You make a generic argument for features in general. And I believe you have a point in general: companies shouldn't ask for permission before adding a "print" button to their product. In this particular case though, I don't think it is very useful to treat this addition as just one more feature. OP explains pretty well why this feature is unusual in its nature and in the impact it has.

Look at it this way: if the next version of Chrome starts mining bitcoins, does not make it opt-in or easy to disable for non-tech people and gives you 50% of any gain realised by this mining, will you still make the same argument?

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

I am not certain that this is the most useful perspective. Maybe cURL is just what the norm should be, the real issue being that a lot of software has bad development practices where it is privileged to develop new useless features quickly instead of slowly and steadily developing useful features. Firefox is mentioned further down and I think it is a perfect example. From that perspective, if Mythos is good at finding many bugs in Firefox, then it is just a tool to further enable bad development culture, by reducing some (but far from all) of the consequences of these bad practices.

The response of "User-Agent is not authentication" is a strawman response to "Unofficial clients should not use our servers". They used it as identification of clients, not authentication. Would the developers be happier if they had used an API key for the web interaction, but package that fixed API key into the app? Would that be "authentication" and thus better to them? It's the same effect, and the open source clone would copy it too.

Same discussion as 30 years ago with open source clones of messaging apps such as ICQ. The open source client pretends, on those days through reverse engineering, to be the official client. Ultimately, it was okay then, because it was beneficial for the operators to have a larger network of users who can talk to each other. Does this dynamic apply here?

Most posters seem to be assuming it's a scam. I can't possibly think of a reason why they might think that. (A few million, yes, but getting it down to one is hard.)

However, that's almost by the by. It's rated for 5G. 5G is old. 6G is the new standard and WiFi 6 has been around for a while now. If you're actually serious about designing a new phone from scratch, and have not yet released it, you'd almost certainly want it to be 6G-capable. Nobody in their right minds designs for yesterday's standards, when they're going to be competing with tomorrow's products.

This, to me, is far far more important than whether or not it is real. If you're designing a product for a market that's on its way out, you've got a serious problem. If you're clamouring for a product that's designed for a standard that could be phased out by the time you see it, then you're not thinking straight.

Why does this matter, if the product isn't real anyway? First, we don't know it's not real, we shouldn't assume that. But, second, it means that nobody thought it was worth bothering with taking the potential customers seriously. The customers are merely meat with cash. That's not an attitude I can respect. Whichever vendor is making these phones is worthy only of my utmost contempt.

The more likely scenario, based on exit polls, is that the husband got dumped because he voted for Trump. And Trump has eroded women's rights and downplayed the domestic abuse of women by men. If you're a woman who lives with a man who voted to reduce your rights, why exactly does it not make sense to leave that man?

If hammering is an issue, randomly drop with 429 95% of requests. Then as an alternative, allow people to buy an API key for 1000 downloads costing 1€.

Then patient individuals can always download for free. Big companies / CI / AI will want to pay or make their own mirror.

Counterpoint: a unique solution also means only one workaround to find around it.

The problem isn't the population. Bedrock can handle more than that. London isn't sinking because of all the people (and London is huge!), it's sinking because the ice sheet that pressed the Highlands deep into the crust has been gone for the last 10,000 years, resulting in the entire island tilting back to where it naturally should be. You could move London's population into the Great Glen and it would not make the slightest difference - London would still be sinking. The ice sheets were a whole lot heavier than a few tens of millions of people.

(Ok, it would make a difference. If the rich people actually lived in Scotland, the transit system and public services would see a thousand percent improvement inside a week. If they were also forced to speak Gaelic, English would vanish in a month.)

Aquifers can be deep. The aquifer that supplies the town of Buxton in England is so deep that it takes rainfall 5,000 years to rech it.

Every place? Fascinating.

There are towns in England and Wales that have been occupied for the past 10,000 years. Manchester isn't the greatest place on Earth, but I'm really not convinced it's going to start sinking into the ground any time in the next thousand years. If "short term" is longer than the remaining lifespan of the human race, I am not convinced "short" is really the right word.

"Short term" is only meaningful if it's shorter than the time needed to take meaningful remedial action, and the time it would take to remediate the problem in Mexico City vastly exceeds the time it will take for the city to crumble into oblivion.

The sun will not explode in 4 billion years. It's far too small. It might well run out of hydrogen by then, but that will simply cause it to swell. If, in four billion years, we can't find a way to drift the Earth outwards to remain within the goldilocks zone, then we're a failure as a species. Of course, we might well have built a Dyson Ring by then. Although, to be honest, if we were going to do that, we'd want to find a gas cloud that was about to form a stellar nursary and head there. If we arrive as the proto star fires up, we've maximum resources in the easiest possible form (a dust cloud, so no mining needed and minimal processing required), can build the Dyson Ring or Dyson Sphere by the time the star really gets going, and have another ten to fifteen billion years.

There is an issue of trust though. How do you know Chrome is not going to install another of these in the future, without asking for consent? This should be opt-in or not at all, and the fact that it isn't tells every company how much they can trust Google.

I was interested in what you wrote but you lost me there. If someone writes a book about "rules for life", they have delusions of grandeur and place themselves into the "guru" category. Regardless of their politics too, we agree on that.

Rebecca Watson is a quite famous skeptic, and a former co-host of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast. Since Dawkins is also in these circles, not too crazy to bring her up.

The class of bugs for PipeFail can be prevented in principle with X^W, which is implemented in PaX, Exec Shield, and some SELinux configs.

Is any distribution that comes with these in the default installation protected against these exploits? If not, what is missing in terms of mitigation protections against this class of bugs?