Posts by Dinanziame

UK watchdog sniffs around Google Chrome's Privacy Sandbox as it may give Choc Factory all the sweeties

I'm pretty sure they don't associate signed-in sessions with non-signed-in sessions. If they did, then my searches in incognito mode would change the ads I see in signed-in mode; and oh boy I'd have noticed that.

File format conversion crisis delayed attempt to challenge US presidential election result

Re: Oh FFS give it up already.

Considering some well-known powerful politicians are still talking of stolen votes and county this and hacking dominion that and forged signature whatever, and apparently with complete immunity from being called on their fucking bullshit, I find it extremely heartening that not a single judge has decided to jump on the conspiracy bandwagon and rule that the election was totally stolen.

We shouldn't have to praise people for doing their jobs properly, but I truly do not know how come judges have all decided to stay honest when it seems US senators can lie through their teeth with impunity.

New York Stock Exchange bins China’s three biggest telcos

Re: Its not a US-China Trade War

The fact that the economy of the world is so intertwined is often brought up as a reason major wars cannot happen in this century. I think we should be concerned with attempts to cut economical links between two major superpowers. There's however a good chance that whatever is done now by the US government will be overturned soon enough, as in by the end of the month.

Realme 7 5G: Parents, this is the phone you should have got your kids for Christmas

Re: Battery

Depends on your country. In India, it's apparently the vast majority of people who needs two SIM cards; one for voice calls, and one for internet. That's just the way contracts are offered.

Google AMP gets a shock to its system as advisor quits, lawsuit claims foul play

Hasn't AMP made the web faster?

In general, I find AMP pages load fast, and if ever I want to go to see the comments section, then comes the slow-loading bloated page... Or at least it feels like it.

Wait ages for an antitrust battle and three come along at once: Google sued by 38 US states over search monopoly

The rules did not change

What has changed is that Google is now more powerful than ever, and they are not allowed to act like they did ten years ago.

The Facebook lawsuit is similar: It used to be fine, but now it's not fine anymore, because you have grown too large.

Google rejects Australia’s revised pay-for-news plan, proposes its own plan instead

Re: Here's a compromise.

Google would probably take that deal in a heartbeat, but from the negotiations so far, I don't think the publishers have anything mind that doesn't include receiving money from Google, even for just displaying a link. The fact that the government is forcing both parties to make a deal, and will impose a deal if they can't manage on their own, seems to indicate it has the same opinion.

Googlers will be working from home until September 2021, says Sundar Pichai, followed by 'flexible' work weeks

Google is pretty famous for its great in-office perks such as free food, fitness, massage and the like. I bet the employees would be pissed off if they got told all those benefits are coming to an end...

Personally, I think it's great to be able to walk to people's desk and chat with them rather than using slack or VC. I can't imagine preferring to work from home. Then again, I have a short commute, so I don't spend half of my life in traffic.

Oh, no one knows what goes on behind locked doors... so don't leave your UPS in there

£10 says the cleaning crew needed the plug to vacuum

France fines Google, Amazon €135m total for slipping ad cookies into people's computers without permission

Re: Privacy fines should be based on the number of users declared on financial statements

I think that they are... €135m is not exactly spare change. However, it's also related to the severity of infringement; in this case the problem is that they are telling people about the cookies, but the explanations are "not clear enough". Considering nobody reads the explanations anyway, I'd say this is hardly the stuff of high treason.

When it comes to privacy, everyone says America needs a new federal law ASAP. As for mass spying, well, um… huh what’s that over there?

I don't buy the argument that it's impossibly expensive for companies to store the data of EU citizens in EU and US citizens in the US. If there is a market for it, cloud providers will provide turnkey solution at competitive prices.

Facebook crushed rivals to maintain an illegal monopoly, the entire United States yells in Zuckerberg’s face

To be honest, it seems easy enough to break them up. Facebook WhatsApp and Instagram hardly have any integration, do they? I mean, it could be that they share all the data in the back for ad purposes, but at least the products are not interdependent for the users.

Australia mostly sticks to its guns in final plan to make Google and Facebook pay news publishers

Re: @veti

It's logical that closing down aggregators is bad for small sites and good for big media corporations. The big orgs tend to be known to users already, and ironically they can afford advertising campaigns on Google to find more users. For large media companies, the biggest problem of news aggregators is that they start on the same foot as fly-by-night operations, and they cannot outbid the small sites when the service is free.

Labor watchdog accuses Google of illegally firing staff in union-busting push – as AI ethics guru Dr Timnit Gebru is pushed out

"So I've been immediately fired :-)"

Kind of interesting to end that sentence with a smiley. Is it happiness about being let out of jail, or the satisfaction of having grounds for a wrongful termination lawsuit?

