Posts by doublelayer

Russia says Starlink satellites could become military targets

Re: Seems reasonable and fair

The Starlink satellites are located in international space. Buildings on Ukrainian soil are not the same in international law. Not to mention that the restaurants you mention are probably franchised to a local owner so can't be claimed as owned by the U.S. parent organizations anyway. Treaties on causes of war would indicate the destruction of Starlink satellites as an act of war against the US and the destruction of the restaurants as one against Ukraine but not the US. Of course, the US isn't prevented from deciding they're going to take it as one anyway (and if they wanted to join the war and have it be legal, all they have to do is get Ukraine to invite their assistance which would probably be pretty easy).

Re: Seems reasonable and fair

Funnily enough, 13th-century common law has been superseded these days. You don't own the skies above your house. Your country can fly any aircraft they want to over it and you're out of luck. You may also not own the stuff below your house, as there are laws about things such as underground water resources and restrictions on mining. And, to the point, there are treaties about satellites and the use of space, so it doesn't apply there either.

You're right about acts of war though. Flying military aircraft over another country's territory without permission wasn't allowed and could have led to war, just as shooting a Starlink or other civilian satellite could. The USSR decided it wasn't worth attacking that time, and the US may make a similar decision if Russia tries it this time. There's a chance they won't, so I wouldn't advocate putting it to the test.

Re: Seems reasonable and fair

Probably not, because the car is most likely located on the soil of a different country, so a military attack on the car would be an act of war against whatever country the car was sitting on at the time. If the U.S. citizen was in it, the U.S. might still take it as assassination of their citizen, which is also an act of war, so you have the potential to get a response from two countries. Military attacks on something the other country claims when they're not in your country can be interpreted as acts of war easily. The primary reason that doesn't lead to war is that countries usually don't want to go to that effort for a small attack. The question is not whether destruction of Starlink satellites would be grounds for retaliation; it would. The question is whether the U.S. would bother doing something about it.

No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them

"So, following your logic. Since Halloween was probably closest (like your HP laptop) they should simply have referred to Halloween?"

Unless they wanted to refer to more than one holiday. This site gets readers from a lot of countries. If you allow me to use all of them, I can probably find you one every week for the rest of the year. As pointed out, if they meant Halloween to start the group, Guy Fawkes Night is less than a week from that, so once again, a logical group of holidays is created.

"Is this deliberate double-dipping or just house-standards-compliant US-centred poor geography?"

No, I think it's actually British poor geography. I find that regions often have unique ways of butchering geographical terms, and one thing that people in the UK do a lot is call the United States "America". This might be because there's no good adjective for people from there, so they tend to be called "Americans" (at least in English), but nobody in the Americas uses "America" as a noun for just the U.S. (the few who do are all in the U.S. and it's not the normal term there either) and, from my limited experience, a lot of other countries similarly don't make that mistake. They make different ones, allowing a general fingerprinting of where someone came from based on the incorrect or sometimes just inexact ways they refer to regions of the world. For Americans, the typical way to get it wrong is to call the UK "England", basically reversing the size mistake the UK people are doing.

Re: I have a problem..

I think they're probably interpreted like school marks. When I and almost certainly you were in school, 6/10 was not an acceptable result. Depending on the course, that was either the lowest passing result or a fail outright. I can't speak for your interpretation of the numbers, but when I was there, my parents viewed 100% as generally expected, 95% as fine, 90% as acceptable if it happened rarely, and 85% as you'd better not get any more of those. The grading system didn't use exactly the same levels, but they were also not keen on lower scores.

Adjusting from a scale like that to one where 5/10 is satisfactory may be difficult for people who are used to the old one, and people asked to give survey results can use whichever scale they're familiar with. That means that, if you get enough people using high numbers to denote good but not exceptional results, it makes anyone who gets a lower number for the same performance look bad. I therefore prefer surveys that use a smaller range of qualitative labels where there's less likelihood of statistical problems. Or surveys that just ask for text feedback, those can be even nicer if ignoring them is easy enough.

"(and why, oh why is my spell checker telling me it should be flavor)."

Because your browser is set that way? This site doesn't control your browser's spell checker. If you don't like it, you can change the dictionary set there and it will stop.

