Posts by doublelayer

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

Re: Coincidence...

Not to mention that Liam makes it quite clear that he does exactly this. In another comment, he explains that he uses a Mac but not the app store on it, which means that to install tools other than the defaults for the OS, he installs them by... downloading binaries from websites. Alternatively, he downloads the code from websites, then compiles them with the compiler he probably got from Homebrew, which he installed by pasting a command from a website. Somehow, this method of installing software, the way that almost everything works at some level, is Microsoft's fault and should never be done. Linux may make it easier by having a repository built in to most distros, but it doesn't prevent it from at times being the only available method to install something.

Re: I bet in spite of the usability angle, there is little to no fingerprint support

It depends on your security requirements for passwords. There are things where the password is not very long or complex because the user believes, correctly or not, that more complexity is not required, where a fingerprint is as secure. This is valid for systems you control, because if your fingerprint is compromised in some way, you have the freedom to turn off the fingerprint access and use something else instead. There are certainly situations where a biometric is considered more secure than it is and therefore the system using it is improperly configured, but there is nothing in it which prevents it from being used as a password for low-security systems.

Re: Coincidence...

"no site that can be trusted will tell you to type commands."

About that: yes, they do. There are still things that aren't found in a package manager's default repositories or that the default version isn't going to work for. There are a few ways around this, but they usually involve downloading a file of some description or running some commands which will do it for you. The file might not be a binary itself, but if it's a shell script, it's no less dangerous. For many users, the distro's default repositories will contain what they want, and I admit that having to use things that are outside it are more often encountered by me when I'm doing more technical things, but there are times when a user might want something that is not in those repositories.

For example, consider tools like youtube-dl or it's modern equivalent, yt-dlp. These things change very frequently because the old versions stop working very frequently. There's a chance that it was never added to the repositories at all, but for many distros, it's probably in there. By it, I mean a version from six months ago that might or might not work. If you want to use that, or a GUI program that wraps it, you will want something more updated. You can download a binary, you can retrieve it from its Git repo, you can get the Python source from Pip, you can find a custom repository that updates the packages more frequently, but in all of those cases, you will be getting some file or command from the internet and running it on your host and if you don't, you won't have the tool. Your statement might represent what should be the case*, but it doesn't represent what is the case.

* Maybe you think that everything should be in the repositories, but you also know that they can never contain everything that someone might want to use. This is especially true when the concept of non-open source software for Linux comes into play. There are some proprietary programs made available for Linux. I have one that I purchased and sometimes install on my machines, and you can bet that it's not in repositories. Their GUI installer is pretty good for less technical users, although the default installation method is still the CLI installation script, but it does involve downloading a binary from a site and using it.

Re: I myself am not so averse to using the command line, but I know I am in the minority.

Of course devs like the CLI, as I know from experience as one of them. We like it for two reasons:

1. We spend a lot of our time in it to do our work, so we're pretty familiar with using it.

2. It's a lot easier to design an interface on the command line than to build the graphical UI components. To build a GUI, you have to write so much code and link it together, none of which is the interesting thing you're trying to solve. If you want it to run on multiple operating systems, your tools for doing so are restricted to a smaller number of frameworks, and each of those comes with some restrictions. Yes, we know how to do it, and when it is necessary, we do, but the first version of something to see if it works is usually tested as a CLI program. This is also one of the reasons why you see some apps using web frontends; it's a lot easier to write something that will work well on multiple platforms if you do it that way.

Of course, good programmers recognize when the CLI is a valid option for the program they're writing and when a GUI is needed, and when the program is to be run by nontechnical people, the CLI is usually not a valid option. Even when it's mostly run by technical people, whenever there are too many elements to fit well on the console, it is time to build a good GUI around it.

Developers beware, Microsoft's domain shakeup is coming soon

Re: Why break things with gratuitous change ?

It's not a .cloud TLD, it's a .microsoft TLD. The second-level domain is cloud, hence cloud.microsoft. You can bet that Microsoft runs every part of the infrastructure related to the .microsoft TLD.

Re: Single point of failure

It sounds like they are diversifying. teams.microsoft.com is one domain, whereas multiple things *.cloud.microsoft are multiple ones, which can have multiple name servers involved. Not a lot of diversification, but there is some. A major DNS failure probably won't be much better with that, but it won't make it worse.

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

Re: Contributing Back

"remember he is an academic who has never had to earn a living from being a software developer, this combined with a hippie mindset has poisoned open source and our ability to charge anything for it, hence why we have all the open source funding problems we currently have."

