In most of the world you choose a phone and then hop between carriers as you wish. The US market is not very representative.

For those if you who don't understand what I'm on about: in the US it's fairly normal that the carrier will provide you with the phone and the access to the network. This is called a "locked phone" arrangement.

Correct. SS7 is ancient, and was never created with security in mind. Bell created it in the 1970s, and very idea that security was needed would not even have been in the engineers' world view.

This is a protocol only meant for phone companies, and Bell was still a monolith back then. Similar to the early internet in the 1970s where only the military and a few computer scientists even had access.

Actually, producing shoddy code is precisely what Microsoft is know for. All they are interested in is locking people into their ecosystem, and producing good code is a disadvantage in that business model. The worse their code is, the more difficult it is for users to step away. User lock-in has always been their goal, and they don't even lie about it. This moat strategy is arguably the most deliberate and consistent part of the company's history.

For instance, they created the SMB file protocol not from computer science first principles, but as a hack. And so everyone who wants to interoperate with it (e.g. Samba) is then locked in a decade long attempt to reproduce every single bug in their own code.

We can bust on Microsoft all day and all night, and they deserve it, but the fact that their ability to find and fix these problems has greatly increased is a good thing. Software is incredibly complex, and no software more complicated than "10 GOTO 10" is free from the potential of security problems. Microsoft's QA has gone downhill in recent years, but now it's getting better apparently (even if it's after the fact). They are not going away, so this makes all our lives better.

Lenovo was never an "IBM brand." IBM sold them their client computing assets in 2005, and their x86 server assets in 2014, but Lenovo has never been a part of IBM.

I wrote a file searching utility in C++ about 30 years ago. About 15 years ago I ported it to Python and found it to be faster than using the Windows directory enumeration APIs, and I've been using that ever since. It just searches filenames, but that's all I need.

"NOTE: Experiences vary by region." says to me that Microsoft doesn't even know what their changes will do.

Mars also has a large amounts of sugar, and we're more likely to get there in our lifetime!

I keep hearing things like "my grandmother got so confused, I set her up on Zorin/Mint and she couldn't tell the difference."

The more people just use their PC's to get on websites the less they seem to notice if they use Windows or Linux.

I'm sure the shareholders will be lining up in droves to accept your offer of 1/25000 of a cent per share.

Nothing nefarious here, no potential for abuse, move along, move along.

It doesn't matter if it's bad - if China and Russia agree it's bad you have to be for it.

You can never agree with China because they have a totalitarian AI Surveillance Police State there so you must support a totalitarian AI Surveillance Police State here.

If you are against techo-feudalism you must be one of them Putin Lovers.

- The New York Times / Langley, apparently.

I'm amazed to find your comment is an isolated example of reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Many others are 'accepting the premise' and 'entering the frame' of the LA Times weirdos.

Didn't expect that today.

Just be careful; a few old IBM sites had toxic waste problems. It sounds like they were just turning off the lights and water and walking away from these.

One woild hope everything was remediated but I wouldn't bet my own safety on it.

Yeah, that's why they mentioned the ancient Sony camera he lifted.

"Crime with a gun" is a separate crime according to NY.

SCOTUS will strike those down eventually. It's like saying "crime while praying" if it's a right.

Obviously he wasn't using the gun to jack a Betacam. He was probably worried about crackheads in there for the copper.