Posts by Dinanziame 1150 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2019
If the default had been to keep the data forever, you can bet your arse that people would have complained that by default Google is not respecting their privacy. Ah well.
I'm glad I noticed a warning about this a couple of weeks ago though. It's been sometimes useful to check which exact date I was in a place, or which exact place I visited on a certain trip. I hope they'll eventually make the backup usable on the desktop.
The technology is problematic in itself. There are many corner cases and abuses possible. I'm not sure it's possible to design it so that it works when we want to and only when we want to.
There's a lot of technologies like that though, from end to end encryption to drones. Guns are sometimes useful and often used for crimes. And cars are sometimes used by criminals to escape the police.
Today’s sentencing is more than just a punishment. It’s a message
The way I see it, punishment is always a message. The whole reason we punish people is to deter them from doing it again, and to tell other people they shouldn't either. In the case of jail sentences, there is additionally the potential benefit of protecting the population from criminals.
Since this lawsuit is filed to a competition tribunal, I suppose it is arguing that Microsoft is engaging in monopolistic behavior — it's fine to offer discounts to your customer, but not if this effectively shuts off the competition by leveraging your dominant market share in a separate business. This is very much like Microsoft was found guilty for offering Internet Explorer for free with Windows, using the fact that almost everybody buys Windows to get a leg-up in the browser competition.
I think Elon is totally able to schmooze Trump for a very long time, and Trump knows that being Elon's friend is good for his brand. But there is a bigger problem regarding "Tesla's ability to execute on full self-driving vehicles" — Elon has promised the cybercab for 2027, meaning it definitely won't be ready by the end of Trump's term in 2029.
has labelled Microsoft a participant in a "censorship cartel."
This is obvious political posturing claiming that big tech is censoring right-wing viewpoints. I wonder if Republicans are ever going to put their money where their mouth is and actually sue big tech platforms for exercising what is technically their first amendment rights. This would go straight to the supreme court, and then who knows what would happen?
I think the fact sideloading is at least possible on Android should allow Google to set some rules on what it allows on the Play Store. To take the most obvious examples, porn and racist content are certainly forbidden on the Play Store, and I don't think Google should be forced to allow them.
I wouldn't bet that the creator of a racist game would manage to force Apple to sell his game on the App Store either, but maybe the Supreme Court would have interesting ideas on whose first amendment rights prevail.
It seems that US elections often hang on a relatively small percentage of voters in a small number of states. You can imagine that with a relatively small effort you could change the results, and have an absolutely disproportionate impact. If you consider the amount of money that is poured every day into advertising for much smaller stakes, it does make sense.
Note that the EU's DMA 6(11) regulations already force Google to let third-parties access query and click data:
The gatekeeper shall provide to any third-party undertaking providing online search engines, at its request, with access on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms to ranking, query, click and view data in relation to free and paid search generated by end users on its online search engines. Any such query, click and view data that constitutes personal data shall be anonymised.
Not sure what Google considers is fair and reasonable, or whether anybody has even tried buying it. Not sure what they consider anonymised.
no more advertising and all this shite just goes away
And a good chunk of the internet with it. The only news sites would be behind paywalls, and I guess Bing would be the only search engine left, as it is the only one owned by a company that does not derive most of its revenue through ads.
The first is what is known, that is your username/email
This is silly. The email is publicly known; anybody can know it so it can't be used for authentication. And touching the key works for keys; when a passkey is stored in your laptop there is no presence requirement and the laptop can be hacked from anywhere. Some laptops have equivalent hardware that can only be activated physically but it's not the norm.
I see the point of having two-factor authentication — having a yubikey, or a couple of yubikeys for different devices, on top of using a password. That's the two-factor part. More factors, more security: Now, instead of just having the password, I also need to have a yubikey. But replacing the password with a passkey stored on a phone or a laptop, that's a different story. Not only it means that if I lose the device or it is stolen, the thief can do whatever they want. What's even worse is that the device containing the passkey can get hacked.
But intentionally deleting automatic backups is probably the boldest move i've heard of yet!
I don't think these really count as backups, but whenever you modify and save a file in emacs, it saves a copy of the previous version in a file of the same name with a "~" suffix. So you end up with a lot of files called input.txt~, code.cc~, index.html~ and the like, which tend to clutter your directory. It's not a big deal, but it tends to be forgotten with time, so I see now that I still have in my home directory a file called blo~ created in June 2023.
I don't really rely on this feature, though it must have happened a couple of times in the past 29 years that I was useful. But at some point I was sufficiently annoyed that I created an alias to delete all of them more safely than typing "rm *~" with three paranoid checks that I don't have a space in the middle.
Are they the same across the entire EU, so you don't pay more for a subscription to watch Italian football if you live in Italy than if you live in Estonia? Or is as I guess it is, and you do pay more if you live in Italy?
The prices can be different in different countries, but if you buy a subscription from your home country, you must be able to watch it from anywhere in EU. The rights owners cannot block you using geolocation. You are expected to buy a subscription from your home country, and companies are allowed to check where you live... But they don't have to. A company in Estonia does not have to check that you are living in Estonia.
There are a bunch of companies, typically in the business of copyright, who try as much as they can to charge a different price for the same thing depending on the country of the user, just so that they can extract the maximum amount from everybody. The EU has made this illegal, and it should now be possible to buy a movie or subscription anywhere in the EU and watch it anywhere else. The same should apply to Apple.
I recently saw a job ad on an online store. The store presented itself as being local to a major European city, and the job ad accordingly requested for the country's work permit. If you went to look for details however, you could realize that the company is based in HK and would likely never need to hire anybody in Europe.
It's not a problem to give a discount — the problem is only giving a significant discount on your product A to users of your product B, in particular when you have a large market share for product A and a small market share for product B. That's because another way to present it is that you're telling the many users of your product A that from now on they'll have to pay way more for product A unless they start paying for product B as well, whether they need it or not.
Microsoft would know how this works:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiative_for_a_Competitive_Online_Marketplace
https://www.theregister.com/2010/03/05/ft_discovers_lobbying/
Sounds good to me. The fact that we've been using relatively unsafe reactors does not mean we have to keep using them, or stop trying new designs.
Nuclear power now delivers just a meager 4% percent of global power use and they want to expand it at least 10 fold.
As long as there are coal power plants (40% of total), we should do everything we can to find other sources. It's much worse than nuclear on all dimensions, even radioactivity, but especially in the number of deaths it causes.
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