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Except the reporter wasn't simply reporting what the Google researcher said apparently. At least not originally. Let me play Devil's Advocate for a sec.

Here's the actual complaint Keeper is making, and if you compare some of the text they mention that was contained in the original version of the article to the twice-revised version that's currently posted, there are some differences in the phrasing and verbiage that affect the factual accuracy of the statements being made.

For instance, just look at the URL for the article and you can see that the headline has changed. It currently reads:

For 8 days Windows bundled a password manager with a critical plugin flaw: Plugin for Win 10 version of Keeper had bug allowing sites to steal passwords

which, from what I can tell, seems to be an accurate statement (though Keeper disputes it on a technicality). But note the differences from the original headline:

Microsoft is forcing users to install a critically flawed password manager: Win 10 version of Keeper has a 16-month old bug allowing sites to steal passwords

which was false at the time of publication since the bug has been fixed prior to publication and the new bug wasn't the same as the previous one (though it was very similar). The complaint goes on to list dozens of other statements across the various iterations of the article, each of which they've taken issue with.

That said, let me take my Devil's Advocate cap off and say that I don't really think that the Keeper case has much merit, since most of the "false" statements seem to be minor technicalities at best. As an example, they contend that "Keeper" didn't have any bugs, since it was the Keeper browser extension that was buggy, not the Keeper app itself. They also contend that the buggy extension wasn't "bundled", which is technically correct, but it's installed via the bundled app, so to an end user it would have seemed no different than if it had been bundled. So, yay for being technically correct?

Really, I think they're taking issue with the connotations of the original headline and the bad press it created, and they're just trying to prop up their case with as many slight inaccuracies as they can find, no matter how slight.

You'd be shocked at the number of people *PLEADING* for a 3-6Mb ADSL connection. In houses that *HAD* a 3-6Mb ADSL connection. And, when the ownership of the house turned over, AT&T (and other incumbents) said "Sorry, no more ADSL" (which equals... no internet).

https://arstechnica.com/inform...

I'd survive today with a 3/1 Mb DSL connection. Enough to stream SD. Enough to adequately RDP to a cloud service, which is how I'd do all my development were I so unfortunate. But, for a lot of people, and we're not talking super-rural... we're talking suburban subdivisions here... there isn't even that.

I think you mean, "inconceivable!"

Ajit Pai keeps claiming that this just restores things to the way they were in 2015 before the Open Internet Order of 2015. While that is technically true, it was only prior to 2005 and between 2014-2015 that net neutrality wasn't in place. The statements by Ajit Pai, Ted Cruz, and others that the Internet did fine without regulation is not true.

The FCC first established some net neutrality concepts in 2005 as an "Internet Policy Statement": Net neutrality was not needed before then because ISPs did not start the bad behavior until 2004-2005, for example, Madison River Communications blocking competing VoIP services. The FCC didn't establish regulations until they were needed.

The 2005 "Internet Policy Statement" was pretty basic:
"(1) consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice; (2) consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement; (3) consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network; and (4) consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers."
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...

The FCC then expanded those concepts into the "Open Internet Order of 2010:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Unfortunately, on January 14, 2014, the DC Circuit Court ruled in Verizon Communications Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission that the FCC had no authority to enforce the Open Internet Order on service providers unless they were identified as "common carriers."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

To still be able to regulate ISPs after this court decision, the FCC established the new "Open Internet Order of 2015" that classified ISPs as common carriers:
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...

Broadband investment being down since 2015 is another Ajit Pai flat out lie. Investment was actually at its lowest between 2014 and 2015 when there was no net neutrality rules.

"In December 2015, AT&T’s CEO told investors that the company would 'deploy more fiber' in 2016 than it did in 2015 and that Title II would not impede its future business plans.
In December 2016, Comcast’s chief financial officer admitted to investors that any concerns it had about reclassification were based only on 'the fear of what Title II could have meant, more than what it actually meant.'
That same month, Charter’s CEO told investors, 'Title II, it didn’t really hurt us; it hasn’t hurt us.'"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
https://arstechnica.com/inform...
https://www.wired.com/story/th...

I think you mean, "inconceivable!"

Ajit Pai keeps claiming that this just restores things to the way they were in 2015 before the Open Internet Order of 2015. While that is technically true, it was only prior to 2005 and between 2014-2015 that net neutrality wasn't in place. The statements by Ajit Pai, Ted Cruz, and others that the Internet did fine without regulation is not true.

The FCC first established some net neutrality concepts in 2005 as an "Internet Policy Statement": Net neutrality was not needed before then because ISPs did not start the bad behavior until 2004-2005, for example, Madison River Communications blocking competing VoIP services. The FCC didn't establish regulations until they were needed.

