Slashdot Mirror

What a freakshow it must be over there. Their corporate culture permits this kind of crap to make it to production:

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

Who is still working at Facebook? The backroom guys who keep those servers running must be mortified to be associated with these bozos.

Once this new monitor is sold to regular consumers, I am sure that Sony will not forget to upload this important patch

.

That also describes Tesla now since they are still maintaining sales even though tax credits have mostly evaporated for the cars they sell.

Well actually it doesn't because now they have a new revenue stream to replace it which is selling carbon credits. I'm all for electric cars when they become viable to replace the broader range of ICE use cases but Tesla customers really are the ultimate suckers! Seriously paying thousands of dollars for a "full self driving" system that doesn't work with no timeline of when it will work and then when that price got dropped those suckers were appeased by being offered the opportunity to be beta testers. Yes that's right, BETA TESTERS for the software that controls your car. Tesla customers are fucking retarded and Tesla knows it:

"I kept saying, here, I'm dumb, take my money"
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/price-cuts-anger-some-tesla-customers-who-preordered-full-self-driving/

"I feel the way Charlie Brown felt every time he tried to kick the football and got it snatched away,"Starr told Ars in a Monday phone interview. "Maybe I'm just a chump. I keep trying to get that football."
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/04/elon-musks-erratic-decision-making-leaves-loyal-tesla-fans-frustrated/

That also describes Tesla now since they are still maintaining sales even though tax credits have mostly evaporated for the cars they sell.

Well actually it doesn't because now they have a new revenue stream to replace it which is selling carbon credits. I'm all for electric cars when they become viable to replace the broader range of ICE use cases but Tesla customers really are the ultimate suckers! Seriously paying thousands of dollars for a "full self driving" system that doesn't work with no timeline of when it will work and then when that price got dropped those suckers were appeased by being offered the opportunity to be beta testers. Yes that's right, BETA TESTERS for the software that controls your car. Tesla customers are fucking retarded and Tesla knows it:

"I kept saying, here, I'm dumb, take my money"
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/price-cuts-anger-some-tesla-customers-who-preordered-full-self-driving/

"I feel the way Charlie Brown felt every time he tried to kick the football and got it snatched away,"Starr told Ars in a Monday phone interview. "Maybe I'm just a chump. I keep trying to get that football."
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/04/elon-musks-erratic-decision-making-leaves-loyal-tesla-fans-frustrated/

We've handed 100% of our children's k-12 performance data over to google, and 100% of our children's web surfing habits to various surveillance companies.

The real rub being that in an effort to appease the think of the children crowd Google has promised not to advertise to the students 'on this device'. The between the lines on this being that the student's profile follows him to any other computer system he signs in on.

Everything about the arrangement of chromebooks (or i-books, or whatever the local flavor may be) in the classroom is a life-long privacy nightmare for an entire generation of Americans, and nobody even seems to care.

One of the biggest most powerful data brokers the world has ever known will now know exactly how well an entire generation scored on every academic test/project/assignment they ever took. This is the tradeoff our public school system has made in our names, in a bid for convenience on the teachers part.

Last year, I tried as hard as I could to gain an exemption for my student against use the school issued chromebooks, we are happy to use our own device, and the entire student facing suite of tools is a web-portal that can be accessed by any device. Nobody had even considered a parent would not want their student to use them, and eventually I was told I can revoke my permission to use the device, which will doom my child to not being able to use IT systems in class at all. It was clear to me in the 3 months I worked this that none of the school officials had even read the user agreement or privacy policy that comes along with these devices.

This year I already knew how unorganized and uninformed my local school was regarding this technology, so I just told my student to tell them he had an exemption on the first day. It stuck. He still carries and charges the chromebook for specific test and such, but he is now in charge of his own device, and is learning the value of his personal data, how to be responsible and safe online, and how to take steps to limit the baked-in surveillance of the modern web. He knows this is a privilege, and he knows any abuse of this arrangement will end it. We got lucky, but my point is that it's still possible to take back control.

At a minimum, these devices should come with mandatory privacy training, and it needs to be clear to the student what data is being archived by what companies.

https://www.eff.org/wp/school-...
https://www.eff.org/document/f...
https://arstechnica.com/inform...
https://appleinsider.com/artic...

