Posts by Henry Wertz 1 3137 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
They should probably have some hosts files (/etc/hosts) at least for some internal systems, that would help a lot with DNS failures and routing failures (depending on how severe they are.) Or at least have some key IP addresses written down in some key locations (on paper, in case the list is eletonicaly stored somewhere that becomes inaccessible) so if DNS or routing go down they have addresses for the name servers and routers.
"** And before someone says LOL that's what you get for azure, AWS is no better and decisions were made prior to me joining the company"
Yes. I was surprised when I worked on a project that involved Amazon Redshift, that it's PostgreSQL 8! It didn't cause me any troubles, but that's a 15 year old version of PostgreSQL! Not quite the same situation, but I assume they heavily customized it, and at that point found it was too difficult/not worth it to heavily customize newer versions, as opposed to just cherrypicking fixes and possibly a few features from newer versions and backporting them.
Scalable proccesor -- just an FYI, they like to do this on ARM too. The typical phone, tablet, or etc. ARM has the MMU option, FPU option, NEON option, 64-bit ARM will have SVE, etc., but these are all technically options. Linux kernel requires the MMU; a few older ARM ports did support operation on FPUless chips, probably some of the software builds for wireless access points and NAS (Network Attached Storage) still have FPU-less ARM support (if a wireless access point is just feeding settings into a built-in wifi chip and running a admin web server, then this doesn't use any math and they can save a small bit by ordering an FPUless chip.)
I've heard good things about RISC-V! A modern design designed for simplicity but also designed so making high-performance versions is entirely possible; no royalties and designed to avoid various patents, no cost for one to do their own implementation.
"Remember those days when OSes were the be-all and end-all?"
Nope, I switched to slackware back just before windows 95 came out, and both slackware and ubuntu (that I switched to later) don't make OS updates a jarring change. I sure remember *others* getting all excited about "windows current version + 1" coming out, but ubuntu upgrades? About as undramatic as you can get, not terribly exciting.
The case is a bit weak. The accounting was very shady, things like using prepayments for a year (or even 5 years) service contract to cover losses in 1 quarter (so that quarter looks ok but the 5 year contract would then show 0 income for the other 19 quarters...) Shady but not actually illegal at the time. Apparently it was evident on the books that this was happening, and Autonomy officials were not making statements one way or the other about their financial condition. HP got some warnings of irregular accounting at the time and just ignored them and bought Autonomy anyway.
This may still be fraud but that's why the case is dragging so long, the accounting was shady but legal and there is no smoking gun "they said this and it was false."
Yeah...no. I already had a choice to pay for onstar on my existing car (emergency assistance, some app so I could unlock my doors and for some reason check the fuel level from my phone, traffic alerts. and the gps navigation would be done via onstar instead of an on-board system.) Not interested in paying subscription fees for things like this thanks.
good move. Truly, this is a microoptimization (size reduction is low, and time to look up a timezone would be unaffected essentially... maybe even increased if looking up a symlink, following that symlink and opening resulting file was any slower than opening file directly.) I'd do it if nobody objected. But they are objecting, so why bother?
For ease on the time zone administrators, just add a control file and script to saying which timezones are equivalent post-1970 so you can update the post-1970 for Berlin and the script can copy the post-1970 info to Oslo etc., so users have their seperate files but administrators burden is still lowered.
I saw one, some Tesla made a right turn, kept turning right until it hopped the curb and drove onto the sidewalk. At which point the driver finally paid attention and grabbed the wheel.
I read about whole waves of programmers resigning, tesla would want features shipped asap while the programmers pointed out they could not guarantee any level of safety shipping that fast. i'm sure having waves of new replacement programmers come in to work on it has REALLY helped that code quality.