The 2005 "Internet Policy Statement" was pretty basic:
"(1) consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice; (2) consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement; (3) consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network; and (4) consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers."
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...

The FCC then expanded those concepts into the "Open Internet Order of 2010:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Unfortunately, on January 14, 2014, the DC Circuit Court ruled in Verizon Communications Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission that the FCC had no authority to enforce the Open Internet Order on service providers unless they were identified as "common carriers."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

To still be able to regulate ISPs after this court decision, the FCC established the new "Open Internet Order of 2015" that classified ISPs as common carriers:
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...

Broadband investment being down since 2015 is another Ajit Pai flat out lie. Investment was actually at its lowest between 2014 and 2015 when there was no net neutrality rules.

"In December 2015, AT&T’s CEO told investors that the company would 'deploy more fiber' in 2016 than it did in 2015 and that Title II would not impede its future business plans.
In December 2016, Comcast’s chief financial officer admitted to investors that any concerns it had about reclassification were based only on 'the fear of what Title II could have meant, more than what it actually meant.'
That same month, Charter’s CEO told investors, 'Title II, it didn’t really hurt us; it hasn’t hurt us.'"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
https://arstechnica.com/inform...
https://www.wired.com/story/th...

These days games are just boilerplate code that connects to the Internet for additional assets and the core gameplay even.

Nope. That's just wrong. The studios tried that, and guess what? OnLive was the broken mess that resulted. Too much lag caused the games to be unplayable. This failure was caused by bandwidth issues, and given the "future" that the FCC and it's owners (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc.) have brought us, it's not about to be tried again anytime soon.

Also, if you were referring to SimCity, guess what? you didn't need an internet connection there either.

About the only game type that you need an internet connection to play is an MMO. But even then, that requirement can be circumvented, assuming you have a private server for the game's client running locally. (Not that you'd really want to do that, given that the main draws for MMOs are interactions between players. Don't believe me? Go run a mangos server to play WoW by yourself.)

Finally, the publishers wouldn't do that anyway without some form of subscription or recurring payment in some shape or form. It costs money to run the servers used by players in that instance. Managing a world within an MMO is easier and cheaper to do computationally, than running every player's client session on top of that. (Or worse, running one completely isolated world per client as would be the requirement for a single player game.) Then you'd have the issue of needing to render the results and encode them into a video stream.... So basicly you'd need to have the computational power and bandwidth to run YouTube, in addition to the combined computational power of what would amount to a game console for every single player, all contained within a physical server farm somewhere, and the cooling power needed to keep it from frying itself to do this. Never mind keeping the hardware up to date to keep pace with developers. And you expect a one time payment of $60.00 per player to be sufficient? HA! A $20.00 monthly fee would be stretching it, never mind that's on top of the ridiculous prices for bandwidth ISPs want to charge for. And before you say: "Well people won't be paying for individual games anymore..." You do know what other media format did that don't you? What was the result of that move? Oh yeah, they release the shittest crap they can put together on a minimal budget, then claim it's the next great thing, and people hate it, because it's the same unimaginative crap as before just with a different coat of paint on it.

Can't wait for the next issue of Call of Paint Job! /sarcasm

So, it makes no sense these days to crack games or videos anymore.

Go tell that to the guys who cracked Denuvo on a repeated basis.

Why should we trust Netflix?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
I remember the French speaking ones trying before and when they closed the news sites down the publishers saw sharp decline in news.

While we dont know fully what the fcc will do, they are looking to prevent states from forming their own rules. I dont think that them scapping the rules will give any local governments more power to regulate the ISP's. https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

You're technically true on all points, but you're missing some details:

The peering provider had upgraded to switch toward comcast with a higher bandwidth network card and asked comcast to do the same to their switch.

This, by itself, was not newsworthy because this is what they had done in the past. What was different was that Comcast refused (source 1, source 2).

Also of note is that Netflix tried to get ISPs to join their Open Connect program, where Netflix would install servers within Comcast's own network (at no cost to Comcast) so the switches wouldn't need to handle the traffic, but Comcast refused (source 1, source 2).

Netflix was trying to deal with its growing data usage as inexpensively as possible. Without the above details, though, it looks like they were trying to do so at Comcast's expense. IMO Comcast was in the wrong here because Comcast's customers were the ones paying for the network/data, but again, that's just my opinion.

They're not becoming a CABLE company, they're becoming a company which provides video. HUGE difference.

Same difference.

