Posts by Fazal Majid 542 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2007
It is also a fact the UK got a disproportionate amount of EU R&D funding. It was still a net contributor, like Germany or France, to be sure, but oddly enough the Treasury hasn’t replaced the former EU contributions with domestic R&D funding, just as the NHS is being funded by the NI hike (i.e. new taxes, not reassigned contributions).
Then again it is a national sport for politicians in EU members to blame the EU for their own failings, it’s just the UK press (owned largely by a US citizen, Rupert Murdoch) and political class showed an unusual level of mendacity, like one Boris Johnson making things up out of thin air.
Preliminary results from the M2 MacBook Pro 13, where the chassis hasn't been redesigned, suggest the M2 runs hotter than the M1 and is encountering thermal throttling. Now the MacBook Air has been redesigned and may have better thermal design, but it still doesn't have a fan so it's an open question as to whether it can sustain the performance before throttling occurs.
The A350-900ULR has a 9700 nautical mile range, and can do London or New York to Sydney non-stop, Qantas is trialing this as part of its Project Sunrise service due in 2025. It's still a twinjet but a much bigger one, with a capacity similar to early B747 Jumbo Jets.
The A321XLR is a much cheaper and economical jet that can still serve some fairly hefty point-to-point lines like most transatlantic lines.
And hasn’t approved the spectrum yet, because Telcos are furiously lobbying to arrogate themselves that spectrum as they unsuccessfully tried to do in the US, despite having in Ajit Pai the most telco-captured FCC head in decades. Telcos, really, *really* hate the idea that someone, somewhere, may be transferring data without paying for it.
After a blistering pace of speed improvements, Apple's Silicon team seems to have hit a wall, the same one Intel hit a decade ago. The M1 Pro, Max and Ultra are just refinements on the M1 design from 1.5 years ago, and I suspect most unoptimized apps will not see any performance improvement from a lowly M1 MacBook Air, apart from the faster SSD and increased RAM. Let's see what the M2 looks like.
Then there is the case of the pedestrian who was mowed down by a Uber self-driving car in Arizona. Their programmers, no doubt hired from the same school of douchebaggery as their executives, programmed the car not to slow down because that would inconvenience passengers. The safety driver was busy playing with her cell phone. The NSTB issued a scathing report blaming an "inadequate safety culture", which is putting it mildly. Sometimes moving fast and breaking things means breaking people, to a pulp.
Since they do not put a prominent "Reject All" button next to the "Accept All", the 69% number is as spurious as the alleged consent.
A better data point: 96% of Apple app users opted out of tracking when Apple introduced opt-in in iOS 14.5, and this was in the US, which is generally less privacy-conscious than Europe. So the real figure is not 69%, it's 4%.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/
Some of our more clueful legislators like Ted Lieu or Ron Wyden have been raising the issue of SS7’s terrible security for years, or more precisely its utter lack of any security, so far to no avail. Next generation signaling protocols like Diameter are a little better, but telcos have to invest in firewalls and audit tools for their signaling networks, something they are clearly unwilling to do. Note that this is not just applicable to legacy telco crap like SS7, BGP security is also a shambles.
After a brief dalliance with a Logitech M330 Silent Plus wireless mouse, I've gone back to a wired and cheap £10 B110S, buying a little gamer stand thing that elevates the cable so it doesn't drag on the desktop (and costs more than the mouse itself).
My experience with both Bluetooth and USB receiver mice is that after a few months the receiver starts acting up and the mouse skips. The simpler mice also work without needing you to install awful software on your computer to cause random crashes. As for the rubberized coatings, they are made of incompletely polymerized plastic painted on a hard plastic shell and will invariably disintegrate over time, instead of being made of silicone. Let's face it, these are inexpensive peripherals designed to last a year at best.
The UK is the home of ARM, but let SoftBank, a Japanese company specializing in Ponzi schemes like Uber or WeWork, acquire its tech crown jewel.
As for Intel’s plans to open a cutting-edge fab in Europe, their CEO clearly stated the UK is not in the running because of Brexit.
Option-3 on a Mac. The layout is US-ANSI, but I would assume the crackpot UK layout is available for those who use the ¬ or ¦ symbols on a regular basis.
I can't understand why anyone would take a gamble on this kickstarter during a time of supply-chain uncertainty, specially when the Keychron K7 is cheaper, available with optical switches, a more compact layout ditching the seldom-used function keys in favor of a Fn2 layer, and a track record of delivering.
The French and German knew, and evacuated their Afghans much sooner, which is why they did not need as much capacity in the last days' mad scramble and that's why they were not the "second largest evacuation".
The Germans evacuated some through the land border with Tajikistan, as Tom Tugendhat pointed out to Raab. Raab responded "but the Tajik border was closed". Yes, because they evacuated in April, well before the closing, which he would have known if he had bothered to meet the Afghan or Pakistani foreign ministers.
A few of the evacuees on the French flights was later found out to be a Taliban fighter. He was put in prison, but can't be deported back to Afghanistan due to human-rights laws, and the fact there are no more flights nor does the French government have diplomatic relations with the Taliban to arrange their return.
I just switched from Three to EE a couple of weeks ago, mostly because they are the only provider with Apple Watch Family Sharing support (so I can get my daughter a watch for emergency call and geolocation purposes). I didn't realize as a BT offshoot they had these public-service obligations, thanks for the info. Their speed is definitely slower than Three, but voice service is more reliable in NIMBY mast-hostile Hampstead. I still keep a Three SIM for my iPad, which is where most of my data use lies, however.
The telcos' sense of entitlement is something to behold. Just the term "Over The Top (OTT)" shows they feel entitled to a share of revenue they did nothing to earn beyond building the infrastructure they are already paid to provide by their clients.
Telcos have a legitimate beef with governments for being used as cash cows via spectrum auctions, and unfunded mandates like having to rip out their Huawei gear and install more expensive and technologically inferior Ericsson/Nokia instead. That said, no one forced them to overbid in the spectrum auctions.
As for the tech companies, if anything they are the ones who could be demanding payments. Without their content, no one would buy the telcos’ Internet service.
Most of the cost of 5G equipment is due to baroque telco standards laden with legacy baggage, that are exceedingly difficult to implement and test. It would make perfect sense for Western governments to fund a few competing open-source projects at major universities to develop 5G and 6G stacks. That would destroy the Western equipment manufacturers and their proprietary systems as well, but remove the risk of Chinese domination.
And got a slap on the wrist for offenses that other CAs were removed from the trust store for. Same with Symantec. The problem is that when a CA gets a significant enough market share, removing their trust flag will break too many websites and clients will complain, so even Google with its Chrome monopoly cannot afford to drop the hammer.
With organ donation the donor is dead and the interests of the still-living outweigh theirs.
I realize the OP is Australian, but here in the UK the NHS has done things like transfer data to Google without proper consent, and given that despicable firm's equally despicable data practices, that means control over the data is forever lost.
As for her contention that data can easily be "anonymized and securely aggregated", it is simply laughable, as all anonymization schemes this far have proven easy to defeat by a determined data scientist.
The way to get that data for important purposes like epidemiology is by earning trust through transparency and accountability, and shady practices like implied consent are the opposite of that.
It's because NSO was sloppy in its attempts to cover its tracks from a couple of SQLite process accounting databases used by Apple to track network activity per app (so they can report to you network usage in the Cellular control panel, presumably), or did not vacuum the databases to expunge the deleted rows from the filesystem. I'm sure they've fixed that since once the Amnesty International and Citizen Lab methodology was published.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2021/07/forensic-methodology-report-how-to-catch-nso-groups-pegasus/
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