The reason many US school districts can't get drivers is this "well, they can wear masks or not" attitude that anti-masker assholes have gotten forced into many districts. Covid is totally out of control, delta variant is rampant, but anti-mask assholes think they should be able to wander around in public, no vaccinations, and infect everyone around them. In our state, the idiot governor passed a law saying schools *can't* have mask mandates... thankfully this was overruled by the feds.) As an asshole and a hypocrite, she whined that localities should be able to make up their minds for themselves when the feds had a federal-level mask mandate and she didn't want it, then hypocritically took away localities right to decide when there was no federal mandate but sensible towns and school districts passed mandates on their own.
Restaurants have the same issue (with restaurants, you have areas with no mask mandate; and areas with one, where anti-mask assholes make a point of showing up anyway with no mask then arguing about it. Usually falsely asserting their rights, ignoring the businesses right to be safe.)
in both cases, people don't want to risk their lives (especially over something where simply both wearing masks cuts spread 99%, but people are too selfish). Packages are not gooing to give delivery drivers Covid, so I don't blame them choosing to deliver instead.
Ditto. I haven't heard of it either, and this is the kind of thing I would have expected to have heard about at some point. Maybe they would still have not had enough paid users, but it couldn't have hurt to get the word out a bit more than they did.
Could be sweet! I had a Acer Chromebook 13 with NVidia Tegra K1... quad core ARM and roughly GTX650 GPU. The bad side, Acer sure new how to design it to a spec, the battery wore out, power plug got flakey, case got stress cracks, and touchpad began sagging into the case all withing about 2 weeks of each other (after about 1.5 years of use.)
The good, 22 hour battery life!! 18-20 in normal use. 10-12 if I ran video encodes on it (full load on all CPU cores.) I booted chrubuntu (stock Ubuntu with a few hardware-specific scripts and such they pulled over from chromeos.) ChromeOS and Ubuntu both ran GREAT on it.
I think in reality Nokia simply doesn't want O-RAN. Carriers want it because they can more flexibly mix and match equipment. Nokia was in it because it makes sense to be in an industry group so they can have the information needed to have a working implementation, in case it becomes something they simply must support to make sales.
But I doubt the biggest vendors are happy about it, the mix and match the carriers want is exactly what Nokia and the biggest vendors would prefer not to have, it's only going to cost them (they could sell 1 component in a O-RAN network deployment instead of a whole "solution" without it.). This gives Nokia an easy out.
to me this is an input validation problem. i'd make sure "change direction" and "delete" type characters are handled before the data gets to the ai system, that unicode characters that look like others are handled (sticking a cyrillic or greek or chinese "letter that looks like e" in the middle of otherwise-roman characters, switch it to an e) and so on.
I'm not surprised at all; Apple has been well known, clear back to the 1980s to have what I'd consider excessive corporate security. Almost every project is secret, you are not to talk to coworkers about what you are doing; you don't talk about your managers because that may leak info about management hierarchy; for all I know this was level of secrecy alone may end up with pay discepencies, simply because group A doesn't know what group B is paying.
I mean, how autonomous is this AI? If the AI decided food containers would be a useful field to research, decided to search for design and came up with this fractal design, and then desired to patent it... maybe it should be the inventor.
If Stephen decided to look into food containers, set up a neural net and some parameters, and let it run, to me the neural net is an advanced tool and as much as he'd like the neural net to be the inventor, I'd say he invented it then.
It is a valid question though, if full AIs emerge or are built, or aliens show up, how quickly can we get our laws updated so they are not treated under the law as objects.
Yeah I sure didn't. Last few projects I wrote that used Javascript, I didn't do anything specifically to break IE; but I also didn't test against it and have no idea if it worked with it or not. Person I wrote it for, their users used iThings (so Safari), Chrome, or possibly Firefox (I developed on FIrefox since I'm used to the debugging tools on it.) I also loaded it in Opera once with no drama there either. I used bog standard Javascript, not pushing the boundaries with some "latest and greatest" features, and a few libs that as far as I know don't push things either, but if IE won't run stuff that'd run on a regular browser 10 years ago, I'm not going to do anything about that.
