* Posts by DS999

8167 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jun 2020

Florida man expands crypto empire with new wireless service and phone

DS999 Silver badge

That would be so on brand for Trump

Not content to sell a phone that when it came out retailed for $250 but is now available for $169 on Amazon for $499, he wants to make even more money selling phones recalled by T-Mobile because they weren't up to their standards!

Take them off T-mobile's hands for $100 each, have some illegal immigrants spray paint them gold and put a "made in the USA" sticker on the box then sell them his millions of chumps.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Being MAGA is self-selecting to be fleeced

If it really was made (assembled from foreign parts) in the US they'd be loudly telling everyone exactly where the factory was and Trump would be tweeting "if I can do it, so can Apple!"

From the specs it appears to be a very generic Android, which are readily available on the ODM market. It won't be customized at all aside from the paint job. It won't be that hard for people knowledgeable in the mobile supply chain to figure out which made it and where once there's been a teardown.

Trump's followers live in a bubble, so even if it is proven that it was made in China they simply won't believe it. There were polls done around the end of his first term and they asked Trump supporters whether they trusted various sources. Mainstream media was something like 35% not surprising since republicans have spent two generations trying to tear it, Fox News was in the low 60s, and Trump himself was in the low 70s. So not all of his supporters trusted him to always tell the truth but they trusted him more than any other source. I imagine if they did a similar poll today the divide would be even wider.

Say what you want about him he's probably the greatest con man the US has ever seen. Religious zealots believe he's practically the second coming, abortion warriors believe he's totally on their side, women believe he will protect whatever abortion rights they have in their state by vetoing any national abortion ban, businessmen believe he's great for business, factory workers believe he's great for unions, police believe he's on their side, the military believes he's on theirs, and so forth. Its nuts. I guess politicians have been doing it wrong all along. He takes all sides on just about everything, he changes positions on a daily basis (he's just flip flopped for the second time in less than a week on rounding up illegal immigrants on farms and in hotels/restaurants) Who knew voters were THAT stupid? I guess he did!

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Re: Being MAGA is self-selecting to be fleeced

It isn't a Trump business he's just licensing the Trump name. Someone else is sourcing the phones and plans, slapping the Trump name on it, and sending a cut to him. If it goes under it won't cost him anything, unfortunately.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Being MAGA is self-selecting to be fleeced

Reportedly from photos from a reporter who got one the "gold" rubs off on your hands from just holding it so the idiots will be easy to spot! I think its hilarious they're trying to claim they're made in the US. Maybe that's where they add the cheap ass spray paint job and they're trying to count that as being "made" here?

I love that Trump is fleecing his sheep. I hope he keeps it up until they are all flat broke because that's what those morons deserve for being in thrall to a con man.

Dems hyperventilate about Palantir's work with the IRS in letter to CEO Karp

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If they seed this in the proper spots

They can get the "libertarian" wing of MAGA very very upset about it. They hate the IRS and hate the idea they might be on a "mega database" even more. If it is just democrats alleging it, it probably won't pierce their bubble. But if it does Palantir will be getting hit from both sides.

Apple dodges Optis patent payout for now as judge orders a do-over

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Re: We don't agree.... APPEAL!

Even if the court had to pick up the cost the judge or other court personnel who screwed up wouldn't personally bear the cost. If you think they ought to then we'd end up with lower quality people because the smart ones would prefer jobs when they can't be personally put on the hook for unlimited costs (think screwing up between Apple & Qualcomm and how much money a trial between those two would cost) for even an honest mistake.

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Re: We don't agree.... APPEAL!

The appeals court said that the lower court screwed up in multiple ways. Why should you have to pay more to appeal when your trial was not properly conducted?

Courts already have ways to avoid appeals "wasting their time". If there is no question of fact or law in dispute the appeals court can simply refuse to hear it.

