have to be very careful to hit the right time to transmit. The phone could wake up and remind them, and that would probably be required because I don't think it can transmit from any location, so they would need some time to get into a position where the phone and satellite can communicate better. Depending on the nature of the emergency, this may not be as easy as it sounds. If you're sending a message because your car stopped working in the wilderness, then you can probably just wait in the nonfunctional car while you wait. If someone is hurt or there's any growing risk, waiting for hours in the hope that it will work then is not great. If you have no other option, try it, but if you're going into such a situation, have another option.

Office gossips beware – chitchat could choke your career chances

Re: GDPR

Yes, it really is. GDPR is about specific people, specific types of data, specific definitions for collection, processing, and distribution, and lots of details around those. It is not a shorthand for anything you don't like happening to or with information about a person. If you need to comply with GDPR, you will need someone who understands the law just as much as someone who thinks they can do whatever they like; both of you will end up being wrong.

Mandiant's brute-forced X account exposes perils of skimping on 2FA

Re: Brute forced?

I generally try to be generous with the number of incorrect attempts before it locks, but always have that feature enabled. I may give the user ten tries to guess, because it lets them try a password, try it again because maybe they mistyped it, try it with a simple character swap, try a different password because they might have been mistaken, etc. Three attempts can make things annoying for users. There is no excuse for leaving this out, though.