Posts by doublelayer

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

Re: Post Office

I'm sure they can automate the process of opening envelopes and resealing them. I doubt they can automate the process of reading all the mail. I've used OCR software and it has enough trouble with printed text in a normal font. Handwriting is not something it will scan through very well, and people with stuff to hide can always make their writing more sloppy if they need to. Of course, mail isn't very good at allowing recipients to hide or to be mobile, so depending on what communication needs hiding, it's still not a great option from a number of perspectives.

America: AI artwork is not authored by humans, so can't be protected by copyright

Re: Utterly predictable.

In fact, the ruling appears to make your proposed goal less likely, not more. By ruling that a machine's output can't be copyrighted, they prevent the operators of such systems from adding "we automatically copyright the output before you see it" clauses to the terms, because they aren't allowed to copyright them either. It would also prevent them from turning on a copyrighter bot that just copyrights everything it can in the hopes that someone will eventually write the same thing.

Re: Good!

Copyrights and patents were designed to protect the creator, not to limit them. There are many things covered by one or the other that cannot functionally be made by a single creator. For example, while I can make a film all on my own, it's going to be worse than if I get multiple people who know what they're doing and we make one together. If we do that, it makes sense for everyone to share the copyright for that work, rather than to try to find one person who deserves it all and who has to pay everyone else. A company is a method of allowing multiple people to work together and own things together as a single entity, and having that company own the copyright to the created work is the efficient way of making that possible.

That doesn't mean we have to do it that way, but most other ways are completely broken. For example, if we all held copyright to different pieces (I own the soundtrack for the first hour, person A owns the second hour, person B owns most of the screenplay, person C owns the part of the screenplay where the scientists are describing the situation because Person B got the technobabble all wrong, and person D owns the footage for the background), then things break down if person D needs to leave but we still want to set my introductory piece to their scenery, because they can't give us their copyrights even if they want to. Similarly, if we all own the copyright jointly in a personal capacity, then what happens if person C gets mad and quits, and now they say we shouldn't use what we have because they don't agree to allow the use of their fraction of the copyrights to everything. Having a company, where the ownership and contracts specify who has what level of control and formalizes the distribution of profits, allows the group to act together in a way that most alternatives would find difficult.

Re: As a slight aside.

"nobody mentions that none of us are as good as Shakespeare?"

Maybe some of us are. Not me, certainly, but I don't subscribe to the theory that Shakespeare's work is the best that written art can attain, or even the best in English. There are some things that Shakespeare likes to do that would annoy me in anyone else's work, and I don't plan to let him off the hook for them just because he's the guy who gets listed in the "best literary creators" database judged by people who like him already.

Maybe some of the hackneyed tropes that can be found in his plays weren't so familiar in his day, but a word that's often used to describe his brilliance is timeless, and it's a word I don't always agree with. For example, if books I'm reading today drop in "Two people meet, they haven't even spoken yet, they're in deepest love or at least they think so, both of them feel the same thing, and now they're going to spend the next few chapters wondering if the other one is", I'm disappointed and more pessimistic about the book being able to go somewhere interesting. Yet Shakespeare has several plays that rely on pushing that button in act I and either waiting until act V to clue the characters in (comedies) or having the characters do something really stupid about it (tragedies). There are authors who, in my opinion, have made more entertaining, meaningful, well-written literature. That doesn't stop Shakespeare being rather good at writing things, but I wouldn't elevate him to the apex of quality he holds in many literary minds.

Can YouTube be held liable for pushing terror vids? Asking for a Supreme Court...

Re: YouTube doesn't deserve section 230

I can only refer to the number of pieces of software which call themselves "spam filters", including software that has existed for decades, which scan message content to determine whether to send it to the inbox or sort it into another folder, often called "spam" although "junk" is also common. Every mail account that has come with its own folders by default tends to have such a folder, and many things scan messages to put them in there. This has existed for as long as I've used email, which is less time than you've spent administering mailservers, but it's not as if I made up the term yesterday. If spam must never mean unwanted messages unless they're also sent in bulk, the alternate definition is at least thirty years old and in common usage. We don't need to argue terminology, though, as you can take my original comment, swap "spam" for whatever term you think best fits the thing I'm talking about which remains filtered, and it still stands.

Re: YouTube doesn't deserve section 230

I disagree, and I'm not sure administrating a mailserver for a long time necessarily means you have the perfect definition of spam. Spam can be sent to lots of people at once, or it can be sent to one person. The thing making it spam is whether it has been requested by the person who's going to read it. This might mean that something is spam to me and not to you, but just because there exists one person who wants to read the message doesn't mean it can't be spam to anyone else who receives it.

"This kind of crap never sees your personal disk space, it gets nuked in transit."

