I wonder what they paid for it? I'd like to think maybe it was $100 or something, but Fyre presumably still owes people money, so maybe it had to be a bit more?

Either way, Limewire was a pretty toxic brand until those blokes bought it. Now it's pretty much unheard of. Fyre is about as toxic as it comes, so one wonders what they're going to do with it.

> Why is the UK suddenly attractive now when it wasn't a few years ago?

We're pals with your new king, that's why. We're a place that US companies can sell their wares and go to get the things they need - but we don't encroach on the US's own abilities to do things. We're not going to do manufacturing, we're not doing espionage on US companies, we're not a security threat, etc etc. In fact, we're easily coerced in times of need, perhaps even an occasional proxy for US power projection abroad. Whilst we won't go into a "forever war" on our own at the behest of the US, we'll certainly throw in some help when the US wants to do such a thing - thus reducing US exposure.

Mostly though, we're a "safe" offshore talent pool and we're (in general) quite happy to buy american crap.

You're right - and yes, there are plenty of decent windows admins in the world, so I'm sorry to have lumped you in with the less talented. But I'll bet you're well beyond what any school could afford.

I've been trying to setup a tech club at my kids school. I wanted to do an actual hacking club, and then washed out the fun to just make a sort of introduction to Linux. The school said no to both (I'm currently working on a microelectronics club, but they may well say no to that too).

What I learned is that teachers have literally no time for anything. I mean none. Even "just" getting them to clear the way internally for me to take over an deliver the club was hard - and at that point they were pretty keen on the idea. So if teachers need to spend 5 seconds extra on something, then they're going to work around it if they can - be that security or something else.

Secondly, I learned that thje IT people running the school systems are nice enough, but they're windows people. UK schools use Windows top to bottom, and so they hire "that sort" of admin. Without trying to slag them off to much, my experience of "windows only" admins is that in general they're not actually terribly good. They can keep some windows things working, and they somehow have a strong enough stomach to wave the mouse around endlessly on a desktop machine to get it setup or working or whatever, but they just follow the procedure. There are exceptions of course, but I seriously doubt you could have a conversation about the effects of randomness on AES keys, or TLS setup flows, buffer overflows and memory safety or a miriad of other deep topics. They just don't need to know that stuff to be able to operate Windows systems.

When faced with a guy like me offering to teach kids about Linux (even on a server outside the school network), they worried that the kids would learn things the school didn't know. All of it is outside the curriculum, so the Head of Computing doesn't know it either. I'm absolutely sure kids could run rings around all of them in short order, and I'm also sure the "lure" of all that "forbidden knowledge" is pretty strong - I know it would have been for me at that age.

I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm all for teaching kids Linux and security - and I'd be super clear about the "rules" too. Leaving a void doesn't look like it's working, but schools aren't made of money, so amping up their security and the types of people that look after their systems doesn't look like an easy option either.

I think part of the problem here is "what is social media?". Slashdot is a primitive form of social media, and hey, we're all still here, and AI doesn't seem to have taken over, and whilst some of the editors have been spearheading slop long before AI got into the game, there's not really any algorithm at play here.

Contrast to "the big ones" we all know - the slop problem is very real there, and so are the echo chambers. It's hard to know what to do about that. My personal view is that education is probably the way forward - if you're able to understand what it is, what it does to you and why it works the way it does, then you're at least able to make realistic decisions about it. Otherwise you're just getting swept along with it, and are at risk of believing everything you see.

I'd also say that watching my kids (and their friends) growing up, they (for the most part) don't have "social media", but do have messaging with each other. Right now they're mostly setting up groups of 5 kids and talking about going shopping. It's only a matter of time until they join or get added to groups of people they don't know to talk about something or other. That's social media - sure, no algorithms, and probably no AI, but it's "global shouting" like you find anywhere else. It's only going to take one or two "influencers" getting into those groups telling kids to do something we don't and we might as well be on twitter - but it'll all be done without any of the silicon valley companies being involved.

So in terms of "the death of social media", I'd say it's more about the hit to Silicon Valley, and less about the act of communicating in that way.

We had a "cashpoint wars" where banks were trying to get their machines in good places. Back then they used to need a branch to go with it, and they couldn't get enough branches in enough places, so were losing out to others because of planning rules and the like. The regulator stepped in and forced the to interoperate, and so we got fee-free withdrawals from anyone's machine.

There's much less need for ATMs than there once was, so it's all gone a bit quiet. We've still got a lot of machines though.

£0 charged by most ATMs in the UK (for any UK bank withdrawals, if its your bank or not). Hell, we actively avoid going to machines that charge because there are enough that don't.

A few years back the old farts in a couple of banks kicked up a stink to the regulator about it. "why should be provide a service for free which isn't free?". There was such a public backlash that they STFU about it, and haven't brought it up since.

If I recall, in protest people were sending 1 pence to each other (which again, doesn't attract a fee) just to spam the life out of the crusty old banks that were out of touch with their customers.

That's a lot. I just checked a couple of old Vue apps I've got - so not quite 'hello world', but not super advanced either. They have about 800 packages or so. Certainly pushes the chances of using one of these malware packages pretty high, but seemingly not as bad as React (which always struck me as an over-engineered solution to most problems).

