Posts by doublelayer

Zoom's new London hub – where 'remote work' meets 'we need you back in the office'

I wasn't the thumbs down guy, but I don't like this. I'm on the nohello side. If you have one question, put that in the message and I can start responding to it immediately. If it looks like a long question, I'll send an in progress message to let you know I've started. If you have a lot of questions, then either send the first one or send a message asking for a talk, ideally with some context about why.

The reason for this is that I have to quickly decide when a message comes in whether I should switch to that one or continue doing what I'm already doing. If I don't make that decision quickly, I become distracted. Switching to the chat software to acknowledge your greeting and ask what you want, then wait for you to type what you want will be that distraction. This means I'll either run the risk of being distracted when I shouldn't be or I'll ignore something from you because I don't have information which, if I did have it, would have gotten me to switch more quickly.

The alternative isn't better. I'm thinking of the last phone I had without downloaded voice messages, where retrieving them required using the voicemail IVR system. The one I had would read phone numbers before every message and very slowly. On the positive side, it would be very easy to write them down. On the negative side, after listening to a phone number for twenty seconds, I was quite irritated and was no longer paying attention because I wanted the system to shut up. I tried to turn off that feature, but in that case, finding out the number for someone who didn't say it in their message would take about twelve button presses to turn it back on and then off because it was only available as a global option.

Re: I think it is the perfect time to start a new company : Gloom

I'm less convinced about the idea. At least if the business does short-term office leases to a particular client, that client can use the office for some purpose that someone benefits from, like having a bunch of people work on the same thing in person temporarily before going back to remote working or having a public place where others can be directed. While there certainly are people who would rather not work from home, not all of them really value a rented hot desk much, since it won't provide them much that they couldn't have had at home, and if they're paying for it out of their own pocket, they could probably buy the things they're using with a few months worth of rent payments. Some people will really like the experience and become customers and I could see a lot of people finding that there is an occasional day when it's convenient, but in order to accommodate that latter group, the office would have to have a lot of vacancies which is not very profitable.

India launches contest to build homegrown web browser

Re: Our global internet is being killed off by governments.

I think they'll find it very hard to get people to adopt this voluntarily. My best guess is that they'll talk for a while and eventually give up. However, we are talking about the country that really likes turning off the internet for whole states* for weeks, so I don't think more sophisticated censorship is inconceivable.

* By states, I mean places with larger areas and populations than some countries. It's usual for the people cut off from the internet to count in the millions. Also, those shutdowns don't tend to be universal, because it more often applies to the mobile networks than terrestrial ones. A lot of people only have mobile connections, so that isn't as easy to deal with as those of us for whom home internet is generally available.

Re: Nationalism for the sake of Nationalism?

Yes, I imagine that's what they'll get, but the Kazakhstan parallel is why they wouldn't just ask Google to use the CA. Kazakhstan wasn't going to make their own browser, they were going to require people to install their CA, so the browser writers made sure that doing that wouldn't work. That may be why India has decided they need to control the software so they can insulate it from any sneaky decisions where Firefox allows their CA for six months then pushes an update that revokes it the way they've proven they're willing to do with other untrustworthy CAs. I'm pretty sure you won't get any other features that can't already be found in browsers.

Re: I wish them luck

You are absolutely correct. Unfortunately, India did announce that they were going to make their own mobile OS. Then they announced that they had. Guess what it was. If you guessed that it was a version of Android with the name changed in a couple places, you win. Making a real new browser is hard. Cloning one and saying you have is easier.

Re: Nationalism for the sake of Nationalism?

"what can an Indian made FOSS browser offer over just encouraging contributions to, and maybe even mandating use of, existing FOSS browsers?"

My interpretation from the article: control. For example, we've got this bit:

The desired browser will have its own trust store, use a root certificate from India's Controller of Certifying Authorities,

This may sound familiar. It is what the government of Kazakhstan said they were going to do about six years ago. An attempt to be able to MITM all traffic by making any certificate they wanted. The open source browsers responded by both refusing to include that certificate by default, and a couple versions later, modifying the code so that, even if it was installed, they would refuse to use it. Mozilla doesn't like shredding its users' privacy for a dictatorship's benefit. So what would they do if India suggested that its government should have that level of control over certificates? I don't think they'd let them.

If I'm correct, India will have to do more things to make sure people use this browser, because as I said in an earlier comment, I don't think people will be installing it very often. They have indicated a willingness to punish those who don't comply with restrictions, even odd ones, that they've just made up. They have the option to be much stronger about this if they're interested in increasing control. At the moment, I don't think they have sufficient investment to get what they've asked for, though, so it's probably not a big concern at the moment.

Re: I wish them luck

I wouldn't count on that. For one thing, my prediction, and I'll be happy if I can come back and say I had it wrong, is that the final result will be another wrapper around Chromium. This I base off the fact that it's all people do nowadays when they want to announce that they've developed a new browser. Who, other than Firefox, has built something around Gecko recently? The only people I can think of are those who cloned an older version of Firefox at some point when they didn't like what Mozilla was doing, which is fine, but not really the same thing that has been built around Chromium. If IndiaBrowser is just a wrapper around Google's code, then Google will have as much power as they ever did.

