Posts by Dinanziame

One year after Roe v Wade overturned and 'uterus surveillance' looks grim

Yes, people are. This is because a lot of these Supreme Court arguments are shameless justifications for whatever people want to happen anyway. For instance, since you are bringing up recreational drugs, the fact that growing your own marijuana was ruled as something the Federal government may forbid under the interstate commerce clause of the constitution, arguing that people who grow their own marijuana have an influence on the illegal interstate commerce of marijuana because they stop participating in it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich

You may argue that two wrongs don't make a right, but one needs to be wilfully blind to ignore the political reasons for the reversal of Roe v Wade.

Google bug bounties inch closer to Microsoft's payouts

Some people do it as part of their job, for others it's a hobby. I suppose being the recipient of a bounty is also nice to have on your resume when you apply for a position.

More importantly, it also keeps the public safer.

As for the matter of incompetence, let the company that built a million-user product without security flaws throw the first stone...

It wasn't so long ago that companies would sue researchers who reported vulnerabilities in their software. There's nothing wrong with bounty programmes. And yeah, some vulnerabilities could be sold for more to black hat hackers, but then again crime is often more profitable than honesty.

Not sure how that's related in any way to newspapers hiding government incompetence.

Google accused of urging Android devs to mislabel apps to get forbidden kids ad data

Re: A silly crime

I think that says more about you than about your workmate.

Google has blocked in its in-car software rivals, claims German watchdog

I don't get it

What are "services for infotainment system"? Apart from the GPS/maps system, what else is relevant on a car dashboard? Are car makers really complaining they would want to have Google Maps but their own phone app, or their own AI assistant?

Where's my money?! Now USA Today publisher sues Google over online advertising

Re: Feel the sympathy melt away

I'm somehow missing why they think they have a particular standing to sue. "We have a website and we didn't get rich"?

Google searchers from years past can get paid for pilfered privacy

One wonders how, exactly, they came up with that number. Can they justify it? Will they show all their work?

It's a settlement, not a ruling. Which means that Google was willing to pay that much to make the lawsuit go away, and the class action lawyers were not optimistic that they could get more. That's it, essentially.

That said, I assume the logic went on the lines of what's the tiny percentage of queries that contained private information, how often did the destination website get that information, what's the actual damage considering the users were willing to send an unencrypted query to Google...

Megaupload programmers cop a plea in New Zealand to avoid extradition

Re: New Zealand lost its way

At least they were properly charged in the country where they did the crime, and were not deported to a country where multiple life sentences are common.

Google Lens now can spot problematic skin spots, or not

Re: ByeBye Medical Insurance

In what kind of country would a medical insurance be allowed to hike fees for people who are sick?

Europe teases breaking up Google over ad monopoly

Jail time for executives has happened a few times in the past (VW emissions scandal), but it's unlikely to happen here because you have to prove criminal intent; meaning they deliberately hid what they were doing because they knew it was illegal. By comparison, Google generally defends its anticompetitive behavior by saying "yeah of course we're doing that... why wouldn't we? It's good for the users"

Re: "it may have abused its dominance to favor its own AdX platform"

The EU has fined Google 8 billion Euros so far:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Google_by_the_European_Union

Likely some more billions this time again.

Clippy designer was too embarrassed to include him in his portfolio

I liked clippy

I mean, not as an assistant — it was bloody useless. But i remember clicking on it to rotate through all the animations. My favourite was when it came "closer" to the screen and "tapped" on it.

Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse

It's important to note that you won't be directly seeing the keyboard on which you type. You'll be seeing the internal screen on which is displayed what the device's external camera sees, with a tiny lag which is probably going to make typing on a keyboard a jarring experience. Just trying typing on your keyboard without looking directly at it, but looking at your phone with the photo app displaying the keyboard. You'd think the display is responsive, but good luck writing anything.

This Vision Pro does not seem to be made for walking around. It does let you see what's around you, by displaying on the internal screen what external cameras see, but the promotional videos mostly show people sitting still and not moving their head much, and it's probably not a coincidence. I assume that the lag between reality and display is perceptible enough to induce motion sickness.

I can believe in it as an entertainment device, but as a work device I find it unlikely. So far, most work meetings, even remote, require a keyboard to be useful.

Scientists think they may have cracked life support for Martian occupation

Re: May??

In the first place, aren't cosmic radiations due to the lack of magnetic field the biggest problem?