That depends how it's being relayed to me. Since I'm running my own mailserver, at least for some accounts, I'm the one nuking a lot of it in transit, but it's still using my bandwidth even if I've elected not to keep a copy. This is theoretically costing me, and if I were flooded with it, it would be a problem for me. Even without doing it, it's spam because it's being generated by bots that have identified that there's a server that accepts connections and send whatever crap they want, and I'm not interested in reading whatever they have to send. Even if bandwidth and CPU time was free, it would still be spam because the content is not desirable to me. For example, if my brother-in-law was sending messages to the point that I no longer want to see them and he didn't stop when asked, he would have become a spammer to me and my spam filtering systems would be used to prevent me having to see the unwanted messages. Perhaps you would like to split the definitions and call some things "spam" and others something else, maybe "junk mail". If that's not your approach, then we must agree to differ.

Re: YouTube doesn't deserve section 230

"Spam is about abuse of resources, not content."

I don't know what you're attitude towards spam is, but mine is all about the content. It's unsolicited email, but there is some unsolicited mail (my friends saying hi, for example) that I want to read and some that I don't, and the thing that determines which is which is what the messages contain. The resources occupied on my server are relatively unimportant to me. Yes, the messages will take up a few kilobytes on my disk, but that's cheap and they're going to take up that space anyway while they wait for me to check the junk folder and do a clean. It's all about rejecting content I don't want to have shown to me. Not to mention that, even if you want to argue that I'm doing this for technical resources, any system that hosts user-generated content, especially video, pays for the disks on which it is stored and even more for the bandwidth of delivering it and would save by deleting stuff they don't like. I think they're equally about the content, but if you want to bring resource usage into it, the resource usage for a video host is a lot more than a mailserver.

Re: YouTube doesn't deserve section 230

It's not a completely separate issue. It's a direct comparison. The spam is unwanted and the systems that guess at it still produce false positives. There is no way to have a perfect spam filter, but few people turn it off entirely to avoid the false positives. Online moderation uses similarly unreliable filters because to them, and it is them who make the system and pay for it, the costs of some false positives outweigh the consequences of no moderation, or moderation only when their small manual moderation team gets the time to look at it.

I'm sure the people who end up experiencing the false positives are having a bad day. This is not great for them, and if there was a good solution to it, I'd advocate for it, but there is not. I'm also sure that some of them complain about this automatic moderation being a freedom of speech issue, because it's popular to say that anything that happens that you don't like is a violation of that right when it isn't. For example, if a platform leaves your video up but doesn't pay you for it, clearly they haven't blocked you from saying what you wanted (even if they deleted it entirely, that's their right as well). If it happens too often, it might be worth them considering diversifying their income stream away from one unreliable video platform, maybe having multiple unreliable platforms or self-hosting their videos and finding alternative methods of advertising. Or complaining more often to YouTube and hoping that improves their services. When a business is unreliable, I tend to try to reduce my reliance on it.

Re: YouTube doesn't deserve section 230

"They found it offensive that someone was sticking their tongue out in the thumbnail on a video about hot sauces. If that's not "exercising editorial control" I don't know what is."

I don't know for sure what that is, but I have a guess. Maybe they used some kind of machine learning model to guess whether something was offensive and it messed it up. Annoying for the creator, I'm sure, but not the heavy-handed censorship you make out. If you're posting here, you should already know that these programs are unreliable and that they are necessary. Ever had an email accidentally routed to the spam folder or dropped altogether by your mailserver? Did you turn off your spam filters altogether and remove the verification systems on the server? Me too and me neither, respectively.

Re: Disappointed with the author's description

What part of the provided information was wrong? Was it not a terrorist attack? Was it not in Paris?

There were other attacks there as well, but they aren't relevant to this article. That doesn't mean that they were worth forgetting or that the victims of them shouldn't be remembered, but the legal case which is the subject of this article is not related to them. If the other attacks have to be listed because they involved more victims, why not include other attacks that killed even more? Many countries have faced attacks that killed even more people, and those attacks are important too. They're not mentioned because they're not related to the news the article is talking about, and the other 2015 attacks are not either. It is no disrespect to the victims there.

Bitcoin mining rig found stashed in school crawlspace

Re: Accounting control

Assuming the mining cluster was the same size throughout, that appears to be about $2k per month for a large school building, which may share its bill with other buildings administered by the same body. If they use electricity for heating, that could also be a highly variable bill. I found a report that mentions a $1M electricity bill for one year of a school district's usage, and it claims this to be an average amount of usage for U.S. school districts although the specific location of their example wasn't specified. At that point, the increase in usage could be small in proportion to other expenses and didn't get called out in time. I doubt public government finance departments have the staff to analyze each bill at a detailed level, and they may take the approach that if it's a bill they expect, then they pay it and maybe worry later if there's a problem.

