Posts by doublelayer

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

"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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Re: Don't do that.

What's dangerous about that? Pointless, yes, but not dangerous. It's the same kind of thing as people banning entire countries because they think it will save them from attacks (which it won't, either in general or coming from attackers in that country). People have been doing things like that since the internet became a thing, and it hasn't caused any dangerous consequences so far.

Re: x.com's porn past

Even if he assigned ownership to the company that went bankrupt, I fully expect him to bid on it during the proceedings. Do you really think anyone else will bid higher for that domain name? Maybe someone will bid just to make him pay more, but he has this weird obsession with X, so he's going to keep that domain.

China bans export of drones some countries have already banned anyway

Re: "Beijing says it just wants world peace"

You mean all the pieces of the world that were once ruled by some China-based power in its illustrious history, because that's kind of a lot of places. The fact that they didn't rule all of that at the same time and often it was more "We can bully the king of that place" rather than "We are the king of that place" may not matter much. There are a lot of modern countries in that area who don't fancy the idea of being deleted.

Of course, China has also taken steps to gain power over places they don't intend to incorporate into the country, reinstating the "we can bully the dictator of that place" policy with the occasional support to governments that support them. It's similar in practice to the "protectorates" that colonial powers set up when they wanted to pretend they weren't making colonies, although the China version doesn't come with any of the pretense that they have to provide protection unless they feel like it. They're certainly not unique in this respect, as large countries often try to have control over weaker ones and often not for the better, but China has certainly been doing it and, in comparison to some others, for worse goals and to worse ends than elsewhere.

AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay

"Last I heard, about 1/2 the allocated IPV4 spaces was unused. That is, not connected to an endpoint."

I saw that report too, but that was about a decade ago. I don't have updated figures for today, but it's almost certainly lower. I'm sure there are still blocks out there that aren't used, but probably most of those are either held by companies for expansion because they routinely lease out addresses to customers and can't operate without spares, held by some company because they're planning to sell it when the price is nicest, or held by somebody so large that they can ignore requests for those addresses back. For instance, I don't think the US Department of Defense needs all the addresses they've got including three /8 blocks, but do you think you can convince them to give them up?

Your assumptions about demand may not be correct either. ISPs still need IPV4 addresses for routing. They can do multiple layers of NAT when the addresses run too low, but it's a pain for everybody. The more addresses they have, the simpler their networks are. ISPs could theoretically get away with having exactly one address for all of their clients, but they're not going to and we as clients don't want that. That remains a source of demand along with all the servers people would like connected to the internet.

We could go to more extreme methods to take addresses from places that fail to use them the way we'd like and reallocate them to someone else, but it will only slightly improve the situation for a few years. Is IPV6 so horrible that we can't take advantage of that larger source of addresses? Integers aren't expensive, and it's weird to end up treating them like a valuable mineral of which there is a limited supply and costly extraction for each chunk.

There's probably some out there to be used, but not as much as you think. It's also quite unpopular. Your justification of a second IP address is one of those things that nobody really wants to do if they don't have to, because sharing one IP address, while sometimes practical, always introduces more complexity than just having multiple addresses for separate systems. For example, if you're doing something as simple as running multiple HTTP servers on multiple servers because they either need more resources or different software that can be run on one*, then multiple IP addresses allow you to uniquely identify each server involved and using one requires that something intercept the SNI request to do the internal direction, which is another possible point of failure and requires configuration. If they're constrained enough, then you do that anyway, but if they're not, you avoid it. This is why we should want to get to IPV6 and retire IPV4; there is no real reason that we can't use longer addresses, and the limited quantity of shorter ones requires us to do otherwise useless work.

* Whether those servers are VMs on the same hardware or separate hardware devices doesn't really matter in this situation.

Re: "IPv6-only" VPS

That's how I'd expect it to work. You could always turn off the IPV4 routing by changing the network configuration. What they meant by it Twas that if you hosted something on that system, including just an SSH connection, you'd have to use IPV6 to get to it. They would have left an IPV4 connection out to permit you to access sites that weren't IPV6-capable and because there's basically no IPV6-only network in existence and it's more work to set that up than to provide a CGNAT one.

It's official: EU probing bundling of Teams with Microsoft 365

Re: Money grab

"You can't even remove Teams from Windows, so it *is* an abuse of monopoly"

You can. Sure, they install it for you which is pretty annoying, but it can be removed and it's not too hard. You're posting here; I'm sure you know how.