The situation is all the way bananas, and nobody seems to care.

Batteries are a huge fraction of the cost of an electric vehicle, and will remain so for the foreseeable future, making them far too expensive for most people to consider.

Not true. Even the pessimists expect EVs to reach price parity in about 5-7 years, and some industry executives expect it to happen much sooner. And that's just the upfront cost. Take into account the lower fuel and maintenance costs for EVs, as well as government incentives, and we already passed the point several years ago where EVs have a lower total cost of ownership in some places.

And no American ones? Yet the Euros are the first to scream about how great they are for the environment and how bad the US is. Looks like they just proved to be hypocrites.

There's Chrysler and Jeep

Chrysler settles in lawsuit over diesel-emissions cheating

More than 100,000 diesel Dodge Rams and Jeep Grand Cherokees will need software updates.

The US Justice Department (DOJ) on Thursday announced a $305 million civil settlement between Fiat Chrysler and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a lawsuit over illegal software found on certain diesel Dodge Ram models and diesel Jeep Grand Cherokee models.

and whether they think they can win in court. In Netflix's case the volume is probably lower ($13/mo vs $60-$80 per game). For some of the bigger offenders it probably comes down to the difficulty of winning. Not that the EU won't do just that. Their consumer watchdogs seem to have some teeth unlike America. But in these cases you go after low hanging fruit first.

Necessary bills for unnecessary outbreaks are being paid by all of us.

https://arstechnica.com/scienc... The true dollar cost of the anti-vaccine movement

So when Bezo's claimed that he was hacked by Saudi Arabia,
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/31...
it was really US NSA operatives that hacked him.. got it....
not sure if it's all that smart to screw with the worlds richest man.

The embrace comes as people are increasingly cutting their cable connections and moving to streaming services for their entertainment needs.

Comcast will just charge you a broadcast fee! It was just over $1.00 when they initiated it in 2014, but it is running about $20.00 per month today. They can raise the fee anytime that they want, and you have to pay it or face an even higher Internet bill.

Living the dream. Looks like Google+ was beyond even his capacity to save.

All of that psychotic ego rambling and you *still* have not answered why you need 14k lines of Pascal to output a simple text file. Care to try again? Or will you finally admit defeat? Note that anything other than providing a simple answer for why you need 14k lines to perform such a simple function is defeat in public whether or not you admit it.

No he will "RUN FORREST RUN" back to his friends at Malwarebytes.

We are walking up the ladder of job complexity due to technology, leaving behind more and more people incapable of educating themselves up for the jobs of the future. There will indeed be a massive and growing class of the unemployed and the unemployable as programmed machines take over the lower level jobs, many of which are the entry level jobs that start one off in work life......A huge percentage of the human population is only suited to lower level manual labor.

Indeed.

Every time an article like this comes up, a bunch of people show up and say, "There will be jobs we haven't even thought of yet, and those people can be retrained to do them." While I'm a pretty creative person, I struggle to come up with a future unskilled job that won't be done by robots and machine learning better and faster than it could be done by humans. Nobody is going to come up with a new job and not throw AI and robotics at it first. Humans won't even be considered for it, and the tasks won't be designed to be done by a human anyway. All the VC money being thrown out right now is going to startups which promise a revolution doing exactly this.

The first hologram world guides aren't going to be humans. It's going to be, "Hey Alexa, where's the strip club?" You're not going to give a valet the keys to your flying car. Dive bars and chain restaurants are going to profit immensely from automated service. Sit down, have your eye scanned, and your preferred meal and beverage are delivered to you and billed to you. All while checking out super realistic titties at the hologram world strip club beamed into your eye.

We are seriously nearing a time where a lot of the stripping, table waiting, cooking, and bartending jobs may be in serious peril. Combine that with what Boston Dynamics is doing, and we've got a lot of people to find jobs for in the near future that don't have the capacity to build skills that can't be replicated by technology.