Intel reportedly chips away at fab workforce – but hey, maybe there's a tax break coming

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The only reason Trump wants to "renegotiate" the CHIPS money

Is because he doesn't want Biden to get any credit for the resurgence in US chips manufacturing. He thinks if he changes the deal slightly (like he did with NAFTA/USMCA and with the recent trade deal with the UK) he gets all the credit for anything good that happens (if anything bad happens he'll blame someone else like he always does, of course)

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

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Even if you buy all his criticisms (and I don't)

It doesn't matter. The only alternative worth considering for most is Chrome (or Edge which is basically Chrome except your personal data goes to Microsoft instead of Google)

You don't get to whine about privacy when the alternative is owned by the biggest (or second biggest if you think Meta is even worse) privacy violating company in the world! Do I like Mozilla's change in privacy statement? No, but on the privacy front they are still 10000% better than Google!

As for Pocket, that never should have been added. That's the sort of thing that should be an extension, not a built part of the browser that's designed to be super annoying to people who don't want to use it! Its like the Firefox version of Clippy!

Here's the thing: Apple's ban on third party browser engines, and to a lesser extent Firefox, are the only things standing in the way of Google completely owning the entire web and web designers designing and testing only in Chrome just like they did 20 years ago in the dark days of IE6.

This "Firefox is dead to me" argument kind of reminds me of the people who were angry at Biden/Harris for not taking a stronger stance against Israel's war in Gaza, and either sat out the election or protest voted for Trump. Congrats now the thing you said you care about is even worse. Are we going to cut off our noses to spite our face in browsers too?

Doomed UK smartphone maker Bullitt Group finally liquidated

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Those are pretty low targets

Apple has been doing the first two forever, and Samsung more recently as far as the software updates (it is a bit harder for them since they sell low & mid range products too so they have a lot more of them)

The 80% battery thing is kind of pointless. I think modern batteries can do that without too much trouble but if they couldn't you could easily get around it. Just downrate your batteries a bit in the EU market and don't let people use the full capacity when its new that way it can lose more than 20% of its "real" capacity while still meeting the EU reg. EU consumers should check the mAh ratings of the batteries in phones marketed in the EU against identical phones marketed elsewhere and see if there are any discrepancies. Maybe not now but 10 years ago there definitely would have been!

Not sure what good "labeling" repairability is supposed to do. People who care enough about that to make it a factor when choosing are already consulting iFixit which is gonna be a more trustworthy source than OEMs rating themselves. Actually they're likely to be pessimistic in such ratings as I'd imagine in typical EU fashion they will heavily slap you down and fine you if they believe you're being too generous. Anyway most consumers won't bother looking at the fine print to find that stuff, or care even if they noticed it - because screens are much more durable than they were a decade ago so phone "repair" just isn't something people think about as much as they might have a decade ago.

Penn State boffins create silicon-free two-dimensional computer

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200ps switching time is NOT equivalent to 5 GHz

Processors that are clocked at 5 GHz switch a number of gates during that cycle, not just one. The "3nm" class transistors in the latest CPUs switch at well over 100 GHz.

LibreOffice adds voice to 'ditch Windows for Linux' campaign

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Re: That's bullshit

It isn't like your existing version of Libreoffice will quit working on that Windows 7 laptop. Why do you care if Libreoffice isn't upgraded to the latest and greatest version when you've already accepted having an OS that hasn't been updated for half a decade?

Besides, "end of support" just means they won't test on Windows 7 or fix bugs that are found to affect only Windows 7 but not later versions. You can probably still update, though probably the automatic updates in the app will stop functioning to avoid the chance they break people's working installs.

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As I've said before

They need to PICK ONE and recommend that one distro, whichever their Linux guys believe would be the easiest to install for someone with zero Linux knowledge.

Yeah all the distro warriors will be up in arms complaining that the reason there are so many is because everyone's needs are different blah blah blah, or mad because they think their pet distro is the one that should have been chosen. To that I say, SHUT UP!

