Posts by doublelayer

UK Online Safety Bill to become law – and encryption busting clause is still there

Re: Not sure how this will go.

The "cheese pizza" thing is one of the weird products of conspiracy theory culture. In this case, it comes from hacked emails from the 2016 US presidential election. Russia hacked a person running a campaign of the candidate Hilary Clinton and dumped the emails online. People who didn't like the candidate started reading them, looking for evidence. They didn't find the clear emails they were looking for, though there was some stuff for somewhat sane people to complain about. The insane people weren't worried about bureaucratic details of party politics and needed something much more intense, but one of them noticed that the various members of the party did discuss both cheese and pizza on occasion. They decided that this could mean child abuse. In exactly the same way that The Register becomes very concerning if you replace words like "cloud" with "secret plot to kill innocent people hidden in this article", this made all the people in the campaign look like child abusers if you were thinking too hard with too few brain cells. The most famous result of this particular theory was that a group of people decided that a pizza restaurant at which some campaign staff would meet must be the storehouse for child abduction victims (they had concluded it must be in the basement, even though that building didn't have one), and one of them charged in firing a gun, though nobody was hit. This is not the only consequence, just the most potentially lethal one.

Why the poster to whom you replied chose to use the term is another question. If it was intended as humor, I suggest that people not do that. In addition to the communication problems we've just seen, it could cause people to misconstrue your views.

As TikTok surveils staff's office hours, research indicates WFH is good for planet

Re: Good for the planet?

For those who don't intend to read, or give up after the painful grammar gets to you, here's an appropriate summary.

Point in contention: "As much as I'd like to justify reasons for WFH, I'm not sure it being "Good for the planet" is one of them. At least, not in any significant sense."

Proof from article: Climate change from human-created means is overstated/nonexistent/not my problem, pick your favorite because all are in there. Anyone who says different is an evil censor who won't let me say the kind of stuff I'm saying right now.

Conclusion: WFH isn't better for the planet because using more power and the emissions that result are irrelevant/not your problem.

The article makes no point about WFH in either direction because it wastes a lot of paragraphs complaining that the actual people researching climate issues don't listen to people who don't care and would like to be able to ignore it. All you'll read in the article is a number of anecdotes about the failings of climate scientists, some of which are even true. Of course, they will point those failings out as evidence that the conclusions they come to are inaccurate, which few if any of the anecdotes even suggest. You've seen it before. Don't feel you need to read this one for a point about WFH; it's not in there.

Fedora Project mulls 'privacy preserving' usage telemetry

Re: Stats please

You realize this topic is two months old? I will answer for them, as I doubt they're coming back. I don't know where the 75% came from, and it's clearly wrong, as it could be at most 70% (the Firefox and Safari are clearly not using Chromium). Still, any number between 52% and 70% is both large and a majority, even if you want to argue the distinction between Chrome and Chromium which you have attempted.

On that topic, it's true that Chrome has some stuff that Chromium does not, and most of that stuff is dangerous. It doesn't make Chromium benign, though, a simple chunk of code you can just use and Google takes nothing. Chromium is the vehicle by which Google pushes each new change to web standards which erode privacy and send data to them. It doesn't just include the code in the browser that directly contacts Google servers, which standard Chromium still does by the way. It also includes the code that allows code from Google's ad network to do things it shouldn't. When they propose a new "privacy-oriented ad system", they put it in Chromium. When they add new fingerprinting methods that use hardware the browser shouldn't need access to, those go in Chromium. If they make WEI a thing, and I haven't seen the extreme arguments it will probably take to delay it, they will put that in Chromium too. We then have to trust that a browser that chose to use Chromium as its base when other open source ones are available will somehow excise out all this stuff. They won't. It's a lot of work that most users don't understand, most who do won't know how to check, and some who could check won't bother.

"Really?. WE for the Second time. So who is this WE then?"

The journalistic we. It's like the royal we but a bit more often self-deprecating. You'll have seen it many times before, so I'm guessing you aren't really unfamiliar with it.

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

Re: Remember the auctions?

Depending on whether those are 3G data connections or 2G SMS ones, they will stop working or carry on respectively. At least from looking at a few pages online, it appears that the providers that are discontinuing 3G in the UK intend to keep 2G online for a while. That won't help people who had data connections running over 3G, but anything that sent data as SMS, as virtual voice calls, or using one of the mostly nonfunctional 2G data methods should continue to work. This is not necessarily true in other countries, as many of those which have already shut down 3G (east Asia and North America mostly) or are going to (Europe, various others) included 2G and shut them down simultaneously. Maybe 2G infrastructure is less popular there for some reason or the mobile companies are even less concerned about it.

