Isn't exposing young influenceable minds to violent militarism like this "Army" inappropriate? :)

Wait until you find out what the coca in coca cola was.

Just think 100 years ago there were kids running to the local soda fountain to get their hit of Colombian Nose Powder and no one cared. This is why most soda fountains were in drug stores. They were dispensing cocaine.

85 years ago your grandparents (or now great grandparents) were running around Europe killing NAZIs and blasted out of their minds on Pervitin... YES IT IS CRYSTAL METHAMPHETAMINE! How did you guess?

Got a cold? Great! I have just the decongestant for you! It's orally administered heroin! Made by Eli Lilly Co. They even had coupons during cold and flu season to get your heroin at a discount!

Why is Conservatism bad? Or Communism? Or Fascism? Or whatever MAGA is this week?

I don't want to hear about any company's latest enlightened hypocrisy on politics. If you make shoes, STFU and make shoes. If you make coffee, STFU and make coffee. If you make guns, STFU and make guns. If you are stupid enough to mistake your corporation for your customer's moral compass you shouldn't be running a corporation, and you are probably losing money for your shareholders.

As for Starbucks, the problem is they aren't liberal. They support all the things! until they have to actually pay their employees a competitive wage, or actually be socially responsible. Running advertisements on waste reduction, fair trade, and global warming to tell you how important they think it is is WAAAAY cheaper than actually doing it. If a company is telling you they are doing ANYTHING other than maximizing profits for their shareholders (which is what they are supposed to be doing), check your wallet because they're probably trying to rob you.

Gasoline isn't just short chain hydrocarbons. There are detergents, and other chemicals added to keep engines clean and keep exhaust clean. I assume having read the article that this doesn't come from thin air. What will the legislative or regulatory impacts on generating gasoline from thin air going to be? As someone with a PHEV this would probably completely serve my gasoline needs.

Why are we still listening to a guy who was paling around with Epstein, had a CENTRAL role in Epstein donating huge amounts of money to MIT Labs, and claiming PUBLICLY that forcing a child to have sex doesn't hurt the child?

Honestly, Slashdot... this entire post should be deleted. It's gross.

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/17...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Porsche pushed the EV to the exclusion of almost everything else.

The company suffered huge losses. https://www.reuters.com/busine...

The CEO is gone: https://rennlist.com/articles/...

The new CEO is now trying to unwind the EV mess. https://www.reuters.com/busine...

So to answer your question, Porsche didnâ(TM)t sell more EVâ(TM)s they sold less of everything else. Now they and their parent company, VAG, are broke.

If you want to sell people on your "save the world through misery" bull***t, it has not worked, and it will not work. It has been rejected by normal people every time it has been proposed, if not at the point of proposal, at the point where people realized the damage that those policies were going to do.

Even the EU is rolling back the ban on ICE powered cars in 2035. Why? First people can't afford them, and the infrastructure to charge them is lagging far behind. Second, China is passing even Tesla in ev production, and while the EU hates Elon Musk, China terrifies them.

If you want to save the world find a way to make the planes produce less CO2. Find alternative lower carbon fuels, and mass produce them for aviation. If you think I'm spending 6-8 hours in cattle class to save the world, turns out, no. I will personally waterboard a volcano with a tanker truck of gasoline before I do that. The reality you need to face is so will everyone else who has a choice. No one will deliberately choose to be miserable.

I am curious if this is the correct metric to use to judge bias. I would love to see every question pulled from the transcript and checked for bias to see if this is simply a function of a left leaning crowd wanting to question right leaning journalists. It seems to me that the behavior of the moderator and the audience is a more sure gauge of bias than that of the guests, but perhaps I'm mistaken.

Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or another one of the big software development companies could easily fork ffmpeg itself, fix the open CVEs, provide their own (likely incompatible) features, and become the new standard - leaving the original developers out in the cold. Google did this with Blink (forked from WebKit, which itself was forked from KHTML). They took a fork of a KDE backed project, put it into what is now the #1 browser in the world, allowed Microsoft, Opera, and others to then use it in their own browsers — and now Google owns the entire narrative and development direction for the engine (in parallel to, and controlled to a lesser extent by Apple which maintains WebKit). The original KHTML developers really couldn’t keep up, and stopped maintaining KHTML back in 2016 (with full deprecation in 2023).

That is the risk for the original developers here. You’re right in that there isn’t really anything out there that can do what ffmpeg does — but if the developers don’t keep up on CVEs then organizations are going to look for new maintainers — and a year or two from now everyone will be using the Google/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook renamed version of ffmpeg instead.

That’s the shitty truth of how these things work. We’ve seen these same actors do it before.

