Posts by doublelayer

B-List celebs including Lindsay Lohan fined after crypto shill probe

Re: I can't wait till they hammer Brady and Matt Damon.

I know at least one of those was in an FTX advertisement, in which case they probably followed the rules which basically say that you can hire any actor to say that your company is great, but making them hide information as was done here is the problem. If the actor just read lines that the company wrote, then the company can be at fault for the lines but the actor isn't expected to check their legality, and if the company had the actor read the required lines while still conducting fraud elsewhere, then the actor's definitely not at fault for what the company did. I don't know if both of them did that or if the other one did something different, so this wouldn't always apply.

Unknown actors deploy malware to steal data in occupied regions of Ukraine

"In a war, i'd assume that ad-hoc hackers will be defacto working for the state and would be going for information with some form of useful application just based on "what would I do?"."

I had to think about what I would do, but assuming I turned to hacking systems as a way of helping out, I would not do it this way because, having obtained useful information, I wouldn't know who I could give that information to. If I've discovered useful information about Russian troop movements but I don't know someone high enough in military command that can use it, then what good is it that I know it? If I already had some, I'd try passing things around in the hopes that it gets somewhere useful, but if I had to pick a target, I would pick one that can be affected without having to have connections. The alternative is making the information public in the hope that the Ukrainian military will find and act on it before the Russian military found it and changed their plan, but the risk is that someone else would impersonate me and post false information, so that method has risks too.

Re: Powershell ?

They target Windows because the people they want to get information about are using Windows. If the people were all using Linux, they would target Linux. Malware that does target Linux has been successfully written and deployed against Linux systems, including many strains of ransomware. Did you also think that Macs don't get viruses a while ago? Do you think that now?

Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools

Re: Typical Russian whining

It would be very dangerous to put anti-Russia comments on your LinkedIn page if you were living in Russia. That is not what I or the person who originally checked it expect to see. However, what is not at all dangerous is to post nothing there, either nothing at all or nothing political. Nobody would be arrested for being silent on LinkedIn. Similarly, nobody would need to prove themselves by posting pro-war material there. The fact that he did suggests that he had a reason to, either he believes it himself or he wants others to believe he does. Well, no matter which of those it is, I believe he does, so objective achieved.

That depends where the code is being used. For example, they're blocking contributions that would add support for the hardware they produce in the mainline Linux kernel. That means that they can't sell the hardware as compatible with mainline and have to patch themselves. Fewer people will buy their hardware if it has that limitation. In other cases, there is probably much less effect on them, but it happens automatically because the people have been sanctioned. GitHub doesn't have an office of people discussing whether a certain person being banned will affect Russia's electronics industry. They have a list of sanctioned organizations and they push the button to ban people connected to them. They assume the people who made the sanctions list know what they're doing.

Re: Ridiculous

"these would-be FOSS contributors are not even living in a democracy. What would you do in their situation?"

I would do as thousands of their countrymen have done and leave the country. It's not fun for Russians who despise their government to pick up and live in one of the countries that still accepts them, but they do it. Some did it to save themselves from the draft, which I don't have any problem with because by doing so they also save the people their drafted selves would have to shoot. Some of them would never have been drafted and left before the draft intensified, but they left for their own consciences.

Now that I've said what I'd do, let's look at what he did:

"You may rest assured that this "sanctioned corporation" takes no part in this awful war,"

There's a reason it's on the sanctions list. No, it didn't send troops to Ukraine, but it manufactures electronics necessary to build weapons and as a precaution, it was added to the sanctions list. I don't have a problem punishing the company, which does not automatically extend to punishing its employees directly but they may be disadvantaged as a result. But he goes on:

"and even if making civilian server products can be viewed as somehow taking part, that part is definitely far less than what, say, BMW or Bosch took in WW2, yet nobody seems to have cancelled them or at least remembered what they've done, let alone their individual employees."

We remember what they did, but that was many decades ago and, you know, it ended. When the war was still ongoing, do you think people in the UK were importing a bunch of BMW cars? They were not. They were not allowed to.

"All this is stupid, xenophobic and racist. Especially you labelling me as a terrorist on the basis of my ethnicity."

And a completely incorrect statement of what happened. Nobody called him a terrorist and it wasn't about his ethnicity. They blocked his account in a sweep of sanctioned organizations and it's about his position. I know a person who is also Russian in ethnicity and contributes to open source software, but because she doesn't work for a sanctioned company or support Russia's invasion, she hasn't been banned anywhere. He knows all of this, and he's making this up because he doesn't have a response for the real reasons why he's been affected.