According to this story, T-Mobile is planning to acquire a company called Layer 3 which currently offers TV service in a few markets. Their prices and programming are pretty much the same as what you get from your local cable TV company.

Ultimately this is nothing more than "everything you hate about cable TV but done over the Internet". It's meaningless bullshit that is going nowhere. T-Mobile must have some money that it needs to waste.

We had court rulings that permitted ISPs to block BitTorrent (see the results of Comcast v. FCC)

Of course, Comcast had already stopped blocking BitTorrent about two years before that ruling, due at least in part to a class-action lawsuit filed in the same general timeframe as the FCC investigation. And who knows what the FTC would have done had Comcast not folded.

It would be awesome if people would open their eyes a bit to the overall system of checks and balances we have in this country and not just declare the only two options to be a state-controlled Internet or the wild wild west.

Michael Powell, former FCC Chairman and now current president and CEO of National Cable & Telecommunications Association, claims we shouldn't be concerned at all by the current FCC Chairman's plan to completely abolish all regulatory oversight of the Internet. In other words, fox claims hen house perfectly safe under his supervision.

As to Michael Powell clairvoyance, remember when he claimed there would be more choice once the 1996 Telecommunication act line sharing provisions were repealed? That certainly worked out well for the ILECs increased profits, err "investments".

Micheal Powell has surely become an inspiration for the current chairmain Ajit Pai. I can only imagine how much he is already salivating over his future "Pai Day" once he leaves the public sector and the Washington revolving door richly rewards him for his loyal service.

You may have also got them easily replaced due to class action settlements and known production batch defects. They shipped me an ipod nano years after the one I got for an ADSL promotion fell 2ft or less onto tile and cracked the screen on day fucking one of having it. They refused to replace it since it was 3 weeks outside a known defect window and was deemed to be dropped and not covered. https://www.geek.com/apple/ipo... https://arstechnica.com/uncate... Nothing I have ever owned before or after this cracked so easily and I was pissed. It was clearly one of the defects. So they didn't replace the $350 defective lcd at the time, but like 5 years later I get a replacement as a result of a class action settlement because the batteries were defective. https://gizmodo.com/5858916/ap... Fuck Apple. Deny all problems until customers band together and push back against Apple denying clear production failures. In the 2000's, I had to get my aunts iMac repaired due to the defective capacitors. They were leaking like crazy. Apple wanted $1100 to replace the motherboard. I ranted about how my cousin has bought Apple shit since the 80's and Apple care when it was available and it was like 2 months out of Applecare coverage. Eventually, after 45 minutes of pleading, they did the one time exception since they bought Apple care a number of times. I believe if there was proper disclosure, my cousin could have checked the caps during warranty period to get it replaced before all the caps were completely fucked and total NFG.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

Ajit Pai, as many in this administration, is just trying to co-opt the narrative and build some alternate reality that agrees with his own agenda. It's just sad that some people still listens to their garbage.

Acccording to this report,
  https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-million-us-homes-have-only-one-25mbps-internet-provider-or-none-at-all only 20% of houses have access to more than two providers for high speed, with much less than 20% of houses having more than two providers for lower speeds.

A duopoly is hardly what you could call good competition.

A secondary problem is that government agencies (for example, various municipal or local governments) are also being actively blocked from providing any service at all, due to the outcry about it interfering with the free market. Attempts by some local authorities to provide network infrastructure have been blocked with legal action over this matter.

Imagine if the local government was also blocked from providing road services and it was just left to private companies to provide roads to your apartment? How would that work out? Probably ok in the middle of the city, where there might be a couple of companies willing to build roads to the dense population there, but you'd be out of luck in suburbia or rural areas.

So far it hasn't worked out for most places even for wired networks, in that in most areas you only have a choice of a single provider, who is able to gouge for maximum profit and has the ability to effectively block the entry of new-comers by tying access to supposedly common access poles up in red tape, as has been covered in previous Slashdot stories.

The resulting investment that is made by two separate companies to provide separate network physical layer infrastructure would be far better spent providing services over a common physical network.

...companies like comcast are quickly dumping anything on their sites that claimed to offer or in any manner support net neutrality, such as...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

Only 2 decades ago? You are a newbie.

over 2 decades ago. It's like you've forgotten how to read! That could be 20 years and 1 femtosecond, or it could be 50 years, or really anything over 20 years.

News Flash, systemd is not going anywhere.

Time will tell, I suppose. At any rate, as I said previously, I really don't care so long as it doesn't cause problems for me; and it doesn't.

Linux isn't UNIX, and that is a good thing.

Indeed, it is not, but one of its key strengths has always been its (mostly) adherence to the Unix philosophy. By Linus' own admission, Linux was built around Unix.

