Posts by doublelayer

Apple just cut Tim Cook's pay by 40%. How ever will he get by on that $50m?

"Can you pick the next guy that can do it? With 100% certainty?"

No, but I can't say with 100% certainty that Cook won't break something in the next year. Any person is capable of making a stupid mistake, many of which seem plausible at the time. The history of companies doing something disastrous for them is long, and many of them don't look like guaranteed bad ideas when proposed. 100% certainty is impossible, but you know that already.

There's a difference between being a visionary who can successfully take a company from nothing to a moderate success, or even from a successful company to a behemoth, and someone who can avoid crashing an already successful company. Steve Jobs had to be the former twice, getting the initial Apple products sold and rescuing the weakened Apple in the 1990s. Even that wasn't all down to him, but he played an important role. Cook did not have that problem; Apple was massive in 2011 when he took control of it, and it's massive now. You're right that someone could pull a Musk and break anything, even something as successful as Apple, but it takes effort to be that bad, as we're seeing with each bad decision that Musk makes.

This isn't to say that Cook doesn't deserve the money he gets. I don't particularly care about that. Apple's got a bunch of cash and decides to give it at any level they choose. Nevertheless, Cook's neither a miracle-maker nor the only person who can operate Apple.

Admittedly, if you're in the mood to buy an island, such things are very expensive. You'll have to work for a few years on $40M a year to afford that. Why people want to buy islands is another question, but I don't know the answer to that one. I could think of stuff to do with hundreds of millions, but a lot of those things involve giving it away to people or organizations.

Time to study the classics: Vintage tech is the future of enterprise IT

Re: Some things just never went away.

Sadly, sometimes the businesses who understand this correct sentence add on a second one: "If the code's still running then it's sensible not to keep a staff of 1980s programmers around". This leads to the multimillion system collapsing and nobody being around to fix it, which usually leads to finding someone who wrote code in the 1980s in the hope that their familiarity with the unusual environment will mean they can fix it fast. While this is good news for the person who can probably command a nice compensation package, it's not great for anyone else. By all means keep the old system around, but have a plan of how to maintain it and a plan of how to replace it and execute one of them with the other in reserve.

Russians say they can grab software from Intel again

Re: Warranty obligations ?

While that would be nice, it's hard to list every situation where you might want to cut off services. Some contracts will manage this with some kind of generic clause about complying with international sanctions or sanctions of some particular host country. Others might add in a "at our discretion we may cut off services" clause, but that's less common because customers can interpret that as "when we feel like it whether there's an external reason or we just want more money". If you don't do one of those, you have a hard time implementing that in a contract, and customers can sue you in countries that will enforce a contract as written.

EU plan to make big tech pay 'fair share' of telco fees reportedly weeks away

Re: Everyone should pay to get to the Internet backbone

Or in other words, people's desire for bandwidth has increased, and that requires them to upgrade hardware. It's not a tax on you; it's what happens when people want a better service than has been available. It doesn't much matter that they're using it to consume video. If users were all using their bandwidth for another purpose, such as remote work or hosting their own servers at home, you'd have the same situation.

Microsoft to offer unlimited time off for US staff

I tend to store up some paid leave days, using anything that's going to expire but otherwise keeping a buffer. I do that so that, in case of emergency, I have days I could use outside of work and I have evidence to show a manager that I don't use time off too often so they don't expect I'd take days at short notice unless I needed to. With "unlimited", this breaks entirely. I'm not sure how I'd actually use the days, but I'm certain it would be much worse for me if my employer switched to a policy like that.

AI-generated phishing emails just got much more convincing

Re: Just WOW!

I would think so, but it might help a scammer who isn't fluent in the target language (does GPT work in anything other than English? It doesn't look like it from a cursory search). Then again, you could just hire a proofreader for that, but GPT might be an alternative.

Re: "I hope this email finds you well."

"what about limiting access on "the supply side"?"

You can do it, and many email servers have done just that when spam got too bad, but if you do it too aggressively, email you expected to receive starts getting dropped. If there's a new requirement for outgoing mailservers every month, then you can pretty much guarantee that there will be some that don't get updated in time. Some of this won't be easily solved without a redesign, but since email is so widely used, it's unlikely we'll scrap it. We may be stuck with layer after layer of patches.

