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Comment Re:Electric Company (Score 1) 27

The Courts need to recognize that Internet has become a necessary utility and that the music companies need to deal with the individual directly through the Courts, not in a lazy clandestine way.

The record labels were originally suing individual users back in the Napster days and it was causing a bit bad PR for them.

I also can't help but think that going after ISPs is something of a cash grab, since I really don't know anyone who even bothers trying to pirate music anymore. It's no longer worth the effort with how cheap music streaming services are.

What really scared them was other countries not tolerating that bullshit and in most other countries if you lose a lawsuit like this the other party can come after you for damages. They don't care about negative PR, but a case where they are forced to pay out for having their spurious claims disproved scares the living shit out of them because it sets a precedent.

Comment Running out of ideas to steal. (Score 1) 44

Yeah... Android manufacturers need to pull their finger out and give Apple some better ideas.

Multiple manufacturers have tried the folding phone several times with little to no success. I can't see Apple succeeding (they'll pretend they are though).

What I can see is Apple presenting their most rigid phone ever as "the iFold 1billion and 2 PRO" with someone standing on stage showing us that it flexes slightly if measured with laboratory equipment... and when people break it in real life telling us "you're folding it wrong".

Comment Re:Navy SEAL drills work best for Navy SEALs (Score 2) 104

I read Richard Marcinko's leadership book (Marcinko was the SEAL who founded DEVGRU, the SEAL's most elite unit, aka Team Six). From it, I concluded this: Applying Navy SEAL principles to lead people works best when the people are physically and mentally built like Navy SEALs. Most people are not, not even elite company CEO's and their staff.

It becomes a game of square peg / round hole.

Special Operator type training is far too advanced for a corporate retreat, what they really need is basic. Learning how to march as a unit, work as a unit, understand and follow orders, et al. Shit that a soldier is expected to have down pat long before they ever get advanced training. Training that might actually be useful in helping people work together or improving discipline... However the ego of your average corporate dick will never allow that, they think they're special so they want the special training.

But in reality they aren't getting anything special, just paying to be shouted at by someone who claims they were a SEAL, SAS, et al. but in all likelihood never were.

Comment Re:Built from leftover parts (Score 1) 136

Totally different business but exactly the same problem. Nordstrom generally has the latest trend clothes in fashion and pretty good quality; it's known for it. But when it had leftover inventory it knew there were people a step down from their target demographic that would love Nordstrom's quality products even if they're a season or two out of fashion for cheaper, so they opened Nordstrom's Rack to sell off the excess inventory.

Nordstrom's Rack got so popular they couldn't keep it stocked, and eventually started developing their own dedicated Nordstrom Rack brands, which sort of defeated the purpose of Nordstrom's Rack as it's entire value was Nordstrom's quality, late season, at a discount, but now it's discount quality with the Nordstrom's name on it.

Law of unintended consequences I guess.

Not really an unknown consequence.

Popular brands know never, ever release your cheap products under your brand. Airlines are famous for this, when QANTAS wanted to release cheap, no frills flights under a LCC model, they didn't brand it as QANTAS CHEAP because that would cheapen the brand QANTAS, they created a new airline called JetStar and even though they are wholly owned subsidiaries. It's not unusual for a budget airline to operate under the parent airlines AOC (Air Operator Certificate... the bit of paper that says you're allowed to carry passengers), LEVEL (Spanish low cost carrier) operated under another AOC until it got it's own (Iberia's I think). The point is, they didn't want to associate the parent brands just in case they got successful.

But this isn't exactly off brand for Apple, they're charging $700 for a $300 laptop and $300 is being generous as we know it's really a $200 phone.

Comment Re:on the one hand (Score 2) 76

Anyone with a brain, having just invented a deliberately anonymous cryptocurrency that starts to take off, would NOT EVER touch the seed coins, especially once it became obvious that everyone was watching their movement.

The second that stuff moves, Bitcoin value tanks AND the ultimate destination of all those coins becomes international news. Hardly anonymous.

No, whoever they were, and for literally whatever reason they started the project, they would have created other additional accounts later on, capitalised on those, had no connection to the original accounts, and still be a billionaire now. But just one of hundreds / thousands of others that are all untraceable and not really being watched.

And when Bitcoin mixing services came out, they'd have been all over it - just to preserve anonymity if nothing else.

We know precisely one thing about Satoshi - and that's that they don't want to identify themselves. Maybe there is $138bn sitting in an account they could in theory get access to. But it would immediately reveal information about themselves that may well work against them - taxation authorities would be all over it, press, public, every penny would be traced to its final destinations, etc.

So even if they only had, say, a couple of million in another account... they'd use that. Not everyone wants to be a stupendous billionaire in the public eye. You have to be a bit of a sociopath to be a billionaire at all. And then think of things like security, press, public scrutiny, etc.

Maybe they've got enough to live a life of luxury, that they've properly declared, never have to work again and, ultimately... still stay absolutely anonymous.

The one thing we know is that they understand anonymity. Why on earth would we ever expect them to do the most stupid thing ever and reveal themselves, rather than just hide amongst a large crowd and enjoy the rest of their life?

Comment Re:Apple is Doomed! (Score 1) 136

There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Comment Re:It's about the hardware (Score 1) 136

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

Comment Re:Electric Company (Score 3, Interesting) 27

Make illegal phone calls (e.g. fraud, harassment, unsolicited commercial spam, etc.) and they'll cut your telephone off.

Far closer in terms of analogy and technology. And extremely viable.

The electricity company are not directly facilitating or have knowledge or would have reasonable knowledge of your Internet activites.

But your phone number is actively facilitating your phone service, the same way your ISP Is actively facilitating your Internet service. And you would get cut off by your ISP if you were sending spam, or hacking people, etc.

Either the ISP has NO business doing that (and thus they couldn't cut you off for sending spam) or they are monitoring and able to cut you off (in which case they could cut you off for piracy).

Comment Re:A million notices? (Score 1) 27

If you kept sending spam email, your email account would be terminated. If you used your ISP connection to do it, they would start terminating your connection. Whether that was personal, business, paid or free.

How is that different to keeping using your ISP connection to download illegal stuff, once the ISP has been notified of that?

Are we saying that unsolicited commercial email is somehow significantly more damaging to people and incurring a greater commercial cost than pirating movies?

Comment Re:How is this possible? (Score 5, Informative) 67

According to the writeup; there are two methods: it is possible for an extension to mark some parts of itself as 'web accessible'; and linkedin has assembled at least one characteristic file for 6,1000-odd extension IDs and attempts to fetch it to confirm/deny the extension's presence.

The other is based on the fact that the whole point of many extensions is to modify the site in some way; but the site normally has largely unfettered access to inspect itself, so they have theirs set up to walk the entire DOM looking for any references to "chrome-extension://" and snagging the IDs if found.

Not exactly a 'declare installed extensions'; but it looks like, out of some combination of supporting the use cases where an extension and page actively interact by design and either not wanting the possibility or not wanting the complexity of trying to enable 'invisible' edits(presumably some sort of 'shadow' DOM mechanism where as far as the site and everything delivered with it knows only its unedited DOM and resources exist; but the one the user sees is an extension-modified copy of that one, which sounds like it could get messy), inferential attacks are fairly easy and powerful.

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