See ya!
Both posters are right -- at the moment, T-Mo has a pretty nice summary of plans, you pick one of the confusingly named plans (Magenta and Magenta plus are both "unlimited", but one's more unlimited than the other...) and it goes to a nice summary telling the difference between the plans at a glance. It's not too confusing right now. And second poster accurately describes T-Mo's phone payoff (which is how all the carriers here do it now -- except AT&T, who are evil and list their phones at about the same monthly price, hoping you won't notice the tiny tiny fine print stating it's for 36 months rather than the 24 everyone else is doing, getting them like $300+ extra cash out of you.
First poster is also right, recently they had a summary chart, but with asterisks where they now have info in the chart ("unlimited hotspot*", "unlimited data*") so it just looked like several plans with everything unlimited with no reason to have different prices, until you plowed through fine print. Since they'd also just bought Sprint, they also had a *second* page of plans that were broadly similar (+/- $10 or so on the price, similar features.. but look at the fine print and since it was a different cell co the throttle speeds, cutoffs, etc. are all a little different; the Sprint plans tended to have far more full-speed hotspot.) I don't blame T-Mo on this one though, it's better to keep old plans their just-purchases customers may want available than to immediately ditch them.
Not that the other carriers are better -- I have Verizon Wireless, and they now have *five* unlimited plans, a set of limited data plans, seperate plans for "connected devices", tablets, hotspots (one with unlimited data, but only available based on where you live -- which makes a bit of sense, their network is a tad congested in some areas and selling unlimited home internet in those areas would not be great.) I'm in a sweet grandfathered plan, but *that's* confusing!
The surprise to me is that it was the T-Mo side cracked into -- Sprint's been infamous for having a mess of a backend system for 10+ years, and I honestly just assumed it was the Sprint side cracked into.
Main issue here is, historically the printing and on-screen graphics both used GDI, GDI ran in kernel space, so virtually the whole printing system is still in kernel space. Don't get me wrong, you could stick the whole printing and print spooling systems in user space (like Linux does) and still have nasty exploits, but you'd hopefully at least have it running as an unprivileged user instead of in-kernel.
Happened here in US. When I graduated from college, there were ads which, from job description, made it clear the US was still running their Star Wars program (that had supposedly been discontinued when I was in grade school). And these were not vague jobs listings were one could put two and two together to figure out what was going on, they were pretty specific descriptions of what one would be working on.
(Note, I would not bring up the specific program etc., but it doesn't matter now, several years later they had some public demos anyway, so it's common knowledge that these supposedly discontinued projects were ongoing.)
More likely scenario to me would be having the AMD kit used in some ATM or slot machine, and this attack could be used to try to recover keys and so on. Still pretty contrived, you'd have to either have nobody notice you've cracked the ATM open and are running wires into it (or even less likely, a casino where they don't notice this) -- or have access to a machine you've carried off.
In the distant past, IBM had a crypto processor for ATMs on a card, it had X-Ray detection, and physical tamper detection, including a battery backup so cutting power first didn't help, self-destructing if either were detected. They still make tamper-resistant modules for ATMs and such, I just don't know what specific anti-tamper measures they have, it does include protection against voltage manipulation though (... I suppose a fancy way of saying it has some fat capacitors on-board, or shuts off if voltage is out of spec, or both.)
I suppose this gives notice that someone who is tempted to replace a crypto processor with some key storage by AMD SEV, don't.
Interesting result (Google shows some real estate listings, Duckduckgo shows PDFs), but I can see blocking it -- it's returning people putting up scans of their cards for purpose of forging copies of them. This is exactly the kind of thing Google blocking it is no problem.
