Posts by doublelayer

Lawsuit: We've got the stats to prove Twitter ax fell unfairly on older, female engineers

From the statements in the article, it appears they're not talking about that. As Musk sees that, the pledges to work long hours at high intensity for no reason was an opt-in situation, where choosing not to was effectively quitting. He was smart enough to realize that, if he denied them things based on that interpretation, he'd end up in court, so he pretended to promise them that opting out would still come with some support. Still, that was a place where people got an option. This case seems to be referring to the people who were fired unilaterally before that choice was presented. He decided that thousands of people weren't good enough to be given that choice, and they didn't get to self-select, even on what is probably an illegal contract. They're alleging discrimination in that first round of firings.

How to spot OpenAI's crawler bot and stop it slurping sites for training data

Re: The risk with Robots.txt

Not including directory Y in your file isn't very much security, since if there are any links going there, it won't be hard to identify it. However, you do have a way to do this in robots.txt without implementing something server-side which filters stuff out, which is stronger but more work. What you do is this:

disallow: /

allow: /x

It doesn't only filter out /y, and if you want most of your site open, then you'll have to put a lot of things on that list, but it is the only option you have if you're limited to static files and the honor system. One other note: depending on the bot, this may not have them crawling the /x directory because they start on the homepage and only go to things that are linked. You might have to add another allow statement for that page.

4 in 5 Chromebooks sold to US students in Q2 as demand rises

Yes, this is now true. This is why, when those computers were older, they were slow because the software was too resource-intensive for their hardware. Today, laptops of a similar age would be acceptable for school use and should be kept. Unfortunately, today, Chromebooks of a similar age are likely not to get security updates anymore, meaning that, unlike the Windows computers which will almost certainly be running Windows 10 and will get updates until 2025, and most of them will be able to run Windows 11 for updates after that. Or they could experiment with running Linux, which would provide longer support but I wouldn't count on a school system choosing to do it. The point was that you aren't guaranteed hardware failures before that ends, and schools don't just assume that it will happen and throw away all the old stuff, therefore the old stuff should be maintainable.

Re: Lifespan

"At this point, I don't think exposing students to something else than the Microsoft fiefdom is a bad thing. Especially when it also comes with Linux."

You act like using that Linux mode is going to be taught. It will not. The only thing that will change is that they'll be taught to use Google Docs instead of Word to write some papers. Either way, the only skill they leave with, a useful though very limited one, is the ability to use a word processor. Neither will teach them about computer internals, since neither OS is designed to show people that stuff and schools aren't intending to hold a class on IT. For the same reason, Windows now has a Linux mode in WSL2 which is at least as strong if not stronger than Chrome OS's, but that's not going to lead to teaching Linux CLI skills in classes that weren't already doing it. Not even using Linux machines directly would bring that into education, because the first necessary step is wanting to teach that skill.

Not hard to understand

"He estimated that doubling the lifespan of the 48.1 million Chromebooks used by K-12 students could save taxpayers stateside around $1.8 billion dollars, assuming there are no additional maintenance overheads."

This explains, if it was necessary, why it won't happen. Just imagine what even a small cut of $1.8B is like, and whether you would rather have that or not have it. Google already made that decision: they'd rather have it. Their experience with Android indicates that they'll never be held to account for the problems this causes others.

When I was in school in my adolescence, that school had some laptops which could be used by students. They were the chunky models running Windows (Chrome OS wasn't a thing by this point), and they weren't always in great condition. However, one of the primary problems with them was that they were slow. This was not because they had underspeced them. This was because all of them were about five years old and someone was trying to have them run the latest version of Windows and probably multiple layers of management and antimalware software. Hardware does break down, and if these were carried around by the students at all times rather than being moved around to wherever had requested them, they'd have taken more damage. Still, they managed to keep laptops around and functional long enough for their technology to become the limiting factor. If Chromebooks are being damaged a lot more, they might want to check if there is a hardware reliability problem versus other options they could buy.

North Korean hackers had access to Russian missile maker for months, say researchers

Re: The Russians run their missile developement on Windows?

That's an option, and sometimes it works. Some of the people who assume that is the cause might find that their forgetting to lock the door or maintain the alarm were more influential. Doesn't change the fact that, no matter the strength of your security, it is possible for someone to breech it and you still want to respond when they have, not give up on the basis that if they got past your defenses, then you're dead.

Re: The Russians run their missile developement on Windows?