It has been proven many times that choice is paralyzing for people - too much choice makes people want to avoid the choice at all - which in this context would mean continuing to use Windows 10. Even the author's recommendation of three choices is too much choice for people who will be predisposed to want to find a way to not make any choice at all. How does someone with no Linux experience properly decide?

No, just give them one. Maybe it isn't the "ideal" choice for their needs but being directed to the "wrong" distro isn't going to be what sinks or swims someone's potential attempt at ditching Windows. It will be the fact that they've been used to Windows for years, and what they're using won't be Windows. Even if some small fraction of people find that one distro unsuitable and would have liked another more and possibly stuck with Linux that number will be greatly outweighed by the people whose eyes glaze over when presented with too many choices about something they know nothing about and respond by making the choice not to try Linux at all.

Put Large Reasoning Models under pressure and they stop making sense, say boffins

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Re: Sigh.

Mmm... but these models do not simply brute-forcing the problem

Step by step instructions for which are provided how many times over on the entire web? Ingest the entire web and you've ingested those instructions, which it can follow.

If you created a similar problem that's different from the existing in a small but important way those models will all fall on their face. A human who knows how to solve Hanoi would recognize "oh this is like that but different in this respect so I'll need to adjust my strategy to compensate" and still solve it. Because humans can reason and LLMs cannot.

The launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests

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Facepalm

Re: The problem with AI is trust

You don't think the man page is the first place I looked? This was a DD-WRT router so it didn't have a man page but I consulted the man page for 'ip' on my desktop Linux box, which directed me to the man page for 'ip-address'. Please have a look at it and tell me where it describes "change" or "replace" options at all, or has a single example for changing an IP address it. It does not. That's why I went to the web.

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Re: The problem with AI is trust

Where was I suggesting AIs could perform critical evaluation? I was saying that's possible for humans to do when searching the web (not that all do a very good job of it) but it is impossible for humans do when consulting an AI because you just get the answer without any context around why you should or should not trust it to be correct.

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The problem with AI is trust

When you do a search you aren't a passive consumer believing the first link you click on is "the answer", at least not if you are asking a question with even the smallest amount of complexity to it rather than a knowledge query like "when was Galileo born?" No, you have to make a conscious evaluation of whether you trust that source, which will be different for different people.

For example, "how do I change an IP address in Linux using the ip command", which was a search I did just yesterday since I was faced with my first encounter with a Linux system that didn't include 'ifconfig' and trying to "change" or "replace" an IP results in a secondary IP being added. It turns out, stupidly beyond belief in my opinion, that this is by design. I refused to believe there wasn't a single step command to do this so I tried at least a half dozen links and they all gave the same stupid answer. I tried ChatGPT but it told me I should delete the current IP address first then add the new one, which for obvious reasons is even dumber than the "right" way of adding a secondary IP and then deleting the first!

When I'm searching the web I get context cues to help decide if I trust the link I clicked on. I evaluate the domain, and (despite the obvious pitfalls) I'll trust wikipedia, stackoverflow or reddit more than some domain that looks like it was created by a SEO. I get cues from how the information was conveyed. Was it in response to a question identical to mine? Was it upvoted or positively commented on by others? I can look at related content, if the search points to a site that's all about "how to do stuff in Linux" I would trust it more than if some random guy's birdwatching blog has a few random posts about Linux.

You don't get any of those cues with AI. You either accept its answer or not, and have no way of knowing if that info was originally scraped from a good source or was AI indigestion / model collapse. It's like the "I'm feeling lucky" button on Google has made a comeback.

Techie exposed giant tax grab, maybe made government change the rules

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It is basically a blackmail scheme

The team owner says the town should built him a new stadium, or at least contribute hundreds of millions toward the new stadium, or he'll take his ball (along with his team) to a different city where they WILL build him a new stadium. Because it is basically understood these days to win a major professional sports team to a city that lacks it that building them a stadium is required and often not the end of the largess.