The other part is assuming that, since India payed some money to the writer of the browser, that Indian citizens will start using it. It's the same thing that happened when people assumed that everyone in China would run Huawei's Harmony OS (they don't), that every company doing business in India would use their videochat platform (they don't), that everyone in India would buy Indian-made mobile phones (they don't), that everyone in the US would buy one of those "only made in America" products (they don't), or any of the other times when someone assumes that some ill-defined concept of patriotism means they don't have to make a good product just because they think they've attached it to their country. They don't even refrain from buying from hostile countries unless the government bans or significantly restricts it. If they do build this browser, people are still going to get the default one their operating system brings, and a lot of them are going to go to a Google site, get the Chrome ad, and install the thing. Few people will go to the site and install India's version. I can see India doing some things to make them install and possibly even use this browser, but if they don't, it's not going to be adopted.

There's a good chance your VPN is vulnerable to privacy-menacing TunnelCrack attack

Re: Looks like I'm safe!

I wonder what statistics are available about use of public WiFi. While I don't go to places with those networks often enough and most of the time, I'm not trying to connect, I remember using them somewhat frequently a few years ago (I have a VPN) which now feels less necessary with a mobile plan with more coverage and a less limited data throttling policy. I'm sure there are places that don't have that level of mobile coverage or quality, but for the many countries with developed networks, I wonder if public WiFi has become less often used in general.

Re: Network routing working as intended

It doesn't have to be that narrowly targeted if an attacker with a public access point either collects a lot of known VPN addresses and spoofs them all or even tries it for every client. In the latter case, a lot of clients will receive something weird with their first request that isn't really trying to establish a VPN connection, but most of those first requests will be an OS service or a connectivity check, so they won't see it. That said, it's still a relatively complex attack that is difficult to do automatically, so it's unlikely to be seen very often on even those malicious access points that I occasionally find.

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

I didn't say you had to trust me or them. I didn't say all their statistics were wrong or falsified, although when you see statistics from lawyers, you know they are the set that support their case. That may be the only correct way to view the data, but it also might be very wrong. I do not want to convince you of a particular point. I will, however, explain some things you questioned.

First, you don't understand why I said that 16 employees created the divide they're talking about. Here's how I got that. There were, as the article states, 248 people over 50. 60% of them were fired. Of the set below 50, 54% of them were fired. Had they fired 54% of those over 50, that would have come to 133.9 people, which we can round to 134 although I rounded it to 133. They actually fired 149 people, which makes 16 more than my original rounding of 133. Therefore, the difference that they are pointing to, which is 6 percentage points, is 15-16 people. This may but does not necessarily indicate a small sample problem. For a simplified example, if they fired the three-person team mentioned in my original comment, you could say that they fired 100% more women than men, but the difference is one person, which makes it more likely that it wasn't for that purpose. This is a simplistic understanding, as there are plenty of reasons other than simple chance that could have been used. Some would indicate discrimination and some would indicate normal running of a business. If the sample size was large enough, assuming that some other factor was necessary would make sense. Since it is smaller, that is not as evident and other factors must be investigated.

The difference becomes larger in other sets. For example, the female-to-male divide consists of 221 people, which is a much larger sample. That still doesn't necessarily indicate discrimination, but that is much less likely to happen by random chance. By far the best number they have is when they limited the numbers to engineering roles. The reason for that is that, if there were a lot of women and few men on the moderation team, then when Musk decided to demolish the moderation team to get started on destroying the business early, the women would end up in a worse situation for a reason that will not count as discrimination in court. They will probably have to make a lot of similar subsets to demonstrate discrimination when controlled for what kind of job was being done by the person who got fired.

Bringing in random chance is already a problem, since even with the extremely poor quality that was used during the process, people don't get fired by random chance. Calculating how likely this would be if the decisions were made using dice is not the right way to determine discrimination or not anymore than you would expect your raise to be determined by flipping a coin. You still might be treated unfairly, but it would be due to decisions of your employer that they didn't want to give you more money, not valuing you accurately, or discriminating against you, none of which is random. When you start comparing something to random chance, you open yourself to lots of arguments about what counts as a positive result which will dramatically change the random value. When that comparison is of no value, it is often not useful to bring it up because you'll end up in a stats fight.

Re: At will, aka "Right to Work"?

They're really not the same thing. You can be in no union at all and have more barriers to leaving a job or getting fired from one, or you can be in a union but can leave or be fired very easily. Or, of course, you could have both or neither, but the difference is most noticeable when you consider one of the two at a time. It is always possible that being in a union will increase the barriers to getting fired, but that is not guaranteed. There are also many jobs that simply will not have a union involved, so the policies on whether you have to join that union* aren't very relevant to that one, but the policies about when and why you can be fired still affect you. The things are not synonymous.