Re: Drat - I will need a new 'phone

Depending on what you do with it, you can get that with modern hardware. They have simple 4G phones which last a while on battery because you're not doing much with them. That is not guaranteed if you turn on the hotspot or insist on having them run apps, which most of them can do but not very well, but if you use them like an old feature phone, it will have battery life like one. If you can manage to use a smartphone like that, you'll generally get even better battery life since the batteries are so much larger. I've tested this with a phone that remains unused except to make calls on occasion, and the battery lasts more than a week easily, and five days with the hotspot function turned on all the way through.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Re: CEO contempt of users ends badly as predicted

The two basic methods of non-crazy license checking are to provide the user with a license code which can be validated by the software and not really checking how many times the code has been used, I.E. the honor system and assuming that people will pay for access instead of sharing someone else's code*, or using an online system which uses an account system to limit activated licenses. Neither will tell components how many installs are there, and since the number of installs would also count people who installed but never activated (free trial users, planned to buy but then forgot I installed, or any other reason), even hooking Unity up to that activation server wouldn't count installs for them.

* Yes, that honor system method is used and does work. I have bought software on a few occasions, and several of them have used a method where some token of mine is signed with their private key and that is my license. This is my favorite method of activation, since even if their servers shut down and they don't care about me, I can still use the software. If I know that's the license system, I'm much more likely to buy it, having had some negative experiences with more aggressive license checks. It doesn't help count the number of times I've installed or whether I'm still using it now, since the activation was local.

Re: On the one hand

I don't use or care about Unity in any case. If they're truthful about the threat's severity and needing to call in the police, then it is never justified to make such a threat. I must admit that, having read this article and no other ones, I did start to wonder if they had some other reason to close the offices. The only thing that suggests otherwise to me is that they say they called in the police. Had they not, I would have expected that they expected some protests and made up a fake threat to either prevent them showing up on camera or pretend that those complaining were more dangerous. Please understand that I'm not saying this happened, and with the statements they've made, I think the chances are lower. However, I get a bit suspicious when a company does something stupid and then finds some other problem they won't give details about.

Re: On false equivalences

The distinction is not as important as you claim. Of course they contain some parts of Unity, because that's how a system like that has to work. They do not contain the part that developers were buying. I cannot get a game built on Unity and use that to make my own, nor is the Unity runtime included in one useful to me in any way other than running the game that included it.

My comparison would be to a compiler. If I buy a commercial compiler and make a binary from code I wrote, there will be some stuff from the compiler in the binary. It will have some of its own runtime functions. It will almost certainly have optimization routines that are now copied into my binary since that's probably why I bought one instead of using Clang. That is also the entire point of the compiler; if it didn't do that, it would be worthless. Unity without the runtime is also worthless.

The comparison between compilers and hammers isn't that ridiculous either. In both cases, they're tools that you use to make something else which function in one easily understood way. Unity exists to build programs that run with its runtime and nothing else. Since there is no other way to use it, then that is the expected method of using the tool. Hammers and Unity are more similar than you're claiming.

Google promises eternity of updates for Chromebooks – that's a decade for everyone else

"when it comes to newer versions of Android not being supported, it's often not up to the device makers."

The first few ones tend to be entirely up to the makers. It's relatively easy to check: if someone else managed to get the same SoC to run a later version, then they could do so too. Here's an example. I will use Planet Computers as the guilty party here although they're far from the only one to blame. They have a device, the Cosmo Communicator, which runs Android 9 on a Helio P70. The P70 is also in use in devices running Android 12. I don't mean Lineage OS ported Android 12 to it, I mean that someone else manufactured a phone running Android 12 on it and still has a Mediatek license. Maybe Android 13 can't run on it without breaking some license that must exist somewhere, but versions 10-12 are at the least are on Planet.

Given this, I have to wonder if we're assuming a contractual detail where none exists. Can you explain why the contract says "thou shalt not update the operating system", or just speculation that it must do? I've seen plenty of the latter, but the closest I've come to seeing the former is some talk about vendor-written kernel patches, which shouldn't stop them running newer Android on an older kernel, using someone else's kernel, or open sourcing the kernel changes which they're supposed to do anyway.

I've heard that argument before, and there might be something to it if you strip off the first four layers, but that shouldn't absolve anyone of anything. Many device makers don't release updates even when no kernel changes are needed. I'm talking about things as basic as the monthly security updates and they don't bother releasing them on time if at all. You can't usually blame any SoC company for that. The same is true of new OS versions, which when they do eventually arrive a year late (most devices excepted) will be using the same kernel you originally had, probably with a higher patch version but they're not jumping from one LTS kernel to the next even if it's out. Only then can you start to blame the SoC vendor, except the manufacturer is responsible for choosing that vendor and could have picked a chip where support would be longer or where they could do the work. Lineage OS and similar custom ROMs manage, with no contracts for proprietary information, no access to internal code, no debug devices, and no funding, to get modern Android versions to run on lots of old devices. Manufacturers which have all of the above can do it to, and when they fail to do so it's not because some SoC vendor just won't be nice and give them support, but because they don't feel like it. The same way that Google could push the latest Chrome OS image to every X86 Chromebook in existence, and with a little effort could have made ARM ones the same way, but won't do that so the manufacturers can keep selling new ones.

