Maybe it is the push off the cliff that Paypal needs.

Not likely. Because PayPal still does one thing no one else does - which is allow two random people to accept credit card as a payment option. In other words, the recipient does not need to have a merchant account.

While PayPal does more than this nowadays, that is still one thing that no other system does. There are alternative systems but they generally are very limited (I think Visa has one that allows random people to take Visa payment).

Sure there are private networks that do the same thing if people are both members of it, but you'll find they're US only and generally hijack through a bank account to get the transfers done. But if you just wanted to do a random payment not using cash, PayPal is surprisingly your only option.

All other options require both sides to have an account - PayPal only requires the recipient to have an account - the sender being charged does not need one.

For instance, they created the SMB file protocol not from computer science first principles, but as a hack. And so everyone who wants to interoperate with it (e.g. Samba) is then locked in a decade long attempt to reproduce every single bug in their own code.

Incorrect. SMB was created by IBM to share printers and files in the PC-DOS (and likely token ring) days.

Microsoft adapted it for their Windows networking product in Windows NT as an alternative to the IPX/SPX protocol that Novell had.

Andrew Tridge then realized his SMB client/server project would work not just for IBM, but for Microsoft networks as well with a few slight adaptations to evolve the protocol (especially since it wasn't running on TCP/IP in the early days).

Microsoft later adapted it for Windows Vista in SMB 2 and Windows 7 as SMB 3. But SMB 1 still remains a deprecated option because many Linux based NAS devices, in an attempt to skirt the GPLv3, still use an ancient version of Samba that only supports SMB1. (Samba went to GPLv3 about 3 weeks before it released support for SMB2). This is why many routers and cheap NAS boxes still require you to install SMB1 support.

(NAS providers like QNAP, Synology and vendors like Apple chose not to use the GPlv3 Samba after this, and wrote their own SMB2+ implementation). The need for SMB1 should decrease further because the Linux kernel itself has SMB2+ support inside it.

At which point we can truly ditch the nightmare that is SMB1, which is kept around less for Windows and more for devices running Linux. (You need SMB1 for Windows XP and lower and those haven't been supported in over a decade)

The other thing is SMB was for file and print sharing, and Microsoft did the EEE thing with it once IBM was no longer interested in it which Samba had to follow faithfully to be completely compatible.

Correct. SS7 is ancient, and was never created with security in mind. Bell created it in the 1970s, and very idea that security was needed would not even have been in the engineers' world view.

This is a protocol only meant for phone companies, and Bell was still a monolith back then. Similar to the early internet in the 1970s where only the military and a few computer scientists even had access.

Exactly. It was created for a world where only phone companies were to connect to it and those connections were vetted basically by government people in suits who establish diplomatic relations who then let the telecom systems interconnect. And since you can manually route calls, those diplomatic relations generally interconnected the world because every link was trusted. Other than maybe a few countries (e.g., US and Canada, where Bell generally interconnected them together in whatever way made sense from a geographical sense).

These days anyone with a couple thousand dollars a month can get an SS7 connection and route a phone call through it, be it VoIP, POTS, or other thing.

And yes, old cellular network protocols are vulnerable - LTE and below use SS7. 5G uses a much more secure networking system.

Screenless is stupid. Screens are cheap now. By all means make it audio centric but if I just have to get out my phone to get any info that isn't convenient to get via audio, then I might as well just use my phone for the audio stuff too.

Why is it stupid? Your Amazon, Google and Apple all have screenless speakers that do what this does. You might even remember when Burger King triggered a bunch of them with an ad on purpose. (Apple processes their audio stream to avoid triggering their devices so anytime someone at Apple does "Hey Siri" it doesn't trigger your unit at home).

They are likely still very popular devices and people seem willing to put in such spy gadgets in their home that can listen to them 24/7.

Granted Amazon did start offering units with screens. But the general consensus is it's more to show you ads rather than the few times when you need a screen.

But yes, just another "smart" spy-speaker in the end.

So the Billionaire can leave, but he'll end up controlling his company remotely from out of state unless he can do everything with AI or make do with mediocre employees or use AI and have a few less-than-stellar employees for grunt tasks.

