Posts by Dinanziame

File suffixes: Who needs them? Well, this guy did

Nowadays, file extensions are not really used by the computer — they're used by humans who want to know the file format. It's a buggy system, since the extensions can be wrong. The Word document can have .txt extension, the .html file can be a JPEG.

When you are using a GUI, you can have icons that do the same job, but you are not always using a GUI; the GUI often just repeats what the extension claims without checking; and the GUI might not even understand the proprietary format.

But personally, I'll keep using extensions. I'd rather have some indication of what the file format is, and hope it was set properly, rather than having to guess every time.

In an arms race with criminals to protect our privacy, it's too early to admit defeat

I'm on the pessimistic side. Internet has been called the global village, and as people living in villages will tell you, it's impossible to keep secrets in a village.

In the early days of the internet, people used to wonder at this strange new phenomenon that people otherwise quite balanced would turn out to be abominable human beings on the internet, secure as they were in their anonymity. But this early internet anonymity has gradually eroded, and people have realized by now that not only it is difficult to stay anonymous, but what you write on the internet can catch up with you after a very long time. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

Apple tweaks AirTags to be less useful for stalkers, thieves

Re: Remove the Battery

You must have missed the numerous articles about various phones and laptops, often made by Apple, where the batteries are glued to the electronics and seem designed to make battery changes impossible...

D-Wave to go public after $1.2 billion merger deal with SPAC

I'm among those very sceptical about quantum computing, but that's not the important question: are they currently profitable?

Google Cloud started running its servers for an extra year, still loses billions

Re: For reference:

Not $32 profit, $32 revenue. Profit was $9.62 per person. That said, we can expect people in developed countries reading tech news are worth more, and we are contributing maybe up to $1 a day to Google's wealth. Ha! Who said I was worthless?

Chromebook sales in recession: Market saturation blamed as shipments collapse more than 63% in Q4

I think a lot of the drop has to do with how incredible the jump was last year when everybody was finding work from home solutions. 2020 and 2021 are going to be outliers for almost all metrics...

Microsoft revenue up by a fifth as world shuffles through the pandemic into the metaverse

Re: Metaverse is a failure

Is the Metaverse supposed to represent anything more than a sort of second Second Life? Possibly displaying digital stuff bought as NFTs?

Former Oracle execs warn that Big Red's auditing process is also a 'sales enablement tool'

Oracle does not have customers

Oracle has hostages.

Japan solves 5G airliner conundrum: Keep mobe masts 200m from airport approach paths. That's it

Re: Protectionism ?

I think everybody agrees on those facts, which makes it even more surprising that the rollout is having such issues in the US, and nowhere else.

Microsoft patches the patch that broke VPNs, Hyper-V, and left servers in boot loops

I think the most embarrassing issue recently was Outlook breaking at the start of the year because 2201010001 could not be stored into a signed 32-bit integer...

Tesla driver charged with vehicular manslaughter after deadly Autopilot crash

Re: Assisted cruise control

Tesla has actually removed radars from some of its cars, leaving only cameras. Reuters

And before people start saying "it's because they were not needed", the radar was removed only from cheaper models... Meaning it's simply a safety feature that was removed for cost reasons.

Billionaires see wealth double during pandemic as tech bros lead the charge

Re: "governments could tackle these inequalities"

a billionaire can undo by playing in another country

Nitpicking, but all of these people are US citizens, who famously have to pay US income tax even if they live somewhere else. And if they want to stop being US citizens, they have to pay estimated future tax bills on the way out.

Lawmakers propose TLDR Act because no one reads Terms of Service agreements

The world is too complicated and it should be simpler

By curiosity I read Google's Terms of Services. I had to hit PgDn 27 times to get to the end. Though the text was not dense, included whimsical drawings, and was quite easy to read. Mind you, this did not include the Privacy policy, which is 32 pages just by itself...

Bug in WebKit's IndexedDB implementation makes Safari 15 leak Google account info... and more

Re: Webkit...

From a developer's point of view, the rendering engine is the browser, and the UI is just a skin on top. It's like claiming two cars are different models because they're not painted the same color. Anyway, this article is about a security issue in the rendering engine, so it does not make sense to talk of the skin on top of the rendering engine.

Google and Facebook's top execs allegedly approved dividing ad market among themselves

"The user should be the customer"

I want to point out that one thing that is expected from customers and that internet users almost never do is pay. There's a large quantity of websites, not only Google/Facebook but also news and content creators, that only survive thanks to the ads. I don't know how much users would be willing to pay these websites for an ad-free experience, but I don't think it would be much.

