Posts by John Savard 2460 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Sep 2007
The pudding was marked "2 x 150" rather than "2 x 150g", so apparently somebody didn't know the 150 meant 150 grams, failed to input the net weight of pudding in the product... and so, lo and behold, instead of 83 new pence per 100 grams (one third of 2.49 pounds) we get what was shown in the photo.
At least this shows that it isn't because decimalisation has made the arithmetic more complicated rather than less!
There was no encryption chip, nor, for that matter, was there any plaintext on the Encrochat servers. The phones were an ordinary phone from a normal Spanish cell phone company.
There was encryption software which communicated through the Encrochat servers.
The Encrochat servers got compromised, sent malware out to the users' phones, and then the malware read plaintext on the phones and sent it to the cops.
Instead of making it legal for consumers to bypass it, they should make it illegal to put this nonsense in products in the first place. Apparently, the voters don't have sufficient control over legislators to bend them to their will instead of that of big corporations. Since they can vote for whomsoever they please, they can fix that.
As far as I'm concerned, the only acceptable new chip for Apple Macintosh computers, once Apple makes those chips itself, is one that runs 68020/68882 code, PowerPC code, and x86 code, so that it becomes possible for the Macintosh to seamlessly run all Macintosh software ever at full natiive speed. And, yes, that would mean including OS 9 as a component of future releases of OS X.
So? What software authors can do with their source code only matters if they do, in fact, choose to do it. Computer owners are limited to the applications that are actually offered for sale at their local computer store.
Of course, Apple could require software companies, as a condition for placing their Macintosh programs on the App Store, to have both versions of their software. But since the Macintosh, unlike the iPhone, does not compel developers to give Apple its 30% cut, even that won't necessarily be decisive.
This is true, but since the defendants and their sales operation are physically in Lebanon, their primary concern would be with abiding by Lebanese law.
This court decision could have the unintended consequence of Dell entirely losing access to the Lebanese market, if its government is sufficiently affronted by an attempt to pre-empt the ability of its courts to decide whether terms in contracts governing businesses in its country are valid or not.
And here I was going to mention the 72-column limit for languages like FORTRAN, and what do I see but the first commenter has beaten me to it!
However, this does not mean that Linux Torvalds does not have a point, because not many people are using Linux with 3277 display stations hooked up to their computers.
There you are then. End unfair competition; only countries with labor laws, health and safety standards, and wages comparable to those in the United States should be allowed to export to the United States. So Americans could buy made-in-Switzerland cellphones, or made-in-France cellphones, but not made-in-China cellphones.
If Huawei were a responsible global corporate citizen, it wouldn't have got itself into this trouble by exporting American tech to Iran.
But that Huawei is turning to make phones using Chinese technology since American technology is no longer available to it... what else can they do? Roll over and die?
One possibility of what may be expected of them is that they might pay a huge fine and then become subject to U.S. oversight to prove they will never do this again, but presumably this isn't really an option for a number of reasons - not just because the Chinese government wouldn't let them, but because the United States is no longer prepared to give them a second chance.
If TSMC wants to build fabs that make 5nm chips and 3nm chips, and so on, some of the devices used there come from the United States. So they have to obey these rules, or they will be cut off from the things they need to keep making more modern chips. It is not like China is a bigger market for them than the United States and other Western countries.
There was a short time under the Clinton administration when Russia was friendly with the United States under Boris Yeltsin, and China's sole nuclear-armed submarine was in port for repairs. But we missed the opportunity for a pre-emptive strike followed by regime change in China. Then, with the threat from China eliminated, Russia and India could have given up nuclear weapons - and Pakistan would no longer need them to keep up with India. The world would have been saved from the threat of nuclear war, with all nuclear weapons in the hands of responsible countries - the United States, Britain, and France - and there would no longer have been any threat against Taiwan.
The court ruled that Google became liable because the individual involved had notified it about the article.
But did he send Google proof that the article was misleading?
Without that requirement, Google could be required to conceal search results about people who in fact committed crimes, but against whom charges were withdrawn because the police felt they couldn't get a conviction - some evidence being inadmissible, some witness being un-cooperative, and so on.
That won't promote public safety.