"No MBA is going to *buy* anything else when Teams is already installed, so you *do have to* use it. Not your choice either: Corporate drones have decided it for you."

That's not how businesses work. If they went straight for the free, they wouldn't be buying Office in the first place. And since we're on the topic, the Teams that businesses that use it are using isn't free because it's included in the Office subscriptions they pay for. The included free Teams thing does basically none of the stuff they need. If they were all going for the cheapest version, we'd have LibreOffice and Thunderbird, probably still on Windows, and we'd have to deal with that. They don't do that. Many businesses use something else, most commonly Zoom in my experience but there are quite a few options, for whatever reason. Not to mention that if a company decides something, that's their choice. You were never going to get a choice about what systems they choose to employ, but they have the freedom to choose something else and you have the freedom to do so on your own computers.

That doesn't necessarily make bundling not monopolistic, but it does make your arguments for why it is incorrect.

Re: Money grab

It does something that the old version could not. That's a feature. It might not be a particularly needed feature, but it is one. Not to mention that it has integration with other Office parts, for example working with Outlook to have meetings integrated with the calendar that people already use. I won't argue with you about the quality, though as I've said I can't name a single thing that makes me glad I'm using Slack instead now.

"Bundling exists solely to kill competitors, mostly Slack. Anyone who isn't a moron can see that: IE vs. Netscape again. And same abuse of monopoly, again."

Before they had Teams, they weren't really competing with Slack. Skype didn't really share features with Slack. Now they are, of course. When Teams started being a product, Slack had a much stronger position in the business chat market than Microsoft did, and they've lost market share not only to Teams but to many others, especially with more video meeting capability. For example, see how Zoom's market has ballooned over the past years. We had a pandemic to help that along, and I give that a lot of credit for Teams's success. You are free to disagree with that.

Re: Money grab

"Like in the 90's browser wars, why would companies bother with Slack etc when they are essentially getting the same thing for free and deeply integrated with something they already pay for?"

Slack might have to actually develop features that are better than the alternative. I get the idea why it has the look of something anticompetitive, but on that logic, Microsoft should be forbidden from adding any feature at all to Office, because theoretically someone might have a business that could get hurt. I also don't know what level they'd have had to go to to have prevented this. Had they not bundled it, but allowed someone to use their existing licenses for it, would the not-automatically-installed factor have gotten them out of this, or are they required to have it be a completely separate product which you have to pay for in order not to restrict competition with the alternatives, all of which have a free version of their own? At some point, it becomes a stick to allow the other competitors, who didn't exactly have a tiny slice of the business communication market, to prevent themselves having to compete with larger companies.

I've used Teams before, and I use Slack now. Teams wasn't very good. I have many complaints about it. Slack has problems as well, just different ones. They're both basically fine depending on how their used, but both could be substantially improved. Maybe if Slack wants to improve its market share, it might look at areas where people want different features and start adding those.

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

Those who buy expensive audio equipment are very sure that doing so has an effect, whether it does or not. The same applies to people who have very expensive or specific photography equipment or processes. Both of them are correct to some extent, as a moderately expensive camera or speaker system is better than the cheap versions available to anyone, but either can be taken to extremes where they're convinced that the product is better even though everyone else can't tell the difference. This doesn't matter much to me, as I'm not doing either so whatever equipment is used doesn't bother me, but it can sometimes help to consider whether some peculiarities in your desires might be approaching the unrealistic level that you see clearly when it's something that's not your hobby.

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

Re: Off topic

Usually, it either means someone who makes heavy use of a piece of software or someone who understands niche functionality of that software. In this case, it's the former, so since journalists probably have a lot of tabs open at all times, they value more functions to manage them than I do, since I only have five open right now and I'm going to close a couple of them soon anyway.

Re: Off topic

So they want to write some code to remove the chance of pressing a wrong button on a calculator while mindlessly entering figures, something that has the chance to produce incorrect results every single time, replacing it with something that can be tested and, having done so, will produce the same correct or incorrect results every time? The horror. It's a good thing I'm in IT (okay, I confess, I'm a developer which I know isn't considered as good) where we never do that kind of thing. Shell scripts are forbidden, you hear? Manual typing at the shell only.