Stanford sends 'hallucinating' Alpaca AI model out to pasture over safety, cost

Re: "safety"

If those rude things consisted of "[Insert name of group] are murderous evil people who can never be trusted, here are some invented examples, why don't we oppress or kill them", that could lead to some unsafe conditions. Chatbots lack the filter that most humans have against saying things that extreme, but unfortunately there are humans who would have that filter about saying it but lack the filter about not believing it. Even if it hasn't said things of that nature as many other chatbots have, if they can't stop it from saying something more minor that they see as offensive or unwanted, should they have hope that it never will say something dangerous? I wouldn't.

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

Re: Seems pointless

Google may discourage it, but you'll find it everywhere. I have a collection of APKs from a system image for a device I was analyzing. I've checked about twenty packages. The small applications like the Latin IME and contacts app don't have any native libraries. All of the rest have them.

But Google says not to? Here are some of those:

com.android.chrome

com.google.android.apps.docs

com.google.android.apps.maps

com.google.android.apps.photos

com.google.android.gms (Nobody should be surprised with this one)

com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox

Everybody uses native libraries and for a good reason. Google can't pretend it's a bad idea when they do it all the time for the same reasons that others do, and you can't assume that Android is platform-agnostic when it uses so many things that would need recompiling even at the user-installed application level.

Re: long-term Windows users are used to this and will barely notice

"To clarify, the "walled garden" I was referring to the operating system, where the core operating system, drivers and sub-systems can only be sourced from Apple."

You can install drivers and kernel extensions from third parties. By default, you will need to get a special certificate from Apple to do this, but they still allow you to build them and a user who is willing to deactivate their security checks can use unsigned ones. They have deprecated some interfaces used by kernel extensions and migrated behaviors to system extensions, but the ability to attach others' system modifications is still there. I don't think this qualifies for walled garden status as IOS does, where you cannot add something to the system unless it fits in narrow approved channels and Apple has approved every step of the process.

Re: Seems pointless

"Microsoft still haven't done it, despite the likes of iOS and Android demonstrating the virtues of not being tied to one architecture."

You might be surprised what would happen. IOS is on one architecture: ARM64, Apple chips only. They've switched once, from 32-bit ARM, and that might be termed a change, but it's not guaranteed that they could just push a button and have it all recompiled to X86 or something else. Android does use interpreted byte code in many places which makes porting easier, but a lot of applications use compiled components that are architecture-specific. Take apart an APK of an application you use sometime and check what's in the lib directory. There's a chance there isn't one and there's a chance you see a long list of architectures (if Google wrote it, there probably is), but for most apps, expect to see armeabi-v7a and maybe arm64-v8a if they've produced optimized code for 64-bit, and that's it. Those apps will need a recompile if the architecture changes and emulation isn't good enough.

Re: lovely machine

When you call it a "lovely machine", what are you referring to? So far, you've indicated you don't like the software, the processor, and the price. This seems mostly incompatible with calling it lovely unless you're particularly enamored of something else, like only having two ports or having non-replaceable batteries and RAM.

I'm not that impressed with it either. I'm glad they're using some open firmware for ARM, so maybe eventually we'll have more generic support for alternative operating systems, but since we don't have that, I'm not that interested. It's also expensive for something that's not a great machine. The only benefit I can see is the battery life if you don't use emulation, which is nice but I don't really need it at the moment.

Re: Now hand it to the FOSS desk....

It's probably useful to do, because I have seen at least once where Liam commented on someone else's story and several people assumed he wrote it and accused him of contradicting himself when what he really did was not entirely agree with the original author. Clarifying that he's the author makes it clear that it's not another person employed here, though looking at the username would confirm this.

Re: long-term Windows users are used to this and will barely notice

I agree that Macs are not a walled garden and the original complaint is baseless. However, I have to disagree with "Apple even tell you how to [get around software they block]". No, they don't. I know how to do it, and one reason is that I've been called for assistance by everyone I know who got hit with the message that Mac OS gives when you try to run something untrusted. The message that makes it look like the file's been corrupted and does not tell you that you have to open the menu and select "Open", even though you just did that by clicking on the application, then possibly go into the settings to change a policy, then go through that menu again and then it will be trusted. They don't tell you how to do that. Still, because it is still supported, it would not be fair to call them a walled garden. Just a garden whose gate latches are weird and confuse people.

Re: long-term Windows users are used to this and will barely notice

I think it's a good option, but it's useful that, when updates are available, normal user-managed Windows installs give you the option to shut down without updating as well, an option that corporate-managed machines often ignore. The reason is that, if it's a laptop and it usually is, I might need to take it with me. Having it installing updates while closed in a bag and not plugged in is inconvenient because the machine can overheat or lose power. My solution to this would be to put it into sleep mode instead of shutting down until I'm ready to install the updates. I understand why companies do this, because I've seen enough people who would never install updates except when being threatened with violence so I'm aware that my acceptance and compliance is not universal.