Christmas is called Christmas, and it's a holiday. If you have another holiday at a similar time and you want to refer to the group, you call it holidays. Just as if I want to refer to the computer in front of me, I call it "This HP laptop on my desk", and if I want to refer to the multiple computers over here, I call them "these computers". Failing to specifically name the HP in the group with all the machines present isn't insulting that laptop. As people point out, there is another recognized holiday (in most countries) for the start of the new year, and that's a week from Christmas, so they're often logically grouped together. Since this article was published in October, they may actually be referring to other less celebrated holidays closer to today, taking place in November. Depending on your country, you may have one or more of these.

Why I love my Chromebook: Reason 1, it's a Linux desktop

Manufacturers have been cranking out cheap ARM-based Chromebooks for some time now and they're still doing it. The MT8183 is a popular SoC to put in it. This is often for the cheapest devices out there, but that was supposed to be the goal of Chrome OS, so that you could use low-end low-power hardware and still get a good experience. I still find it weird to see Chromebooks with 10-core 12th generation I5s in them, selling for as much if not more as a comparable Windows laptop (with less work required to install a Linux of your choice) and significantly more storage.

"You might not like Google's privacy policies, but I think you have to give them credit for creating a computer desktop with such superior continuity."

No I don't. You can do that with Windows and Microsoft services. Turn on Windows, use browser of choice to open Office 365, write documents. Don't store anything on your disk. Yay, same result. In fact, with their integration of OneDrive and automatic backup, you can do a lot more with their system just by signing into a Microsoft account when you set up, and they can restore all your files and programs to allow you an offline version. I don't do those things because I value my privacy, but if I wanted it, Windows would be better than Chrome OS at doing it whether I wanted browser-only or not.

Re: offer to install Linux

I think you're right, as long as the same people take a polite refusal when they expect a technical person to fix their equipment. I say that as a person who not only accepts the task, but does so with whatever software the user is happy with. Still, some users can be unreasonable with what they expect a person to fix, leading to similarly unreasonable rejoinders from people who no longer want to put up with that. The people whose equipment I fix understand that I'll fix their equipment in the way they want and are polite and grateful when I do so. I won't do it for people who are rude while making the request or come back to blame me later, and I've not only experienced that before but have heard many stories of it happening to others.

Re: Windows machines lifespan

"Have you had the sad misfortune of being asked to help a non El Reg reader's home machine that is a few years old?"

Yes, and the machines invariably get through it without replacement. They don't just go bad after three years. Some users can manage to screw them up, but those users can do that in two months, and they can do that to anything (yes, Linux is included for the most destructive users). I've fixed a lot of older Windows machines, and I rarely have to reinstall. When I do, it's usually because a hardware failure occurred, and you can't blame a broken hard drive on Windows. So in my experience, the allegation that Windows machines live for three years is complete rubbish, especially when used to justify devices that come with programmed-in software death dates. There are other reasons not to use Windows, but not every possible excuse is valid.

Microsoft boss Nadella's compensation pack swells 10% to $55m

Microsoft matches charitable donations. So he gave $100k on his own to charities, and MS contributed another $100k to the same organizations. The round number suggests that was probably a cap on the amount they would match for him, so he may have given more in donations which weren't matched.

BOFH: I know of a small biz that could deliver nothing for a fraction of the cost

Re: When will the BOFH resign?

He's already a long-term contractor who gets paid an undisclosed large amount of money. Every time he gets fired, he gets a raise when he's hired back in a matter of days. I'm not sure he needs to do any corporate acrobatics to keep this going.

The GNOME Project is closing all its mailing lists

Re: Discourse is weird

And here we have the problem. We could put this on NNTP, but that too would mean switching off the mailing list. Unless you have something keeping them in sync, and if you do you could do that for a web forum if you were so inclined, you'll still have to decide what is the best solution. Some people would not want NNTP and say the email list is better. Some people would not like NNTP and say the web forum is better. Some would not like either and ask for NNTP. There is no objective answer.

Acknowledging the downsides of an email list, as I did, does not mean I hate email lists or support web forums. It's just a useful way to evaluate the advantages of one solution over another. Web forums have the advantage in searchability and archiving, whereas mail threads have the advantage of choice over how you handle incoming messages. These are useful comparisons to consider when you choose which method will be the primary channel for discussions.