Then I wanted to download stuff, so I had to write a disk driver, I had to write a file system so I could read the Minix file system in order to be able to write files and read files to upload them. So essentially when you have task-switching, you have a file system, you have device drivers—that's Unix.

Have a great time misunderstanding systemd!

I understand systemd quite well, thanks; well enough that I've got a number of Ubuntu Xenial instances running with no issues, thus why I don't personally have a problem with it. If you recall from a few posts back, I was merely explaining why many others do.

a party who's central plank is laissez faire capitalism

Sadly, its worse than that. They want the government out of the picture as long as profits are rolling in, but as soon as shit goes south they're quite happy to beg for giant bailouts on the back of the taxpayer rather than simply letting failed companies fail as should happen in a laissez faire system.

If we look at ISPs (with all the recent flutter over net neutrality..) Their main argument against NN is that regulations are bad competition will fix it. Yet those same ISPs are continually trying to block competition, frequently by lobbying for you guessed it .. regulations .. that impede if not outright block new competitors.

The FCC won't comply with FOIA. They just ignore it. The only way to get the comments is to subpoena them ...

Depends. Does the FCC have the same management style as Georgia Election officials?

A server and its backups, believed to be key to a pending federal lawsuit filed against Georgia election officials, was thoroughly deleted according to e-mails recently released under a public records request.

The new e-mails, which were sent by the Coalition for Good Governance to Ars, show that Chris Dehner, one of the Information Security staffers, e-mailed his boss, Stephen Gay, to say that the two backup servers had been "degaussed three times."

But I don't think an unregulated internet is going to go very well.

The Internet worked well for decades without net neutrality.

There's no competition in many areas

94% of US census blocks have more than one residential fixed provider, 75% have three or more providers. Many rural areas also have various forms of wireless. If you need good Internet service, don't move to a backwards, remote part of the country. It's not the job of the federal government to ensure that every part of the country has all the infrastructure you deem necessary. Heck, nearly 10% of US households have no sewer service; are you going to legislate access to sewage treatment next?

And a lot of the local monopolies are due to government regulations in the first place; the way to fix that is to eliminate those regulations. Many of those exist at the local level, so if residents of Hicksville want more Internet competition, it's for them to change their laws restricting it.

Furthermore, net neutrality decreases competition in the ISP market because it leaves price as the only differentiating factor, and that's winner-take-all.

And make no mistake about it: the primary effect of net neutrality will be to perpetuate the monopolies Google, Facebook, Netflix, and YouTube are creating, because their business models crucially depend on it.

The entire net neutrality debate is absurd. It's the kind of ignorant, self-serving stupidity wealthy techies come up with again and again and that uses the poor and the underserved as little pawns in political games. The people arguing for net neturality couldn't care less about households with only one ISP; what they care about is the big corporations they work for and being able to binge on streaming video while making others pay for it.

https://arstechnica.com/gadget...

Where do you live that you have 13 different ISPs? For most people, they have one or two ISPs to choose from. A quick Google search located this report that, at 25Mbps (the current definition of broadband), 30% have no providers, 48% have only one provider, and 19% had 2 providers. Only 3% had 3 or more providers. That means that nearly a third of people in the US don't have broadband and two thirds have only 1 or 2 providers. If you have 13 different ISPs, you're very lucky, but you're also a huge exception to the general rule.

This is the problem with floating definitions of broadband. When you increase that floating definition to 50Mbps, how do those new lower stats serve to prove your point?

What zip code do you live in sir, so we can research your claim of only 1 provider with 25Mbps? I suspect your claim will be false however I will keep an open mind.

Think of the funding within the US gov and mil for that CPU whine and just the right gif no bid contract.
The spying that could be done.

Make a staff member to load the special gif movie onto their air gapped network in some other nation.
That gif could cause just the right CPU whine to transmit data to the waiting collection microphone.
Years of gif study to create a gif for the most common cpu's. The AV would be looking at changes to the network and OS.
The resulting CPU whine would not be seen as an intrusion attempt.
Each frame of a long gif movie could make the cpu transmit different sounds and data out but that would need a lot more study.
"New air-gap jumper covertly transmits data in hard-drive sounds"
https://arstechnica.com/inform... but with a lot of gif's and the cpu.

Furthermore I have a dim view to say the least of people like you who tell others to 'give up and give in' to having their privacy and their lives invaded by shitty corporations and shitty governments who want to stick their little brown noses in people's private business

Nobody has to tell anybody else to 'give up and give in'. The listening device on my phone will records your conversations just fine.

