Posts by DS999

Green recycling goals? Pending EU directive could hammer used mobile market

Re: Apple

two-orders-of-magnitude-lower data rates

Who the hell uses the port on their phone for DATA? I can't remember the last time I plugged mine into a computer, but it was surely pre-covid.

With iOS 18 Apple made it possible to "unbrick" an iPhone using another iPhone, where previously it had required plugging it into a PC (I guess it used iTunes somehow?) which was the last thing that could only be accomplished via a physical port. There were some people speculating that rather than go USB-C they'd go portless, but this was apparently the one thing that would have made that impossible. Even though bricking is rare, you still have to have a way to recover from it that doesn't involve disassembly!

They'll just be shipped to the rest of the world that doesn't stupidly regulate the ports on a secondhand phones.

A huge week for satnav as both China and Europe make generational launches

Re: SpaceX?

For some reason the EU decided to stop Ariane 5 launched based on a schedule for when Ariane 6 was supposed to be ready. So there was a gap where they didn't have much launch capability, so a few are being launched from the US on SpaceX. Future launches go back to Ariane.

Re: Radio doesn't go through water well

Beidou originally was just for China, but it has had worldwide coverage for years now. Many "GPS" receivers in devices including most smartphones use Beidou alongside GPS and Galileo for faster acquisition and more accurate location.

Europe to force Apple to help rivals connect to iOS, iPadOS

Re: iOS "interoperability"?

Graphics acceleration works perfectly well for third party apps, and has from day one. Do you think all those third party games are getting the frame rates they do without acceleration?

Re: iOS "interoperability"?

So they made their tracker work better than Tile's, but once they got together with Google and created a standard API all trackers could work like Apple's. Should Apple have not been allowed to make trackers work better because it would decrease Tile's usage?

Re: iOS "interoperability"?

When did Apple "block" Tile?

They even worked with Google to come up with an industry standard "find my" API that would work across both iOS and Android, meaning Tile can work with it too if they choose. But that sort of stuff doesn't happen overnight. If they had to come up with the standard API first before they can release any new products, they would probably release a lot fewer products (and create fewer new APIs as a consequence) because doing the API first means you have to get it right the first time - because no doubt the EU would complain if they change the API after third parties had targeted it with products.

iOS "interoperability"?

Do they really think they're going to get Apple to license iOS to third party hardware OEMs? Because that's what it sounds like they're talking about.

Apple would pull out of Europe before they'd accept that. They still have the scars from the disaster that was macOS licensing in the 90s.

No way? Big Tech's 'lucrative surveillance' of everyone is terrible for privacy, freedom

Google's defense to the press

About this was "we have a privacy policy".

If your privacy policy is basically "we can do anything we want with everything we collect on you", which I'm sure it is after you go through the endless pages of legalese with all the exceptions for what I'm sure is a promising first page or so, that's a pretty weak defense.

Iran's cyber-goons emailed stolen Trump info to Team Biden – which ignored them

Trump did say in 2016 that if a foreign government offered him dirt on his opponents "why wouldn't I listen?" so if the democrats did use it they would only be doing what said he'd do - what he did do in accepting the help from Wikileaks.

Unless you're dumb enough to believe that they "just happened" to time their releases of information when Trump had bad news he wanted to bury like the "grab her by the pussy" scandal, and Roger Stone was known to be in direct contact with Wikileaks.

The problem with using that Iranian information is that Iran doesn't favor either candidate, they are just a chaos agent who wants to our election to be as messy as possible. So there's probably a very good chance they'd slip in some fake stuff with the real stuff so they can get a two-fer, scandal for Trump's campaign if there's anything bad revealed, then scandal for Biden's campaign when it was discovered some of the information was false.

Not to mention, Trump loves to play in the dirt and nothing seems to stick to him for very long. He'll happily throw anyone under the bus to save himself, and since he never sends emails there wouldn't be anything incriminating written by him. It would all be dispensable underlings, and before long we'd hear his tried and true "I hardly know that person" but they'd know he'd bring them back in his administration if he won.

Starlink's new satellites emit 30x more radio interference than before, drowning cosmic signals

Re: How come there's no regulation?

The FCC doesn't test satellites or other hardware themselves, they rely on the applicant to do proper testing and present results in their FCC filings showing they meet the regulations. If they do not meet the regulatory limits, the FCC can pull their license to operate. Whether that would mean shutting down some functionality of the Gen 2 satellites, reducing their power output, or shutting them down entirely, who knows.

