Posts by martynhare

RIAA DMCAs GitHub into nuking popular YouTube video download tool, says it's used to slurp music

Freedom of thought and freedom of speech...

Combine these two freedoms and copyright falls apart - especially in the case of music. The argument that playing a recording of a musical work is the same as the artist performing it falls apart the moment that publicly playing back the words of a racist gets the person who hits the play button arrested, not the person who originally said them.

In any event, YouTube needs to list the licence terms associated with videos because you can upload under Creative Commons. With their help it would be trivial to add a licence check by default to make the RIAA piss right off.

JavaScript-based address bar spoofing vulns patched in Safari, Yandex, Opera

Re: Flash for Web is almost dead...

As in moving on to WebAssembly, WebGL, WebUSB... etc? In the year 2030, maybe every website can look like Runescape and we can call it Web 3.0

Love Minecraft: Java? You'll have to learn to love your Microsoft account as well – it will be required next year

Re: Slurp Slurp.. Slurrrrrrp

Depending on the system in use there are multiple benefits:

TOTP - prevents keyloggers from being used to compromise accounts

SMS - in addition to the above, also alerts you when your password is pwned

U2F - prevents phishing attacks outright and requires physical theft to compromise

U2F is the strongest option, while SMS is the weakest due to potential SIM swap attacks. All are better than just having a password alone. U2F is your Google Titan type system, TOTP is your Google Authenticator type system and SMS is like Twitter but without pictures.

Like a good defragging? The latest Dev Channel Windows 10 might be for you

Re: Wonderful

...given we are talking about development software that's not intended for general use, this is appropriate advice.

Remember that Windows takes snapshots when upgrading, as well as keeping a Windows.old folder if you have the space to spare. It really does make it easy to revert with both System Protection (System Restore) and the recovery rollback options available.

When you tell Chrome to wipe private data about you, it spares two websites from the purge: Google.com, YouTube

There really is nothing to see here - I'm serious.

The developers integrated Google Account authentication with the browser and reused what was already there to track state (why wouldn't you?) for maintaining authorisation tokens. If someone clears every bit of data from their browser, then it would lose that state information and result in you needing to log back into your Google Account. As it's assumed that Chrome users would want their seamless Google Services integration by the very nature of the browser's design goals - protecting the data from deletion makes more sense than duplicating code when it comes to efficiency. Unlike Microsoft Edge, which has a dedicated set of system services that ship with Windows to act as a broker for authenticating to Microsoft Accounts (and/or Azure AD) to achieve a form of authorisation persistence, Google doesn't have that luxury.

Common sense shall always reign supreme. This isn't a deliberate act to benefit any form of privacy invasion. It is a user-first policy to make things work the way they're intended to, while minimising bloat.

UK test-and-trace coronavirus data may be handed to police to nab those who aren't self-isolating as required

If we didn’t have such ridiculous laws in the first place...

The police aren’t the problem, nor is sharing this info with them necessarily a bad thing. Sharing this information could allow police to do a decent public service (to protect people) by checking to make sure those who live alone aren’t ending up bedridden and dying unnoticed. As in, the police could be the good guys if we started forcing lawmakers to repeal the mess we have created.

The real problem is that we live in a country where nobody wants to follow the rules (as they’re written) because they’re only designed to help businesses and the economy. Well, what the hell is “the economy” anyway? To me, it looks like a nebulous phrase intended to misdirect us into believing that killing the cohesion of our local communities (with the approval of big business) hasn’t ruined our once great nation. Perhaps someone with a bigger, better brain and more life experience can show me the error in my logic.

It truly is insane that copying things, making our data more intelligible, growing plants, having sex the moment puberty hits, disbelieving the narrative behind a world war (whether rational or not) or telling someone to “piss off” could potentially result in the same type of punishment (albeit a different length) as killing, raping or maiming somebody.

If we would only throw out antiquated notions of: communications decency, intellectual property, illicit substances, unnecessary age restrictions and all the rest of the stuff nobody should care about... we could then trust the police knowing a lot more about us. The problem is that the rule book is so stupid that the only way to not get in trouble for just about anything is to do everything one can to make sure the police stay freaking clueless.

So why is it a problem to share this info with the police again?

Elizabeth Holmes' plan to avoid her Theranos fraud trial worked out about as well as her useless blood-testing machines

Learn to code? Nah, learn to spot BS!