1. This crypto-coin is called Jimbo. 2. $8m was stolen from its devs in flash loan attack

I'm confused

I'm not sure what happened that was illegal here? It appears that these people have set their own algorithms to buy and sell their own token, unsupervised, at variable prices. Somebody came up with a better algorithm to do the same thing and made a mint. What's the crime? It's like having a good day on the stock market.

Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

Re: So yeah how are those autonomous cars coming along ?

Oh no, the autonomous cars are a solution to a very definite problem, which is that we have to drive cars. First, it is an insanely boring task; and second, we regularly kill people while we do it.

Amazon to shutter its Chinese Appstore – the one used by hardly anyone, anywhere

Re: Does anyone even use Appstores on smart devices anymore?

At the moment, my banking app is probably the easiest way, and might soon be almost the only way, to pay my bills. Some banks require two devices to authenticate yourself, so unless you want to use two different PCs you rather have to download their app. The app from the national train company is also the simplest way by far to buy a ticket. The app from the national topography service is very useful when hiking (much better than the one coming with the phone).

Maybe you don't use app stores anymore, but I can say with confidence you are in a very small minority.

Russian IT guy sent to labor camp for DDoSing Kremlin websites

Re: "illegal invasion"

So am I, but I still hope nobody ever calls it a "legal invasion." It's a terrible sentence, even when the invasion itself is justified.

"illegal invasion"

I hope Russia loses the war and gets kicked out of Ukraine; but I can't prevent myself from wincing when I read, like in this article, the words "illegal invasion". The expression is at best absurd, and at worst hypocritical. Invasions are not regulated by laws, and cannot be legal or illegal (Which does not prevent the possiblity of war crimes during said invasions, but that's a different matter). For that matter, if you ever entertain the idea of using the words "legal invasion"... please don't. Regardless of the invader, invaded, and motives, it's just wrong.

Teen in court after '$600K swiped from DraftKings gamblers'

Re: New password for everything

Until the password manager gets hacked, and then you're in deep trouble

Privacy Sandbox, Google's answer to third-party cookies, promised within months

Re: Sounds worse

Note that all of these are replacements for techniques that are currently enabled by third-party cookies, and that are far more intrusive from the privacy point of view. It can't get worse than it already is.

Search the web at least once every two years or risk losing your Google account

Re: Our internal analysis...

So just mandate 2FA then, Shirley.

Yeah, no. There's probably hundreds of active users who will never move to 2FA, because it's too complicated/not giving Google my phone number/not buying a key fob...

Will LLMs take your job? Only if you let them

Re: Great quote

Yeah, I read so many SciFi stories about people losing their jobs to a robot, but curiously not a single one of them was about a SciFi writer losing their job to a chatbot

EU and Canada on waiting list for Google's AI chatbot Bard

Re: Growing competition

At the moment, the estimates I've seen is that each query costs on the order of a cent. It's not much, but they'll still be losing money for a while until they manage to get it under the cost of a subscription

YouTube's 'Ad blockers not allowed' pop-up scares the bejesus out of netizens

Re: I do feel for Google.... but...

The price is not set by how much they would make through ads otherwise, it is set to maximize how much money they make. They do a study of how many people would accept paying for $2, $5, $10, $15, $20, and they chose the price point which maximizes how much they make. There is no particular reason to think this would correspond to how much they would make from ads. It's like thinking that plane tickets are set by comparing how much it would cost people to walk instead.

This is also how are set the prices of chocolates, clothes, cell phones, cars, and pretty much anything in life whose price is not regulated.

Re: Subscription

It would make no sense for them to do that. It's much better to have a billion users who grumble about ads than a couple of thousands who will watch very few free videos.

YouTube is what it is because of two reasons:

1) all the users who use it

2) all the creators who use it

The first reason is more important than the second, because creators can easily be on multiple platforms, it's worth it for them as long as there are enough users. But if you lose half the users, the creators won't come anymore. If YouTube becomes subscription-only, the vast majority of users will leave, and YouTube will die.

EU-US Privacy Framework could make life easier for a data biz, if it survives

Considering both the EU and the US are in the Northern hemisphere, there is no ambiguity. Same as it's perfectly fine for public clocks to indicate the time without mentioning the time zone, even though the meaning of a given time is location-dependent.