Uncle Sam sues Facebook for allegedly discriminating against US workers in favor of foreigners on H-1B visas

Sounds weird that a company making money hand over fist would do such things to save pennies. Then again, never underestimate greed.

Where's the mysterious metal monolith today then? Oh look, it's atop a California mountain

Re: "Where will the mysterious metal monolith appear next?"

Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett. The only thing generally known about it is that Godot never comes.

How a nightmare wormable, wireless, automatic hijack-a-nearby-iPhone security flaw was found and fixed

That's pretty cool

I vaguely wonder how many people haven't yet updated their iOS to the version that is patched. Apple has good form in this, and they support relatively old devices.

I'd say this is another cautionary tale about proprietary systems, but then again Heartbleed was in OpenSSL. And by the way, I've always found suspicious that such a vulnerability happened to be submitted on December 31, when everybody was too drunk to notice.

Italian competition watchdog slaps Apple with €10m fine over allegedly misleading iPhone waterproofing claims

Re: After a short dive in sea water.

I went diving for an hour in the sea with my Pixel 2, filming the fishes... It still works, but the USB connectors got damaged; it now only charges with some cables and not others.

The salt water is more corrosive, and the connectors are outside of the phone; but shouldn't electronic components and the rest be safe?

AWS going AWOL last week is exactly why less is more in cloud server land

"Too bad they won't live – but then again, who does?"

I've seen what you did there... Seen things you people wouldn't believe... like tears in rain.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla is a monastery-burning romp that would be way better if it was not an Assassin's Creed game

Re: You're either a fan of the AC games or not

The first game was really more a proof of concept than a full game. If you really didn't play any since that one, you should try at least the second one. Much better story, and beautiful sceneries. But then I like Italian renaissance.

The Animus plot was okay in the beginning, and it was even somewhat interesting in AC Brotherhood — you got to do something in the "present". But then, they borked the end of the plot; it was never interesting afterwards.

I can understand the author of the article dropping the original title in the middle out of boredom; it was more a proof of concept than a finalized game. However, I found AC 2 breathtakingly beautiful, with a much more interesting story. I haven't played games after Syndicate, but most of those I played gave a really deep immersion in historical events, full of explanations about what was going on at the time, with the odd details — e.g when Robespierre was arrested, he was found with a gunshot wound to the jaw; probably a suicide attempt but details aren't known. Well, that's a scene in the game.

TikTok given another week to sort out how to sell itself

By this point, there's only two months left in this administration, so it might turn out less trouble for them to just do nothing. I'd give it at least 50% chance that Biden kills the whole thing.

Marmite of scripting languages PHP emits version 8.0, complete with named arguments and other goodies

Because reasons

It's also appallingly inconsistent about what a library function that does something is named.

That is because the library function names were originally tweaked to have different name lengths, because that is how they were bucketed. This is official, as declared by the creator of the language.

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

She probably enjoyed the whole thing

UK coronavirus tier postcode-searching tool yanked offline as desperate Britons hunt for latest lockdown details

Re: This is easy to scale... or should be

Binary search? The word you're looking for is HashMap.

HP CEO talks up HP-ink-only print hardware and higher upfront costs for machines that use other cartridges

Re: The problems:

If you don't print often, don't get inkjet.

The funny thing is that when inkjet came out, people said that laserjets were for people who print a lot, since they are faster...

Privacy campaigner flags concerns about Microsoft's creepy Productivity Score

Why not by number of code lines?

Giving employees a score that they can game will never be useful

Mysterious metal monolith found in 'very remote' part of Utah

Re: It's alien

Actually, monoliths can happen in the middle of deserts. For instance, Uluru is a monolith.

some just disappeared almost overnight therefore probably violence was involved.

A true hallmark of civilisation!

Teams seeks 24-hour party people for consumer chat

Re: Entschuldigung, bitte

The point of instant messaging is to chat with other people... and for that, you need other people using the same system.

Re: Entschuldigung, bitte

Because everybody wants to keep users in their own walled garden, and there is no regulation forcing them to play nice with each other. Even something as simple as text messaging is hopelessly fragmented between iMessages, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams, RCS, Signal, Telegram, WeChat... How can you expect video calls to be interoperable, when video is a lot more technical, and a lot less likely to be powered by compatible systems?

US Air Force deploys robot security dogs to guard base

No offensive capability has been built into these puppies, however, they're strictly monitoring only.

...so far.

That said, why robots in the shape of dogs? Can they do anything better than a quadcopter? Or a remote-controlled car?

Compsci guru wants 'right to be forgotten' for old email, urges Google and friends to expire, reveal crypto-keys

Re: Verba volant, scripta manent

One-Man-Bucket?

UK's Space Command to be 'capable of launching our first rocket in 2022'

Where will the rockets take off from? Saint-Helena?

