Posts by doublelayer

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

"So when was the last time you actually replaced a SSD, battery or some other internal on a laptop?"

Two weeks ago. No, I don't work in IT for my company, doing this to broken user machines. I do it for myself and for friends. In the past two months, one friend got extremely annoyed with a Mac from several years ago which is still fast enough for their use cases, but had a battery that was worn to the extent that they were tethered to a wall. Fortunately, this was from when Apple wasn't gluing things down, so I got them a replacement and spend a few minutes with a screwdriver. Their computer is good again and for much less than it would cost to buy any replacement, let alone the same model from Apple's current line. Then we have the two weeks ago situation where I removed a disk from a laptop, in this case because it was not turning on and accessing the data was going to be faster if I read it in a different device than if I fixed the problem that developed.

Sometimes, I do this for myself, but the fact that I'm doing it for friends and family proves that there is demand there for doing repairs. By making the repairs easier, we make it possible for people to do them on their own without needing an expert or to hire the assistance of someone who doesn't need extreme equipment to manage it. Contrary to your statements, cheap laptops are not usually built so badly that you have to break them to open them up, and if they are, the chances are that they were among those that weren't intended to be opened, which is exactly the problem.

Re: Apple's League

"from a software prespective I find that Apple supports an older OS a lot longer than Redmond does."

And you think this why? This is a provable claim, and it's not true. For example, my old Mac, which cannot install any Mac OS after Mac OS 11, but can still run the latest version of Windows 10. The hardware is the same. This applies to any Intel Mac released after 2009 or so which has reached the end of Mac OS updates. I'd have agreed with you if you were talking about IOS and Android, where the facts are equally provable but go in Apple's favor. I may even get to agree with you when Windows 10 drops out of support. The reality is, however, that I have a computer here which Apple dropped over two years ago and Windows will continue releasing compatible updates for almost two years past today. I'm not the only one who can say that.

Re: Compatibility

Well, they have been, but I don't think the reason they stated is why. Manufacturing problems and the fact that a lot of people bought computers in 2020 that are still just fine probably contributes.

Re: Seriously

What, being confident, even if it later turns out you're wrong? Yes, that is legal. I'm having trouble figuring out what people expected him to say. There's a chance he's right, but if ARM is a much worse threat, than he said, he's unlikely to say "ARM's going to win, we can do nothing about it, start panicking". If he was lying about whether Intel has a certain product or the known capabilities of his competitors, that would be a problem, but he only stated an opinion about ARM's possible success. That opinion isn't that outlandish: I'm confident that you could come up with a list of reasons that ARM could fail to take over the desktop market, even if you have other lists about why it might succeed.

Apple Private Wi-Fi hasn't worked for the past three years

Re: Nobody apparently cared?

"somebody down the line probably knew, but didn't think it was worth mentioning it to somebody more senior."

Probably not. The team that made private MAC addresses tested their new feature to make sure that, when they connected to networks, the random one was sent to the network equipment and the real one was never used in addressing. Both of those tests passed, so they figured that was all that they needed to do. Meanwhile, the AirPlay team that wasn't even thinking about the feature change because network connection is abstracted away from them didn't think about the fact that what they were doing with MAC addresses was going to cause problems, and the network connection group didn't know about or think they had to deal with code that was used for a completely different protocol. There's a lot of cracks between those two groups for this to fall between. It's not even a thing that simple testers would notice, since the packets sent for AirPlay will have two MAC addresses attached: one where a MAC address normally is which contains the correct, random one, and one encoded in the payload which is the one that shouldn't be there. A testing group would have sent lots of packets and looked for the MAC address resetting to the hardware one, but they probably wouldn't be doing payload inspection to see if it was being leaked in there.

Intel CEO Gelsinger dismisses 'pretty insignificant' Arm PC challenge

Re: History will repeat itself

There is Windows on ARM installation media which works basically the same as Windows on X86 installation media. It's a different disk, but as far as I know, it will give you the same result. There are some distros that have made ARM installation disks, but the reason they're not common is that most Linux on ARM images won't run on anything else. The people making the media would have to make a hundred different versions for each board it's going to run on, and they get bored first. There is general-purpose media out there for anything that uses a standard boot system. The list of devices that actually uses that system is... nothing. Okay, it's probably not nothing, but none of the stuff you're ever likely to buy. Meanwhile, Windows isn't designed to run on most ARM devices, and only on Qualcomm or rebadged Qualcomm chips, so they can more easily limit their target to something that will at least use Microsoft's standard.