US is full of stupid assholes, far more than I ever expected, and I'm saying that living here. It's amazing how many people here are unwilling to wear a mask to avoid KILLING people; and a few won't get this vaccine because they believe ridiculous conspiracy theories (which is dangerously misinformed), but a large number simply don't care about anyone but themselves, think they won't get too sick so screw everyone else. If these assholes would just wear masks for 2 weeks, Covid would be gone! Selfish, self-centered, won't take a few minutes out of their day (and $0 cost) to save people's lives (by vaccine), and/or a couple bucks and 0 time to save people's lives (by wearing masks.)
First, I agree with those who thing forging Covid cards should have a penalty... not like years of prison, but some length of non-suspended, non-bailed-out jail time, and a hefty fine. These anti-vaccine people are effectively killing people because they are too selfish to get a vaccine and wear a mask, so fuck them for also buying and using forged vaccine cards, and those who make them. In the US, you DO get jail time for drunk driving, so getting it for something this dangerous, wreckless, and selfish, is totally justified.
Side note -- I have my proper vaccine card.. Why -- WWWHHHHYYYY --- did they make it like 110% credit card sized! It won't fit in my wallet. I live in Iowa, the governor's and anti-mask idiot, during the earlier mask requirements she made sure to point at every press release that businesses are expected to require masks, but it's unenforceable (... which of course is false, the local police can and did stand outside a Walmart and write up warnings and tickets for people trying to go in illegally without a mask). More recently this year she wasted time, money, and energy passing rules trying to ban localities from passing their own local mask mandates (of course, if she wants to falsely claim laws are unenforceable, that cuts both ways, so localities have flipped her the finger and passed them anyway.)
Not to rant... but these anti-mask assholes in the US keep falsely claiming they are libertarians. You are NOT a libertarian if you think you should be free to not wear a mask, but then turn around and say businesses should be prohibited from choosing to have their own mask requirements. That is not libertarianism, that is yourself being a selfish asshole and wanting to impose your selfishness on others.
Glad it's there -- I like firefox better than chrome in both appearance and functionality. I turned back on the traditional menu bar (I can deal with a hamburger, but in this case prefer the old way) and away I go. Don't get me wrong, I won't get into some fit and leave computing if firefox went away, but it doesn't look like it's there yet. Having multiple browser implementations keeps Google "honest" (they must more-or-less follow the specifications.. not a criticism, Google does aim for 100% compliance... not just do whatever they'd like with Chrome and say that's what a browser is.) Microsoft tried that with IE a few decades back (putting in ActiveX, pushing for IE and Windows-only cack being what web sites should use..), but it was Firefox and Opera back then too that kept them from just claiming whatever IE does is the standard.
I'm guessing .NET is much harder to port; LLVM (and GCC) are large and complex, but in terms of actual services they expect from the OS, essentially they open files, process them, and spit out output files. And both are designed with adding new CPUs in mind. Compared to .NET and Java, where they will be using some specific memory allocation support, threading support, and all sorts of OS services (which may not be used by the VM, but some base Java or .NET libraries will expect them so Java/.NET software can potentially use them... of course, libc, libpthread, etc., would be needed for something being compiled with LLVM/GCC to be able to access that functionality too...)
I still don't know (on Intel's part, not HPs!) if this was an unmitigated disaster or a brilliant move.
New Coke -- people say it was some disaster, and the new coke itself was; but it greatly increased sales of regular coke. I suspect it was a collosal mistake on their part that just happened to increase sales in the end... but there are those who claim it was all one elaborate campaign to increase overall sales.
Itanium -- so this cost Intel dearly, but, they knocked a lot of competitors off the market -- HP had both PA-RISC and Alpha (Alpha from DEC)... which BTW various PA-RISC and Alpha models were taking turns being fastest CPU available on the planet, Intel at that point wasn't even close. Got SGI to quit using and developing MIPS. IBM may have considered it (no more PowerPC/POWER) but decided to not drink the coolaid. I'm sure there were a few other architectures that ended then but I can't recall them off the top of my head. I don't think they expected AMD to introduce a 64-bit chip. Just saying, it cost Intel dearly, and my guess is it was just a collosal mistake on their part... but (other than IBM) after all these workstation vendors tried then ditched Itanium, they had stopped development of their own CPUs for too long to restart their programs and catch up, they all ended up buying Xeons instead!