Sure, in the same way that, if I see someone trying to break into your house, then it's too late to do anything and we might as well sit back and watch while they take your stuff. There is such a thing as responding to threats you did not succeed in completely preventing.

Re: The Russians run their missile developement on Windows?

It depends what they mean by "full compromise", but most likely they're referring to privilege escalation to system or admin level from a nonprivileged account, in which case having code execution doesn't automatically give you that. I'm not sure what naming the founders or city was supposed to tell me, though.

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

Re: Windows 2025

"Of course something has. Probably the H/W vendor who wants their commission selling the extra application. W10 is a great selling platform."

It's as much a selling platform as Linux would be if someone provided a version which tried to sell you a program that you already had. In short, it's not at all connected to Windows, which would not do that without the manufacturer or whatever software changed it making a decision to do so. That action is possible on any operating system, but no operating system does it on its own.

"In fact it subsequently did open in Edge. I wonder how many modes Edge offers for presentation and copying compared to a real PDF viewer."

Nobody said Edge was good at it. It has some modes, and if you want something with more features, you install it. It's there to provide basic functionality, the same way that even a basic Linux image will probably have some text editor, but you'll still install the one you want because the built-in one is there so you could fix a config file, not because it's the one you'll always want to use.

Re: OS versus hardware death match

Most of the time, the incredibly powerful mobile CPU is completely unused. Same with the RAM; since the phone is generally tuned to evict anything except the app on your screen and the background daemons, it doesn't need very much. This is also true because no matter how much memory some manufacturer shoves into the high end model, there will still be people with 4 GB or less so, unless the app is a high-end game, it's probably designed to run on that kind of device. Of course, Android helps make the case for the CPU by having inefficient software so the lowest-end CPUs feel sluggish, but once you get into mid-range performance, telling that apart from the maximum becomes harder. I think it's a lot like the five high-resolution cameras they put onto them. Some people actually have a use case where those cameras or that CPU is useful, but often people just buy the expensive thing without knowing that they won't benefit from it.

Re: Working on Windows

I got it, you know how Windows works. However, your idea of worse is kind of hard to separate from the main concept of "different", which you have also made very clear applies to your situation. For example, elsewhere in these comments, people have described reasons why they think Linux is worse. They sound a lot like your reasons: something they find easy on Windows is not easy on Linux because you need some other software for it, which you might have to configure in a text file somewhere, and that's before we pull in other possible sources of confusion. These things don't make Linux bad, which is why such posters get a lot of downvotes and disagreement in the replies. Neither does this always apply to Windows.

If you've been here for long, or really anywhere else where Linux has been debated, how often have you heard someone say something like this:

Linux is fine if you like the defaults, but as soon as something breaks, you'll have to go to the command line and edit configuration files based on flawed instructions from someone who posted them six years ago about an old version of the software.

Because I've heard that argument. It's very similar to the one you just made about the registry, in that both things do happen, both are annoying, and both are a bit easier if you're familiar with those OS structures and understand how they work (although that knowledge doesn't make either go away). The problem with the argument is that people who use it imply that some system is unique in requiring them. The one I quoted makes it sound like Linux needs a lot of CLI configuration and nothing else ever does, whereas the Windows-based argument suggests that users constantly need to go to the registry, but nothing like that is ever required on Linux. They've taken the starting point of truth and expanded it to the point of incorrectness.

So you would like some VMs? You can get those from nearly any cloud provider you like. I wonder what features you think the distro providers should be making, given that installing the distribution of your choice into a VM running on anyone's cloud takes about ten minutes. You can then connect to that machine from any system you choose using any communication system that's compatible.

I'm also not sure that you'll get the decrease in price you hope for by depowering the terminal. Sure, instead of a nice laptop processor, you could use a low-end, low-power CPU, which should save a bit off the total cost. The peripherals are still going to be the same, and you'll still need fast networking and sufficient graphics to be able to process the data coming out of your VM or your weak hardware will start to cause glitching. The main thing you can reduce is the disk, but unless you normally equip your laptop with a huge and fast storage array, the disk is likely one of the cheapest parts there already. A 256-512 GB SSD is not that expensive nowadays, so even if you decrease it to a 32 GB EMMC, there's a low cap on how much that can save you. You can see this by comparing Chromebook costs. Unlike what Google claimed when they started making those, there aren't a lot of cheap and good Chromebooks out there. You need to pay about the same as a Windows laptop with comparable performance, and your terminal will only be slightly less expensive than that, mostly from savings on the CPU.