Re: Obviously hasn't seen

This is excessive praise for the Pi 5, and by doing that, you're harming its image. The Pi 5 has a faster processor than the Pi 4, and certainly for some uses it is enough processing power, but it is not remotely similar to X86 chips. Even when just considering the processor, the Pi's using four Cortex A76 CPU cores, which is not really the height of speed that ARM has available. For context, the popular chip for use in SBCs that aren't made by Raspberry Pi is the Rockchip 3588, which has four A76 cores at the same clock rate as the Pi does, but also another cluster of four A55 cores. When compared against the low end of Intel's chips, it is slower on nearly every benchmark but more power-efficient. The Pi's CPU is slower than the 3588 and, since it's made on a 16 nm fab, whereas the 3588 is made on an 8 nm one, the Pi doesn't even get those nice power consumption figures that the 3588 does.

This isn't even including the Raspberry Pi's slower storage, which has a large effect on perceived speed when used as a desktop. By pretending that these things are equal, you're making the Raspberry Pi compete in an area where its designers didn't intend it to. The designers didn't make the Pi 5 to be as fast as an X86 desktop, which is why they went with a relatively basic quad-core A76 SoC rather than getting a more modern set of cores on a better fab. Qualcomm's desktop and laptop chips are much more powerful, coming with eight cores and usually using ones that aren't already five years old, though that varies. If you pretend it's something it's not, then you run the risk that users are put off when they find that it doesn't do what you suggested it could and assume that it's much less powerful than we know it to be.

I'd compare it to Netbooks. I liked the concept of a really small and light laptop when they came out, but when people tried to make it do everything a large laptop could do rather than consider that it's low performance was useful to making it small, light, and with acceptable battery life, they found that it fell short. Their subsequent requests effectively killed the model. If you're using a Raspberry Pi as a desktop, then you have to know what it does and what it doesn't do, in which case you'll have no trouble using it as you'd expect. If you try to make it do everything, you'll find some of those things it doesn't do well.

Re: History will repeat itself

He's trying to sound confident, whatever he may actually think. However, history isn't quite as one-sided as you paint it. ARM has always been in phones, because it has always been power-efficient. Intel trying to break into phones is taking X86 to ARM's home front. ARM trying to take the desktop space is the opposite, and there is reason to expect that it will have similar troubles that X86 did when it tried to go mobile. After all, AMD was even less successful at producing mobile-capable chips. While Intel didn't really succeed at getting its chips into mobile phones, they have had a lead over AMD in the low-power low-performance space for quite a while.

That's no guarantee that ARM will continue to fail as it attempts to take the desktop, but keep in mind that this is not the first time it's been tried. The previous attempts have resulted in some prominent failures. We still see a lot of people dismissing Windows on ARM, even though it's been much more successful than I thought it would when it first came out. I think a lot of the attention is here specifically because of Apple's successful switch, and that has been quite impressive, but that's no guarantee that Qualcomm or someone else will be able to successfully copy it or that the market will care enough to adopt it.

PIRG petitions Microsoft to extend the life of Windows 10

Re: "All software reaches a point at which it's no longer supported"

"Write the bloody stuff right in the first place. And if it's not right, then make it mandatory to fix it for free for however long someone's using it."

I've got some code here that was written in the early 1980s. I already had to patch it to compile something that doesn't fail to start on modern computers, and that version, while it runs, doesn't work right. Where do I send the request that they fix this, even though the people who wrote it might have been dead for a while and have almost certainly retired? The company identified in the copyright statements has also been shut down. If you push on this, I'll find whoever last used an IBM System 360, and if there are literally no uses of it in production anymore, buy part of one just to see if I can make IBM fix things in code that's nearly sixty years old.

Code doesn't self-heal. Work is required to make it do things it wasn't already doing. If you try to force people to be responsible to fix any bugs that ever crop up, then you'll just get a lot more "not a bug, just a feature or design decision" replies because it won't be feasible to fix any problem you ever come up with. Everything you buy will run out of support eventually, and you'll have a lot more success by trying to assign a sensible limit to that such as existing consumer protection law does rather than trying to regulate its life to infinity.

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

Re: I've always been curious...

It really wouldn't be that difficult. If they had to merge the videos together, that would be computationally expensive, but all they have to do with the existing video is to have their ad encoded at the same resolution to avoid buffering problems and merge the files. That merging is one step above concatenating files in difficulty. It's true that some compression systems would be marginally less efficient if they did it, but they can prepare for that by chopping the source video into pieces so that they don't have to reencode any of them in real time. They could make it work, but they're kind of lazy, so they haven't appeared to bother.

Google Cloud misses revenue estimates – and it's your fault, wanting smaller bills

Re: Meh

My guess is that they've built something to only show you short videos in a never-ending avalanche, because as far as I can tell, that's what TikTok is and people seem to like it. Also as far as I can tell, each of the videos concerned is just short enough that they can't actually do anything useful in it, no matter how hard they might try to compress it. I don't think it's just so that you can upload a short video, but to take the ones they have and inundate users with them because evidently that helps.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is now available ... if you pre-ordered

However, I doubt that many children are getting started with their programming experience on a Pico or Pi Zero. Yes, you can get a Zero and plug it into a screen and a USB hub with an efficient keyboard and mouse to avoid requiring too much power, but it's clearly not meant for it. The Zero models are much more closely matched to wanting a board to build into some other device, although I have one that serves as an automation device for me. On the other hand, they've got a much better desktop in the Pi 4 than they did at the start, so the original educational dream is probably better served by that model than by the ones that came before. I wonder how many schools are using them as such, though.