Google yanks Apple Silicon Chrome port after browser is found to 'crash unexpectedly'

We have become spoiled

I remember that IE crashing was never unexpected. It's rather not crashing in a whole day which was unexpected.

Max Schrems is back... and he's challenging Apple's 'secret iPhone advertising tracking cookies' in Europe

Re: They just don't get it.

I remember clicking on a "don't track me" button somewhere, and as a last-ditch effort, the website showed a message on the lines of: "Are you sure? We're going to show you ads anyway, we might as well try to show you something you're interested in instead of random crap"

Not on your Zoom, not on Teams, not Google Meet, not BlueJeans. WebEx, Skype and Houseparty make us itch. No, not FaceTime, not even Twitch

Strongly disagree as well. For all its brokenness, the visual aspect makes it far more palatable for me to have meetings. This will affect different people differently, but it's far easier for me to follow what people are saying if I see them speaking. And though it cannot compare to a physical meeting, you still can transfer a lot of visual social cues.

30 percent of world agrees not to require onshore storage for e-commerce customer data

At least they included NZ on the map... Which often doesn't happen.

Shock news: NASA lunar ambitions might be a bit too... ambitious

Admittedly, what's the point of sending a human there? It's been done before, at this point it's just checking whether we can do it again fifty years after, with vastly more experience of rocket science and technology that is insanely more powerful. It's not the worst thing to waste money on, but you can do more interesting.

Microsoft emits 112 security hole fixes – including the cure for a Google-disclosed kernel vuln exploited in the wild

Re: I have a dream too...

Sometimes I wonder if requesting fully-secure software isn't akin to requesting a safe that cannot be broken into, or a house that cannot be burgled. You can add safety measures all you want, but ultimately you can never be 100% safe...

Test tube babies: Virgin Hyperloop pops pair of staffers in a pod, shoots them along 500m vacuum tunnel

Re: Logistical Challenges

This still seems very complicated and inefficient compared to Japanese bullet trains, which are vastly simpler and cheaper to build. Admittedly they only do 300 km/h, but that is enough to be faster than planes for distances like Milan-Rome, since you remove the trips to/from airport and the waiting time at the airport. For trips under 1000 km, high-speed trains are already competitive with flying, while being far easier to build and use than the hyper loop: As you said, you buy a ticket and wait for the next one. There might be a small range around 1000 km of distance where the hyper loop is fast enough to beat the simplicity of trains and simple enough to beat the speed of flying, but it's very niche and hardly seems worth the trouble.

Bad software crashed Boeings. Now it appears the company lacked a singular software supremo

Hear ye, hear ye. It should be made clear what are the penalties for trying to bypass security with kludges.

Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

Re: FCC

Oooh, you just reminded me that Ajit Pai is going to be kicked out of the FCC... Another reason to celebrate

City folk vote to each get $100 every time cops, govt officials illegally spy on them with facial-rec AI, minimum $1,000

Re: Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day

By golly, you must be fun at parties

Let's Encrypt warns about a third of Android devices will from next year stumble over sites that use its certs

Android is far more customized by phone manufacturers than you would think. They literally do a separate fork of Android for every single phone model. Every nifty feature like edge touch or foldable screen or having three separate cameras, the manufacturer needs to modify the code. So Google cannot just send an update; they can only provide a patch to manufacturers, and those need to apply the patch to all of their forks. Which is, as noted, not exactly in their interest, since they make money by selling new phones, not by maintaining older ones.

Google has been trying to regain control by putting more and more features away from Android into the Google Play services; though that inevitably raises the problem of them having a monopoly control over Android phones.

Google previews Document AI for parsing forms: Just a catch-up with AWS and Azure?

Can it be used to count votes?

It seems like some people might need some help doing that

San Francisco approves 'CEO tax', hopes to extract up to $140m a year from corps with wide exec-staff salary gap

Re: Does the corporation need to be HQ'd in San Francisco for this to apply...

It's still very unclear to me how does that work. Let's take Google, which probably has a gap of >600. Google has offices in SF, sells ads to businesses operating in SF. What is this tax applied to? Is it a sales tax on services sold by Google to companies in SF? Or on services sold by Google employees in SF to the rest of the world? Is it a net income tax on profits made by Google in SF? Are Google employees working in SF paying more tax on their salaries?

I do see the article mentions "gross receipts attributable to San Francisco", but as far as I know, this gobbledygook could mean any of the above.

India, UK strike tech co-operation pact and plot deeper links once Brexit's done

I already vaguely suspected that IT salaries are so low in UK because of the competition from India. I guess that's going to be reinforced further...

H₂? Oh! New water-splitting technique pushes progress of green hydrogen

Is it worse than the fuel we currently put in cars?

Cops aren't normally the most 'agile' of folk, but that's exactly what London's Metropolitan Police Service would like to be

Oh yeah, they should totally use Scrum. And Kanban.