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Comment Re:Pony up (Score 2) 204

So funny to see people bitching about spyware when they carry a smartphone everywhere, do online shopping, use credit cards etc.

1. You sure these are the same people? There are LOTS of people in the world, some people complain about spyware AND either don't carry a phone, or carry a dumbphone or run Graphene or something similar.

2. Online shopping and credit card usage can be limited; one can buy their laundry detergent on Amazon with an Amex and still pay for their kink toys in person with cash. One need not opt out of the surveillance tradeoff EVERYWHERE to still desire a means of making private purchases in certain cases.

3. Most of the surveillance done in a car is done after the car has been paid for by the user. Money has changed hands, but the OEM still seems entitled to sell data the driver generates. The selling of the data does not benefit the owner of the vehicle at all, only the person gathering and selling it. This is different than a payment processor or online merchant that provides a service that has some benefit to the user - access to goods not easily available through traditional retail or where retail purchase would involve prohibitive distance or transport requirements being some examples. In the case of credit card companies, yes, they most definitely make money off purchase data...but they also use it to combat fraud and mitigate liability, which cash simply doesn't make possible. And, in the case of smartphones, even stock ones, data harvesting is more selective, and the phone can be left home, while the car cannot. Yes, data is still harvested and used in ways that don't benefit the customer, granted...but it *does* provide a counterbalance that a remotely usable vehicle kill switch does not.

"But muh smartfownnn" is such a lazy and overly reductive argument against a very complex situation that has plenty of room for nuance and specifics.

Comment Re:Pony up (Score 1) 204

Everyone bitching and moaning over too much spyware and nanny electronics here is what you asked for.

Is it, though? Serious question, I looked into this some time ago...and they make NO claims of this. They claim they don't have an infotainment system, fine...but that doesn't mean it lacks a GPS tracker, a "tattletale" connection that sends CANBUS/ODBII data back to a mothership somewhere, and/or a remotely accessible kill switch.

If you've got documentation that says that the Slate lacks these things SPECIFICALLY, I'd love to read about it...but when I looked, they made no claims of this and made no spectacle of it in their privacy policy...so 100% sincerely, if you've got a citation for this, I'd LOVE to read it.

Comment oh yeah (Score 2) 19

We do. I'd bet you'll find Squid somewhere in most large orgs. Lots of things can replace various parts of it, but it remains a super handy swiss army knife for dealing with most things HTTPS.

At one time, Squid was also the core of at least one big public CDN's product I know of. What they run now has diverged a ton and I heard they purged all remaining squid project code at one point, but it was recognizably descended from squid for quite a while.

Comment So? (Score 1) 57

This seems like a situation where it's very hard to get excited about the idea that it's the regulator's problem. Did some Canadian fed technically have the authority to inspect? Quite possibly. Is there some sort of justification for even the cost of performing the inspection, much less any undesired knock-on effects of the notion that literally all vessels must be inspected no matter what, in a case like this? Seems harder to make that case.

There are a lot of situations where large portions of the public have no choice but to use products and services that they have no reasonable ability to be "informed" about. Either it's simply not possible if you aren't in a position to legally compel honesty from the vendor or it's a case where "informed" is PhD-level work in the area, or a combination of the two; but some rando's aggressively contrarian submarine that loudly and proudly skips all industry certifications and is available on boutique scale for very wealthy customers doesn't seem like one of those cases.

Comment Wait..what?? (Score 3, Interesting) 65

its new, unnamed virtualization software is incompatible with Veeam

So, being as Veeam supports Hyper-V, Proxmox, Nutanix, Red Hat, and XCP-NG is supposedly coming within the next month or two...what could they have POSSIBLY moved to, and why the hell did they walk past all of those other products to do it?!

Comment Glorious success! (Score 4, Funny) 184

Not only do we have the concept of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement; the current level of disagreement between the agreeing parties suggests that we actually have at least three distinct concepts of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement! Where a lesser leader might myopically interpret having a single agreed-upon set of terms as essential to a treaty; Great Leader understands that American Greatness requires more.