GNOME Foundation's new executive director sparks witch hunt

Re: Good Grief Charlie Brown!

"I think you'll find that most[0] old UNIX hacks will agree that horses for courses is the proper answer to "what OS is best"."

However, I've often found that many of them have a rather small herd of horses, and simply assume that anyone who picks a different one is an idiot. Generalizations are dangerous, but take a lot of the "old UNIX hacks" and have them all react to people talking about Windows and see how many of them suddenly have a different view about whether that horse is a valid choice. Some of them might turn out to have a more dogmatic view, though by no means all of them.

Re: It's not a witch hunt.

While true, that doesn't stop the concept from making sense. Utopia was coined to tell people that it was impossible, and the society described isn't very great, but it still works fine as a term for the theoretical pinnacle of society, at least when we talk about utopian opinion. Thus, just because the term meritocracy was created to demonize it doesn't mean that we can't use or adopt some concepts from it.

The book that coined the term had its own conceptions of how a meritocratic society could be created and what it might look like. It doesn't follow that anyone who praises the idea wants to see the society depicted, since few have read that book. Meanwhile, some people might want to try a society where capabilities and skills are more useful to success than wealth and connections, even though that will probably never change. As usual, if you take this or any other point about how society could be improved and stretch it to its extremes, you'll get something very unpleasant. It doesn't matter which attribute you choose to use: if you write a book with the premise that "The most [attribute] people rule the world with absolute authority", the end picture will either be utopian if you're naive or dystopian otherwise. A strawman argument of that nature can argue against literally anything you like, including positive things like democracy or freedom of any kind.

Re: It's not a witch hunt.

If you read my reply and think I've missed it, then I'm afraid it really has. Perhaps you could be so kind as to tell me what I missed? What I see in your comment are two points:

1. You would like open source developers to make new and unusual things, ignoring conventions if they feel like it.

2. You don't think anyone should tell them otherwise, since they're open source developers and I have no reason to give them instructions.

I disagree with point 1, unless their changes are there to add unusual features, because I think that changes without features just annoys the users. I agree on point 2 that they have the choice to do whatever they want, ignoring any suggestions I might provide them. I'll still state my opinion as you have done, but they have no reason to listen or follow.

Re: On the third hand

That was basically my point. Revolutionary UIs can pay off if they do revolutionary new things and the new interface is necessary to productively having those features. In most of the ones I've seen, the new conventions are just somebody taking all the stuff we have already and dumping it in different places. That's far less exciting. When I see the latter, I wonder what we could have had if that developer had focused on writing something that didn't already exist. They can do whatever they want, but it doesn't change my opinion on what helps and what doesn't.

Re: It's not a witch hunt.

Of course, they have the right to write whatever they want, no matter how strange. If they ask me what I think is best, though, I'll suggest that they write one of two things: something that's extremely revolutionary because they really think it's a significant improvement, or something that works in a comfortable way. Something that does something a little new but mixes up the UI for no reason could probably be better, in my opinion. That doesn't mean they have to care, but I still have my opinion just as they have theirs. A desktop that follows conventions is quick to pick up. One that tries something completely new might be worth the effort of learning the new controls. One that switched all the controls but doesn't do anything unusual is just annoying, which means they won't get to try many new things if users have ignored it.

Scammers use India’s real-time payment system to siphon off money, send it to China

"I don't think I ever suggested these problems were reliant on any peculiarity of India's."

As far as I can tell, this thread is discussing whether this is a social engineering problem or one that's peculiar to India's UPI system. Raj took the view that it was not related to UPI, and you disagreed. That would mean that you think it is reliant on some particular aspect of UPI, not just social engineering on a different transfer system. I certainly read that suggestion, and I don't see what other one you have in mind.

Adding verification to the process would help, and that is certainly worth trying, but I don't think that the suggested measure, verifying phone numbers against account names, will really do anything to help social engineering. The account name shown to people transferring funds won't change. You'll just get an indication that the phone number was registered with the same name that the account was. If they're already showing account names, it sounds like they are already giving the victim one opportunity to smell a rat and cancel the transfer when it appears to be an individual's account rather than a business one. Phone number validation won't do more of that.

Most of those things are problems that could exist in any payment system, and aren't particularly reliant on any peculiarity of India's. The only technical change suggested was this:

One key initiative could involve verifying that any new mobile number added to an account matches the account holder's name, thwarting scammers from gaining control by altering phone numbers," advised CloudSEK.