"In addition, I'm somewhat puzzled by the seemingly lack of control suggested. We live in a world where many are crawling over each other to monitor (and steer) the digital lives and actions of users all over the world. Telemetry build in by default, backdoors on wish lists for Christmas. And here we assume that world + dog can exhaust their (bad) creativity effortlessly without limits, and without anybody keeping track or noticing?"

Yes, both are true. Mostly because some of us are resisting the backdoors, so if someone announced a new version of email which gave total control to others, I would refuse to adopt it. In other cases, the people who want backdoors don't particularly care about solving security problems while they do it; an advertiser doesn't need to avoid spam or malicious messages while mining your data. The internet is a remarkably open place, and there are people taking advantage of it just as they do in real life.

Re: Rules would help

Theoretically, misleading spam emails that aren't overtly fraudulent are legal too, but they're unwanted by everybody who receives them and we therefore speak of them as undesirable and act to suppress them in our lives. The same applies to faked news stories. Not to mention that, depending on the content, such faked stories can be illegal if they involve libelous content or calls to illegal actions. Even if they don't, they're undesirable and we should treat them as we do spam: to be defended against even if their authors cannot be charged with a crime. If you're quibbling over the use of the word "crime", even though the article mentions several clear crimes which you've agreed with, we can supply a different word and continue on with the original approach.

Apple aims to replace Broadcom, Qualcomm wireless chips with its own

Re: I don't think I recall

Maybe you'd care to tell me what my lack of experience, to which I confess, has failed to teach me? If you've got tales of how everybody in component manufacturing expects to lose money when they sell their products, then I'm happy to learn. In my experience of other things, there are a few reasons companies might choose to sell at a loss, and all of them are risky to the company and require them to have planned a lot for it. History is full of examples of companies who thought that being cheap would win in the long term only to find that they don't have enough money to take that as far as they need to. Unless you have a foolproof plan for why selling at a loss is good for you, don't do it, and if you think you have one, it still might not be one.

Re: Don't make many products?

I'm not sure where you got your numbers, any of them, from. You say they have eight flavors of laptop. They have five models that they make, and one of those is an old version which they still manufacture. Likewise, they only have eight iPhone models that they still sell, three of which are older versions. In 1980, not only did they have three computer models (2 plus, 3, and 3 plus), but they also had a display and a printer. By 1990, they had lots of models of Macs and peripherals.

The distinction is between Apple and comparable companies. How many models of Mac laptop can you buy? Air, Pro 14 inch, and Pro 16 inch, with a new model of each one every year or so. How many models of Dell laptop can you buy? I don't know because they seem to have an infinite supply with names like Inspiron 15 5000 4I2SNZ7, but I can guarantee it's more than three. This can bring positives, such as it being easier for Apple to standardize on parts, and it can bring negatives, like not having a choice of laptop at any price level. This is something where Apple has taken a different approach to some other large computer manufacturers, though I know of a few small companies that similarly aim for a small set of models.

Re: I don't think I recall

"Apples model is to play competitors off against each other until they sell at, or often below cost."

Welcome to economics, where the method you use is to find the place that can give you what you want for the lowest cost to you. I'm not sure why you expected something else, but if you want to sell components and not below cost, stop turning the price down when Apple asks. You don't need a monopoly to avoid making stupid economic decisions with your own company, and many other component manufacturers manage to supply Apple or other large manufacturers and make a profit. If it turns out that your competitor can make a profit at a price where you can't, then that's your problem and you might want to do something about it.

Microsoft to move some Teams features to more costly 'Premium' edition

Re: "Another security feature lets admins control who has rights to record a meeting."

I've got one of those as well, and if yours is anything like mine, you can just use capture software which allows you to feed the recorded track into your headphones simultaneously, common in software geared for audio production as well as video. No other hardware is needed. This is why the lock on the record button won't do anything, and I'm sure the person who put it there knows that and was asked to do it by someone who doesn't.

Re: "Another security feature lets admins control who has rights to record a meeting."

