in embedded use I ban strncpy and offer a strlcat version.

Some cops are bad cops. Some cops are presumably not-bad, but have done a piss poor job of policing the bad cops.

"The rotten apple spoils his companion." — Poor Richard's almanack, 1736

I don't like city or highway driving. Country roads and off road are my preference. And if I'm commuting, I'd rather catch up on my inbox or read a book than white knuckle down the mountain in heavy traffic.

C doesn't have strings, but sometimes people like to have some bytes with a 0 on the end. Some of the memxxx() functions are useful with C's fake strings. For example, memchr() is good for when you have a null-terminated string but it also some upper bounds. And stuff like strncpy() doesn't appear to have anything at all to do with null terminated strings, and is grossly misnamed.

I don't know. Those licenses always had terms, fine print, and EULAs. Many of which I an confident had clauses that allowed the vendor to terminate your write to use the software at least under certain conditions.

Just because they had not effective detection and enforcement mechanism does not mean the legal condition never existed.

Honestly that gets us into other odd questions like what is a sold license is it an authorized/authenticated copy, the split of paper the license terms are printed on? If you did continue to use the software after an action that should have triggered revocation but the company did nothing to stop you from continuing would that take us into "adverse possession" territory?

Honestly if the lawyers really want to have fun the whole world around selling boxed copies of software with 'enter your license key' from the disk sleeve could have become really strange had it continued.

This is the problem. The practical uses cases as I understand them pretty much fall into the same buckets we use NLP for now. If you don't want to use LLM or GenAI technology we already have a lot of really great ML/NLP tools that do a really really good job.

In fact a lot of these tools would do a better (or at least more reliable) job of about 70% of what I see companies deploying in the customer service chat bot space, they'd be much cheaper and faster too. I have tried to explain to several clients, "You know you could do all this with Google DialogFlow" but no they'd rather wank around building MCP/SEE/Agenic replacements for the REST services they already have, futz around with prompt design, and then figure out how to test for abuse cases all so they can pay for tokens..

By they time you chain down Gemini/CoPilot/GTP down to respond in corporate approved ways half of customers could not tell the difference anyway and most would probably enjoy an experience that is consistent focused and quick.

And so it seems to go with 2Brains here, seems like an expensive and complicated way to do things we have been able to do well with NLP for 15 years now. Using LLM at scale means an expensive and complicated pile of machinery, but what is attractive about using them places where they are not really needed is "Its what all the cool kids are doing" not the expensive and complex part... Good luck 2brains...

That only explains why most (but not all) universities go along with the grift. It doesn't explain how we got into a situation where the entire government got behind it, and think tanks publish essays and establish a party platform around denying free college or cheaper tuition.

Variation of third verse: And all the teachers are dead

Mass debt is profitable to the ones pulling the strings of our government.

"A poison—so subtle, so insidious so irreversible. It won't even kill you unless you stop taking it."

You're allowed to do whatever you want, I'm not the debate police.

pro tip: it's not necessary to put sarcasm in quotes.

Oh for sure! Running any of the jailbreaks for iPhones has mostly meant installing a huge heap of packages from Gwd Only Knows Where

Useful for having a run-time environment to study an application from you do plan to use on an uncompromised device, perhaps for reusing older hardware for some other non security critical use case, but no frigging way would I consider using a jailbroken phone as my actual phone, with real contacts and access to real data and accounts I care about on it.

This is a case where regulation KILLED.

Basically this a was thing that was essentially marketed to wealthy tourists. It WAS done under a regulatory environment, and so those people had far more trust in it than they should have. I bet had they been forced to drag the thing out to international waters and do some sketchy bitcoin transaction to pay or whatever they would not have found takers!

Regulation of this kind of stuff simply does not work. What regulator has any experience inspecting a deep sea sub? - None.. What engineer could draft what appropriate safety standards are for something like this? - None at least not without completely stifling innovation.

Yes we know from the post incident analysis corners were cut compromised materials were used and engineers and officers on the project should have know better, but that is negligence and it is why we have torts.

Modern rail roading is a good example, we have a lot of regulation. Mostly it works, but there are still the occasional accidents. Pretty much every rule in the book has one or more corpses behind it, it isn't like someone say down and just wrote out the FRA's inspection schedule, we learned the hard way the inspection frequencies required to catch certain problems before they turn into dead bodies -> then -> we said ok everybody is going to do that.

Honestly the DOT (US or CANs) should have exactly one regulation covering something like this, something akin a product safety label that says, "the safety of traveling aboard a device of this class is not well understood, proceed at your peril"

I am fan of owning your own device so I generally consider a positive thing when this stuff happens, provide the exploit path requires physical device access that inst possible to do superstitiously, IE tether then thing and put it in DFU mode, with the full restart that implies, vs pairing some bluetooth thing or something and exploiting the running OS.

Yeah I get it it means it isnt secure to travel with it - fair argument.

This though is almost cruel to release. Most of the affected devices are old enough Apple will probably just move up their end of support plans for them. Probably harms more people trying to save a buck and hang on to old kit, than helps people who might like to play with it without the lock down..

Garbage regulations like IP create these behemoths. If you want freedom, stop regulating monopolies into existence.