The problem with that is that most devices don't support it at all, and a number of others don't support it completely. Of course I would prefer to use that to extend the lives of devices, but the only way you can have a chance of that is to get lucky or buy a device that already supports it. From the devices page, you've got a good chance if it's a Fairphone or a Pixel, but otherwise you're going to have to rely on luck.

I recently helped a charity with some mobile device management. Their phones consist of low-end Samsung and Motorola devices, nearly all with MediaTek SoCs. The hardware is fine, but the software support is not going to last for long. Not a single one supports Lineage OS. I don't think I can convince them to only buy Fairphone in the future by paying at least four times the price, but even if I could, it's not going to help with all the hardware they have now.

Re: ChromeBook - Peak VFM!

And what version of Chrome OS is it running? How many unaddressed CVEs are in that? If you didn't make up this story, I think you'll be surprised with the answers to that, since 2013 devices had a three-year software support life. Maybe now you'll see why we object to it: the hardware is fine, but they've artificially left you with security vulnerabilities even after they've fixed them for other people.

Re: "at the end of their usefulness"

Yes, it does still start at product launch, and the warehouse time is likely to be much worse than nine months. The reason is that most manufacturers, at least the last time I checked, were using "product launch" to mean "we made a prototype somewhere but haven't offered any for sale yet" and that retailers think that Chromebooks don't really go bad so they're often selling ones that are three years old (from actual product launch) as new. I still think that any death dates should be marked prominently on product packaging. Maybe then Google will make Chrome OS stop working when the hardware can't handle it.

Re: At Google, 10 > 13

I discussed this in a different topic. I think they were being sneaky with that "automatic". It suggests to people who haven't read about it that, after that time, updates are manual instead of automatic. What it actually means is "We'll automatically stop your computer getting any more updates, no matter how much you might want them and be willing to do something about it".

Re: At Google, 10 > 13

They're also doing some fun phrasing to get there. Technically, Ubuntu LTS versions offer five years of support. However, if you are running Ubuntu 20.04, you can upgrade it to 22.04 on basically everything, so you get unlimited support as long as your hardware has drivers and kernel support and you're willing to run a manual update every few years. Chrome OS doesn't have that. They're not aiming to provide much support, but to be fair to them, I didn't expect they'd do anything like this and I don't see a sneaky exception in their statement, so I have to acknowledge that they have made a substantial improvement.

Britcoin or Britcon? Bank of England grilled on Digital Pound privacy concerns

Re: whatever it is that Parliament has decided is the right boundary for privacy

The insane energy currencies are doing that on purpose, because they allow anyone to mine blocks and therefore need some way to prevent people from making fake ones. The extremely difficult computing is designed to make that happen at the cost of way too much electricity being used. A central bank doesn't need to have unauthenticated people doing that work, and therefore can make one that won't farm out the verification process to random people who have bribed power plant operators. For all its other faults, and there are many, a digital pound would not have anywhere near Bitcoin's energy usage.

Re: "... where the government can basically determine what you look at, what you're spending ..."

It's not always that easy. Of course, the obvious answer is that there is still cash and you can use it to buy many things, so they can't see that. Even with credit cards, they don't automatically see everything you've bought. They just see where you spent money. They can know how much money you gave to a store without having a list of products you bought there. Of course, they can go to the store and ask for records of the specific items and the store probably has that data, but it's not linked together in a database they can query on a whim.

A digital currency may end up working similarly, but the extra fluidity might mean that tracking subsequent transactions is easier. For example, if I pay £55.04 to Amazon for two items, they will hold onto that for a bit to make sure the funds are coming, then split out their fees and transfer the amounts to the sellers of the items I bought along with everyone else's payments. Without asking Amazon, it's hard to tell which items those were. With a digital currency, they might not need to hold the money for a while, meaning they wouldn't have any reason to amalgamate transactions into one payment, so the timing and value of the transaction to the seller would be more easily tracked. No guarantees that it would work that way, but it is certainly possible.

Re: @jmch

That kind of demonetization does allow a government to destroy some money, but at a high cost. The only way India got away with it is by having an authoritarian government willing to take unpopular steps because they had plans for not losing the next election such as shutting off the internet when people expressed anger about that or anything else. They also had a lot of people suffering in order to target the criminals they were trying to, and may have failed to hurt those criminals as much as they planned. While any government can do it, it's unlikely to use such a blunt tool because they're going to make a lot of people angry and may not even get what they wanted.

A theoretical digital currency could give them more targeted power, allowing them to cancel your money while leaving mine alone, or allowing them to target some of your money while leaving the rest of it. This power is dangerous. That's what the politicians quoted in the article were asking about (among other dangerous things), looking for assurance that the British digital currency wouldn't have them. I don't trust this high-level view of it to be clear on what powers exist or will exist, and so I'd recommend that we not have one unless a more rigorous review ensures those capabilities are absent.

Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone

Re: re: Yes they are.

So have I, and that's a completely reasonable thing to do and one I recommend that everybody does. I do it not only to escape at least some trackers, which actually are evil, but also because I don't much care for advertising and I prefer not to see it. My desire not to see it doesn't make it as evil as the tracking, or really evil at all. I don't much enjoy eating grapefruit either, but that doesn't make grapefruit evil.