Re: 3 Percent now and forever IMO.

In their defense, I see posts by those who haven't used Windows in that time or longer (or claim not to) who are sure they're knowledgeable about modern Windows. Sometimes, they too have ancient ideas about how Windows works which are not true.

In my defense, I use Linux nowadays and don't agree with the rest of their complaints. There are differences, sure, but I find them on lots of systems and you basically have to put up with it on whatever systems you choose.

Re: Working on Windows

However, a lot of your irritations are because all the things you've used for the past fifteen years are different. Many of them are possible, but you don't do them instinctively now. This is one of those things that people assume won't impact Linux, but actually does, because people become familiar with something and experience that momentary irritation when something they already know how to do doesn't work here. The new thing might be similarly difficult or it might even be superior, but while people regain their footing, it adds annoyance. Just because you don't have your routines set up doesn't mean that the system is at fault, as I've said to people who hate Linux because the desktop doesn't look the same, they could get used to that if they see it as the cosmetic rather than functional difference it is.

"Why would anyone consider cloud storage where the service provider has access to their files is beyond me."

Three reasons:

1. They don't know that.

2. They don't know what the alternative is.

3. They have looked at the alternative and found it more complex than they want.

Option 3 depends on what they're considering. For example, there is the option of self-hosting. That is nice, and it works pretty well for me, and I know how to manage the networking and configure the disks for resiliency inside a machine I built and software I installed. Not everyone knows how or wants to do those things. For example, my box is on a private network, and if I'm not on that network, I can only access it by connecting to the VPN I also set up. People who want their files accessible from anywhere but don't know how to have their own VPN endpoint are unlikely to do the same.

Alternatively, maybe they're considering some hosted service with encryption like the one you described. I've never used it, but I start wondering how key management works with this. Are you responsible for having keys on any machine that can read the files? Or does it depend on your ability to log in? If it is the latter, do you lose your data if you forget your password? If you don't, then it sounds like the encryption key is stored somewhere that's out of your control. If the data would be lost, that is a good sign that there is probably encryption, but it introduces a weakness if you need that password reset for some reason. If encryption is too easy, I start questioning its quality.

I don't use OneDrive, but I know people who do. Some may use it without thinking of the security, but others understand that it is not encrypted storage and treat it as a big, convenient, insecure disk. For a student, they aren't very worried about Microsoft taking a peek at their homework, and if their laptop breaks, they've got a copy of it that they can quickly pull down from somewhere else. There are many services that can be used for that, and doing it yourself would be nicer (and is what I did even as a student), but there is still a reason that someone might opt for it anyway.

Re: Windows 2025

"Linux lulls one into assuming that a desktop OS will just open a PDF on demand. Trying to open one on the W10 laptop mentioned elsewhere tries to sell me Foxit. W10 is really just a selling platform."

Something has messed with the file associations. Normal Windows 10 will open that PDF in Edge by default. PDFs are common enough that I think including a reader makes sense, and that was annoying before Edge gained that power, but it works now.

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - They'll try

They have an obligation to act as their investors tell them to, since their investors will name them, vote for them, and can remove them*. Some investors will have goals other than "give me as much money as you possibly can", but a lot of them are focused on getting the cash. If I was running a company owned by others and I decided how much profit was reasonable to me, the chances are high that they, the ones with the final authority, would suggest that my idea was wrong and they want more. I could resist that for a while, and it would probably work in the short term, but as my idea of reasonable and their idea of possible started to diverge, my ability to prevent them from getting what they want would degrade.

* Well, investors who have enough of the company. Investors like you and me who don't own a lot get to live with whatever the largest investors and the strongest parts of the company decide to do, and while we have the choice only to invest in companies that pursue lower profit margins, they tend to grow less so not as many people choose to do so.

It won't even get that far. Sure, some people pay for Office365 in the cloud, but most of those are businesses who are using that for email, chat, and also they get Office on the machines. Home users might be buying that for OneDrive, as that's relatively competitive for other cloud storage, or because they misunderstood what kinds of Office are available. However, they're going to balk at a cloud-based PC when they already have a computer and the cloud one is so ridiculously expensive. Businesses may at least have a reason to deploy VMs there, as they've been doing that for years before Microsoft came up with the idea of multiplying the price and doing the hosting themselves, but home users don't have any reason to use it and, in my experience, hold onto hardware much longer than it holds on to modernity*.