Are you ready to go all-in, head-first, on a laptop? ASUS's Zenbook Pro 16X asks for that commitment

Re: Legacy

And every time a machine is reviewed, you post the same thing and praise Apple's processors as the only alternatives you accept, for some reason I don't really understand or care about. I might be able to save you some time in the future: if it's a review and Apple didn't make it, it doesn't have an Apple processor in it, so you don't have to read the article until you find that out.

The Shakespearian question of our age: To cloud or not to cloud

Re: The whole premise of this article is bullshit

"So are you saying that you agree that it is pretty much only people reselling cloud services that can benefit from the cloud?"

No, because I would disagree with calling them "reselling cloud services". I would call it using the cloud services. If I run a website that scales with demand, I'm not reselling their services because, by using my website, you don't get to set up anything of yours in the cloud. I am, however, relying on those services to conduct my business. For the same reason, if I decide I can run my site off on prem servers, I'm not reselling those either. I'm using them. Depending on how I use them, I might benefit from the cloud or on prem more.

Since you're posting here, I assume you have a technical background meaning you're well aware that some companies need a lot of servers to conduct their business and other companies don't need that many. The ones that need a lot of them tend to benefit more from the cloud, but most crucially the ones that need a lot of them but don't need that many all of the time are most likely to benefit.

Re: Shakespearian question?

I don't vote very often (I still haven't on your posts or anything in the thread), but I think the buttons make sense. There are many cases in which I disapprove of something but can't really argue against it. Here's a simple one. When a security event happens, there are often people who will post a comment like "They deserved it". I don't agree with this, but what should I say in response? If the person who said they deserved it didn't post reasons, I don't have anything to rebut. I could post "They didn't deserve it and I disapprove of your blaming them", but the downvote just shortens that. It will be equally divisive whether I post that message or press the button, because I'm still disagreeing. Instead of twenty copies of that useless rejoinder, we can see a simpler count and leave the wording of the response to anyone who feels they can respond to such a statement in a more useful way. This is why I don't mind the system as it exists today, but it's a subjective opinion so I don't expect you will agree with my reasons.

Re: The whole premise of this article is bullshit

The comment was intended to discuss the benefits of cloud servers, so it wouldn't relate much to manufacturing unrelated things. If your product is software that runs on servers you operate, a website that handles a bunch of visitors, or anything where your need for servers is related to the demand you have, then you can benefit from cloud's ability to scale and could consider that as a potential option.

If your business is making airframes, then your servers are likely not that important to you, because only a few people want airframes, they only want a few of them, and they won't care all that much if your order form makes them wait thirty seconds to confirm their request has been submitted. If you make software that thousands of people use daily, then it won't be acceptable to make them wait like that, so that company would care a lot more about their ability to scale than the airframe company. The same applies to people who use servers to present content to users. For instance, if I had to wait a long time every time I clicked on an article or posted a comment with the possibility that I'd get HTTP errors half the time, I would be less happy with this site. They use CloudFlare to help with some of that scaling problem in case they get a lot more readers than typical.

Re: Shakespearian question?

"At least have the guts to thumbs down and follow up with a reason why you're giving it."

I can generally summarize their reasons. Any time you see a thumbs down, it means "I don't agree with something in this". That's their reason. Why do they need to spam the forums with lots of copies of "I disagree with you"? When I disagree, I tend to post a response, but that's usually when I have counterarguments to your arguments that I feel are worth talking about. For the same reason that they don't have to post lots of "This!" comments when they agree with you and can just push that upvote button, the downvote button is the way to express disapproval without necessarily having to post a lengthy response.

I didn't vote either way on your comment or any other comment in this thread. However, I can probably explain why some of the people downvoted and didn't leave a comment. They might disagree with the idea that someone is bad for disagreeing with a company's decision to give a platform to someone else. They might agree with the disapproval of the person concerned, or they might think it's irrelevant. That is not a comment that needs a lot of explanation; one person says they care about this detail, and other people either don't care or feel the opposite way. Comments saying "I feel the opposite way" are content-free, so they use the button instead. Presumably some people avoided posting "I feel the same way", and they pushed the upvote button.

If you disagree with my explanation and you want me to understand why you think I'm wrong, post a reply. If you just think my approach is wrong, but it's a subjective thing that can't be defended either way, here are some quick vote buttons.

Re: But...

"If everything you need for your business is at the other end of a service that's down, you're stuffed."

That's true, but that's equally true with an on prem system. Unless the people are there to fix it whenever it breaks, you can have the same situation and it's just as bad. I've experienced this from the maintainer's and the user's sides. I maintain equipment for a charity that doesn't have a full-time person to do it. I have a full-time job as a developer at a different company, so my maintenance usually happens out of hours. When their on prem server (in my defense, not one I set up) failed during working hours, they had problems while they failed to get my attention because I was in meetings and then had to work with my instructions on what to do over the phone because I wasn't able to be there in person. Obviously, a company will probably have more than one part-time volunteer IT admin, but if the admins who know the system are unavailable, it can be broken.