The economic impact can be considerable when measured over the lifetime of the stadium, especially since that stadium will end up being used for other events like concerts that also have economic impact. There will be a construction boom around the stadium for building of hotels and restaurants/bars and there will often be a conference center or similar associated with it so those hotels stay full when games/concerts aren't happening if it is too far away to get people to otherwise stay in those hotels when visiting that city.

But it is all down to the fact that city A is blackmailed by the owner to gift him a stadium because there will always be cities X, Y and Z who don't have a team and are willing to give him a stadium to get one.

The problem as always is that while it makes sense as far as overall economic impact, the average person is paying the cost one way or another while the team owner and the owners of the hotels, restaurants, and construction firms that built it along with the events firm(s) that handles the conference center and books the concerts derive most of the benefit. But where things like this are put to a public vote that vote often succeeds because enough of them are fans of the team or they get fooled into believing some of that money will somehow trickle down to them.

Dems demand audit of CVE program as Federal funding remains uncertain

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Browsers could/should address this

It wouldn't be difficult at all to have the browser's Javascript module detect such deliberately obfuscated code and throw up a warning refusing to run it unless the user changes a config option to disable that warning.

There's really no innocent reason why a website should present such crap for a client browser to run, so there is no reason any end users should want their browser to be capable of running it even if it is "compliant" Javascript code.

UK dumps £2.5 billion into fusion pipe dream that's already cost millions

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Re: Rewrite needed

Considering the time and expense we've gone to so far despite not yet achieving commercially viable fusion, it is a given that once achieved it will be hugely complex and expensive to build the first fusion power plants. So complex that even if every single detail of how it was achieved was made public there would be a handful of countries or organizations on the planet capable of replicating it.

The real work after it is done will be in refining it to simplify it and scale it down in size and cost. Even if it was first achieved by a private company they would make a lot more money by licensing their IP and letting others further develop it. I could see it ending up something like commercial patent pools, so that first company is the founder of the pool, other companies that make refinements that are accepted as part of the "standard" as it were get added, and they all get a cut based on the power produced.

I think it would be inevitable that like say the MPEG patent pool you'd eventually see an effort toward an "open source" version that works around the patents or waits until the foundational ones expire. Since fusion doesn't open the door to WMDs the way fission reactors do, and most of the world agrees that climate change is a problem we need to take seriously, I think it is a given there will be great interest in nations cooperating in an "open source" fashion to do some of that "refinement" work.

The response of different countries to such an entreaty would likely follow typical patterns. Our current administration would likely insist on going it alone, and we'd end up with the usual sort of public/private partnership you see in the US - public money be used for development, private ownership and capture of the profits once complete. We'd probably have the highest cost for fusion power in the world as a result.

Other nations would probably also follow their typical path - China would widely deploy it internally outpacing the entire rest of the world. They'd make it available at bargain prices to poor nations but with some strings attached ala belt and road! The EU is the most likely place we could see the "open source" type cooperation, and Brexit Britain will beg to be let in the door.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: exceeded the amount of energy that went into the reaction chamber

What you say is true for tokamak style fusion that uses plasma as once ignited it can be sustained, but laser induced fusion needs to power the lasers again and again for each and every pellet. It is more comparable to the power needed for spark plugs, except that there are 192 spark plugs and they require over a megawatt each.

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Re: exceeded the amount of energy that went into the reaction chamber

"Collecting the energy" in the type of fusion they're targeting will be via boiling water to make steam - the same at best ~60% efficient way we collect the energy from a coal or natural gas power plant. Though with the added fun of the heat being delivered via fast moving neutrons which eat away at all the parts they're exposed to, meaning regular downtime will be required to replace them and the parts being replaced will be low grade radioactive and have to be disposed of accordingly.

There are others out there targeting "direct energy capture" which bypasses the neutrons, steam and radiation (plus uses easier to source materials to fuse!) but the downside (there's always a downside) is that it requires temperatures ~3x higher than the neutron/steam type of fusion. That downside may make it seem fanciful given our struggles to reach even the lowest fusion temperatures, but at least one company thinks they can do it. Plus there's some reason for optimism that since even making the lowest temperature fusion work for power production would require truly CONTROLLING the plasma rather than just containing it, assuming we can figure that out we may improve our plasma temperatures by an order of magnitude or more.