Privacy is still a Thing, it's worth protecting and fighting for, and it's criminal so far as I'm concerned to tell people otherwise.

People have always traded for convenience. We traded away our community for a semblance of privacy. Originally privacy was never a thing. When people lived in small bands and villages you knew everyone's business. Privacy and the expectation of it briefly became a thing when society got spread out enough with enough people that it wasn't worth it given the technological limitations. Now those limits are going away and privacy is going away again. This time the town gossips are news agencies with agendas and corporations operating without morals or only ethics of blind profit.

I'll look down my nose at you and everyone like you, but do NOT go around telling people to be like you.

You can choose to not do business with or permit access to people who carry a 'smart' device of any kind. But in the first world that means limited yourself. Depending on the market you will not doing business with a lot of people. They will simply find someone with your skills but who doesn't care about cellphone surveillance (cell-veillance?).

They will look down their noses at you and wonder 'what bad things have you done that you must hide?' You become the 'rude weirdo' that asks people to put their phones in radio-bags before hanging out with you at lunch.

But if you want a return to that brief period of personal privacy you'll have to start a cultural and legal revolution. Eventually all new "private" buildings with come with these fixed smart hubs. First to provide 911 assistance or as a selling point for a luxury home. Then as part of parole terms for the poor criminals. Like those who don't double-plus-good-think in our brave new world of corporate group-think.

Where do you live that you have 13 different ISPs? For most people, they have one or two ISPs to choose from. A quick Google search located this report that, at 25Mbps (the current definition of broadband), 30% have no providers, 48% have only one provider, and 19% had 2 providers. Only 3% had 3 or more providers. That means that nearly a third of people in the US don't have broadband and two thirds have only 1 or 2 providers. If you have 13 different ISPs, you're very lucky, but you're also a huge exception to the general rule.

So this SpaceX idea with the low earth orbit satellites may not be such a bad one then ? https://arstechnica.com/inform...

I've been a strong proponent of FCC-enforced NN. However, this article does raise some really good counter points. Pai and crew keep saying that the market should decide, and ignore the fact that there's absolutely no competition for the vast majority of the nation (only one broadband provider in my entire state, for example). The EFF article talks about how fostering competition is really the solution, if it could somehow be done. Here's something that was done in a small town where I used to live that really could make a huge difference.
If you don't feel like clicking on the link, the short story is that there's a municipal fiber network, but they actually don't act as an ISP. They are just a last-leg service and you select from a range of ISPs that have run a service to the town's central hub (which greatly lowers the barrier to entry for an ISP). Some are calling it new and novel, but it sounds to me like the Internet of the 90s, where you pay your phone company for the line and you pay AOL or some such to act as your ISP. Then the phone companies bought out the ISPs and that's how we ended up with today's mess. I vote for switching back to the 90's model like my old town did.

That would be the ideal situation yes; however, the government has granted our current ISPs a monopoly in most markets of the USA. We cannot legally do your example in most areas because of those previous agreements. This is why net neutrality must exist in its current form. The government took away true competition when it made those agreements, because of that we need the regulation so consumers can't be screwed by the monopolies the government allowed to happen.

Pai and crew keep saying that the market should decide, and ignore the fact that there's absolutely no competition for the vast majority of the nation (only one broadband provider in my entire state, for example).

They are absolutely not ignoring it -- in fact, they've already addressed the problem by re-defining one provider as "competition"!
https://arstechnica.com/inform...

I've been a strong proponent of FCC-enforced NN. However, this article does raise some really good counter points. Pai and crew keep saying that the market should decide, and ignore the fact that there's absolutely no competition for the vast majority of the nation (only one broadband provider in my entire state, for example). The EFF article talks about how fostering competition is really the solution, if it could somehow be done. Here's something that was done in a small town where I used to live that really could make a huge difference.
If you don't feel like clicking on the link, the short story is that there's a municipal fiber network, but they actually don't act as an ISP. They are just a last-leg service and you select from a range of ISPs that have run a service to the town's central hub (which greatly lowers the barrier to entry for an ISP). Some are calling it new and novel, but it sounds to me like the Internet of the 90s, where you pay your phone company for the line and you pay AOL or some such to act as your ISP. Then the phone companies bought out the ISPs and that's how we ended up with today's mess. I vote for switching back to the 90's model like my old town did.

in 2014 Netflix was paying Comcast because its traffic was being deprioritized
Verizon was slowing down Netflix in 2014 as well and asking for money

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
https://www.extremetech.com/co...

Prior to that, the telecom companies could have done all those things -- but they didn't.

Yes. Yes they did.

Unless you wanted to use facetime over your AT&T data plan.
As far as I can see AT&T did exactly what they say they won't do now, in 2012.

