Re: "only five percent believe this surveillance should be unrestricted"
Downvoted by my wife, I see :) :)
2280 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Aug 2009
"A survey of randoms saying they don't like something is worth precisely fuck all."
Yes and no. A recent petition proposing that Paula Vennells be quite rightly stripped of her CBE got more than a million responses and was likely instrumental in her making the decision to jump before she was pushed and hand it back; as well as showing various up-for-reelection politicians that the Post Office scandal might actually be worth spending some time and energy on instead of ignoring.
I had a conversation with her indoors about this the other day. Her view: if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear; if absolute surveillance saves 1 girl from getting raped, it's worth it.
As I couldn't find the words to express how stupid I found that statement, and I quite fancied still being married, I chose to just stay quiet. When people actually believe that, there's no convincing them.
Not really the primary focus of this article, but subscriptions are the bane of my existence. I hate that I don't own Microsoft Office or Photoshop. I detest that several features on my car either cost a small fortune to 'buy' or an even larger fortune (spread out over time) to 'rent'. I loathe that my house security system is advertised as having features x, y, and z, but when bought and installed, it turns out to only actually have x; the other features being tied to a mandatory subscription. I baulk at the idea that actually "owning" a house these days requires 2 substantial incomes and a mountain of savings, otherwise the rental market is the only way to go.
The only subscription I don't mind, ironically, is HP's Instant Ink. I print about 5 pages a month, so their 'free 15 pages a month for life' tier gives me all I will likely ever need. Right up until they remotely brick my printer with an 'upgrade' in order to get me off this and onto a paid tier.
"people will not tolerate or accept it"
Yes they will. It's the drip drip drip of what's 'tolerable' or 'acceptable' - just like having cameras and microphones throughout your house and in your pocket was unacceptable and intolerable 2 decades ago, yet now more than 400 million people VOLUNTARILY do it (source: www.statista.com).
It's a combination of obfuscating the purpose of these devices, and wearing the consumer down such that it seems 'normal' to just allow it.
Correct. Some Apple products are hideously overpriced (Mac Pro wheels, FineWoven “premium” cases, many Apple Watch straps) but USB-C chargers are priced in line with other equivalent quality adapters from other manufacturers.
PS the most powerful Apple USB-C adapter is 140W for $99/€99. Equivalent adapters from Belkin, Mophie, UGreen and Anker all (non-)coincidentally also cost $99/€99.
"If you don't have data, you're not sending ANYTHING these days."
Whilst you're technically correct in that an SMS is sent as 0s and 1s, just like voice is also sent as 0s and 1s over a digital cellular network, it's not considered 'data' from a billing or usage perspective. As others have pointed out, it uses spare space in the cellular communications channel, and is extremely limited in capacity compared to "actual" data. It was never intended for rich media.
You can send SMS anywhere you can make a voice call, even if your 4/5G and WiFi has dropped.
The "anticompetitive" argument isn't even an argument; I don't understand why it's being presented as a credible position. Apple are under no obligation to make, or keep, their proprietary messaging service accessible to a third party. That's it. End of argument.
The question of whether reverse engineering is legal is a different argument but ultimately irrelevant here aside from potentially giving Apple grounds to legally require Beeper to cease and desist.
"They warn that the AI community should be cautious when considering whether to open source LLMs, and suggest the best solution is to ensure that toxic content is cleansed, rather than hidden."
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
When it comes to information, the solution isn't 'cleansing'. It almost never is. Because then the system becomes simply an extension of biases inherent in the 'cleanser'; for example:
REMOVE_ALL FROM $data WHERE query="What is a Woman" AND response=CONTAINS("biological female")
”What is competitive about Apple's messaging app? In fact, this is anti-competitive behaviour.“
The iMessage protocol is Apple’s IP; no company has an intrinsic right to use it. Protecting your IP and your competitive differentiation is not anti-competitive; in fact, if there are security implications then Apple are pretty much obliged to close the loophole.
"US senator Elizabeth Warren weighed in on the debate and argued: "Green bubble texts are less secure. So why would Apple block a new app allowing Android users to chat with iPhone users on iMessage?"
You know full well why; competitive differentiation.
The only thing worse than a rich, greedy, power hungry, soundbite-addicted tech corporation is a rich, greedy, power hungry, soundbite-addicted senator.
I really don't get why you're getting so many downvotes (apart from this being the Reg, hugely left-leaning, and passionate Musk-haters almost to a man/woman/non-binary entity).
As I understand this case, it hinges on protection racket-esque practices by the unions; "nice company you've got there, would be a shame if something happened to it; join us and you won't have any problems". That's unacceptable, regardless of the wider context. I'm all for legal protections to ensure that a union CAN be formed IF the employees of the ACTUAL COMPANY actually WANT it. I'm against having this 'choice' imposed upon them whether they like it or not.
And you're correct that unions often claim to speak on behalf of employees who aren't members, weren't consulted, do not align with their ideology, and do not want whatever they say they're fighting for. Throughout the years I have worked for several large corporations, and as night follows day, come salary raise time the union was pushing for a "fair and equitable distribution for all" (i.e. 'everybody gets 2%') against the company policy of a greater share of the rewards but only to high performers. As a high performer, the unions did not speak for me; yet they invariably claimed to do so.
Trouble is: you'd get one of these mythical beasts then within 6 months the vendor would be looking for additional revenue streams to squeeze out of you.
As long as Wall Street is driving quarterly numbers, you'll never be able to just buy a product and have it work forever. The machine needs feeding.
In a previous life I worked in a crew setting up electrically triggered fireworks for a local council display. About 100k's worth of fireworks, so not small but luckily not nuclear either.
The (council-owned, and probably custom-made by the local 6th form college) master firing box had about 100 banana plugs, two buttons and a badly positioned label saying Master Sequence Start, which sounded to us like they started the programmed timing sequence. We figured both buttons needed to be pressed together to act as a safety.
We found out during the pre-test that the two buttons did very different things. One was actually labelled Master Sequence, and it started the built-in sequence to set the connected fireworks off in the programmed order and timing.
The second button was labelled Start, and it fired a signal down all wires simultaneously. You used this when you had no directly connected fireworks, but were using multiple daisychained slave boxes each with their own programmed sequence and the fireworks connected to them . The Start signal just meant that they all started their sequences at the same time.
If we hadn't run the pre-test and had just pressed (what looked to be called) Master Sequence Start, we would have set off all the fireworks simultaneously; which would have been a hell of a bang.
Lessons were learned on that day.