Researchers claim spoof-proof random number generator breakthrough

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What's wrong with using astronomical observations

A radio telescope pointed at the black hole in the center our galaxy should be capable of generating a nice stream of very not spoofable numbers. You could even go beyond what these guys did and make it more trustworthy by pointing multiple radio telescopes in different countries at the same spot. Since they'd be geographically separated their observations would pass through different parts of the space around Earth. That would insure that Earth based satellites etc. (even ones not publicly known) can't "get in the way" as it were. Since you have multiple receivers you avoid technical faults being responsible, and since they're located in different countries they'd be operated by different groups making it harder to compromise them all to get the "random" numbers you desire.

AST just got a small boost in its D2C battle against Elon Musk's Starlink

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Satellite connectivity is a niche

Beyond emergency use, or maybe being able to send a non emergency message to my girlfriend like "hey I'm going to be getting back a day later than planned" if I was spending a few days somewhere without cell access so she'd didn't worry, or maybe she could message me if she was supposed to pick me up from the airport but needed to alter plans, I don't really have any use for it. I suspect that level of occasional "nice to have" would be true of most people.

Now there will be a niche though where they will consider it vital, either because they regularly travel into areas without cell service or they live in an area without cell service. I see that niche as something like Nextel's "push to talk" thing 20 years ago in the US. There were people who lived by that service and they had Nextel service because they were the only one offering PTT. But there weren't enough of those people for other carriers to bother adding the feature, or for phones to standardize it like SMS was, and once you had phones where you could "talk" your text message its userbase largely fled and Nextel ended up getting bought out by Sprint.

I think that having satellite service beyond the minimum I described will be the same thing. It will have a small but very devoted base so maybe T-Mobile having that (I am assuming Starlink will or at least should be able to provide better service than AST or Apple's Globalstar just based on their number of satellites) would be a differentiating factor to get that niche to choose them. They've already sort of gone all-in on trying to capture rural customers with their nationwide buy of 600 MHz spectrum so a lot of those customers are probably already with T-Mobile.

Do you trust Xi with your 'private' browsing data? Apple, Google stores still offer China-based VPNs, report says

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WTF?

Why should Apple/Google pull them?

Just because they are (supposedly) linked to China's government? So what if organization A objects to a VPN that's linked to Israel, organization B to Russia, organization C to the US... There will be nothing everyone trusts, so they should just delete them all right?

Now if the *US government* said "we do not trust the following VPN apps because they're linked China's government they could presumably tell Apple/Google to remove those apps from the *US* app store (and I sincerely wish it would have to be done under a law that was passed specifically for the purpose, not some shady executive order from a president who thinks he's a king)

So this "tech transparency project" could point stuff out and recommend the US government (and maybe other governments) do it for their citizens, but pressuring tech companies to do it for everyone just based on their say so? Fuck that!

As for the question in the article's title, if I was using a VPN I would rather the information go to some other government than to my own government. Because one of the most important uses of VPNs is to preserve your privacy/anonymity from your OWN GOVERNMENT. Unless you have access to state secrets or are otherwise potentially vulnerable to foreign blackmail I think you should ALWAYS prefer some other country's government having access to things you want to hide rather than your own government. Because even if you trust your own government today you might not trust the one you have tomorrow - as the unfortunate lesson of the US is teaching us all right now in real time.

What the hell is Xi going to do with my browsing data? He doesn't care about me, I am and never will be of any importance to China's government. But my own government, who knows maybe some tech zillionaire supposedly making the government more "efficient" slurps it up and sells it to advertisers or feeds it to his pet AI.

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

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Re: The BOFH is slipping

but as long as it took to change the floor-button labels in the lift, and the signs on the office doors

I think we've found the BOFH's cousin!

