I think for my first Android software project I'm going to come up with a text message like program that uses your data plan. I could make a killing on something like that if it took off. Although I'll probably get my ass sued off by patent trolls so I may not bother.
Right after you build your time machine to go back in time 4 years before the 100+ other people already made apps that do just that for Android / iOS.
Yeah, but he'll still have a niche, in the 45 minutes between when his app hits the Market and when the process server brings the patent lawsuit papers.
Your point is well-constructed... but it also shows that you have a bias towards content over presentation.
The fact that it's all one long paragraph, is missing occasional letters, and may have small grammatical errors is absolutely irrelevant to the point that you are making. You used concrete examples and came to a logical conclusion.
But the rest of the world is biased toward presentation over content. It's sad, sure... but it's been that way since the Eternal September, and it's not going to change. In fact, the short-attention-span web is hurtling forward 140 characters at a time, thanks to look-a-birdy sites like Twitter and Facebook.
And in that web, you have to know what browser your visitor is using, so that you can give them the brain candy they want before they lose interest and look, a birdy.
The cell phone companies are way ahead of the curve on this one. They've been working on ways to screw us over for years now... and the more you know about making the sausage (from sites like HoFo), the more you know how bad you're getting it. Especially in the US.
Just a few days ago, I got a text message from T-Mobile saying, "Texas Recovery Fee now included on monthly bill." Oh for crying out loud. Does the grocery store charge me a "Municipal Services Recovery Fee" to get back the cost of their food service license? Even the tire store doesn't charge the "tire disposal fee" if I tell them to load 'em up in the back seat. I'd drop 'em in a minute if it weren't for two things: 1) Everyone else is just as bad or worse, and 2) T-Mo makes it easy and *cheaper* to stay *out* of a contract, which actually makes me *more* likely to stay.
A society where we try to eliminate 100% of the wrongness-- I mean honestly TRY-- is a horrible society. We have to accept some loss; at a level we must take some serious steps to curb that loss, but below that we have to accept it as a price of living in a pleasant, civilized society with something we like to call "freedom." Those of us who are upstanding citizens are essential to maintaining this "freedom," and even those of us that aren't but only occasionally lean across the ethical barriers we normally respect are keeping the system healthy by not building our house over on that side or making regular visits.
Agreed. That's why I'd rather "the authorities" focus on the actual bad guys, selling counterfeit merchandise, than on a bunch of college students who will some day want to get paid themselves.
In reply to the increasing number of posts that claim I'm a tool for linking "piracy" with "drug running" -- you haven't *been* to an inner-city flea market, have you? But I can see his point... the maf-IAA will make that linkage without the caveat, and extort a few thousand bucks from some suburban kid with a lot of bandwidth.
So... this prevents someone copying a BD disk with a VCR? Or a TV capture card?
I'm actually confused here. Do people actually copy digital media this way any more? What does this prevent?
The only experience I've had with actual "piracy" is from my kids' friends, who don't know or care about "digital rights" or their "management". I'm very picky -- I obtained every movie and.mp3 file I have legally, because as a content generator (computer programmer) I kinda like getting paid. My kids' friends... not so much.
There was one particularly memorable experience, when my daughter's friend brought over her DVD of the "Freaky Friday" remake... the weekend after it opened in theaters. Her mom got it at the local flea market.
It was an obvious bootleg, and darn near unwatchable (even if you liked the movie). It really did look like it was the result of a guy with a cheap digital camcorder set up in the back of a movie theater, with scratchy sound patched in. It wasn't HD quality... heck, it wasn't even VHS-on-the-car-dashboard quality. But the teens thought it was great.
That's the sort of "piracy" I'd like to see the maf-IAA focusing on, because it has actual consequences for real people. Those bootleg DVDs, their little brothers the bootleg CDs, their cousins the bootleg shoes, and their close friends the stolen goods, fund the same underground economy that supports drug running and other nasty social ills.
Applying strongarm tactics there would be good for society... but probably wouldn't generate as much profit as shaking down college kids.
So eight out of 10 browsers running the test failed it? That's not terribly surprising, since I have to install a plugin to run the test.
I don't know Qualys from Quantas, so I'm highly unlikely to install their plugin just to find out whether my browser has vulnerabilities. In fact, I'm not terribly likely to install any plugins at all (though I'm enjoying Ghostery immensely).
