* Posts by DS999

5333 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jun 2020

No new top boss at NSA until it answers questions about buying up location, browsing data

DS999 Silver badge

There's zero chance of that in the US

With one party that is vehemently anti-regulation where business is concerned, only wanting to regulate government, and both parties in the pockets of $big_business thanks to all the campaign contributions that fund their election.

Even the hardcore pro-privacy guys like Wyden tend to only talk about limiting on the margins how much privacy raping corporations can do, because he'd have a really hard time getting re-elected if he pushed hard for the type of privacy laws Europe has.

Scores of US credit unions offline after ransomware infects backend cloud outfit

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Execs Still Don't Get It

On the other hand, if smaller credit unions were running their own internal IT operation the level of competence will vary widely. Some might have all the latest patches and technology, and others see it as a cost center and there are running antiquated technology that's updated only as required by outside regulation, and you have no way of knowing which side your credit union is on until it is too late.

The service providers are hopefully more likely to be on the 'well run' side of things since providing that service is their company's main business. That's no guarantee they are, and even when you do things "perfectly" if you're hit with a zero day flaw there's nothing you can do about it.

Senate bill aims to stop Uncle Sam using facial recognition at airports

DS999 Silver badge

If ALL it is doing

Is comparing your face to the face on your ID card, I don't see the problem. It doesn't affect my privacy to have a machine check whether my face matches the picture on my ID instead of having a person do it. If it says that's not me, then a human double checks - just like if one TSA guy said "hmmm...that doesn't really look like him, what do you think Fred?" to a co-worker.

What affects privacy is permanently storing the photo it took of me to do that check, or comparing that photo to photos other than the one on my ID like pictures of wanted criminals. So the bill should simply say that no faces can be stored for more than 24 hours (to allow checking later if it turns out the software screwed up and allowed me to fly with someone else's ID) and faces can only be compared to the face on their ID, not a bunch of other photos that have no bearing on whether I'm who my ID says I am.

Electric vehicles earn shocking report card for reliability

DS999 Silver badge

No it does not require any sort of special fuel

The condensate is acidic, so you want to have a neutralizer (which is literally just a tube along the pipe that is filled with calcite) to prevent acidic discharge from damaging pipes or etching concrete (if it is drained into a nearby floor drain)

I had a condensing hot water heater installed in the restaurant/bar I used to own, and it ran off ordinary natural gas.

DS999 Silver badge

There's no way it has a 3 year design life. Something like that would have a far longer warranty. I helped my mom get her furnace/AC replaced a couple years ago, and parts like heat exchangers were warrantied for 10 years. If one corroded out after three years she would get two free replacements under that warranty!

Interpol makes first border arrest using Biometric Hub to ID suspect

DS999 Silver badge

That should be corrected to say Interpol has ANNOUNCED arresting one person. They may have arrested others who were false positives, then had to let them go. Obviously they are not going to publicize those failures, though if they're happening eventually some of the people will take their story to the press and it'll be become known.

America's ambitious Artemis III likely to miss 2025 Moon landing date, auditors sigh

DS999 Silver badge

Re: No-one..

Musk doesn't run SpaceX, Gywnne Shotwell does. It is amazing the difference competent leadership makes when you compare SpaceX and Twitter.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: No-one..

It would really make SpaceX look bad if Boeing's delayed SLS was ready before it.

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Fine line

His success reminds me of Trump's claim that he started with a "small loan of $1 million" from his father back in 1972. That $1 million would be equivalent to around $10 million today, and he inherited a total of over $400 million from daddy, worth over a billion in today's money. Makes for a great demonstration of being out of touch with real people, since likely a low single digit percentage of the population has parents wealthy enough to loan them $1 million in cash before they reach the age of 30.