Comment Re:I'm wetting my pants now (Score 1) 66

Is that really a bad thing? There are certainly plenty of examples of old things that suck; either because genuine improvements became available after they had already solidified or because they were always broken and are now running purely on denial-fueled risk tolerance; but, in principle, it seems like it should be a bad thing that age is seen as a bad thing. Especially when software is more like math than like civil engineering in terms of the tendency of its materials toward corrosion, embrittlement, and fatigue. (and when so many 'modernization' projects turn into expensive failures or go way behind schedule and over budget to eventually death march toward feature parity, sometimes even achieving it in time to be declared legacy themselves.)

I'm not calling for a crusade against 'fast fashion' software; if people want to bang out an app on the fast and cheap to catch the moment when people care they can do that; fine, whatever; but it seems like software built on real long term service timescales should get a lot more credit than it does. Absent specific criticisms; it's not "eww, there are people who weren't even born then", it's "the software has been in service for a generation".

All the more if there are a lot of outfits doing the same thing: having some unique oddball legacy thing means having potentially crushing maintenance requirements unless everything was gloriously secure from day 1, which it probably wasn't; but if there is some big mass of enterprise Java 8 why should we call it all eol and scramble rather than just maintaining java 8? Especially when we can do so in software, without some of the vendor and hardware inflexibility you see with things like old school mainframe applications where there's an implied commitment to a single old school mainframe vendor in perpetuity.

It's not elegant; but realistically we are far enough both into the history of computer science and the history of computers-as-hardware-you-can-buy that there's a lot less obvious, low-hanging, progress to be had by going 'modern' relative to the amount of fashion and fad chasing. Especially if (as is the case for a great many people and organizations) the scale of your problem has grown at or below the rate at which hardware advances have made systems not particularly well designed for scalability faster.

Comment Cost comparison? (Score 1) 66

Obviously this would require coordinated action, and some people likely have other reasons to want to either poke at or kill legacy applications; but(since all those java versions are solidly post openjdk) I'd be very curious to know how the cost and risk associated with "modernize because java 18 is going eol!" would compare to just...not...having java 18 go eol. Unsexy maintenance project that you'd need to pay to have done, sure; but very plausibly better characterized and lower risk than trying to deal with a lot of the oddball internal accretions that would otherwise need updating; and, depending on how much people have running on java 18, certainly possible that they'll individually spend a fair bit more running the treadmill than it would cost to just keep kicking java 18 down the road until (almost) nobody cares.

Comment Re:Bill Gates is so happy! (Score 1) 155

My response was specifically to the original poster who, for some reason, was taking a "we are losing the class wars; breed faster!" position rather than the "if you are already losing the class war why would you even think about putting in that much effort and cost so your children can deal with a bad or worse outcome?" position.

It would honestly not surprise me if that is a nontrivial contributing factor: If you aren't emotionally invested in children as an end in themselves the wage and cost of living numbers have done very little to encourage you to see them as affordable since roughly the late 70s(with a combination of substantial stagnation for anyone who is primarily wages rather than capital gains; and such good news as there is mostly confined to people who complete at least undergraduate education and remain in a career track full time) and people who are emotionally invested in children are often willing to go to considerable lengths to try to improve their children's outcomes; but are presumably discouraged by the prospect that they will most likely be downwardly mobile instead.

It's not a surprise that people who want labor, cannon fodder, or taxpayers to be abundant for them are fretting about it; but it's hard to see why most of us should care. Why do things that are good for society when society is pretty overtly disinterested in being good for you? You may be able to squeeze the current labor market a bit; because people who already exist tend to take the "or starve" possibility pretty seriously when deciding what they will put up with; but if you offer nothing but the demand for a toiling underclass to encourage people to have children that's not terribly compelling, either for those who aren't interested in sacrificing for children and see hitting education and career hard as increasingly existential or for people who would sacrifice a lot to better things for their children but are more or less accurate in seeing it as highly unlikely that they will be able to.

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