AT&T blocked access to Apple's FaceTime for customers on their unlimited cellular data plan in 2012. Are you being willfully ignorant, or are you the regular kind of stupid?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

You must be the SPESHUL KIND OF STUPID if you think getting the government involved in regulating the internet is going to IMPROVE things.

You really believe that in the ten thousand pages of net neutrality regs AT&T wouldn't be able to find rules to support doing exactly what you don't like?

Here's a hint: GUESS WHOSE LAWYERS WROTE WHAT YOU SO NAIVELY CALL "NET NEUTRALITY".

You got the balls to answer that? I bet you don't.

You have the balls to Google "regulatory capture"? I bet you don't.

Nope, you're going to keep believing the US government is going to IMPROVE things.

Just like they did with airport security and the TSA.

Right?

YOU DO THINK THE US GOVERNMENT MADE AIRPORT SECURITY BETTER WITH THE TSA, DON'T YOU????

What? You DON'T?!?!?!

Then WHY ON GOD'S GOOD FUCKING EARTH DO YOU THINK THAT NET NEUTRALITY WON'T DO TO THE INTERNET WHAT THE TSA HAS DONE TO AIR TRAVEL?!?!????

Oh, that's right. The color of the sky on your planet ain't blue.

AT&T blocked access to Apple's FaceTime for customers on their unlimited cellular data plan in 2012. Are you being willfully ignorant, or are you the regular kind of stupid? https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

I used this link, which is working with hypothetical future numbers

Why would a plug in hybrid that never has the engine touch the drive train (Chevy Volt) have any worse performance than a pure electric?

And why on Earth would you compare a car that uses gasoline engine to power itself?

What's your argument that you couldn't scoop 2/3 the battery out of a long range Tesla, but a small ICE and charger in there and get a short plug in range, but quick full for long rides?

You're providing examples of nobody trying, sure, but where's an example of anyone failing?

Tesla hasn't done it because they want to do all electic, Chevy hasn't done it because they don't focus on performance (they're also trying to hit mid-range price, and have been building their current model for a couple years vs the more performance model 3 barely being in production), BMWs clearly isn't focusing on performance either (I think it's all electrical drive, but I could be wrong), the Prius Prime is a traditional hybrid (both motor and engine can power the drive train) and is super low performance, but clearly focused on efficiency over those other cars.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2...

If only 5 companies control 99% of social media and one of those companies is also the provider of most of the hosting on the Internet, how much will it matter if you can access any site if all the other sites are irrelevant and attract no users. As an example, Gab was basically extorted by Google for not banning more people. https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

It's drifting off topic, but having written a lot of Win32 code and enjoyed how twisted Win32 is this is funny as fuck

https://arstechnica.com/civis/...

Win32 makes me feel like I'm stuck trying to converse with some kind of Janus-faced Gogolian bureaucrat monster while filling out endless government forms consisting mostly of unmarked boxes scattered on the page.

One face of the beast barks terse orders in a fictitious Eastern European language. The other face keeps shouting useless information fragments, like a dementic who reads packaging labels aloud in a futile attempt to remember them for longer than a minute. It sounds like this:

"CARTONSIZE fgd, Cch! PWSZ lb, HUGEBOXDESCRIPTOR plwd... Plexy_gladsz, LONG LONG pssccht! CANE_SUGAR dwFlag PIKEFISH lodz HALT PWZ_MILK_WHITE_WHITER_EX, da, wctombs."

You're clearly a fucking industry shill. Perhaps you forget Comcast getting caught throttling bittorrent? Comcast forcing Netflix to pay for access? Verizon charging extra for privacy? Wheeler stepped in and put the brakes on that bullshit before it got even worse. Now Pai wants to undo that *and more*. No way.

I also remember all those things getting resolved without Governement intervention. And then Wheeler came in and tried to impose More Big Governement where none was required. The fact is, the previous rules were already sufficient and adequate at preventing the kind of shenanigans that were tried over the years, as proved multiple times.

Solved in 2009 :

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

Prior to actual 2015 rules. Funny dat. But I guess I'm just an "industry shill", whatever that means.

So you agree it would totally fuck the internet? THANKS!

The internet IS a utility and should be protected like one (see below).. if that wasn't possible maybe you'd have a point...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

More evidence you're wrong.

Many of the companies screaming the loudest are the biggest advocates of censorship.

If by that, you mean that ISPs are in favor of censorship, you're right. If you're arguing that companies like Google, Netflix, Facebook, etc. are advocates of censorship, you're just chasing shadows and distracting people from the real issues.