Musk's story similarly leaves out of the rich parents, and how they got rich. I'm sure he started with a similar "small loan" back in the 90s. If it weren't for government money Tesla would have gone under before it shipped its first car, but now that he's got his he's one of those "the government is the problem, they should get out of the way and let innovators innovate" types that believes government spending should be cut to the bone to reduce the tax "burden" on billionaires.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Yaccarino

Regardless of her views, she probably has some sort of incentive bonus to stay on the job to prevent her from quitting in frustration when the real CEO keeps shitting himself in public.

Even if she's a true blue MAGA believer like Musk, she would have to be really annoyed that he is constantly making her babysitting job more difficult and making it more and more likely that Twitter will chase all the normies away and devolve into another right wing echo chamber like Gab or Trump's tiny little sandbox he shouts from.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Actually, I kind of agree with him

Well, there does seem to be a concerted effort to destroy X, and attack Musk. Should corporations be doing this?

Just because some individuals may want to "attack Musk" and "destroy X" does not imply that corporations who make the decision to take their advertising elsewhere have a goal of doing so. If that was the case, why have they been advertising on Twitter (I refuse to call it X like the guy dumb enough to believe he will ever turn it into an "everything app" wants us to) for the past year? Wouldn't they have simply reduced their advertising budget down to a trickle over time? Or quit advertising before the takeover, so they can claim it had nothing to do with him?

Does that have free speech implications?

Only if you believe like Musk does, that Twitter is entitled to its advertisers to continue paying them for advertising regardless of whatever lunatic shit he posts, or seeing their ads alongside Nazi accounts, or whatever next month's craziness will be? For all the problems there are with Facebook they probably think that's a far safer place for them to advertise, so that next time Musk inserts his foot into his mouth up to his kneecap no one will be calling their PR department asking for comment. There's a reason why normal CEOs don't go out of their way to stir up controversy. Maybe IBM's CEO believes the Earth is flat and Elvis is still alive living with JFK and Marilyn Monroe, but if he so he's smart enough to keep his crazy to himself to avoid damaging the corporate brand.

Free speech, just to educate you Trumpies who don't believe in the constitution except for alternate Tuesdays when it is time to buy another AR15 and certainly have never read it, in its First Amendment states "CONGRESS shall make no law..." Congress was not involved in any way with the decision of IBM et al to stop advertising. You can whine all you want about your theory of how these corporate meanies want Musk to fail, but there is no evidence of that. But given that a sizeable percentage of you idiots still believe Trump won the election despite that lack of a single grain of evidence ever presented in any court of law anywhere in the US, you obviously don't consider facts when you decide what conspiracy theory to hitch your wagon to.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: I got an A; the teacher gave me an F

That's the whole Trump/MAGA ethos. Take credit for being a "genius" for things you think make you look good, hold yourself blameless while pointing the finger at vast vague conspiracies against you for things you think make you look bad.

Sure everyone does this to some extent, it is human nature to want to believe that we are responsible for good fortune rather than luck, and are willing to blame others for bad fortune. But only with Trump has it been raised to an art form, and has spread to the third of the population who worship him like an orange Jesus.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Actually, I kind of agree with him

So you are a "free speech absolutist" but you don't think IBM et al have the right to "speak" with their advertising dollars where they choose to? Musk seems to believe Twitter is entitled to these advertisers spending money there, and if they choose not to it is "their fault" if Twitter goes bust.

You clearly do not subscribe to what you claim to, or have a remarkable ability to choose when and where free speech rights are "absolute" and where they are non-existent.

Weak session keys let snoops take a byte out of your Bluetooth traffic

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Does Anyone Else Remember Bluetooth was DESIGNED to be INsecure?!

There are plenty of examples of protocols that in version 1.0 didn't have security in mind, but bluetooth is in version 5.something. It has changed a lot as its use cases have evolved, and along with that so have its needs for security.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: If its a flaw in the spec

No one said the software can't be updated, just that there's a flaw that impacts pretty much every bluetooth device because it is a flaw in the spec.