DS999 Silver badge

The BOFH is slipping

When he got the boss to agree to hiring someone to do the moves he should have suggested a vendor, which just happened to be one the BOFH owned and he could sub out the work to people who were at least mildly competent. Or he and the PFY could have avoided all the problems from incompetent/overeager contractors and done the work themselves over the weekend while getting paid a month's worth of salary at the inflated rates his company was charging!

Slapped wrists for Financial Conduct Authority staff who emailed work data home

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That sounds like an oversight I once exploited

Back in my student days my university had networked PR1ME computers. Each had their own distinct logins/accounts, but their filesystems all accessible from each other, like NFS or CIFS. They had a feature called "add remote ID" which was the shell command "arid", which if you provided a login/password valid on that remote system allowed you to take on the permissions of that remote user when you were traipsing through its filesystem. So far so good, nice feature and very useful if you wanted to access files between your accounts on multiple systems without leaving them world readable which would have been required without the remote ID feature.

They had things tied in with the mainframe in some way so every account was associated with a "project number" that came from the mainframe that represented your resources in dollars. As you used the system you'd consume resources and if you ran out you couldn't login and you'd have to beg the sysadmins for more. The root/Administrator equivalent on PR1ME was SYSTEM, and long before like many of us might do I had tried to login as "SYSTEM" with no password just to see what happened and found that some of the PR1MEs would say "incorrect password" but a couple that would say "no money left" or whatever the message was when there was no money allocated to the account. I didn't think much of it at the time, since there was nothing you could do with a passwordless account if it had no money.

So when I later learned about "arid" I tried adding SYSTEM on one of those passwordless systems, and discovered that usage bypassed the project number accounting stuff and let me act with root powers on that remote filesystem. I got to poke around in places I had never been able to poke, there were tools there for creating and deleting accounts and changing passwords, tools for showing how much money each account had left (but not changing it since that came from the mainframe) and so forth.

Since the system comp sci students used was pretty sluggish with everyone trying to compile our code before assignments were due I thought I could make things a lot easier on myself if I created an account on that remote system. I could do my work on a far less busy system with much faster compiling time then copy it back to the system I used to submit the work. So I did that, and I was pretty careful to always disconnect from the modem bank and reconnect before logging into my fake account, and deleting all my files after I used it, but I must have slipped up as after the semester was over I was contacted by the higher ups in the IT department and they'd caught on to what I did.

What they couldn't figure out was how, so I sort of bargained with them that I'd tell them everything in exchange for not getting banned from the computer systems (which would be kind of a problem for a CS degree) You should have seen the look on their faces when I told them how it was all caused by having no password on that SYSTEM account lol!

User demanded a ‘wireless’ computer and was outraged when its battery died

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Not just Australia

You often reserve the coarsest swear words for your closest friends. A guy may say "hey fuckface" to greet his best friend, a girl may say "hey whore" to greet hers. Its not universal of course but it is extremely common at least in my experience here in the US.

Google faces billion-quid bruising over Play Store fees in the UK

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Re: Google's stratagem for free to download applications from Play Store?

So now imagine there are a dozen app stores in competition with each other for each platform. Does the BBC "pick winners" and decide which one or two app stores they distribute from or have some "public good" mandate to support them all? Or do those app stores get to copy apps from the main app store to fill out their app catalogs in the name of "fairness", so even if you only submit to that main app store it gets on all the third party app stores whether that's what you as a developer want or not?

If the BBC submits its app to a bunch of app stores do we now have a big page of links to download the app from each app store? Or does it leave out the links and simply say "download from your favorite app store" and leave it up to the end user to search? In which case people who aren't pretty careful about what they're downloading could end up with a counterfeit/clone version and not the official BBC version. Or maybe porn.

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If there were no "scare dialogs"

It would be trivial to trick less technically knowledge people into downloading malware infested versions of real software. The reason there are dialogs that come up if e.g. a web page tries to install software is to prevent fooling people. The more you make it just as easy to install from a third party app store, or to sideload, as to install from the Play Store the more easy it will be to fool people who don't understand that is what they're doing or the risks in doing so.