I think the gig economy is the canary in the coal mine. We're already seeing a lot of people doing a bunch of random part-time jobs because they can't find reliable full-time jobs. At the moment, it's still cheaper to hire them (and not provide benefits, and thus force society to subsidize them) than it is to invest in automation. This won't be true of any new businesses, however. And it's not necessarily going to remain true, especially if we decide that businesses can't pay their employees so little that they need social welfare services to survive.

The proper way to profit from vulnerability research is by shorting the stock of the publicly traded company before publishing your results. The capital gains can be used to fund more research. https://arstechnica.com/inform...

Ars also has an informative story with lots of links. This guy does deserve the sentence he got. If his jail sentence means others will learn not to do horrendous acts that endanger peoples lives then GOOD! No sympathy for this sociopath or psychopath. Don't parents teach kids that video games are not reality?

the large publishers have all stopped the "we esports" part of PR for every new title

Which raises another question: How do Comcast and participating players plan to handle cases where a video game publisher withdraws copyright permission to stream matches of the publisher's game from Comcast?

It appears they had developed a system whose job it was is to inform the pilot if the flight control system was receiving erroneous sensor data. The two recent crashes did not have this safety feature installed. Now as to WHY a system to ensure maximum safety isn't required by regulation rather than being a billable option is beyond me.

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

Already done: https://arstechnica.com/gadget...

i hear this mentioned quite a bit, do you happen to have a citation/link for reference?

(to be clear, it sounds absolutely plausible, and I wouldn't doubt it for a second -- but still curious as to the specifics)

There are plenty of articles about the $1.5 billion in FCC subsidies given to ISPs annually (here's one), but I've never seen anything substantiating the part about "handing it out as bonuses to execs". Not that it might not be true, of course.

Yes, well, Trump attempts to dictate "Thou shalt not purchase from company XYZ". No proof, just an assertion that they are not trustworthy. Because the country caught intercepting Cisco shipments and introducing backdoors into them is soooo trustworthy.

He's being an arrogant ass, continuing the usual foreign policy of the American government. Individuals Americans may be nice, but the US government is full of itself (and has been for decades, nothing to do with the current president).

Well Trump's alternate imaginary facts outweigh your 'theoretical facts'. You must not forget that the man is probably the most stable genius in the known universe ;-)

Yes, well, Trump attempts to dictate "Thou shalt not purchase from company XYZ". No proof, just an assertion that they are not trustworthy. Because the country caught intercepting Cisco shipments and introducing backdoors into them is soooo trustworthy.

He's being an arrogant ass, continuing the usual foreign policy of the American government. Individuals Americans may be nice, but the US government is full of itself (and has been for decades, nothing to do with the current president).

Pai has threatened regulation if they do not implement it voluntarily. https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

I'm sure telecom carriers would welcome local competetion and build out their infrastructure for everyone:

http://www.startribune.com/tel...

https://www.fiercetelecom.com/...

https://www.bizjournals.com/de...

https://arstechnica.com/uncate...

https://www.reddit.com/r/cordc...

There is no provision in the contract (assuming that there is a contract, which in a fact not in evidence) preventing you from NOT allowing Microsoft to do the things they have said they have your permission to do.

The EULA disagrees that you can stop Microsoft from doing whatever the fuck it wants to your machine.

Why is this a problem? Because bandplans change.

Have some links.

Yes, but Trump wants it blocked, too. Blocking a merger like that would have been very much a Democratic Party policy a decade ago. https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

Yeah, it's better to live in the US where...they've had similar laws for years now...shit...

I doubt we'll see another copyright term extension bill in the USA before 2024 for several reasons.

- First, Authors Guild actually opposes it, as authors have realized how keeping things out of the public domain causes authors to have to walk on eggshells to avoid infringing third parties' copyrights.
- Second, the 1998 extension was predicated on harmonizing copyright terms to those of the European Union. In its opinion in Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Supreme Court recognized the possibility of "legislative misbehavior" but allowed the 1998 extension through because of harmonization. But no major developed anglophone market has extended the term further than the EU's life plus 70.
- Third, the US Trade Representative doesn't appear interested in extending the U.S. copyright term. The USMCA treaty, which replaced NAFTA at the end of 2018, extended the Canadian term but did not extend the U.S. term.

I mention 2024 because that's when U.S. copyright in "Steamboat Willie", The House on Pooh Corner, and Ravel's "Bolero" expires under current law.