That change is not likely to help much. If India tracks ownership of phone numbers, scammers could buy cheap phones and have them registered as their mules while keeping control of the devices. The people who are changing phone numbers are those who decided to be willing accomplices, so this shouldn't be a problem. This suggestion would work better if the scam involved the victims changing their account phone numbers, but the article makes it clear that they are socially engineered out of their cash and the account details only apply to people who have time to set up the infrastructure beforehand.

The point that the system operates outside the money laundering law is a better possibility, although they didn't suggest what technical changes are required to fix that. Unfortunately, a lot of schemes like this manage to get around such legislation if the scammers simply wait a bit longer for the funds to clear before cashing them out or transferring them over borders. Scam rings that operate this in a variety of western countries, including but not limited to many large ones based in India, know this firsthand. If our banking systems, with all their anti-laundering facilities can't prevent that, then adding a delay to their system is unlikely to be sufficient to prevent it in India either. You'll need more, and I don't know what that would be.

CEO Satya Nadella thinks Microsoft hung up on Windows Phone too soon

Re: Nadella has only...

Worse than Android? While I don't think it would have been great, I think you have to remember that Android is made by an advertising company that doesn't often bother to make things unless it props up the advertising part of it. I think Google is still under the misconception that people buy their ads because they can track a lot of data, not because people who buy a lot of advertising haven't thought about where or how they should be doing so optimally. I don't even know if it's possible for Windows Phone to do that worse than Android did, and comparing Android to desktop Windows, there's little comparison. There are lots of ways for Windows Phone to be worse, and I think they would have found a few, but I really doubt that advertising would have been one of them.

Google - yes, that Google - testing proxy scheme to hide IP addresses for privacy

Re: Pardon my lack of trust

"The entirely accidental advantage - albeit not for you, the end-user - is that whoever you've chosen as your "trusted" DNS provider now gets all your DNS lookup traffic instead."

While this is true, it isn't much different from normal DNS. Yes, your ISP might cache some results for you, but if they were treating your traffic the way we want, they sent every request right to the server you asked for, meaning that your resolver already could have a list of DNS requests attached to your IP address. This is the case no matter which of the three typically supported DNS protocols you employ, so you generally have to be careful with your choice of provider. The one difference between the three is that, in traditional DNS, your ISP is free to ignore your choice and serve up whatever results they want, and even if they don't, they can read any lookup you perform, whereas with either of the encrypted methods, they cannot do that.

"I always assume that most attackers are just some script looking for an uprotected target."

That's true, but most attackers know that some IPs will be blocked and will scan from a few endpoints. For example, they may run an initial scan from a cloud provider, but since many of those are subject to blocks or extra scrutiny, some of them will just try anything that didn't respond from a compromised host in a western country. Unfortunately, most operators of scripts that know enough to cause you any trouble at all already know about region blocking and go around it. There are certainly many people who are too stupid to manage that, but they're also generally too stupid to do your server any harm unless you have a glaring hole in your configuration.

"I can't see me selling much to China, Russia, half of Africa, plus assorted Eastern European and Middle Eastern countries."

I suppose that depends what your site is for. A lot of mine are simple informational sites, and while my visitors are rather limited in number anyway and concentrated near where I live, I do get people visiting from some of those countries. I have to assume that at least someone is interested in what I have to say. You may also get some visitors who live in a country you think is more likely to be interested but are traveling, and blocking them may make your site seem broken. It really comes down to what your site is for and what negative consequences would arise if you didn't block. For the ones I run, both personal ones and ones for employers*, I have not seen an attack that a blanket ban would have done much about. I'd have fewer failed attacks registered in my logs, but I'd still have plenty.

* I'm not a sysadmin, but I do work in security, so I get to see logs even if someone else runs the server.

Re: Ha ha ha ha... no

Not hard at all. Google simply bakes it into Chrome. This permits them to implement it as a MITM, but they won't because they're not that stupid. Instead, your browser will handle the TLS connection and their proxy will simply send the TCP or QUIC packets through for you. I guarantee you that that will be authenticated with your Google account, though. They won't need to break the encryption. Some scripts may still be able to determine your real IP, depending on how well Google blocks it.

As for interception, you're right there. Google won't break all the encryption, but they will certainly collect a ton of data about your browsing and Google's new motto should be "Google never deletes, even if it lies about deleting".

I'm sure it won't be long until those who typically block IPs quickly end up blocking Google's endpoint IPs. This will either be done as a block, as it sounds like you're doing with countries*, or it will be done one at a time by your automation that detects unwanted behavior from an IP and blocks it, since it will be easy enough for abusers to use this service so you can guarantee at least some of them will. It's not going to be hidden, so it will be as easy to block as blocking Tor exit nodes.