Re: Discourse is weird

"Whether it's in a web forum or a mailing list, the data being processed is pretty much the same, so the issues you're encountering aren't to do with the medium of transmission, but with the client UI"

Some of the time, yes, but not always. For example, threading in a web forum versus in email means a pretty different experience. A thread in email probably has several copies of any search term due to replies containing previous messages or parts thereof, but you can't guarantee that someone's done that or uses any given format. It may fork repeatedly, but the subject line and structure will not clear this up. If you joined the group after the thread started, you may not have all the components even if you wrote a program capable of automatically disentangling these. For later finding information, a public forum that structures the thread and its child threads as they occurred is likely to make the process easier. Something akin to the nested thread display mode in these forums can make it clearer who said what and when.

Apple boosts bug bounties but may not fix some bugs in past operating systems

It's the second one. Someone at Apple looked at Microsoft's announcement that, in 2025, they'll obsolete hardware that's over seven years old at that point by denying security patches even though the new OS would run fine on it and said "We could do that right now, couldn't we". This is a shame because I used to be pleased with Apple's support lifetimes. Yes, they always cut off Mac OS releases at some point which was annoying, but when they blocked hardware from updating to a new version, they tended to keep security patches flowing for that latest one. It used to be that, as long as you updated when you could, you'd be patched for a while. They have stopped doing that and they dramatically shortened their major version support life, meaning that plenty of very serviceable Macs are being unnecessarily isolated for software support.

Just like with Windows 11, there are ways to force a newer OS release to install on hardware it's not supposed to support, at which point it runs fine. This requires effort and skill the average user won't want to do, but it functions. More proof as if we needed it that there is no technical reason for either Apple's or Microsoft's hardware requirements.

ISS dodges space junk from satellite Russia blew up

Re: Now wasnt there some reagan-esque starwars stuff ?

The SDI equipment was supposed to have satellites in orbit to destroy stuff that wasn't in orbit, not the other way around. We have the technology to fire a laser at the junk from down here, but leaving issues of power and targeting aside, what's the advantage of doing that? It's likely to just split up the junk into smaller and more plentiful junk in approximately the same place, which doesn't really do a lot. The SDI suggestions were just trying to break missiles or change their trajectory, not induce the precision control necessary to redirect them, but that precision is more important when dealing with space junk.

The sticky material suggestion won't be feasible either. The junk isn't in one compact place. You'd need a truly massive glue ball to envelop even a few pieces of it. If you have a substance that acts as an adhesive and is really light, you could use it to change the orbit of individual pieces, but not to collect all of them (and getting that material near the piece would require a lot of fuel from the controlling satellite).

Twitter's most valuable users are ghosting the platform

Re: Out of curiosity

"I don't think that choosing 3 things is a too unreasonable 'starting point' as it acts as an initial 'pump primer' so that you start seeing some things actually of interest to you in your feed after you have signed up,"

I think it is unreasonable for two reasons. First, the platform allows the user to follow specific sources. You don't need them to throw stuff at you. You can pick what you want manually. Second, requiring you to pick three items from a short list means you're very likely to get stuff you don't care about. These are like if you went into a library, and before you were allowed to look at any list, they required you to select three of their twelve categories and started choosing books from those sections and handing them to you whether you wanted them or not.

I don't have a problem with Twitter wanting to recommend things you didn't ask for (well that's not true as it would probably annoy me), but they can do that by looking at what you like. You'll be much better at recommending books to me if I give you a list of the last ten I enjoyed than if I pick from a short list of very broad topics.

For example, I like science fiction, but not all of it. I like science fiction where it doesn't make up too much, which means it usually occurs on earth in the present or near future with a few modifications. Hard sci-fi in space is good too. Fantasy in space with lasers instead of swords and aliens with way too many Xs in their names instead of dragons is often shoved in that section too, but I don't want to read it. Similarly, I know people who really like the other kind and don't enjoy books that spend chapters 4-6 explaining how the fusion reactors work including a discussion of required shielding materials and manufacturing, so if I'm recommending books to them, I can eliminate those from my list.

Re: He wouldn't have the userbase of Twitter

The budget was estimated at $221B, which includes all the research and development and 135 launches over three decades. So to simplify, you can have 26.8 shuttle launches for each Twitter.