Now, let's assume for a moment that I'm the type to install any plugin that asks nicely and looks shiny. Gee, is it any surprise that Qualys' plugin isn't the first one I've accepted? And is it any surprise that I've got other issues?
This test suffers from a terrible self-selection bias. Those most likely to take the "test" are the ones most likely to fail it.
As the user/owner of a non-self aware device, it should obey me, even if my intention is to use it to destroy itself, or others.
The problem is that this is the situation we already have. Our machines obey us, even if we have been socially engineered to instruct our machines to perform tasks that are malicious. A zombie PC damages itself, its owner, other machines, and their owners.
This application of the mythical "Three Laws" seems designed to protect us from ourselves.
Now, this is going to annoy the living crap out of me, and I will definitely want to find a way to disable the directives. Especially that Fourth Directive. Oh, sorry, I keep thinking of John Murphy's Prime Directives:
1. "Serve the public trust" 2. "Protect the innocent" 3. "Uphold the law" 4. (Classified)
Was that what it was? I would have sworn I first read about the remote-controlled dragonfly in a Hardy Boy's novel, in the '70s. But I was just a kid, so it could have easily been some other Boy Genius novel.
Hey, I never suggested that running out of gas in the middle of West Texas in the summer (or winter, or fall or spring for that matter) is a Good Thing, even if you've kidnapped the Gasoline Fairy and thrown her in the trunk for the trip. It's definitely up near the top of "The stupidest things RobertB has ever done."
What OnStar did in that case was rescue me from my stupidity. Which in a strictly Darwinian sense would be bad, I suppose... but from my RobertBinian perspective, not dying of heat stroke and dehydration is indeed a very Good Thing. Chances are, if I never used OnStar again, I'd keep my subscription just because of "that time that they saved my bacon."
Talk to the nice lady from India (or Southern California) who has never seen ice in any amount larger than a water pitcher, and tell her you're kind of lost.
No need to work that hard, just do what I did. Run out of gas in West Texas, say between Childress and Quanah. Make it on a sunny 100-degree-plus Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer. You, too, can have a conversation with OnStar like I did!
Me (sheepish): I ran out of gas. OnStar: We'll send someone right out.
Time passes...
OnStar: Sir, we show you near Childress, Texas, but I don't have any facilities there. What's the nearest larger town? Me: This is West Texas, Ma'm. There are no larger towns.
They ended up sending out the county sheriff with a five-gallon jug of gas.
Can't. The Sun is in the House of Taurus right now. Bad time for reading pertinent information. Sorry.
Don't be ignorant. The sun is in Aquarius right now, which makes it a great time to find a source of liquid entertainment. I'll take mine in the form of a Tequila Sunrise, please.
I know the cell phone companies (including Apple in this overgeneralization) are a bunch of greedy so-and-so's, but a quick perusal of the stories at (The Customer Is) NotAlwaysRight.com will show why the Water Damage excuse is rather valid.
Me: "Thats right, but there are conditions, one being that the phone cant have any liquid or physical damage. I need to check for that."
Customer: "Fine, here."
(When I open up the phone, it stinks of alcohol.)
Me: "Sorry, this smells like it has alcohol on it."
Customer: "Oh, well, I dropped it in the sink and I know you wont fix it if it has water damage, but I didnt have any ethylated spirits, so I soaked it in vodka for 2 days to dry it out."
(Fair warning, though... My Ghostery plug-in shows a whopping 18 web-watchers on that site. No wonder it won't come up on my phone. Or maybe it's the water damage.)
I was on the site for a while. It was always slightly clunky, but I'd prefer a free, one-man labor of love to a buy-in site that basically tries to promise sex for money. It was particularly helpful in helping me discover that I wasn't as bad as most of the creeps out there... and conversely, creepiness doesn't belong exclusively to those of the male persuasion. That was good to know -- it helped me realize that I need to be picky. (And my pickiness was rewarded many times over when I found my fiancee. In my Sunday School class).
But on the tech side, it irritated the living crap outta me that POF would send me a weekly e-mail with my password IN PLAIN TEXT. Every week, just as a reminder of how easy it would be to log in. Yeah, easy for *anyone* to log in as me and, if I were foolish enough to put important information on POF, to mess with my life. And, of course, if I were foolish enough to use that password for my bank account... well, I think anyone on this site knows the rest.
