So you honestly believe all those judges and lawyers that claim to be involved in upholding the law (including the constitution) are actually [i]all[/i] violating it by legislating first-amendment-violating precedent from the bench? That's some massive coordinated conspiracy there.

Might I be so bold to propose an alternate explanation? You misunderstand the protections the constitution grants. It does not grant license to say whatever you want, whenever you want, to whomever you want, regardless of the consequences. And good thing too; because that's the way of chaos. If anything, the constitution's poorly phrased and vague protections lead to protecting clearly harmful deception for no good reason; and simultaneously, the protections are way too narrow; applying only to certain forms of government intervention, not indirect forms, nor intervention by powerful non-state actors, (e.g. intervention by other states or the likes of platforms).

It would be nice if we had actually meaningful protections for potentially constructive discourse, whistle-blowing, and honestly expressed belief that cannot reasonably be known to be false. You know, the less snazzily phrased stuff that actually matters when it comes the the whole point of free speech, being that it informs the electorate and public discourse. As is, the exceptions to the protections in the US are laughably broad, failing to protect valuable speech routinely, e.g. allowing systematic chilling effects, and indirect punishments. And it's also way too vague, protecting not only grey area statements you might feel are reasonable to protect to avoid chilling effects, but also outright lies and deception for which no reasonable argument can be made that they contribute. So on the one hand, the government can coerce the public discourse freely, but simultaneously cannot even get involved in dealing with known falsehoods; it's like liars are presumed innocent even when proved guilty.

But perhaps the most damning bit of it all? In some cult-like mass suspension of disbelief we've all grown so vigorously protective of some document a bunch of rather humanly imperfect democratically-challenged guys wrote up that we don't even dare consider that it's perhaps possible to improve on it, and indeed that perhaps rather than being so sure we've got all the answers that [i]just maybe[/i] it might be worth looking around and seeing what works why, and which protections matter, and [i]improving[/i] rather than creatively reinterpreting old statutes ever less reasonably. The founders weren't perfect; and we should be able to do [i]better[/i] by now (indeed modern partisanship is largely a consequence of errors of judgement by the founders!), [i]and[/i] even when we do retain laws from centuries ago, we've basterdized them beyond recognition. Do you really think e.g. the founders thought that unregulated lobbying and campaign finance by corporations was something that could and should be protected by the first amendment? Of course not; that's the result of ever more strained and abstract interpretation of statutes, rather than intent.

I completely disagree. I you hire an ethicist, and then proceed to not just ignore ethical problems but additionally rub peoples faces in it by making them fill out pointless forms that never get acted upon, your company should have a bit of nasty discourse, ideally not just internally. Even if you don't care about what the employee perceived as bigotry one bit, this behavior by Google is a big red flag both in terms of morals, and in terms of competence. Note that they're not disputing they have a problem with bigotry nor disputing that they're failing to address it - the only issue they're taking action on is the fact that it was communicated internally in a way they disapprove of.

The kind of behavior google is engaging in here means discouraging valid criticism - after all the proper channels not ignored initially, and internal discussion then circumventing those channels resulted in immediate termination. That kind of corporate culture is a losers business; however - it means they won't be able to respond to issues their employees note, because they won't even see them in the future. This is the kind of thing that leads big organizations to drive themselves off a cliff with poor decisions even though "everybody already thought they were poor". Famous recent examples include Boeing's utter self-own, leading to not just hundreds of lives lost, but also an almost existential threat to the company.

It's absolutely vital employees feel they can criticize company policy, especially if problems arise such as when the proper channels for feedback fail to act or even attempt to address concerns. Sure, at some point enough whining is enough, but nothing in the story indicates a long history of toxicity. Even if there was such a long history, to avoid a chilling effect, it's necessary to point out the long history of toxicity so that others don't feel like any criticism is punishable, but see that it's the long history of toxicity that's the issue - and even that is a tricky line to draw, and they clearly didn't do that.

Many people are looking at what the employee did or said. But it hardly matters! The point is not how much right or wrong was on each side of the dispute, it's that the employee believed they were in the right and nevertheless summarily terminated for telling what they thought was the truth. Even if they were completely in the wrong, these actions by Google (and specifically how quickly and unyieldingly they were performed) will inhibit their ability to benefit from their own employees.