There's basically nothing you can do to prevent someone with sufficient motivation from capturing the video. Even if you completely took over the OS so no video capture software would work, you could use hardware which copies as well as displays, and even if you prevented that as well, it won't stop a user pointing a camera at the screen. Since it's impossible to prevent, the feature isn't going to stop people but is probably there just to respond to people who don't understand that and think that blocking the record button is all they need to do to hide what they've said. I've dealt with those users who demand a feature even though it's not going to accomplish what they want, but if they're annoying enough, you add it anyway. If enough of those people have demanded a lock on that button, then a lock will be added, even though it doesn't accomplish much.

Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty

Re: You ran it on WinCE and..a..Dreamcast?... Really?

Why do you think that mentioning WinCE somehow cancels out their points? They didn't say they wrote WinCE, or even liked it. In fact, the fact that they chose to run BeOS in a VM instead of sticking with WinCE suggests they may have shared your negative views of it. As it happens, I had a WinCE handheld at one point. I didn't write the OS, I didn't write apps for it, I didn't even buy the device (come to think of it, I'm not exactly sure on the chain of people who had it before it wound up in my hands). I just had it and used it. I would hate for that to invalidate any opinions I ever have about OS quality.

"There's a gaping corner in the market for a wedge "bedroom computer" that just works, isn't too expensive, and runs games. Build it and we will come!"

I doubt that. This isn't the 1990s anymore. Cheap laptops and tablets are everywhere, and they meet a lot of those requirements. A cool OS like Haiku appears to be doesn't sell as many things as yet another iPad does, and there's basically no chance they'll get as cheap as landfill Android tablets which are surprisingly common. Mobile games are quite popular and the app stores are full of them. If you want something that's better at being a computer, cheap laptops are out there and run pretty well, with the original Windows or the OS of your choice for the more technically aware users.

I don't think there's that much of a gap in the market. Any new computer will have to compete against a laptop, tablet, or both, and I don't see how Haiku, even if it's UI is as great as everyone here says it is (I never used BeOS) will take over.

New software sells new hardware – but a threat to that symbiosis is coming

Re: Dropping Older Architectures

Testing is not the only problem. It is a problem, but another factor is that, any time something is added to the kernel, someone has to consider how it will affect the paths that are custom to the old hardware. For things that aren't supported by the hardware, the writer either has to implement a software shim to support it anyway or a bypass to disable the feature. That's extra work which slows development and can break things. Automated testing will not automatically detect it.

Even without that cost, testing isn't a simple task. You have to have a lot of examples of old hardware lying around. I have some old hardware, but I don't use it to test every patch to the kernel and I'm guessing you don't do so either. I'm also not about to maintain a museum of archaic technology which I have configured to run tests every time a patch comes out in the hopes that someone is still using it with the latest kernel and thus benefits from that effort, because it's a lot of work for almost no benefit. I'm prepared to guess that the older hardware you've got is A) not so old that they've dropped it yet and B) doesn't run the latest kernel version anyway. If I'm wrong about both those assumptions and you value that, maybe you should assist them with running the tests and verifying functionality on your platform.

64-bit not just for more RAM

The article's claims about the replacement of 32-bit by 64-bit is understating what we got from that switch. It's not just about addressing more than 4 GiB of memory. That was part of it, but the 64-bit instructions also help a lot. With 64-bit registers and operations, some things involving larger chunks of data can be done in orders of magnitude fewer instructions, which means much faster execution. We didn't adopt 64-bit processors to make OS vendors more money; they had 32-bit versions for over a decade after AMD64 parts became available. We didn't do it to make the hardware manufacturers more money; the existing 32-bit parts would keep working until mechanical failure, software support lasted enough that basically nothing would refuse to run, and although it has been dropped from some distributions, it's quite easy to compile many of them for 32-bit if you need it. We did it because it produced better processors, both for servers and for desktops. There's a reason why other 32-bit processors for non-embedded purposes have been superseded, including nearly all smartphones.

Second-hand and refurbished phone market takes flight amid inflation hike

I wouldn't ask anyone to get a smartphone if they don't want one, just to avoid making incorrect allegations about what the negatives are. As for your situation, I'm with you about the size of most modern phones; I'm still using an old phone because few new ones come anywhere close to its size.