* I generally suggest against blocking entire countries, since you might have some visitors from there who can't easily get a new address, especially if they don't know why you've blocked them. Meanwhile, attackers from that country are smart enough to figure that out, and if they really want to attack you, they know how to and do use proxy services of various kinds. It's your system, though, so you're free to ignore this suggestion.

Re: Pardon my lack of trust

The difference is that DoH doesn't help Google directly, only indirectly by denying information to others. I can use it without sending my data to Google. This proxy system sounds a lot like the one Apple introduced. They claim to have a firewall between their managed ingress points and theoretically external egress endpoints, but we only have their word for it. My suggestion is the same: only use Apple's proxy if you trust an Apple-run VPN, and only use this proxy if you trust a Google-run VPN. I do not. I will not use it.

A cheap Chinese PC with odd components. What could go wrong?

Re: Prejudices are such fun.

So if the name looks like other names, then the companies must be the same quality? Is it just not being a simple word or common name in English that makes it one of those? All you can tell from the name not sounding familiar is that you don't know about the company. It could be the worst of counterfeit operations or the next powerhouse in the product line, but you don't know where it will fall on that spectrum. Given that this is probably a Chinese company, this could easily be a three-syllable Chinese name using a couple different romanization systems. Had you not heard of them, Samsung would sound like it fits in with other brands, but you wouldn't assume that Samsung-made RAM is terrible, would you?

Re: So, very much like the wildly popular Raspberry Pi series.

We're not talking about expense. If we were, I could start talking about benchmark numbers for the different processors, the speed advantages of the SSD in this one, or so many other points of differentiation. Just talking about ports, a typical desktop setup will use ports on two sides of a modern Pi: power input and display output on one side, USB keyboard and mouse and possibly Ethernet on the other. Meanwhile, for this computer, literally all those things can be plugged in on the back unless the power port is somewhere else, as that wasn't mentioned. The USB ports on the side can be used for more temporary peripherals. That doesn't guarantee that you'd use that setup, as your keyboard and mouse would have to share the one USB on the back to get there, but even if you didn't, you're still using the same number of sides in the same arrangement as you would for a Pi. Only if you need multiple USB devices without a hub and VGA will you have cables on opposite ends of the box, just as if you want to plug something into the GPIO interface, you'd have cables on both sides of a Pi. Are they really so different?

Re: All together, one, two, three!

Can you wipe a simple disk in a standard X86 computer? As it happens, yes you can. I don't know about this box in particular, but there are only about a hundred devices out there with exactly the same spec but differently shaped boxes, and they mostly run Linux just fine, so I'm guessing it runs well.

Still got a job at the end of this week? You're lucky, as more layoffs hit the tech industry

Re: Those pay brackets are a trick

It wasn't one particular job quoting a range. It was an article discussing pay rates in the programming industry in the UK. Since we're talking about it, I've found the article I was talking about. Most of it isn't relevant. The part that I was referring to is this:

Moreover tech roles account for over half of roles in the £50,000 to £70,000 bracket and three quarters of roles in the £100,000 to £150,000 band.

Meanwhile, here someone has quoted their salary as £32000, and although they weren't specific, it sounds like they're doing a programming job. I am trying to understand how likely a certain salary is. If someone tells you that they're a programmer and earn £50k per year, does that sound plausible, too low, or too high? What if they said they were a sysadmin? Would someone doing such a job at a large company be likely to earn a significantly different amount? I really have no idea about those answers, because some people on that article said they earned over £150k per year, some quoted numbers in the £30-40k region, and there was a lot of discussion attempting to equate many numbers in the middle with the edges of the range. This is why I can't know whether my experiences of unsympathetic colleague complaints are generally applicable to the UK, or only some parts of it.

Re: No need to worry

"Programming is a working-class job. Anyone with the right mindset can do it; you don't need formal qualifications,"

That was not my meaning, nor do I think it was yours. "Working class" is not a term that is much used in my country, since it's hopelessly vague about exactly what boundaries there are on it, even more than the still vague "middle class" etc. In addition, not all programming is comparable. I have three problems understanding the level of pay that workers in various countries can expect:

1. When we end up talking about some job, we're often rather nonspecific about what it is. I've split it into IT and programming, but someone who writes a few scripts and someone who writes the code that absolutely must run in a certain number of processor cycles and will cause something to blow up if it crashes are doing very different jobs and will be paid very differently.

2. This is more my problem as a foreigner, but I have trouble understanding what a certain number of pounds means as a lifestyle. Converting it into local currency only goes so far to giving a picture since the more expensive parts of life are usually the ones that vary most between locations, which makes comparisons more difficult.