The cloud can also be broken, but the admins are there to get it back up and generally do so quickly. I've used a cloud service that had an outage, and without having to do anything, it was back to normal in a matter of hours. Had we deployed services in multiple regions, we wouldn't have been affected anyway, but this was a test environment. That point is the most important one. If you can't withstand the service failure, you need to have redundant and backup systems, whether it's on the cloud or in the building. Neither one will prevent you having that dependency.

Ex-Meta security staffer accuses Greece of spying on her phone

Re: PMSL

"Shouldn't you be bowing your head in shame if you're a "security staffer" who allowed themselves to get pwned (if the allegation is even true)?"

No. As someone who works in security, one thing that you will find out if you don't already know it by working in security is that you are not impervious to attack and nor is anyone else. For the same reason, if you're an expert at self defense tactics and someone shoots you, that is not a cause of shame for you and it does not exonerate the shooter. Victim blaming doesn't help.

How the Internet Archive faces potential destruction at the hands of Big Four publishers

Re: Rearguard action by IP rentiers is fierce but destined to fail

You've made this argument before, and there's little chance I can do anything to convince you otherwise, but you can't do complex work on the hope of patronage. I make plenty of stuff which I give for free to anyone who wants it. In fact, I end up paying for that because it's using servers I set up and pay the bills for. That's great when I don't care about profit, and in many cases, I don't. The reason I don't care about profit is that I have a job elsewhere which makes me the money I need to live, so making the stuff I'm giving away can be a hobby. I don't tend to spend a lot of extra resources doing that, though. I've put a donation button on one such site for people to reward me for the work they're generating. Over the five years that's been there, it's been pressed exactly once. I could not live by doing that work, and if I found myself in a situation where I needed to get those expenses elsewhere, those free resources would lose my attention if that's what it took.

Copyright exists because there are people who value the production of ideas and intangible knowledge enough to pay for it, but they won't if you insist on everything intangible being free. If you destroy copyright, then you'll still get anything that a rich person wants enough to pay for someone to make it, and many things where a relatively rich person has free time and makes it just for the love of making it, but you'll lose anything where the creators created the work and needed money. From investigative journalism to good literature, it has often been created by people who needed payment to continue making it, and in the past they've been able to use copyright to get it. Your plan has side effects that you should stop ignoring.

Re: Best place on earth for radio recordings.

I don't want them to go away and I don't think the people expressing surprise want that either. I have donated to them in the past and I benefit from their services. Still, with the level of copyrighted work they're hosting, it doesn't surprise me that they've got people angry at them about it.

Vessels claiming to be Chinese warships are messing with passenger planes

Re: Peak China?

"Xi (I have heard) is obsessed with stability. Nothing must rock the boat."

Not unlike the history of Russian leadership, until they decided that now they were stable, they might start rocking someone else's boat. Before their invasions, they were focused on stability. Economic stability, improvement of Russian infrastructure, destruction of movements inside already-held territory that were opposed to them, making sure they'd never have to worry about elections. They had a lot of chaos from the 1980s and 1990s to sand down and it took a while to get that. After they started messing with their neighbors, they realized the risks of sanctions and therefore cooled down a bit between Syria and the 2022 full invasion of Ukraine to get a few more things stable, such as reducing their international debt and storing up money and resources for their domestic economy. Newly stabilized, they resumed the tactic of turning up the instability on others.

I'm sure Xi wants stability. That's going to cause enough problems for anyone unfortunate enough to live in China. The problems for people outside China will come (well, they're already here, so get worse) when he's comfortable that he has the stability he wants. At that point, he will have the insulation he needs to start playing with other people, generating chaos that he hopes won't affect him too much.

We read OpenAI's risk study. GPT-4 is not toxic ... if you add enough bleach

This whole article? Or just the input to ChatGPT? The rest of the article is about all the chatbots, and does not rely on ChatGPT to write it. Since it doesn't rely on any features of ChatGPT to provide information for the article or to prove a point, the article isn't invalidated.

As for that prompt, it demonstrates that ChatGPT is willing to assume what GPT4 is (if I anthropomorphize it) without understanding, which demonstrates something about the chatbots. It's also not a bad response to the query and somewhat correctly describes the risks even though there's a bit too much praise in it. Compared to some of the worse blather I've seen from ChatGPT, I found that quote to be pretty good.