If the session key is "weak" in terms of too few bits, that's not something easy to fix. You have to change the spec to allow a larger session key, and only when all your devices have been updated is the problem fixed. If you have devices that are no longer getting updates, too bad. You have to replace those devices as any bluetooth communication with them can never be secured even if the devices they are talking to have been updated.

DS999 Silver badge

If its a flaw in the spec

It is probably not necessary to list the vendors and devices that are susceptible. You'd hope they would all be, as if they weren't then they would be exposed as not having properly implemented the spec (or as having found the flaw but not bothered to tell anyone else)

Hubble science instruments still out after going down 3 times in a week

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Boosting

You usually don't throw the car away when you have a flat tire, it's cheaper to just change that tire

True, but space telescope technology (imaging/CCD especially) has advanced a lot more than automotive technology over the same time. It might be more like throwing away a 1923 model T to replace it with a 2023 Ford Focus, which few would question as an improvement even if the model T could (in principle at least) be repaired for much less since it has far fewer parts and no finicky electronics.

Plus how long would it take to put together a manned mission to Hubble? A couple years, at least? That puts you into late 2025, and Hubble is only supposed to last to the end of the decade so you're talking four years. And this repair isn't even needed as it could function on only one gyro. There is a need for a Hubble successor for visible light astronomy. I think scientists thought that with modern technology ground based telescopes would be sufficient given the much larger mirrors they use, but Starlink is showing us a preview of things to come for ground based astronomy. Think about how bad that will be in 2030 with 10x today's number of LEO satellites.

Google goes geothermal to power some bitbarns

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Greenwashing

Housecats kill a lot more birds than wind turbines ever will, and no one is trying to ban them.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Greenwashing

Are we really supposed to worry about subterranean microbial ecosystems? So you would ban all drilling, for anything - including water - in the name of saving them?

A small scale project like this will tell us whether this is a viable strategy in the long term. Will less heat be extracted over time, or does the surrounding rock move heat efficiently enough that any lost heat is easily replaced? Does a single well cause a statistically significant increase in detectable seismic activity?

Not sure why you think this would use a lot of water? They would recycle the same water through the well, not use fresh water at the inlet and dump it at the outlet.

Car dealers openly beg Biden to put brakes on electric vehicle drive

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Cars dealer in America?

I can see their point of view. I wouldn't want to have my dealership used as the equivalent of an Amazon package pickup site.

Reportedly many dealers are doing almost anything they can to steer customers away from EVs not only because of the reduced service revenue they'll derive from them but also because they fear OEMs will use the EV switch as a way of cutting the dealers out of the purchase process. So I'm skeptical of the reports about how long EVs are sitting on dealer lots versus gasoline cars - if the dealers are hiding them in the back and claiming they are problem plagued (and maybe the early EVs from major OEMs are, I'm sure there's a learning curve in their production) it is hardly surprising they are sitting on lots longer.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Cars dealer in America?

Only in certain states like Texas. I guess the good old boy car dealers must have a lot of political power there. Most reasonable places allow direct sales, but with many brands not only offering warranties but covering all routine maintenance during the first 4-7 years of ownership, there needs to be a place to have that done. That place doesn't necessarily need to be one that also sells those cars though, and there's no reason they should only service certain brands. Its done that way because it has always been done that way. Probably something that started with Henry Ford.

Chains like Car-X manage to service all brands, and can do pretty much anything - once the warranty on my Audi ran out I used to take my car to a nearby Car-X even though the dealership is only a mile further down the road. They had much cheaper labor rates, and were able to obtain the same parts when I wanted the "real" part or aftermarket "equivalent" or remanufactured parts when I wanted to save money. The dealer will only use brand new Audi original parts.