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Re: Defacement

I'm using "below" to refer to two dimensions, as you're well aware. When a screen is placed vertically in front of you, you can think of the vertical dimension as up/down and refer to an item placed vertically lower as below, where the original page content is. In fact, I find myself lacking in any better word to describe something that appears vertically lower, as the only other option I have thought of is "under", which I think is more likely to apply to the Z axis.

Re: Defacement

I am not a legal expert either, and there is always a chance that I'm just wrong. The problem comes when we try to decide what law this would be breaking, technical argument or not. The post that started this thread didn't name one. They just said "defacing", and "defacement" is not a legal offense. If code was injected into the webpage, there might be some claim to computer misuse legislation, although even that might not work since it's being done by the software the user chose to run and someone would try that argument. Since code isn't being injected, it's software showing a banner, which it already does. For example, this and other browsers will sometimes show warning pages about a site's security or reliability depending on whether it's told to look out for known malicious sites, and those banners would also not be what the page author wants the user to see, but they are also legal.

Re: Defacement

As I said in my original post, I do not support their actions. I described them as "despicable", which I think indicates my feelings on the matter. The rest of it, unpopular though it was, is about the legal realities to the extent I understand them rather than my opinions.

Re: Damned if you do...

I'm not sure about the search boxes, but the "Don't you want to use Chrome" box still appears on a lot of Google's websites if you ever end up there. I use relatively few Google services, but whenever I do, they see that I'm on Firefox and put the recommendation in there. The most common for me are using Google Translate (I'm unaware of a translation service that is both private and understands more than 40% of the words) or when people insist on sending me things stored in Google Docs or Drive. It also appeared on YouTube at some point though I can't remember if it's still there now.

Re: Defacement

It's not modifying someone else's site. It's showing you extra stuff in the application you're using to view that site, without modifying the original site which is now below. This doesn't make the action less despicable, but it does prevent it from being illegal. Short of market manipulation complaints, there's nothing to stop a developer from putting any messages they want in the UI, and Microsoft's tiny slice of the browser and search markets make an anticompetition argument hard. Nobody's done anything to Google for pushing their browser, and they have a much larger market share, so I wouldn't hope too much for any regulators making Microsoft shut up about Edge.

Google destroyed evidence for antitrust battle, Feds complain

Re: Heh

"Then again, if the employees were careful to hide any shady business in unrecorded chat messages, it only means that they'd have otherwise hidden their shady business in unrecorded meetings."

That's possible, but the other possibility is that they used chat because that's the typical system* and didn't take any action either to preserve or to hide their messages, allowing Google to decide what to do with them. Had Google had a retention policy that kept them, the messages could still have been there. This is more likely to be the case when the employees are implementing something the company knows is illegal but the employees don't know, whereas employees doing something they know could land them with a criminal charge would likely be more careful with their comms.

* In one company at which I worked as a student, so many systems were set to send emails to everybody, including many people who not only didn't care about what they said, but also wouldn't even have understood what they said, that email was no longer a reliable way to communicate with anyone. You could send an email and the people who set up filters to eliminate enough of the junk would eventually see it, but even for them there was enough junk left over after filtration that they would only look at email infrequently. The internal chat system became the only way people tended to communicate with one another.

Ukraine invasion blew up Russian cybercrime alliances

Re: If Russia gives legal immunity to cybercriminals

"The harder the cybercriminals have to work to even reach IPs in the US/UK/EU the less actual cybercrime they have a chance to commit."

If it's Russian government supported, they won't have all that much trouble getting VPNs. They can use a lot of layers of proxies, so they can first go through China, then to another endpoint which China isn't blocking, from there onto a compromised computer in Canada, from there onto a cloud server in Germany, and by now it's hard enough to tell whether the German server is responding to commands from someone in Russia or not when you don't know the path. The changes you propose would work for organizations that send a lot of traffic out from Russia, because they can't easily VPN through somewhere without being obvious about it, but cybercriminals don't tend to have to send all that many packets to get their job done. A few kilobytes of encrypted C&C traffic from Russia can set off a global botnet to spread the instructions around, and there's little you can do to prevent that level of traffic from getting through.

As another method of penalizing Russia, blocking the networks could work though I won't promise that it's worth the consequences. It will probably put a large dent into small-scale criminal activity from people who aren't savvy enough to get their connections through. For anything with government assistance or with sufficient experience that they were already the scale of a small company, it's likely to be ineffective unless the world can quickly and easily agree on a thick line (we can't, because it would require almost immediately cutting off China because they're certainly not going to drop Russia's traffic).

Europe to consult on making Big Tech pay for the networks it floods

Re: Sense

"This makes sense - when you use roads you pay taxes to get them built and maintained."