Therefore, this response by Google is both morally repugnant (those with power over others need to be able to take criticism, even the kind they couldn't make themselves); and furthermore self-destructive. Not good signs for the long-term health of the company.

No no, this isn't (just) slashdots fault; one of the actual articles omits the script tag too!

Although it's some next level irony that one of the articles itself appears to have been vulnerable to script injection somewhere in their publishing pipeline, because it's very implausible they just so happened to purposefully remove the script-tag entirely from the company name without even an explanation.

What next, are they going to steal users too?

We better all rally to protect the pseudo-monopoly browser before it loses some of its possessions. /s

I tried this on a crucial SSD, and it returns zero's instantly(from my human perspective) after deletion.

There's good reason to assume all ssd's will do this eagerly, namely that it costs time to do so, and that having more pages free makes wear levelling more effective. For those that don't know; ssd's cannot rewrite data; they can merely clear whole blocks of NAND (iirc typically around 1MB), and then write individual pages (iirc typically 4k). More background https://www.extremetech.com/ex... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - but the upshot anyhow is that it's critically important for SSDs (both for perf and longevity) to collage small writes, and not just rewrite 1MB of NAND anytime you happen to save a 4k file, especially as we transition further along the SLC->MLC ->TLC -> QLC -> PLC types.

And that means that if you delete large files (i.e. a block of 1MB or more), it's important for the SSD firmware to get that block "available" for wear levelling and future writes again, ASAP.

Hence it's highly unlikely this is ever going to work for multi-megabyte files on ssd; it's too important for the SSD to comply with the TRIM for it to choose to ignore it. Small files may not be deleted right away, and perhaps small leftovers of files after all whole blocks are gone, and just maybe for some SSDs if the SSD is swamped and chooses to delay or ignore the TRIM (theoretically possible, but doing so limits peak perf and longevity) it's conceivable some blocks may not be lost. Even if the SSD hasn't deleted the block, it may have deleted the requisite entries from the internal table it uses to map OS-level pages to physical NAND blocks, leaving you out of luck even then. So it's going to be rare to get any data back after a trim. There's no guarantee that trim will be honored, but you can safely assume that is the norm.

In theory the SSD may ignore the trim; yet in practice SSD's can't afford to do that.

Perhaps more relevantly, and more predictably anyhow nowadays: Restorable until the OS-issued TRIM command is processed by your SSD.

In normal usage, you won't be able to recover much from an SSD. Small; sub-block size files: sure; and if you're really lucky files deleted while your drive was swamped and you pulled the plug quick enough.

I mean you can argue that it *should* be worth more than that; or that it would be *nice* if it were worth more than that, but clearly, it is *not* currently worth more than that. Even if the land-grab by powerful tech corps had not been successful (but it is, and bow to them already), it's so easy to make pics nowadays, that simple supply and demand dictates that the value of pictures has dropped, dramatically.

We don't have to like it, we can agitate for political moment to change things a little (not that I'm optimistic in today's hyper-partisan society), but simply refusing to accept the new normal feels like tilting at windmills.

Not to mention they may not even have understood or read the terms of the loan, because clearly the loansharks weren't trying to be upfront about those kind of things. As far as the lenders were concerned, they might still have been behaving reasonably.

And *even if* their loan was overdue: harassing all kind of other people is, well... harassment ;-). The only reason they ever had to have access to that list of friends was harassment; i.e. even asking for that is worthy of punishment, regardless of whether or not they end up using it.

Legislators and lawyers can figure out where to draw the line between merely shady and what's worth punishing, but setting aside the legal question: clearly the behavior of the loan-sharks here isn't OK, no matter who their customers are and what they did. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Ha. I had to implement DMARC for an organisation once, and I'm totally unsurprised nobody else is bothering to.

To start with, DMARC is barely worth focusing on. It consists largely of SPF and DKIM (with some reporting added in). But both DKIM and SPF are a pain to setup and/or plain wrong or fragile.

SPF won't survive forwarding; so that's right out: enable SPF, and *more* of your mail may end up in spam folders. I'm not sure what the designer of SPF was thinking, but clearly thinking wasn't high on their priorities.

