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Comment Re:A little late. (Score 1) 148

The left has become incapable of recognizing it' own authoritarianism or just how far and fast it has moved away from the center. Since 2008, the American right is 2% further to the right, while the Left moved 31% further left. That's far enough from the center to be unable to distinguish it from the far-right. Bill Clinton probably looks like Rush from there now.

I don't give a shit about movement to the right or left, not right now. I just want basic competence and support for the rule of law, because those are the things we've totally lost under the current GOP. A bit of compassion would be good, too. What I wouldn't give to have Dubya back.

Comment Re:lsof -i ? (Score 2) 50

I guess this will be logging that type of data, so another data logger.

Little Snitch is not a data logger. It's a real time connection monitor.

Let's say you're using an app, and it decides to make a random connection to some server. Little Snitch will immediately pop up a dialog asking what you want it to do - let the connection through, block the connection, and if you want to allow it always, block it always, etc.

The fact it's immediate generally is for tracking purposes - the event happened because you clicked a button or started an app. A logger just makes an entry in the log, and it's really hard to correlate that log with user activity. Maybe you were running Audacity, and when you start it up, it makes a connection to the owner's server completely out of the blue. Maybe it's checking for an update. Maybe it's trying to upload your data to its servers. What you learn is that it happened when it was launching. With a data logger, you just get notified of it but have no way to figure out what you were doing at the time of the log entry.

In this day and age of telemetry and such, having it show up immediately when an app tries to make the connection is far more useful than having to do rules of allow and deny lists and having no clue what's causing it. Knowing it was a specific app uploading all your personal information means you can choose to switch to something better, block the upload so you can continue to use the app, or some other thing.

Comment Re:Financial in nature, no kidding? (Score 1) 33

But the thing is, the reparations that the courts can give are financial.

Injunctions are usually granted in cases where non-financial losses are likely - where things can happen that the courts might not be able to reverse through a ruling. For example, sale of a car with sentimental value at auction. The courts will likely temporarily block the sale of the car because once the car is sold, there's nothing the court can do to make someone whole - the transaction will be extremely hard to reverse (especially if the buyer disappears) and a simple replacement might not carry the same meaning or sentimentality.

But because Anthropic's damages are primarily financial, this is something the court can easily award. I mean, if it costs Anthropic $100M, they'll likely accept $100M in damages, it doesn't have to be specifically that exact $100M. Even better, if Anthropic is able to get customers to claim they could not use its product, that could add to the damages while the case goes on.

Companies can encounter damages that do require injections - like say a partner wants to sell the company to a competitor, but the other partner doesn't. The court will likely hold the sale while it resolves the case because if the company is sold, it's going to be very hard to undo that if it has to. So sometimes the damages aren't all financial in nature.

Comment Re:I was there (Score 1) 107

I think it was brought up because a youtuber brought it up recently in one of their videos and it probably went viral.

He mentioned how it was billed as supposedly a relaxing spa type retreat that wasn't, and what was a disaster for some, others found fun and team building.

It wasn't captured as anything other than "CEO misreads room for team building event". All I know is such activities aren't for me so I don't know if those who weren't equipped to do that sort of thing had an alternative thing or they were forced to participate.

Comment Re:Pyrrhic Victory (Score 2) 209

He's running his messaging strategy like a reality show. It's designed to keep people off balance, uncertain, distracted and misinformed. It's designed to encourage you to "tune in" a few hours later.

I think you give him too much credit. I don't think his "messaging strategy" has any design, nor is it a strategy. It's just Trump saying whatever shit bubbles to the top of what sometimes passes for a mind. And it's random and changes every four hours because he's random and changes what he believes every four hours. Or every four minutes.

I don't think he even "learned" to act like a reality show... I think this is just who he is and who he always has been, albeit with an added layer of growing dementia. He was moderately successful on reality TV not because he figured out how to be moderately successful on reality TV, but because his normal personality, style and complete lack of ethics, morality or consistency just happens to be perfect for reality TV.

Comment Re:Microsoft issues the Linux keys too (Score 4, Informative) 98

Microsoft issues the secure boot keys that are used by all Linux distributions.

If they can just arbitrarily yank someone's keys like this, apparently without explanation or appeal, then what does that mean for those Linux keys? Are they subject to withdrawal for no reason as well?

Incorrect. Microsoft signs the boot shim. This lets you use Secure Boot with the default Microsoft keys you use to boot Windows. So any PC, with Secure Boot enabled, can boot Linux. The keys built into every PC are Microsoft's, and even if you hard reset the machine, they will revert to those Microsoft keys.

You are encouraged though if you run Linux, to create your own keys, and install them on your PC. Doing so would require you to re-sign the Microsoft bootloader but you are free to use your own keys. The only reason Microsoft signed the shim is because some OEMs do not make it easy to install a third-party key to secure-boot a non-Windows OS. So the Microsoft signed shim means if it can boot Windows, it can boot Linux.

