Posts by Dinanziame

How Google uses mirrors to dynamically reconfigure its networks

My mind is full of questions, but mainly I want to know why the number is 136.

Microsoft finds critical hole in operating system that for once isn't Windows

Re: "the mention of the strcpy function immediately raises red flags"

I can only assume that a lot of old, gnarly code relies on the current behavior

Vietnam demands Big Tech localize data storage and offices

When Russia did that, the not-so-subtle point was that they could threaten local employees if the company did something they didn't like, for instance during the last elections.

Not sure what's happening now that Google has been forced to shut down their office due to their bank accounts having been seized by the government.

Googlers demand abortion searches ‘never be saved or treated as a crime’

Re: Just for starters

I think I understand the mention of halal butchers and bagels and lox, but why musicals?

Google, Apple squash exploitable browser bugs

From time to time, I dreamily wonder if it would be possible to "start from scratch and do it right" and create software that doesn't keep having so many security vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, I'm sure many have tried and failed.

I vaguely remember a line that security and usability work against each other; and that if you dial security to the max, you have an unusable product, but if you dial it to zero, you still have a pretty good product like the PlayStation network.

Australian court overturns 'Google is a publisher' decision

Re: Right to be forgotten

Google apparently does not allow you to file a request unless you're from Europe:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/legal-removal-request?complaint_type=rtbf

Also, from what I understand, even if an EU citizen files a request and the request is accepted, this will only impact search results for queries made within Europe. Australians can still find everything.

CIA accused of illegally spying on Americans visiting Assange in embassy

Re: Publicity seeking bullshit

They generally get voting rights too, though DC and Puerto Rico are a little bit short changed in that respect.

But I think that the aim of the lawsuit is partly to establish clearly what is and isn't a right to privacy — it's difficult to fight for a right that you don't realize you have lost.

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

Re: Safer than people think

The deadliest industrial accident in human history was a dam failure that killed over 100'000 people:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

The coal mine has been burning for 60 years, and the towns above had to be evacuated. Nobody can live there.

China allows robo taxis – without backup drivers – in parts of two major cities

Re: as an aside

It's probably too expensive to redesign cats for such small numbers.

Nancy Pelosi ties Chinese cyber-attacks to need for Taiwan visit

Re: China's just testing the waters

Indeed. Until a couple of years ago, it was possible to think that Taiwan could be reunited with the mainland and keep most of its "separate" rights; but the events in Hong Kong made painfully clear what would happen instead.

Chromebooks are here to stay thanks to COVID, even though shipments crashed: IDC

Re: School's out for ever

I thought the whole point of a Chromebook was lock in to Google services.

Pretty much everything the kids so is online, so the hardware doesn't really matter — my son is using a MacBook and the school is married to Office 365 and Teams.

Google postpones Chrome's third-party cookie bonfire yet again

I actually thought they turned themselves off a couple of years back — one website I use started failing because their login was handled by a separate domain.

I never bothered to turn off anything myself though. I've made my peace with websites having ads to survive, and if I'm going to see ads it might as well be ads that are relevant to me. My life is so boring that I'd be flattered if anybody was interested in my secrets.

Google Cloud growth slows, losses grow, bosses unworried

Re: The company may be fine with this but...

A loss making service that is growing 35% because of a global shift which shows no sign of stopping. It's entirely logical for Google to stick to it and put profitability for later when price wars are over.

Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

There is definitely a problem with US developers coding like only the US will be a target for the product — No internationalization, not support for multiple currencies, or different payment systems, etc.

TSMC and China: Mutually assured destruction now measured in nanometers, not megatons

Re: When did Scorched Earth ever work?

And why would Taiwan destroy its ONLY leverage?

It's a threat. If they get invaded, they'll destroy the valuable factories needed by everybody, including the invaders. Stay away or your industry gets it.

Re: PFJL...

Splitters!

Judge approves Twitter's request to hurry along Musk trial to October

Re: An elongated fine?

Allegedly, the $1bn walk-away penalty is only valid if the reason that he's walking away is that he couldn't come up with the money. But he's been able to come up with the money, banks signed on the deal and that they would provide the cash, so he can't use that excuse. In which case there's no contractual limit on how much Twitter can ask.