Facebook is an advertising platform. Left alone they will effectively advertise anti-vaxxer nonsense to the detriment of kids like this.

The trouble with a purely algorithmic news source is that it's going to serve you up more and more of whatever it is you're clicking on. That's because the algorithms aren't really that complex. There's no magic, it's just "People who clicked this video also clicked this video". Without someone stepping in it becomes an endless echo chamber. One that also tends to push the worst ideas up to the surface because extreme, visceral ideas get the most reactions and most clicks.

The problem is that the current ad supported Internet exists to increase engagement. They want to keep you on the page longer, clicking more and seeing more ads. This is a hyperactive version of what happened in the 80s when News shows figured out that fear sells and they all started running terrifying news stories about pedophiles and gang bangers.

My mom saw those and locked me up in my room, never mind that most pedophiles are family members or authority figures like priests and the gang bangers stayed in their own little neck of the wood because if they didn't the cops came round and busted heads. It was all lies, but it had a huge impact on my life when I spent the better half of my teenage years in constant conflict because I wasn't allowed to go anywhere or do anything. It sucked.

And yeah, she was an anti-vaxxer too. Give people like that something to be afraid of and they will. Instead, cut it the fuck out and replace it with reality.

that Uber disabled safety features to make the ride smoother for a Demo to their CEO and then forgot to turn them back on. It was on Ars.

I'm not sure how that effects things, but it probably should have been investigated more.

You make the same mistake of jumping from "ISP" to "cable company". Cable television infrastructure is just one way of delivering Internet services. If you want to talk about monopolies for ISPs, stick to ISPs. Then count the number of ISPs there are and see if "a lot more than one" doesn't put a crimp in the claim that there is any monopoly for ISPs.

No, it doesn't. There are only three real ways of delivering broadband currently:

• Cellular — competition is inherently limited because available spectrum is limited. Therefore, we will never have many more cellular companies than we already have. There is no meaningful competition between them, and they are in the middle of further consolidation, because it turns out even four is more than are practical. Also, unless you just happen to be right next to a tower, LTE service does not even meet the federal minimum limit for being called broadband (25Mb/3Mb). In other words, this might as well not exist.
• Fixed wireless — this only works well in high-density areas, and requires unsightly equipment that is often not allowed to be installed. So again, in most areas, this might as well not exist.
• Cable/fiber/twisted pair wired infrastructure. Of these, twisted pair doesn't have broadband at any meaningful range, which leaves cable and fiber. So you have at most a duopoly, and that's if the phone company thinks there is enough profit to be made by worth running fiber to your neighborhood. Otherwise, you have a monopoly.

As a result, almost 21% of households have exactly one broadband provider, and that's cable TV. And an additional 19% don't have access to any service that meets the minimum criterial for being broadband (source: Ars Technica). It isn't that I'm ignoring other types of ISPs. They just aren't viable outside of dense population centers, which makes them all entirely moot for the purposes of this discussion.

The OP makes the mistake of ignoring that there are NO government-granted monopolies for ISPs. Not a single one. There USED to be "exclusive franchises" for cable television companies, but that was outlawed more than 20 years ago, and any such franchises are long expired. There MAY be exclusive franchises for wireline telephone companies, but that's for the wireline telephone service, not because they are an ISP.

It should be noted that only local-level franchising laws were banned in 1992. State-level franchising laws are still allowed. But still, it doesn't matter, because as I said, even where local governments opened up their towns to multiple cable companies, the result was almost invariably the complete and total failure of any newcomer.

A local government can "require" two cable companies all it wants to,

Actually, it can't. A government cannot force a company to come into a market to compete. It can only get out of the way and allow them to, which happened under federal law a very long time ago. The fact that nobody wants to compete against an existing company isn't a "government-granted monopoly", it is pure economics.

I think you kind of misunderstood that statement. The construct "X can do Y all it wants to, Z" does not actually imply that X has the right to do Y. Rather, it means that even if we assume that X is capable of doing Y and does so, then Z. I guess it's a southern thing.

Tesla’s shit system just murdered another person. Teslas are electric death traps.