Yes, you do, but those roads are public property and open for public use. If I as a company build some roads of my own and allow you to pay to use them, I don't get to demand taxes to maintain my private roads. It's up to me to find the money to maintain the thing I built with the intention of making a profit, and if I find that my Extra Motorway Corporation isn't managing to turn a profit, then it's up to me to fix that. That could involve changing the prices, finding more people who might want to use my roads, selling the road to the government and making it public, or shutting down and finding a business that people are interested in. When ISPs make a profit, as most of them do, they don't give it to us. When they make a loss, or just not as much profit as they want, it's not up to us to supply it.

Re: All should pay their costs to the backbones

This is how it should be. It doesn't matter that they're low-margin, especially when they don't have much competition anyway and take advantage of that to have a much higher margin on some customers. You charge what you can to get customers to buy your service and to be able to profit from providing it. The tech companies have higher margins because people want to use that specific company more than they want to use one particular ISP.

Truck drivers may be paid badly for a number of reasons, and some of those reasons are things we should change involving labor regulations or anticompetitive actions. However, we shouldn't assume that, when those problems have been removed, that package delivery will start to have the same margin as manufacture of the thing in the package. It's a lot harder to design and manufacture a product that I want than for someone to drive the box to me, and as long as that remains the case, the person delivering it will make a smaller margin than the person creating it.

Re: All should pay their costs to the backbones

"When I talk about "backbone" I mean more than the local Internet exchange, this should include the cost of bytes between these exchange points."

That's how it works already. I pay my ISP, who uses some of that money to pay for their interlinks with other ISPs, who use it for their links. Sometimes, they peer so that they don't have to pay one another for traffic, usually when that would have been a relatively balanced exchange anyway. If the networks my ISP is linking with start charging more, whether it's because they want to build some expensive stuff or they've realized what wonderful things money can buy you, my ISP has the choice to either pass those prices on to me or to find another way to route the traffic. That's the point of having an ISP manage their connection. Since they are already paying the network operators, it doesn't make sense to add on other charges, and trying to do so would inevitably lead to confusion and to price gouging (if my ISP can bill me for some network they used and present this as a get out of complaints card, then they no longer have any incentive to be efficient with how my traffic is routed).

Many connections are billed by usage, either by bytes transferred or by flow consumed, and this is a perfectly reasonable business model. I've had such contracts before and I have a lot of contracts like it; my electricity and water usage, for instance. Most industrial connections have billing that takes one or the other of these into account when deciding on the price, and every cloud provider certainly does and often with a very healthy multiplier on it. However, it should be the choice of the ISP whether they will give me such a contract or if they intend to offer an unlimited package, and if they find that offering everything for less than it costs to deliver the everything I use, then it is a problem they'll have to fix themselves. It should not be our responsibility or that of other users if an ISP chose an unprofitable price. It certainly shouldn't be the responsibility of companies who are almost certainly paying more as their usage goes up to the networks that the ISP has chosen voluntarily to link with.

Kremlin claims Ukraine hackers behind fake missile strike alerts

I didn't vote either way on the comment. I think at least a few of the downvoters may have reacted to some of the rhetoric which is similar to, but not necessarily in agreement with, arguments from Russia apologists. For example, it is common for apologists to say something along the lines of "something MUST be done ASAP to de-escalate this war" when they mean that they want someone to make Ukraine give up and sue for peace, no matter that they'll have to give up large areas of their country and doom the residents of those areas to at best a life under dictatorship and probably much worse, before Russia comes back in two years and tries again. The reason the sentence often means that is that there's little that can be done to make Russia de-escalate, given that most countries that care about Ukraine have already placed severe sanctions on Russia and further penalties are more likely to escalate rather than de-escalate. I don't know if the original poster was saying this, and from the rest of their comments, I think it's unlikely. Still, I generally have some suspicions when statements of that nature are made, because there are some who start with a reasonable-sounding argument before pivoting to their real, less reasonable stance.

The problem is there's no negotiation that works. You can't open with "How about Ukraine gives up this, then you go away" when the Ukrainians know it's not going to last, and you can't open with "How about Russia goes away" when Putin's in charge and either can't retreat for his own sake or doesn't want to because he's an insane megalomaniac. It's helpful to have some negotiators on standby if Putin should find himself lacking in breathing skills, but until something like that happens, there's not much negotiation that can be done.

At first, I thought the post was referring to reports from civilians that they were forced to wear the same bands that Russian soldiers were wearing, thus meaning that they were more likely to be killed accidentally by Ukrainian forces; still the Russian's intentionally murdering people, but using others' weapons to do it. Then I went back and saw the username.

I can't do that, Dave: AI drowns top sci-fi mag with story submissions

Re: Forums?