No, they've existed for a long time and, while they can often be annoying, they don't impinge on your rights the way that data collection does. We don't get to decide something's evil just because we don't like it. If we get a physical newspaper and someone's paid for their text to appear somewhere on it, that doesn't give that advertiser any power over us, as we're perfectly able to ignore that box and read only the parts we care about. The same is true when advertising appears in other media.

Where that begins to restrict us is when those ads can take actions such as running malware on our systems or when it is used to collect our data. That is something that previous advertisements cannot do and where they're beginning to take from the reader. Passive advertising is not the same, and we should focus on the parts that do us the most harm when we fight against it.

Re: Sure, it's possible, but why would you want it?

We already have that, it's called entering symptoms into Google and reading every page that turns up. The pain you experienced could be a cardiac problem or indigestion, but if you read far enough, something nonspecific with no scans to go on could be almost anything else. You let an LLM pick from those and you'll get diagnoses like broken ribs plus radiation poisoning. People who act on that will find their problems are worse than if they consulted a doctor who actually knows this stuff, even with the risk that they occasionally misdiagnose. An LLM tells you what is possible and isn't even great at limiting itself to that. That's not a good way to make medical decisions. Otherwise, any time you felt slightly unwell, whether it was eating something that disagreed with you or a bit of overexertion, you can assume you've caught almost every parasitic disease in existence.

Re: "neither will they leak all our most personal data to the cloud"

"The mothership could write an AI that watches for unauthorized sharing and helps you stay secure (while still collecting a fair amount of info that would be useful for its own needs.)"

That clause on the end is really quite off-putting. The AI and the company does not "need" any of my data. Its needs will be the desire to mine my data and sell a package of users to someone else. I use software that doesn't collect any of it for any needs unless that collection is explicitly to do something I asked it to do. At least, I do so whenever possible.

As far as I can tell, the author's recommending effectively the same dream that advertisers like to sell. You know the one: when they're busy ignoring the privacy implications, they explain that seeing ads about things you're really interested in would be helpful to you. To be entirely honest (not entirely hostile which is my first approach when it comes to advertisers), ads for things I'm actually interested in that provide the information I'm looking for would be much more useful than generic ones because adverts on their own are not evil. Advertisers just don't have any ability to actually provide those ads and appear to have little interest in trying any mechanism other than stealing more and more of my personal data. The article seems to suggest that using an LLM on every bit of my data would allow that software to make recommendations that would be useful to me, and in their mind, this would somehow be a free service provided by some creator of AI models for which I don't pay with my data or a large subscription charge.

That part isn't going to be true, but nor are any of the other parts. An LLM that's read all my communications and watched my actions is not going to be able to answer my questions, but a search engine can. The reason for that is that an LLM doesn't have recent information which many of my searches are trying to get, it makes things up when most of the time I need accuracy instead of overconfidence, and that what I want right now is often disconnected from the emails I've received today. We humans are pretty good at typing what we want into a search box. I don't think we'll get any benefit having a program try to guess on that query, no matter how authoritative sounding the produced essay is.

Activist investor to GoDaddy: Cut costs, improve sales, or sell

Re: Sorry guys...

Not clients, since I am a programmer, but I have a surprisingly long list of people or organizations for which I'm the unofficial tech assistant. The unofficial bit means that, if they say that they're going to have their domain on a site like this, I can only recommend that they consider transferring* once or twice and then I give up. So yes, I do know people who have domains hosted through that registrar, and in at least one case, they also use email and web hosting through some subsidiary of them. I don't know why.

* Admittedly, I would have recommended the registrar I used, Gandi, which has recently taken a similar approach which means I'm in the market to transfer my domains away from them. So maybe it's for the better that people don't take my advice. I can only say that they have been good for several years before they got bought by someone else and went bad. Still, I put domain registrars in the same category I used to put Windows antimalware programs a while ago: you would find one that seems great and feel confident that you had something, but at some point, you'd have to resume the search as they always change for the worse eventually.

US Department of Justice claims Google bought its way to web search dominance

Re: Microsoft would know

I wonder how much Google's still doing to install Chrome on computers without users understanding it. For years, every piece of Windows software had a Chrome installation option which had to be unchecked. I haven't installed too much Windows software recently, so I don't know if that's still the case. However, I have worked on computers of a few people who were using Chrome but, when I asked why, didn't know how it had been installed and just used whatever opened. I wonder if they're more successful at covertly installing it on Windows than on Mac OS. Of course, Safari use on IOS is more due to Apple's lack of browser choice.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon and others sue OpenAI

Re: Fair Use? I Think Not

"And the "netflux" logo example is showing decent Fair Use, btw. So in that case, it was all working ok."

Try using that as your company and logo and see how quickly you get hit with two trademark complaints containing phrases like "intentionally similar marks". You would lose the cases. The choice of name would be on you, the choice of logo is also on you but the AI helped. That opens the makers of the AI to the risk that Netflix will want them to stop doing stuff like that.