Just because Reg readers are generally technically knowledgeable and don't have to worry about this doesn't mean that there aren't millions of people who could potentially become victims if every installation method had to be treated the same by the OS.

US auditors beg Pentagon to pay attention to latest report about IT system flaws

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The one place DOGE is needed

And it was nowhere to be found. Instead the DoD is getting a huge budget INCREASE despite having a president who claims he doesn't want the US involved in any wars.

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

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Re: Are those ovens standard commercial ovens?

No wonder mess hall food has such a bad reputation if they think you should be using ovens to prepare caviar!

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Are those ovens standard commercial ovens?

Or did they get screwed by the contractor and end up paying $500,000 per oven for some sort of special oven the way they get screwed for $30,000 toilet seats on aircraft that are supposedly special in some way?

Because if they are standard commercial ovens or as I would assume there's no reason they couldn't retrofit standard commercial ovens the best solution might be to rip them all out and replace them with the same sort of ovens they'd put in an Army base's mess hall. Hopefully those aren't also under special contract?

Tape, glass, and molecules – the future of archival storage

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Re: The DNA fantasy

We should still run it through 7zip just in case.

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Angel

Re: The DNA fantasy

The natural way to prolong DNA-stored information is to copy it frequently

So you put it into living creatures that will reproduce and carry it on. A good method to do that is to use a virus, which can change/add to its host's genetic code. So long as multiple copies are placed in parts of the DNA that are not actively used for gene expression (i.e. fitness for survival) it will tend to stick around for a very long time. Turns out we have rather a lot of that in our "junk" DNA as do most living creatures.

Maybe we should try to decode some of the replicated viral fragments in our DNA as if it was a message. Perhaps there's a section in there that when decoded says "we genetically modified you from your ancestors to increase your intelligence and make you capable of speech, and will return in 100,000 Earth years to see how you're faring", and it includes a star map viewed from the North Pole at the time they wrote it so we can figure out when to expect them back.

Amazon has changed its nuclear deal in Pennsylvania to bypass grumpy regulators

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Re: Not as it seems...

You require they be a publicly traded company with a market cap over $500 billion or somesuch in order to be eligible for such self-insurance. So subsidaries, startups and private equity backed stuff aren't eligible, only those with deep enough pockets to be capable of paying. So in Amazon's case, its gotta be the same Amazon that's traded on NASDAQ, not some fly by night registered in another country where they could weasel out.

Heck go a step further and require they post a "bond" in the form of unvested shares that add up to $50 billion or whatever you think the worst case cleanup bill ends up being. Those shares only vest if a disaster happens that triggers the need for cleanup. No problem with the nuke plant then those shares never vested and are canceled when and only when the plant is fully decommissioned at end of life (or sold to another party) and all the regulatory i's and t's have been dotted and crossed.

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Re: Not as it seems...

So require that Amazon be that insurer instead of the taxpayer. They are worth $2 trillion, they could pay for even a Fukushima level cleanup with by issuing a few percent of their cap in new shares.

Require that condition be a part of their corporate charter, and mandate its inclusion in the charter of any successor organization so they can't do shenanigans to get out from it. There are legal methods to bind a covenant to real property that applies to future owners, so I assume the same would be possible with a corporate charter.

Behold! Humanity has captured our first look at the Sun's South Pole

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Any rocket scientists

Or people with quick access to rocket science adjacent software able to calculate what velocity would have to be reached for a craft to achieve polar orbit? I imagine it was difficult to just to get a 17* incline here, getting a 90* would probably required massive additional velocity and it would be difficult or impossible to use planetary slingshots to help.

Tug reaches flaming ship carrying electric cars off Alaska coast

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Re: ships or decks never catch fire

Would shipping them with batteries that had never had their first charge be an option? I know that discharged lithium batteries can still catch fire, but never charged? It would be a logistical pain though, since they couldn't be driven off the ship to the flatbed for shipping to the dealer.