If you are interested enough, you can get a set of friends who all like what they're told to like. This can work if you can't actually get a bot army to do it for you. When you come down to it, why have a chatbot write a story, anyway? There are only two reasons that make sense: you want to get paid for writing a story and you don't want to do the work or you want to show off that you wrote a story and you don't want to do the work. Both are subject to artificial voting.

In addition, there's not that much incentive for non-artificial voting. Would you like to read ten thousand sci-fi short stories, a few thousand of them generated by a chatbot, a few more thousand generated by people who can't write but think they can (and some of those the kind of people who don't understand what periods or paragraph breaks are for), a thousand on topics that are not of interest to you (for me, it's the kind of people who write a story with magic but think that because there's a spaceship, it must be sci-fi), all in the hope that one or two of them are actually good? You'd spend so much time reading bad stories that you might not make it to the first good one. Even editors start with a summary or an excerpt and end up skimming some things before they decide whether to take on a novel, and they're expecting to make a profit from doing it. I don't have the time to be an unpaid filtering editor when I can go buy the result of someone else's filter.

Re: "...AI could turn writing from a serious craft into a cheap commodity"

"if you read through centuries old books then you'll find that as the cost of printing was high, the quality of writing was a lot higher because editors (and the reading public) had higher expectations."

I haven't always found that. I think at least some of that may be due to the fact that we tend to know a relatively small set of classics which were better than a lot of other books written at the same time but which didn't endure as well. Comparing the best thirty books from the 1840s, or at least a selection of thirty from the good pile, with the sum of what's available in the 2010s, it wouldn't be surprising that the 1840s look better. What I tend to find in less popular older books (and even some of the popular ones) is a lot of extra loquaciousness which certainly sounds fancy, and probably it did at the time as well, but doesn't necessarily add to the quality of the book.

It is within the capabilities of any writer, if he be endowed with a thesaurus and a dictionary, and the will to act thus to make his speech in comportment with the styles of yesteryear, or perhaps a more meritorious attempt would be to render such speech in a manner that resembles his contemporaries' imaginings of such a style without a mimesis most ardent in its honesty, to adopt as his own any oddities of vocabulary or syntax that he believes will engender the accolades of which he is desirous. It doesn't make what they have to say any better just because you have to disentangle the run-ons, or worse unnecessary references to something else, to get there. I've seen people try to write that way today. They produce terrible stories and think that sounding formal will help, but they are wrong.

Re: Author's guild

The low-quality stuff you can find now is at least mostly the kind of low-quality junk that can be produced by someone actually trying to write and who probably thinks they created something at least mediocre. Imagine what heights of junk can be created by someone turning on an automatic random word generator and not bothering to check the results. Imagine how much harder it will be to find something you want to read when there's ten times as much junk you have to get past in order to find it.

Starlink performance sees a bump, and so do prices

The word "datecenter" does not appear in the article content, the suggested story headlines beneath it, or the poll for this week which does contain the word "datacenter". So if I'm understanding your complaint correctly, you're unhappy that ad content created by a third party has a typo in it and you're blaming it on The Register, even though they didn't write the ad or choose it, and Americans in general, even though "datecenter" isn't proper spelling there either, and you feel the need to complain about both of them? Just making sure I know the purpose of your ranting.

Re: So you can't budget for a set amount

It's the general playbook for such companies: get some customers who don't have any alternative, then slowly increase the price each time you can. Unfortunately, it is not unexpected when an ISP does it, and it seems quite common in the US from all the complaints I've heard about it. A mobile provider probably does less of it because their system works in a lot of places, but I've been around earlier when they were having fun with service contracts with lots of loopholes, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they did price adjustments frequently as well.

Starlink fans like to speak as if Starlink will somehow avoid all the things people hate about existing ISPs. There was no chance of that. They got into a market where charging more than you need to for less than you offered while applying for and getting as many government contracts as you can from which there appears to be no improvement is business as usual. They're not upsetting that; they're just tapping into the money stream.

Re: So you pay more to have less?

That is typically how it goes. If you want something that everyone else wants at the same time, expect to get lower quality and higher prices. Depending on exactly what you're buying, one of those might be a larger difference. For instance, when the pandemic was just getting started and everyone wanted laptops right now, you would end up paying more money for a lower-spec laptop just because that one was in the warehouse and you could have it but the good ones had already been shipped to their buyers. It's not that surprising that Starlink has chosen to take advantage of demand to charge higher prices.

The clock is ticking on a possible US import ban for Apple Watch

Re: Puh-LEEEZE!

Their argument is pretty stupid, but yours isn't exactly great either.

"One could make a compelling argument that the entire Apple iThingie ecosystem (specifically including the Apple Watch) has a negative effect on public health, what with its promotion of a sedentary lifestyle, and demonstrably addictive presentations that tend to disable one's brain during use."