Re: mDAU

There are a lot of accounts that are automated and designed to be that way. One avenue for delivering short amounts of public information from a program has been to tweet it, making a feed that other interested people or programs can parse without having to do the distribution (such as having an API to retrieve it or an RSS feed). Obviously you can't advertise to a bot and expect anything. Those would be most of the non-monetizable users. They may also include users in locations where they don't sell advertising yet or users attached to large institutions where showing an ad to the person who happens to be posting today might not be very useful, but I don't know how far they go to find who is truly monetizable.

Your next PC should be a desktop – maybe even this Chinese mini machine

Re: Home office

One difference is that you can simply close the laptop, sending it into a sleep mode with all your stuff still in place, and take it with you wherever you're going. There are modes you can use on the desktop, but if you put it into the analogous sleep mode and pull the power, it won't return as well. Even using those modes, it won't come up as quickly. There are other advantages to having a battery, such as resistance to power failures and additional portability, which is why I generally prefer to use laptops even if I'm using them in one location most often.

Cisco AnyConnect Windows client under active attack

I've used it (not chosen it), and in that case, the advantage was multi-factor authentication with hardware tokens which was mandatory for access to networks with sensitive systems. I think the native client doesn't support this, and in any case would have required more manual configuration as we were using a lot of different OSes (they also had a bunch of infrastructure for using Linux boxes with the same authentication systems). You could probably implement that behavior using a number of options for clients, but you're adding something in all cases.

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

Re: Lessons?

"Serious question: how much of this old equipment wants to have an upgrade, if its been running for decades how likely is it a new issue will raise its head rather than things just chugging along?"

I'm not sure whether I understand your question entirely, but most of the institutions running this stuff don't want new equipment, stating reasons you have. If they update things, maybe it won't work and it will be extra effort to fix all the problems involved. Using the older stuff will be just fine, because how likely is it to break if it's been running fine for decades?

This is classic failure to consider the costs, and it sometimes goes bad. For the same reason, the companies with the hardware often don't bother keeping spares or having any plan for problems. This means that when some part finally does let out the magic smoke, they don't have one and it's so old that you can't just go to the store and get a replacement. Let's say it's the hard drive. You can probably go find a hard drive with the required interface somewhere, but it will likely be used, no warranty, for significantly more cost than it should be, and you have to find it at the last minute. After you get that, do you have a full recent backup of the old disk, something that can write that backup to the new disk, a way to check the behavior when you put your imaged disk back into the equipment, and a guarantee that these things have been tested and work? Usually, the answers to most or all of these is no.

Upkeep of systems takes time, effort, and money. If you don't do it by having as portable a system as possible where you can use any modern hardware with minimal effort, you can also do it by having a resilient hardware setup with plans and preparations for everything that could fail. If you do neither, then you'll have lower costs if nothing goes wrong, and if something does then you could be stuck for a long time and end up with a much higher bill.

Re: No loss of hardware support

Outsource it. Go to archives of existing distros, get an old image, and find a mirror of the package repos that is still online. Clone the important files you want from that onto something else on your isolated network (because those distros don't get security updates anymore), and tell your distro where the new mirror is. If you rely on this old machine for production use rather than curiosity, keep that mirror on standby.

Re: Asking out of complete ignorance...

Some things in the kernel codebase aren't running and would give you no performance advantage. For example, if you strip out the 486 compatibility, your kernel will run at the same speed (unless they add something that they couldn't earlier, but if the only change is removing stuff, then no speedup). Some hardware support, drivers for instance, could be removed and make things a little more efficient, but mostly it would cut a little of the RAM usage rather than anything with CPU time.

If you have performance problems, the kernel is not likely to fix them. Tuning the kernel can produce some advantages, but what's likely using your resource is services and programs that run in the background. You can probably get faster by either disabling them in a distro that you're already using or by switching to a lighter one that doesn't have as many included by default. You could start analyzing what's using your resource by using resource monitoring tools and checking which services are enabled in systemd or init (also remembering to check tasks they might run such as cron jobs).

Re: <raised eyebrow>

Well, since it's building us rather than the other way around, you're only getting complete support for you (support not guaranteed, this is not an LTS release and the hardware only has minor error correction features), but we have a lot of DNA from other branches of humans. This indicates that we were reproducing with those branches at some point, meaning that, if they were still around, we could likely still do so for the time being. So I would say there's a likelihood of backward compatibility in there, though like 486 support in the modern kernel, it's untested and for almost everyone untestable.