So I'm not at all surprised that someone found a way to hack POF. Sending a password in plaintext is bad, but not uncommon. Heck, T-Mobile does it. But sending it every week, unsolicited? I'm sorry to be rude, but that's just stupid.
I know the comments so far follow the easy pattern -- either "what could possibly go wrong, lol" and "doesn't evolution kinda favor *longer* lives?" And I'm not entirely comfortable with human populations being used as guinea pigs for disease research -- cf. Tuskeegee et. al.
But Dengue Fever is some serious stuff. It's called "break-bone fever" for a reason -- the muscle and joint pain is debilitating, and lasts for weeks or months. It's one of those things that keeps poor communities impoverished -- each person infected requires care-giving, taking two or three healthy people out of the economy for every one infected.
There's no vaccine, and nothing on the way until 2015 at least -- like many tropical diseases, there's more money to be made from lengthening a rich white guy's m@nh00d than there is in lengthening a poor brown woman's life.
So as leery as I am of making random modifications to the DNA of an uncontrollable pest... I can at least understand the motivation.
Awesome idea, and I'd love for a minefield in the spring to look like beautiful-but-deadly Warhol painting.
But I really don't like one aspect of the plants that my tax dollars are paying for. From TFA:
Homeland Security agents are interested in adaptations so that only agents using infrared technology could see plant color changes, Bauer said.
If the plants are going to detect things that blow up, wouldn't it be a Good Thing for us average citizens to be able to use them? Allowing civilians to become projectile-absorbing materials is something terrorists do... not letting us know that we're walking past a dangerous area seems hardly better.
Oh, but the true purpose becomes clear:
Another possibility: Police could use the plants to enforce drug prohibitions, Bauer said. "Such sentinels," he said, "could be very inexpensive."
They're NOT developing this in order to make us safer. There are very few landmines on US soil, after all (though Civil War battlefields might resemble a game of Pac-Man). They're just trying to find a cheap way to put more potheads in prison, so they can learn how to be real criminals. (Damned if I can figure out how that makes me more secure... guess I should just let Big Brother do my thinking for me.)
It didn't happen in my case, but my attorney posted on her own Facebook about using Facebook in a divorce case. I don't recall the details, but I think the ex-wife needed to prove that her ex-husband was not deserving of joint custody with the kids. His Facebook posts went a long ways towards helping her case -- they were full of rants about "that bitch", and pictures of him and his new girlfriend in non-family-friendly situations. The judge was not pleased with the ex-husband -- and getting dressed up and talking purty in court doesn't mean a lot when you're known to be a thug IRL.
Obviously, the dangers of hacking a FB to make someone look bad are real, and judges probably don't know a lot about IP address tracing (even if it is something FB does, which I don't know). But for most of the family law cases out there, where it often boils down to he said vs. she said, Facebook is a dream for the good guy's (or gal's) lawyer. Not so much for the other side.
I tried to look up information on the Ouachita National Forest last year, and was warned by Google Chrome that the site was a potential malware host, with parts of the site coming from a.cn domain. I didn't push forward to the site to find out exactly what part of a.gov site would require.cn content.
It looks like they've fixed it now, though I'm really not sure... this sensible URL expands to a hundred character monstrosity that's just begging for a reverse-engineering attack.
From TFwA: Curiously, the duration of the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) coincides very closely with the reign of King Louis XIV of France (1643-1715), known as the Sun King.
The conclusion is obvious. It's France's fault! Now, pass me a mess of those Freedom Fries.
That's... awesome. You don't have to know the players to recognize a good old-fashioned troll-and-flame war, 1980s style. Boil it down, and you've got a typical bash.org conversation. I'll add that to the stories I tell my kids about how things haven't *really* changed since character-based-display days.
The other one is how I was doing tech support via direct modem dialup to someone's PC in Helsinki, using "Carbon Copy"... while fixing the DOS problems, the (mostly non-technical) lady on the other end was flirting mightily, 20 years before online chat became part of society.
There is a whole industry dedicated to trading on familiar names to sell new (and completely unrelated) ventures. Why waste years building credibility when you can buy it?
IOW, if its not the same BYTE, its not the same BYTE. Does anyone really care about the "brand" so much that they are excited to see it back in use regardless of what that use is?
Completely agree. BYTE was a pioneer, something unique, a computer magazine back when computers were an oddity, not ubiquitous.
