Posts by ratfox

I find the whole thing fascinating. Whether Bitcoin goes even higher, manages to keep its value or crashes back, history is being made. As a social experiment, it's almost unbelievable.

The EU needs to have some way of forcing its institutions to behave. This is ridiculous. From what I understand, there's even a committee that does have the power to remove Battistelli, and they're doing nothing, probably because they want to preserve the independence of the patent office. I guess they're just going to wait until his ten is over...

Thankfully, there's little chance that the next guy will be quite as bad as this one. Knock on wood.

Do they realize that they are outsourcing censorship to private companies? AI-powered censorship, no less. This is going to end well.

The king's clothes

Except everybody knows the king is naked, even himself. Nobody wants to admit they're powerless to fix the situation.

Yeah, sounds academic. In the first place, you don't want the battery drain. And then, this only works for people actually caught by the camera. On my phone, the angle under which the screen can be viewed is much wider than what the camera sees. Very interesting work and all that, but pretty much useless.

What's that about FCC rules aiming to facilitate one touch make ready policies? Does Ajit Pai know about this?

Everything has big effects when on that scale

When Google put a pacman game on their home page, it reportedly cost $120 million in productivity...

Finally

With a bit of luck, it means that the telcos will lose some of the power they had to force crapware on users. Maybe now they'll work harder to provide upgrades... Though to be honest, I haven't bought a telco-controlled phone in ten years, and I doubt I'll ever do it again.

The good thing is that no matter how dominant Windows was in 2003, and though it is still pretty important today, it is far from being as unavoidable as it used to be. MacOsX is a fairly acceptable alternative, and depending on your needs, so are Linux or ChromeOS. So Android will probably not keep its crown forever. And I would argue that Windows was far more dominant in 2003 than Android is now, considering the most famous flagship phone is an iPhone.

In fact, there is pretty much no major app or game which only runs on Android and not on iPhones, while there are even now tons of software, in particular games, that run on Windows and have no MacOsX version.

viewed by a "specially trained representative from our community operations team," to check the photos are actually legit nude snaps

I'm surprised that in this day and age, a major tech company would actually claim it's necessary to have a human in the loop. Surely that's what machine learning is for? Seriously, even without going to machine learning, Google and others have had porn filters for ages, and they're pretty reliable most of the time.

In the very least, I'd suggest a two-tier system: A first check is done with an automated detector, and if the image is not detected as a nude, then the user is asked for permission for an actual human to look at it and check the actual nakedness. This way, most pics can be submitted without anybody having to see them, and Facebook even saves money on the manual work.

I really wonder why these videos have to be so weird. I mean, that videos for children don't need to be high quality and can be churned out at low cost, fine. But why do they need to be disturbing?

The privacy row first arose in 2010, when people realised that Google's then-kinda-new StreetView photo-collection-mobiles were collecting the names, MAC addresses and locations of WiFi access points in homes and businesses.

I might be wrong, but I think that the big problem was not collecting the MAC addresses and locations of WiFi routers. It was that they were also recording whatever data was being sent over the networks.

Google was recording the locations of routers to make it easier for Android phones to find out where they are when they detect the same WiFi network, and this is something relatively uncontroversial which iPhones also do.

But they had no particular reason to record the data sent over the network, they didn't even know what to do with it, and it seems that they recorded it just because why not. That's the part that got them in trouble.

Pity they don't say what type of phone it is. I assume it's an iPhone, but maybe there's other phones that are hard to unlock.

Or maybe they tried both 1234 and 2580, so now they're stumped.

"Splitting not a solution"

First, I'm thinking that there are still price comparison engines in Europe, which unlike FoundEm managed to survive these past years, and some of them are trying the solution offered by Google. FoundEm, however, has no interest whatsoever in Google's solution being successful. They want it to fail, to augment their chances in a future lawsuit based on the EC decision. They're not really an impartial observer.

Second, I might be wrong, but if Google does split off the shopping property and considers it as a separate company, that means they stop doing anything anticompetitive. FoundEm's argument is that it would still be a crap product, but Google is allowed to make a crap product. Like putting ads on any website makes the website worse, but most websites have ads.

I read somewhere that if the EC does not accept Google's solution after six months, they will fine them retroactively €15M per day since September. That would more than double the original fine of €2.4B. I can only assume Google is feeling confident?

The sad thing is that the only reason they went with face ID is that they wanted to have a full-face screen, they didn't manage to integrate the fingerprint sensor within the screen, and they balked at copying from Android the quite convenient fingerprint sensor on the back of the device.

If anybody needs a proof of how much they were willing to compromise to have an full-face screen, you only have to look at the ridiculous notches at the top of the screen. In my opinion, the fact that they went with face ID is a second proof.

I used Perl quite a lot, because at the time that was the simplest thing to read a text file and use regular expressions. I wrote a Perl cgi-bin script that would let you surf the web in Elvish letters, and I can't believe that it's been 16 years since The Fellowship of the Ring.

I've learnt Python since, and I would probably use that instead now. It's more verbose than Perl, but the additional readability more than makes up for it.