She was foisted upon the world as a women’s role model in much the same way that learning to code was latched on to as a solution for poverty. What happened to the good old days when the press would just shit on everything until it was actually independently proven? The press wasn’t wrong this time though, she is a women’s role model... teaching us all the time honoured art of separating fools from their money.

It’s a shame she didn’t just stop at conning investors because if she had, she’d have been on par with how Elon Musk pitched The Boring Company.

Here's the new build, Insiders... wait for it... wait for it... Is it Windows 10X's upcoming ... Oh. You can change refresh rate of the display

Don’t you mean...

BIDMAS

Even 2020 cannot bring forth the Year of Linux on the Desktop

Re: Is this really a valid point?

As in the driver itself or the accompanying software?

There’s supported backwards compatibility as far back as Windows Server 2003 (user-mode) driver support in the Server 2019 print spooler. That’s more than good enough, as anything older would use kernel mode drivers and need a decent hypervisor, locked down networking, constant snapshot rollbacks and a regular reboot cycle - just to keep things (relatively) secure.

I regularly use printbrm.exe to port over printers from older servers on the quick without even replacing the drivers. 35 minutes ago I replaced an SBS2011 box with Server 2019 and no driver downloads were needed, as the print queues along with their existing drivers “just worked”

Alibaba-aligned e-commerce outfit Taobao quits Taiwan

Taiwan is the real China..

It’s the only province which didn’t succumb to Mao and is therefore the only real remnant of China which remains. Anything we can do to help the real China, we should do.

Besides, they have cool ideas like “anarchical conservatism” where they allow citizens and the opposition to push changes through in the same way the ruling government does. This allows everyone to have faith that things will get done when politicians claim they will be.

Taiwan is awesome.

Samsung aims boot at Apple's decision not to bundle a charger in with the iPhone 12, foot ends up in mouth

Novel idea this but...

How about making it sit in the middle of an elongated speaker grille? Phone speaker quality (just like vibration quality) has gotten worse over the years despite codec improvements.

Try busting out your old classic Blackberry, feeling it buzz and actually talking to someone like a phone is designed to. You’ll be amazed at how much better the experience is.

We don’t need notches and before Android/iOS smartphones, we actually had better call quality.

It's 2020 and a rogue ICMPv6 network packet can pwn your Microsoft Windows machine

WPF, Winforms and WinUI are open source now

With .NET 6, you will find Mono is redundant and all older .NET architecture-independent code will indeed work on Linux, with a lot of native code working on Wine. With that said, .NET 5 will probably fix what you’re after. Try it, it’s at RC2 already. It should work inside and outside of Wine.

Even though Linux is very much viable and has been for a long time, I’m still not sure why folks expect not to be shafted by their constant, short-lived technology swap-outs in the Year of Our Linus 2020. For every bit of freedom gained by having source code access, freedom is lost when they break your stuff because they don’t feel like maintaining a given API. That’s ignoring constant ABI changes which break old binaries unnecessarily, as in breaking the code you actually run!

If you’re a non-gaming home user and you’re upset about Windows 10 as it’s normally shipped, you’re still better off pirating an LTSC release and a copy of Office 2016/2019. The customisations you make will work for a good 10 years and doing things this way means you can just get on with life.

Has Apple abandoned CUPS, the Linux's world's widely used open-source printing system? Seems so

Re: will drop PPD file support soon

Google Cloud Print is obsolete because they added the needed printing support to ChromeOS.and most good printer manufacturers added remote printing support that didn’t rely on Google Chrome to work anyway. Some even went as far as offering email-to-spooler gateways.

It’s all just an unnecessary additional hassle, especially with AirPrint, SSDP/uPnP support built atop IPP. People already have options which “just work” better than Google’s on every OS including ChromeOS.

To stop web giants abusing privacy, they must be prevented from respawning. Ever

We can already see how

“Legitimate interests” declarations to make you have to opt out, rather than opt in. - for starters. Then, they make it so you need privacy-invasive services to use the products you buy, sometimes even after you’ve purchased them without those anti-features initially included.

Oculus is a fantastic example of this, where your device will become semi-useless after 2023 unless you allow Facebook into your life. Or, how about Microsoft Windows, which pools together diagnostic data and advertising data to try and cheat the system, making it hard to define the consent you have or have not given. Then you have Fitbit, where Google will tie in all the data at some point, if they haven’t already.