Net neutrality isn't about big tech companies getting screwed by the ISPs. Those companies are big enough that any ISP that seriously tried to break them would get customers marching on their headquarters with pitchforks, and lawyers having pleasant conversations in front of a jury. You don't block Netflix or Google or Facebook and get away with it. Believe me, it has been tried. And there are entire industries selling personal VPN services that arose to get around those blocks.

No, net neutrality is not about the big players. Rather, it is about the next YouTube or Facebook or Netflix. Net neutrality means that those smaller players can't get throttled by the ISPs in favor of those big tech companies that can afford to pay their extortion fees. And in spite of the fact that these laws actually hurt the bottom line for those big tech companies, the employees of those companies are so strongly and nearly unanimously in favor of net neutrality that the upper brass are publicly supporting a policy that isn't in their best interest. That's how you know that what Pai et al are doing is screwing the public—when hundreds of thousands of highly skilled people with knowledge of how the technology works almost unanimously think that Pai's new policy is a threat to the freedom of the Internet.

And one of the greatest ironies of the whole issue is that the sort of people who love to throw this XKCD comic out there are the ones shitting themselves the hardest at the idea that ISPs might take their platform away, but when it is GoogleFacebookTwitterYouTube doing it we are invited to a lecture on how we are not entitled to a soapbox.

I'm sorry to say this, but your entire post is basically just a distraction from the actual issues here. You're conflating two completely unrelated situations.

• Censorship by tech companies: okay, because you aren't entitled to a soapbox paid for by somebody else.
• Censorship by ISPs: bad, because you are entitled to be able to use the soapbox that you paid for.

This perhaps needs further explanation, so that you can comprehend why "Weev" is completely and totally full of it.

Tech companies have the right to limit what is done using their servers. They are paying for the cost of keeping those servers on the public Internet, so they can set whatever rules they want to set, within reason. As a user, you are their customer, and you have to abide by their rules. More significantly, there are millions of other ways to make your content available online for a negligible amount of money without using the services of those particular companies. Your servers can be physically located anywhere in the world, which means that no tech company, no matter how big, is capable of completely censoring your right to free speech. Period. Full stop.

By contrast, ISPs do not have the right to block or throttle content from companies that exist on the public Internet. Those other companies are paying for their connection to the public Internet, and are not customers of the ISPs that historically did the throttling in question.

And you cannot reasonably argue that the customers of the ISP have to abide by their rules (throttling their access to sites on the public Internet), because their users have little or no choice in ISPs. Unfortunately, in the United States, ISPs are usually a monopoly at this point, with one or fewer viable broadband ISPs i

This Ars Technica article was much more informative than the cited sources.

Brines evaporating should have left detectable level of salt deposits which we are not seeing.

That said, if it is sand, we should also be seeing a build-up of these darker sands at the bottom of the slopes which we are not seeing either.

Clearly we are missing something that a visit would resolve.

The good news is much like Charlie Rose gets embarrassed off the national stage, hopefully companies that don't take security seriously will be forced into bankruptcy.

Hoping for some unaccountable process to help users is no substitute for software freedom. Hoping is apparently flatly incapable of addressing purposeful choices to not fix remotely-exploitable problems (whether bugs put there by accident or weakening something on purpose like Microsoft did with the Skype protocol to make it easier to spy on Skype users).

Proprietary software is often malware and there are plenty of instances where the proprietor goes unpunished despite years of anti-user aggression (Apple's iTunes being vulnerable for years allowed spying, Microsoft Windows ignored user privacy settings, Google admitted it tracked user location data even when the tracking setting was turned off). Each of these problems and many more could have been fixed for virtually everyone by sufficiently skilled and motivated users if the software involved were free software, but users were not allowed to inspect the software, improve the software, or distribute improved variants to others.

There are no guarantees of program security so a useful perspective focuses on how users can improve the chances they'll get software that does what they want. Hoping for something better is foolish, passive, and completely unnecessary.

He was there when Uber paid off some hackers with $100k after data breach. Because paying off criminals (or terrorists) never emboldens them to do it again. https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... An awesome company, just awesome.

But the guy they quoted in the article already had a public sector job.

Here is the article cited: https://www.fastcompany.com/40498626/instacart-workers-are-striking-over-wages-reportedly-as-low-as-1-an-hour. There is only one "guy quoted," and the quote is "some shoppers are being paid less than the federal minimum wage, like a Jackson, Miss., worker who put in a 19-hour week in Jackson, Mississippi, that paid out $37.75 (roughly $2/hour)." No mention of a job in the public sector.

