If AI were compelled to pay royalties on the copyrighted data they trained on, it might slow down a little. But not enough.

This administration is pouring gasoline on the fire because they WANT a roaring stock market and a weaker, more insecure middle class. There's a lot of 1% money that's tied up in the stock market, and the owners would love nothing more than a home foreclosure spree to shift into.

If you're not convinced, why are all the AI people building impregnable bunkers?

Setting aside SM for a moment...

Looking back, I think the internet caught a terminal disease when LinkExchange and WebRing were bought out (for purposes of ending them), and cable Internet giants were allowed to merge with each other and then merge further with entertainment companies. Even Comcast offered "free homepages" which ended in 2015 (which I was surprised to learn... without a ring/exchange, you were totally reliant on Google and precise search terms which kind of killed publishing for the people).

Of course this merger fever meant we were creating incentive to reshape the Internet as a form of cable TV. Maybe it would have burned without policymakers pouring gas on the fire. But it's happened. The vast majority of Internet traffic is now "apps", generally social media. And the mergers are not stopping. The world is being carved up not by nations, but by billionaires who want (above all) want common people to be disconnected.

If you go back to forums you used to visit in 2014, they are absolute ghost towns. I feel for those admins who are probably spending $1,000s a year to keep them running, hoping people will come back. Networks (of the people kind) don't reverse decline.

  I'd love to see a return of webring/linkexchange, something that's not depending on a central server (I don't know if this new DNS-over-HTTPS and Javascript talkint to DNS-HTTP servers could be a starting point).

If we ever want to take it back, and I don't think we can, but there needs to be a new technology or an old one brought back but also made low-friction and without any easy points of failure.

MFI exists because of security. Let me know when the last Android USB roofing exploit gets closed.

0% of people who wanted to mandate Apple use USB-C actually have an Apple device.

You could try to sell them on Lightning being a âoeone handedâ plug in operation, but they can not relate.

Oracle bought Sun for 7 billion... and as owners of that IP, they've won a $9 billion lawsuit against Google.

That's 28%.

L(should have)GT: https://research.checkpoint.com/sending-fax-back-to-the-dark-ages/

I attended this talk yesterday, and it was by far the best talk I attended at defcon26. The researchers did some amazing work to get this exploit. You can get the full tail of hackery at the link above, but here's my (probably/mostly correct) summary:
 

• At some point, the fax standard was amended to include support for JPGs, in order to allow full-color faxes
• As the researchers wrote in the above-linked blog article, "For some unknown reason, firmware developers tend to re-implement modules that are already implemented in major popular open sources. This means that instead of using libjpeg [ref.13], the developers implemented their own JPEG parser."
• When the All-in-One device receives a JPG fax, it stores the whole JPG file in local storage (on disk, essentially). This differs from how it processes TIFF files, where the headers and image data are separated. Because the whole JPG file is stored as a normal file, it gives the attacker a platform from which to operate.
• The firmware-developer-implemented JPG parser has a number of bugs, including buffer overflow vulnerabilities in the COM (CVE-2018-5925) and DHT (CVE-2018-5924) markers. It turned out the bug in the DHT marker parser was the easier one to exploit.
• Exploiting the DHT marker parser buffer overflow gets them arbitrary code execution. The code they want to execute is stored in the remainder of the JPG file. Because the OS on these All-in-One devices has no security controls and everything runs with highest privileges, they were able to use this ability to overwrite the LCD screen (to visually prove pwnage) and then to use the Eternal Blue and Double Pulsar (which they managed to squeeze into the ~4000 byte payload they had available in the JPG file) exploits to start attacking other hosts on the network. Since these All-in-One devices tend to be connected to the office network (else, it's hard to print on them), this presents an excellent jumping off point for attacks.

All in all (all-in-one?) this was some amazing research and the full article is well worth a read.

All of the major WiFi equipment vendors (Cisco, Aruba, etc.) have offered this for some time -- though they don't claim anywhere near the MIT Lab's level of accuracy. For instance, Aruba calls their offering "ALE" or Aruba Location Engine. It sits as a separate virtual appliance and communicates to the central WiFi controller (AirWave in their parlance) or to the individual APs if they are operating in autonomous mode. It gets signal strength indications for each WiFi and bluetooth antenna in range of the APs (note: *not* just those devices that are Associated with the WiFi networks served by said APs) and feeds that into ALE. From there, you can map out the devices. Both Cisco and Aruba's products have very extensive APIs to access this info. Maybe they can enhance their offerings with MIT's new technology and get the location resolution improved a bit. For now, in the wild, it's often difficult to get a station (i.e. device) location down to better than a range of 3-10 meters.

The story of the Last Straighter computer game (which was renamed Star Raiders II, but is NOT the lost Star Raiders II referred to in this post) is told in this interview with its programmer: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com...

The cognitive dissonance from this is that the politicians that seem to have the strongest tea party support tend to be the most scientifically backward bunch out there. From Michelle "pray the gay away" Bachman, to a whole host of global warming deniers. Have they decided to sacrifice their science principals to achieve the goal of lower taxes and smaller government, no matter what wacko they have to sign on with in order to get that?

What the frell? No Farscape??

I misread the headline as:
Viagra May Help People Pay For Space Burials

In checking your other posts, I realize when you said "Apple turfers" you may have meant "anti Apple turfers", not "Apple astroturfers".
If that's the case, sorry I let you have both barrels because you mispoke or I misunderstood.

Still, group labeling of accounts is pretty offensive. You can block any user.
  I guess I don't participate in /. conversations as much as I did in the nineties, so I've only had to block on a few occasions.

"Labeling" users? How offensive. How do you propose doing that, by affixing "armbands" to their usernames? Maybe you are the one who needs to wear a stigmatic identifier.

I'm -pretty sure- Apple's roaring success depends naught on maintaining an army of "turfers". However there seems to be no end of anti-Apple posters like yourself, suggesting they exist. I see the value of pre-emptively accusing your opponent of your OWN sins, however all documented instances of "astroturfing" have been attributed to Microsoft or their agents.

I'm not an Apple fanboy. Been running Linux at home since 1994. But at least Apple advanced desktop computing, while Microsoft held it back AND helped change the Internet into this incredibly insecure thing, by virtue of a PERMANENT army of zombie computers. Old MacOS was never as cavalier about security as Windows still is, and Apple's record on security is pretty damn good with OS X. I can still gripe about the window dressing on the Mac desktop, but the underpinnings of OSX are a solid standard UNIX kernel... the modern Apple OS foundation is solid, unlike Microsoft's.