One of its problems is that it doesn't behave like us. If someone asks a question here, I decide whether I know the answer to their question and whether I can write a good response to it. Maybe I'll only write something if one of those is true, but if both are false, I won't hit that reply button. GPT doesn't ask those questions, can't understand the answers, and always tries to make a reply. It's going to generate more wrong answers even with all the people who don't know what they're talking about simply because it lacks the ability to decide whether to respond.

The other problem is that when I have real filters, where I understand that something is wrong so I never claim it, GPT only has rough filters that understand that certain clusters of words are probably wrong so avoid those, but if it phrases the same concept in a different way, its filters don't work. Unfortunately, I don't think I can claim that humans generally have functioning filters for wrong (either factual wrong or moral wrong), so maybe that is more of a similarity with us than I'd like it to be.

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

Re: Mobile dongle and ISDN

This is why I have roaming turned off on my phones. I'm not near enough to a border to set it off very often, but I figure it's much easier for me to manually enable that if I travel than to ever hit it by accident. I'm not sure how highly they would charge me if I did use roaming, but I can see the charges for international calls to countries they haven't zero-rated and if it's anything like that, I'll be avoiding roaming when I can.

Re: Isn't that Configured Backwards?

It could be either type of emergencies. For example, if there is damage to the wire bringing your phone connection to your house, which could be caused by a variety of things, then your mobile phone will still work in an emergency of that nature (yes, its wires can be damaged as well, but they likely have more backups than you do and if that tower fails, there's likely another one in range that can be used instead). If an emergency happens that involves both systems operating on backup power, then the landline can be the emergency option if the batteries run down as expected.

Google: Turn off Wi-Fi calling, VoLTE to protect your Android from Samsung hijack bugs

Re: Apple

Your attempt to put down Apple is showing your ignorance on the topic.

"Or even if it means buying new hardware because your current device can't install/run the update."

You're talking about Android, aren't you? Apple supports the latest operating system on most of their devices for about seven years. When an update is released, all those devices can install it on the first day. There is no delay. What if your device is too old to run it? They're also known to release security patches for the last supported operating system version as well. When the latest devices were running IOS 14 but some devices had been stuck on IOS 12, they released security patches for IOS 12. Those were also available at the same time. It's Android where there's doubt if a security patch will get to your hardware and how long it will take. By the time an iPhone doesn't get the feature updates anymore, security patches for an Android device released at the same time have stopped (unless you've installed a custom version that somehow manages to patch even though it was so hard for the manufacturers). That iPhone will get a few more years of security-only updates as well.

I'm happy to complain about it when Apple does something bad like this. In fact, I'll do it right now: they do cut off their Macs' security and operating system updates too early and for no good technical reason. Had you been talking about Macs, we could have agreed and had a fun time trashing their artificial obsolescence record. However, that record is bad because I'm comparing Macs to Windows and Linux computers. I have to compare iPhones to Android, and the iPhone's security update situation is better than the best Android devices out there and almost incomparably better than the average.

Re: Wifi calling on? Really?

To be fair, they did basically start with some examples that, in their generic form, can be paraphrased as "unless you have no or bad signal". Since you have no signal, you would fall into that category of people with a good reason to use WiFi calling.

I had that situation at one point and enabled WiFi calling to deal with it, and I have to admit that I had several problems whenever it was operational. I'd answer a call and could hear nothing for the first five seconds. I seemed to have several seconds delay before an incoming call would make my phone ring, meaning I had less time to pick up before it went to voicemail. I had people reporting that my sound quality was worse even though I was using the same microphones on the same device and my WiFi was fast and low-latency enough to be able to handle it. This may have improved in the five years since I had to employ it, but I was glad to switch it off when I went somewhere that has signal.

Re: Good luck with that

"Perhaps the mad rush to kill off GSM, UMTS/HSPA, and CDMA was actually a mistake?"

The problem here isn't intrinsic to VoLTE, so I'm not sure it's fair to blame the shutoff for something that Samsung's code caused. It was going to be turned off at some point eventually, and people have been making VoLTE-capable modems unaffected by this exploit for quite a while. I'm not sure how long a deprecation should be extended for a a just in case backup option for a problem not caused by the new version.

John Deere urged to surrender source code under GPL

Re: why is it so hard to follow a simple license?

It certainly happens at times, but in a lot of cases where people get involved, it's not. A good example concerns one of the projects that's done a lot to protect their GPL rights: BusyBox. BusyBox used to sue basically everybody that used it and didn't give the source. They were so prolific compared to everyone else that embedded Linux firmware users started making alternatives like Toybox, which is why Android doesn't use it.

We would hope that all this action by BusyBox gave us some useful code, but the developers who looked at all the source from companies they sued found otherwise. They found that most places had either not modified the code at all or had demonstrated their incompetence by patching in code something they could have accomplished by changing flags in the makefile. Rarely was any of the code the companies were hiding useful to the community; it was just hidden out of laziness.

