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Comment Re: Priorities (Score 1) 19

TPM is one of the most useless tools towards that end. Get a DMA card and find out why. For security -- especially for somebody in my position -- it's incredibly useful. There's no conspiracy to deprive you of your copy of "love, actually" or "mean girls", so you can relax, your bootlegged chick flick collection is safe from TPM. Believe me, I have several terabytes of bootlegged sci-fi movies on my Plex server, and I'm not in the slightest concerned about TCG coming after that

Actually the concern was SGX, which is now gone, and that would have impacted a lot more than just your copy of 50 shades of grey -- it was actually a security nightmare pretending to be your friend. TPM is completely open. SGX was exactly the opposite.

Comment Re:Ok sure (Score 1) 53

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) has issued a blunt correction: the waterway is open, and international shipping will not be held hostage by Iranian threats.

Off-topic and completely wrong, both! Apologies for continuing the off-topic thread (and maybe feeding the AC troll), but CENTCOM is apparently channeling the old Iraqi Minister of Information now, and I think this is worth correcting for anyone not paying close attention.

As of today, July 12, 2026, the Joint Maritime Information Center (JMIC) is clear—the southern route is available, active, and fully operational.

Yes, but that isn't remotely the same thing as saying the strait is open. That small southern corridor couldn't handle anywhere close to the normal traffic volume, and shippers mostly still don't dare try. Insurance on transiting ships is 30X higher than normal. As a result of the high risk, high insurance costs and lower-capacity corridor, the tonnage transiting the strait is less than 5% of normal.

Oil prices have come back down, somewhat, but this is because of reduced demand, not restored supply. The reduction is due mostly to China decreasing imports by some 5M barrels per day (a couple of years ago people were saying they were crazy to be building a lot of coal-fired power plants that were idle the day they were commissioned, but those are largely what have made it possible for China to cut consumption by so much), partly by increased US exports (which require high prices to sustain) and partly by ongoing releases from various strategic reserves. China can probably continue its reduced consumption rate almost indefinitely, but unless the strait is really reopened, prices are going to go back up.

Tehran’s goal is to turn the Strait into a weapon of war, using the threat of blockade to force the world into making "one-sided deals." The U.S. is calling that bluff. By maintaining clear, open corridors and demonstrating the military will to degrade Iran’s strike capabilities, Washington is signaling that the era of Iranian maritime extortion is coming to a violent end.

Cool story, bro.

The truth is that Iran can just continue doing what they're doing and the economic pain on the rest of the world will increase. The US has not demonstrated that it can degrade Iran's strike capabilities; the US strikes did some damage but never significantly reduced Iran's ability to strike shipping, and Iran has quickly rebuilt what was destroyed. It doesn't take a lot of expensive, hard to relocate infrastructure to manufacture drones, unlike uranium enrichment.

The bottom line here is that the only way the US is going to restore the strait to full operation is by giving the Iranians whatever they want, which will include leaning hard on Israel to halt operations in Lebanon. Trump's decision to attack Iran has massively strengthened the mullahs' position, both internally and internationally.

Comment Re:Disillusioned with EFF (Score 1) 19

> I had some interactions with EFF a few years ago that left me sad. They definitely do a lot of good work, but .. Could you provide verifiable citations on these interactions with EFF?

No. I no longer work for Google so all of the documentation, emails etc. are inaccessible to me. Is there some reason you doubt my truthfulness?

Comment Re: So basically... (Score 1) 195

Sure, and SpaceX is going to cure cancer and let us all live forever for free. The fact that they once did something that somebody somewhere thought they couldn't do doesn't mean they can automatically do anything.

I didn't say that.

Note that SpaceX themselves say they don't really have any idea whether datacentres in space will work.

More than once, too.

Telecom experts were saying there's no way you'd be able to bring down the cost of phased array antennas to a reasonable level. Nobody at SpaceX was certain of that either. Then it happened anyway.

https://www.businessinsider.co...

Enjoy some nice fodder from gizmodo about heavy lift rockets being scalable:

https://gizmodo.com/bad-news-f...

Many others as well, like stainless steel instead of carbon fiber, the booster catch, the sheer scale of starlink, supercooled fueling, space lasers, hot staging (without sacrificing the booster), and full-flow staged combustion (which many had tried and failed.) And those are just the ones I can tell you about. There have been failures too, for example the attempt at landing dragon with thrust instead of parachutes.

I didn't say anything about stopping it.

Then you're just trying to be contrarian.

There are good arguments for proceeding carefully though. A million satellites in one of our most valuable orbits comes with a bunch of problems.

Nobody said otherwise, however, I don't believe you understand the significance of starlink's orbital parameters with regard to safety. You think you do, but you don't.

Elon doesn't have any downside. He's never going to sell his shares unless he absolutely has to.

Did you even pay attention to what I said? I asked how the GP believes there's fraud going on. Who is defrauding whom? Either you've come here just to be contrarian, or you've come to ask about your genital warts. I don't know which, but if there's a point to any of this, I've yet to hear it.