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

I did acknowledge that there are things that could be done to find the workers, but that wasn't my point. Whether or not they can find the workers, they are preferring to use those workers over automation, even when they can't find them for the price they want to pay. This indicates that, for those jobs, automation is either infeasible or prohibitively expensive. This will improve as we get better robotic technology and if AI ever gets to a state that's more reliable than the recent fad, but there will be limitations on it that we aren't aware of.

Our discussions on the viability of certain automation demonstrates this point. Will we get self-driving cars that can be used and trusted? Some people say that we will within a year, but admittedly they said we'd get that seven years ago so we can discount them. Some people say it's impossible and will never happen. Some people say it will take decades, but will eventually exist. Some people are far more optimistic. Some people say that it will be technically possible quickly, but not socially accepted for much longer. I don't even know which one you think, but only one of those groups can be right and I don't know for certain which it will be. You can get even wider differences if you talk about AGI, as there are some people who have become convinced that large language models already demonstrate it (at least I can be sure that they're wrong) and some people who are entirely certain that a machine that executes deterministic logical operations can never demonstrate consciousness or understand and replicate the actions we do that require consciousness from us. We also have arguments about how wise it would be to attempt to create or use AGI if we could do it. That question is critical to understanding whether human labor could be made obsolete.

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

As a musician, I like the idea, but there are lots of ways it might not work. They might hear differently than we do; a piece written for human instruments and transposed into ultrasound might prove to be unpleasant due to differences in propagation and absorption in those higher frequencies. Or, a simpler thing, they have music themselves and find ours to be too different for their general liking. A lot of traditional music from one part of the world isn't very popular with those who have lived elsewhere and is interpreted quite differently.

Not to mention that there are differences between societies with the use of the standard musical components and, in some cases, those components themselves. For example, a lot of music is based on a 12-tone scale between notes that are octaves apart, but not every musical tradition on Earth uses this. There are some instruments that are designed for more than twelve notes between octaves, which sound kind of weird if you're not familiar with them. I think that an alien civilization that has music is likely to have more similarities between theirs and ours than in any other type of art, but that's no guarantee.

Re: Thermodynamics would like a word

so the military has photos of this object and has certainly analyzed them, because radar-jamming flying objects that obviously exist are somewhat concerning in war zones and just in general. When it was a balloon, they took notice of it and people were pretty worried about what it was doing, resulting in a missile strike. No, according to this guy, nobody did any investigation and nobody got the camera feeds. That could mean that the military simply does not care about UFOs of any kind, which is already disproved but maybe they just don't care about them in the place where they're fighting wars next to multiple enemy countries who might have them as weapons or surveillance systems.

What evidence do you have to suggest they were caught on camera? So far, I'm hearing that something happened to the radar, which could be mechanical failure, software glitch, or nothing, and conveniently means there's no radar evidence, and something happening to infrared, which is compatible with there being nothing there and means there's no IR evidence. Why does there have to be visual evidence, and how do you know it ever existed?

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

I did just post, but I had one more idea I want to wedge in. Another part of this problem is our assumption on what we'll have in the future. We do not have terraforming technology now. We have been talking about it in the past. A few people were stupid enough to suggest that nuclear weapons could be used as a terraforming tool, for example. We assume that we'll get that stuff at some point, but it might turn out to be more difficult than we thought, and there's no guarantee that we'd get it by the time we have transportation that can easily deliver it to another planet. For that matter, we don't have a guarantee that we'll be able to make interplanetary transport cheap enough for some uses; there's a possibility that it will eventually get cheap enough for more serious work, but that fast travel will take a very long time to be efficient enough for us to use it. We can only guess about which of those will come first and by how far, and it's likely that our ideas of what 2073's technology will look like are very different from what we'll actually have by then.

This also has a parallel in human technology. Five centuries ago, we had the transportation technology to go to almost anywhere on Earth. Some places hadn't been visited, and some would be dangerous to try, but it was not prohibitive to travel to the opposite side of the planet. What technology did the people have for doing things? Very little. They didn't have the power of communication with home, they didn't have the power to prevent themselves being infected by diseases, they didn't have safety equipment to survive or avoid storms, they didn't have the power to drift down and observe without notice, and they didn't have a lot of information about themselves or their world either. While space travel is a lot more complex than sea travel, and many technologies will be needed before anyone can have space ships, this is an indication of how disconnected some advances can be. Nothing intrinsically requires people to build navigation technology before they make advances in medicine; it could go in any order people want.