3. When people have stated numbers, they have had some pretty massive ranges. In one article I remember, the article spoke of salaries ranging between £50-150k, which is a pretty wide range in itself, and then we got into a discussion of how much that was worth where salaries as low as £20k were added in. This effectively gave me a range from the 30th to the 99th percentile of individual income in the UK*, which doesn't really help me imagine what is realistic.

In the case of your example of the programmer and cleaner, I'd be curious to know how this worked out. Was the cleaner working a lot more time? Were cleaners in short supply in the area? What, specifically, was the programmer doing. The comparison suggests that they were working similar amounts, but since that wasn't stated, it could also be a cleaner working many hours compared to a contract programmer who only has one small contract at the moment. If that happened, while that might be reason to be unhappy, it wouldn't actually lead to the conclusion that cleaners are paid more for their work than programmers are. Since I don't know the details, I cannot possibly judge whether that's reflective of the country or not.

* Percentiles are for anyone with taxed income in the year. It was not specified how much work they did or whether they're in a household. Figures were from the 2020-2021 tax year from the UK's ONS.

Re: No need to worry

I didn't downvote, and I'm not in the UK, so I can't know exactly why they did. My idea of why they did involves something that might be a misconception, since I don't know what normal pay rates are for various jobs in the UK, and when they've been discussed before, the numbers were all over the place. One thing that I think might have contributed to it is IT versus programming. The previous comments were mostly talking about programming jobs, whereas the comments talking about the UK's mentioned IT. That disconnect could have gone unnoticed by someone who assumed they were saying that programming was a working class job and paid accordingly.

Whether that was intended or not, there's also an attitude by some people in the industry that they're not paid enough, even among some people who earn a lot more than others could expect to be. I am a programmer and my income is somewhat high compared to the average in my country. That doesn't make me capable of buying whatever I want or living in luxury, but it does mean that I have a lot more stability than some do. Occasionally, some colleague of mine will complain about the financial hardship they think they're going through, an argument I find unsympathetic since it is a level that many could not get to. Whether their underpaid or not, which is always possible, they're not experiencing the hardship of people who don't have a job like this. I don't know how many programmers in the UK this applies to, let alone other types of work in IT, but perhaps the person who pushed the downvote button was reacting to that assumption whether accurate or not.

Re: But the job market is booming....

I don't think they intended "save" to mean "put money in a box and do nothing with it". I think they meant it to mean to keep the money in something that should earn some return and a risk level that isn't concerning to you, rather than spending it. That way, you can avoid being that guy who has a well-paid job that most people couldn't dream of, loses it, and has to panic about paying necessary bills because they spent all their money on luxuries. Investing properly is saving, as long as your approach to investing isn't more like gambling and you keep saving the proceeds.

Indonesia grounds second broadband satellite to free up digital inclusion funds

It depends how much capacity they already have on their own satellite. It might be cheaper to distribute equipment that can communicate with that rather than buying equipment and service from another company, and they might get better service than either by subsidizing some cables and mobile towers.

The problem with Jon Stewart is that Apple appears to have cancelled his show

Re: Open platform

Not the case, as there are specific categories that qualify an organization as a charity and collecting donations for terrorism is not one of them. Not only would other law enforcement be coming after that organization for supporting terrorism, which is a crime that the Americans take very seriously, but the tax authorities would be coming after them to say that they did not qualify for tax advantages and now owe the back taxes on all the donations they received. There are requirements out there, even if they're not always as well-policed as they could be.

Re: Open platform

I'm sure they do. The ones I've seen have used the government's databases to check that the charity is valid, with the advantage that they make it easy to conduct ongoing checks. Instead of requiring every company to check government records each time, they can get a list of any charities that have been struck off in real time and, should the government's systems change, not every company that deals with charities needs to change their systems. Some of the third-party databases I've seen also handle abstracting out the international databases, meaning that if an international charity becomes involved, you don't have to deal with a foreign government's system and translation issues to know whether it's valid or not. Those third-party databases are not deciding on their own whether an organization deserves charitable status.

Re: Unfortunately this is how all of Hollywood operates

You may have it backwards: the inclusion of the line was for China's benefit, and they were pleased with its inclusion. It was China's neighbors that have a problem with it and Vietnam in particular which banned the film for including it. Countries don't much like China deciding to claim it owns the ocean that's next to them and not next to China.

More X subscription tiers could spell doom for free access as biz bleeds cash

Re: Personally, I don't pay for ads.

As I said, I don't mind their presence and ignore them. Similarly, I find most of the stuff that Windows has these days easily ignored or removed, so I don't care that much about that either. So they preinstall Spotify, but it's not like they start it, so if I do nothing, I don't see it. Instead, I uninstall it once and it goes away. They make Edge default, so I use it to download Firefox, make that default, and the only time I see Edge again is if something really is refusing to work in Firefox and I need a Chromium-based browser for something because I haven't bothered installing another one. Or if I press any help buttons in Windows settings, but those help buttons rarely go anywhere useful, so I don't press them. Windows does various things that annoy me, but the various ones termed advertisements haven't been part of the list. Maybe there are worse ones that I either don't get or have not noticed yet.