SpaceX made $75 billion dollars off the IPO, possibly at quite an inflated price. He also gets his Twitter investors off his back as they can now cash out their formerly underwater shares at a significant gain.

Who was on his "back" exactly?

Whether any of it is fraud or not is for lawyers to figure out.

And they start with an argument, predicated on a legal theory. I don't see anything resembling either of those. That's exactly what I was asking GP for.

Every company is going to hype their stock before an IPO. SpaceX says, buried deep in the prospectus, that they really have no idea whether datacentres in space are going to work or not, and they have a few very compelling reasons to push highly speculative, AI-related ideas even if they don't think they're going to work.

And what's your point? There's uncertainty in business? You're just now figuring this out?

Comment Disillusioned with EFF (Score 5, Interesting) 19

I had some interactions with EFF a few years ago that left me sad. They definitely do a lot of good work, but I had thought they would be pretty good at understanding complex technical issues and their nuanced interaction with social and political issues, but my experience was quite the opposite. They're a pretty blunt hammer, mostly focused on rejecting any technological change regardless of its benefits. Even that would be okay if they were at least able to articulate sound objections, but that also didn't seem to be the case.

I was working on Android and participating in the ISO 18013-5 mobile driving license standardization process. I thought it would be a good idea to consult with ACLU and EFF, partly to get their buy-in, but mostly to get their feedback. I thought they might have concerns that I could help to address either in the standard (though, honestly, the European members of the ISO committee were already going above and beyond with privacy protection and abuse protection -- the Germans in particular are incredibly paranoid about such things -- and that's good!) or in the Android infrastructure I was building.

ACLU was great, at least for a while. The reason it was great was because the ACLU representative I was working with was Jon Callas (former. CTO of Silent Circle and PGP Corp, Chief Scientist of PGP Inc.). Jon is brilliant, with a deep and abiding interest in privacy. He was generally impressed with the approach we were taking, and had some good insights for tweaks we could make to tighten it up. Unfortunately Jon only worked with the ACLU for a couple of years, and we struggled to find anyone to engage at all after his departure. I'm not sure he wants to share publicly his reasons for separating, so I won't go into that (though I will point out Jon's article, linked above, is not an official ACLU position).

EFF... not so much. The EFF folks seemed not even to be able to understand what we were building. They kept comparing it to e-Verify (which they think is unambiguously bad) but were unable to articulate precisely what the problems with e-Verify were, or how those might translate to mDLs. I was actively seeking feedback on concerns that I could try to mitigate through good design and implementation. Their response was just a blanket "no, this is all bad" with no thought behind it, and no consideration for the individual privacy improvements that electronic delivery with selective disclosure provide as compared to plastic cards that just lay all of your personal information out there.

My discussions with police were actually far more productive than my discussions with EFF. The cops recommended pro-privacy tweaks that I incorporated -- their concern wasn't actually privacy, mind you, but liability, both financial and legal. The chiefs I spoke with were very concerned that there not be any circumstance in which a police officer might need to touch your phone, because they didn't want to deal with the crap that would ensue when phones were broken, or illegally searched. They were significantly more tech savvy than you might expect, too, and of course they deeply understood highway stops and other police interactions.

But EFF was just frustrating and useless. Which is too bad because I had always had a lot of respect for them and the work they do. I still do, I guess... I just understand now that they have morphed into a typical lawyer-based civil rights organization. Which is good! We absolutely need those! But they lack the technical sophistication I understand they had when founded.

Comment probable (Score 2) 128

>"A simple data-entry error, magnified and broadcast nationwide by a growing surveillance network operated through an opaque partnership between a private company and public agencies"

With a large-enough data set (and so many humans involved as well) even the very improbable becomes probable. When you are invading the privacy of drivers many millions of times a day, just the slightest error rate can mean lots of people affected by false positives. And the more they add additional sensors, additional cameras, additional databases and interfaces into other systems, the more dystopian this will become...

Comment Re:Who is liable in an accident? (Score 1) 95

So who is liable in an accident? The manufacturer?

Yes, the manufacturer of the self-driving system. People have been asking this silly question for a decade now, even though there is no other answer. Google, at least, has stated publicly on many occasions that they are liable for the actions of their self-driving vehicles.

Comment Re:Good luck with that (Score 1) 95

They admitted exactly what I said. Which is that they periodically remote control the cars.

No, they did not. In fact they said exactly the opposite, that the cars are never remotely-piloted. They said that the cars occasionally request guidance, which means something like "Should I go this way or that way?", then the car acts on the answer.

Comment Re:Microsoft might be right about this one (Score 1) 30

Did you report it to your bank? It is almost certainly just a coding stupidity on their part, perhaps looking for a specific user agent.

Try: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... and set it to lie to that domain about what you are using. I would absolutely leave my bank (or any service) for another one if I couldn't use Firefox... and they would know why as well, because I would have already reported it to them way before I left, and then would let them know why I left if it wasn't fixed.