Macs are even less likely to get put in the cloud. Yes, you can rent one, and people do, but those are people who either have something Mac-specific which benefits from location in the cloud or want a Mac, but not all the time. Apple does not provide that service themselves and the authorized services don't let you run Mac OS on something other than a Mac they built. As the remaining Intel Macs get deprecated, this will become even harder to work around because one Intel processor is a lot more like the one in a Mac than any given ARM processor is like the M1-2 range. Outside of short-term rental or wanting someone else to run the power and networking, there is no advantage to a cloud Mac.

* A computer can last a long time if it's running efficient software and is regularly maintained. I have some rather old machines that are still usable. I've seen a lot of home machines that are as old as mine, but they have not been maintained and using them has started to get painful. This is usually why I'm seeing them, because I've been asked to help clean them up and make them functional again. Sometimes, it's better to replace them anyway, and the people I know aren't very eager to do so even when it's warranted. They're not going to be paying $31/month for a low-spec VM.

Re: functionality

"You don't need MS Office to provide the office functionality that users want."

I think that might be missing their original point, and I'd like to say right now that I use both Linux and LibreOffice, so I'm aware that the sentence I'm quoting is correct. However, I don't think that's what they were arguing against. A lot of users who are interested in an application aren't particularly focused on office software in general or Microsoft Office in particular. Many users have something else they care more about, and they may be content using either Microsoft or Google's cloud-based offerings which work fine from Linux or they are in the group of users for whom LibreOffice is completely capable of doing what they want. However, there are users who want other kinds of software that are less available on Linux. What makes this harder to generalize is that there isn't as much software that nearly everyone will use frequently, but there are lots of types that some people use very often, often enough to make an OS decision based on it.

One example that I'm more familiar with is audio production and editing. There are some programs that do that on Linux. For basic audio editing, there are tools for it. I would have no problem cutting or mixing some things on my Linux PC. For more complex things, people tend to use rather large and expensive programs like ProTools (Mac and Windows), which is probably the most popular, or one of a few commercial alternatives which also target one or both of those platforms. They then add additional plugins which are also commercial and proprietary, and those don't target Linux either. Even when someone uses a program like Ardour, which provides some of the features of the large DAWs, they find that the extra functionality that is added by plugins are unavailable on Linux. Depending on what they want to do, they may learn to work without that and learn the new interface, but people tend not to want to, especially if they need that for their job.

It's not just that. I've heard arguments about Adobe photo editors versus GIMP. I don't do that, so I don't know about the power or usability differences. There are probably other categories of software that some people want, and this is a situation where Linux doesn't have as many options because a lot of proprietary companies don't target Linux. Many users don't object to running proprietary software, but companies often assume that Linux users will, and the market share is small enough that they ignore us. I don't have a simple solution to this, but if we're going to discuss it, know that it's really not about Office, except for some heavy users of Excel for which LibreOffice doesn't have perfect compatibility.

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

Re: Supporting data??

I'm betting on the former. They should be able to collect that data, and someone probably does, but statistical analysis of that data is hard and leads to complex reports that say things like "The correlation indicates with low confidence". Manager's don't want to look at that, and Google's business relies on that fact. After all, a lot of advertising is useless but people do it because they can't be bothered to analyze whether it helped or to run some experiments to see how much. Why should they check the numbers when they can just announce the new idea, which might be beneficial or harmful but they have the freedom not to check which.

Re: Accommodation on site....

What kind of facilities do you think they'll provide for that, though? I somehow doubt you get a place where you can move in all of your things. Most likely, it's a smallish room with a bed, table, and bathroom, useful for being able to stay there but not where you want to live full time. That's assuming that paying every night will allow you to reserve a specific room at all times rather than getting assigned new ones on occasion, basically the difference between static IPs and ISP DHCP where yours doesn't change very often but you can't guarantee it. People might start comparing it to other options in the area, even expensive ones, to find something that better fits the kind of residence they expect with a well-paying tech job.

Re: I spy a business opportunity

The threat of being fired when they're caught using someone else's security credentials to access an office. Maybe someone would be willing to take the risk, but I'd never entrust my credentials to someone else because they could use them to access the office while pretending to be me, possibly before doing something worse, and I have a feeling both of us would receive some nasty consequences as soon as that was discovered.