And then wait for California to introduce a law that if the CEO works remotely from the company, then workers are allowed to work remotely as well. And by remotely, I mean the CEO lives in a place where no substantial office of the company exists. So if they live in Florida, they will need to set up an office in Florida where the CEO will go to and staffed with a certain number of people who also come in to work daily. Say, 10 to 20 people must work in the same office as the CEO to be not considered working remote. And those 10 to 20 people must regularly come into the office.

And said office must in a properly zoned for business. So no inviting 10 family members for an in-home office.

If nothing else, Florida and Texas now see a boom in CEOs having to open offices and hire people.

So it turns out politicians can pass legislation that helps people.

Mamdani has been doing a lot of it.

Of course, it was too hard for the "other" politicians because they were being paid off. Mamdani ran on a platform that those other politicians were describing as something that would destroy the state.

Finding a new encrypted filesystem must be upsetting you.

Apple's official method is multi-step.

First, you decrypt the volume - you control-click the disk and click Decrypt. Wait for it to decrypt (takes hours).

Then you convert it to APFS, the current filesystem Apple uses.

Then you enable encryption on APFS and wait for it to encrypt.

Chances are the HFS+ encryption is likely outdated and weak and sometimes it's better to not pretend. Or it was a hacked addon to HFS+ which didn't support it initially. Like how fscrypt is on Linux where support is added to ext filesystems. APFS natively supports encryption and getting rid of a filesystem layer to simplify things would add security.

Yes, but you have to have a magnetic field to push against.

In Earth orbit the device can interact with the Earth's magnetic field, but propulsion to the moon or Mars?

What will it push against? How powerful is the sun's magnetic field at that distance?

Maybe it's just for Earth's orbital use? The key reason satellites age out in orbit right now is because they run out of fuel to keep them in orbit. So they have to have a reserve amount for a burn to deorbit or to enter a parking orbit.

If this means satellites have basically unlimited fuel as long as they have power, this could mean satellites are smaller, lighter and last basically forever. It certainly removes the main reason a satellite has to be decommissioned.

The ISS gets routine fuel shipments so it can stay in orbit. But satellites don't and various ideas have been proposed to refuel satellites so we don't have to junk otherwise working equipment.

Why would this be surprising? They know if is or has been registered right?

Exactly - how else would Microsoft be doing it? I would say this started in the Windows XP era where they tied your Windows activation key to the hardware IDs. Change your CPU and you might have to re-activate Windows. Or change your motherboard. Or change your network card.

Microsoft always hashed your hardware IDs to form a unique hardware ID they used to tie to your activation key. If you tried to install Windows XP on multiple PCs and use the same key Microsoft would notice and disable your key.

You can do what one guy did in Washington - do a FOIA request. The photos and data are public records after all.

Don't make it a big FOIA request, just make it something targeted like an intersection on a date between two times, an hour apart. You travelled through it and want to see what information the camera got about you.

And maybe do more FOIA requests for other intersections as well.

The reason for the targeting is highly focused FOIA requests are less likely to be rejected as over broad requests and thus you are more likely going to get your images and data you requested.

What happened in Washington was the city councils got worried because the courts have started saying the FOIA request was perfectly valid and they have no reason to withhold the information requested. Councils were worried that the requests could contain information that stalkers might want. The courts kept saying to release the information, council kept pushing back, and then council cancelled the agreements because they saw they were going to have to release the information and they could not restrict who got a hold of it.

In other words, having the information available turned it into a liability for council because they had to release it as public records and there would be plenty of people like stalkers who would just love to get their hands on the information. So the only solution was to not collect the data in the first place.

If 250K is exceeding expectations, then the expectations are wrong and haven't been supported by the data for a long time.

I think the feeling is that most people don't drive vehicles much beyond 10 years or 100K miles. Because generally speaking once you get to that point in a car's life, repair costs skyrocket.

Sure, there are plenty of cars that if treated right will get you way beyond 100K with minimal problems (it's where Toyota gets their reputation), but many will start having issues around 150K or so.