Re: Personally, I don't pay for ads.

I don't much object to them. I can't provide you a complete list, but as a simple example, Ubuntu tends to recommend its commercial support package every time I log in. For example, on one box I have, it prints this to my terminal:

Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:

http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud

It also recommends extended support, a commercial product*, but that's because this is an old 18.04 VM that I haven't deleted yet. This is not the only one they have, nor the only phrasing of the message, just the one that I saw when I logged in today. It's also a server edition, not a desktop one. History has the example of the Amazon affiliate link in Ubuntu desktop. I'm focusing on Ubuntu because most of my personal boxes are Debian or derivatives, and as far as I know, plain Debian doesn't have any of these.

If I objected to this, I could do something about it. I really don't care that it's there. Nor do I much care about some of the similar things in Windows. If you want to consider the examples, though, there is a small starting point.

* Well, it would be free if I chose to enable it because this is a personal use VM and I don't have another one, but it's mostly of use to people using it in business and for them it is not free.

An article a few days ago explains some of this. The theory is that New Zealand is being used as a small test market for developed countries, with the Philippines serving as the test market for less developed countries. One contributor to that was that the Philippines has recently passed a law to track the owners of phones which might make user identification and extra tracking easier, although that is speculation. If Twitter likes the results, that will come to more countries.

Winklevoss twins back in hot water after NY AG sues over $1B cryptocurrency fraud

Re: Crypto Currency

Basic "what backs this currency" chart:

Specie currency:

What backs it: Gold or some other rare metal, and the hope that it continues to be rare and desirable.

What can break it: Someone finds a new richer source of the metal or just finds a lot of it. Other valuable metals are found and people start wanting both gold and platinum, decreasing the price for one.

Fiat, normal currencies:

What backs it: The government's willingness to keep the supply of money relatively constrained and only print it when economic conditions justify it, not when they find a use for free money. If they're doing it correctly, its supply should be somewhat based on the ability of the economy to produce stuff of value.

What can break it: Someone not knowing what they're doing or a government that wants to spend right now at the cost of having a massive economic problem about ten years from now.

Cryptocurrencies with spec-limited supply:

What backs it: The fact that there is a finite supply of it around and that the code doesn't allow anyone to easily create more, usually tying some difficult process to creation which may have a limit. Bitcoin is an example of this.

What can break it: People deciding they don't want to use it, either because they don't think it's worth something or they want to replace it with something else.

Cryptocurrency without limits in the spec:

What backs it: Trust in the creator, who you don't know, and by creator I mean the person who wrote the code, not the maybe more famous guy hocking it. In other words, nothing.

What can break it: It was designed to break when someone has given the creator enough of a real currency to do a runner. If you're lucky, he doesn't manage to complete the runner.

Come work at HQ... or find a new job, Roblox CEO tells staff

Re: Cheaper than layoffs

I do wonder how much they'd pay to someone they already chose to fire. Given the payments they've said they will give to anyone who won't move, I wonder if it really is cheaper. This is especially true since they're paying a relocation cost for anyone who doesn't leave. Since they have those costs, I think there's a possibility that it's not a stealth layoff, which is actually worse because it means the executives are really stupid enough to think they can rule their company by pointless edict and don't understand the likely consequences.

It's probably going to work out badly, though, this much I'm confident about. Allow ing employees to self-select who will quit means you'll probably lose some you need and fail to get rid of some that you could do without. If they had done a layoff, they would probably end up paying a similar amount but would get to choose people they didn't want, and if they were really strapped for cash and wanted to get rid of people, there are easier ways to get employees to quit than announcing an expensive relocation policy.

Re: The struggle is real

I agree with you on some of your points, though I'd be careful about how absolute you think they are, as how easy or difficult it is to get someone started depends rather heavily on how crap the processes are. I have seen some advantages to interactions that happen in person which I don't think text chat or video meetings have equaled, but my anecdotal experience isn't enough to say that everyone experiences that. However, I must entirely disagree about this point:

"It's also worth noting that Roblox is taking what seems like a modest step, requiring employees to come in three days a week rather than five, which should make the pill easier to swallow."

Their modest step requires that everyone they either hired in a different place or permitted to move to a different place has to move to a new, expensive city. Just because they can work in their home on a couple days doesn't stop that move from being quite a big change for all those people. They have the right to do that, but I am not surprised at all that people see that as a rather onerous requirement. One might suggest that, if they were going to do this, maybe they shouldn't have allowed people to join from locations other than San Mateo in the first place. It's the same reason that, when I've talked to people offering jobs, they often state right in the first meeting where the job is and whether I'd have to move, because they know that a large subset of their market is unwilling to do that. These are the people who will not state important details like how much I'll be paid until everything else is done, and even they know that the location is so important to most applicants that they could be wasting a lot of time if they don't make sure of that.