The Apple Watch, a device that famously turns exercise into a game where if you skip a day, you lose, is "promotion of a sedentary lifestyle"? I don't think you should need a watch to tell you you haven't walked enough, but from those I know who have one, they're frequently exercising more to make their watch fill in their daily goal system, and if they've been stationary for long enough, the watch tells them to start moving again. They've built their fitness software to discourage a sedentary lifestyle. Whether they've done it correctly, and as I haven't bought one I'm not sure, is debatable.

Also, the applications people use when their brains appear turned off are in most cases not written by Apple. The people you're complaining about are likely using one of a number of apps from social media or gaming companies, and they happen to be running on an Apple device. I don't know that I agree with your complaints in general, but it's akin to blaming the computer manufacturers or browser writers when you don't like what people do on the internet.

Marketing company chases Twitter for $7,000 over 'swag gift box for Elon'

If you pick up one from the street, maybe. If you get one from a company you already know is at whatever event you went to directly from someone who worked for them and your first step is to dd your system repair image onto it, thus obliterating any filesystem and files there might have been on there, then you're likely fine. While it's possible they've added extra sneaky code to the controller and if you're using it in a sensitive environment it's best to get fresh ones from known channels, most times I've gotten one is when a company wants to sell things to me and all they include is some PowerPoint files I don't intend to read. For the same reason, it's possible that a company-provided pen has a microphone and transmitter in it, but for most companies, it's a pen made as cheaply as possible designed to write just long enough so that you see their name while you're there if you happen to use it.

That would work if the company chose to give that. The way I read the article, Twitter asked for it and agreed to pay for it, but then didn't pay when the bill showed up. I'm guessing they wouldn't have a contract that allows any company to send them something unsolicited and expect payment.

Re: Elon

That payment was only if he couldn't get people to fund his takeover. For some reason, he managed to get multiple banks to put up piles of cash for it, so that wasn't an option. He could still have backed out, but then Twitter would have tried to sue him for significantly more. That might also have been a fun thing to watch since he signed a contract eliminating all the good excuses for walking out on the deal.

That's usually why I keep them around, then I realize that I don't do all that much painting and that at my rate of predictable clothing destruction, a couple shirts will last for a decade. I've had a slightly better record using the tiny USB disks companies often give away. For a while, I had a couple 1 GB ones that were used for my recovery Linux images because they'd be too small to be erased when I needed a different disk. It didn't do much for the companies whose names were written on the disks, but at least I found them a bit useful.

Puri.sm puts out LapDock for its Librem 5 smartphone

False praise does not help

"The era of a phone that can also be a tablet or a full computer is arriving, thanks to FOSS."

The era of a phone that can also be a tablet or a full computer already got here. Android's had support for that for a while with a few different companies' standards alongside the half-baked Google version for every device (some exceptions apply because it's Android, exceptions always apply). People don't use it.

Yes, Linux is a better desktop operating system than Android is, so a Linux phone should be better at it, and it probably will be when we have Linux phones better than this. This phone is not capable of running a desktop system very well based on its specs. From reviews, it's not that great at being a phone either. You've complimented the CPU (incorrectly, but that's for later), but there are other problems as well. Here's a simple one: 32 GB of EMMC storage. That's what you have to put your desktop operating system on: a disk that's smaller, slower, and less reliable than anything you would ordinarily use. The good news is that you can put in a Micro SD card for some expansion, but it's not going to be fast. 3 GB of RAM isn't exactly impressive by 2013 standards either, but that is less likely to be immediately problematic if you don't open too many browser tabs.

Now onto the CPU. You've told us that "it's easy to forget that even a relatively low-end smartphone is still a powerful computer by the standards of just a decade ago", but this is incorrect. Four A53s are not fast when compared to a 2013-era computer processor. I don't have good benchmark numbers for the specific SoC used in the Librem 5, but those are standard cores where performance is proportional to clock rate and memory speed (that appears to be the same), so let's look at another quad-A53 chip, specifically the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 (MSM8916). It got Passmark benchmark numbers of 424 at 1.25 GHz, so for this devices maximum 1.5 GHz (not specified how often it will operate at maximum), we'll adjust its number to 509. Let's look at some CPUs from 2012 (we're not that far into 2023 anyway) and see what their numbers are like. I don't want to use anything too powerful, so I'm looking at small laptop CPUs. How about the Core I5-3317U, a dual-core 1.7 GHz part that's far from the top of the rankings. What's its benchmark number? 1988, 291% above our adjusted Librem number. AMD hadn't ascended to its present position at that point. Let's try one of their parts. How about the low-end APU A6-3650: 2008. But that one has four cores. How about a dual-core model like the Athlon II X2 240e? This is by far the worst I found and it's number is ... 1002. Some phone processors are powerful enough to serve as laptop-class chips, but this is not one of them. You don't by a Librem 5 for the CPU. You buy it because you want open software and are willing to compromise on basically everything else to get it. People know that and it's fine. Don't pretend it's something it isn't.