Re: Lessons?

I'm sure that equipment exists, but I doubt that you could find me a single production 486-based machine where they're running the latest kernel. I doubt you could even find one where they're using a 5.x or 6.x kernel of any kind, including LTS versions. When people keep antiquated hardware running, they usually keep the original software on it as well. They might install kernel patches for security updates, but they almost never update the kernel to a new minor version. If they're willing to go to that level of effort, they could update the machine to use more modern hardware instead, and doing this brings maintainability benefits so usually the reason they don't do it is cost.

Microsoft ships non-Surface PC: a cheap Arm box for devs

Re: RaspberryPi is $200.

I think you're well aware that this box, in comparison to the Pi, has more RAM, faster RAM, more cores, faster cores, more storage (any storage), faster storage, and an NPU. They're not competing, and acting like they are is going to make the Pi look bad. Somehow, you missed both of these and wrote a comment like the Pi is actually better. They're not meant for the same uses, and they won't serve well in each others' ones.

Re: Windows RT 2?

I can confirm that it does run the emulation at least somewhat successfully, but this was when I tried it out on a Raspberry Pi (and it was a 3B). Unfortunately, that means I can't comment on how well it works, as any performance problems (and there were some) can be put down to using a low-end 2015-era processor and 1 GB of RAM to run Windows 10 which wouldn't enjoy that process. It booted, applications ran, X86 applications did too without crashing, but it was so slow that I ended the experiment and didn't try it again. It's probably better on modern hardware designed for it.

Luxury smartphone brand returns with $41,500 device

Re: It will become obsolete even faster

"If it was Android at least you might be able to hack the bootloader and install generic Linux on it when the vendor no longer supports it."

Right, because you can do that with all the phones out there. Why should it be any harder to do that with this device? They're probably using the same general firmware with the same lack of documentation and easy-brick locking systems as most Android devices. Don't assume Android will give you any OS freedom, because you'll have to fight for all of it and often it won't work.

There are lots of good reasons not to buy this ridiculous thing. In fact, the fact that they're trying an alternative OS is the only thing that has any positive attribute whatsoever and that could prove either to be a lie or to not mean anything in the long run. Still, the chances of getting generic Linux to run on any given Android phone are very low.

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

Re: I don't mind PDFs

Talking someone through a table of contents isn't that hard, at least no harder than having them find a page number (except in the case of the badly-designed PDFs I mentioned in my original post). It's a short number, just like the page numbers, and you can link directly to the section. If you're dealing with people who don't understand how to use a table of contents, then I'm confident in saying they'll have trouble finding a page in a PDF as well unless it's printed onto paper exactly the size the designer planned and they're treating it as a paper book.

Re: Problems with cut and paste and lack of editing are features, not bugs

PDF isn't locked from modification. Oh yes, it's a lot more annoying to modify than other formats, but it's not impossible to edit it. If you sent me a contract, I think I can get a major advantage by editing it and that you won't check for changes, and I have no ethical objection to defrauding you that way, the fact that you put it in a PDF will not save you. I can learn to modify it, make a new file that uses the same formatting as yours, or send it to some friends of mine who have to deal with documents a lot more than I do and so already know the tricks to editing PDFs (I just checked with one of them and she is confident that she can edit the contract she thinks I have now).

There's a reason that real companies don't send you PDFs for legal contracts, but either have you come in in person and sign their stack of paper or use an online e-signing system where the contract is presented to you and you sign on their server. PDFs do not protect you from modification. If you think they do, you're likely to be safer with a word document because at least you'll check that one for changes whereas your overconfidence with PDF may lead you not to do so. Since any file you send me can be edited by me, you either have to not use my copy, check my copy for changes when you get it back, or trust me not to do that. Since you'll have to do that no matter what format is in use, having a format that makes editing annoying is a disadvantage with no upside.

Re: I don't mind PDFs

"Try to tell someone "look at page 57, what you're looking for is there" - with an HTML file.... and no, telling "it's at paragraph 4.35.22.2535.2222" is not that simple, hard to memorize, and less practical to find, even with a decent search function."

You're right about badly made HTML, but if you compare it to badly made PDFs, the problem is the same. In badly made PDFs, "go to page 57" means scroll for a while until you find the number 57 or try searching for the string "57" and hope this document doesn't have many numbers in it. Unlike paper where pages are clearly separate, PDFs don't always use the markup to distinguish pages and some display systems will present numbers that aren't page numbers (like screen refreshes that change based on the size of a window) like they were page numbers.

