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Comment Re:All bets are off if you have physical access (Score 1) 9

You don't need physical access to install a bootkit, just root access, and full disk encryption would only protect against bootkit infection via an evil maid attack. The bootkits being discussed here get install by just running on top of the full OS with root privileges.

But on the other hand, bootkits are an extremely rare form of malware, likely the rarest type, and I think creating Secure Boot in response to it was a case of whipping a curious little problem into a crisis and then never letting a crisis go to waste.

Comment Keep in mind... (Score 1) 57

...that there's a LOT of minerals and other nutrients in food, only a fraction of which are produced from chemicals in fertilisers, O2, and CO2. If you produce too much with too little consideration of the impact on the soil, you can produce marvellous dust bowls but eventually that's ALL you will produce.

Comment It's not just foreign languages (Score 1) 36

There's a lot of stuff that is on the Internet that doesn't end up in AIs, either because the guys designing the training sets don't consider it a particular priority or because it's paywalled to death.

So the imbalance isn't just in languages and broader cultures, it's also in knowledge domains.

However, AI developers are very unlikely to see any of this as a problem, for one very very important reason --- it means they can sell the extremely expensive licenses to those who actually need that information, who can then train their own custom AIs on it. Why fix a problem where the fix means your major customers pay you $20 a month rather than $200 or $2000? They're really not going to sell ten times, certainly not a hundred times, as many $20 doing so, so there's no way they can skim off the corps if they program their AIs properly.

Comment Well, that's one example. (Score 1) 151

Let's take a look at software sizes, for a moment.

UNIX started at around 8k, and the entire Linux kernel could happily sit in the lower 1 megabyte of RAM for a long time, even with capabilities that terrified Microsoft and Apple.

The original game of Elite occuped maybe three quarters of a 100k floppy disk and used swapping and extensive use of data files to create a massive universe that could be loaded into 8k of RAM.

On a 80386SX with 5 megabytes of RAM (Viglens were weird but fun) and a 20 megabyte hard drive, running Linux, I could simultaneously run 7 MMORGs, X11R4, a mail server, a list server, an FTP server, a software router, a web server, a web cache, a web search engine, a web browser, and stil have memory left over to play Netrek, without slowing anything down.

These days, that wouldn't be enough to load the FTP server, let alone anything else.

On the one hand, not everything can be coded to SEL4 standards (although SEL4, by using Haskell as an initial language to develop the core and the proofs, was able to cut the cost of formal programming to around 1% of the normal value). On the other hand, a LOT of space is gratuitously wasted.

Yes, multiple levels of abstraction are a part of the problem. Nothing wrong with abstraction, OpenLook is great, but modern abstraction is mostly there due to incompetent architecture on previous levels and truly dreadful APIs. And, yes, APIs are truly truly dreadful if OpenLook is the paragon of beauty by comparison.

Comment Re:dumb question (Score 1) 186

Either put up or shut up. If it's so toxic, leave & start your employee's utopia. I'm sure you'll have workers breaking down your door to work for you at your much-higher-than-market wages, with 'work when you want, vacation when you want' hours, work freely from home policies, and (somehow) the most expensive glorious health coverage available.*
If it's not enough to leave, stay and STFU. Complaining AND staying is just cowardice and carping.

The reason they can't (even if they have the resources) is that the market rewards brutal worker exploitation, or at least fails to punish it in any way while allowing businesses to reap the benefits. Labor laws that enforce decent working conditions would be a good start towards a solution, and those start falling into place after similar union-negotiated working conditions become common enough that they're a de-facto market standard. Unions make the progress and government just locks it down.

Comment Re:And TP-Link is being investigated for a ban.... (Score 1, Interesting) 34

The solution is easy. WiFi 6 is only just starting to come out in the marketplace. If TP-Link hijacks the standard development procedure, solidifies a workable WiFi 8 quickly, and manufacturers/users in Europe, Asia, and Oceana all start using WiFi 8, skipping WiFi 7 entirely, the US will be left with an inferior standard that only they have gear for, with no option to use WiFi 8 for many more years because the only manufacturers making it can't sell in the US.

Comment Re:dumb question (Score 1) 186

Not being snarky, it's a genuine question. If they're that unhappy, there is absolutely nothing stopping them starting a business themselves and running it with all the principles of kindness and generosity and compassion that (they assert) is missing in the workplace they're in.

Because they don't have the money to start a business lying around (a $1k emergency expense would be a big ask for the average American, average startup cost is around $20k), they likely have health coverage tied to their employment, and they probably don't like the odds of competing in a market riddled with oligopolies that benefit from massive economies of scale and labor arrangements that can treat workers as consumables and work them to their limits.

HTH

Comment Black Jack/Syndicate (Score 1) 186

Of course, I'm just guessing, since, as far as I can tell, the summary doesn't tell us what constitutes a "toxic workplace".

The article, however, does tell us exactly what people reported as toxic. From TFA:

Top Causes of Poor Mental Health:
59% Toxic work culture
54% A bad manager
47% Lack of growth opportunities
47% Increased workload
33% Staffing shortages

Among those with poor or fair mental health, 51% say their well-being would improve if employers removed toxic employees.

Corporate America really reminds me of the Syndicate from Jack Cambell's Lost Fleet/Lost Stars novels. A corporate state where skulduggery rules amongst the executive classes and fear is used to rule the worker classes. Probably where the author got the idea for it.

Mark my words, unless your country decides to stand up for itself against corporate greed, you'll have to call them "honoured CEO" before too long.

OTOH, work really doesn't have to suck, it just tends to most of the time.

Comment Re:The bright side (Score 1) 37

And he has been massively successful!

He has brought inflation down to tolerable levels, he has done a lot to improve the overall fiscal picture.

And you believe that? If you look at the inflation of South American countries you'll notice that Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Equador and Peru next to Argentina looked completely flat. When you zoom in you realise that they had the same curve but topped out around 12% where as Argentina went to over 220% and only dropped down to 110%. Brazil and Colombia followed similar curves and they had left wing governments (Lula and Petro respectively) which should tell you it was a global condition and Milei (as well as Lula and Petro) had little to do with inflation coming down.. Otherwise you'd best be praising the Brazil's Lula and Colombia's Petro for the same thing.

Comment Re:this has happened before (Score 1) 35

Yes, and IIRC in the '90s/early 2000s they recommended a lower grade of AES for civilian vs. military use. And more recently, there was the TrustCor debacle.

If the NSA can get the non-hybrid PQ algorithm to be the standard for future versions of TLS that would be the NSA's biggest ever win in cryptography standards sabotage. The level of danger they're willing to heap on all non-military communications again raises the question of whether they think their foreign adversaries are massively inept compared to themselves, or if they just think that creating this widespread danger is worth making their jobs easier.

Comment Re:Disallow commercial use (Score 1) 41

Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works and change it to do what you want. Access to the source code is a prerequisite for this freedom.
Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so that you can help others.
Freedom 3: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. This allows you to give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes.

The proposal for non commercial use, license otherwise violates all for freedoms.

Comment Re:Disallow commercial use (Score 1) 41

If you need a license to use it the way that you want it violates the principals of open source.

The concept is you should be able to receive the source code with the default license and use it as you wish. If you require extra licensing to use it as you wish it cannot be part of the ecosystem and is not open source.

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