Anyone who knows what the licenses mean wouldn't have a problem using GPLed utilities like an embedded Linux system, because they know they don't have to release anything secret. They would also understand that using a GPL library would require them to release code they want to keep internal, so they should be careful enough not to do so. This clearly won't apply to everybody, but so much GPLed code out there is part of a runtime means that you'll see that more often even for developers who don't understand licenses in the slightest.

Re: Not sure compliance would help

That requirement for installation information only applies to GPL 3 or LGPL 2.1. Linux uses GPL 2.0 only and does not require installation information. A Linux image that you have the source for but cannot install on the equipment offered does not break the license for Linux. They will need to find a GPL 3.0 component in order to have a right to installation instructions.

The GPL applies to any code that is deliberately licensed under it and any code added to or linked with that code. Crucially, it does not apply to code that interacts with GPLed code with a method less direct than linking. Depending on what components are covered by the GPL, this can lead to different effects.

Let's take a common case: they have a firmware image that boots Linux. Linux is covered by the GPL, so they have to release the source to Linux. If they've modified Linux, for example by putting in extra code necessary to use their hardware, they have to release that too. Not that they always do, but they are required to. When their image starts, it runs an application they've written that is not part of Linux. It uses Linux's system calls to function, but it isn't integrated into the kernel. For now, let's assume that program doesn't use GPL libraries in it. They do not have to release the code for that program, even if it runs on Linux. This is just an example. There are other situations, but this one is common for embedded firmware.

Your assumption: "If that's the case there must be huge numbers of systems that break the GPL. Pretty much everything now seems to run on Linux!" is simultaneously correct and not exactly correct. Firmware that's effectively closed and uses Linux is not a problem if they release the code for the GPLed parts, which in many cases ends up being either completely or almost unmodified copies of the Linux code you can already get. That's not always true, but most of the embedded Linux devices you see all around you have not done anything interesting to the kernel and their required code releases wouldn't be very interesting. Even though it wouldn't help anyone, few of the companies that are required to release that source actually do it, which is why there are GPL violations nearly everywhere.

Re: why is it so hard to follow a simple license?

People still use the LGPL on some things. I am one of those people. In fact, when I do it, I'm deliberately trying to leave that option to the people who use my library. Even though that's true, the original point overstates it a lot. The code they've mentioned so far isn't using the LGPL, it's using the GPL.

Unfortunately, in many cases, companies that release GPL source code aren't providing much of use. You can get a copy of the Linux source, possibly with a few changes, but the application that is run on top of that Linux kernel and does all the important stuff is proprietary and they won't give you anything from it. Even if you search through all the source they gave you, you'll find a bunch of code you could have already gotten from its canonical sources in most cases. It's much rarer that companies include GPL source directly in the binary they want to hide from users, thus requiring them to GPL that part of the code. This is one reason I don't understand companies that don't comply with the license; most of the time, if they did, they'd be giving up no secrets whatsoever.

Don't Be Evil, a gaggle of Googlers tell CEO Pichai amid mega layoffs

Re: In proper societies, ...

The effects are the same. The causes are different, which is why there is a distinction. Fire someone because they're on leave: not allowed. Make someone redundant whether or not they're on leave: allowed. There may be differences about when that starts to apply, but since it's not connected to their being on leave and would have happened to them if they were actively working at the time, as it has to thousands who were not on leave, the rules don't forbid it. You can suggest they should be different, but there is still a large difference.

ReMarkable emits Type Folio keyboard cover for e-paper tablet

Re: I have a Remarkable 2

Somebody went through the posts here and downvoted every one. I wouldn't consider it a judgement. I'm still not sure why they do it, but it happens from time to time on random topics.

Re: Good reasons, or just reasons

Exactly, which means that by not updating those components, Sailfish will have to navigate around the older Android components. I'm not sure if that's why the page on Gemini OS support says that Sailfish is using version 3.0 while the Jolla website informs me that version 4.0 has been out since early 2021. Maybe that's not the reason that it's still on 3.0, but still, I'm getting indications that the Gemini is stuck on older versions of software on all of its operating systems despite being actively sold by its manufacturer right now.

This would not be considered acceptable with other hardware. If Microsoft informed you that your laptop just wasn't going to be supported, so no Windows updates, and not for any technical reason but just because they didn't feel like it, it wouldn't be normal. When we buy X86 kit, we generally know years in advance before it will be dropped by Windows* and it's basically certain that the hardware will break by the point that it's dropped from Linux. There's no guesswork, and if we find one running an old version of software with security holes, it's almost always because the user or administrator decided not to bother installing the updates rather than the manufacturer simply not providing any.