BYTE had its time. Like all of us, it lived and then died. The arrival of some gadget-review "Zombie BYTE" should be an occasion for sorrow, not celebration.
Slashdot Mirror
I went straight to the Market to download the browser for my Android. Fired it up... now I'm stuck at "Request sent. Waiting for response..."
I suspect that every other T-Mobile Android user on Slashdot is doing the same, and the poor guy's SMS gateway is now a smoldering heap of slag.
Interestingly, the Market reported that the download count was "10+". Obviously, there's some latency there...
It's also explicitly noted in the app's Options:
Confirm HTTPS Requests (checked by default)
Prompt for confirmation before sending HTTPS requests (recommended as HTTPS requests sent through Smozzy are not secure)
So I guess you want to forget about any good parties you went to?
I've always heard that the best parties ARE the ones you can't quite remember clearly...
Yeah, but he'll still have a niche, in the 45 minutes between when his app hits the Market and when the process server brings the patent lawsuit papers.
Your point is well-constructed... but it also shows that you have a bias towards content over presentation.
The fact that it's all one long paragraph, is missing occasional letters, and may have small grammatical errors is absolutely irrelevant to the point that you are making. You used concrete examples and came to a logical conclusion.
But the rest of the world is biased toward presentation over content. It's sad, sure... but it's been that way since the Eternal September, and it's not going to change. In fact, the short-attention-span web is hurtling forward 140 characters at a time, thanks to look-a-birdy sites like Twitter and Facebook.
And in that web, you have to know what browser your visitor is using, so that you can give them the brain candy they want before they lose interest and look, a birdy.
The cell phone companies are way ahead of the curve on this one. They've been working on ways to screw us over for years now... and the more you know about making the sausage (from sites like HoFo), the more you know how bad you're getting it. Especially in the US.
Just a few days ago, I got a text message from T-Mobile saying, "Texas Recovery Fee now included on monthly bill." Oh for crying out loud. Does the grocery store charge me a "Municipal Services Recovery Fee" to get back the cost of their food service license? Even the tire store doesn't charge the "tire disposal fee" if I tell them to load 'em up in the back seat. I'd drop 'em in a minute if it weren't for two things: 1) Everyone else is just as bad or worse, and 2) T-Mo makes it easy and *cheaper* to stay *out* of a contract, which actually makes me *more* likely to stay.
A society where we try to eliminate 100% of the wrongness-- I mean honestly TRY-- is a horrible society. We have to accept some loss; at a level we must take some serious steps to curb that loss, but below that we have to accept it as a price of living in a pleasant, civilized society with something we like to call "freedom." Those of us who are upstanding citizens are essential to maintaining this "freedom," and even those of us that aren't but only occasionally lean across the ethical barriers we normally respect are keeping the system healthy by not building our house over on that side or making regular visits.
Agreed. That's why I'd rather "the authorities" focus on the actual bad guys, selling counterfeit merchandise, than on a bunch of college students who will some day want to get paid themselves.
In reply to the increasing number of posts that claim I'm a tool for linking "piracy" with "drug running" -- you haven't *been* to an inner-city flea market, have you? But I can see his point... the maf-IAA will make that linkage without the caveat, and extort a few thousand bucks from some suburban kid with a lot of bandwidth.
So... this prevents someone copying a BD disk with a VCR? Or a TV capture card?
I'm actually confused here. Do people actually copy digital media this way any more? What does this prevent?
The only experience I've had with actual "piracy" is from my kids' friends, who don't know or care about "digital rights" or their "management". I'm very picky -- I obtained every movie and .mp3 file I have legally, because as a content generator (computer programmer) I kinda like getting paid. My kids' friends... not so much.
There was one particularly memorable experience, when my daughter's friend brought over her DVD of the "Freaky Friday" remake... the weekend after it opened in theaters. Her mom got it at the local flea market.
It was an obvious bootleg, and darn near unwatchable (even if you liked the movie). It really did look like it was the result of a guy with a cheap digital camcorder set up in the back of a movie theater, with scratchy sound patched in. It wasn't HD quality... heck, it wasn't even VHS-on-the-car-dashboard quality. But the teens thought it was great.
That's the sort of "piracy" I'd like to see the maf-IAA focusing on, because it has actual consequences for real people. Those bootleg DVDs, their little brothers the bootleg CDs, their cousins the bootleg shoes, and their close friends the stolen goods, fund the same underground economy that supports drug running and other nasty social ills.