The headline is inaccurate, since here Cisco is not using Zoom instead of WebEx by choice.
Not that I've even heard of WebEx, but it's nice to know a more secure alternative to Zoom is available.
However, a subsequent web search, while it turned up mentions of recent extensions to Skype, and Microsoft's Teams product, seemed to indicate that WebEx was the only major direct alternative to Zoom. However, Jitsi Meet, an open-source alternative, was mentioned.
Given that, instead of putting portable atomic clocks in our smartphones at great expense, why not just put atomic clocks in our cell towers or something? In fact, once one gets an accurate position for every cell tower, it's quite possible that some old-fashioned method of radio navigation, not needing atomic clocks at all, could be used to find one's position without the help of satellites. Although maybe the atomic clocks would still help in rural areas.
Unauthorized possession of classified military information is a serious crime.
Unfortunately, if these miscreants live in a country hostile to the United States, which would like to get its hands on American defense secrets, it's unlikely that this will help to lead to their prosecution.
Thus, there's an urgent need to make nuclear weapons obsolete, so that the United States can have something better, with which to effect regime change in Russia and China. Then our computers will be safer, because ransomware scum would have no place to hide.
While we're waiting for this to happen, though, Microsoft needs to fix Windows so that things like this just can't happen. If you want to install a disk encryption utility, that should have to happen before Windows boots up - in a special "install mode" of the operating system that you only get into if you want to, something like getting into the BIOS on startup.
Your country has elected Narenda Modi as its leader.
A leader who has interfered with relief efforts for victims of communal violence in Orissa.
A leader who has moved the political landscape in India so that all the parties have to display "nationalism", which means supporting favoring Hindus over other people in India.
So criticizing India is not hostility to the people of India, it is solidarity with the right-thinking people of India who believe in equality.
Of course, India's national lockdown is also problematic. The grocery stores are also closed. It was not announced in advance, and up to the lockdown, people were repeatedly urged against panic buying. So many people in India will be locked down in their homes for two weeks without enough food.
One result has been mass migration of workers in the cities, going back home to rural areas - on foot.
Couldn't Italian law be used to force him to share the plans, because saving lives trumps everything? And because the law required him to do this, no lawsuit could be made in italy - against the doctor, but they could always try suing the Italian government.
Of course, the U.S. might threaten trade sanctions for disrespect of intellectual property.
Indeed, ARM is a bigger threat to Intel than RISC-V. Today, Android is popular in the high-volume categories of smartphones and tablets.
Someday, RISC-V will be popular. But unlike ARM, Intel doesn't need to buy a license for RISC-V. So it could churn out RISC-V chips whenever it felt like it. With all those facilities x86 paid for.
Obviously people don't want to spend more money than they absolutely have to.
The solution is clear.
Make operating systems completely secure, so that you don't need to buy anything extra.
Severely punish attempts to compromise computer systems, so that no one will dare to try for nefarious purposes. This solution is great, because its costs are borne entirely by the people whose fault it is that we have a problem. (Maybe tax software companies that make imperfect operating systems to pay for the hackers' bread and water while they're in jail.)
Cut off internet and telephone connections to countries that don't fully cooperate in prosecuting hackers, like Russia, China, and North Korea.
It's clear to me that at least two of the three examples you gave are useful for typosquatting attacks by hackers, to get people to install malware when they think they're logging into Facebook or installing WhatsApp, so it seems to me that Facebook is not trying to stifle sites that criticize it.
Well, our technology isn't anywhere near that advanced. No, for all its power by our standards, I'm sure that Deep Thought would dismiss it as a mere abacus - and, indeed, many orders of magnitude less powerful even than the computer than it had actually so dismissed.
Excuse me? Since the firm was innocent of all wrongdoing, the website should have been returned to it immediately.
Since, instead, Homeland Security retained control of it in order to secure a waiver of damages from the firm, the persons responsible for imposing that condition should face criminal charges of extortion. Pure and simple.
Recently, there have been some very positive announcements about fusion power. And a lot of major corporations take quantum computing seriously enough to invest in it.