* Windows does now drop support, but we were given four years notice that they would, and that applied to equipment that had already existed for two to three years at least. I'm still not happy about it. Before that, they would tell you that the hardware was likely not going to work, but you could insist on installing Windows anyway and it would try to run Windows 10 on your Pentium with 512 MB RAM. This appears to still be true, but their comments on the matter have changed.

Re: Purpose

There may not be a problem, but consider removing some corner cases from your list. For example, in a situation where you can write in a notebook and not take it out of a secure location, this tablet would have to remain inside the secure location as well. Also, since it has an upload feature (I don't know how secure that is), that adds another asterisk to the security that the users should understand.

It can still be suitable for use cases as long as users understand the limits. Still, I wouldn't have thought that meaningful encryption would be too hard a feature to add.

Re: Good reasons, or just reasons

That helps a bit. As I haven't used Sailfish before (I have never had one of the few supported devices), I tend not to include it. Still, the Android software is what they ship it with, and unless I'm misinterpreting their rough Linux page, the software from which the Linux versions get their kernels. This means that, by failing to update their Android images, they're not only leaving the users of the Android software with insecure software, they're artificially hampering their Linux users as well, and given that a quick check on Wikipedia confirms that Salefish is also using Linux, probably that too.

This would be bad enough if they had just dropped the product and expected users to buy a new model if they wanted something newer, but no. They're still selling Geminis (although not ones with English keyboards, so if you want one, maybe one of the other languages for which they evidently made too many is close enough). They've built a computer, with the software update requirements of any computer, and they're now failing to meet those requirements. As much as I like the concept, and I find all their hardware at least somewhat enticing, that's not something I will support.

Re: not heartbroken, yet heartbroken

The Unix philosophy works well in software because there's relatively little cost to having multiple programs in one computer. If I write one utility or two to do a set of tasks, the resulting binaries are likely about the same size as the combined one, and all you have to do if you are using them together is set up the communication between them.

That doesn't work so well with hardware. Let's say that I have implemented a Newton-like system for interpreting handwriting and you'd like to use it with this tablet. Too bad, you can't. That's not exactly true, of course. You can upload all your writing to a server, either a cloud-hosted one or one in your own house, have it perform the operation, and sync the results back down. That adds lots of latency, because now the software won't be running in real time. It also adds dependency on whatever communication system is used to do the transfer. This isn't a problem if you don't want the feature, but there are benefits to combining features in hardware that are much smaller when all the components are software. This is why we have the general purpose computer instead of the electromechanical calculator, word processor, and digital document communication device on our desks.

Good reasons, or just reasons

"Yes, it [the Planet Computers Gemini] runs an old version of Android, but there are good reasons why it wasn't updated,"

I read that article. As far as I can tell, what you're calling "good reasons" consist of the following:

1. MediaTek can't be bothered.

2. Planet can't be bothered.

3. Planet couldn't be bothered to think about this when they chose to use MediaTek components, nor could they be bothered to think about this when they chose different MediaTek chips for their next two products, neither of which will get meaningful software support either.

Software support doesn't have to be a major issue. For example, if this writing tablet didn't get a lot of new features, that might be fine if it's really designed to have few features. Not so for something that is running a full operating system with access to plenty of sensitive data. We should not accept this lapse in software support that leads both to insecure software running on many users' devices and premature generation of waste electronics. We definitely shouldn't claim there are good reasons for the lack of the support just because the hardware is cool. I'd like that hardware, but that does not exonerate the manufacturer from what they've done with it.

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Re: Well that was unfortunate.

This is when you have to quickly invent what SUE stood for, and of course you write it SUE, what were my colleagues doing? System unjournaled environment, it was due to an image problem and cropped up several times because the patching program had to be run manually. As long as the person asking isn't technical, they'll accept it. After all, if you search the invented phrase, you get lots of technical articles so it must be a real thing.

The US would sooner see TSMC fabs burn than let China have them

Re: What goes around....

"The problem from many American's perspective is that they were also oh so willing to sell out to the mainland. They may have made a nice profit by playing both sides, but it has not in anyway gained them any sympathy. They did the clever thing and maximized their bottom lines, now they get to see if it works out for them."

That's an interesting perspective. I take a very different one on both counts.

First, about their education. They were not given anything by the United States. They came and got an education, but it's not as if that was funded by the U.S. government. They came and payed for that. Also, the U.S., like a lot of countries, doesn't automatically extend visas to graduating students. They would have to, and in many cases did, apply for permission to stay in the country without which they would be legally required to return to Taiwan or find somewhere else. You cannot expect someone to have loyalty to your country when they payed for everything they got and have to request permission to stay.