* Technically, it's not that you are required to join the union, but that you could be required to pay the price of union membership. Participation is optional.

To be honest, I'm not convinced about their statistical analysis there. I wouldn't be surprised at all that there was discrimination there, since a lot of the process appeared to consist of random people who didn't understand anything about the company getting a large sheet and marking people off manually without having met them or studied much data about them (we're talking about the idiots who asked people to prove their worth to the company by printing out the code they wrote). If you were designing a process to create an environment likely to pull out someone's biases and inflict them on people, you could hardly come up with a better one.

The problem is with the sample sizes. For example, I was on a team which was 66.7% women and 33.3% men once, which is a wide disparity. Of course, as you've already guessed, that was because the team was three people, and that is the lowest the disparity could possibly be in that situation. Twitter had more people, but it wasn't millions, where such a percentage would be nearly impossible to get without some other deciding factor (it could be intentional or some other correlation). With a smaller set, it is more likely to happen by chance. For example, the disparity in workers over 50 comes down to 16 employees. The chance that 16 members of a set of 248, or even from the theoretical set of 115 after the first 54% of the set had been fired, being chosen when the process was so inefficient doesn't necessarily indicate bias, nor is it a one in a trillion case, since any set of that size would be the same percentage and sets of many other sizes would have been treated identically (I.E. considered a wide disparity but not ridiculously wide).

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.

Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

She probably didn't identify herself for the same reason I wouldn't. I don't really want to be questioned by the police. The stolen phone example has already occurred to me: someone found a phone on the ground and brought it to me because they thought I would have the skills to locate its owner. The phone had been reset and locked by Google's anti-theft mechanisms, but wouldn't tell me identifying information about the owner. Now do I want to try activating a stolen phone on my network in the hope that Google tells me who to return it to instead of deciding that I stole it? I brought it to a mobile store, asked them if they could find the owner, and left as soon as possible. I don't know what if anything they did with it, but I certainly don't want to be the point of contact for the police on a situation that isn't related to me. The best case scenario is that they record information about me in a system that's likely unprotected and will be leaked in a few years.

US Supreme Court allows 'ghost guns' to fall under federal purview

"I really can't wrap my head around why they're so determined to allow untraceable guns."

It's typical reaction to a strongly-held opinion. They think "I don't like restrictions on guns. This is a restriction on guns. Therefore, I should not like this". If it stopped there, they might think twice and figure out how weird it got, but they've added another statement to their syllogism: "I do not like restrictions on guns. I hate the people who suggest restrictions on guns. This is a restriction on guns. Therefore, I should not support it and I should hate the person who does". At the point that they've added a bad person who can be blamed, they don't feel the need to keep thinking about whether the idea they just had makes sense, even under their previous opinion of guns being great. It's not limited to that opinion, either.

It's a common logical failing that affects many of us, including me. Not about guns in my case, but there are things that I strongly support, and I am more easily prone to making quick decisions about things related to those without considering all the factors. I try to remind myself to review things that I've made instant judgements about to reevaluate whether that was a good judgement. I'm not great at that, nor are many others I know. Some others I know never even think that their opinions could be wrong, so as soon as they form one, it is set in stone and may never be questioned.

Ukraine's Victor Zhora: Russia's cyber 'war crimes' will continue after ground invasion ends

Re: It couldl all have been so very different

Yeah, that's not what happened. Russia has had a lot of opportunities to be involved with the west. Most of the time, they've been invited to work with those countries on international issues and they've taken that opportunity. I'm not sure which specific incident you're thinking about this time, but not every time that they aren't given a chance to join in is a permanent snub from the rest of the world saying "you might as well turn yourself into a country that everyone else hates". Russia's current isolation is a result of repeated attacks on other countries with which they have no legitimate cause for war, not the openness or lack thereof from the United States. In fact, while they were conducting those attacks, they received a lot more approval and support than they deserved because countries in the west kept hoping that, if we didn't close them off, establish closer ties, keep helping them improve their economy, make sure they never feel in the cold, maybe some day they'll stop invading other countries. That failed.

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

Re: Lifespan

I accept your premise, but I disagree with the conclusion. You estimate that a device can be kept for four years. Theoretically, that means Chromebooks are fine, since they'll get 6-8 years of support. The problem is that the longest times are for the flagship models, the ones that cost as much as a Mac and you're certainly not buying. That leaves you with the standard 6-year support cycle, and they get that support from some time of the manufacturer's choosing, which isn't when you obtain them. You can go and find Chromebooks sold as new which are already four years through their lifetime (I think the manufacturers started counting before they finished making them). Those tend to be the cheapest ones, you know the ones that a cash-strapped school might buy so everyone can have them. Now you've got machines which you think will last four years, which the school will budget for lasting four years, and which probably will continue holding together for four years, but you'll only get two years of security on them. Even the worst Windows laptops will have security updates for that time, even if they're annoying to use. I haven't tried the low-end Chromebooks, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they're also painful to use, especially having seen Chrome's hardware requirements.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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;

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.