Then, you have to see what the company you work for has consented to. Even if your personal data from your own personal accounts isn’t slurped, your same PII will be slurped from corporate data you submit instead.

GDPR has done bugger all to end spying, it just added abstraction layers.

Lift us up where we belong: UK's Network Rail puts elevators online

May I announce..

LiftSurfer Pro - the premium way to avoid crushing issues of the 21st century! Never again will one have to worry about a crowded carriage ever again!

LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade, tells rival project to 'do the right thing' and die

Re: "We were caught quite off guard"

I’m not sure what Pascal is talking about here. Microsoft demonstrated to the public that Office 95 still runs on Windows 10. They “don’t support it” but their team still tests compatibility with it and Application Compatibility applies shims to keep it working.

Global Privacy Control emerges as latest attempt to let netizens choose whether they want to be tracked online

Re: They Will Never Stop

Oh you revoked consent did you? Wonderful! Have you objected to each of our “legitimate interests” yet? No? I guess that means we keep your data after all! Sucker!

Re: They just don't get it........but maybe that's the point!!!

This idea falls over the moment key services reject users with the header enabled or set to a value they don't like. Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari have both got decent controls in place to help bugger advertisers on a technical level, without giving the option for websites to beg users to disable them.

Firefox has the advantage (over Safari) via an option to namespace/containerise access to cookies and cached data based upon the site in use (based upon what's in your address bar). For example, this means if you visit facebook.com, then visiting non-Facebook sites does not allow their Facebook Like buttons to link you to the Facebook account you normally use. Likewise, this throws a massive spanner in the works for Google Analytics and similar services.

On Chrome/Edge, these protections aren't available, so you have to blacklist using browser extensions instead - which often results in e-begging from website owners. Blacklisting doesn't cover future tracking services, while the Firefox (optional) namespacing method does, without even needing to block adverts.

Microsoft tells staff work-from-home is now ‘standard’ – with caveats galore

Re: Commuting

Employers can add as much tracking tech as they please, as they would have to pay for all of the infrastructure needed to run it. They would also be liable for any security breach which leaks PII, by law. You can’t outsource risk and unauthorised disclosure of video footage from someone else’s private property is the sort of thing that incur big fines. Ignoring those caveats for the employer, it all still benefits employees the most.

Here’s why: Employees can enjoy starting at the exact second their working day begins and finishing the very second it ends. As it isn’t paid time, one can take their full lunch period in peace, undisturbed. Oh and those mandatory monitor breaks under health and safety? That’s 5-10 minutes away from the screen each hour, every hour. Overtime claims? Well, those become easy to account for and prove. They’re even easier to create openings for when people take holiday. Finally, everyone instinctively knows when an employer seems paranoid that employees begin religiously arse covering, following procedures to the letter, not just in spirit. Imagine being paid more to do less. That’s what monitoring gives you in the world of technical IT.

Reality is that most employers want less monitoring, not more. Most managers know that they will lose more through losing access to free, uncompensated labour than what they could ever gain if everything was closely monitored. We don’t have much to worry about.

Selling hardware on a pay-per-use or subscription model is a 'lie' created by marketing bods

Re: Spot on!

Let us debunk these claims:

"avoidance of capex (and potential debt/difficulty to get loans)"

Capex for most IT hardware comes without potential debt. An employee either needs a workstation or they don't. It's that simple. Same for printers, where cheap and reliable B/W LaserJet printers win the day. If you can't afford the hardware, you definitely can't afford the employee in most cases.

"avoidance of maintenance cost"

Maintenance costs for most IT hardware is minimal. We are talking about parts replacement. It's technical support which still incurs the bulk of the costs and renting your hardware doesn't fix that because by and large, vendor support is inferior to your in-house (or even outsourced) IT support when it comes to general troubleshooting.

"avoidance of obsolescence"

OEMs like HP offer 5 years of next day on-site repair coverage as an option for both servers and workstations. Microsoft keeps server variants of Windows updated for 10 years while workstation variants now get lowest common denominator rolling updates "for as long as the OEM supports the computer". This means businesses in general need only set an alarm for 5 years time and then begin rolling out new hardware as and when appropriate.

