That's a pretty shallow(thought admittedly depressingly popular) analysis of the situation.

Being in public does leave you with no particular defensible expectations of not being observed, and possibly even remembered for a time, by assorted passers by; and typically also permits more direct tailing of people for observation purposes(subject to some, often slightly vague, threshold at which having PIs or paparazzi hunting someone remains a problem even in public; as we saw here where the police took the notion seriously enough to show up but not to do anything in particular).

What it has historically never meant, for technical reasons, was pervasive coverage and longterm retention. Which is certainly increasingly feasible with only moderate levels of investment; but is absolutely a novel development for what 'public' and 'no expectation of privacy' meant.

It's like defending the installation of a massive network of sprinklers because "you have no expectation of staying dry when you go outside; haven't you heard of rain?" Sure, nobody the weather to be sunny all the time, any more than they expect everyone to avert their eyes in public; but they would correctly consider the installation of irrigation equipment on every lamppost to be an intrusion on their ability to stay dry despite the fact that the sky has never extended them a constitutionally protected right to no rain.

Pity the poor Europeans, crying out without the bot slop occupying the top half of the results. I wonder what Google is going to do to ensure that the 'degraded' results aren't universally preferred to the alternative?

I suspect that the relationship is not linear in a case like this: cancer tends to be a big issue for otherwise healthy-ish people because a lot of varieties of it take some time to develop; either chronic exposure to whatever the carcinogen of concern is or some time after the exposure when your luck with the mechanisms that suppress abnormal cell division eventually fails, or both.

There is probably a part of the graph that is mostly linear, nondrinkers to very light drinkers to light-ish drinkers; but anyone who is really hitting the sauce and succumbing to DUIs, cirrhosis, or other non-cancer alcohol mortality is making themselves ineligible for alcohol related cancer death.

That's why I hate most subscription services. Gyms, AAA - hell even insurance to some degree. They're all built around the idea that the customers should be paying but they're the enemy.

With a straight up transactional or metered service, the more the customer uses something, the more they get paid. They're incentivized to make the service or product good. With a subscription, the more the customer uses a service, the LESS money they get paid. They want to balance the scales between making the service good enough to keep the customer from unsubscribing but not so good that they use it.

How good is their game-streaming at cutting out the various 'filler' time(loading screens, startup animations telling you that Nvidia is the way it's meant to be played) and does it have some sort of 'suspend' state to handle cases where you would pause a game if it either doesn't have save on demand anywhere or takes a little while to load from save?

I know I have a bunch of games that I don't actually play all that much, in wall time terms; but Steam's 'executable run time' number is 2x-10x as high because I'm not necessarily going to save, quit, open, load if a game can be paused and alt-tabbed without crashing or continuing to eat all the GPU time to render a static image I'm not looking at; and I'm not necessarily going to do anything other than pause if I'm called away for 15 minutes by something else.

Unless the streaming service is impeccable at cutting out the various little waits it seems likely that people are going to start resenting the time limit even more than their level of seriousness and actual hand-on-controller-and-attention-locked time suggests.

Given that they already purchased Activision Blizzard King, including the "King" part of it, they clearly already have a considerable interest in casual players.

What is less obvious is how that is supposed to work for their streaming service. The stuff aimed at casuals, sensibly, is normally targeted at either potato-tier PC specs or the (pretty punchy in absolute terms) mobile devices that people worth targeting have.

It is much less clear whether there's a 'casual' market that demands current-gen console performance in very limited amounts rather than mobile or iGPU level titles. Given the extreme prevalence of various 'free to play' models that do sneaky monetization later it also looks like the 'casual' market's (significant) amount of money is largely locked up behind the sort of price sensitivity that requires clever psychological tricks to break through. I'm not sure that they'll be a good fit for something as obvious and psychologically burdensome as a ticking countdown timer hanging over every minute they play.

I have no particular reason to assume that Nvidia is lying about what this software does; but unless they've stumbled on a veritable miracle it's going to mostly be a mechanism for running largely separate models of whatever size your hardware allows; not anything close to what the datacenter comparison implies.

There's a reason why Nvidia sells most of their higher end models intended for parallel use with NVLink between the chips inside the chassis and a lot of either infiniband or RDMA-capable ethernet between multiple chassis; as well as shoving a considerable amount of RAM per GPU onto those parts. And it's because latency and bandwidth matter a lot.

As it is people seek out the unified memory parts, Apple's or strix halo, or nvidia's little GB10, because the GPU having to go to main memory over a mere x16 PCIe link is already a serious problem. If you think either 256 or 512 Gb/s directly to the PCIe root on the same die as the main memory controller doesn't cut it I have some...bad news...about how well NICs are probably going to work for you, especially with the Nvidia parts that don't support RDMA even if you have NICs that do.

Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

I'd hardly call exact date of birth "low information content".

And yes this does reveal exact date of birth, regardless of the bullshit obfuscation that it supposedly only reports age range. The server simply tracks the reported result every time the user connects, and on some specific day the result CHANGES to announce their date of birth.

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This is based on SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts), brought to you by the same fuckers making Trusted Computing and the TMP (Trusted Platform Module). It's part of the same shitstack to prohibit you from altering your software and to lock you out of your own files, and to send spy reports out over the internet so you can be cut off if you "fail" the Trusted Computing check.

The software can use a TPM's (Trusted Platform Module) Sealing function to encrypt your data such that it's impossible to access your own data if the software is modified. It can then pass control over that data only to software updates that carry a signed security certificate from Broadcom (or any other company using this system).

It is no longer open source, your system no longer works as you can no longer access your Sealed data if you change so much as a single letter of the code. Even recompile unaltered code won't work, unless you magically manage to get your build environment absolutely identical to the company's build environment and get byte-for-byte output. Even that may be impossible with the newer levels of non-deterministic compiler optimizations.

Also, with TMP's Remote Attestation feature can be used to transmit your machine's software configuration over the internet, so that you can be cut off if your system doesn't match Broadcom (or other company's) cryptographically signed certificate.

And then of course there's Network Access Control (NAC) / Trusted Network Connect (TNC). In the long term, the goal is for ISPs to use NAC/TNC to interrogate your computer for Trusted Computing compliance, and deny you any internet access whatsoever if your machine isn't compliant. Software with this sort of "security" certificate would pass inspection, while any attempt to alter the code would be detected as "tampering". You then get "quarantined". What "quarantine" means is that you are denied internet access - with the exception that you do get very restricted access which can only be used to download the approved software to "fix" your computer into Trusted Computing compliance.

Physical ones are definitely rare beasts. Hypervisors make having support for it a lot more generally useful, though. You can still run into weird edge case limitations(certain PCIe devices, under some circumstances, really don't like being detached from the host and popped onto a VM); but the hypervisor will definitely be able to tell guests stories of dynamic reconfiguration that the hardware isn't electrically or mechanically capable of supporting; and being able to add or remove CPUs or RAM without rebooting is nice.

It could certainly just be a numbers game; tons of ICE vehicles out there; or whether there's an issue with accumulated cultural assumptions and engineering priorities.

I can at least imagine that there's a difference in mindset between "this is a 12v lead acid starter battery; it'll put out a solid few tens of amps for the starter motor assuming it is working correctly; but its energy density is kind of trash and we mostly prefer not to dump additional systems onto it, especially when that exposes them to the slightly gross output of the alternator" and "This battery has been designed to fully provide for all energy requirements of a vehicle; if you displease it it will probably kill you and then burn vigorously for a day or two. A foundational assumption of all systems that need energy is that they'll be connected back to it in one way or another because there aren't other energy sources here."

Not like electric vehicle designers couldn't/don't make mistakes, and certainly some of their mistakes burn with the really exciting commitment of a large light metal fire; but the engineering culture around an ICE vehicle seems much more likely to produce a string of individually reasonable, collectively dangerous, "c'mon, it's just one little 12v system" requests that get bolted onto a fairly antique battery without too much broader thought; while analogous feature demands in a fully electric vehicle will either be judged high energy enough to potentially get brought into the high voltage wiring(which, barring gross negligence across the design is treated like it can and will kill you) or totaled in to some low voltage system budget that will be handled by a DC-DC converter designed with actual care because going from 600v to 12v isn't something you do as casually as just slapping another 12v requirement in parallel with the other stuff on the 12v battery and calling it good.

Your timetable is way too aggressive. Yes, plant life will eventually die from lack of CO2 - but that's expected to be no earlier than around 400 million years from now - and possibly as far as 1 billion.

This sounds like it was written by someone who actually knows what they are doing, so I assume that they know better than I; but I am surprised to hear that it is impersonating a system dll; since (in all comparatively recent windows versions) system components are signed. Absolutely tons of fuckery you can do to them and around them; but if dpapi.dll doesn't have a signature that checks out the mechanisms that try to keep OSes up and running on marginal hardware subject to random power loss will likely eventually object and attempt a repair, even if there isn't any more paranoid EDR tooling in place.

Is the on-disk copy of dpapi.dll untouched and only the in-memory instance tampered with?

I just can't believe that It was the guys with their finger on GPU allocations, not just the expendable PC OEM they were trying to throw under the bus, the whole time. Whoever could have guessed?