Paying for WinRAR in all the wrong ways - Russia and China hitting ancient app

Re: What?

Not exactly. It's used to find an executable file when you give it a string. If I type "program" into the Windows terminal, it will try to run program.exe, program.bat, program.cmd, when it can find one on the path. That way, someone can abstract whether this tool is a shell script or a binary without having to change the name. The problem is other applications choosing to open a file by telling the shell to execute it, rather than by using the normal functions to open a file. Sure, Windows will treat an attempt to invoke a non-executable file as a request to open it, something Linux wouldn't do, but that's no reason to use that to open a file.

UK tribunal agrees with Clearview AI – Brit data regulator has no jurisdiction

We read it. Maybe the reason we don't entirely buy that is that Clearview AI is not law enforcement. It may sell some stuff to law enforcement, but what it is is a commercial company that uses the data it collects (illegally) for profit. That's commercial use, no matter what end the product is used for. For the same reason, I can't open a camera factory and claim that, because the police used my camera when they needed to surveil a criminal, that I'm now exempt from laws because I'm law enforcement. Every other law would agree; my camera factory wouldn't get to avoid paying tax because I'm part of the government. My camera factory would not get to ignore local regulations because I work with a higher level of government. Clearview isn't granted any special treatment by the United States government, so to be granted that from the UK is stupid.

First Brexit, now X-it: Musk 'considering' pulling platform from EU over probe

Re: Limited number of accounts

First, there is a word before the article. You might have noticed it. It's in all caps, red font, and bold. It says: "COMMENT". Next time you see that, you can know that it's an opinion piece and be less surprised to find opinions in it.

The percentages you mention aren't applicable either. I'm assuming that you saw "A Very Large Online Platform under the Digital Services Act is one that can reach 10 percent of the EU's population." and "Europe makes up about 9 percent of X's global monthly active user base", but those aren't the same units, so the 9% does not necessarily mean it's under the 10% threshold. That would depend on how many people are in the global user base, but it depends even more on how the law defines the reach of a platform. This is already in question, because some of the companies classified as VLOPs under the law have challenged that designation by trying to argue that they aren't really that big. Zalando, has questioned its designation on the basis that the law is considering people who don't have a strong enough connection, and that they claim to be a retailer not an online platform. Certainly, 10% of the EU populace doesn't have an account on Zalando, but they're still considered a VLOP unless their case is successful. On that basis, you may not need to be a monthly active user to qualify as someone that Twitter can reach. Having an account is probably enough, and visiting without an account may qualify depending on how pedantic the regulators are.

Re: Precedent voor other VLOP's?

Sure, that's always an option for them, but most of those platforms are successful because they're very large, and they don't particularly want to cultivate a competitor that has unrestricted access to a market of half a billion relatively wealthy people. Apple's free to not sell iPhones in the EU if it doesn't like the USB-C requirement, but as it has demonstrated, it preferred to just adopt the port for everybody without risking those customers. The platforms covered under the VLOP provisions will probably do the same. They'll lobby for changes and see if they can find their way around the requirements. Amazon's already got their first attempt at that in the courts. When it all ends, they'll comply as much as they think they have to to keep out of trouble.

Re: If/when no more X in the EU ... how should Thierry Breton ... "tweet" / communicate?

From the article:

As The Register reported last week, His Muskiness had a rather public spat on the website with Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner for Internal Market, who was simply reminding social media platforms of their content moderation obligations under the law.

X marks the bot: Musk thinks spammers won't pay $1 a year

Re: In Other News

I don't really know what you're going for here. Among other things, if you're serious, you do realize that banning affiliate links in articles is really not the same as "pay to publish", and that the writers are still paid for their articles. I'm also a bit curious about stackable offenses, it kind of sounds like a fun game.

DoJ: Ex-soldier tried to pass secrets to China after seeking a 'subreddit about spy stuff'

Re: So how did we find him?

And, for years, I've been seeing articles where the American military complains that they don't have enough people. This is sometimes generic and they don't have enough of any kind of person, but it also has explicitly included people with technology skills to the extent that I think I've seen two proposals to draft them. So yes, people do consent to that and other invasive things, but clearly not as many people as they would like to do so. Adding more onerous things will only make that problem worse, while easing up on some of them might help attract some of the people they want.

Apple finds another use for USB-C – a cheaper Pencil

Does that cable work in both directions? One problem with a lot of USB cables is that they're really only designed to run power in one direction. This is even true of some USB-C to USB-C cables, although it's gotten better. The ports can often switch between client and host modes, but usually only when a connected dongle is detected. The charging cable was designed to charge the iPad, so I'd start wondering whether it will agree to power something on the other end.