Due to the coming end of Moore's Law, good quality hardware will now easily outlive the 10 year mark and continue to work with the latest Windows releases. That is why these vendors can get away with selling these products "as a service" in the first place. Esepcially with AMD processors, where vendors can keep the same motherboards in service for many years, while offering "the latest" business-class CPUs.

"elasticity/flexibility up and down and in terms of contract terms"

Existing cloud solutions which don't involve hardware-as-a-service can cover temporary excesses. There really is no need to rent physical hardware to achieve flexibility, when the hardware you're purchasing can easily last a decade.

"immediacy of services (for cloud services at least) with no lead times"

People can immediately evaluate most products/services. Many evaluations can be extended with a quick phone call to the sales department. It's common for evaluations to last 90 days or more for many services. Renting hardware doesn't offer immediacy unless it's IaaS which is outside the scope of this.

"outsource of infrastructure expertise"

Outsourcing your IT is a bad idea, outsourcing your infrastructure outside of your outsourced IT is even worse. That's self-flaggelation of the tallest order.

"outsource of hosting and connectivity"

That's outside of the scope of renting hardware from a vendor like Lenovo.

Heads up: From 2022, all new top-end Arm Cortex-A CPU cores for phones, slabtops will be 64-bit-only, snub 32-bit

Re: No 32 bit?

ARM isn’t known for rich backwards compatibility, unlike x86. Dumping ARM32 support is great in this situation because mobile platforms are also not known for backwards compatibility, Linux isn’t known for its adherence to backwards compatibility (beyond the kernel<->userspace boundary) and it gives Microsoft one less excuse to create a legacy mess before they even start.

Suffering silicon: Benchmarks for Apple's A14 chip are in, but post-Intel Macs, when they arrive, will tell the real story

Not any more..

macOS has no future if Apple can’t capitalise on Microsoft’s ineptitude this time round. For once, Apple are ahead of the game, with key applications ready to go, while Microsoft has nothing. Even Linux users have a major head start on ARM. If Apple doesn’t steal the market with ASI Macs over the next 5 years, then that product line will die out.

Windows 10 to let you know that your SSD is dying rather than throwing out a BSOD when it's already too late

Yes, you are, regardless of the amount of RAM you have

There are enough apps on Windows that allocate enough virtual memory that they never use to require a page file to work properly. Linux uses overcommitting and copy-on-write trickery to overcome this while Windows does not (in exchange Windows doesn’t suck anywhere near as bad as Linux when it’s out of RAM).

Seriously, I’ve had to increase the page file for HP Z4 workstations (rocking 64GB of RAM) to at least 1.5x the total RAM just to stop Microsoft Teams randomly crashing on modern Windows 10. Only an idiot disables the swap file or keeps it small if they know how the internals work.

Microsoft takes another shot at the Windows-on-Arm thing with a revamped Surface Pro X powered by new SQ2 silicon

If ARM succeeds over x86

...then Microsoft’s days of platform dominance are numbered. They’re so far behind now it’s going to be impossible to catch up, unless people poo poo ARM in favour of x86 long-term. COVID might just be the game changer in that respect, as people won’t need mobile devices if they’re all working and socialising from home for the next few years.

Right now, a Raspberry Pi is functionally more useful than a Windows-on-ARM laptop, with tens of thousands of native software packages available. Likewise, macOS will be the dominant desktop ARM platform overnight due to the fact it already claims to have native Microsoft Office and Creative Cloud ported. Microsoft have basically shipped their apps as Apple-first again, just like they did to themselves with their last ARM venture (Windows Phone) and look how that turned out.

Apple seeks damages from recycling firm that didn't damage its devices: 100,000 iThings 'resold' rather than broken up as expected

Google has short life cycles...

..but Apple is clearly killing it right now.

Microsoft says bug, sorry, 'a latent defect' in Safe Deployment Process system downed Azure Active Directory

Re: Anti-nominative determinsm

Doesn’t let’s encrypt rely on ACME for validating certificate remewal entitlements?