In well written HTML, you don't tell people to turn to page 57, you tell them to go to section 3.2.4 (you do structure your manuals, don't you) and you give them a link that jumps there. If necessary, you can link to specific pages, paragraphs, sentences, or whatever else you want. You may now tell me that you can do that in PDFs as well (which technically you can now, but support is still flaky for it), but a lot of PDFs don't do that just like a lot of HTML neglects the power of the language. If you write either well, they will both be fine. If you write them poorly, PDF will not only fail to save the disaster, but can make it far worse.

Musk reportedly wants to gut Twitter workforce by up to 75%

Re: To be fair

While you can still have shares in a private company, receiving a small number of shares in one is pretty rare. They're not very useful to a person who doesn't already invest in the company because you can't easily sell them and even if you find a buyer, the company doesn't have to make filings that public ones do so the buyer can add extra requirements to the sale and has the option of legal action against the seller if they end up not liking them, something they don't get if you sell public shares. For those reasons, it's pretty rare for private companies to give shares to employees.

The first reply to my post corrected the record about what they're going to do, which I didn't know. If they hadn't done that, they had a few options but giving out shares of a private company would have been a pretty unlikely option.

Re: Musk

Let's consider what would happen. I'll give the UN a magic election wand that can generate a fair election with no interference. In reality, that doesn't exist and the election, even with UN observers, would not be fair, but we're ignoring that for now. Those voting in the election have lived under Russian occupation for a while. They know what the results will be. The election can generate the following situations:

The vote goes for Russia. Russia annexes the land and takes all the people as citizens. Those who are likely to oppose them would have voted for Ukraine, so Russia will find them and make their lives unpleasant.

The vote goes for Ukraine: Russia refuses to accept the result and continues fighting in the region. They want those who oppose them to be out of the way, so they find those who voted for Ukraine and make their lives unpleasant.

Those voting know that whichever way the vote goes, those who support Ukraine will be targeted in the aftermath and their situation will be basically the same. Under those conditions, why would anybody vote for Ukraine? Even if their ballot would be counted correctly, it would only bring more suffering to them. You'd probably get incredibly low turnout unless the occupiers forced people to vote, and being forced to vote at gunpoint has a way of telling you which way you should vote. Russia has no claim to the territory and no right to demand an election. If you disagree, then I'm announcing that I've personally annexed all of Russia east of the Volga and demand that we democratically poll to see if I won it.

Re: To be fair

When the deal completes, Twitter stock will no longer exist. That will throw vesting arrangements for the future into a weird state where someone will have to reissue them with something else since they can no longer have shares. This would give the company and its new owners an option to attempt machinations to devalue any packages they don't want to pay by messing with the conditions on them if they don't try canceling them outright. I wouldn't hold my breath on getting value from those if they vest after the deal completes.

Public cloud prices to surge in US and Europe next year

Re: "it's not software-as-a-service, it's software as a hostage"

Yes, but unless they're generating their own renewable energy, the prices for renewable sources have also come up because people want energy from wherever they can get it. Also, in many cases, the sustainability numbers from clouds mean that they used gas because they have to have the reliability, but they offset emissions in some way to cancel out the carbon they calculated they released. In both cases, cloud providers are still subject to fluctuations in energy prices and probably only a little less than other companies due to their cash cushions.

Re: variable site pricing?

They have that, although they don't explain why the prices are different in each region. See, for example, this system that compares pricing per region for Azure VMs:

https://azureprice.net/

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Re: Bad design

I have one too. The one I hated the most was the HP programmable key software, which watches for F12 and, if you've accidentally put the keys into function key mode, would launch some kind of programmable function. That function for me is not installed, so it spawns a window telling me that the tool I need to program a function hasn't been installed, and if you press the key multiple times, you get multiple windows that you have to close individually. Fortunately my employer trusts us engineers with admin access so I could find the service responsible for that craziness and disable it. Now it does nothing, which indicates that I need to press FN+shift again to make those keys resume their OS functions.

India fines Google $162 million for abusing Android monopoly

Interesting list of changes

Going through the short list of changes mentioned in the article, some of these could have either no effect at all or massive ones, depending on how they would be enforced.