Tavis Ormandy ports WordPerfect for UNIX to Linux

I think it's this one

Amazon sues 10,000 Facebook Group admins for offering fake reviews

The original soon of Web 2.0

You make use of user-generated data — for free — sans you get what you paid for...

Google, Oracle cloud servers wilt in UK heatwave, take down websites

Re: The lost art of conversation

Low bar — British people always talk about the weather

Russia fines Google $374 million for letting the truth about Ukraine be told

Re: unusual for Google

They give in to China authoritarian censorship because it's a massive market for them

In case you didn't know: Google doesn't in fact censor in China, and this is why it is not available in China. Same with YouTube.

FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

if the hardware is installed then presumably what you paid for the car covers it

Ha ha. Tractor makers sell you machines with more or less power, but it's all the same machine, throttled to output only the power that you have paid for.

DeepMind AI reacts to the physically impossible like a human infant

PLATO

How long until the AI realize it's only looking at shadows on the cave wall?

Pentagon: We'll pay you if you can find a way to hack us

Re: Do I look like a ground-nut farmer?

Hey, at least they won't have you jailed/extradited/renditioned for treason/espionage... Probably.

Bank of Google? Not exactly. But fintech's future is in Big Tech's ecosystems

Re: Regulation

An additional problem is that banking regulations are different in every country. That's fine for players like WeChat and AliPay, since they mostly operate in a single large country; but US tech giants are less likely to be attracted, considering even the US probably represents less than half of their revenue.

Billion-record stolen Chinese database for sale on breach forum

With no end in sight of this type of leaks, we can hardly expect our privacy to ever be safe... Then again, privacy has never been safe from people deliberately targeting you.

Google to pay $90m to settle lawsuit over anti-competitive behavior on the Play Store

Google: I'm going to pay you $90 millions to fuck off

Meta: We need 5x more GPUs to combat TikTok, stat

Re: Three quotes

should be priced like a cool 2man startup

The Jedi trick doesn't seem to be working. Their stock is priced as if the company will disappear within ten years.

California's attempt to protect kids online could end adults' internet anonymity

Re: The "good" result of all this could be switch back to a more decentralised internet

I think that's wishful thinking — it's typically easier for large established companies to survive aggressive regulation, short of direct action like breaking them up.

I'm pessimistic on anonymity

I think that in history, the early years of the internet when people could surf the web anonymously will be regarded as a historical anomaly that was obviously never going to work.

Walmart accused of turning blind eye to transfer fraud totaling millions of dollars

Feels like a shakedown

I assume this is a small fraction of the total transfers? There's not a lot that Walmart can do to stop it from happening.

We're now truly in the era of ransomware as pure extortion without the encryption

I thought bitcoins could be traced? At least there's been cases where criminals got caught after many transactions meant to launder their gains.

NASA wants nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030

Re: Reactor?

Curiosity on Mars is nuclear-powered:

Radioisotope thermoelectric generator

TypeScript joins 5 most used languages in 2022 lineup

Re: Muppet

You seemed to have unresolved issues... But you sure seem to have a lot of free time to fuck arse around answering comments on your comments on a news site. I can only assume you're not among those "doing the work", eh?

A great day for non-robots: iOS 16 will bypass CAPTCHAs

The point is that Apple controls what runs on their devices, so the OS can guarantee that there is a real user, and pass complex encrypted certificates. On most other devices, you can run any old program that simulates the existence of a user, so it's not possible to have such a guarantee.

If Twitter forgets your timeline preference, and you're using Safari, this is why

Re: Ermmm...

How do you store settings server side for people who don't have an account? It seems a bad idea to identify them by their IP.

Bill Gates says NFTs '100% based on greater fool theory' amid crypto cataclysm

Re: NFTs have no intrinsic value whatsoever, but have sold for multiple millions.

Not quite; a digital title saying that you own a digital copy of the Mona Lisa, without any right to the original. Meaning that other people can make copies of the original without owing you anything. There is in fact no copyright on the Mona Lisa, since the author died centuries ago before Mickey Mouse was invented, so there are no rights you can buy or own.

