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Comment Re:YMMV - But the knockoffs have a legit market (Score 1) 122

I have to agree. Now, I really wish they'd make an actual brand name for themselves and label the products that way, but half the time those "SEGBDGEDC" brand items for things like screwdrivers, drills, etc actually work plenty good enough for home DIY type stuff. I wouldn't use them if I was using a tool every day for work but for around the house its fine.

To some degree "VEVOR" has started doing that though. A lot of the "cheap but ok" stuff has been started to be branded VEVOR pretty frequently.

Comment Re:debit card rewards (Score 1) 52

If I remember correctly, merchants could always give a discount for paying in cash, but they couldn't charge extra for paying with a card. They may be effectively the same thing, but what the credit card companies didn't want was people being unhappy that they were being charged more than the advertised price.

Sort of, but many of them have language that makes it ever more the same thing as a surcharge. Particularly in gun shops/shows, its VERY common to see "All listed prices include a 3% cash discount. This discount cannot be earned via credit card.".

What's crazy is when that put that verbiage on AUCTIONS. The auction price that I bid myself somehow is supposed to include a "3% cash discount".

Comment Re:debit card rewards (Score 1) 52

Sort of. The "rewards" are also there to make people spend using the credit card and carry a balance. They know if people think they're "making money" while charging purchases that they're more likely to rack up that total. They know they'll make more via the interest charges in the long run. Sure some particularly responsible card users may be able to game it for some rewards, but they'll be so much in the minority that it won't matter.

Debit cards don't carry that potential, so you won't find any debit cards offering rewards anywhere close to what the credit cards offer.

Comment Re:I just wish they'd quit calling it an OS upgrad (Score 4, Insightful) 122

I'm not going to run it but people have said the kernel handles realtime needs much better than 10.

That's the thing, there are a bunch of legitimate improvements to Windows 11. They're just all very obscure, hard to explain things hidden away in the kernel that most users will either never encounter or never even notice.

The things they will notice are the far worse task bar, the randomly missing features that were removed for no apparent reason, the higher hardware requirements, the constant nagging to use new Windows features, the existing features that have been randomly changed for no readily apparent reason, and the new features that are too buggy to use, like HDR support or dynamic refresh rates.

Comment Re:Why (Score 1) 330

and it was a black guy in a Bubba truck.

Cultures influence each other. Being in South Carolina (where individuals of both the black and the bubba variety are very common), I've seen plenty cases of a 4x4 pickup with a lift kit . . . and those tiny sidewall tires on giant rims.

At this point it'd be a flip of the coin to figure out which of the two is driving it.

Comment Re:Memory prices (Score 1) 27

With the way memory prices have gone with this latest generation, I want the next gen of CPU's to have a memory interface that can support mulitple different types of memory.

EG, the boat doesn't have memory slots - it has a connector that allows you to connect memory slots of whatever type you want (DDR6, DDR5, DDR4, etc).

These damned memory sticks have gotten too expensive to replace every time I upgrade my CPU.

I wouldn't mind seeing GPU's with socketed VRAM either. Given how much of the price is tied to that it would be good to be able to reuse those components.

Comment Re:So, how does that cause privilege escalation? (Score 3, Informative) 34

At least on my systems you need to be root do to anything with nf_tables. Is this some distro specific permission stupidity?

Maybe. There's a feature called user namespaces in Linux that effectively allows an unprivileged user to act as if they were a privileged user within a specific environment. (Basically, containerization.) Within such a namespace, a non-privileged user could conceptually access nf_tables as if they were a privileged user. In theory this would only allow them to add additional filters within the namespace, but the vulnerability here can provide direct access to kernel memory.

Some distros add additional layers of security to prevent flaws like that, blocking access to nf_tables even within a namespace, but the vulnerability links to ways around those. (Link to the Wayback Machine from the source vulnerability disclosure.)

It's possible your distro may be secure - or it may not be. It depends on what features are enabled.

Comment Re:That's creepy (Score 2) 40

Only the sender and recipient have they keys to decrypt the messages on device; Apple does not.

Which is great, when they're in transit. But once they're on-device, they're decrypted, and then Apple has access to them.

We know this, because there have been court cases where iCloud-subpeonaed iMessage messages were presented as evidence.

Just because the transit is secure, doesn't mean the endpoints are.

Comment Re:Solution: "Factory Reset" and then never connec (Score 2) 33

1. Factory reset restores default settings - it does NOT roll back system updates.

2. A Roku device not connected to the internet is going to be lacking its core functionality. If your goal is to use it as a dumb display, or to solely just a local media library (eg Jellyfin), then maybe, but 99% of all Roku users want to do more than that.

Comment Re:Weaponization of lockouts (Score 1) 66

DVRs were the starting point. The namesake for what you're talking about, tivoization, is Tivo, the DVR that existed way back when TV was still analog and being displayed on CRTs.

It's why the GPLv3 was made: to add clauses to forbid tivoization. Instead, a lot of the open source community moved in the opposite direction, moving to licenses that allowed companies even more freedom to lock up their code.

At some point people have to learn and fight back.

Good luck. This is not a new fight by any means. You could argue that the FSF has been fighting it for almost half a century. People by and large do not care.

Comment Re:Win the battle, lose the war (Score 3, Insightful) 66

More likely they'll separate the OS and the TV code so they can ship the open source OS along with their closed source software

I'd be amazed if this wasn't already the case. We've already been through this with Tivo, it was one of the reasons behind the creation of the GPLv3. Tivo based their DVRs on Linux, and provided downloads of the Linux code. But their DVRs used hardware DRM to ensure that only code signed by Tivo would run, making it so that even with the open source code, you couldn't run changes on the hardware.

From what I can tell, Vizio is doing the same thing, but isn't providing downloads to the kernel code they're using. It's possible that there's some proprietary hardware drivers that they don't want to release code to, but Nvidia has already show how to work around that.

I expect the end result to be like Tivo: a bunch of archives of the open source software used in the TV, but none of the code required to make it useful and no signing key necessary to allow any changes to run on the TV itself.

Comment Re:Federal Bribery and Taxpayer Abuse. (Score 1) 101

Every republican that acts like it's bad, probably voted for it. Every democract that speaks out against it probably voted for it.

You can't count on voting records to mean anything, thanks to the "designated villains:" the politicians whose job it is to tank a law that a party wants to be on record as having voted for, but don't want to pass. We're watching this happen right now with votes on the Iran war. Democrats don't want them to pass. What they want is to be on the record as being against it and want Republicans to be on the record as supporting it, even though there is no chance they'll do anything to stop it if they get the power to do so.

Both sides play games like this, with the end result being that only laws that have the support of large donors having any real chance of passing. Who votes for and who votes against is always carefully calculated to let vulnerable politicians give the appearance of supporting things constituents support, while never needing to support those things in actual fact.

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