"Having said that, the filtering is rather clumsy: the "orphaned wizard boy" is a far older trope than Harry Potter (no-one pretends otherwise) and I feel their filtering more demonstrates that they have no decent ideas about getting their AI to do something interesting ('cos they are not really AI mavens, merely owners of big buckets)."

That is all true, but it doesn't in any way contradict the fact that their bad ideas are not bad original ideas, but copies of someone else's ideas, whatever your opinions on the quality of those.

Re: Library Genesis ("LibGen"), Z-Library, Sci-Hub, and Bibliotik

"Bibliotik requires logging in, something I doubt OpenAI is capable of."

Oh, you do? I better go over there right now. They've got millions in cash just sitting around, so maybe they will pay me a great salary as someone who has managed to write a lot of bots that are capable of putting some text into boxes on a login form and keeping a session cookie. I didn't know I was so brilliant that OpenAI couldn't find anyone capable of doing so.

If they went as far as to make the books collection a specific sector of their dataset, not just gathering it in with their web crawl, then they're more than capable of creating an account anywhere they want to gather up training data. The multiple sites that don't require logging in could easily have been included with the crawl. So far, every one of the cited sites could easily be in the training data.

Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

"What did they do if they didn't say anything? Look mean?"

Send threats to her web host until all her sites, not just the ones they were complaining about, were taken offline. That would get my attention pretty quickly too, and depending on how much I wanted to try the gambling in the courtroom game, I might decide to let them have what they want in order to get my sites up. It all depends how important those sites are to me and whether I think they're vindictive enough to go after them even if I segment them. I'd be tempted to try a stronger response to them, but I've never had to do so before and it's easier when I imagine the scathing legal (sort of, I'm not a lawyer) letter I could write than when I'm actually facing a large department of people who really do have law degrees.

Next time, read the articles, then you'd know what they did.

When does tackling pandemic misinfo become censorship? US courts argue it out

Re: Fairly obvious answer.

One problem, which leads to moderation decisions on independent websites, is how people will use different levels of comment when they're trying to communicate their chosen conspiracy theory. For example, the lab leak theory. That, in those literal words, is plausible. Unfortunately, a lot of the people suggesting it at the time weren't using the "lab leak" theory, but the "intentionally developed biological weapon released on our shores" theory centered around the same lab. Some of the crazy people weren't even willing to stop at stating that as proven fact and started suggesting responses which wouldn't even have made sense if it really was a weapon. Responding to this is a subjective problem, because many people who want to state a conspiracy theory are willing to use a phrasing that sounds more reasonable before trying to jump to full crazy mode. For instance, start with "5G is a new system which large companies are spending billions on and require equipment to be placed closer to your house", all of which is true, then change "new" to "untested", then switch "large companies" to "secretive groups of elites", then keep switching things until you've reached the "Bill Gates makes 5G to give you cancer" theory, then get some people to burn it down. When fighting back against the last stage, moderators have to choose at which point they'll start working, because if you let them take them right up to the "burn it down" step on your platform, it's pretty easy for them to take that last step elsewhere.

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

Re: It was only after the implementation began that they revealed that they couldn't.

Systems like this are the one case where I have some sympathy with the Agile people. I have never seen a specification for a system like this that was close to meeting the requirements. A lot of this is because they're still often making monolithic requirements documents when looking for suppliers. Their requirements documents list a bunch of things that are needed, but nothing more advanced than that, and they end up getting exactly what they asked for. If their requirements said that they needed a web form to collect a certain set of information, they'll get it. The supplier won't care that nobody really knows where the form is except by bookmarking an address, that that one input has an annoying JavaScript validity checker that requires you to have a very specific format for something whereas another has no validity checking at all, and that nothing very useful happens with the form after they click submit because the person who focused on the system wrote about the part you see and didn't think very much about the part you don't.

When it comes to requirements checking, they'll be able to tick every box. Does it have the following forms? Yes, it does. Does it accept all the valid input examples? Yes. Does it reject the invalid ones it was told to? Yes. Does it store the completed forms in a retrieval area for the government workers? Yes, using a table which is effectively the raw output of "select * from" reformatted for HTML. Does it let those workers delete old forms, add comments to ones in progress, and send them to other groups and people by address? Yes. Does it take the forms and automatically figure out which office they need to go to, which follow-up step is required, automatically send that to the requester and notify the specific handler afterward, features that would save the government hours of administrative work? Well the requirements document didn't say that, so of course nobody wrote that in. Does it use a standardized format for these documents which allow someone to easily script such a process later? No, because the requirements only listed a bunch of activities that were needed and allowing each engineer to define whatever data structure they liked for the bit they were working on made development faster and completely broke any ability to interoperate.

Re: It was only after the implementation began that they revealed that they couldn't.