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

I see some flaws in your argument as well. The ideas that, if one kind of technology is better, then all of them must be at the same level. This is not guaranteed here, so why should it be guaranteed elsewhere? Our technology is a function of our biology and our environment, and the common threads in that technology are common because all humans are roughly the same shape and live in roughly similar places. Even with that, some countries have specialized in certain technologies and not others. North Korea, for example, has spent a lot of time and money on pretty good weapons systems and can't make any computers; they import all the hardware from China and they run Linux on them. Some countries have had nuclear power for sixty years, and others have none and don't intend to build them, either because they have energy from other sources and don't see a need to build one or because they have fears about safety or something else that mean they refuse to build them.

Aliens could not only have these kind of beliefs or priorities that change what they choose to build, but they almost certainly have different forms and environments. Something that we consider normal because everyone finds it useful and it quickly spread could be almost entirely useless to a certain alien species. They might visit us and decide to adopt our version, or they might visit us and decide that they don't need ours either.

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

"We're already struggling to find tasks that people are intelligent enough to do, but that can't be automated."

No, we're not. Haven't you seen all the people saying that they can't find workers for basically every job? Yes, they could probably do something to get them, but they're admitting that they could not automate that job yet and find it more efficient or better to have a human do it. We've been building robots for decades and we still don't have one that is as reliable at figuring out how to reproduce tasks that one human can do quickly. Of course, when a machine is needed to do one specialized set of things, we're quite good at building that, but humans still work pretty well for tasks where quickly interpreting a situation in a non-static way and responding quickly to unusual situations is a frequent situation.

Aliens might have improved on this. There's a reason to believe that they will prioritize it before interplanetary travel. However, that is not a guarantee of that. Different countries here haven't pursued every piece of technology in the same order because some of them had preferences on what was most important. For all we know, aliens could have preferred transportation technology to mechanization and AI, either for pragmatic reasons, for instance if they inhabit somewhere small and need transportation for sufficient space, or ideological ones, such as a belief that AI is unreliable or dangerous.

"As for food, there have to be hundreds of planets they could terraform to support their own native nutrients, without the hassle of dealing with an organised indigenous species. Nope, not buying that either."

And we could easily eat whatever can be grown outside our houses, but we often import things from elsewhere because we think it tastes better. I suggest that, if our nutrients are the same as theirs and they appreciate it, they either destroy us and try automated farming of our crops and livestock, or that they have the humans do that after eliminating threatening technology and organizations. This also assumes that they have terraforming abilities, which is not guaranteed. Possibly our planet is also livable for them and they find it easier to live here than to turn a place like Mars into a pleasant environment.

Google's browser security plan slammed as dangerous, terrible, DRM for websites

Re: DRM enabled things

"However DRM enabled video and music streaming. All video and music streaming nowadays is because DRM exists, like it or not."

I disagree. I think that piracy enabled streaming. When the producers of media realized that people wanted to view their content on computers, they tried for years to pretend that nobody wanted that and they could get away with not providing it. This was the time when people who weren't willing to break the law had a lot of difficulty finding somewhere to legally purchase access to something without a huge hassle, and those who were willing to violate copyright had an easy time locating almost anything. That's what made the sources understand that, if they didn't provide the service that people were obviously interested in, they'd have to do a lot more against all the people who were pirating it, which would have been a bit difficult.

DRM is quite weak. I have never made any pirated content in the past. I'm not sure where I could start posting it if I did. Yet, I can think of several ways that I could obtain the content to post in the first place, even if it required running a cable and copying the content on it. I've done that before for legal uses. There's some work involved, but it's not a big problem. DRM is there because producers demanded it, and it does make the task of pirating content a little harder, but not so much harder that it can't be done.

"I'll probably get downvoted to hell about this but this has the potential to enable even more things."

I won't downvote and I entirely agree. The only difference is that I think the things will all be bad.

"Anything that has multiplayer goes into extreme lengths to prevent client tampering and cheating."

That's fine, as long as that only applies to people who use the thing. They can make their client, and gamers can install it. The client can check that it's signed on every start. Or if they want to be really secure, they can make their own game-specific hardware and only allow players to use that. What I don't think they should be able to do is insist I run locked-down software because, if I decided to play their game at some point in the future, they want more control over my system than I have.

"Ensuring the validity of the client is a very common in gaming but also in enterprise."