Now that I have a newer one covered by warranty I'm back to the dealer, but if it wasn't for the fact I'm getting all scheduled maintenance and warranty repairs free (plus pickup/dropoff and a loaner car also for free) I'd be taking it to the Car-X. The dealerships have some sort of exclusive relationship with the automakers, and are getting reimbursed for that service. If my car had the equivalent of a "health plan" where I could take it wherever I wanted that within the "preferred provider network" with zero copay and elsewhere I'd have to pay a share of it I'd have no reason to go to the dealer. There are probably some really complicated repairs only they can do, but hopefully that won't be needed on a car that's still under warranty!

Don't mean to sound like an ad for Car-X, I just used it as an example because I'm happy with this one particular shop near where I live.

Goldman sacked: Apple 'wants out' of credit card collab

DS999 Silver badge

Yes there had been articles about Goldman being unhappy with the deal and wanting out, so even if there wasn't a built in escape hatch they are probably more than happy to let Apple out of the deal early.

It always seemed like an odd partnership, a company that is almost 100% consumer focused with a company that has almost no focus whatsoever on consumers outside of the 1% of the 1%. Honestly I think both sides just liked the cachet of being associated with the other's brand.

DS999 Silver badge

You don't get regulated like a bank for having a lot of cash. They had probably tread too close to being a bank at some point - they've dabbled on the edges of the sector for a long time. I remember "Google Checkout" from almost 20 years trying to compete with Paypal, maybe they wanted to let consumers deposit money with them rather than having it use their bank account or card and they were warned they would be regulated as a bank (as they should) if they went forward with that plan so they backed off.

Paypal does maintain deposits for consumers (sort of) but has a linked bank account or card, and it has avoided being regulated as a bank but it has had to fight battles with regulators for years to avoid it.

If just having "too much cash" was enough to trigger bank regulation then all of the major Silicon Valley companies would have been in danger in the previous decade.

DS999 Silver badge

They don't want to be regulated like a bank

That would be a huge pain in the ass for a giant company that does banking as a tiny little sideline, rather than its main business.

Now if those regulations would allow Apple to create a separate company to be "Apple Bank" or whatever then they certainly have the money to make that happen. The regulators may not consider it as a separate company if Apple owns or controls it, but if they made it truly independent it would have shareholders who will want to make money and be pushing for unfriendly practices Apple doesn't want like charging late fees and excessive interest rates. Maybe they could incorporate it as a credit union, which is sort of a non profit version of a bank...

I'm sure Apple has had people looking into this for a while now. If they were smart they started looking into it before the ink was dry with Goldman Sachs, as a "just in case". Maybe they can turn that around in the 12 months or whatever until they leave Goldman. Either that or they have someone else lined up, I can't imagine they'd be willing to end the contract before its official end date of 2026 without a solid plan in place.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: I just don't get ..

It has 2% cashback on purchases via Apple Pay, and its deposited daily which is better than any competitive card. It is only 1% for "normal" purchases so I have another card that gives me 2% for non Apple Pay purchases, plus an Amazon card I use exclusively with Amazon since it gives me 5% on purchases there. Then there's the business card I got solely because it had a $900 cashback incentive if you spend $6000 in six months, which isn't all that hard to do. That's something I can't figure out - how in the world can that ever be a money maker for them? I half expected they would find a reason why I wouldn't get the money, but a couple months after the six months were up and well over $6000 in purchases I got a statement credit for $900...

The Apple Card is also quite consumer friendly, without any of the stupid fees for stuff like late payments. Something Apple insisted on, and probably limits their choice of alternatives to Goldman Sachs in the future.

China's Loongson debuts processor that 'matches Intel silicon circa 2020'

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Fake benchmarks though

Maybe it isn't needed. A PC from 2020 is still very useful today.

It is also nowhere near as fast as the fastest PC from 2020, but I agree a fast PC from 2013 or an average PC from 2020 it IS as fast as would be fine too. But they didn't point out its true performance in comparison with either current or past Intel chips, they used bogus benchmark comparisons to make it seem like it is competitive with Intel's highest end CPUs.