I see the problem, but not the solution. Most of the ways that you can mandate payment have an unavoidable effect on some of the other freedoms that I value highly. If, for example, how much you have to pay depends on what kind of user you are, then it's no longer free to use by anyone, anywhere, the way that open source tends to require. It also restricts the freedom to modify and distribute, since the version I changed and distributed still contains most of the work that went into it before, so presumably I have to collect payment and redirect most of it to those authors.

A lot of the suggestions I've seen are, to the user, little different than proprietary except that they can modify the code on their own computers, and there are some proprietary licenses that also permit that. If that's the intent, then, from my perspective, you might as well be proprietary. At least the proprietary authors aren't pretending to be something they're not. I'm open to hearing ideas about how this could be done differently, but so far, I haven't seen one that works, preserves freedoms, and fixes any of the problems with funding.

Re: Contributing Back

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

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

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

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

Re: Contributing Back

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

LockBit ransomware kingpin gets 4 years behind bars

Re: Mikhail Vasiliev the “cyber-terrorist”

I agree on the terrorism bit, but not on the cause damage to protected computers bit. I can certainly damage your computer by working only with the software. I can do that in two ways. I can damage the hardware by running intentionally destructive routines repeatedly. However, what they meant, and what we all understand, is that they damaged the computer as a system, a system of which the software is a crucial component. That damage can be repaired by wiping it and rebuilding, but nothing said that damage has to be irreparable to be called damage.

As for protected, of course it was protected, the protection just failed. Your house is protected; it's got walls to protect it from flying projectiles (blown by winds mostly), it probably has fire suppression of some type designed into it including materials that are hard to burn and alarms, and it has locks on doors and windows to make entry harder. If I walk up with a big hammer and a flamethrower, your house's failure to prevent those from doing damage doesn't prevent it from having had protection, just not enough to withstand what happened to it.

US House goes bang, bang on TikTok sale-or-ban plan

If TikTok were to die, I'd be perfectly happy with that outcome, but I don't think this is an appropriate or even legal way for that to be arranged. I oppose it, not because I want TikTok to stick around, but because I don't think adopting the unfair legal regime in question is a good thing, especially if it expands to more countries and more companies. China already has restrictions like this, and I'd much rather see them drop it than everyone else adopt it.

Oh look, cracking down on Big Tech works. Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi surge on iOS

It might work if you set up your account with an EU address and make sure your network traffic always comes from there. Depending on what you do, you may not appreciate the transatlantic latency for all communication. However, if Apple doesn't want you to use it badly enough, they can collect information about your connection (American mobile provider) and GPS location to determine that you're not actually over there, so don't count on it working now, and if it does work now, it can break at any time. I'm guessing that your best bet will be to wait until the next jailbreak comes out and see if you can unlock it from there.

Re: Brexit Bonus?

I'm not sure if people in NI get this feature, but I do know that buying it there and bringing it back means you don't get it. Your current location, not purchase location, is used to see if you have the right to use those features, so much that if you leave the EU for long enough, you lose them. I'm also not really sure that people in NI would get it. I understand that there are trade regulations in common with the EU, but it doesn't make every EU law apply, and the DMA would have to be applicable law for NI to be included.

Microsoft decides it's done with Azure egress ransoms

"Q. How would MS know the difference between an "egress" and running a bunch of queries on your datatables that happen to involve exfiltrating all the contents to somewhere else?"

They wouldn't, which is why both are billed and why you have to shut down your account or meet some other requirements to qualify for that bill to be canceled.

"2nd Q. Why on earth did you go cloud or Azure in the first place?"

Well in the case of some of my employers, because they're relatively small, so they don't need enough servers to set up their own server room, and renting them across continents instead of collocating them was considered either cheaper or more reliable (I write code that runs on the servers, not choosing where to put them). I think they could have done better by running the compute-intensive internal stuff somewhere local, but running the public-facing stuff on cloud servers makes sense the way they've arranged it.

Whizkids jimmy OpenAI, Google's closed models

Re: My, what drama

Of course they are not hallucinating; they are emitting information that is not of use in the situation, a situation they don't understand or try to fit. Hallucination is the word we apply so we don't have to write that sentence, or the more detailed paragraph, that actually explains what happened. We use such verbal shorthand all the time. After all, we say that a program "writes" to a file rather than explaining how the program transfers data to an operating system buffer and the operating system obtains an available location on a physical or virtual disk, transfers the data from its buffer to that location, and when necessary, links that location to other locations that are related to the file, and if I want, I can expand "file" into several sentences of technical correctness too.