And I say shim because that's the actual component signed - major Linux distributions re-distributed the signed binary. But it's bootloader independent - you can use the signed shim to boot your own version of GRUB or other bootloader and continue the secure boot chain if desired. (If you use something like Ubuntu, you're likely to encounter this if you try to compile your own kernel or module where you then h ave to add a key to the shim so the kernel can run your new module.

Microsoft can stop signing new shims, but that has nothing to do with Secure Boot. It's just a way so everything that can boot Windows can boot other OSes even if the OEMs lock down the computer.

Big companies often use their own keys for secure boot.

Comment Re:Non VR VR! (Score 1) 24

Then again, Apple's treatment of the Vision Pro perplexes me, so who knows what Apple is doing there...

I think Apple is trying to figure it out too, so they're just letting it be a developer's playground as in "Here's some cool hardware, now do something with it".

It's a device looking for a purpose, and Apple is just trying to see where that goes. I'm sure most of what we do with smartphones today wasn't what Jobs envisioned back for the original iPhone, so the Vision Pro is similar. Maybe hoping to see if an interesting use case pops out.

Comment Re:Total BS (Score 1) 252

The pilots carry a transponder. If you make it down to the ground alive, you hide, turn on the transponder and wait for a rescue.

There was an article about the Boeing device that is just this.

It uses spread-spectrum wideband technology in fast burst mode so you can communicate. It's encrypted, digital and the fast burst means every transmission lasts well under 1ms which means by the time you detect it, it's too late to triangulate the position. (Think of the annoying beeping prank toys you can get)

Wideband technology means even if you pick something up, the location is spread out, and is a much weaker signal as it barely disturbs the noise floor.

It's also a 2 way communicator so you can send messages to it and they can reply back, and basically handheld. You strap it on, turn it on and it transmits your position in those bursts.

Of course, the biggest farce is about the second pilot being reported in the news. Which is a farce because if you know anything about the F-15E, you know it's a 2 man aircraft. So you know if you shot one down, there are two people you have to account for. It's not just public information, it's basically well known information. The fact that one was rescued means obviously there's one more to look for.

Comment Re:Sounds like a good problem to have (Score 1) 136

To put it in perspective, by then you could get IBM PC clones for under $1,000.

Not in 1984. Clones were cheaper, but the $1000 PC era didn't arrive until the 90s. The cheapest IBM PC was around $2000, but you were looking at like 128K of RAM and NO floppy drive. (The original IBM PC had a tape interface so you could use ... audio cassettes. While not unusual since every other computer had tape interfaces, basically nothing used it other than CBASIC - cassette BASIC which was a ROM BIOS option). That configuration was rapidly dropped and prices rose because you really needed 256K of RAM and 2 floppy drives.

Though one loading MS-DOS from cassette tape might have been an interesting alt-universe thing.

Among the 8-bits, the Commodore 64 was probably the cheapest around $500-600 (and another $400 for the disk drive, or $200 for the tape drive, I think).

Computers weren't something in many homes in 1984 - if you had one, it was likely an 8-bit one. PCs didn't really land in the home until later on when clones started coming down at half the price of IBM, But that was still several thousand dollars. An IBM with hard drive, single floppy and 640K was north of $5000, so a clone would likely be between $3000+ for a similar configuration.

The thing is, the MacBook Neo was done so Apple could experiment - to comply with upcoming EU laws, use up some chips they had sitting around and other things. They didn't expect the sales they got because honestly, if you survey the sub-$600 laptop market on PCs, it's rather dismal. Apple somehow packaged together something with a stunning screen, metal case and decent battery life. The CPU and RAM were middling, but for light tasks decent enough. But the display is bright and vibrant and outclasses anything you can find, the case is sold and not creaky plastic, and the battery life isn't abhorrent. It's also not a thick beast and retains the Apple aesthetic. And no stickers.

Honestly, it's something of a competitor to the iPad itself. Apple sticking a touchscreen on it and you pretty much can't justify an iPad anymore.

Comment Re:More from the "never happened" department (Score 1) 252

It does not look like this did anything to "stop nukes". Iran still has the material. Iran can still make nukes with not too much effort. The main reason they stopped is that they do not actually need to have nukes. But after this moronic attacks, they got freshly motivated in that area.

I think after this moronic attack, they now know they don't actually need nukes, at least not until the world loses its appetite for oil, or finds other sources that make Gulf state production irrelevant.

Comment Re: This is what stochastic parrots do (Score 1) 104

A human is able to tell if an LLM is wrong. The opposite isn't true.

Also, even if this fallacious claim were true, it wouldn't actually support Arrogant-Bastard's claim, which wasn't about the state of AI now, but a claim about "intrinsic properties", meaning it would be true forever.

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