Rest assured, if that happens Musk will pull a Trump and claim it is a political hit job by Biden and Harris, and lie "I reviewed the testing done personally and it is fine, the FCC is just incompetent".

Re: Just for curious...

In the US, Starlink may be able to sustain their profits by joining other ISPs to prevent the FCC from trying to improve the state of rural broadband

Starlink wants to prevent it because those funds are only for building infrastructure in rural areas to connect people who live there. That's the holdup in a lot of places, it costs a lot to wire them up and won't pay back for 10 or 20 years. Telcos want payback in 5 years or less or they won't invest. This is not a subsidy to pay their bills, it goes directly to the telcos for capital investments they wouldn't otherwise make.

It is not intended to subsidize companies who already provide connectivity in those areas, which Starlink does, so Musk is pissed he can't dip his wick in billions of taxpayer funds like he did at Tesla and SpaceX. Because he can't have it, he wants the program shut down. Come to think of it, that's probably why he wants to be Trump's "efficiency" guy, his one act will be to shut down that program and then he'll quit.

Re: Just for curious...

Dunno where you live but where I am in the midwest even the smallest towns are getting fiber, often out to even remote farmsteads because it is the rural electric cooperative that's doing it. AT&T seems to have given up improving their cell network around here, but Verizon keeps lighting up more 5G (including some 6 GHz stuff they list as "UW" even though it isn't, but I see 400 Mbps on speedtest a half mile from the tower...unfortunately not in my house which is in a low spot and will probably always have 2 bars) and I hear TMobile is doing the same with theirs.

Maybe it helps that we're Centurylink country, so everyone gave up hope long ago that they'd do anything. Now that others are running fiber they've started doing some in my state, but only in the places where there is already fiber! I'm sure that makes sense to some lawyer or beancounter somewhere, but it doesn't make any sense to anyone else.

Re: Just for curious...

Musk claimed late last year that Starlink was "cash flow positive". Which means that the monthly revenue from customers exceeds the ongoing monthly cost to launch new satellites. Since the satellites have a finite lifespan estimated at ~5 years they'll forever be launching them.

The long term problem for Starlink is that as fiber and 5G expand, the potential customer base for satellite internet will shrink every year so the price gonna increase over time.

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

Re: Hard truths

Once all the old C programmers are gone, something else (probably several something elses) will have supplanted Rust as the "it" language, and the Rust developers will be the old fogeys trying to stand in the way of other languages being used.

UK activists targeted with Pegasus spyware ask police to charge NSO Group

Re: A bizarre barter in the bazaar

The owners of NSO probably don't care what happens to Israel - they'll be rich enough to live wherever they want. That's the problem with sociopaths, they only care about themselves.

California governor goes on AI law signing spree, but demurs on the big one

Re: MAGA turds like you have been screaming about "companies fleeing California" for 20 years now.

But California lost a congressional seat because of people fleeing, so who's correct?

California gained population, but other states gained more. That's why they lost a house seat. Given the real estate prices there, it isn't hard to see why people would prefer living in places where it is an achievable dream for people who aren't doctors or a couple each making $200K at a tech company to own your own home before age 50.

All but three states gained population from 2010-2020, the big loser was West Virginia. If people were choosing where to live based on red vs blue, there is hardly a redder state in the country than West Virginia! Illinois and Mississippi also lost a very tiny amount of people.

Re: Gavinator Nuisance is just another $%#& politician and it is a presidential election year

MAGA turds like you have been screaming about "companies fleeing California" for 20 years now. Yet they still have the 5th largest economy in the world, when compared to other countries.

So maybe aspiring nazis like Musk leave, but there are still more new businesses created there in a day than leave in a year. If anything was going to influence businesses to leave it wouldn't be "regulatory, tax, anti-freedom" stuff it would have been WFH. But companies have successfully pushed back on that, but the tradeoff is they still want to be located where the talent is located.

Tor insists its network is safe after German cops convict CSAM dark-web admin

Only 2000 exit nodes?

That seems quite doable for law enforcement with sufficient resources to compromise. The German police alone wouldn't be able to budget enough for that, but if you expand it to INTERPOL, plus the FBI and the like, its seems well within their reach.