US govt wins right to snaffle Edward Snowden's $5m+ book royalties, speech fees – and all future related earnings

Re: And how exactly

Jitsi operates using HTML5 and let’s you run your own server and authentication backend. It’s also free as in both beer and freedom. They also have a public server with open access that supports private channels with password protection (but anyone can kick anyone)

Red Hat tips its Fedora 33: Beta release introduces Btrfs as default file system, .NET on ARM64, plus an IoT variant

Re: Beautiful Desktop

I think it is fair to say GNOME 3 is still very shit when compared to MATE but good when compared to the older GNOME 2. Try dynamically adding and removing monitors of differing resolutions when you have menu bars on multiple screens - you’ll see what I mean. GNOME Shell 4 should fix the performance issues though, as they know they screwed up by making it single threaded the moment you use it as a Wayland compositor. At that point, it will be a very competitive desktop environment.

Apple tailors Swift System library for open source and Linux support

Porting the GUI over alongside the rest is very important, otherwise it is no more multi-platform than .NET.

Had Microsoft gone all in with their framework and not half arsed it with .NET Core, they would have market dominance right now, with people being able to rapidly prototype and build desktop applications with consistent GUI forms functionality. We might have even seen Linux desktop shells and window managers written with it.

Apple in their ignorance are making a huge blunder because any native GUI apps which “just work” when packaged for multiple platforms would add to Apple’s potential for dominance, especially if theirs is the “native” solution in that regard. Given Microsoft are far far behind on ARM, now is the perfect time to dethrone them over the next 5-10 years.

In Linux-land, developers will take whatever good code works. Distros have never had a consistent, native toolkit (Qt is as close as they have ever had) and will fall in line with whatever works and people want to code for.

Not one to be outdone by Microsoft, Apple's cloud fell over too. Unlike Microsoft, it hasn't said what happened

Re: Hosted on Azure

iCloud runs on Azure in many countries. So if Azure goes down, so does iCloud. I’m beginning to think hosting your own stuff is superior in just about every way,

Microsoft lends Windows on Arm a hand with emulation layer to finally run 64-bit x86 apps at last

Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

Linux already has a complete set of ARM native applications, including a fully functional office suite, multiple browsers and creativity apps one needs for basic work. It’s hard to find common packages in the repositories for Debian (for example) which aren’t already available for the architecture out of the box. Tens of thousands of applications.

macOS is about to drop its first ARM-native release with a complete set of applications automatically ported from iOS and a number of key partnerships to ensure rapid delivery of Adobe Creative Cloud, iWork suite, Safari, iMovie, Logic Pro etc. It will have more mainstream modern applications available than Windows offers today in the Microsoft Store even counting x86.

What does Microsoft have ready for their ARM port? Bugger all. Given the quality of their store, will they ever be ready? I doubt it. A hypothetical Raspberry Pi 5 on Linux will still provide a better functioning device than any ARM box shipping with Windows. If manufacturers ship this crap, maybe that’s when we will see The Year of The Linux Desktop.

Who watches the watchers? Samsung does so it can fling ads at owners of its smart TVs

Re: "...most of the population are stupid and/or ignorant..."

The portion which finds everyone mean.

Bill Gates lays out a three-point plan to rid the world of COVID-19 – and anti-vaxxer cranks aren't gonna like it

Re: If Bill Gates has the technology to implant chips to control people's behavior

As opposed to implanting the identification chip in Fry?

Fictionally speaking, Windows’ Cortana is nowhere near as hot as Futurama’s Leela.

Microsoft claims to love open source – this alleged leak of Windows XP code is probably not what it had in mind, tho

Someone unaffiliated with ReactOS should...

Use this to add the missing functionality and compatibility so that folks can enjoy the good old days of Office 2003, Media Player Classic, Opera (Presto) and the like with a highly ergonomic and easy-to-understand UI. Why? 4GB of RAM should have been enough. Modern software is not of any higher quality where it really matters - resource efficiency and reliability.

Epic, Spotify, ProtonMail and pals rise up as one against Apple's 30% cut, call for end to Cupertino-style markets

Re: How about... F-Droid

There’s a perfectly fair store out there that only requires reproducible builds and source code availability. If these bitches want the high ground, perhaps they should actually produce ethical software themselves.

Microsoft open-sources fuzzing tool it uses in-house to keep Windows so very secure

Re: RE: That pedigree may not fill you with confidence ...

Their developers definitely have the time, training and tools. What they don't have is the luxury of being able to eliminate bad ideas through complete code rewrites. While they did separate their Native API from the Public (Win32) API, allowing them to change a lot of core code, they're committed to Win32 API stability to the point where VB6 code still works.