But there is a huge difference between China and the USA govts.
In China, when you disagree with the govt, you and your family disappear, cannot travel, don't get a lawyer and often aren't seen for a yr. If you appeal, you get re-sentenced to death.
In the USA, you get a lawyer, can usually fight back, appeal any decision.

A few quick reminders:
Xi is
* a dictator for life
* sends millions of Chinese to "re-education camps"
* no freedom of speech
* no freedom of travel
* China uses tanks against their own people.
* Religious re-education cities with 1M+ people.
* smartphones **must** have govt tracking software
* Your social network posts are tracked by the govt and rated. A poor rating can block rights and travel.
* don't recognize international waters as ruled by world-wide govts
* Currency manipulation
* intellectual property stealer / Hacker of companies and govts world-wide
* Highly selective enforcement for any laws; usually against foreign companies and Chinese companies that cause large number of deaths
* Tibet takeover
* Tienanmen Square; they admit to killing over 1,022 civilians. Other estimates are over 10,000 deaths.
* Check your server logs, most attacks are probably from Chinese IP ranges.
* Their elections are fixed - only approved party members can be on the ballot. So, would you like Bernie or Clinton or Gore or Dukakis?
Like any of those are even a different choice from the others. Well, freakin' terrible vs really, really, bad is a choice, I suppose.
* Police in China behave like thugs. Ok, sometimes that happens in the USA too.
* Taiwan, cough.

Don't forget what China is and how they behave.
---
Cisco and Motorola caught Huawei stealing their intellectual property.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/S...

        Huawei Admits Copying Code From Cisco in Router Software
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
---
        Motorola sues Huawei for trade secret theft
Huawei physically stole parts in 2014 from a testing robot during a
visit to T-Mobile. The robot was used to ensure buttons on phones would last.
---
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/1...
China hacked more than 245 companies and agencies, including US Navy and NASA.
Ref: https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

This happened while The US/China economic espionage pact was in-force beginning in 2016.

The USA isn't perfect, but it isn't China. Not by a long shot. If you refuse to decrypt data at the US border, they keep the data and you can sue to have it returned. Canada, UK, Australia, France, Thailand, and 50 other countries would demand you unlock it at the border without any reasonable cause. It is illegal to refuse, a crime.

trump was right.. we do need '6G' asap.

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

I don't know if you've heard, but NASA is buying a few more Soyuz seats. I've read scuttlebutt that Boeing's previous test of the capsule abort system messed it up enough that they're going to have to scratch it from further testing and use the unmanned demo capsule instead, which could put them a capsule behind for the first manned flight, delaying it while they make another capsule. So it looks like we may be riding with the Russians for a bit longer, even if it isn't every time.

No less than Google has announced that Spectre vulnerabilities are here to stay and cannot be resolved in hardware or software. Researchers presented a new Spectre attack that cannot be defeated. Existing x86 and high-end ARM designs are all vulnerable and will remain broken for any kind of meaningful security.

Google: Software is never going to be able to fix Spectre-type bugs, 2/23/19

If Intel's top CPUs are unfixable, that may be influencing Apple's decision to move to ARM, especially if Apple's chip guys think they can fix those bugs in hardware.

An A13X CPU with decent cooling and high clock rate with multiple neural engines could make a very compelling MacBook Air. Even more so if it was immune to these speculative execution attacks like the various Spectre exploits.

Comcast just started charging me the Broadcast Fee despite the fact that I use an antenna. The only other choice that I had was slower Internet service for an even higher price.

After the first bill comes in, I will contact my State Attorney General. Comcast has already been dragged to court by two other States, and has had to settle. Hopefully, they will be forced to reimburse all customers in my State. If other States join in, perhaps it will help customers across the country (USA).

Donald Trump's gonna roll out 6G!

I tell you, the best wireless. You're gonna get tired of winning this wireless.

first gen 5g phones are gonna suck through battery like crazy. I wouldn't get one until the 5g modem can be integrated and doesn't need to be separate. Probably best to hold off for a year or so to technology mature.

Due to the complexities U.S. Congress has thrown into the copyright legislation, with retroactive term extension, etc.