• Allowing third—party app stores to be sold on Google Play;

This would probably not go very well if those stores actually sell apps, because that would be an in-app payment for digital products, and Google has terms restricting payment for those if the app is in their store. Enforcement of this would be likely to require some modification to that restriction or nothing would happen. Someone could probably put FDroid in the Play Store, though, as all those apps are free. I wonder if that's a good thing.

• Allowing side-loading of apps;

Google will argue they already do that. If India means that they'll have to remove some of the restrictions that make sideloaded (and for that matter any user-installed) app subject to restrictions that system apps don't have, they'll need to clarify this.

• Giving users choice of default search engine other than Google when setting up a device;

I thought Google already had to do this somewhere, but maybe I'm still thinking of Microsoft's browser box and assuming someone put one on Google. Either way, useful but small.

• Ceasing payments to handset makers to secure search exclusivity;

That could give us some interesting results, but since they already have them over a barrel with Google Play Services, maybe not as much as we'd like because they could integrate it into that and charge companies less than they were.

• Not denying access to Android APIs to developers who build apps that run on Android forks.

This also requires clarification. I wonder if that means they'd have to open source some of their proprietary services, or just avoid breaking them when sideloaded (which usually doesn't work).

I have a feeling nothing will happen from any of these. Google will appeal somewhere or convince the current Indian government that they could help with their attempt to cancel out democracy in return for this going away. It would be interesting to watch Android change if they did have to change for this.

AI programming assistants mean rethinking computer science education

Calculators

The effect of these tools on computer science courses is similar, though smaller, to the effect that calculators had on mathematics education. For early courses, their existence can basically be ignored. Just as a student could type in the multiplication assignment and get correct answers, these programs can spit out functioning answers to the common introductory problems. Any student who uses a calculator instead of learning the mechanisms of arithmetic is going to have some problems when the assignments get more complicated. They can even use calculators to solve basic algebraic problems, but when they're asked to create an algebraic problem from a situation and then solve it to get a useful piece of information, they won't understand how to do that. In later assignments, the calculator can speed up the process of getting correct answers. Similarly, we're not asking students to write simple introductory programs because there are so many jobs out there needing them, but so that they can learn the concepts necessary to write the more complex programs that AI codewriters can't manage at all. Once they know how to write software, they can feel free to use the AI code writing tools (subject to the copyright and licensing restrictions) if they find it speeds them up.

In universities, I suggest that we let students fail a bit more than we would otherwise. If a seven-year-old child uses a calculator on their homework, it's worth finding out and helping them learn the concept on their own because it will affect them later. If a student who is much older decides to cheat on the introductory computer science assignments by having a tool create correct answers for them, I will have no sympathy when they get faced with a more complex problem requiring analytical skills, skills that the other students who actually did the homework will have gained and they will lack. This is not as good an approach for computer science taught to younger students though.

Re: Potential to move learning up the stack

"The instruction could focus more on choosing which suggested solution has the best tradeoff for the problem at hand. Things like how to evaluate O(1) vs O(N) vs O(N²) complexity in suggested code would be appropriate to teach in beginner classes. Topics that used to be considered graduate level or at least Junior / Senior level undergrad could move down the stack to more basic and intermediate level instruction."

Maybe it was just me, but that was taught right after the basics of syntax and structure were complete. Understanding performance is critical and not too complicated, so you can do it early already. The courses where we used more complex algorithms and mathematically proved things about their performance came later, but understanding the practical answers in straightforward algorithms justifiably came early.

In order to understand the tradeoffs, you have to read and understand the code these tools spit out. Even ignoring the chance that the code you got from the tool is wrong, you still need that level of literacy to parse it. That comes more naturally to students who have written code for themselves and analyzed it, because they need to understand how efficient code is created to judge whether someone else's code is efficient or to improve it.

Millennials, Gen Z actually suck at workplace security

Re: Cookies are not a security risk

"Two pieces of information commonly sent are your browser and OS. Oh, and there's the time and possibly your location."

These are not in cookies. Browser and OS are in the user agent header. If you set your browser to delete all cookies, it will not change that header. Time is known by the server because it's processing your request and it has a clock on it. Location is from your IP address, so if you're directly connecting to the server, they can use that to take a guess. None of that data will be protected if you disable cookies. The only thing it does is to hopefully make it harder to fingerprint you if your location changes.