In the land of GNU/Linux, volunteers can push forward better solutions and outright ditch bad ideas. In the fantasy world of Apple, the company forces developers to adopt better solutions in a uniform manner. In the world of Windows, developers just shrug off new solutions, knowing Microsoft must maintain the old ones to avoid upsetting enterprises dependent on old stuff.

(Edit: That's Public, not Pubic)

Don't pay the ransom, mate. Don't even fix a price, say Australia's cyber security bods

Yes and so are the anti virus companies who make enhanced decryption tools you can buy using the keys the criminals provide. Both sides of that battle WANT criminals to honour decryption so that everybody wins. What is even funnier is that infosec professionals get easy low-hanging fruit knocking on their doors wanting to be certified as being less likely to get owned as a result. Outsourced IT tech support even loves it because “user induced damage” is routinely excluded from contracts and that includes users running malware.

Apple to Epic: Sue me? No, sue you, pal!

Re: SLAPP

The easy defence this time round is that Epic isn’t entering into the smartphone market but the video gaming market with their software, where Apple are charging less than their competitors for reviewing updates ($250/year) and not much more than the competitors for processing purchases. Why is this the case? The PlayStation Store and Xbox Live Marketplace are not smartphone marketplaces and the same product is sold there too. The market is dictated by the product you sell, not where you market it.

Unlike Spotify, Epic don’t seem to have a leg to stand on. I wish Spotify the best of luck with proving Apples monopoly abuse and I wish Epic the best of luck in keeping their developer account for Unreal Engine but Fortnite needs to respect the rules.

Apple commits to support human rights - 'We believe in the critical importance of an open society'*

Re: So much for Apple's vaunted privacy...

Apple have delayed the change until early 2021 but it actually makes no difference to folks who already care about their privacy because those people:

0) Enable “Limit Ad Tracking” which makes the IDFA blank for all apps anyway (iOS 13)

1) Don’t have Facebook or other ad-supported malware installed in the first place

2) Use tools to build iOS VPN policies which block specific IPs and domains

3) Use blocking DNS servers through policy as a second line of defence

4) Use the Content Filtering API to block other trackers from within WebKit

To cover 0 just look in Settings, it’s a simple toggle. To cover 2, 3 and 4 with ease, I happen to use AdGuard for iOS with a lifetime license but there are many other decent tools in the App Store which do the same - as Apple gradually extended their APIs since iOS 11 to better suit these kinds of apps.

All Apple did was delay providing normies who didn’t know about Limit Ad Tracking the ability to blank the IDFA per-app, alongside warning them about the privacy implications for every service they use. The end result is actually a negative for the people who go out of their way to prevent spying but a massive positive for those who don’t.

I haven’t seen an advert on my tablet in a heck of a long time. I even block non-advertising elements like the sign in, comments section and subscribe buttons on sites like YouTube because it’s so easy to do with a couple of taps inside iOS Safari.

As promised, Apple will now entertain suggestions from the hoi polloi on how it should run its App Store

Re: A larger share

I would cry if $random_apps started importing their own rendering engines and overriding content filtering policies when I click external links. I’m immensely grateful for Apple applying this restriction, as my approach of no-ads-are-worth-seeing applies to all apps which use the embedded web view for external content. Comparing this situation to Android, you can easily see why Apple have chosen to do this (for my benefit). It also improves performance and keeps everything consistent.

Developers don’t deserve freedom and users deserve simple, centralised control over what happens on their device. I also like the In App Purchase system, which can be centrally turned off (it is on my devices) thanks to Apple enforcing the use of a single, simple, well-maintained API. If all this control for me as a user means third party developers don’t profit as much, well.. boo hoo! Developers don’t have a right to prevent me from pre-emptively blocking their offers!

I tried the whole freedom thing where third party devs get equal say. It’s called Windows and the result is a mess of random UI toolkits, inconsistencies in behaviour, no decent HIG and no way to maintain a consistent security/encryption policy, let alone per-app mandatory access controls like what the App Store enforces.

One day, Linux distros will catch up and we will see disgruntled people suing them for not trusting their GPG signing keys out of the box - just you wait, it’ll happen.

Google Chrome 85 to block ads that hog power, CPUs, network: Web ads giant will black-hole 0.3% of web ads

Firefox is calling...

...she wants her RAM and her users back!