By the way, most reviews don't talk that much about phone call quality because it's seen as a basic feature. They're all basically fine, so reviews only tend to mention it when it's markedly bad. It's like a laptop review discussing the quality of USB ports--if they're doing it, it probably means there's a big problem with the USB ports. Unless you need something unusual, such as an adjustment for a hearing disability, phone calls will probably be fine. I make lots of calls on mine with no complaints, and I've had similar experiences on other models.

Re: Wait on buying new

"I can envision a wily entrepreneur reloading Android phones, at least, with an AOSP build such as Lineage and then reselling them with an extended support or warranty plan, which would extend their lives even further."

I can imagine that too, but I've yet to see one that achieves these goals without compromising on others. I have seen, for example, some distributions funding themselves by selling phones with the distribution applied, but usually without any guarantees on the hardware and at prices similar, if not higher, to the phone's original price (because of compatibility issues, new devices are rarely sold there). It helps to fund the projects, so that's nice, but it doesn't help for people who want to save money.

"My point was, the "others" in your quote are using that data to make BILLIONS while your privacy disappears before your eyes."

And your point is so general as to become rubbish. Smartphones are small computers, and the privacy implications depends on what software you use and how you use it.

"Map GPS tracks where you go and what you do."

No, it doesn't. If you use a GPS application that has offline map data, it doesn't report where you went. You have many options, most of which use data from Open Street Map, and some of which are open source, which permit you to have navigation and privacy. Even if you use one that does report where you went, it doesn't automatically report what you do there.

"apps / photos / video are parsed by bots with facial recognition to determine who you hang out with and your social activities."

Nope. Some smartphone camera apps do facial recognition to organize photos, but that doesn't mean everything else is parsed or that the data is uploaded anywhere. Many phones lack the feature or can have it disabled. You can also install a different app for taking pictures if you don't like what the factory one does, and the factory one will no longer be able to run on that data.

"Your credit rating, insurance rates and even potential job prospects are impacted."

Now you're just making stuff up. That is a potential risk with the misuse of private data, but it doesn't automatically come from owning or using a smartphone and you know it.

"Smart phones do everything for you, making you dumber. Phone runs out of battery and kids can't operate today."

The ever-popular assumption of generational superiority with no evidence to back it up. Your parents might have had one about you too, whether that was about the stupidity-inducing power of computers, television, radio, electricity, telegraph, cheap oil lighting, easy availability of written content, general availability of written content, or existence of writing altogether. You know how that assumption about you being stupid is pathetic? It applies to this one too.

2002 video streaming patent holder sues Amazon and Twitch

Re: Patently

"For larger startups VCs often have as a requirement that the start up file for patents in order to get funding, solely because they hope if the adventure goes tits up, they can do some patent trolling to recoup their loses."

There are several problems in this. The first is that it's not the reason the VCs are asking for patents. They're hoping to make money from the idea, and if someone starts to copy it, they'd like to block them. Hence their attempt to get any patentable (or not) thing patented to set up roadblocks for the competition. Sometimes that's valid because the innovation is really a new invention, sometimes the applications will either be so obviously bad that they drop it or will be rejected, and sometimes they should be rejected but aren't, but that's the motivation.

Patent trolling is another issue. If you have a valid patent, then defending your patent rights isn't trolling. There are times when I dislike what can be done with a legitimate patent that's not being used well, but it's designed for a good reason. Trolling is a problem when the patents are invalid, but for the same reason that granting invalid patents in the first place is a problem. The solution is better oversight from the patent offices instead of approving anything.

Re: BSD

It tells me nothing. I even looked them up to try to find an explanation of why they called it that, and I've still got nothing. Their website lists four previous names, some of which suggests they're a computer-based company, and a different page suggests they're in the food distribution business and mentions no technology products.

Wiretap lawsuit accuses Apple of tracking iPhone users who opted out

Re: Share prices

At this point, whether someone was looking or it was just paranoia, I'd write a script to regularly collect thousands of prices of stocks chosen at random, including anything held by the investment, at regular intervals (every five minutes would do). The system can withstand the bandwidth, and the firm is likely paying for that system in any case, and it lets people look at recent data without leaking any information about what they're doing.

US Supremes deny Pegasus spyware maker's immunity claim

Re: NSO is an accomplice of every crime committed by its customers

"Pegasus is not harmful."