Micron joins the CXL 2.0 party with a 256GB memory expander

Of course, but I recommend you buy a really good UPS. It could provide some extra vigilance points as well. I had a device from the early 2000s which stored all its data in RAM and, if you ran the battery down, would delete all your files and reset to factory settings. Oddly enough, I was a lot more careful about keeping that one charged, even after I invested in a compact flash card to keep my files.

We'd pay good money to see... oh dear, Elon Musk 'needs an MRI scan'

Re: Musk paying for something?

The same people who believe both that Musk is a genius fighting for some unspecified rights and also think that some treatment was related to their online postings and unfair, when in reality it's unlikely to be related to posts and, if it was, they were probably pretty bad.

That site appears to take an animal's running speed and multiply it by the ratio between its height and a human's to get a faster one. This doesn't make very much sense to me as a method. I suggest instead that we look at the speed of lizards that are already that size. Monitor lizards which are in the 60-90 kg range can move at about 20 km/h, although not for long periods as they usually use that to ambush something nearby.

Two US Navy sailors charged with giving Chinese spies secret military info

Re: A minor burn

I don't understand. Are you referring to the "Petty officer second class" part? Because that's a rank, a job title. The "petty officer" part means that he is a junior officer in the navy, superior to the average sailor but not high up in management, and the "second class" part further divides that group into subgroups, kind of like the various adjectives people put before the part of their job title that says what they really do so you know how important they're supposed to be.

Re: Comparing apple pie to mandarins

If the situation described actually occurred, where the government suspected that the exchange was to take place, then they could have provided fake data to exchange, thus demonstrating that the criminals were willing to complete the act and having a stronger case. That's not the first time such a thing has happened. For example, there was a guy who decided to steal sensitive information and sell it to Russia. He sent his invitation to the Russian embassy, which decided they didn't want to deal with this guy and called the FBI. The FBI created some convincing fake Russian agents to complete the deal and then arrested the criminals. So if this did happen, they would have prevented a risky exchange from happening. Of course, from the article, it sounds like they didn't know and something really did happen. That wouldn't have made a case where the investigators knew pre-crime a show trial.

Re: the US are such hypocrites

There are lots of moral explanations about why someone thinks it's bad or not. A lot of spies have their own moral justifications for why it's not a problem that they're doing it. They will, as all moral arguments are, be very subjective.

Most of the time, it is considered an act whose morality depends on the purposes for which you're spying. This means that it isn't seen as a universally bad thing; spying on bad guys is good, and spying on good people is bad. This isn't that different from a number of actions that humans make moral judgements about. This also allows someone to defend their choice to spy by altering their definitions of "bad people".

Of course, there are other ways to draw the line, some of which can look a bit crazy. I'm thinking of a novel I read years ago concerning a hunt for Nazi spies in the UK in 1940, the conclusion of which was that some spies were German by birth and some were British. One character commented that he respected the Germans for their determination, but had the utmost disrespect for the British because they had been disloyal to their country. I remember the statement so well because it always struck me as a really stupid way to look at the ethics of espionage; I would judge them equally badly since they were spying for immoral goals and would have judged them equally well had they been spying to disrupt those goals. Of course, this was a work of fiction, but morality by patriotism isn't only a fictional construct.

Blue Origin tells staff to catch next rocket back to their desks

Re: Colleagues are distracting

"I haven't run into many situations where an impromptu meeting was a useful thing."

Maybe our environments or experiences are different. I have had a few occasions where we were assigned a goal to be split among a few people, and we had the freedom to design and implement something between us. At times like that, it could be convenient to get those people together to discuss ideas, diagram something out, and see if we agreed on things or if we had questions that needed to be asked. That can be done on a call, just as your large office with whiteboards can be replaced by a screen share and a program that lets you draw, but I've found that the speed of bringing people together could be useful. It could also be scheduled in advance, but that requires coordination when, in all likelihood, everyone is available sometime today without having to juggle calendars.

I find that the "big room with lots of whiteboards, chairs, table, internet etc" works even better if there are walls in the middle, because then you don't have to wear headphones all the time or worry about distracting people when you discuss something around a whiteboard near which someone unrelated is trying to work.

Re: Colleagues are distracting

They didn't say that doing something unfair was simply wrong, but that it could cause problems. That is true, and you are certainly aware of it in aspects other than where the desk is. For example, if someone came to everyone on your team and informed them that some people were receiving dramatically lower pay than some others, there would probably be a lot of concern by people wondering if they'd been shortchanged, trying to figure out whether they were in the low or high group, providing excuses why they deserve to be in the high group and others didn't, etc. That's perceived unfairness, and it could be warranted differences in pay or quite easily be something worse. I think you misread their argument and interpreted a demand where they intended a caution.