DKIM is, in principle, better. Except: it's pretty fragile, and breaks in unfortunate ways. Email processesing pipelines have traditionally had leeway to do all kinds of stuff to the message, and in particular the content. But with DKIM - if you so much as trim a trailing whitespace, or accidentally reorder a header, it silently breaks (but dmarc adds overcomplicated reporting, so if you're lucky you might have that set up right and tell something fishy is up).

Also: validating the sender is all fine and good, but that's not what your email client is showing you, right? So even if everything worked just fine, it would be much more confusing than https - and I'm not sure people understand https, let alone email headers.

And even if everything happens to work - this is really just the tip of the iceberg; it's far from simple, with reporting and whatnot. And better hope you never make a mistake or all kinds of mail will disappear into /dev/null thereafter. Also, in real organisations you may run into issues like department X does the website and has DNS control, but B does marketing and email... so let's just test that inter-department communication system, shall we? Since it's all complicated to set up, it takes a modicum of expertise too. Color me unsurprised that it's not taking the world by storm; it's confusing, expensive, fragile, risky, not really all that valuable, and there's no special interest group to push it.

So... yaaaay, DMARC might, ever turn out to be a thing. Or not. But hey, at least we have a not-quite-solution to spam we can pretend we're aiming for.

Have you ever heard of these things called "kids"?

Good chance that pedestrian will do really, *really* stupid things if you surprise them.

It woudn't be healthy if mozilla share were 99% either. But that's neither here nor there: it isn't and there's no plausible scenario in which they turn into a monopolist, not to mention the fact that they're a non-profit whose interests are perhaps less likely to push them to abuse than companies peddling your private data and opinions to the highest bidder.

One thing that article glosses over a little too quickly (at least - I'm not convinced) is the bit depth, and specifically the fact that appropriate dither means that 16bit is enough (and by explicit implication, that more is wasteful).

So, for uncompressed audio... sure!

But almost nobody listens to uncompressed audio, and the argument was about "what kind of format should my music files be in".

Compressing dither isn't trivial. Usually dithered signals don't compress as well. Certainly in visual applications they do; I'm not sure about audio - but I'd be surprised if it were different.

And that suggests that if 16bit is transparent because of dither, then you're possibly better off using 17-20bits without dither, and (if necessary) dithering post-decompression to playback on a 16bit output.

Then again, I rarely use headphones, so I'm never going to hear the difference anyhow. A 64kpbs opus file sounds perfect to me ;-).

Dealing with rendering layers is a tricky optimization process. All browsers have had notable issues with it over the years, and almost certainly will for the foreseeable future, including most definitely chromium - as a job I maintained a chrome+website plugin for a few years and ironically chrome had the most issues of all browsers in this regard. If you've ever tried to optimize an HTML layout for animation, and low interactive jank, you may have run into issues with similar root causes.

It's just not that trivial to figure out which few potential layers - amids the thousands (and sometimes more) in a typical web page - the browser should materialize as one of it's highly scarce usually on-GPU layers, and which it should flatten onto another one.

So that hidden div can be nasty, because the browser can't predict if it will *stay* hidden. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the div wasn't actually `display: none`, but instead used one of the many less complete forms of hiding, which is probably why whatever heuristics edge used went wrong. It may have been non-hidden in a previously rendered frame. Who knows?

Seriously though - if a huge site like youtube can't be bothered to seriously test in edge, then something is wrong. The only reason to continue supporting edge for MS then would be strategic. And they apparently just decided: screw that.

Even without exclusivity, this would hamper competition greatly: it means that devs will rely on those apps being present, and thus that those apps are required for full usability, and thus that third-party apps probably simple cannot work well in practice. Furthermore, most phones are not high-end, and many are even downright small: requiring google's apps means that extra apps are frivolous luxuries such phones can not really afford. By requiring their presence, competitors immediately must reduce the quality of their phone by adding "bloatware" in order to be allowed to compete; after all, they cannot eliminate the google apps.

Finally, this is all kind of missing the point. Whether or not the deal is fair is *not* at issue. What's at issue is whether google suppressed competition with their market power. Even if the deal were fair (which is really hard to judge, IMNSHO) to the phone supplier, it may still be anti-competitive. And at the very least I can see the logic in how this app bundling was a form of competition via imposing roadblocks, not competition on the merits: i.e. illegal.