Had one at the U of I -- when HP found they were not selling very well, and wanted to show sales, they sold an Itanic-based HP Superdome to the U (engineering department) for something like $1,000 (this was something like a $250,000 machine.) I talked to someone in the department, within days they'd already scrapped their plans to scrap the old PA-RISC-based system they had, since it was easily outrunning the Itanium one.
I know you're joking, but GM got around gas guzzler tax on some Corvettes (for a few years, before they updated the V8 and roughly doubled the fuel efficiency -- a V8 getting 35MPG? Yes.) by shipping them with this "skip shift" thing, you had a 5-speed transmission (maybe 6-speed, but given how long ago possibly 5), but it would force shifting from 1st to 3rd (mechanically locking out 2nd gear) under several conditions -- unless you bought a $5 option that was a resistor they plugged in to disable skip-shift, or just bought your own resistor and plugged it in.
Dell probably literally could just sell the computer not fully assembled, if they could trust their customers to actually plug the PSU into the motherboard.
yes and it's true. I don't know how many are really held back versus complaining they are. But, in the us there are discrimination programs (it's not "reverse" , discrimination is discrimination). Instead of just recruiting more diversely, making sure everyone has a fair chance, and eliminating discriminatory practices... they introudce discriminatory practices in the form of race-based set asides and race-based quotas, sometimes lowering the standards depending on race (which does nobody a favor, including those hired if they were not really qualified for the job).
By the letter of the law this is just as illegal as setting aside jobs for white males would be, but seems to be a fully vetted method as far as actual implementation is concerned.
I haven't run into any problems here, but the people who do and complain about it are not being some kind of racist assholes, as some would like to suggest. These programs to "level the playing field" are sometimes very badly designed and implemented.
It's true though, AWS must make huge money on the bandwidth charges, they charge whatever costs for the cloud services and full retail on the bandwidth as well. Of course, this is just Cloudflare wanting to get you a discount on AWS, but make it up by you paying them for egress charges instead essentially.
I said this on the previous article about this, but the Windows ACL system is simply too complicated. If Linux (or OSX, BSD, etc.) had a backup password file readable by anyone who's not supposed to be able to, it'd be apparent at a glance (the user, group, and RWX permissions are listed as soon as you run "ls -l", and quite a few GUI file browsers also show them.)
I don't have any big suggestion on what to do about this, I guess even the possibility of replacing or changing it much depends on how much of Windows stuff is tied deeply into ACLs, and how much just kind of "sits on top", it's still restricted where it can read and write but would not care what security mechanism was doing the restrictions.
Whether the 100x figure ever existed is probably irrelevant anyway. You now have advanced IDEs (Integrated Development Environments), better debuggers, faster compilers and such (so if you don't have proper logging in your program, you can add some to track down a bug and rebuild in a reasonable length of time), heavy use of languages like Python where you don't have to recompile (...usually)... OK they had interpreted languages back to the dawn of time too. Languages now tend to give useful error messages, and line numbers, when things crash too (which is not 100% reliable, since the crash could have been due to an earlier problem, but sure helps.)
I'm just saying, even if there had been a 100x figure 40+ years ago, things have changed now. Personally, when I've found bugs in my Python code, it may be marginally harder to find the bug later than to avoid a typo or something as I type the code, but surely not a 100x difference or even close to that.
So, there's an easy reason for different treatment here.
NSO was running spyware and running the spyware backend in AWS. There's no question that's against TOS, it's not a grey area, and there's nothing to discuss. It doesn't matter if they're running it as a business or service, they can do that with their own systems if they want.