Re: Colleagues are distracting

This is one of the important parts to me. I don't mind working in an office, in fact there are some advantages I've noticed when doing so, but the office needs to be designed for the kind of work that people are doing. If a company is hiring workers who really can work efficiently while wedged into an open office and thus wearing headphones to hear themselves think, then they can probably work as efficiently if not more efficiently anywhere else. There's something to be said for walls and doors that allow people to separate when needed, hold impromptu meetings when necessary (rather than trying to bring everybody into one of three meeting rooms which are always already reserved by someone or trying to hold a meeting by talking past someone who is doing something else), and contain the tools they need frequently to do their work. Offices that aren't designed in that way are likely throwing away lots of productivity for tiny savings in real estate costs, something that remote working can decrease even more.

Couple admit they laundered $4B in stolen Bitcoins after Bitfinex super-heist

What happened to them is that both of them were and are bollocks. The code was never law. The people who said it was were either trying not to bother doing anything about crimes and/or planning their own crimes. Others said it to indicate that legal solutions can't always deal with technical realities, for example if cryptocurrency is stolen it may not be possible to retrieve it just because the police say it should. Either way, the law never agreed to just let the code handle things.

As for self-enforcing contracts, those were never what proponents claimed they were. They had lots of ideas of how you could make those into, effectively, automated lawyers who could check on the real world and take actions accordingly. What you could actually do with them was build more cryptocurrency-like assets on top of existing ones, with various bugs that people weren't always great at removing before making them live. Sometimes, people found a way to use that, but it was never what people claimed it to be. Neither changes any of the legalities about cryptocurrency, like the thing being legal and stealing it being illegal, so they also have no effect on what law enforcement chooses to do.

Re: As much as I'm not a fan of the idea of billionaires existing...

I don't agree with you in any way, but even under your terms, they didn't hit the level you required. As the article said:

In case you're wondering, 120,000 BTC in August 2016, when Bitfinex was ransacked, was worth about $70 million;

Cocaine is illegal to possess or to transfer. Bitcoin is not. See the difference? Now you might have Bitcoin for an illegal reason, and in that case going to the police to recover it would be a bad idea, just as it is a bad idea for drug gangs to report to the police about stolen cash. However, if you own it legally, which this company did, then there is no reason for the police not to investigate the theft. That principle works as long as the thing that was stolen is legal to have, no matter what that thing may be.

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Re: Spoiler alert - game solution

This also being the problem with text adventures, since in the situation, there is a safe plan. You know there's a hole, and you know there's a ladder. So don't take large steps into darkness near the hole, take small ones, shuffle, or even crawl so you can feel ahead of you. Sure, there's danger if you had to move quickly, but we didn't see any risks that required that. However, in the game, there's probably no way of moving like that.

Re: Spoiler alert - game solution

That's bad, and I'll also add the situation where there appears that there's an obvious solution, but you can't get the game to let you do it. You can never be sure if the game needs a specific wording of the command before it will accept that you know what you're doing or whether you're really not supposed to do the obvious thing, but either way, you're stuck. The other problem with a lot of these games is that there is one path you're supposed to take, but the game doesn't block you. Sure, you can wander around a lot of places and get information, but it's not going to let you complete any other tasks until you get past this block, so you're just wasting your time trying to go around it. This happened too often for me. I enjoyed some text adventures, but I had some others reach the point of frustration such that playing a new one was more of a gamble than I wanted. At least with normal books, there wasn't much chance of the book simply stopping you on page 94 and not allowing you to read any more of it.

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Re: We had a similar incident

I'm guessing that cable sustained some damage, possibly sufficient for it not to work anymore. Still, the insulation on a thick cable can be surprisingly strong. While I didn't calculate it, I had a damaged but quite thick cable which, being bored, I decided to use as a rope attached to heavy objects which I then dropped to see if it could really be used that way. The only failure was when I had undone my knot to add more weight and made a bad replacement, allowing one of the weights to fall off and complete its drop. The cable withstood the pressure. I wouldn't want to use that for anything safety-sensitive, but if the cable just has to keep being in one piece rather than being able to deliver sufficient power to the right place and nowhere else, it can take some stress.

Lacros rescues Chromebooks by extending their lifespans

Re: Limited life span?