The comparison they made would be like if some third world auto manufacturer making ultra compacts claimed their car had performance comparable to a Lamborghini, by saying "in third gear it is as fast as a Lamborghini Huracan", ignoring the difference that their car had only three gears while the Lamborghini has seven.

DS999 Silver badge

Fake benchmarks though

This chip tops out at 2.5 GHz, and they claimed it matched an Intel CPU that clocks up to 6 GHz in IPC - basically that if you downclocked that Intel CPU to 2.5 GHz this Loongson chip will beat it.

Apple M3 is neck and neck with that Intel chip when the M3 is running at 4 GHz and the Intel is running at its full 6 GHz, so Loongson has a loong way to go to catch up to the state of the art in either IPC or raw performance.

Meta: If you're in our house running AI-massaged political ads, you need to 'fess up

DS999 Silver badge

Especially

Political advertisers!

They are just saying this to try to dodge heat when the inevitable happens and some dark money group runs an ad with a deepfake video of Biden saying something he never said. Zuck will say "they were required to tell us they were doing that, they didn't so we pulled the ad" (but only pulled it after two weeks of controversy and tens of millions of people had seen it)

Ukraine cyber spies claim Putin's planes are in peril as sanctions bite

DS999 Silver badge

Re: "the civil aviation sector of terrorist Russia"

And let's note both those leaving the country and in losses (Cargo 200 and 300) in terms of military aged men are rather higher for Russia

Too true, but unfortunately Russia can sustain such losses much longer because Putin is a psychopath who doesn't care about military aged men in Russia (or countries under his thumb like Chechnya) beyond their use as cannon fodder to support the war to prop up his tiny penis ego.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: "the civil aviation sector of terrorist Russia"

Who is the "we" who have "stolen Syria's oilfields"?

And the only "we" who started the conflict was Putin. He is the one who lined up a vast army on his border over several months, in full view of the world, while everyone warned him not to invade. But invade he did - he planned to take the entire country but fortunately his vaunted military was shown to be an inept paper tiger, and their invasion was Kyiv was a comical failure. Or would be "comical", if not for the atrocities their war criminals committed in areas they briefly occupied like Bucha.

Only a complete psychopath who has no feelings of empathy for anyone could possibly support Putin in this war, and try to rewrite history claiming it is all about "protecting" ethnic Russians in the Donbas and Crimea by conveniently ignoring how it started and how Russia attempted to make a beeline straight for Kyiv. You are true scum.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: How's the 3day SMO going?

Wow you really are a Putin stooge. What a sad life you lead carrying water for a murderous dictator.

UK government rings the death knell for SIM farms

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Ban banning things

I'd pop across to Europe somewhere, buy a multi-sim capable device and bring it back to the UK

Or operate it from the EU using a plan that allows unlimited texting to the UK.

Brits turn off Twitter, although teens and tweens keen on generative AI

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Xitter monthly users reach new high in 2023 says Elon.

And we should give that claim exactly as much credence as the claim that Teslas will be fully autonomous in 2016. And 2017. And 2018. And 2019. And would be able to act as an autonomous taxi providing revenue of over $100K a year in 2020. And so on.

The only public figure who has a higher density of lies per sentence is Trump.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Imagine ...

He didn't buy it stay relevant, he bought it so he could personally determine what's relevant. Or so he hoped.

Data-destroying defect found after OpenZFS 2.2.0 release

DS999 Silver badge

Re: ZFS here we go again

Data integrity checking didn't help them find a "data destroying defect" during whatever testing they do (which obviously isn't much) so it failed in the place you need it most - because hardware errors that cause bit rot are far far less likely to happen than software bugs that mangle your data!

Before you object "well once the data is mangled the checksums will be on the mangled data" if they are doing it that way, they are doing it wrong. Too much software does it like that because it is more efficient to checksum at the output, but the goal is not efficiency the goal is minimizing the possibility of undetected error. You need to separate the process of checksumming from the process of writing the data on the drives, specifically to catch this case. That's how it is done in the networking world, you checksum directly on the received data, then checksum on the data as it is sent separately. It is done that way specifically to detect any data that is corrupted as it is being moved about during the switching/routing process.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: ZFS here we go again

Maybe not "totally safe" but ext4 is so widely used that it is at least for my purposes perfectly safe so long as you aren't following the bleeding edge via your distro.