Yaz

Look — I’m a developer. I get it. I’m personally all for having organizations do more to support the OSS they rely on. But the people in the C-suite are more worried about organizational reputation and losing money to lawsuits. If a piece of software they rely on has a known critical CVE that allows for remote code execution and someone breaks in and steals customer data — that software either needs to be fixed, or it needs to be scrapped. Those are the choices. Our customers in the EU are allowed to request SBOMs of everything we use and pass it through their own security validation software — and if they find sev critical CVEs in software we’re using there is going to be hell to pay. And the people in the C-suite can’t abide that level of risk.

Most software development companies (outside some of the biggest ones) don’t really have the kind of expertise in house to supply patches to something as complex as ffmpeg. But a company like Google has the staff with sufficient experience in this area that they could fork the project, fix the issues, and redistribute it as their own solution to the problem — and now Google is driving ffmpeg development. Organizations that need a security-guaranteed version will simply switch to Google’s version, which will likely slowly become incompatible with the original. They’ve done it before — Chrome was Google’s fork of WebKit, huge swaths of users flocked to Chrome, and now Google has over the years made enough changes that their patches often aren’t compatible with WebKit (and, of course, WebKit itself did similar when they forked KHTML).

Now forking like this is great for the community, but it can be tough on individual developers who see their work co-opted and then sidelined by massive corporations. And that’s really why the ffmpeg developers need to be very careful about ignoring CVEs like this. They do so at their own peril, as anyone can fork their code, fix the issues, and slowly make it incompatible with the original. And a big enough organization can ensure they’re fork becomes the new standard, leaving the original developers out in the cold.

Yaz

That, or your project gets sidelined. Which is where the danger lies.

I work for a big multinational software company that uses a lot of Open Source Software. We have a security office that audits all of our products several times a year. If any piece of our stack shows any open CVEs we have a fixed amount of time to fix the issue, with the amount of time varying from a few days (for CRITICAL severity issues) to roughly half a year for the lowest severity issues. A lack of a fix for a published CVE isn’t an excuse for not fixing the issue on our end — the software still has a security flaw in it, and the organization is so incredible security averse (thanks in part to having contacts in the defence industry) that they don’t want to risk expensive lawsuits and the loss of reputation if a vulnerability is exploited.

A lot of bigger organizations now work this way. We’ve all seen what has happened to organizations that have had significantly security breaches, and it’s not pretty. Our customers are big corporations and government entities — and if they even sniff a risk there are going to be problems. So if there is an unpatched exploit, we’re expected to either switch to something comparable, or DIY a solution (either replacing the library in question, or potentially patching it ourselves).

If ffmpeg allows known and published vulnerabilities to languish, the risk here is that organizations that use their code will simply stop using it and will look for other solutions. That’s a tough pill for an Open Source Software developer to swallow, especially when they make it as big and important as ffmpeg. You might wind up in a situation where an entity like Google forks your code and takes ownership, and eventually gets everyone to migrate to using their version instead (like what they did with WebKit to Chrome), leaving you sidelines. Or maybe someone else jumps in with a compatible solution that works well enough for enough users that they switch to that instead.

Now in an ideal world, the Google’s of this world would not only submit a CVE but would also submit a patch. Having been an OSS developer myself I’ve always encouraged my staff if they find a bug in a piece of software we use to file a bug report and ideally a patch if they know how to patch the issue correctly — but I know that is hardly universal within our organization, and probably even less so elsewhere.

TL;DR: a lot of OSS success relies on having lots of users, or at least some big and important users. But you risk losing those if you leave CVE’s open for too long, as company policies may require scrapping software with unfixed CVEs. That loss of users and reputation is dangerous for an OSS project — it’s how projects get supplanted, either by a fork or by a new (and similar) project.

Yaz

"U.S. authorities have secretly..." If it's on Slashdot it's not a secret. The US Government wants everyone to know these trackers are there.

wow a terrible platform full of terrible people doxing and targeting men got targeted and doxed. How on earth did that happen?

Oooh my, they're AAAALL Big Chungus sized and fugly af too.

Ooh, and if you leave your database open to the internet... that's not cybercrime, that's you being stupid

"Karma!" -- Fernando Alonso.

that would 100% be a firing offence.

Honestly, setting an AI you don’t control lose on your production database? Really? That’s just gross incompetence. This is code that a) wasn’t written or reviewed by a human, and b) code that wasn’t even tested on a development copy of the database.

Developers that do things like that are a liability. Unfortunately as “founder” he’ll likely just post something on LinkedIn about learning from his mistakes and “personal growth”, and that will be the end of it. Anyone else would have been shown the door to accelerate their “personal growth”.

Yaz

I only used that as a lead-in to the ceiling cat joke. Politics on slashdot are waaay too dangerous.