Here is the second article cited http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Instacart-workers-plan-Sunday-Monday-strike-12366805.php. Two Instacart workers are quoted. Neither mentions a job in the public sector.

Here is the third article cited, the ars technical article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/some-instacart-workers-to-strike-over-pay-that-can-be-as-low-as-1-per-hour/. Ah-- at last-- Six people were quoted, and three more people's wages were listed (but they weren't quoted directly). ONE of the many people quoted was the guy who said he had a civil service job.

So it's a little disingenuous to say "the" guy they quoted in "the" article.

So. What you meant to say was ONE of the large number of people quoted in the three articles cited also had a full-time job.

Even the humble MicroSDXC card uses 16 stacked dies. And have done since 2014

https://arstechnica.com/gadget...

To boost capacity, SanDisk said in a statement that it had "developed an innovative proprietary technique that allows for 16 memory die to be vertically stacked," and each memory die is "shaved to be thinner than a strand of hair." The new card will be available exclusively through Amazon.com and BestBuy.com initially, and as a Class 10 SD card it offers minimum read and write speeds of 10 megabytes per second. This should be sufficient for recording 1080p video, according to the SD Association's speed ratings.

Are you saying that testosterone and estrogen don't give men and women different benefits?

That's such a weak-ass hand-wavey defense of stupidity. You, Damore and all the others making that argument have completely failed to show what specific benefits apply to the kind of mental work that is relevant to engineering.

Yeah, its easier for men to put on muscle mass. And too much testosterone tends to make people behave like assholes. Neither is of much value in tech.

Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence that gender differences in mathematical ability are due to socialization, not biology. For example, two neighboring villages in india, one with oppressed women, one with empowered women. The former has women who suck at math, while in the later village women are just as good at math as the men.

There will be more litigation and maybe this new ruling will be overturned, or maybe not.

The appellate court ruling is high quality, clear, and logically ties together a lot of the loose ends in software copyright. It will not be overturned, and will guide software copyright for generations to come (that is, although there are still procedural ways it could be overturned, any reasonable judge is likely to be convinced of the solidness of that decision). Future litigation will revolve around what exactly should be filtered out, and what can be abstracted, thus building on the appellate court decision.

The whole truth please. In 2016 a jury found that Google's use of Oracle's (newly deemed) copyrighted APIs is fair use. Final score: greed 0, common sense 1.

Never mind that the "high quality" appellate decision you laud is actually idiocy in the supreme, the structure and sequence of function declarations not deserving any more copyright protection than a list of names and phone numbers does. Now that that stupidity has been effectively neutered by a jury it does not matter whether it stands or falls, but in any case it remains an embarrassment to the rule of common sense.

You said, "Absolutely no one would consider Slashdot a sound source of business advice about technology. No one."

The 12 Slashdot stories to which I linked are summaries that link to many stories at other web sites about Apple not managing correctly. When there are many stories like that, the entire reputation of Apple is lowered.

You also said, "Meanwhile Apple has built $260+ billion in cash on its books."

I don't say I know all the answers. However, it appears to me that Apple has done extraordinarily well for 3 main reasons:

1) The world has realized that mobile phones are extremely helpful in making our lives more efficient.

2) The only big competitors use the Google Android operating system. Those competitors prevent updates to fix vulnerabilities. One story about that: Op-ed: It's time for Google to take responsibility for Android's security updates (May 15, 2017)

In the past at least, anyone who buys an Android phone is, knowingly or not, buying a phone that is not secure, or will eventually be found not to be secure when vulnerabilies are discovered.

Also, Google has arranged that Google Play apps automatically update themselves. That means the app providers can make changes that allow more control, or do other possibly destructive changes, without the mobile phone user being able to know why a phone is operating differently, or even know that it is operating differently.

One of the stories: Fake WhatApp Update for Android Dodges Google Play Vetting Process (Nov. 6, 2017)

3) Steve Jobs built Apple's present world popularity. Steve Jobs was extremely abusive in some ways, but good at making sure that Apple didn't release products with problems. Now that advantage has disappeared, apparently, judging from the 12 Slashdot stories to which I linked.

When you disagree, don't call people "idiots", as you did 2 times. Stay logical. If you know better, show us how you know better.

How can watching a stream be illegal for the consumer?

This lawyer has tips on legal defenses when being sued for downloading something, and "downloading isn't illegal" is not one of them:

https://jux.law/copyright-infr...

Wikipedia says "To an extent, copyright law in some countries permits downloading copyright-protected content for personal, noncommercial use. Examples include Canada and European Union (EU) member states like Poland, and The Netherlands." I think if the US were one, it would have been listed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Here's an Ars Technica piece on the question: https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...