AOL was an online service, kinda a counter-model to the Internet, where you had a centralized "information service" instead of a data network. While on the Internet everybody could, for example, run a webserver, having services on AOL meant having a contract with AOL.

They later did offer Internet access, but that was when the service essentially was already half head. Few people cared about the "AOL" aspects of "AOL" then.

While in reality most security issues stem from careless implementation of otherwise trivial software, these papers are essentially just distractions. They serve only to state how "cool" the researchers are, not how any of this will actually impact security or how to improve security.

It#s kinda like research papers which find out that, if you change the speed setting of your ethernet port... and use an unshielded cable, you can transmit data, weakly. Then they go on, demonstrating this in a very inept way, discrediting any scrap of hope they actually looked into a book on information technology. And all oft that completely ignores, that on most computers you _will_ notice the ethernet interface constantly renegotiating... and that nobody uses copper ethernet for classified settings.

Well I think many people greatly underestimate how cheap launch capabilities can get. The Falcon Heavy claims to just go a bit below $2k per kilogram. A typical ~400 Wp solar panel is something like 20 kg, and those often cost below $100. So you'd pay $40k to get up a $100 solar panel.... at overly optimistic prices.

In the meantime the real price of batteries is sinking by the month.

... that for decades now we have rather smart schemes to keep the beam aligned that are so dead simple they don't need computers. You can do that with simple electronics and a pilot "beam" going upwards from your target. So that's kinda the part of the whole idea that works best.

It's still a fairly bonkers idea, as you can just place solar panels on the surface of the planet... and you can more than overcompensate the atmospheric losses by just putting on more cells... and storage... for a fraction of the price it costs to send those panels up there. Those plans are like Gadget-Bahns, trying to steer politicians away from doing sensible things right now for lofty goals in the future.

So yes, this is a bonkers idea that keeps popping up every decade or so for the last few decades. So many of the detail problems have been solved for decades. The main problem, that it's extremely expensive, however remains.

BTW to show you how old the idea is, it was a background set piece in the story "Reason" by "Isaac Asimov" from April 1941.

Considering how much money he has/controls, that's just peanunts to him. It's like when I did a $1k price for something... probably even less.

Secret services are known for using a technology known as "lying". In fact this is a very common tool in their toolbox.
If a secret service says, they don't to "X", it may mean what you expect it to mean, it may mean the opposite or anything in between. This way they can say things without revealing actual information.

For example, telephone networks are not "back-doored" for surveillance, they have official interfaces for that. I may mean that the UK has struck a deal with the US to get access to the data they get from their backdoor. It's impossible to tell.

When you can update and/or raise prices arbitrarily while being an important part of many businesses, there is no rational reason to not exploit the users as far as possible. You can "enshittify" your product and/or raise prices a lot.

This might be like Google, which is killing itself by making their search product worse and worse.

I am, of course, reading this in Firefox.

Not with its current management. Which is a shame, it kinda was the last kinda free (as in speech) browser.

I mean, OK, doing public things with my likeness is a problem, but we are talking about a simulation. The simulated being is not me, it's a simulation. It's at best, a copy of me. Nothing that happens to it has any meaning to me. It's like when I get a copy of a movie and burn it, that doesn't harm the movie itself in any way.

I mean you can always tell yourself that, despite all the evil the "GAYMAN" (Google, Apple...) companies do, they still provide a sliver of a benefit to humanity. Sure they might destroy democracy, exploit our attention spans... but at least we get touchscreen phones, and next day delivery on soap.

However this is not the case with Palantir. Palantir only exists to prop up dictators. There is no benefit in that company, only damage.

I mean just like the numbers based on running Javascript from advertisement servers, the numbers on Steam probably are severely skewed away from Linux and *BSD. There is a correlation between not loading advertis or not playing computer games and running Linux and *BSD. Just like there is a correlation between a work computer and it running Windows.

I mean even heavily Windows-oriented websites, mostly browsed from work computers, like heise.de report much higher numbers than that.

In railway safety is usually very important, and a stopped train usually is in its safest state. So everything typically fails towards stopping a train.

You can stop many stations by placing a copper wire on the tracks at a strategic position, making all of the systems believe that there is a train. You can puncture a brake line and the train will stop. You can cut wires used for signaling and the signals will fall back to stop... on AFAIK any signaling system.

Well yes it does, it's a smart card, it has not only storage and cryptographic primitives, but also the ability to run software.
Even for E-SIMs:
https://laforge.gnumonks.org/b...

Here's just one random vendor:
http://www.logossmartcard.com/...

The use is, for example, to re-format phone numbers, so if someone roaming abroad enters a national number from his home country, the SIM card will intercept the call and change the formating into something the foreign network will understand. (there are also other ways to do that, but this is the cheapest)
In some developing countries this was used for app-like services on phones where you cannot install software, since SIM-cards have some control over the user interface of the phone.

Well the phone book is a "filesystem" feature of the SIM card, it actually predates Java by (more than) half a decade. I'm refering to the ability of most modern SIM-cards to execute Java software. That software cannot use standard string functions because of limitations in the VM.