Dell reneges on remote work promise, tells staff to wear pants at least 3 days a week

Depends on the job. I've found it much harder to ramp up engineers remotely. I normally tell new team members they should ask me questions about ten times a day, and this really goes much better if we are sitting two meters apart. Text conversations are much slower, and video meetings are not so good either.

So you would interview new hires via text? You would teach courses at university via text? You would explain your new design via text? You would present your product to customers via text?

Yees... On the other hand, you regularly see stats published that the industry is lacking ten times more people than that. I don't think people who are laid off have difficulties finding new jobs.

The first real robot war is coming: Machine versus lawyer

Re: LLM. All your works belong to us.

What I find funny is that, though I read a lot of science fiction stories about people losing their jobs to robots, none of them imagined science fiction writers losing their jobs to chatbots.

Google sues CryptBot slingers, gets court order to shut down malware domains

Re: But…

Scammers have some of the best customer support on the internet.

Microsoft may stop bundling Teams with Office amid antitrust probe threat

Re: Saturation point reached.

If I understand correctly, the DMA does have provisions that messaging apps should somehow interoperate. If that's correct, it's going to be very interesting.

Techie sacked after jetting to tropical island on sick leave

Nice coworker

I'd want to leave a company staffed with such nice people.

Taiwan asks US if it could chill out on the anti-China rhetoric

In this case, I feel a certain numbet of politicians are all too happy to pile on the Taiwan issue and ratchet up the rhetoric, to look good towards their constituents. Taiwan might well wish they would stop raising the issue. Taiwan is de facto a country, and it would be nice if it could be recognized as such, but some things cannot be hurried or forced ro happen.

Re: So true..

We'll see how well you ride a bicycle when you're 80 years old. Those I know can barely walk ten minutes. And congrats on bringing his son in the discussion, as if he was relevant.

Student requested access to research data. And waited. And waited. And then hacked to get root

Not caught either... Or they never caught up with me

I once unintentionally created a security vulnerability in the lab website by creating a PHP webpage that allowed users to upload files into a subdirectory — for instance, upload an arbitrary PHP file that would then be executed on request, including executing bash commands. I realized the problem afterwards but didn't fix it, which came in handy later when I needed to grab a data file from my private directory once but couldn't get ssh to work for some reason; I was able to upload a PHP that would copy my file to the website and download it from there.

How much to infect Android phones via Google Play store? How about $20k

How much for iPhones

Don't tell me it's not possible

China somehow got through COVID without MS Teams but – phew! – it's arrived

Re: I wonder....

It happens regularly that western companies give up on making money in China and exit the market. Of course, no company ever did that of they were making significant money there...

Re: No morals then

Slight correction: Google products are pretty much all unusable in China, because indeed they don't censor results. It's probably not a big market for them.

When Google cost cutting goes molecular: Staples, sticky tape, and PC sweating

They never print anything at Google. They don't want to leave a paper trail.

Italy bans ChatGPT for 'unlawful collection of personal data'

"there may not be a lawful basis"

This sentence raises my hackles. It is full of FUD, and seems to imply that unless you have a law authorizing something, it must be forbidden by default. If there is a law being broken, then point out which one, clearly; otherwise go fuck yourself.

Had enough of Android? First 'Focal' based Ubuntu Touch is out

Re: Sadly not tempted for now

What Linux on a phone needs to succeed (and isn't going to get) is the ability to be installed on virtually any old phone

Yeah, that's not happening for a long time. The hardware inside phones are way too different for that to be possible.

Re: Renaming and discontinuing

Don't tell me what I don't already know.

Okay, so... er... 2+2=4... The Earth is round... er... The sky is blue...

Google Cloud pitches 'Gen Apps' – low-code AI-based tools, not post-millennial kids

Re: Angels and Daemons vs Beasts in the Cellar Funding Wolves of Wall Street

Peak inception right here

Judge grants subpoena to ID Twitter source code leaker

Technically, it's unfair to say Twitter has lost half of its value since Elon Musk bought it. It had actually already lost a quarter of its worth during the acquisition since it was an LBO. Twitter essentially borrowed $13B and gave it to shareholders, saddling itself with the debt in order to reduce its own worth, just so that Elon Musk and his pals could buy it for only $31B.

They'll probably have to declare bankruptcy to get out of paying the debt; otherwise the company is as good as dead.

China urges Apple to improve security and privacy

Re: Wait, what?

It does feel like the wolf reminding the little red riding hood not to talk to strangers.