There are two problems with your assumptions. The first is the eight years thing. That's only for some models, nearly always the expensive ones. The cheap ones do not promise that, usually promising at most six. And those six are not from the time you bought it. It's from some undeclared time of release, which is usually somewhere around the first prototype coming off the machine for testing. Then the clock starts counting before any become commercially available, and as the machines stay on store shelves for at least a couple years before they make a new model, more than half of the support lifetime has already elapsed when you buy one.

The other problem is that there remains no technical reason for the end of support. I replace my hardware when it is broken or when it can no longer do what I need of it. If I break my laptop before software support ends, I will repair or replace it. If I don't break it, I expect that I can keep using it until the software it needs to run no longer functions well enough on the hardware. Not some date when the manufacturer effectively tells me "Time's up. It didn't break by now so we're breaking it for you". If they stopped supporting new versions because my hardware had too little RAM, that's a legitimate hardware restriction. If they provided updates but the CPU wasn't powerful enough for it to be convenient, that's a legitimate reason to make it obsolete. They are not doing either of these things.

Re: How long can Google say the same thing

I'm confused. Did you stop reading at that sentence? That was sarcasm, pointing out that the "technical limitation that Google is working hard to fix" story is a lie. They deliberately made the devices expire, and the limitation is a very weak one. They could have avoided this very easily, and even though there's some friction involved at retroactively changing it, it's not the challenge they make it out to be. I think the rest of my comment indicated this, so I'm curious why your response focused on the sarcastic sentence.

Re: How long can Google say the same thing

Redesigning wouldn't be too hard: do it the opposite way. Update the Chrome engine, and make the login window a page that it renders rather than a part of it. That's effectively why they did it in the first place. However, that's not really necessary. They already made a new version of the Chrome code. That Chrome code continues to run on Linux if I installed it, and Chrome OS requires that Chrome run on the Linux kernel at the base of the OS*. Just allow that updated version to be installed without changing the login screen, the way they're installing it on all the other Chromebooks which are not receiving a customized version of Chrome per model.

* For now, anyway, as they're considering switching kernels and using Zephyr. Because that's not a big decision or anything. They can swap out kernels and recompile everything but installing software on an OS it supports is beyond their capabilities.

How long can Google say the same thing

"The reason that it's taking Google some work to achieve is also the reason that the company is trying to do it. The goal is to be able to update the browser separately from the underlying operating system."

The reason that they were integrated in the first place was, of course, due to someone holding the Chrome OS developers hostage for several years and threatening them until they made that design decision, so now they simply have to. Oh, no, it was because Google decided to do it. They can change their design at any time they wish, but for some reason they have chosen not to. Similarly, they can abstract out their OS from the hardware a bit so that the hardware doesn't need support death dates (I like how they renamed them Automatic Update Expiration dates so it sounds like manual updates are still possible when in fact they are not). In fact, they already have that abstraction but choose to act as if they don't. The support expiration is designed in for some reason, likely so people have to buy new equipment, and Google can remove it on its own, at most having to wave the powerful hammer of software dominance at the manufacturers if they don't go along. They don't do it, not because there is a pressing technological problem, but because they have never planned to do so.

This isn't the first time Google has done exactly the same thing. Android has been in this cycle since it was released. They could have mandated updates at any time, but they've never done so. They have on at least four occasions announced that they're going to make technical changes to make Android updates less reliant on manufacturers, but nowadays, the update images still come from the manufacturers' servers and only if the manufacturers have bothered to create them and Google does nothing about it. I wonder when the next article will come out with Google pledging to do more when they could have made it happen at any time with ease.

Old-school hacktivism is back because it never went away

Re: DDoS is not "hactivism".

The tools they're using are intended to DDOS, and they're using them for that purpose. In your analogy, what they have is a hammer that's only designed for smashing stuff, I'm imagining one with an uneven head so any attempt to pound in a nail would just gouge the surface the nail's going into. That's what they want to do.

Also, it's an assumption on your part. I know how networks work and, although I've never done it before, I know how to start a DDOS attack. Therefore, it is possible for them to have the same knowledge. What's more, they probably are better at operating such an attack than I would be at first; I understand the technology that needs to be in place, but I don't know the marketplaces for bots to use during the attack, nor have I set up the proxies to hide behind. If I turned to DDOS attacking, I'd have to do some work to get to the point they're in now. So you may not be correct about their level of knowledge, even though as I said it's unlikely they have more advanced skills given their weak attempts at taking action.