The problem is that the client isn't very good at knowing their requirements. It's not just defining them properly or not, though that can also be a problem. I've experienced this a number of times when someone made a request to add something to code I manage. They aren't great at specifying what it is they need, but even when I ask them questions, they only supply some of the details I'm going to need before I can make this thing. The reaction to this varies. In some cases, I know enough about what they're doing that I can guess what they need to fill in the blanks and it comes out close enough to what they're thinking that modifications are slight and mostly cosmetic. In other cases, I'm told to do exactly what they said, whether I think it's a good idea or not, which often leads to the system being subpar for most of their needs, in some cases so misaligned that they don't bother using it or they use it in a very different way than it was originally proposed.

Keep in mind that these are, in most cases, stories of people working at the same company I am who have asked for something and who can ask for code changes by sending an email, and it still ends up like this. Governments are in the worse situation of specifying their needs to some other company, not the developers directly. The developers won't be given the option to guess at any ambiguous parts of the system because it would make it harder to prove that the supplier had completed the contract, and it wouldn't help if they had that flexibility because those developers don't understand what local government really needs. Meanwhile, local governments generally don't have the resources to bring in the dev team and let them work alongside all the workers for enough time to gain an understanding of the needs because that would effectively cost as much as putting each of the engineers through training for every job they have. It's no surprise to me that they specify some database and set of forms they think they need and get exactly what they said, but find that what they said has gaps and isn't very flexible when their requirements change. Asking the supplier to write the spec is likely to mean that the supplier has some meetings with a few managers, writes down what they say, and writes a spec with those forms instead. The product will look different, but the quality will be similar.

NixCon drops Palmer Luckey's AI combat drone maker Anduril as sponsor due to military ties

Re: Mealy-Mouthed Code of Conduct

I see your pedantry and raise more:

"1. Pedantic note: "between our actions" should be, "between their actions"."

Not necessarily. As long as the person who wrote the document is also in the set of participants, then "our" is perfectly correct grammatically. I don't know where they got the text, but it's probably written by someone who is already part of their group in some way and does something more than writing generic terms, so the chances seem high that they are a participant.

"2. An action will have whatever effect it will have on a community; wishing really hard will not make that action have a stronger effect."

Correct, but the document doesn't say that the tools available for strengthening those relationships, as they say, only include "wishing really hard". Depending on what their actions are, that could have a much more threatening sound. That line could work pretty well for an evil group vowing to step up the plans for conquering the world.

"How does one distinguish harassing photography or recording from non-harassing photography or recording?"

People have to do it all the time in courts, in laws, and in response to some people who take the "stalking" joke* too near actual stalking.

* It seems popular to say, in a jocular manner, that looking up information about a person was stalking them. For most people, saying this means looking at their LinkedIn or other social media pages from a Google search. If it went further, it might be real stalking, or at least unnecessary behavior that a lot of people would find unsettling.

Linux on the Arm-based Thinkpad X13S: It's getting there

Re: Still lots to do

You may not have put it in the article, but you did put it into your comment and it wasn't more useful there. If you intend to compare processors, you generally have to be specific enough to avoid ambiguity. Not bothering to find a comparison is also valid if it's not important, which may have been the case for your article.

Re: Pepperidge farm remembers

"RISC-V offers freedom from planned obsolescence."

Why do you think that? RISC-V processors will get faster like any others, and software designed to run on them will do as all software does and grow to fit the resources available. Devices with the first range of RISC-V processors will eventually be too slow to run the latest software, just as ones in other ISAs do. If it's about the ISA in general, they don't really go bad. This is evident from the fact that you can still run RISC OS on a modern ARM chip or DOS on a modern X86 one. The reason those systems don't run flawlessly are due to the many other pieces of hardware they don't support, not the CPUs refusing to support or run them. RISC-V will become obsolete in the same ways and about as fast as other ISAs, and if I had to point to a difference, the main one is the ease of adding proprietary extensions to it, which if it happens too much, means that RISC-V will become obsolete faster as people adopt extensions that weren't in the original system. I'm curious to hear your reasons, because I think this is one of those incorrect assumptions I was talking about.

Re: Pepperidge farm remembers

"If you want a RISC-powered laptop computer"

This, as I see it, is the problem. There are a lot of people with strong opinions about ISAs who appear to have ideological points for their preference which aren't really connected to any benefit. Preferring an ARM computer because of battery life makes some sense, but preferring it because it's RISC does not help. These opinions vary. Some people, for example, are incredibly excited about RISC-V and want it in everything, right now, even though they appear to have no idea why it would be helpful and in some cases are under the false belief that it will mean advantages for open source software which it will not bring. If you want a RISC laptop for its own sake, it might be worth considering why that helps you. If you don't have an answer, you may be wasting your time and resources on something you wouldn't benefit from if you succeeded.

Re: Still lots to do

"But really, given the price point, neither CPU nor GPU performance is the point here."

This doesn't mean the same thing to me that it appears to mean to you. If I said something like that, it means that the price is low, so a weak CPU is acceptable. You later admit that it's a premium price, and some searching indicates that this price is $1099 US, although the UK site seems to suggest that it's £711 at the moment (probably without VAT, it doesn't say and discounted from £1579 so the prices are all over the place). At prices like that, I have various options for more powerful machines, and something else will have to make the deciding factor. From your brief comments, battery life would seem like the best bet for that distinguishing factor.