There are still privacy risks, and privacy of a company's information can be of security importance, but it's useful to know what cookies do and what they don't.

Re: Cookies are not a security risk

"Plus some sites have in the past used the bad habit of storing various credential tokens, session ids etc in cookies - in cases where creds have a reasonable lifetime then malicious attack could use creds info in cookie to impersonate you on the relevant website and exploit away."

That is bad, but unrelated to storing the cookie. If you don't store the cookie, then you will be asked to log in next time because you won't present the cred, but the site would still accept it if you did. If you have malware watching the connection, either resident on your device or intercepting the traffic, then whether or not you save that data, the malware can get a copy and use it. That's a problem with the site and setting the option to immediately delete cookies will not fix it.

Re: Meh

I think that experience helps a lot, but don't pretend that everyone in your generation got that. You got that. Many others came to computers later on when they were not shared and there was no scary BOFH to notice when they did their first stupid thing. You'd think that using these machines for decades would have helped, but you'd think using them all the time would as well and that doesn't either. Only learning about them helps, and many people never bothered taking that step.

DisplayPort standards bods school USB standards bods with latest revision

Re: Can you just punt on the "what kind of USB-C cable is this?" question

No. Thunderbolt requires support on both ends. If you use a Thunderbolt cable and one of the sides doesn't support Thunderbolt, then you will have a problem. At least some cables will have a fallback USB connection, but I think that's optional and it certainly won't use the faster Thunderbolt connection if your USB would support faster speeds than the fallback wire does. It might not work at all, and if it does, you won't be guaranteed any speed advantages for doing it.

YouTube loves recommending conservative vids regardless of your beliefs

It's relevant to what will be offered. If you want to see whether you get echo chambers, you want to see how likely they are to offer you something that isn't in line with the belief you had before. Clicking on things at random won't tell you this, because you won't have established any interest for them to uphold or subvert.

I get the idea: they probably want to disprove the mantra that there's a conspiracy to deplatform certain views, which we know isn't true. They may even want to collect more data to demonstrate how YouTube's algorithm finds what to suggest. However, by having the participants choose videos at random, it makes it rather hard to decide how that decision is related to what you've watched. For example, if we assume a clear left-right scale from 0% at far left and 100% at far right, then if I randomly watch a 27%, 89%, 62%, 2%, and six apolitical videos in my first ten, what should I expect the political content of the recommendations to be? Basically anything they show me now can be seen as supporting an interest in something I already watched or being opposite of it. I'm afraid the methodology of this study leaves many doubts that it has proven anything, even excluding subjective things like how left/right is this video.

Collapsed Arecibo telescope to be replaced by school

If you're working on something that doesn't exist in nature, then we're getting close to bioweapon territory. Bioweapon labs on the moon aren't quite as worth the investment as research there.

Designing a lunar laboratory that can avoid infecting people requires a lot of stuff that a terrestrial one does not. Isolating people in a facility is actually a lot easier down here where we have experience doing it and where recovery from a disaster doesn't require hasty organization of a relief rocket launch. If you want more separation from people, you can avoid some of the lunar conditions by using an isolated place on the planet such as an uninhabited island in the Arctic or even high on a mountain that you don't let people climb.

If whatever you're investigating is really so dangerous that we need the isolation, then you can try the moon, but if it already exists on earth, then your risk is primarily from that, not your lab. If it doesn't exist on earth yet, you might need to ask why you need to deal with it (if it's alien microbes, keep that on the moon, but if it's something you're making, maybe consider not making it).

CEO told to die in a car crash after firing engineers who had two full-time jobs

Re: A sensible use of your time.

Original: "If their boss finds out, they can just get someone to write their own script and fire him/her."

Reply: "*just get* someone else? People who can automate their own jobs grow in some kind of tree where company can go and pluck them out if current employee is sacked?"

No, that's not the risk. The risk is twofold:

1. The company didn't realize the job would be easily automated and could now, meaning they could go find someone to automate it for them. The reason they didn't before is that they weren't thinking of that option, but that could be lost if the person who did it tells anyone.

2. The company already has ownership of the scripts that are running on their machines since they were written for the company by an employee, meaning they don't need to find someone to write them. They can find someone who can use the ones they have already, which is a larger group of people.