Re: DDoS is not "hactivism".

From DDOS attacks that have happened in the past, the people using those tools do appear to understand what those tools do and, in at least some cases, how they do it. I do question how useful intermittent DDOS attacks are at achieving any goals, but it is incorrect to say that they're using tools they don't understand; they probably don't know enough to do something more advanced, but they're aware of their intent and actions.

China floats strict screentime limits and content crimps for kids

Re: many parents reading this article would find China's approach appealing

And some people who are great at IT don't use Word very much if at all because they're doing things other than writing prose. Not playing games is no guarantee that they'll learn something else, and using Word is no guarantee they'll become IT literate. A lot of office workers know how to use Office, at least the basics, but if you've ever worked in office IT, you know how that doesn't translate into other knowledge.

In addition, I know several people who got into technology, often software development, by playing and modifying games. That wasn't my path into it, and I'm not that into gaming now or in my youth, but I know enough people who are good at it who started that way that I have to argue against your generalization. Depending on what they're doing, games can also be used to teach IT skills. Consider, for example, the many Raspberry Pi projects which are based around games of some kind, and that in order to get those into a playable state, the person will have to learn some Linux commands and IT basics, and then they'll still have a computer on which they can continue to test those skills. This is no guarantee that everyone who likes videogames will get IT skills out of it, but you can't really guarantee any of the related behaviors. People who like to read books may not become great at writing or the artistic use of language. People who enjoy music may never gain the ability to play or compose it. However, the potential is still there for some to gain those skills by starting with something they enjoy.

Re: Microsoft have been floating parental controls also...

And how would you like them to identify the parents? If a child sets up an account and has control of the email address, what option does Microsoft have to identify them and then locate their parents to provide suggestions to them? The only method I've seen that works is to require proof of identity every time an account is set up, which I oppose for privacy reasons. Children also don't need to learn very much to understand that pretending to be adults can be more helpful. I had that figured out early in my youth: if I register on this site and say I was born in 1963, then they are fine with it, so why not do that? It also helped because my parents were clear with me about being careful about entering my birth date or other personal information on random sites.

A workable alternative is for parents to help their children set up accounts and are honest about the risks. Parents can also put on their own controls. Yes, there's more work involved in doing that rather than assuming that someone will make a one-click method that perfectly handles everything, but being a parent involves taking on some work.

IBM to build biometrics system for UK cops and immigration services

Re: Undoubtedly

The problem is that facial recognition is unreliable even when you have someone staring directly into a camera in the same place, let alone in other uses like the ones police tend to propose. There are some biometrics that are at least a bit better at being able to correctly tell people apart when they have good input data, but for some reason facial pictures are still being used as the primary method.

Twitter's giant throbbing X erected 'without a permit'

Re: Another.. "Birds of a feather"...

Although in Putin's case, the Cyrillic equivalent of V is the third letter of the Russian alphabet and the equivalent of Z is ninth out of 33. Then again, they are using the Latin Z rather than the Cyrillic З for some reason, so I suppose we can use Latin order.

AMD Zenbleed chip bug leaks secrets fast and easy

Re: Also, I just noticed...

They couldn't run this through Qemu because Qemu specifically implements an abstraction that prevents it. Other software isn't designed for simulating CPUs and wouldn't be doing that. It's rather obvious when you know what Qemu is used for and how it's implemented. It's true that, as far as I know, no code has been written publicly to exploit this from a browser, and you'd probably have to look hard at the output of WASM engines and JS compilers to make it work well, but that is not the same as it not being possible. Web browsers have no hardware abstraction compared to what Qemu does. They don't allow access to some classes of hardware (more if it's Firefox, less if it's Chrome), but the CPU is not one of them.

Indonesia blocks Musk's X.com over its X-rated past

Re: Don't do that.

Yeah, that happens already. That was my point. If an ISP did it, they'd start facing customer complaints but ISPs still do block things on occasion. Usually they're pretty simple with how they do it and circumvention is as simple as not using their DNS servers, but it wouldn't be the first time. Meanwhile, if anyone other than an ISP does it, then it's just a local network making decisions. Corporate networks routinely block lots of things they don't want employees to go to, and my network blocks plenty of ad or tracking servers, but only on this network. The systems already deal with plenty of blocking. It would be a much bigger issue if the backbone providers started blocking, but that's never going to happen. I don't see this request as anything new, though I'm still content to file it as pointless.