In enterprise, the enterprise owns the computer and does the verification. Outside of enterprise, I own the computer and I can verify it if I want, but that doesn't give you the right to verify every machine or decide what can be running there. Neither should the enterprise need to use someone else's system to verify what's running on their machines; they can do that with their own tools, just as I can now.

If you want us to stop treating you as evil, stop treating us as criminals. I do not pirate content. I don't consume that much of it anyway, but when I do, I pay the asking price for it. After I've done so, I might choose to consume that on a number of different platforms, including on my own computer through the web client that your company made. If you don't want me to have that, discontinue the client with sufficient notice for me to stop paying you. Just because I chose to buy access to the content you have doesn't give you the right to have control over all the software I run, nor to cause damage to my privacy in the search for more confidence, but still no certainty, that I'm not going to copy it. If you do, I will just stop choosing to use your service, but others will start looking for pirated copies. I won't support that decision, but neither will I be surprised when it happens.

It's the same thing with other systems. I used a piece of software once which had a hyperactive license check system. It was tightly bonded to a computer. This was a major problem if that computer ever broke, but that's at least understandable. What was less understandable was the frequent decisions to cancel the license in response to system updates, installation of other software, configuration changes, etc. You'd do something else with the computer, and when you next launched the software, sometimes days later to add the extra "I don't even know what I did" factor, the software would announce that your free trial had expired. You couldn't even register it again. You had to uninstall it, purge some files it left behind, install it again, and license it again. Since you couldn't revoke the previous registration either, you were also subject to the opaque process that decided how many licenses were in use but wouldn't tell you the answer, so there was a chance that you'd have to call support and try to convince them that it was all fine. You know what I learned from this? I learned that I needed some other piece of software to do this job, even though I'd paid plenty of money for this one. I found one. They lost a customer.

Re: Scraping

It's not as much that anything you can download can be used for any purpose you like. That is clearly against the law and, in my opinion, it should remain so. What I'm less convinced should be made a legal issue is how you go about downloading data that is public. In short, it should be easy to successfully sue someone for violating your copyright and impossible to sue them for using a bot to download content, whether that content itself was illegal for them to have or not. They can take technical measures against people who use bots. They can disable accounts for that if they like. I don't think they should be able to pursue criminal charges for it. Copyright is unrelated to this topic.

Re: Tracking...

Aren't pranks fun when they mean that, should someone know what you did, they would hate you? Whether pranks should be done at all is subjective, but it's much less subjective when you've chosen a goal like that. The common prank of emailing out something as the unsecured user which announces their failure to follow procedure and often some common message is better because it informs the user what they did wrong and instructs others that the situation is taken seriously. In some situations, it might just be better to lock the computer concerned and give the user a lecture on their return.

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Re: Don't get me started on # and £

I taught some computer science students at one point, and they were somewhat consistent as reading it "hashtag include", "hashtag ifdef", etc. I didn't like it, but I don't really have a name for that symbol which everyone can agree on. Similarly with the various brackets or braces, or for some reason the | character which always seemed to confuse people unfamiliar with the shell when I tried to describe the syntax for piping commands. You know, that vertical line. There's only one vertical line, so there shouldn't be much ambiguity by the point I'm using that descriptor instead of a shorter name.

Apple demands app makers explain use of sensitive APIs

Re: Oh the irony...

What attributes indicate that? For example, if it's that you're using an old browser because your device isn't compatible with an updated one, that is also compatible with someone who doesn't install updates for a very long time, and I've seen those people, so I know they are out there. Also, I don't think they're doing any analysis of what these attributes mean as much as they're storing them to better log what you're doing online. They probably don't know about the age of your device and it will neither prevent them from storing your stuff nor coming to incorrect conclusions about what you might buy and spamming you about them.

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

The use you have to demonstrate can be quite small, even as small as keeping around the original website and redirecting it to products you make, or attaching the trademark to something but not putting any focus into that part. However, trademarks are challenged on the basis that they are no longer in use, and part of the renewal of a trademark is affirming that you have used and continue to use the trademark, because otherwise you are deemed to have abandoned it. At least one case I know of involved someone intentionally making some products and pricing them unreasonably high in order to be able to keep a trademark they didn't want others to have, but they didn't want to use at the time. They were required to have some token effort to make a product or service available under the trademark or it would either be automatically canceled or more easily challenged by someone else. Keeping a trademark may be easy, but it's not like a domain name where if you keep paying the money, you can have it forever.