Yes, it is. Harmful doesn't just mean physical harm, and attacking someone's devices to steal their data is causing them harm. That's why it's a crime almost everywhere. If you don't think it's harmful, then would you be happy to give me total access to all your devices as long as I didn't use any data I took to cause physical injury to you? Seriously, nobody will come hurt you from it. I might take all your money and make public information you didn't want others to know. This would still be harming you.

"Owning a gun is illegal in many countries, but I don't see why that would have any bearing on gun manufactures, gun shops or owners in countries where it is legal."

It doesn't, but if those gun shops sell across the border into a country where it is illegal, that country can press charges.

"All because wiretapping is illegal in country Y doesn't mean that a firm in country I can't make a wiretapping system, especially if it is used by country X where wiretapping is legal."

Wrong. If the thing is illegal in country Y then building it in country Y is a crime. In this specific case, there is also no country X, as wiretapping is illegal in the countries against which it has been used.

Re: Hey, look over there

If Facebook avoided having a zero-day in the first place, that would be ideal. That doesn't stop the fact that there will be security vulnerabilities in any large system and that exploiting those is a crime. NSO built the exploits and launched them, so they share culpability with the people who used the access they paid for. Blaming the criminal isn't misdirection. An affected user can also choose to sue Facebook for this, but on allegations of negligence which may or may not get past the jury. Whether such a claim works or not, NSO is still culpable.

No more holidays for US telcos, FCC is cracking down

Re: Non-digital age tokens

That won't work very well. Such tokens would be very easily resold, meaning that unless it's tied in some way to the identification used to verify it, in which case the privacy purpose of the measure is ruined, anyone who wants one can probably get one. I don't really like the verification in the first place, so I'm fine if it goes that way, but with such an obvious method of breaking everything, I doubt you could get anyone who wants verification to agree to that method.

Cybercrooks are telling ChatGPT to create malicious code

Re: All invention can be used for good or bad

"Well, if the "AI" were AI, it'd pass a Turing test"

GPT has passed Turing tests, as have many other things like it. The original specification of the test wasn't clear on who gets to decide that it passed, but people have been looking at the chatbots of this nature and deciding that they look sentient, conscious, or whatever adjective they choose to apply. These people have set a higher bar (they judge it as sentient even though they know it's not a human), so for this to not count as a Turing test, these people need to be disqualified as judges.

I don't think it should be counted as AI, but I'm not convinced that I could always tell its output apart from a person. Depending on the test conditions, it may succeed in producing output that looks human, so unless they let me assail it for a while, I would probably have a lot of inconclusive results. This indicates to me that the Turing test isn't a great single method of determining whether something is intelligent or sentient. I'm happy to hear others' suggestions as to how we can tell this more reliably, but we will likely never find a test or set of tests that everyone accepts as valid challenges.

Re: All invention can be used for good or bad

"So in a way a positive side from a negative."

Rubbish. More people throwing more malware around doesn't mean any positives. Fortunately, for now a lot of it is going to be crap malware, but it's still noise that we have to deal with. That's like saying that more people going around stabbing people with knives has a positive side because they're not very good at stabbing accurately and maybe that will teach people better self-defense. We're going to have to deal with the mess this causes, but nothing about it is positive.

CES Worst in Show slams gummi gouging, money-wasting mugs, and other dubious kit

Re: JBL clarification

I can't see that much that makes them worse except that they cost a ridiculous amount (you can get everything else for a third of the cost and if you're willing to take out some of the features, for much less than that). The screen means extra hardware that will never get used because it's going to be a bad UI that takes up space and power.

Otherwise, they're basically the same as any other set of TWS headphones.

Tesla fails to push racial discrimination lawsuit into arbitration

If they used papers in a room with one person dealing with them manually, but most places don't do that so much these days, especially when they hire thousands of people. The last time I was hired, the agreements were presented and my consent collected electronically, so there wasn't any way to accidentally forget or modify a contract. I could have attempted to see if I could bypass the "Look at this and accept before you can see anything else" workflow the UI had, but there was probably something in the terms to prevent me and we've all heard the stories of what happens to the terrible hackers who try something as vicious and sophisticated as modifying parameters in a URL.