Google: We disagree with Sonos patent ruling so much, we've changed our code to avoid infringement

Re: Makes me wonder

Probably not, they just didn't want to have to maintain two different repositories of Music (Google Play Music and YouTube Music), probably with separate copyright deals, etc.

It takes more clicks to reject their cookies than accept them, so France fines Facebook and Google over €200m

The saying is very nice and all, but the unfortunate truth is that the law is often unclear, and you sometimes don't know what it means until a judge says so. The French civil law system is slightly more clear on that point than the Anglosphere common law, which is worse because it explicitly puts court rulings above written statutes. When it sometimes takes years for courts to reach a final decision, it's a bit taking the piss to claim that "everybody should know the law".

Oh, you can be sure that Google and Facebook are paying these fines. It's not much for them, and that is fine, considering the issue is not so important. But they are paying.

It's the day before the grand opening but we need a firmware update. It'll be fine

Re: Windows upgrade in process

I managed to have my laptop install a Windows update and reboot — by default to Linux — during the twenty minutes coffee break after I had made it ready for my presentation.

You geeks have inherited the Earth, but what are you going to do with it?

I say we set up a companywide CoD4: Modern Warfare tournament each week

Dibs on the lobby TV!

— XKCD

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Re: Pronouncing...

Nit: The pianos and electric organs are called "Kawai" with one "i". "Kawaii" means cute.

US bags Russian accused of bagging millions after stealing pre-release financial filings

Re: Also spelled

"""Technically"""

I'm not sure how many quotes that word deserves... One thing for sure is that many attorneys are not on the side of justice. It was also the US Attorney for Massachusetts (though a former one) who tried to send Aaron Swartz to jail.

America's 'Team Telecom' backs switch-on of Google and Meta's US-APAC undersea cable

Re: Re a Galactic Intervention Not Verging on the Heralding Anything Novel @iowe_iowe

Oh burn!

Re: Its the latency, not the capacity

High speed trading algorithms don't use undersea cables — they want to be in the same building, if not the same computer as the stock exchange.

TikTok tops Google to win Cloudflare’s 2021 traffic ratings

DNS queries are not the same as time spent on the website though. I don't know how many DNS queries you do while watching an hour long video on YouTube, but probably far less than spending an hour watching 10-seconds videos on Tiktok.

RAF shoots down 'terrorist drone' over US-owned special ops base in Syria

Re: Hmm

It happened in Heathrow

Google Chrome's upcoming crackdown on ad-blockers and other extensions still really sucks, EFF laments

Re: Acceptable ads?

They would ban the third-party website, not the advertiser. There's no point for an advertiser to click on their own ad; it uses their budget without attracting users. Right?

Re: It (almost) Worked for Apple

If I understand correctly, the pretext is security. It's not really possible to build an adblockers extension without giving the extension wide rights to see and transmit your surfing activity. Specifically, the new rules would prevent the transmission of that data, which is crucial for adblockers to check their database of ad services, but can also be used to spy on the user.

UK's antitrust watchdog is very angry and has written a letter telling Apple and Google how angry it is with them

Re: Ironic?

I think it was a chicken and egg problem. They could not have third-party developers building apps for the iPhone before releasing the first iPhone. So the first version could essentially only contain their own apps, but could be used by developers to build apps for the second phone, with enough time to be sure it was a success. Jobs being a control freak probably contributed to this.

West Sussex County Council faces two-year delay to replace ageing SAP system for Oracle

Re: WSCC - Out of a frying pan and right into the fire

I think Oracle has a much worse reputation, specifically due to their audits that invariably discover that due to the default settings that were used at installation, your licensing fees have now doubled.

Don't make an iOS of yourself – Apple's patched its OSes, you know the drill

I thought the dying words of everybody to their closest friend was to make sure to delete their browser history and/or incinerate their computer...?

Facebook slapped with an eyepopping $150B lawsuit for spreading hate speech against Rohingya refugees

Good luck to them, but do they have any chance of winning? Isn't Facebook protected by the same harbor laws?

I suppose in practice, this will be settled with Facebook publicly declaring they'll create a $X0 millions fund to support Rohingya people and pay the lawyers' bill.