Parler is (or was) a disgusting hive of villainy and infamy. BUT, the US has the 1st ammendment, freedom of speech does apply (at least AWS would get bad PR for immeidately terminating accounts due to speech even though they are allowed to). So AWS gave them a chance to straighten up, then closed their services when they didn't.
I didn't know you could make a path that long! The Linux flaw involves making a *1GB* long file name path (+ 10 bytes, at which point the 10 bytes are outside the buffer but at a known location.)
As for the Windows flaw -- essentially a system makes backups (VSS Shadow Copy) of the password files (security hives), and the backup is readable by normal users. I have found in the past the Windows ACL (Access Control List) system to be overcomplicated, and I think you'll find others who agree. I could be wrong but I'm assuming this problem may have been easier to spot (before it was released) with a less-complicated security system.
Probably not the US. Last year, Nutjob Trump sided with those even opposing mask mandates. He was overridden by common sense and decency, so there were mask mandates. But with most states expecting the feds to do something (not literally, but breaking out a procedure for states and localities to follow), and the feds doing nothing... there was no tracing, anywhere in the US, as far as I know.
Now? It's horrifying, several months back Faucci (as an attempt to encourage vaccination) said people would not have to wear masks any more if they vaccinated (to me, it seemed obvious that the anti-mask, anti-vaccine assholes would take this as an opportunity to never wear a mask again.) Of course that's exactly what happened, EVERYONE quit wearing masks within days. There's like 0 mask wearing going on here now (I still put mine on, usually, and I've seen maybe 1 out of 10 wearing one once in a while, despite there still being in-the-wild, widespread Delta variant.) Vaccination rate is like 80% in some areas to as low as 20% in others. California is now re-enacting some mask mandates... but otherwise, with an out-of-control, more virulent, deadlier, and infecting some people with full vaccination, variant in the wild, it's "no masks, go ahead and have that concert or whatever you want." And you know, according to the old media, it's this huge surprise that there's a third (or is it fourth?) COVID wave running through the US.
As for costs... I don't know. I don't think it's even a matter of money. My friend (who is rather short on cash) claims to care about privacy but won't even quit using Facebook and Facebook Messenger. It's not a matter of being able to afford privacy or not, it's just that people will claim they worry about privacy but not even take the first step.
As first poster said, human element is needed -- and NOT just to say "the computer said there was a match." The honest fact is, in a sense the system is racist -- you're probably going to have like a 60% match just for having 2 eyes, a nose, and a mouth (maybe 65 or 70% because of the glasses), +10% for a similar hairstyle, +10% for skin tone, maybe another 10% for having vaguely the same head size and shape (i.e. a girlish head), you're then at like 90% without it meaning much of anything.
If places are going to use an AI, they really MUST have it so a match like this has the operator pay attention, not just go based on some result from the system. The system really needs to have show a name and photo for the match, and the operator needs to be expected to use it (not rely on some percentage match.) It would have been easy enough to be able to either see the photos don't match (... maybe, I suppose it's possible they really are practically a doppleganger for the trouble maker), or easy enough to ask "hey, are you (name)?" or "could I have your name please?" and let them in when it's clear they aren't the same person.
edit: Looked at the photos in TFA, I can see why a AI may have thought they were similar (in particular, they have similar eyeshadow... or possibly some purplish-blue effect in the photos from how the camera and glasses interact.. that stands out.) But it takes a few seconds of human intervention to see they don't have the same head shape and are not the same person. The owner admitted they just look at % match and not photos, that's the issue I'd take up here, if they're going to use an AI that's a bad way to do it.
"He skipped bail because he claimed the Swedish sex case was just a front to get him to America."
And it was. The woman involved said she was not interested in charges, and shortly (within a year) after he was not extradited for these charges the charges were dropped.
I'm not a big Assange fan but this charge was bunk, and I would not want to come to the US if I were him, the US prisons are nowhere close to international legal minimum standards (both by design and because the US loves long prison sentences but doesn't love spending money on the prisons to stick the prisoners in)... and the suggested sentence is excessive (13 years NOT for allegations of espionage, strictly for computer crimes acts violations, is pretty high.)