AI conference and NYC's educators ban papers done by ChatGPT

That cut and paste of a big block doesn't really go anywhere in answering the question of whether text you didn't write chopped up by a program you didn't right responding to a prompt you did write and information you did collate after researching it* is plagiarism or not. I think there's a case that it is, but you could make the easier case that it's low quality for anything that already has quality restrictions and be done.

*I'm assuming that people here are doing their own research on something and then asking GPT to do the part where they write a really boring summary of that research, in which case at least they did something even though their paper will be bad. If they're just throwing in prompts like a student that doesn't want to write their essay, then they may also be committing fraud and the people who gave them funding might have complaints.

Intel: Please buy these new 13th-Gen CPUs, now with 24 cores

No, most people would not be happy with five options, even if we assume that to be five mobile options with separate ones for desktops. There is a wide range of laptops, and a reason why some people want a laptop with a 55 W CPU with a ton of fast cores and some people want a 6 W processor with slow ones for something with a weedy battery that can still last a while.

Also, it's bad luck for your attempt to promote AMD that you posted this one day before they released five more lines of mobile products, and they haven't specified how many specific parts that will add or I haven't found it.

Re: 24-cores on a laptop...

I'm guessing it actually has 8 cores with 16 threads. The OS shows that as 16, but you won't get 16 cores running simultaneously because the hardware is running two threads per core. AMD doesn't have any 16-core chips that fit into normal laptop builds, so unless you're using a laptop with a desktop processor (minimum of 105 W TDP which I guarantee would kill your battery almost immediately), you have 8.

Depending on what you're doing, you probably don't need most of those cores often. When you do get something that can use many cores and is CPU-bound, it speeds it up. For general usage, you probably don't need a faster CPU, which is why I tend to specify relatively cheap and possibly older generation ones when people ask me for a computer, but if you routinely have intensive tasks to perform, such as compiling a large project that can be parallelized, a lot of compression or encoding, etc, then you might benefit from one.

Re: Confusing or what?

If you're building your own computer, you decide by putting things in a database or spreadsheet. Let's see, I want it low-power so eliminate the 180W options, I have a price ceiling, I have my own GPU so integrated graphics are not important, let's see a list of candidates with benchmarks. You just put in whatever criteria you want; it works just as well for someone who has lots of cash for this build, doesn't care about power, and won't be gaming so wants the cheaper integrated version. Alternatively, you pick one at random, do a quick review, and decide whether it's good enough, though I tend to use that method for much cheaper things and do the more detailed version when buying expensive long-lasting things.

If you're buying pre-built, the manufacturer already did that and gave you a choice, and if the box looks good, you check out the specs of the one to three CPUs it comes with and decide whether those are good enough.

Re: Twenty Four Cores.........Umpty Ump Threads........Infinite Confusion........

"So.....why doesn't the marketing of these multiple CPU chips make it a bit clearer that when Intel (or AMD) tell us that "more cores are better".......what they mean is that "your mileage will vary"?"

Because they assume you're either smart enough to know what "more cores" means or that you're dumb enough to buy the thing with the highest numbers without finding out. They just announce that more cores are available, and trust the buyer to determine if they care. They'll sell whatever sounds good to get you to buy one, but similarly there tend to be big benefits in raw performance and general computing when they add cores.

You can parallelize finding prime numbers, either parallelizing the specific verification process for a single number, or more likely keeping that single-threaded (each number doesn't take that long) and using the multiple threads to work on multiple candidates simultaneously. More cores is probably helpful if you want to churn out primes. This depends on why you're doing that, but that's not my problem right now.

AMD has a lot of options as well. They also have suffixes denoting power consumption which don't always mean the same thing (5800X takes 105 W, 5700X takes 65 W, these are just TDP numbers not the spread). They also ignore any number if they've got an integrated GPU, meaning that there are multiple different levels of G class chips. They also have random facts you just have to memorize (non-pro G-series APUs don't support ECC memory, for example, but it's not like they make that clear unless you check the spec sheet to verify).

People want so many positions on the price, performance, and power consumption spectrum that you basically have to have several options for many points somewhere in there. I'm not sure if you can make that easy to understand without doing the research, but AMD has done so no more than Intel has.

Twitter data dump: 200m+ account database now free to download

Re: What dump?