Law enforcement might already comprise more than half of the exit/guard nodes in the TOR network, making it quite doable to gather a lot of data about who is using TOR and what is being connected to by TOR. Putting the pieces together to figure out which specific user is connecting to which specific endpoint would be trivial with enough data, at least for endpoints that are lightly used enough to be able to prove a relationship between that user sending out packets and that endpoint receiving them.

Chinese spies spent months inside aerospace engineering firm's network via legacy IT

Re: Probably because this equipment pre-dated things like firewalls (or at least good modern ones.)

My first job out of school was working for an engineering company in 1994. They had a firewall, and it wasn't any sort of recent thing that was implemented shortly before I got there.

Yeah that makes no sense. Does the company not have a firewall? Because in any normal company you'd have to go to some effort to connect something to the open internet - it would be some effort to even find the right network device to plug into for that! Then you'd have to set the correct IP/netmask, and insure it doesn't conflict with an existing device.

All I can think of is that they had no firewall, and if that's the case they should be barred from ever getting another government contract.

Putin really wants Trump back in the White House

Re: Good!

You're basically channeling Chamberlain and his appeasement strategy with Hitler. Didn't he look foolish when Hitler kept going. Anyone who thinks Putin would stop at Ukraine is a complete fucking moron. He's openly said he wants back Russia's empire days, which encompassed a lot more than Ukraine's land.

Lebanon now hit with deadly walkie-talkie blasts as Israel declares ‘new phase’ of war

Obviously this was planned as a two stage attack

Blow up the pagers, so they resort to using the walkie talkies, then blow those up.

I agree that this looks like the act of a country planning a major invasion. Decapitate the leadership, destroy the ability of the leaders who remain by making them fear the use of any electronic communications device, then you roll in and they can't coordinate a response.

Pity someone didn't slip Netanyahu one of those pagers. Not only has he continued to escalate against the wishes of many in his government, but it is looking more and more likely that he knew what Hamas was planning a year ago and let it happen because it gave him the excuse he wanted to level Palestine.

Cops across the world arrest 51 in orchestrated takedown of Ghost crime platform

Even if the cops only infiltrate one of those custom crime phones every year or two

It puts the worry into the criminals that maybe they are unknowingly using one of the compromised devices.

Despite Russia warnings, Western critical infrastructure remains unprepared

Easily deniable targets

Whoever is attacking a vulnerable target in an "easily deniable" way become an easily deniable target themselves.

Open source orgs strengthen alliance against patent trolls

What bullshit

Limiting the length of a challenge, why would they want to make it more difficult to prove a patent is invalid? If you're going to limit anything maybe you'd limit the length of a patent application so the examiners don't have such a backlog?

If they want to limit the length of the challenge, maybe base it on the length of the patent in some way, so that wordy complex patents can have wordy complex challenges.

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

Re: Conspiracy

That it was not thermal runaway of batteries.

So no your ridiculous idea will not work for blowing up the car unless someone first planted explosives in it somewhere. A crime that existed long before EVs using simple radio reception.

The eight year old girl might have been standing/sitting next to a Hezbollah father or brother wearing the pager on their hip. What 8 year old child has a pager in 2024?

Predator spyware kingpins added to US sanctions list

Apple could solve the problem of NSO and its ilk

By "partnering with" (aka paying/bribing) law enforcement in a few select countries to purchase NSO's services, and use them on a phone that Apple secretly controls so they can figure out how their exploit works and shut it down.

A few repeats of NSO investing millions developing/purchasing exploits which become useless a few weeks after being rolled out to their customers might cause them to lose interest in trying to attack the iPhone. And if not, for the price of those bribes Apple gets some top tier security hardening lol

Elon Musk's assassination 'joke' bombs, internet calls for his deportation

Re: Maybe he's was just being satirical

Trump has not done any of the things that Nixon did

No, he did far worse.

He tried to overthrow the entire fucking democracy because he didn't want to lose! Then he stole classified documents and obstructed justice by hiding them and claimed he returned them all. Even his former AG Bill Barr thinks it will be an open and shut case. I know his pet judge dismissed it, but the appeals court is going to undo that, and hopefully remove her as judge. He will face time for that crime even if he wiggles out of everything else, unless he flees the country. No claims of presidential immunity are possible there because he committed that crime after he left office.

Re: Maybe he's was just being satirical

Bullshit.