The problem is, many people don't own vehicles that old so they never see it. After 150K, most vehicles are treated as "beaters" that get minimal service knowing that they're basically going to be scrapped on the first major failure.

It also doesn't help that most people's experience with batteries are ones that are basically useless after 5 years - cellphones, music players, laptops, etc., you get around the 5 year mark and the battery is expected to be relatively useless. So it's not unexpected that they would expect a car with a battery to be severely degraded after 5 years because everything else is too.

Microsoft is also a Delaware company, just like a few million other companies (thousands of which exist at the same address).

There's a reason why DE is the chosen state for many companies to incorporate.

(They were a WA company until 1986)

It is NOT universally required. Incidentally, the FSF may well go after getting that.

That would severely limit where your device can be sold and used, though.

Intentional emitters of signals have to be certified if using a licensed band. That is the law in basically every country around - even tin-pot dictatorships don't want you emitting RF they don't know about.

Now, there are bands the FSF is free to use an unlicensed transmitter on - bands where the owners require licensing (i.e., the owners take on the job of certifying the design) like ham radio. Or the unlicensed bands, like 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz ISM. Here the regulations are basically along the lines of "do not have spurious emissions in the licensed bands next door".

The problem for the FSF is basically they can get it done, but then no one would touch it. If you wanted to produce a device and used the firmware, you likely couldn't put any blocks on what firmware your device runs (GPLv3), which means you cannot get your product certified because you cannot guarantee someone will run authorized firmware. You can put in hardware limiters (i.e., filters), but those things generally make your product perform worse.

The FSF is right on one thing - the firmware blobs are basically identical across users of the same chipset. The simple reason is that the chipset was certified with that firmware already, so if you want the least amount of trouble, you keep the firmware and hardware design the same so you can get through the gauntlet of certifications with the least amount of trouble. (They aren't cheap, you're looking at 5 and 6 figure costs just to do one certification pass so you want to minimize the number of passes you do. And for that you need to hire pre-certification labs which can do the runs and provide the analysis on what you need to fix before you run the gauntlet.

People do sell cellular chips as modules where the RF stuff is done on the module itself which reduces your need for certification and firmware blobs, but phone makers don't use them as generally they are more expensive overall. Chips from Qualcomm and such integrate everything in the SoC from WiFi and Bluetooth to the cellular RF into the main processor so all you need are some RF front ends which means you need only a minimal amount of extra chips. And those chips rely on firmware blobs to be loaded on boot, and those blobs are often binary to the vendor as well. (A place I worked at we had source code access to those blobs, it wasn't pretty).

Well, we know what it's good for theoretically, but that's it.

We don't know if a quantum computer that's useful and practical can be made. We don't know if a quantum computer is even able to accelerate computations over existing technologies.

So far, the only working machines haven't proven either is true - either working on problems so small classical computers easily handle it or can do it just as fast.

And unfortunately that's where we stand - in theory a quantum computer can accelerate all sorts of computations that would take classical computers a long time to do. But there has been no evidence to date that a practical realizable machine would accomplish those goals. Nor has it been proven such a machine can be built.

(It also discounts any possibility of a major algorithm breakthrough on classical computations - so it may not be quantum computers that force the necessity of using quantum-safe algorithms but simply classical computation).

Without piracy, a person's right to go with an older game for half price will be gone

Where is that right enumerated? It's not in the US Constitution, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, or any other document.

There is no such right, anywhere. If you don't want to buy a game at the price offered, there's the other option - walking away. You don't need that game to live and there are likely dozens more in your price range.

You want to lower prices, then increase competition. Sure a game has natural monopolies like IP, but there are likely dozens of other games that have the same basic mechanics or other things.

And there are many ways to legally acquire the game - you could buy a used copy - it's a PC game, a Mac game, and a PS2 game. All of which have used markets especially since it was physical. You do not need to pirate it, it's available legally and legitimately. Now, maybe the price has shot up because people really like it, but that again is a free market thing.

I refuse to believe you won't leave your current employer if a new employer offered you more money, better working conditions or otherwise, which means for you that is also the same market decision.

The only thing piracy has done is maybe deflate the commercial value of the IP.