Though the United States has extended the term of copyright in the past, term extensions do not restore U.S. copyright to works whose copyright has already expired. Anything* published before 1924 is in the public domain. In addition, the Authors Guild opposes the next extension that Disney might beg for and in fact wants the 1998 extension repealed.

* Except sound recordings, which were subject to a patchwork of state copyright laws with a flat expiry in 2067 but are now subject to the CLASSICS Act.

A lot of the flat earthers I've met are really just trolling other people.

Well Flat Earth Conventions and even cruises are a thing, so it's not just trolling. And the folks who attend these things genuinely seem to believe they are doing actual science, while proper peer-reviewed science is considered to be part of some grand conspiracy.

The problem with Youtube, in my experience, is with the recommendation system. I regularly get fringe political, pseudo-science, and conspiracy theory videos showing up as "Recommended for you"; even though they are in no way relevant what I'm watching or searching for.

The summary mentions that the corporate world doesn't understand the OSS norms. Just as likely, in my opinion, the OSS volunteers don't have a good understanding of the corporate participants. We all appreciate OSS volunteers and the wonderful software they create. That said, it should be no surprise to anyone, least of which the person who put the license on the software, that corporations are going to do anything lawful they can to make money. If that means creating terrible patches and not integrating with the flow of the OSS project itself, they may do that. Those engineers at those companies are not the ones profiting in most cases. They are merely being asked to do more with less, as that seems to be the trend. The choice may be to attempt to get changes harmonized with the community or just publish whatever they come up with at the end. I suspect that there's a latent annoyance about this particular thing coming from the OSS volunteers. But, if you have given the company this right in the license (to use the software as long as changes are published), you can't be surprised that they're not doing a good job of helping you merge them into the mainline. They're doing the least they can get away with. To tie it all together, I think it's no coincidence that one of the largest, most successful OSS projects, Linux, was driven by a man who literally had no shame about giving the middle finger to an uncooperative company. (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/linus-torvalds-says-f-k-you-to-nvidia/). He understands the dance, and it's not an easy one. These companies will walk all over you. Let's not accidentally encourage naivety and call it a virtue.

We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.

It's only stupid if you ignore inconvenient things like 'reality'.

We arn't talking about public events where there is a ridiculous number of people concentrated in a tiny area that would completely overload a tower. We're talking about wide-scale disasters like forest fires where the current population is running for their lives.

Why would Verizon need to talk to me directly? If they were actually having bandwidth issues, don't you think they would have gone to the news with that for their defense? I haven't seen one single article where Verizon said, "Yeah, unfortunately we had to limit bandwidth because we lost our towers and the remaining ones became saturated." But this isn't even relevant, as is your "point".

Finally, and this is the single most important point that you seem to be going out of your way to ignore, is that Verizon tried to charge them more money for the privilege of not getting throttled. So the issue was *never* a technical one, and *everything* about Verizon trying to gouge a public service organization during a time of crisis.

Here's even a link for you if you can't be bothered to look yourself: https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

So maybe you should spend less time accusing other people of being stupid and a little more time actually trying to understand the actual situation, hmm?

Well, the journalist has to do that, to get the clicks. The author used to work for the Associated Press and has a master's in journalism from Berkeley. He knows what he's doing and how to do it. Remember the days when journalists were about truth and were on our side?

In some ways we're now entering a golden age for Android roms, with the advent of Project Treble.

All phones shipping with Android 8.0+ are required to support Treble's platform abstraction layer, making life dramatically easier for custom rom bakers, going forward. Older phones benefit too; once their idiosyncratic hardware support is adapted to Treble, they can also expect easier and more stable updates. Generic System Images (GSIs) are now the norm, and will more or less run on any compatible platform.

I no longer remember my password

I'm sorry sir, but perhaps you will remember after 6 months in jail for contempt of court.

No? Well perhaps a year will jog your memory. Or 5.

We can wait.

It's a really good controller hub device, it doesn't solve the outrageous cost of large clickable buttons or mouth-sticks, but it's definitely well thought out with more expansion than you'll probably need.
See:
In the lab with Xbox's new Adaptive Controller, and
Xbox Adaptive Controller is now out -- and we go hand, foot, fingers, and elbows-on