NOBODY thought presidents had immunity for anything that fell under the huge umbrella of "official acts". If they did, Ford would not have pardoned Nixon and Nixon would not have accepted the pardon (part of accepting the pardon is admission of guilt) If Harris wins I hope one of her first actions will be to push a bill that explicitly states that presidents are not above the law, and can face consequences for their actions even if they are "official acts" like ordering Seal Team 6 to assassinate your rivals.

That Supreme Court ruling was a surprise to everyone, even the most conservative legal scholars. I'm not sure if even Trump's lawyers thought it would fly, but Trump's entire legal strategy is one of delay so he wouldn't have to face a jury for his crimes so his lawyers have been throwing every possible bit of sand in the gears of justice until the election. Where he's either elected and he's scot-free, or he's not and the delay strategy will run out and he's already pretty much said he'll flee to Venezuela to escape justice. Which I'd be fine with, he'd be too much trouble to imprison, I just think if he's on the lam he should lose his SS protection. He can afford his own security.

Re: Right wingers saying extreme stuff

And if you're stupid all you can do is get angry.

Right wingers saying extreme stuff

Always fall back on the "it was a joke" excuse. I've not seen much in the way of humor from Musk, though unlike Trump he is at least capable of laughter.

Alibaba Cloud waiting for hardware to dry out before trying to restore customer data

Re: water from above?

They probably have no choice but to continue to use it in the short term. Big cloud providers buy custom stuff, not off the shelf, and they can't just drop an order for a datacenter's worth of stuff and get it in a few days. And when they do get it there's probably a lengthy installation and acceptance test cycle.

So they probably plan to limp along with whatever still works for now and expedite its replacement some months later.

China claims Starlink signals can reveal stealth aircraft – and what that really means

I'm skeptical

The design of stealth planes like the F22 is intended to create as small a radar cross section as possible, by avoiding large areas of signal reflection. If whatever is not absorbed is scattered widely, the amount reflecting to any one place is small and that's why stealth works. Using passive signals to track a drone, which is not designed to be stealthy in any way, and track a stealth fighter, which is, is a far easier problem. Not saying its impossible to track stealth airplanes that way, but saying "hey we did it with off the shelf drones so we bet it works for F22s also!" is a wild extrapolation.

Seems like the sort of thing they'd release hoping to worry the US. If they really wanted to know if it worked on F22s they'd test it on their best stealth aircraft and see how much more difficult those are to track than commercial drones. Which they probably did or will do, but they'll never release the results of THAT study!

Prison just got rougher as band of heinously violent cybercrims sentenced to lengthy stints

Re: US long sentences

Supermax prisons are actually by far the safest as far as protection from other inmates. You are kept in your cell 23 hours a day, there are no communal meals or showers, and the one hour of recreation takes place in small heavily supervised groups - and if anyone causes trouble their future recreation time takes place alone with only guards watching.

Re: US long sentences

Based on the description of their crimes in this article, isn't a really long sentence justified? Do you really think this person could be reformed, and if so what percentage risk of "pretending to be reformed then once released immediately begin committing more crimes" do you think should be acceptable?

Re: A warning message

If his ill gotten gains are bitcoin, pretty sure they'll be worthless 47 years from now!

I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!

Didn't it make you wonder why anyone would want their hard drive to be louder? Or quieter - in which case you'd wonder why the default isn't "as quiet as possible".

Re: Are you sure?

I love Clonezilla for asking 'Are you sure' and then 'Are you really sure?' before committing

But does it tell you what its going to do, or warn you "I think maybe you don't really want to do this" if you're about to do something that doesn't make sense like copying over a live volume?

Because if all it does is ask "are you sure" twice instead of once, then it is part of the problem, not part of the solution! Because asking the same question twice doesn't save anyone from themselves, other than people who have somehow accidentally clicked yes - and if the place you click 'yes' is the same place where you would start to click a command leaving you vulnerable to an accidental double click the fix is NOT to ask twice. It is to move the "are you sure" dialog to another location on the screen!!

I forgive this sort of thing from that era

Memory was very scarce, having a bunch of extra protection around commands that were often going to be executed with more than one person present was an extravagance you couldn't afford.

But in today's world when we have gigabytes of RAM in phones and a terabyte of storage is the size of your fingernail, there's no excuse for programmers to skimp on that sort of thing.

This is a common problem

A CLI will either perform the action, or at most say "are you sure Y/N?" A GUI will do similarly, either performing the action or giving you Yes/No dialog box to click your choice.