I'm not sure what URL you were using. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it's been uploaded to a bunch of places recently and that all of them will eventually take it down following complaints, so unless you were using the original leak which is probably somewhere on a Tor hidden service, you're likely to have to hunt to find the database. Remember that it's not public information, and depending on where you are, it may be illegal for you to possess it.

LockBit: Sorry about the SickKids ransomware, not sorry about the rest

Re: Yeah, yeah, just keep using Windows

What, that Linux doesn't get malware? Someone needs to call up the 1990s and see if we can send the slogan back to Apple, since they have had to acknowledge that Macs do get malware. Linux does too. You can install ransomware on any system that you've broken into. All you need is the ability to read files and write them.

If everybody switched to Linux tomorrow, the most active groups would go to the dark web marketplaces, search for "Linux ransomware", find several results, and start using it. The less active that didn't already have their Linux version would start switching their codebases and come for the Linux users in a month. Please stop with the false statements about Linux's perfection; you make those of us who like Linux and understand what it is annoyed.

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

Re: Shirley?

"Assuming Autopilot was engaged, wouldn't the Tesla have come to a standstill if the Police had got in front of it and then decelerated to a standstill?"

I wouldn't try it. It might work, but the car would probably try to pass them if it could. If anything goes wrong, the car crashes into the police, potentially causing serious injury to the driver and maybe even the police, and certainly wrecking two cars. Given the tradeoffs, I probably wouldn't take for granted that the system wouldn't make a mistake. Unless there was already another risk to safety, I would use the police's methods and follow it to watch and interfere when possible.

Should open source sniff the geopolitical wind and ban itself in China and Russia?

Re: Keep politics out of open source

"You can’t do anything to prevent its use? Then, why bother writing a license?"

The license gets obeyed a bit more often by smaller entities. If I write something and the license says "Amazon may not use this software", then Amazon is unlikely to be using my software because I can sue them and they can lose. They might come to me and ask me to change the license, they might have an employee make a new version of what I did to get around the licensing issue (nicely confusing the legal argument and making their legal position much stronger), or they may just find a different way to accomplish their goal, but they're not likely to flout the license unless they can hide it. If I say "The Chinese government and military are not to use this software", and they decide they want to, I cannot sue them and expect to get anything, and they know this, so they have no reason to care about what I said.

"And if you thought it was being ignored, what possible harm would there be to adding a clause “can’t be used for military purposes, or to kill or imprison civilians”?"

There is no harm to that, but it is contrary to things like the open source definition. Theoretically, it means that military forces of countries I do like wouldn't be allowed to use it either. The reason it's not allowed as free software is that people would come up with lots of other criteria of who is allowed to use it which would compromise the goals of the movement (E.G. no making money from it, no using with Windows, no use by people in [insert country you hate]). If you want to make this license and accept that you won't be categorized as FOSS, there is no problem.

Re: Weird argument

Your resort to what if questions is harming your point. Regulations already exist to deal with those. Therefore, an open source chemical weapon maker is illegal, but not because of open source. It's illegal because of chemical weapon maker. You would go to jail because you made something illegal. If you make something legal, you don't go to jail, even if another person later finds a way to do something illegal with the thing you made legally. If you weren't a participant in their illegal act, the fact that you're useful doesn't cause you to be culpable.

People made cars. People have killed people with cars by intentionally running over them. The inventors and manufacturers of cars are not culpable for those murders.

Re: Weird argument

"Execs from Krupp, IG Farben, Flick, etc at Nuremberg?"

You appear not to know why these people were convicted. Let's review. The indictment lists their crimes. Missing from those lists are anything to do with their products being used for crimes. The lists do include things like using enslaved workers, stealing from occupied territories and concentration camp victims, and providing funding to war crimes. These things are actual crimes, and those are what people were charged for.

How about what they were found guilty of? The following charge was the one that affected all of the defendants at the Krupp trial and wasn't dropped:

Crimes against humanity by participating in the murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, and use for slave labor of civilians who came under German control, German nationals, and prisoners of war;

And some were also found guilty under this one:

Crimes against humanity by participating in the plundering, devastation, and exploitation of occupied countries;

That's it for the Krupp trial. No other charges received convictions. The use of their products is not why these people were on trial.