This is a big problem. As alluded to in the article, John Deere is ridiculous. It's not even as bad as those printers where you have to put in the official cartridges, it's worse.
You can buy a fuel injector or sensor, even the official John Deere one, and the tractor will not use it until some dope at the Official John Deere Dealership (TM) hooks up a USB cable to the tractor and "authorizes" the parts.
You (unless "you" have the Official Dealership (TM) diagnostic equipment) also apparently cannot hook up a scan tool to get diagnostic information, the tractor refuses until the official DRM handshake is performed. Unless you put in black-market Ukranian firmware, which I encourage everyone to do.
It's exactly what the car companies started pushing towards in the late 1970s, before the feds made sure to pass right-to-repair laws (unfortunately only covering cars & trucks.)
Edit: Just to note, this is usually not about farmers wanting to do emissions deletes, as has been suggested (I'm sure a few do...); it's really about wanting to be able to have the equipment you own repaired by any ol' diesel mechanic, just as I don't want to have to go to a GM dealership to have ordinary repairs done on my car.
just to note, the "may or may not" just depends on how hard you lock it down. linux does support verified and signed bootloader, kernel, kernel modules and application binaries, and other stuff to ensure nothing unauthorized sneaks on. used for sure on slot machines and atms.
The big reason US politics are so broken and toxic is summed up right here: "same products as liberals, libertarians, greens, communists" ... in the us there are (as far as most people are concerned) no greens, libertarians, or communists, there are liberals and conservatives. Both main parties pretend 3rd parties do not exist at all, with the result of just the most ridiculous rhetoric and polarization. As far as conservatives are concerned, it's there way or a mix of extreme greeen and communist policies; as far as liberals are concerned it's there way or an extreme isolationism, "go back to slave days" conservatism mixed with fascism. You have extremists like Nutjob Trump where this is true, but you now have people in both main parties pretending like this is true with everyone.
Good. I've seen one Tesla on my parents street. It turned onto the end of the street, kept turning, drove over the curb onto the grass (still turning), about the time it would have hit the sidewalk the driver realized things were going sideways and jerked it back on the road. Nothing there to confuse the system, no snow, the road and grass were nice distinct colors. I do not put any trust into these systems!
I have to agree. I'm not a fan of Facebook, but to take action against a company in the US under antitrust laws, they both have to have a dominant market petition and have to be using this position to lock out competition. Denying mergers and acquisitions can and is done for antitrust reasons. I could certainly see denying them further mergers and acquisitions of competitors. But the fact of the matter is they are not even close to having a monopoly, and (other than buying companies) are not accused of using their market position to limit competition (for example, Facebook does not have any clause prohibiting someone business or person with Facebook from using other services... unlike for example Microsoft, who has had in the past licensing fees that are per-computer, whether it has a single Microsoft product on it or not, and continues to this day to have deals with OEMs making it nearly impossible to buy a PC without Windows on it.)
Yes, back in end of 1999, I knew someone with some Apollo computers (not the NASA ones.... the Apollo that was bought by HP in the mid-1980s, these ran DomainOS.) The U of Iowa ISCA (Iowa Student Computer Association) ran their BBS off the DomainOS systems.
They actually released a year 2000 update for these, but it involved powering them off and back on. The drives were VERY prone to stiction, they stuck and did not release. RIP several Apollos.
I thought they were (for some reason) having to power up a ground computer for some unusual activity. At least it's not on the ground! I'd honestly be more concerned about one on the ground being lost, maybe missing parts, dust, perhaps rust (some of these systems in the past were not put in careful storage, they were just stashed wherever); whereas the in-orbit one is known to still be there and was stored roughly as well as the in-use one.
Good luck backup computer, NASA, and Hubble!!!
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