When a command does something big and irreversible, how difficult would be to have the command say for instance "the following actions will occur: delete account admin_fred; delete account admin_joe;" etc. or "format 4 TB volume that contains a valid NTFS filesystem last mounted on <date>" and give you a chance to proceed or not? It requires a small amount of extra programming, but the time saved by countless admins who do an oops will be repaid ten thousandfold.

This is what happens when engineers write software. And too often I see people say "well if you didn't know what you were doing you shouldn't have been mucking about with this stuff", thinking that software that protects one from their own mistakes is somehow a bad thing.

Feeld dating app's security too open-minded as private data swings into public view

They thought that's what you meant by an "open relationship"

See title

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

I remember seeing some OLD datacenters

Back when I was doing consulting gigs that would have me spend time inside a datacenter. Rooms that were probably built in the 70s or 80s still in use 25 years later, taht had housed mainframes, then minis, then Unix and Windows servers. Probably the only constant was EMC arrays and tape libraries.

I never had to deal with the stuff under the raised floor, but it was always interesting to see what was under there when tiles were removed. They all seemed to have so so many of these really thick serial cables (some sort of mainframe thing) as well bulky SCSI cables (from before fibre channel obsoleted that) snaking all over the place. They never removed them because they were so bulky and heavy the datacenter guys were worried that even trying to pull them out with the end cut off would tug on other cables, rub them against sharp edges in the tile support system, etc.

I think these sorts of intermittent errors were probably well known and that's why they seem to have all adopted a "never remove old cabling" policy. As a result the space underneath the floor in an old datacenter always looked like Indiana Jones' worst nightmare!

Boeing to launch quantum comms satellite testbed in 2026

Re: What can you say?

Article says they are funding this themselves, so while I'm sure they'll be at the trough eventually at any screwups and cost overruns in this project are on Boeing alone and not the taxpayers.

Google Chrome gets a mind of its own for some security fixes

Your browser doesn't need to know your location for that to happen. FedEx knows the destination of your package via the tracking number.

There are very very few cases where that's necessary, and even fewer for camera, microphone, USB and bluetooth which are other permissions that browsers should basically never have, but stuff that Google pushed into the standard and immediately implemented in Chrome. We all know why.

NASA engineers play space surgeon in bid to unclog Voyager 1's arteries

Voyager scientists were "working remotely"

Decades before the internet made it possible for the rest of us!

Online media outstrips TV as source of news for the first time in the UK

Re: The most disturbing thing along these lines I saw

Really, newspapers in the 1970s were generating clicks? Where? Once newspapers became almost entirely subscription based the headlines did a very good job of summarizing the article, because there was no need to "sell" the paper based on headlines. Maybe back in the pre WW II days when newsboys were hawking them on a street corner for 2c they did, but the headline didn't need to be wild, the newsboy could say "some crazy thing happened, read all about it!" since he isn't bound by what the headline says.

The crazy headlines were used to sell papers people didn't subscribe to, i.e. tabloids like the National Enquirer or the New York Post.

If HDMI screen rips aren't good enough for you pirates, DeCENC is another way to beat web video DRM

HDMI's in-built "content protection" is all but useless by the look of it

Not sure if the same is true for HDMI 2.x for 4K video, but for HDMI 1.x the HDCP 1.x standard is useless because of stolen/compromised keys. Many (maybe most) cheap HDMI splitters use stolen keys and don't bother to HDCP protect the output. So basically they act as "HDCP strippers", allowing unecnrypted HDMI to be fed to encoders etc.

While compromised keys are revoked (that's the main reason your cheap HDMI splitter stops working, it isn't because the electronics go bad) it depends on software updates to the device outputting the HDMI. So as long as it is getting software updates it is required to update the HDCP key revocation list. But there are many many devices out there that no longer get updates but are still perfectly functional, so you don't have to worry your "HDCP stripper" will stop working one day.

Google bets on carbon capture tech to clean up its mess – in the 2030s

Re: Monogas

Because that's the only greenhouse gas found at ground level in any quantity (if you consider .04% "quantity")

Stuff like methane may be worse (though shorter lived) but its concentrations are far far lower and it quickly rises and won't remain at ground level for long. To capture it you have to capture it when it is being emitted, like oil/gas wells. Even flaring it is better than letting it escape. But emissions like melting permafrost or undersea eruptions of frozen methane are a bigger source and can't be captured because the sources are so diverse and unpredictable.