"There's \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 with the 64-bit binaries in it, and no way to tell if they're x86 or Arm binaries."

The GUI should contain something to help, but finding out which architecture a binary is is pretty easy if you're willing to run a script. The executables indicate their architecture in the PE header, and if you don't want to parse that yourself you can use a command like file (available on every OS though Windows will need a manual installation) which will do it for you and give you the answer. I would prefer that Microsoft add that to the GUI, although I expect that they'd point out that anyone who knows what that difference entails probably knows enough to do that check.

You forgot the next step: and then the image is frozen and that kernel, and that one only, is the one you need to run this laptop. Somewhere in a forum is a person who claims that mainline 6.23 will run and you only have to follow this twenty-step process involving two anonymous git repos and an existing functional image to swap it in. At the bottom past the steps is a link which goes to a forum post which explains that, if you do that, the screen unavoidably switches off every ten minutes and the USB ports only work at 2.0 speeds, but you can fix the former with a script which keeps the screen working by disabling power management.

Sometimes, I wonder why we bother making and using all the ARM-powered Linux devices. Only a few are at all comparable to what Linux on X64 and X86 is like, and the best of them still tend to have a few problems. No, that hasn't stopped me having quite a few of them myself, but my primary machines still have Intel or AMD processors in them.

Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox open to all: Now websites can tap into your habits directly for ads

Re: Worry less.

I think you might have the wrong idea about why we, or at least I, hate targeted advertising. It's not because I'm afraid that the advertising will be too useful. If the ads were more useful, maybe that would be a weak argument in favor of keeping it on, and that it is as useless for me as it is for you means that it's extra pointless. My problem with it is that the data they're collecting is not data I want them to have, and they are not very good about keeping it to themselves. Not only do I have to deal with ad networks collecting and storing it, but with anyone who buys or steals it having copies. I don't know what's in there, and there are ways that both correct and incorrect stuff in that dataset could be harmful. The quality of the resulting advertisements is mostly irrelevant; if they were collecting that stuff and not showing any to me at all, that would still be a problem.

Re: Sneaky

I generally find that if sites don't like Firefox because they want something Chrome-like, then they are mostly fine with Firefox showing a Chrome user agent. This is usually when I stop using that site. The only exceptions that come to mind are things that use the hardware access APIs that Google decided should be in there, and I don't like them anyway (no, I don't think it's cool to program a development board through the browser when I can flash my own image over serial, thanks). There must be others, but fortunately I've not had to see them too much.

If you like to play along with the illusion of privacy, smart devices are a dumb idea

Re: Enough! Eliminate the root cause

"medications in the US often have text similar to "Compare to <brand name>" on the packaging – that's targeted advertising."

No, it isn't. Nobody was targeted, and everyone who reads the container sees the message. Targeting isn't putting a message somewhere so everyone who goes there reads it, but getting information about people to make a, usually automated, decision about whether to show them the advert or not.

"in the US a blanket ban would almost certainly fall foul of the First Amendment."

I'm sure someone would try it, but it wouldn't work. For the same reason, false advertising isn't protected as free speech. We all have the right to lie, but doing so in a commercial arrangement is illegal because the legislation applies to the result of the crime, not the words used. If they chose to make that illegal, and I doubt that they will, it would not violate the first amendment in the US.

Re: Why would a Washing Machine require my Date of Birth ...

Or you do what my parents did and teach the children how to use the washing machine. Operation really isn't that hard. You would have to work hard to break it, and knowing the steps to properly use it (maybe three of them) means there's very little chance of error. If it manages to break, it is either mechanical failure or intentional, and the latter is very unlikely.

Re: please forgive my lack of knowledge...

That's why we have encryption on as many communication methods as possible. The smart devices probably aren't breaking your encryption, and many of them simply aren't powerful enough to be useful at doing it, but if they did, they could intercept your packets between your WiFi devices and the access point. However, if you're using an encrypted connection at a higher layer, for example HTTPS to communicate with a website or a communication platform with encryption, then just obtaining those packets from your WiFi will only leak a small amount of information. They might be able to tell that you're doing something with your medical provider's server, but not what specifically you or they are saying. Nothing prevents them from turning those devices into spies, but most likely, they'd need some much more powerful servers at the other end to do the heavy lifting because most IoT devices have some pretty weak processors in them. That's expensive and most users' communications are not valuable enough to go to that effort, especially because that's a few crimes wrapped up in one and most companies choose not to commit crimes that are that blatant, preferring a more oblivious crime that they can argue is so minor that nobody should care.

Re: Why would a Washing Machine require my Date of Birth ...

And also that most of the people who aren't old enough to sign a contract already understand that the sites aren't checking the birthday, so 29 August 1978 is a perfectly acceptable input whether that's your real birthday or not. For that matter, a lot of us who are old enough also know and do that because what do these people want our actual birthday for. I write it down somewhere in case someone requires it for authentication, which they shouldn't. So far, it hasn't proven necessary.