India's CERT given exemption from Right To Information requests

DS999 Silver badge

Six hours??

Sometimes you don't even know if it is a security incident or something else six hours after you detect a problem!

If they hold businesses to that they are going to get a lot of false alarms, where they get a report followed up later by a "never mind!"

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Tesla should deal

If it really was 90% he would have let them vote, and excitedly tweet about his "win" the moment the results were announced.

The fact he's fighting so hard shows that the 90% is complete fiction. Sweden is a very pro union country, that seems very unlikely to be the case. Even if the vote would be close, all this fighting he's doing is likely to push those who aren't looking to unionize to reconsider. They would have to ask themselves, what is he so afraid of that is causing him to fight so hard?

Neuralink pockets extra VC cash in computer-brain interface quest

DS999 Silver badge

Musk doesn't seem to have any concept of time longer than a year. He's been promising autonomous driving on Teslas "next year" since 2016. This year he finally admitted it is harder than he thought (duh!) but says that they are totally changing the way it works to use "AI" and that will have it working within a year. He never learns!

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

DS999 Silver badge

"don't trust them to protect me"

I use the cloud as a backup, sending encrypted backup files there you only lose them if you lose your local copy AND the cloud copy is gone when you need it (but you have to occasionally check that it is still available) That copy is out of date since I only do the cloud backup once a month, but since I have mirrored local storage and a daily "backup" on the same mirrored storage (in case I oops and delete the wrong thing) I basically would have to have a fire or flood destroy my house to resort to the cloud copy. If something that bad happens losing a few weeks of stuff is far from my worst problem!

Leader of pro-Russia DDoS crew Killnet 'unmasked' by Russian state media

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Killmilk

He might still be alive if he works out of a basement. Can't fall out of a 7th story window in a basement!

Tesla, Musk likely aware of Autopilot deficiencies behind Florida fatality, says judge

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Stating the obvious

Then it is on Tesla to restrict where it can be used, so that when it detects something it doesn't know how to handle (like cross traffic) it is disabled. They never warned customers "you can only use this on highways with controlled entry/exit", and obviously an inability to handle cross traffic would mean it cannot be used on any city street.

Where were the warnings? The same year as that accident Musk claimed that within a year people would be able to operate their Tesla as an autonomous taxi making them $100K a year. Why do Tesla fanboys constantly excuse this with the lame example of how autopilot works on an airplane? If you took a poll of average people, I'll bet a majority believe autopilot is completely autonomous on an airplane.

Even if you use that excuse for autopilot on a technicality, they have for several years been selling something called "full self driving" which it absolutely isn't. It isn't even the most advanced autonomous driving system!

Robocar tech biz sues Nvidia, claims stolen code shared in Teams meeting blunder

DS999 Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Puzzled

Does no one read even skim the articles anymore? There are several clueless posts like this one on this article where it is blatantly obvious the poster did not read the article.

X's legal eagles swoop on Media Matters over antisemitic content row

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Interesting wording

I don't see what's wrong with their methodology. Either those company's ads can never appear alongside the hate, or it can. It is irrelevant whether the chance of that happening "organically" was small, the fact that it can EVER happen is something these companies will not tolerate. I imagine there are a few Twitter users who follow the hate and follow say Apple because they have an iPhone, so it is ridiculous to claim such a situation can never happen in the real world. It probably already has happened plenty of times, but the people who saw it are the kind of people who are going to report it as a problem.