This, however, is not to say that Ron Rivest is wrong. Fusion has been ten or twenty years away before. And the challenges of keeping a quantum system isolated from the classical world rise exponentially with its size.
My opinion is that it's not safe to assume quantum computing will work, and it's also not safe to assume quantum computing will not work. Prepare for the worst in both directions.
I have to wonder why this was leaked.
It's not as if you can call it whistleblowing. This isn't the CIA or NSA doing something that involves monitoring ordinary citizens of the U.S. to create a surveillance state - or even ordinary citizens of other countries. This is eavesdropping on the secret communications of foreign governments, particularly including hostile ones.
I thought that constitutes doing their job. So what is the motive for the leak? To ruin Donald Trump's morning? To make a big spectacle of Trump going after their source that is presumed to be damaging to him electorally?
It would serve the public interest if thie were evidence the CIA and/or NSA were out of control, trying to subvert U.S. democracy. There doesn't appear to be anything of the sort to see here, however.
The problem isn't that technology exists. Or even that it is being applied to make things more cheaply, or diminish our burden of labor.
The problem is that some people stop having skills that are badly enough needed that they can use them to bargain for a good rate of pay for their work.
We got into this fix because of the free market system, though. That means we don't want to get rid of it, because it produces technological progress, prosperity, and political freedom. Yet, it seems like anything we do to fundamentally reduce people's dependency on the market value of their labor will come into conflict with the free market system.
The existence of North Korea, Iran, Russia, and mainland China could be one reason we think that focusing on actually making our computer systems secure, rather than expecting deterrence through criminal law enforcement, is more likely to actually solve the problem. This is quite reasonable, and the real problem is why the computer industry is doing such a poor job of making our computers secure.
The missing coins were replaced with coins of other dates containing the same amount of gold, so the "thief" didn't make the American government any poorer, he prevented the destruction of a numismatic rarity.
This is like the case of the man who vacuumed Apollo space suits, and then later extracted moondust from his floorboards. He was charged with stealing the moondust from the U.S. government, even though everything would have been fine if he just let it be lost.
The rationale in the moon dust case is a bit like the one behind the rules about ivory, to prevent a market for moon dust arising which would endanger scientific research on it - and one way to put this that applies to both cases is that the U.S. government gets to be an absolute stickler about its property rights as a way to prevent people from frustrating its intentions.
We don't want hacking done for paparrazi-like reasons to be defensible in the public interest.
There was a recent column in the Guardian about how the attacks on Harry and Meghan are likely motivated by the fact that the newspapers involved have also been paying large financial settlements to people accusing them of telephone hacking, so far successfully keeping the matter out of the courts. The Royals are less in need of money than most people, so Harry and Meghan pose a danger of making this strategy ultimately fail.
Given that ransomware is a thing, makers of computers and operating systems should design computers so that backup is easy and inexpensive.
Ideally, they should also design computers so that they are secure, and thus virus infections, including ransomware, just can't happen. Oh, but how could you do that? Well, put everything that involves connecting to the Internet in a sandbox. One that really works.
Of course some data coming from outside on the Internet may need to be taken to the part of the computer where the work really gets done, so this connection needs to be made transparent, visible, and controllable.
While the title of this article is very true, it shouild not be concluded from this trade deal that Trump is a fool.
How can anything be negotiated between the U.S. and China if we automatically assume China won't respect the terms of the agreement?
So while there is good reason not to expect China to reform the practices cited, there is no other way but to begin with optimism. Then, a month or two down the road, when there is some evidence that things are the same as always, there can be a new trade war, this time with real demands for China to take concrete steps even before talks begin.
So instead of thinking of this agreement as giving China a free pass, think of it as the first salvo in Trade War Part II.
Steve Jobs was more indispensible for Apple.
Employers should not facilitate misconduct, and if they do, potential customers may retaliate by going elsewhere. Some people who buy computers or use Internet services are women, who would empathize with a woman abandoned when she is pregnant.
So this kind of personal misconduct is a risk for a company that has to be weighed against other factors. If he had been an assembly-line worker, whose personal life wouldn't be taken as a reflection on his employer's brand, that would also be a different case - therefore allaying fears that we might end up in a state where our employers would be Big Brother, regulating our personal lives.
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