Results are in for biggest 4-day work week trial ever: 92% sticking with it

Re: Surrendipitous Interactions?

"The idea that "serendipitous interactions" In the office lead to creative ideas has been so thoroughly debunked, I'm surprised we keep seeing this old trope dragged out over and over again"

I've not seen it debunked. All I've seen is a lot of people, usually ones who like WFH, saying it isn't true. I can't call something disproved on the basis of "a lot of people don't think it is true". Neither does that prove that it is true after all. I've seen no useful data to making a factual statement about it, and given that it would require some objective judgement on how creative an idea was and how the idea came to exist in someone's head, it might not be possible to prove it either way definitively.

Re: Short-term observations

I agree, unfortunately. I'd really like a four-day week, and if my employer did this maybe we'd try cutting back on the pointless meetings and make processes more efficient. However, there's a reason it got this inefficient in the first place, so if we were permanently on a four-day week, they'd start reintroducing the sources of the problems and productivity would fall again. Companies have many incentives to cut inefficient processes like too many meetings, but so few of them do it. I don't think shrinking the work week will make them do it.

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

Re: BTC working well, Western Union angry

"Prior to adoption of BTC, Salvador didn’t actually have its own currency, it used the US dollar, which it felt was demeaning and an expression of US imperialism."

What rubbish. They chose to use the dollar, and they were free not to when they did and have remained free to change that whenever they like. Incidentally, the dollar is still used there as one of two official currencies. The United States did not make them do it. Nor was it even a desperation measure from a failing currency; the colón was quite stable. El Salvador chose to do it because they thought it would help expand their economy if they had easier access to markets that used the dollar, including the United States and a few of their neighbors that had either adopted it entirely (Panama) or partially (Belize, Costa Rica). This hasn't entirely worked out the way they hoped in the late 1990s, but I must reiterate that the Salvadorian government decided to do it without any pressure, they didn't and don't say that it was anything to do with imperialism, and that they were and are free to change it whenever they want.

Amazon mandates return to office for 300,000 corporate staff

Re: Creepy

I'm still not seeing any inappropriate abuse of a relationship here. I'm seeing two things:

1. The friend told the poster about the job opportunity, and they applied to it even though they wouldn't have found it in a manual search. This is not inappropriate.

2. The friend told the employer about the qualifications of the poster which may have helped. This is not only not inappropriate, but it's also common practice to ask for and get references from former colleagues.

The part you quoted clearly says "I got an interview", which means they had to prove themselves for the job. It wasn't just handed to them. I'd have agreed with you if they said "One of them put a word in for me at their new employer and I got the job right then", but they didn't say that.

"Are you implying that people want to WFH because they don't like their office": Not at all. I am not implying that, I'm stating it outright. Lots of people, including me, avoid unpleasant offices, and fewer people will avoid nice ones.

"and if only employer could make a place employees "don't hate going", then that would end WFH?": No, I didn't say that. I said that it might help people who hate the office to not hate it so much, and then they might be happier about going there. That doesn't mean they'll always want to, just that hopefully it will be nicer.

"How employer is going to create an office better than one's home or private office?": That depends on what your home or private office is like. I didn't work from home at the start of the pandemic, so at the beginning, my home office wasn't a perfect one. It was a desk I used to build projects on that had my peripherals. My projects got evicted and that became the office. If you live in a house with an extra room you can turn into an office, it's better than if you have a small place or one with a lot of other people living in it. Maybe your home office is nicer than mine; it wouldn't surprise me. In any case, the work office doesn't have to be better than everyone's home setups. It could just be better than what it is now.

Re: Creepy

I'm not fishing for personal information. We talk to each other and reveal it. To be clear, I'm looking for extremely private details such as whether they commute by bicycle because they like cycling or just because it's convenient, information which I would later use to invite them to a cycling event if their response was that they like to do it in their free time as well. Or, in another case, to reveal that I have hobbies involving embedded hardware and so does that guy, so when I hear that that guy wants to build something in his spare time, I ask if he'd like my help building the OS image for it. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they pass, and sometimes they're the people inviting me to do something and asking me some intensely personal questions like "I have two dogs. Do you like dogs?". The horror.

I'm beginning to wonder what your colleagues think of you. You appear to view your employer as an enemy and any possibility of social interaction of a very basic kind as a risk to be avoided. I don't reveal private information to acquaintances and you don't have to either to know them a little.