If you want to play host to Nazis at your backyard party, and I won't attend parties where I'm ever put in a position where I'm talking to a Nazi but you still want me to attend, it is up to you to find a way to keep Nazis and one side and people like me on another. Twitter is not able to do that, and I don't think it is possible to do that. The way everyone else running ads deals with it is either to not allow Nazis on their platform (and if one is found to boot him immediately) or to accept the fact they will not get any advertising from major brands. Musk wants to believe he can have his cake and eat it too, but I think he is going to be forced to choose.

DS999 Silver badge

Interesting wording

Calling them "manufactured" which implies that they are fake, when they are not. In fact Musk already admitted they are real in a post so his lawyers would have a really hard time arguing otherwise.

Whether they are "rare" or not is irrelevant. These companies won't advertise with Twitter if their ads EVER appear alongside such content, which Twitter cannot guarantee so long as Musk maintains it as a safe haven for Nazis and other terrible people. Previously when Twitter had a policy against that then it 1) didn't attract them to nearly the degree they are now, because they knew their accounts would be canceled as soon as they were found and 2) such posts wouldn't be removed so there is no incentive for anyone to flag such posts to Twitter.

So basically unless a watchdog like Media Matters checks up on them, Twitter will knowingly be running ads for these companies on Nazi accounts, but excusing it as "rare" as if that assuages the concerns of advertisers. There's no way to prevent your company's ads running alongside Nazi accounts eventually, because Twitter's owner welcomes Nazis and Nazi posts under his "maximal free speech" banner. But his love of free speech ends when it is someone else exercising THEIR right of free speech, such as Media Matters posting what they found when they looked to see what sort of ads would be run alongside a few Nazi accounts, or IBM/Apple/Disney/etc. exercising their right to insure their ads are not run alongside Nazi content.

Binance and CEO admit financial crimes, billions coughed up to US govt

DS999 Silver badge

Re: The cost of a jail-out card

Since he lives in China extradition would have been difficult. That probably provides you more leverage to negotiate a plea deal since the alternative is an arrest warrant meaning his travel is restricted to countries that won't extradite and an open warrant that languishes for years.

Since the main reason people commit crimes like money laundering is to make themselves richer, forcing him / his company to disgorge such a large amount of money isn't nothing. Without his cooperation Binance would have been able to keep all the ill gotten gains. If they threw the book at him and were able to put him in prison, that money would have remained in the company so the shareholders in Binance would benefit. Most of them were probably unaware of what was going on, but some likely at least knew but couldn't be proven guilty in a court of law. This settlement makes them "pay" as well.

It's an imperfect world. The criminal justice system has always been set up more for dealing with petty crimes like "I broke into your house and stole $100 cash" than complex financial crimes that span the world and involve many players both those guilty of additional crimes to those charged and those unaware of what was happening but financially benefiting from the crimes.

DS999 Silver badge

Where's the $10 billion coming from?

Did they really make that much as a middleman for crypto trading? Considering how thinly traded that is, that would be a massively higher profit margin than Wall Street firms make off consumer trades!

Or did they make their money off trading with customer funds like Sam Bankfraud, with the difference that their trades made money instead of losing money?

Telco CEO quits after admitting she needs to carry rivals' SIM cards to stay in touch

DS999 Silver badge

Wow talk about bad optics

Even if carrying your rival's SIM cards is part of your "personal DR plan" you'd want to keep that a secret!

IBM-led advertising X-odus gains steam as more flee Musk's platform

DS999 Silver badge

We have antisemitic hate marches going on in the centre of London, why care about Twitter?

Because the people marching in them aren't getting paid by Disney and Paramount to carry signs advertising those companies. On Twitter they are, so that's why these companies care. Overall as far as concern over anti Jewish hate goes, then yes whether ads for big companies appear alongside Nazi posts on Muskie's playground is down the list of concerns.

DS999 Silver badge

Re: Get the popcorn ready

Musk isn't filing suit to win, he knows it will lose but he gets cheers from the MAGA morons and he craves their adulation. The real reason he's filing suit is to try to intimidate others who report on stuff like this and cow them into silence.