This quibbling about the term is a problem for your argument. We are not talking about whether an LLM "hallucination" is similar to a human hallucination, but how useful it is. Whether it is similar to a brain (no) is not what we're discussing. Many of your philosophical points about whether facts are facts or the result of our perceptions are wholly irrelevant to most of this, because we all have a practical understanding of factually correct or incorrect statements, which is what we have an interest in here. I've had similar discussions before, for example a recent one about what conditions are necessary for a statement to be accurately termed a lie. When you're discussing it on that basis, there are a lot of gray areas and it's difficult to come up with a firm definition, but in real life, there are some obvious lies and trying to divert into the philosophical version to distract from them is not germane and does not convince anyone.

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

Re: Touchscreen

I'm not sure why you said any of this, because if you read my comment again, you'll realize that the "that" that Apple made wasn't referring to multitouch technology, but to the IOS SDK and app store, since that's what I contend was necessary for the success of the iPhone. They did actually make those things.

However, it also doesn't really matter much that Apple bought in a lot of their multitouch technology if what we're comparing is who released multitouch devices. The credit can go to FingerWorks as much as you want, but a lot more people had iPhones than iGestures. By that time, the FingerWorks engineers and technology were part of Apple and thought of as such.

Re: curated app store

The iPhone came first by a few months at least. I'm not convinced that Apple's victory over Microsoft at the MP3 player was that big for the Microsoft side of it. Without the iPod, I think Apple would be in a much worse position, but Microsoft didn't, and still doesn't, have too much in the small electronics business. I think that, had they not tried making a Zune at all, they'd basically be in the same place they are now.

Re: curated app store

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

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

Re: Very Different

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

Re: Very Different

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

No App Store needed: Apple caves, will allow sideloading in EU

Re: Your freedom weakens my security.

Fortunately for you, there is. There is a default set of locks that make it difficult because Apple would rather that you didn't go through this in the first place, additional locks in screen time settings (yes, I think that's a weird place for them to be) that make it harder, and a method for you to completely prevent someone else from using it unless they enter a separate code, mostly intended for children but if your elderly friends trust you, that can work. A search will give you full instructions.

I still find it a bit surprising that you're worried about this more than the kind of scams that are more common, the kind where the scammer asks them to hand over financial details, something an iPhone doesn't at all prevent.

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

I agree that the research isn't really telling us anything we couldn't have assumed, but unfortunately, I think having that answer stated unambiguously with some proof behind it is necessary. The reason is that there are stupid people out there who still think that LLMs are appropriate tools for all sorts of things they can't do properly. I'm not talking about some people here who find that LLMs are useful to help them write things. I have my doubts, but at least I can hope that they're checking and further processing the output. I'm referring to companies that want to take one of them, wrap some other code around it to handle input and output, and unleash its results automatically. Whether that's LLM job application filtering, LLM content moderation, LLM schoolwork assessment, or perhaps the most worrying one, LLM criminal justice, there are people who think that that sounds like a great idea. Mostly, they think that because they think they'll get paid a lot to make it and they'll never have to face it themselves. Something like this is another useful tool in proving why they're wrong so I can spend less time hearing why I'm against it because I'm just a Luddite who fears new technology and losing my job.

Re: Yo! dahs here dahalect hatahn' a' dem racahst stereotypes :|

The distinction between the dialects they're using is a bit more complicated than s/i/ah/g. You may be able to determine this from the examples containing I, TH, and various other things your example has excluded, but having several changes in word usage that your example didn't include at all.

Re: Bias that matches society?

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

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

Re: Broadcaster Presentation / Linguistic Standards

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

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

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

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

Re: Easy fix for Register readers

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

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

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

Re: Never

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

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

Re: Never

"My screen, my rules."

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

You got legal trouble? Better call SauLM-7B

Re: Untestable-Quality LLM-Based Legal Help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Hypothetical Example

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, they don't.

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

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

"Should they charge OEMs to license the OS"

Already doing it.

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

Their contracts forbid that.

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

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

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

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

Re: Reference

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

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

Re: Some smart devices have strong security

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

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

Re: Typical Elon argument

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

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

US politicians want ByteDance to sell off TikTok or face ban

Re: Choice

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

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

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

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

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

Spam crusade lands charity in hot water with data watchdog

Re: RNLI vs chuggers

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

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

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

Re: To sum up ...

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

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

Re: To sum up ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Repeat after me:

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

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

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

Dutch government in panic mode over keeping ASML in the country

Re: Blind to the US?

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

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

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

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

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