Even apart from having brands like "TikTok" and "ByteDance" as potentially part of the US Code, this is an embarrassment. It's a new Red Scare, and the sort of parenting-by-government that one party pays so much lip service against.

If you don't want "your data" (whatever that means in this context) used by ByteDance, don't use their programs!

Further, take a look at these two little excerpts from the bill:

SEC. 2. Prohibition of foreign adversary controlled applications.
(a) In general.—
(1) ...It shall be unlawful for an entity...
(A) Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application)

"Source code", eh?"

(7) SOURCE CODE.—The term “source code” means the combination of text and other characters comprising the content, both viewable and nonviewable, of a software application, including any publishing language, programming language, protocol, or functional content, as well as any successor languages or protocols.

I don't know which programming languages "TikTok" is written in (presumably some subset of Java, Kotlin, Objective C, and Swift), but I doubt ByteDance invented some proprietary network protocol in place of the usual IP/TCP/HTTPS stack.

I, for one, will continue to update my compilers and network stack in defiance of Federal laws written by people who don't understand how computers work.

Microsoft won't say if those zero-days were exploited to target its products, or if the company knows either way.

So that's a yes, then--probably to both?

This won't get fixed until someone has the poorly-considered plan of spoofing their services or political ads behind an incumbent politician's office number.

So long as caller-ID can be spoofed, there's no way for the person actually receiving the calls to make a useful report on them. STIR/SHAKEN fails "open" is only useful for verifying that some intermediate provider okayed the caller-ID. A carrier willing to throw it all under the bus (what? A fly-by-night VoIP provider? Never!) can sign as many bogus calls as they like.

So long as the actual people committing the frauds (insurance scams, fake arrest warrants that can go away with gift cards, fake tech support calls, etc.) are out-of-the-country, the FCC is largely toothless. That's assuming the FCC can even chase the trail all the way to wherever the call originated and that the company who leased the number didn't just happen to have their access credentials "stolen" by some totally-unaffiliated-honest company running a boiler room. So far, the vigilantes on YouTube seem to be doing more good in shutting down these operations than the FCC has.

I originally misread the headline as:

Telly Starts Shipping Ad-Free TVs

Well, shut up and take my money! ...wait.

Telly Starts Shipping Free, Ad-Supported 4K TVs

A bit like peeling a potato and keeping only the skins, that.

What we need are browsers and services that virtually click on everything, all the time, multiple times, pretend to follow every ad, show interest in all of it.

This extensions exists, and it's called AdNauseum. I'm sure it wouldn't surprise you to learn that it was available in the Chrome "web store" until Google realized what it actually does. They then categorized it as malware and revoked the developer's signing key.

The extension does have a fairly heavy footprint in terms of CPU time and network transfer, but that's only because of how pervasive advertising dreck is.

Has Governor Parson threatened to call the FBI yet?

In seriousness, though, a private actor would face all sorts of liability from accidentally publishing that sort of PII on a public website. It'd be really nice to see a federal agency hold his state to account as severely.

You don't need a car that can handle each and every broken traffic light in rural Alabama. If you start there, it's OK if the system needs an additional road-side guidance assistance.

There are (at least) two fundamental problems with this approach:

1. 1. Practice is needed for humans to maintain their driving proficiency
2. 2. Continuity of attention is needed to correctly decide on the next course of action while driving

A system which is good enough to handle the general case of driving (clear roads, moderate traffic, working signals, and well-marked lanes) will, indeed, get most of the miles behind you. However, if that system requires driver intervention when things are sub-optimal, that means potentially surprising a driver with a challenging situation as that driver is getting progressively less proficient and possibly unaware of how the situation came to be a problem.

We know what the consumer use-case for autonomous vehicles looks like: people who want to read or snooze during a boring commute as they'd be able to on a bus. Whether the technology is sufficiently mature enough to support that use case doesn't matter; as soon as it looks like it is, people will act as though it is so.

I *HATE* JavaScript. I hate everything about it. It's the worst language in the history of programming.

What's to hate about a language where you can introduce infinity or not-a-number into calculations and not get an exception? Or a language where undefined values compare to defined values without an error? Or a language where adding two arrays neither does concatenation nor vector addition, but rather stringification and then concatenation--wrecking the two original values at the middle? That is, a language where the type-coercion rules are so brain-damaged that == was a security risk so it needed ===?

If 20 years ago somebody had told me I'd be doing this, I'd have changed careers.

Oh, but we were told this 20 years ago. Netscape Enterprise Server did server-side Javascript then. The only difference is that the industry took a long look at it and rightly laughed it off as a joke. FFS, we universally decided that J2EE was less loathsome.

Somehow, in the time that's elapsed, we became far less cynical and cautious.

Godspeed, fellow refusenik. I'll be over here in the Assembly/C/C++ briar patch. I hear it's awful. Maybe I'll get to the awful parts someday so that I can confirm that, but I haven't found them in the decades of searching.