The Anti Defamation League is Musk's latest excuse for Twitter's tanking ad revenue

Re: Musk's Master Plan

Since Twitter's still in California and the ADL is in New York, both of which have legislation for that purpose, I don't see why that would pose a problem. Technically, X Corp is a Nevada corporation, but Nevada has anti-SLAPP legislation as well. I don't see why Texas would come into it at all, although they too have some provision for countering such suits if it did. Still, there appears to be no reason why Texas would have any power over a suit between a California-based corporation suing a New York-based organization.

Re: Musk's Master Plan

I assumed the even split to be half assuming sarcasm, half assuming it was real, and not really anyone wanting to upvote that sentiment if it was real. Things are not that dire here. Unfortunately, there are other places that would function that way. Still, I think the votes indicate that the sarcasm was not clear enough, not that we have people who believe all that crap together (I don't want to speculate or think too much about how many people believe some component of it).

Re: They can both go away.

Independent of the rest of this discussion, I'd like to argue against a misuse of that law that seems incredibly common. Read that statement again. It says that it gets more likely for Nazism to be mentioned during a discussion. Nowhere in the text does it say that, when it is mentioned, it should not have been or the person who mentioned it is wrong. You could make the point about almost anything else that becomes more likely to be mentioned if we keep talking about some topic, because people will make connections to stuff they're familiar with. The person who first mentions Nazis may be wrong, but that is by no means guaranteed and wasn't even suggested by the original creator of the principle. I find it a bit weird when people start quoting the law as if it argues for the correctness of their point, as it does not in general or for you specifically.

Want tunes with that? India-made POS terminal includes a speaker

Re: Noise pollution.

The beeps are there to help you understand things like whether you have successfully scanned something or you need to move it around some more and can also indicate if you've accidentally scanned it twice. That means you don't have to go through the whole receipt at the end to make sure you didn't scan things wrong. By the way, if your next point was going to be having someone else scan the products, the beeps work for them as well. Given all the other noise involved in a shop, the beeps don't bother me that much. There are thumping and crinkling as people move items, plenty of talking, probably background music, clanking of carts, so it's not going to be quiet anyway.

Re: Why the confused headline and opening paragraph

Yes, they would be happy to do so, and most of them would be honest. However, it would also be quite possible for them to take a lot more money than you planned to give them, something that the system won't do on their behalf. Someone who wanted to make sure that they were paying the amount they expected to pay might be more comfortable using the computer themselves.

Take as a parallel voting where paper ballots are used. There are some locations that have machines such that someone who can either not read or write on the ballot due to a disability can have a machine do that with effectively a big scanner and I imagine an automated pencil but it's probably a lot more like a printer. I imagine that voters may feel more certain that that machine has marked their ballot as they instructed rather than if they got some other person and asked them to please mark my vote for candidate A even if you (the assistant) hate candidate A, even though the majority of people willing to help out would not do anything that dishonest.

IT needs more brains, so why is it being such a zombie about getting them?

I simultaneously disagree with you and them. I think you could do something useful by throwing money at the problem, but they act like you can get a person educated in a generic way that's primarily self-directed. You certainly can learn a lot of things, especially IT-related skills, entirely on your own. However, no matter how good the guides and resources are, that mostly works when you have someone motivated to learn a lot of tiny details and creative enough to put them together in a useful way. The benefit of more organized education is the ability to learn from others, both the teachers and the other students. I gained a lot of skills by discussing what I was doing with others who were interested and capable of doing similar and hearing their ideas, and I passed some ideas of my own to my fellows, and I also got some valuable information by talking with professors who had long careers in industry before they turned to teaching. No matter how great the lecture someone records and puts up on YouTube, it won't give you those things. You can do without them, but if you're going to, you don't need to bother with more textbooks as there are plenty of those for free right now which provide the information a self-taught student will need.

From browser brat to backend boss: Will WASM win the web wars?

Re: There is no direction to go but up, starting from EXCEL

I didn't vote on it, but do you really not understand why people might support what they said and why your views on their comment are similarly open to debate? For example, you say that they have "no knowledge of the tech". You don't cite any reason for saying that and it wouldn't matter because they didn't say enough about anything to be able to guess what their experiences are.

As for why someone might be negative about Excel, it's because it's a really inefficient method of coding which supports almost none of the useful features of programming languages, and if you rely on it, those differences will start to be noticed. The original comment that started our thread pointed this out: if you can take a spreadsheet that takes twenty minutes to load, and possibly longer to update, and turn it into a task that lasts seconds without having to optimize it beyond a generic compiled language, then Excel is not only showing significant inefficiencies such that a 99.59% speed boost was possible, but it's inefficiency that is clearly noticeable to the user. At that rate, you always do the 99% speedup just because it's there, but if it's 0.5 seconds to 5 ms, then it doesn't matter as much unless you're doing it frequently. When you're improving from minutes to seconds, it always matters. This is a real problem, and you've already read about it here, but you attribute negative views toward Excel to snobbery and insult the person who wrote it on claims you can't back up.