Peep show: 40K IoT cameras worldwide stream secrets to anyone with a browser

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Re: What possible problem are cameras in a gym?

Its not just knowing how many people are in the entire gym, you have to know what they're doing. Her gym has classes, so knowing "150 people are currently inside" could mean it is totally packed if there are no classes at that time, or it could be half empty if there are three classes with 30 people each.

It also depends on what you want to do, i.e. cardio, dumbbells, racks, machines and seeing the photos will tell you how busy the area you are going to use is.

Cloud brute-force attack cracks Google users' phone numbers in minutes

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You couldn't even transfer within the same area code

You could only transfer if it was on the same EXCHANGE. Where I grew up it was probably 50-60 miles from the boundary of the area code, so it didn't have any effect on any of this. The city's exchange covered the city and two contiguous suburbs. There was a small town with about 2000 people (now over 20,000) that everyone now would consider a "suburb" since it is contiguous but back then it was a couple miles of farmland away. It was served by a rural exchange that covered about a quarter of the county including that small town.

So if the same situation applied today you might think you lived in one big city since you'd have to travel 3-4 miles to find any farmland but if you were in the right spot on the boundary between the "big city" and "small town" literally moving ACROSS THE STREET would mean having to get a new number!

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distributed to everybody in the country

Only in very small countries. Around here they were just for the city and a couple of suburbs. Though I imagine if you paid enough you could probably get a phone list on magtape for the entire country from AT&T back when they were a monopoly.

Trump guts digital ID rules, claims they help 'illegal aliens' commit fraud

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Re: Dumb

I almost wish they tried it just to listen to the tortured logic from the right about why mail-in voting is terribly insecure, even in person voting requires bringing a picture ID, but voting via Twitter is a great solution!

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Re: "President Trump’s reasoning..."

If they can't use digital IDs then they will continue to use printed IDs. He thinks THOSE are immune to fraud? It is trivial to counterfeit those documents, but digital IDs can include stuff that makes that far harder to copy or fake.

I think Trump is just reflexively undoing everything Biden did just because he did it. Maybe Biden in his last couple months should have put in executive orders to do all the stuff Trump was going to do just to confuse the orange moron.

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Re: Dumb

Did they seriously suggest that?

It is sad that it is no longer possible to tell sarcasm from reality when it comes to the orange moron and his band of worshipping cronies.

Mozilla frets about Google's push to build AI into Chrome

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Why does it have to be built in?

Support extensions/selections for that kind of stuff, then people can choose which AI they want doing it or none at all.

Heck they get Google to pay them to be the default search, maybe they get OpenAI to pay them for being Firefox's default AI? If the Google payments go away based on the antitrust suit another deep pocketed company willing to pay them would come in handy. And no one here should complain about such a deal any more than they complain about the Google deal. It would just be a default, as with search you could choose another or choose the 'off' switch.

Apple-Intel divorce to be final next year

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Why would Apple want to stick with x86 and simply trade horses? Their CPUs are superior to both Intel *and* AMD in single thread performance AND performance per watt. The only reason they don't beat them in multithread as well is because Apple doesn't make CPUs with as many cores as they do.

Trump administration's whole-government AI plans leaked on GitHub

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So stupid

I don't care what technology it is, something that's in its early stages does not belong in an organization everyone depends on in one way or another. The same would be true if someone had proposed the government going all in on Java when that was new or putting everything on the web in the 90s.

Tinfoil hat wearers can thank AI for declassification of JFK docs

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Facepalm

Yes that AI really helped

Given that it wasn't even smart enough to redact social security numbers of still living people mentioned in the JFK files!

Plus it didn't reveal any new information at all. The conspiracy theorists are still going to claim that some stuff is being held back even if everything really was released, so I don't know what the point was other than Trump mentioning during the campaign he would do it.

Now do the full Epstein release. Funny how Trump is somehow shy about that, I wonder why that could be?