Unlike Chrome, it has all the same-origin-isolation options as Tor Browser has (in about:config) to stop websites learning what other sites you use while also integrating a decent set of anti-tracking blacklists out of the box to go alongside your favourite flavours of content blocking extensions.

You also won’t find extensions blocked for “threatening the bottom line” like how Google banned AdNauseam for its creative way to make all advertising worthless whether we see it or not by “extending background prefetching” in order to earn website owners money from adverts without having to actually be subjected to any of them...

Facebook to take board seat at Linux Foundation after signing as Platinum member

Free software is now deader than ever before

With the world getting ever more SaaSy is it any wonder why companies are now pouring money into making their own worse-than-proprietary business models cheaper to maintain? At least with proprietary software, we had the binaries! Now we don’t even have those!

Engineer admits he wiped 456 Cisco WebEx VMs from AWS after leaving the biz, derailed 16,000 Teams accounts

You don’t delete accounts until you’re certain you don’t need to keep the SID<->Name translations intact anymore, the list of security groups granted at the point of leaving or any other associated metadata. In general, you should not delete an account but instead anonymise it many years after systems have been updated to the point where there’s no valid audit trail any more anyway.

Sure, add a pseudonym with a confidentially stored historical record which can be called upon if necessary, but to delete accounts risks losing the ability to review the system for past mistakes or deliberate misconducts years down the line.

Google and Facebook abandon Hong Kong landing of new submarine cable

Unfortunately that’s not illegal, here’s why...

The legislation you’re referring to doesn’t stop someone from only posting adverts in places where only the “desired target audience” can find it. All Facebook offered to do was show the adverts in only the places the advertiser wanted them shown. Your news feed is a different “place” to my news feed, even though we use the same reference string to locate them.

Sadly, it’s too easy to play devils advocate with this one.

Re: Who IS The Worst

The US, while a little bit behind on modern democratic models, at least allows for open criticism of its policies and people. China doesn’t even pretend to allow you that freedom.

Brave takes brave stand against Google's plan to turn websites into ad-blocker-thwarting Web Bundles

Isn’t this all as simple as cosmetically filtering elements like before? The Content Blocking API used by Safari for instance can be fed per-tag rather than per-file blocks. I add block rules to do this all the time to get rid of things like toolbars and login buttons on sites like YouTube and anime streaming sites. Besides, standards like these can’t be properly applied to dynamic content anyway, so the original pages have to stick around, which means one can simply use the original URL which still has to be there.

...and if the World Wide Web does get death by a thousand cuts as a result, then hurrah! We need a greater diversity of protocols for our applications and maybe, just maybe, gopher sites will make a comeback.

Epic move: Judge says Apple can't revoke Unreal Engine dev tools, asks 'Where does the 30% come from?'

Re: Switching to Android

How about the fact that Apple was one of the few companies who were willing to provide a copy of their database schema with descriptions for each field and justifications for data taken, when asked under GDPR?

Also, source code means diddly squat if builds aren’t reproducible like how Debian (for example) does it. Also, the core of iOS is open source, it’s called Darwin and it is published as/when major iOS builds are released.

Sure, it doesn’t include the GUI toolkits or the compositor (if it did, we wouldn’t need Wayland) but then Google Play Services and most basic Android apps shipped in proprietary releases aren’t available as open source any more either.

We don’t have modern phones which are 100% FSF approved as only having Free Software...

Worldwide Google services – from GCP to G Suite – hit with the outage stick

At least it’s still news when GSuite has outages.... they must have cried tears of Azure at the thought...

Only EU can help us, pleads Slack as it slings competition complaint against Microsoft Teams

Re: Slackbot is the worst

They’re giving it away without an Office licence too. It’s a free service that’s independent of Office 365 but can integrate with it. You don’t need to buy it and the free version existed before bundling with the office suite happened IIRC. Microsoft also had explosive growth prior to the bundling.

This means Slack don’t really have a leg to stand on. They need to prove that the bundling harmed them but there’s no evidence it did given pre-bundling growth. They also need to prove the free version (which is also intended for personal use) competes in the same sector and is essentially the same product (as MS pointed out, it’s audio/video orientated, not text-orientated).

Anti-5G-vaxx pressure group sues Zuckerberg, Facebook, fact checkers for daring to suggest it might be wrong

Re: Tossing their toys about

Maybe the judge can dismiss Facebook’s existence while he’s at it...