I manged almost 25yrs working for HP. Stayed with their printers for about 12 years after I retired....

Last year I abandoned them as printer supplier. When my 4yr old HP MFP's print head died, and the replacement head (still available) was almost twice the price of the printer, I decided to call it quits. I didn't mind the ink price .. only printed infrequently ... but spare parts prices really get me.

I'm on a Canon these days. The interface if poor, and the s/w minimal, but ... so far ... so good. ;-)

SD

> ..hostile to sellers
I think it depends on the seller's approach (to some extent). Its rather 'friendly' to serious seller IMHO.

The obscuring of bider's IDs benefits sellers, as it allows them to place phantom bids to artificially
raise the bid prices. Because the IDs are hidden and 'unique' to each item, one can never 'prove'
that the bids are artificially inflated ... but given the number of times one looses by 1$ or 1£ ...
well ...

Then there is the prevalence of 'private' sellers listing scores of items. No not individual postage
stamps, or POGs, but tens, dozens, or scores of laptops, or keyboards, or cameras.
Of course we all have score of working laptops stashed at home, alongside that huge
pile of camers, and all those keyboards ... ;-)

And why masquerade as a private seller ? Because then bid IDs are hidden ...

SD

The entertaining part is how 'they' propose to 'see' all those categories of unwanted 'stuff'.

Its the classic 'externality' approach to the 'problem'. There are laws in place that address most angles
of the 'stuff', but no prictical way to enforce or monitor them. Solution ... make someone else do
it under pain of fines ... then its not the state looking at your 'stuff' but multiple commercial
service providers. And when it fails, as it surely will, the Govt. of the day can point the finger
at the naughty commercial sector who refused or failed or couldn't find a way to do the
looking at your stuff.

What's not to like?

Bruce Schneier has a link to a good article on the nonsensical act here https://www.lawfaremedia.org/a...

SD

Whether the planet is at peace might be an interesting discussion.

But, its more about scale .... population growth, 'net access, increasing services access by 'all' generates
a haystack so big that looking for 'needles' in it become ever more expensive, and probably, ever more
fruitless a task. Looking for 'bad guys' on a planetary scale does sound like a job for cengenital optimists.

my 2d/2c
SD

> how can Signal even leave anyplace

Moving everything to some place(s) that are hard to get to, in some uncooperative jurisdiction(s), might help somewhat.
Running the server-side stuff in some form of distributed mode would further fragment what could be extracted from the same place.

SD

Umm, wasn't this done 30+ years ago .... in 'An Evening with Berfed', 1991 IIRC.
Berfed was the hacker(s)'s commonest typo.

Nothing new under the Sun.
Yawn.

SD

I'll hazard a guess. Loading a black-list on the client end would allow the users to see the sites being blocked, which doubtless over time, will include sites one might wish to visit if one only knew they existed ... sites the 'they' don't want you to go to ... or am I just paranoid ?

SD

A deity that requires national governments to defend it does sound rather weakâ¦

> ..dig in, continue to be silent, and continue to block ..

Its a largely passive culture, and./or an honour/shame culture and/or a power/weakness culture..... depending on who or which individuals are involved.

You, we, the west are not present to jerk the chain.. they stay passive.
You, we, the west are not present so we cannot 'shame' them.
You, we, the west are not present so we are 'weak' in the cultural sphere which shapes their actions.

Hence nobody does anything, it not safe to do so anyway, and unless you have 'power' you'll get kicked if you do.

Its India remember.

Even without Mr Cutler, Digital created the Alpha which launched the same year as Win 3.11.
If they'd got the price and availability right, we'd still be buying systems with an AXP 'inside'
with a compiler suite that actually optimised properly for the architecture. ;-)

It ran Windoze NT once it came out, plus DEC's VMS and OSF/1, RedHat (etc) had
Linux on it, and the boys in Nashua even had Solaris (sic) running in the lab.
Would have saved Intel and HP all the fun of Itanium, and the rest of us would
have had this years i-N performance a couple of years earlier ...

SD

>> 21 century equivalent of British East India Company

Ooo. Thats a comparison I'd net heard of before... Interesting. I'll have to ponder it some more.

SD

At a guess, it looks like the state, or the EU, or secret squirrel has leaned on them ... cos the private relay makes it difficult to see what the users are doing.

Somewhat predictable.

SD

Was HP directly involved I wonder, or were they just the hardware vendor ?
Had the Uni outsourced the IT operation to some 3rd party ?

Backup software needs a process established to run it
The process needs people who operate it correctly.
The people who operate it must have mgt. that check they're doing it right,
The management must be able to say 'hey!, its not working'.

I wonder if this was another Fukishima where nobody dare say anything without loosing face ?
Then when someone wanted a file back ... Boom!

British citizens seem to have swapped faith in a divine being who oversaw a large part of life, for belief in a government(state) who are now supposed to oversee almost all of life. Alas the wisdom and resources of the former considerably outweigh the wisdom and resources of the latter, just as the 'law' of the former is considerably briefer than that of the later. So, maybe the words of 007 may prove to be prophetic "History isn't kind to men who play God".... ?

SD

> ... because their invoicing system was down they couldn't bill their customers

But why should they give their 'product(s)' away ?
Or was it they couldn't balance cash in to cash out (to buy the oil in the pipe(s) ?

SD