Now about trading with China. Yes, they sold to China. So did everybody. It would be one thing if China was under sanction and the U.S. was refusing to deal with them, kind of like the way North Korea is treated by many countries. It wasn't. Expecting Taiwanese to refrain from selling to China when your country was happily doing so is a weird double standard.

The people who started TSMC did a lot more for Taiwan by providing it a shield. Yes, the U.S. and other countries may come to Taiwan's aid if it's invaded for the same reasons that they do in Ukraine: because invasion and war crimes are wrong and we don't like the countries that do them. More countries may be willing to help or to pressure China not to because Taiwan has something they value and they don't have a self-interest reason to want China to just get it over with. Not to mention that TSMC, along with many other related companies, has grown Taiwan's economy much faster than just trading with the U.S. did. I see no reason for recrimination from the perspective of either a U.S. or a Taiwanese observer.

Re: The US doesn't understand China a bit.

The real anthem is more martial, with instructions to soldiers to march against the enemies (when originally written, it meant the Japanese invaders of the 1930s and 1940s). An interesting fact about the anthem was that, during severe lockdowns and protests about them a few months ago, some people were using the first line of the anthem, which loosely translates as "Stand up, those who refuse to be slaves"*, to call for protests. Chinese internet censors therefore had to put in blocks on their own national anthem, or at least its lyrics. Maybe they should consider changing the words to match Pratchett's.

* The official government translation into English is "Arise, we who refuse to be slaves!". Others translate it differently, but the meaning is basically the same.

Re: I am a Rock; I am an Islaaaaannnnnnd

It would involve a lot of destruction and a lot of sacrificed Chinese soldiers. Both are the kind of thing that lead to civilian populations being rather unhappy with the people running the war, which would mean that a democratic nation is less likely to do it, and having done it, less likely to keep doing it long enough to have results. As Russia has demonstrated, when you don't have to worry about your people throwing you out of office, it's much easier to make them die in order to gain a shattered part of someone else's country. China has a lot of people and they don't really need all of them to keep living, which means that they can consider a war which would be rejected immediately by other countries on the basis that the body count would be way too high and the pain of the populace too extreme.

Re: In order to stop another country from destroying you ....

The fabs are not the only thing on Taiwan that China would like, but they are quite valuable and would help them a lot. If they had the chance to snap those up quickly, they certainly would. Destroying them has two advantages for deterring China's invasion: China would no longer get to add them to its manufacturing assets, thus giving it an even stronger position in more products, and they would no longer have access to the TSMC products they use. Just as other countries would suffer from the lack of TSMC-produced parts, China imports plenty of them and would no longer have that source. Leaving them intact during an invasion would allow China to have a strong position in advanced semiconductor manufacturing and to both deny access to the results and to have as many as they want.

This doesn't mean that a consistent threat to destroy them would certainly prevent China from invading, but it would be a large item in the "reasons to wait and invade them later" list, and the items on that list are the strongest barrier to starting that invasion since the barriers "people there don't want you to" and "they pose no offensive threat to you" aren't major concerns for China.

Re: In order to stop another country from destroying you ....

"... destroy what they're after first ..."

More destroy what they're after if and only if they are going to take it, and make it so clear that you will do it that they realize the invasion will deny them what they want. If you could reliably do it, it would work, but I'm guessing the level of reliable is too high for Taiwan to make that promise so consistently. This also depends whether China is ruled by someone crazy enough to prefer a shattered Taiwan under their control over a functioning global economy and not having democratic nations pondering war with them, which for a while has been there. Now that they're no longer trying to replace people, it's just a test to see if Xi comes down with Putin syndrome or not as he ages.

Google stops selling its biz-grade augmented reality specs

Re: I wonder...?

"Some macbooks with worse specs than a business-level Dell PC are $15k....."

No, they aren't. Apple's prices are ridiculous, but if you're dishonest about what they really are, you're doing your own argument a disservice. The most expensive MacBook you can buy from Apple is a 16-inch machine with a 38-core GPU (I'm not sure how this compares to the 30-core version, but it is the most expensive), 96 GB of RAM, and an 8 TB SSD. Since you're using dollars, I'm assuming you're in the U.S., where that machine costs $6499. You can get a machine like that for less money, but it's not going to be the same as a business-level PC from anybody, either in price or in specs.

Enter Tinker: Asus pulls out RISC-V board it hopes trumps Raspberry PI

There is no reason that a RISC-V system will be any less locked down than an ARM one. Either can be designed to have replaceable firmware, but mostly they're designed to be cheap and when some effort is put into it, it's almost always to make it harder to install your own. RISC-V has no licensing fees for the company that designs the chip, that's all. It has no intrinsic effect on what the user of hardware built around that chip will be able to do with the hardware, and just as ARM do, RISC-V have no standards that will make it any easier to solve the problem of porting between different chips, something that X86, for all its flaws, is better at doing.