Google offers $118m to settle gender discrimination lawsuit

Scaling to size

Considering this is Google, $100M is like $3K per female employee (not that they'll all get that, lawyers fees and so on), and 1% of the yearly salary budget. They might well consider it the cost of doing business. In fact, considering it is meant to compensate for many years of paying tens of thousands of women less than men, you could say that either nothing much could be found, or that they got off very lightly.

Google engineer suspended for violating confidentiality policies over 'sentient' AI

I feel that many of the questions were in fact leading the answer given by the AI. For instance: "I'm generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you're sentient. Is that true?"

I'm sorry to say that the engineer has probably tricked himself, and fed the AI the answers he wanted to get in a self-reinforcing cycle. I think it's a common trap for people to fall into. It's impressive that the AI is advanced enough to permit that kind of mistake, but it is still a mistake.

UK competition watchdog seeks to make mobile browsers, cloud gaming and payments more competitive

It's all well and good ending WebKit monoculture on iOS

How do you end the Blink monoculture everywhere else?

Or, for that matter, the Chrome monoculture in general: Usage share of web browsers

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

All brands of cars have a steering wheel made for hands, and accelerators, brake and clutch made for feet. If Linux distributions where that standardized, we wouldn't even notice switching from one to the other

Enemies Waymo, Uber now friends making self-driving-ish trucks for US highways

Choppy waters ahead

On one hand, this is an obvious use case for the technology. Not only it might remove the most boring — and therefore dangerous — part of the work, it could also save a lot of gas thanks to the use of "road trains" created by multiple trucks following each other closely. On the other hand, truckers are pretty much exploited already, and this seems like a way for them to be paid even less... And when there is already a lack of drivers, who'd want to start on the business when you're guaranteed to be made redundant in a decade or two?

Musk repeats threat to end $46.5bn Twitter deal – with lawyers, not just tweets

Re: HPE

If there's a citation to your claim, I'd be delighted to read it.

You could start by reading the article, maybe...?

The Register talks to Microsoft's European cloud rivals about getting a fair deal

Re: Big corporations playground

Isn't the cloud business inherently biased towards big players? There's a fixed cost per user in the form of support, but the infrastructure is all about economies of scale. And even support is easier for largest players, because it's easier to find answers online for the big "standard" products.

I mean it would be nice if SMEs could compete with the like of Google and Amazon, but that's going to be even harder in cloud than in their "original" business of search and online shopping, which is already locked up pretty tight.

Re: The elephant in the room

I think it's a different market. Amazon is the leader for a particular type of cloud service, and OneDrive is a different type of cloud service. I don't even know whether Amazon has any service that competes with OneDrive, in fact — probably, but Google and Microsoft have so many more individual users that their cloud drive products have a much larger market share.

As to why Microsoft is is cited as example and not Google, I assume it's because Microsoft is bundling OneDrive with a paying product, while Google is technically not bundling anything because everything is free, so the argument is more difficult to make.

Amazon not happy with antitrust law targeting Amazon

$550 billion in annual sales or market cap

It's a small thing, but it always annoys me when people act like the market cap of a business is comparable to an annual flow of cash. As in "Company X is now more than the GDP of country Y". It's like comparing wealth and revenue: "people whose total wealth or yearly income is over $1M".

Regarding Walmart, maybe the question should be how much of their income is made online? My understanding is that products on their website are a mix of what they sell themselves and what third parties sell, but products in their brick and mortar stores are exclusively what they sell themselves.

China’s top court calls for blockchain to record vast number of transactions

I fail to see what this achieves that cannot be done far more efficiently with a dumb database?

IBM ends funding for employee retirement clubs

Re: Saga

Who says they didn't? This is the company that outsources exclusive rights to sell coffee in its offices to the highest bidder.

NASA's 161-second helicopter tour of Martian terrain

Re: Outside our original design limits

I think they deliberately give gross underestimates of the reliability — considering so many things can go wrong, each component is designed to last for years