Re: Creepy

That is what I said. Giving jobs to people you know, not recommending you apply. It is not nepotism if I still have to compete in the interview process and am treated with the same standards that would affect a candidate they didn't know. Here's a quick summary:

Why did I get the job:

Nepotism: Because my brother owns the company.

Not nepotism: Because my brother told me the company was looking for someone with my experience and I applied and interviewed normally.

Nepotism: Because my friend didn't want to interview anybody so just went with me.

Not nepotism: Because my friend thought I'd enjoy the company and suggested it, then I applied and interviewed normally.

You see the important point here? Do you have any evidence that the original poster didn't apply and interview normally after being told about the job?

Re: 300k

They only have about a hundred different cloud services, and although I'm not sure whether people use all of them, they have to have maintenance teams for all of that and then add more teams for the interaction and management of those services. Then financial and legal staff for all the countries in which their cloud and/or store operates. They also have a publishing system and manufacture ereaders. This might include the staff for all their subsidiaries as well. I'm not that surprised by the number.

Re: Creepy

What you've said is not what the quote says. That you have some bond with your colleagues does not mean that you have no bonds of friendship outside work, or even that the bond with your colleagues is the same strength as the ones you have with your friends. It is just a connection, and on that basis, I think it is correct (although I would phrase it in a more informal, non-corporate way).

When I've worked with people for a while, I come to know a lot about how they work. I know who is a good person to ask questions, how their work styles compare to one another, if there are significant differences in the kind of tasks they do well, etc. This helps me to complete things more successfully. It's not just work-related things either. I also start to know things like what they're interested in outside work, how they live, how friendly they are, and those things can help as well. For example, I would know who among my colleagues might be interested in working with me on a project outside work, which people I can ask for help if I need it, or who isn't happy with the job and wants to move, and I have helped colleagues leave when I knew they wanted something else. Some of those people have had so much in common that we have had a friendship that lasted even after one or more of us left the job, but many others don't. When we're working so closely together, that kind of connection is useful to everyone and, as we're social animals, is almost automatically built if the information is available. Anecdotally, I've come to know such things more quickly when I was physically close to the people concerned than when I'm doing it all from a video meeting, but this may not be universal.

Re: Creepy

I see we're adding "nepotism" to the list of words you don't know. Nepotism is if I get a job because I have some relationship to the hiring business. It is not that I apply to a job because I know the person and am then considered fairly. People don't always look at every company in existence when they're considering where to go, but if a friend says that an employer is good to work for and is looking for someone with your skills, it's worth considering them.

I think the issues you raised are the most important. I see a lot of people who like either WFH or the office and want to prove that it is always better under all conditions for every person. Most of those people also think "prove" is the same as "shout repeatedly without even trying for evidence". I don't have evidence because I haven't studied it, but there are very noticeable differences in productivity depending on what kind of office you're working in, how easily a team has productive, non-rigid discussions when they're working remotely, and whether they have methods of getting new hires added in that rely on a lot of communication between team members. There will be a different answer for a lot of groups, but even despite this, a company can use those details to adjust the situation for what they want to do. For example, if a company wants everyone to come into the office for whatever reason, they could at least make the office a place employees don't hate going. In case any companies are reading this, this means walls so you're not inundated by everyone's noises and can have some degree of separation between groups.

What Mary, Queen of Scots, can teach today’s cybersec royalty

One time pads: one more thing

"Conversely, the poor cipher used to try and hide the content of messages could have been rendered totally uncrackable, even at the time, by one-time pads, which just need dice, paper and pencil."

They need one more thing: a completely safe communication channel, even if it's later broken. If I make a set of pads and send them to you, and someone copies them in between, then our communications are wide open again. Unless I can hand them to you and both of us never have our pads copied, that system is not uncrackable. Cryptography isn't only dependent on the calculations. It is also, in fact it is more dependent on the pathways the data uses and the trustworthiness of anyone in the position to copy or read the communications. In the modern day, although one-time pads are used, it's usually only one of multiple algorithms used on the same piece of data.

Heads to roll at Lenovo amid 'severe downturn' in PC sales

Re: Renewal are due about now

My employers, however, aren't charities and also hang onto them until they're broken. The only difference is that they don't try very hard to repair them at that point. I was given a secondhand laptop when I started, and it didn't have any warranty I know about on it. I don't know how common that is, and they can be reasonably certain that I could take another laptop from the stores and get it set up for work quickly enough, so waiting for this one to keel over isn't a problem.

SpaceX threatened with $175,000 fine for Starlink crash risk paperwork blunder

Re: The Register has asked the company for comment. ®...

The fine level is chosen by the enforcing organization, up to the cap. They likely reserve the highest fines for things like repeat offenses or ones where they've had less cooperation. I'm not sure if they've had to fine them for this specifically before, but that might be why the fine isn't set at the maximum.