In fact, I go to hundreds of web sites using Firefox exclusively, on many systems, all Linux, and very, very, very rarely have any problems. And 90% of the time, it is because some stupid ass-hat is looking at the user agent and throwing up an irrelevant error message.

There are really only two multiplatform "browsers" left. It is inexcusable that any site can't "support" two.

Comment Re:Being too wealthy really is sociopathic (Score 1) 174

This level of aversion to having to "slum it with the masses" where every last bastion where you might come across a person with a 5 figure income

Dude, you're being ridiculous.

That's clearly not the intention here if the end result of passing through the luxury terminal is boarding the same airplane as those masses, and it is. It's obviously just to make the airport part of the travel experience nicer, in ways that would be too expensive to apply to the regular terminal. It's the same thing as airport lounges (I'm a Delta Sky Club member myself, a privilege I pay money for so I have the option of a nicer place to wait, the availability of hot showers on long trips, food, drinks, etc.) just scaled up to cover the whole airport process... right up to boarding time when the people get shuttled to board with everyone else.

Comment Re: What? (Score 2) 174

What's happened is many of the basics of life have been squeezed. Housing, education, utilities. Meanwhile wages have stagnated, in real terms.

And the data says...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se...

False.

This is just something socialists say, and often, because they need naive followers to buy into their crap to obtain any measure of power, but it has no basis in reality. Unless you live in Canada, Europe (except Belgium), or Russia (which would make a lot of sense in your case) but you're using US pricing, which suggests US context.

Even after you adjust for housing, food, health care, taxes, and other mandatory expenses as suggested by rsilvertard, people are still bringing in more.

https://www.macrotrends.net/30...

The disconnect you're having is I operate based on empiricism, in other words, what can be observed and measured, where you're already known to manufacture and/or spread disinformation.

Comment Re:We need Google (Score 1) 27

How hard could it be to implement a hard "include only these words, exactly as I spelled them"?

The issue is, I think, that those of us who want search engines to work exactly like that are in the minority.

Tiny, tiny minority. And if you think you want that, you're wrong!

Also, it's worth pointing out that finding matching pages in a database of pages is indeed trivial -- and building that is utterly insufficient, because for any query that trivial matching algorithm will return a huge number of pages. Thousands, even for the most obscure technical terms, millions or tens of millions for more-common words.

The hard part of building a web search engine (and it's very, very hard) is ranking the results once you've found them, so the thing the user wants is on top. That was, in fact, Google's big innovation: PageRank was Larry Page's idea for how to rank pages by examining the link structure of the web and prioritizing pages with more inbound links. That specific mechanism quickly broke down when SEO companies began exploiting its structure, but in addition to being gameable, PageRank had another problem: What if the search terms are used in multiple domains? The classic example is the query "python spacing". Am I looking for information about how large an enclosure I need for a captive python, or am I asking about indentation in programming?

So Google, and every other competent search engine, has shifted towards supporting queries in natural language, as well as using contextual information when available, such as the user's search history -- in the "python spacing" example, unless the user is a zookeeper who also writes code, their search history will point to the correct domain.

If you're writing queries as lists of terms that you want matched in pages you're doing it wrong. You'd actually be unhappy with a search engine that gave you exactly that, and you're also artificially reducing the effectiveness of the much better search engine you're using. Try typing questions instead, e.g. "How much space does a 10 foot Python need?" (correct spelling, capitalization and punctuation are not really required, but I use them anyway). This will give the engine more contextual clues about what kind of thing you're actually looking for and you'll get better results.

That said, it should be pointed out that if what you really, really want is "include only these words, exactly as I spelled them", Google will give you that. Just put them in quotation marks.

Comment It's too bad they don't provide numbers (Score 1) 27

It's too bad they don't provide numbers, because the numbers are incredible. I occasionally checked the search qps numbers when I worked at Google, just for fun, and... wow. Say what you will about Google, their scale is incredible. The services work so reliably and quickly that you don't often think about what the infrastructure must be like to handle it -- and you can't achieve that kind of scale just by throwing hardware at the problem, either (though lots of hardware is required, obviously). Every layer of the stack is finely-tuned for performance, with both macro optimizations like sophisticated distributed consensus-based eventually-consistent storage and micro optimizations like libraries that squeeze maximum value out of every cycle.

Supporting tens of millions (maybe hundreds of millions now?) of queries per second against a multi-petabyte (maybe exabyte now?) database is an incredible feat of engineering, as is keeping the whole system humming along with near-perfect reliability. There are a lot of damned fine engineers at Google, and "engineer" is absolutely the right word when you're talking about global-scale infrastructure.

One of my first "Google-scale" moments was shortly after I joined in 2011. The global data center status pages had a bug, which was that the field that displayed the aggregate on-line storage (basically all spinning Rust back then, I think; the SSD transition was just about to get under way), was a Java long, a signed 64-bit integer, and it had just wrapped; Google's online storage had exceeded 2^63 bytes. That is a big number. They just updated the code to use a BigInteger instead.

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