FWIW, I've never liked nodejs in production. It's actually quite nice in the dev tool chain though. Both nodejs and NPM which goes with it are really a bit of a cesspool of "we don't need no stinkin' sysadmins". It seems there's a general culture of "do it our own way" and so loads of it just doesn't play well with established systems management. Fine if that's how you want it, but it means lots of Javascript devs really don't know anything about real systems, so you get a lot of "works on my machine" type stuff, and "just change everything about your environment to suit my software". Evidently you also end up with quite possibly the worst package repository known to humanity too.

They split Hue off to Signify, who license the name. Signify is clearly looking to make money at all costs, and are leafing through the chapters of Enshitification for Dummies at speed.

I'd be less worried about their cloud services going away than I would be about it sucking up every last bit of data about me that it can, or going subscription only or whatever. The good news is all Hue hardware can be controlled by Home Assistant if you want (but you don't get such a nice phone app).

I blocked Internet access from my hub, but it still got an update via a phone update. I'm trying to avoid the 'mandatory user accounts to make you safer' bullshit. Right now I have no user accounts, and I'm safe. Saving a username and password in their crappy cloud isn't going to improve that. If the Hue app goes crap, then there's Hue Essentials, which might work well enough for a bit longer.

Any more of this sort of crap though, and my (small) setup is moving to Home Assistant. HA can do all the same stuff, but the phone app doesn't get Wife Acceptance Factor. In my dreams, I'll write a phone app that uses the HA API to pull out all the Hue devices and mimics the Hue app, but talks to HA to make things happen.

Philips Hue used to be excellent, then Phillips split off Hue to Signify, who are busy getting through the chapters of Enshitification for Dummies. Such a shame.

The UK government is already fully locked into Microsoft. They use it all... Windows, Sharepoint, Office, Active Directory, etc etc. Getting even one government department off MS would be a gargantuan task. Not to say it wouldn't be worth it, but it'll take a lot of work.

One thing I am curious about though is how the UK Government has 'squared the circle' of data sovereignty, now MS has said they can't guarantee it because US laws override local ones. What Copilot knows about the UK mist be extensive, say nothing of Sharepoint.

The UK already does control the relative sizes of supermarkets. None of them are really allowed to have more than about 30% market share - as soon as they do, they have to sell off a few stores or break off a bit of their company or whatever (I think Tesco is pretty much at the 30% level now, but as far as I know isn't yet into those sorts of conversations with the regulator).

I'd also say that in the UK, supermarkets tend to be "everywhere". They're not terribly regional, so every major town or city has some amount of Tesco stores. As a rough yardstick, you can probably assume that of any populous area, 30% of it is served by Tesco.

If 30% of your food supply stops working, it's going to be a problem for the nation (any nation), that's for sure. We won't starve, but it'll cause problems. Whilst the other supermarkets are no slouches, they probably couldn't just soak up the extra they'd have to do to cover it - particularly as they couldn't predict when it would be necessary to do so.

> I doubt broadcom's lawyers would be so sloppy ...

I wouldn't. Broadcom made all these decisions in America and then told the countries to "make it work". Such things go over a lot less well anywhere in Europe than they do in the USA, so it's entirely possible Tesco has a really strong case. If nothing else, I'd say Tesco is a highly competent company, who doubtless has some highly competent lawyers who've been looking at this for quite a while. If they're bringing a case, it's almost certainly got some long legs, if not more.

I also don't get the "you should have worked with multiple suppliers"/victim blaming thing. That's all lovely here on slashdot, but organisations sign perpetual licenses and the like precisely to avoid having to spend the money to have multiple vendors doing the same thing. Tesco signed a perpetual license with a reasonable expectation that it would provide them with software for at least several more years. They probably even expected "reasonable" uplifts in support costs over the years, even taking into account that old versions cost more to support. Broadcom have gone back asking for considerably more than any of those worst case future predictions, and so it's reasonable Tesco would push back.

Either way, I hope that:

1) Tesco wins their case
2) They get off VMware as quickly as possible. I'll bet they could get their 40,000 workloads down to 10,000 workloads pretty quickly. The remainder may well take a bit more to do as there's going to be a lot riding on them.

I'll bet transits are still counted as "tourism". The USA has *a lot* of transit hubs to a lot of places, so whilst someone might be going to somewhere else entirely, their few hours of lay over (or night in airport hotel) in whichever airport still needs an ESTA and an entry/exit through the border.

Transits are quite a "sticky" product. That is, once a transit route is established, it takes a long time for the airlines to change it. However, travel is one of the first things to go when anyone gets nervous about anything, so right now there are some rock-bottom transit prices to various locations via the USA. That of course encourages transit through the USA.

> puts all of the results in to a single, central repository

There already is such a repository - it's decentralised, and free to use. It's called _the web_. It's going to be a tough sell to say we need to make a copy of it so people can use the copy.

However, the core of the idea has some legs... perhaps we can elect to have 'crawl domains'. So www.example.com is my website, but you get to crawl bots.example.com instead. It's a copy I've made, or it's a low power server which responds quite slowly or whatever else.

Domains or something else - it's clear that crawling is no longer something specialised that only a few massive companies can afford to do. It's become commoditised, and so we need to handle it as such. We need something far more comprehensive than robots.txt to deal with it.