Re: Weird argument

You appear to have a few misconceptions about the law. Here's one:

"That’s why the well-established principle exists that drunk drivers can be prosecuted for manslaughter. At the moment they hit the pedestrian, they aren’t responsible for their actions, because drunk."

Rubbish. You are not excused of your responsibility for your actions by being drunk. They committed crimes just by driving a vehicle, whether you hit someone or not. Hitting the person is a second crime, and your being drunk does not in any exonerate you. Doing something else while drunk isn't excused either. If you get into a fight while you're drunk, you can still be charged with assault.

Re: Easier examples

You have made a bad analogy which damaged your point. Writing software that is extended to commit a crime is not the same as performing a nonessential purpose directly in the criminal organization. Typing in a concentration camp is still working for the organization committing the crimes and facilitating it. Making something they used without having any knowledge they were using it is not the same.

You like analogies? Here's mine. Let's say that I'm going to commit some war crimes, namely killing prisoners of war. You have a tool shop. I go to you, buy some hammers, and use them to start committing murders. Are you guilty? No, you are not. If I told you why I was buying the hammers, then you could be. If you gave me the hammers for the purpose, you would be. If you bought the hammers under false pretenses, then I am not guilty for what you chose to do with them. Developers of a library explicitly intended (either designed for or provided for) crimes are guilty for its use, whereas developers of software that is extended by others to commit a crime are not.

Re: Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine

There are international laws, enacted in treaties, which specify when you can use violence against another country. The most famous ones are U.N. and Geneva conventions, but there are others. There are lots of exceptions to such things. None of those exceptions apply to Russia. Here are some examples:

1. If your country didn't sign them, then they don't apply to you. Russia signed them.

2. If your enemies are a country you didn't recognize, you have a claim that it's not a country and therefore doesn't come under some of the regulations. Russia recognizes that Ukraine is a country.

3. If your destruction is something you arranged but not done by your military, you can find a sneaky way to argue it wasn't you that invaded. Russia's using its own soldiers.

They are in violation of international laws on the use of military forces which they agreed to follow. Their invasion is illegal. Sadly, the ICJ doesn't have the power to make them stop doing it, even though it has the authority to judge them for it.

The hypothetical is entirely ridiculous; just because their processor is RISC-V and their operating system is Linux won't do a thing for their missile's ability to bypass defense systems. That would be in the design of the missile and any evasion systems built into it, and I have not seen any open source hide-your-missile-from-radar codebases out there.

Let's say that China needs a massively fast chip for something. They could build their own from an open source starting point, but equally they could just copy a design from ARM, AMD, or anyone else they want. They don't do that now because they lack the capacity to manufacture it and because they can't sell it for a profit, which is why they're focusing on manufacturing more than design. If they wanted it for their own use, removing the profit motive, they could do a lot of things whether the design was freely licensed or not, ignoring all legalities with impunity.

Non-binary DDR5 is finally coming to save your wallet

I agree with you, and in fairness to them, I can't be sure whether they used the term as a technical term, as shorthand, or not at all and the headline writer came up with it. I wouldn't use it either, but that's at least the reason it was used.

"And what's the deal with the "non-binary" terminology?"

It's just that the previous chips have had 2^n bytes, for some value of n, but now there are some with 2^n*3 therefore with a prime factor greater than two. It doesn't mean anything bigger.

With Mastodon, decentralization strikes back

Re: Standards

The problem with interoperability is that social media companies provide different services. Twitter provides short text and pictures. TikTok provides short videos which I don't think are publicly linkable (not sure as I don't use it, but I haven't seen links directing me there). YouTube provides long videos which are more easily linked or embedded. I'm not exactly sure what Facebook does. Instagram is about pictures, and I think at least some of those are designed to be limited to specific people and disappear after some time.

It isn't always the case that something a social media company does has an analogous action elsewhere. Try posting a tweet to YouTube, for example. Requiring them to have some interoperability when their services aren't compatible doesn't make a lot of sense, and I'm not sure how you can deal with that except by having a collection of social media companies that all do the same thing in a nearly identical manner. Mastadon's setup, though federated, provides one service, which social media as a whole does not do.

I'm all for decentralized services, but it's not always possible or desirable to mandate it. Sometimes, it might be better to let people adopt them on their own as long as the option remains available to them, regulating only to prevent the destruction of the option.