I know I'm not the target audience for these devices because no component of them can be upgraded, but they really do look nice. The industrial design is amazing, the screen of gorgeous, the form factor is perfect, and they do promise a smooth Windows experience (whatever that fairy tale might be like)..

That's why my wife has a Surface Book 2, and we've had no end of problems with the thing.

The power supply is inadequate. It's rated below the TDP of the components in the laptop. Plugged into the wall, it will slowly discharge if you're beating the hell out of it. And, if you do that for long enough, the power supply dies. We're on #3 in about 18 months.

The "Surface port" doesn't have great physical registration between the two halves of the device. It'll eventually wiggle into a partially-seated state, with the devices in the lower half hopping on and off the system bus. The fault can be cleared if the device can get into a good state for long enough to detach and reconnect the base, but to do that, the battery charge has to be just so. Since this state sometimes makes the charge controller not want to take a charge, a reboot is often needed.

Support from Microsoft has been less than enthusiastic, and we're not even out of the warranty period!

Meanwhile, my gigantic Thinkpad cost about half as much, deigns to allow users to upgrade memory and storage, has a charger nearly stout enough to chock a wheel, and Just Keeps Going. Horses for courses, I guess.

It also requires GrubHub and the like to operate under opt-in instead of opt-out with the restaurants. They can't (legally) add a restaurant without their permission under this.

That's not in the legislation referenced by the post. Motherboard says that it is, but the legislation is linked, and it's very short.

The only opt-in referenced in the legislation is that the restaurant may ask for the customer data unless the customer has opted-into privacy protection as provided by some other statute.

Upon the request of a participating food facility, a food delivery platform shall share the following information relating to consumers that have purchased food from the food facility through the food delivery platform...

Why should this legislation be so specific?

Anyone advertising to be an agent of anyone else without permission is a fraud. Squatting on a domain name for another business to fraudulently act as a pass-through for them or to otherwise extract money from that business ought to be tortious interference.

What reasonable explanation gives restaurants more legal protection than, say, auto parts stores, grocers, or garden-supply shops?

This law doesn't actually address the worst behavior of these ... "food delivery platforms" (would that be a tray, Ms. Gonzalez?). It merely requires them to connect customers to vendors after misrepresenting the vendor and their products. Yay!

Like the day someone unpublished the left-pad NodeJS module, and that whole dumpster-f^W^W ecosystem imploded?

You can donate any used PC to your local Goodwill store, but they have a policy and an agreement with Dell that it will never be sold in the store. Instead it will be 'recycled' and destroyed.

Dell wants to sell new PCs, you see.

I'm reasonably sure that the local (Austin area) Goodwill stores have heard of Dell, and there are used computers (including several Dell systems) for sale.

One of the things Goodwill does that's probably a smart business decision—even if it's not great for getting less-than-current technology into the hands of the local poor—is selling things on eBay, rather than in the shops. Fifteen years ago, I was picking up fun stuff (SGIs, Suns, VAXes, etc.) for cheap because they didn't run Windows, but someone in the shop got a clue that nerds would bid real money for them.

So it may be that your stores are sending the computer parts off to a regional location (A Goodwill "Computer Works" store) or are selling online, instead.

It would be far better for the US government to simply apply consumption tax at the point of sale

Why should the person buying the product be penalized?

Consumers always pay corporate taxes because any money the corporation spends on anything (supplies, labor, taxes, advertising, upkeep) comes from the consumers, assuming the company is past the start-up stage. Making it visible at the till just removes the shell game.

The complex regulations (which, likely as not, totally provide for what Wal-Mart is dong here, just like it makes their multi-tiered real estate scheme tax-free) is where the corruption comes in. Making corporate taxes simple enough as to be one multiplication on the total sales before taxes removes the cover that lives in the thousands of pages of US and state tax law.

On top of which, there is no way this country could function if this was implemented. There would be nowhere near enough revenue for even basic functions.

Efforts towards making something like this happen (The "Fair Tax") have estimated that we'd need a federal sales tax of about 20%. That'd replace payroll taxes, industry-specific taxes (using taxes as a means of social control), corporate income taxes, etc. I believe that estimate also took into account the massive reduction of compliance costs. Employers pay dearly to make sure that their payroll taxes are squared-away, and the laws change frequently.

There's also something to be said that this is also the only way to effectively tax illegal activity. There's a line-item for that on the 1040 (and on Schedule C) that presumably nobody fills out honestly. If taxation happens at consumption, avoiding taxes becomes less about laundering and more about not being able to enjoy ill-gotten gains.

I do wish article-writers (would be unfair to elevate most of them to "journalist") would stop putting "and that's a good thing", "but that's not good," and "here's why you should worry" in titles and headlines. If the target audience is above preschool age and the author is competent, the conclusion will be met. If either of those preconditions is not met, rectifying the situation is straightforward.