ChatGPT gets Maya dates wrong. I have asked it to convert Maya dates into Gregorian, and it always gets them wrong. When I tell it what the correct date is, it apologizes and tells me I am right.

John Linden and Victoria Bricker, the authors of the article being discussed, are well-respected scholars. So these are not the normal nut-jobs that talk about the Maya Calendar. I have yet to read more than the summary, but will read the article in the next few days. I am sure that Linden and Bricker got the math and astronomy right. However, I am very suspicious that this is how the Maya actually used the 819 day count. There are only about 21 of these 819 day counts recorded in the Maya inscriptions, so proving anything about these is very difficult. 819 is the multiplication of 7x9x13, three periods frequently used by the Maya, so it is more probable that it is just a larger period that comes from these three smaller periods.

Why would you want to build anything that relies on Google? You can't count on it being there in a year? They don't seem to understand the investment necessary to use a technology that can get yanked at any moment. Let's suppose that you build an app around the Google Translate API. Microsoft also has a translate API. Either support both, or only Microsoft's, because you can't count on Google's being there. Companies get built around a technology. Stupid companies will rely on Google.

If you get control back to the machines that were encrypted, you MUST wipe them and reinstall everything. You have no guarantee that the hackers have not left additional back doors on the machines to re-attack them later. The ransom only recovers the data, but does not put the computers back into the state they were. So there is still considerable cost coming.

The cracking of MD5 does not mean that password can be reversed to plain text. It means that a hash collision can be created so that another artificially created password will also log into the account.

We had a car in the 1970s that had just such a feature. You couldn't start it unless the driver's seatbelt was buckled. Except there was an intermittent problem where, when it rained, the moisture after driving caused some kind of short. Then the car wouldn't restart whether the seatbelt were buckled or not. As you might imagine, this caused problems when it rained as you couldn't turn off the car if you wanted to go again any time soon. They never could track down the problem as it is hard to come up with a rainstorm on demand. So I hope the feature this time around is 100% reliable.

I was at a Microsoft Christmas party in about 1990 (+/- a year). Bill Gates and Paul Allen were there talking to each other. Their body language was that they were old friends, not mortal enemies. This would have been seven years or so after the date mentioned in the cnet article. So, even if the article was true, which I doubt, then they had patched up their differences by then.

If I buy a rack of kitchen knives, I can't take it home on the subway? What about knitting needles? I sometimes carry a pen knife. Scissors? Will the play-doh for the kids look like plastic explosives?

I'm no security expert, but allowing HTML mail to arbitrarily download embedded graphics in a mail client is just dumb. From my reading of the articles, doing that doesn't disable the problem, but keeps the information from escaping back to the malicious parties. This is a mail client problem triggering PGP to decrypt, then allowing the information to escape through embedded graphics, not a fundamental problem in PGP itself. Turning off HTML mail support at the client and just taking the text representation of the message looks like it completely defeats the hack. Tell me if I'm wrong.

The Windows Phone was really well done. (We'll ignore Windows Phone 6 and before as if they never existed!) Much more coherent interface than either the iPhone or Android. And the battery life was way better. The problem with it was timing and apps. If it had come out before the iPhone, they would have ruled the market, and Apple would probably be suffering. But coming out after the iPhone and Android, they were continually playing catch up. They never got the app base, and without that it was chicken and egg...nobody bought it because it didn't have apps and no apps because nobody bought it.

There is just other people's computers. What this does is make it easier to move your data between your computers and the other people's computers. Seems like a good move by Microsoft.

http://www.mdpi.com/2075-4426/...

There is only other people's computers. If you move to relying on "the cloud", all you are doing is delegating your security to someone else. Now you have two points of vulnerability: Your local Linux machine, and the "cloud" server, either of which could be infected with malware. You have not fixed the problem, and you have actually doubled your exposure.

We'll lose money with every sale, but we'll make it up in volume.