The nub of the issue: Has your ThinkPad's TrackPoint gone TITSUP*? You aren't alone

It's a constant surprise to me that people want to use them. It's like wanting to play StarCraft with a joystick. Admittedly, using a GUI is (mostly) not a competitive sport, but it's clearly not as efficient.

Alibaba splits itself into Chinese and overseas ops

Are they trying to escape China?

Because that would be the first step.

Computers cost money. We only make them more expensive by trying to manage them ourselves

Re: Two unmentioned benefits

A couple of days work still seems far better than buying you own new machines and installing them in your own premises, though.

Re: "For the rest of us, it's a case of doing our homework"

You are Rhys Rhysson, and I claim my £5

...or Theseus

Google sued for firing staff who claim they tried to follow 'Don't be evil' motto

Re: Google is a US corporation

No, the youngest Gen X are 40 years old now. Millennials are over 25, and up to 39. Those finishing college are Gen Z.

Apple files fresh appeal to stop court order demanding external payment systems in iOS apps

I find quite extraordinary that Apple is arguing it has the right to grab 30% of any transaction executed within an iPhone app, even when processed by third-party payment systems.

No, I expect them to allow users to download the app from somewhere else. No one is forcing them to host anything.

China plans to swipe a bunch of data soon so quantum computers can decrypt it later

Quantum computing and decryption

I know that quantum computers are theoretically able to decrypt some encryption methods, because they can factorize large numbers. But I thought there were different encryption methods which didn't use large number factorization, was it elliptic functions? Doesn't that mean that we could switch to those methods and quantum computers would stop being such a bogeyman for encryption?

How close are quantum computers to be of any use anyway? Because they often seem to be predicted for right after fusion reactors, or whenever half life 3 is released, whichever happens last...

Chat among yourselves: New EU law may force the big IM platforms to open up

What's the point of it doesn't apply to Whatsapp et al?

That said, maybe the simplest would be to force all chat applications to support a common standard like RCS, and accept RCS messages to/from other services. They can still offer bells and whistles on top if they want, knowing that those will not be transferred to users on another service. Pretty much like iMessage supports SMS to a degree.

They might consider forging alliances with certain competitors to share some exclusive features that they have in common, as an advantage on other competitors that they don't like — pretty much like countries sign trade deals. RCS would be WTO, and everybody could choose whether to ally or Brexit.

Amazon India execs questioned after sellers allegedly use site to smuggle marijuana

Amazon has vast artificial intelligence capabilities and should therefore have been able to nip the crimes in the bud.

1. I see what you did there

2. That's what happens when you crow about how powerful your artificial intelligence is

AI surveillance software increasingly used to make sure contract lawyers are doing their jobs at home

Re: People

The great thing is, they're biodegradable.

Robo-Shinkansen rolls slowly – for now – across 5km of Japan

Re: "But the train did come to a complete stop just 7.5cm from its intended stopping point"

In the first place, I severely doubt that human drivers are currently stopping Shinkansen trains manually. The trains stop so that each door in the train is aligned with a gate on the station platform. If they are not aligned, people cannot get in or out of the train. Anybody who has driven a train will tell you that this precision cannot be obtained reliably by a human.

A 'national security' issue: UK.gov blocks Nvidia's Arm deal for now, inserts deeper probe

If it is a bad thing — and you agree that it is a bad thing — then it makes sense for the government to do something against it. New laws are created every day because the government realizes that something bad is happening and something needs to be done about it.

There's only one cure for passive-aggressive Space Invader bosses, and that's more passive aggression

My first idea is that I would act more than happy about the intimate contact and reciprocate. While speaking in hushed tones. And batting my eyelashes.

Though only if I know they don't swing that's way, I guess...

BT's Plusnet shows Google how it's done as email woes enter their third day

I have a preference for Ratatoskr

He is known to deliver messages to Hel and back

He called himself the King of Fraud. Now this bot lord will reign in prison for years

Re: Wasted advertising

<Jack Sparrow>but you'll remember the company</Jack Sparrow>

Microsoft engineer fixes enterprise-level Chromium bug students could exploit to cheat in online tests

Quite apart from viewing the source, I wonder if these people know about the element inspector... Sigh.

There are also those web pages that attempt to prevent you from using the right-click menu. Or even make it impossible to copy... as if that was a meaningful protection in the age of smartphones.

Billion-dollar US broadband bonanza awaits Biden's blessing – what you need to know

I'm sure AT&T and Verizon are delighted to receive free cash that they will never use to improve their network