Applying strongarm tactics there would be good for society... but probably wouldn't generate as much profit as shaking down college kids.
So eight out of 10 browsers running the test failed it? That's not terribly surprising, since I have to install a plugin to run the test.
I don't know Qualys from Quantas, so I'm highly unlikely to install their plugin just to find out whether my browser has vulnerabilities. In fact, I'm not terribly likely to install any plugins at all (though I'm enjoying Ghostery immensely).
Now, let's assume for a moment that I'm the type to install any plugin that asks nicely and looks shiny. Gee, is it any surprise that Qualys' plugin isn't the first one I've accepted? And is it any surprise that I've got other issues?
This test suffers from a terrible self-selection bias. Those most likely to take the "test" are the ones most likely to fail it.
Sorry, please apply the following to the above:
s/John Murphy/Alex Murphy/g
Though to be fair, the Wikipedia article is unclear about what the middle initial "J" stands for...
As the user/owner of a non-self aware device, it should obey me, even if my intention is to use it to destroy itself, or others.
The problem is that this is the situation we already have. Our machines obey us, even if we have been socially engineered to instruct our machines to perform tasks that are malicious. A zombie PC damages itself, its owner, other machines, and their owners.
This application of the mythical "Three Laws" seems designed to protect us from ourselves.
Now, this is going to annoy the living crap out of me, and I will definitely want to find a way to disable the directives. Especially that Fourth Directive. Oh, sorry, I keep thinking of John Murphy's Prime Directives:
1. "Serve the public trust"
2. "Protect the innocent"
3. "Uphold the law"
4. (Classified)
Was that what it was? I would have sworn I first read about the remote-controlled dragonfly in a Hardy Boy's novel, in the '70s. But I was just a kid, so it could have easily been some other Boy Genius novel.
West Texas?! Childress is almost in Oklahoma...
Yeah... too bad I didn't have a GPS. [/rimshot]
Hey, I never suggested that running out of gas in the middle of West Texas in the summer (or winter, or fall or spring for that matter) is a Good Thing, even if you've kidnapped the Gasoline Fairy and thrown her in the trunk for the trip. It's definitely up near the top of "The stupidest things RobertB has ever done."
What OnStar did in that case was rescue me from my stupidity. Which in a strictly Darwinian sense would be bad, I suppose... but from my RobertBinian perspective, not dying of heat stroke and dehydration is indeed a very Good Thing. Chances are, if I never used OnStar again, I'd keep my subscription just because of "that time that they saved my bacon."
Talk to the nice lady from India (or Southern California) who has never seen ice in any amount larger than a water pitcher, and tell her you're kind of lost.
No need to work that hard, just do what I did. Run out of gas in West Texas, say between Childress and Quanah. Make it on a sunny 100-degree-plus Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer. You, too, can have a conversation with OnStar like I did!
Me (sheepish): I ran out of gas.
OnStar: We'll send someone right out.
Time passes...
OnStar: Sir, we show you near Childress, Texas, but I don't have any facilities there. What's the nearest larger town?
Me: This is West Texas, Ma'm. There are no larger towns.
They ended up sending out the county sheriff with a five-gallon jug of gas.
Don't be ignorant. The sun is in Aquarius right now, which makes it a great time to find a source of liquid entertainment. I'll take mine in the form of a Tequila Sunrise, please.
I know the cell phone companies (including Apple in this overgeneralization) are a bunch of greedy so-and-so's, but a quick perusal of the stories at (The Customer Is) NotAlwaysRight.com will show why the Water Damage excuse is rather valid.
Such as, the borderline fraudulent:
And then, the just stupid:
(Fair warning, though... My Ghostery plug-in shows a whopping 18 web-watchers on that site. No wonder it won't come up on my phone. Or maybe it's the water damage.)
I was on the site for a while. It was always slightly clunky, but I'd prefer a free, one-man labor of love to a buy-in site that basically tries to promise sex for money. It was particularly helpful in helping me discover that I wasn't as bad as most of the creeps out there... and conversely, creepiness doesn't belong exclusively to those of the male persuasion. That was good to know -- it helped me realize that I need to be picky. (And my pickiness was rewarded many times over when I found my fiancee. In my Sunday School class).
But on the tech side, it irritated the living crap outta me that POF would send me a weekly e-mail with my password IN PLAIN TEXT. Every week, just as a reminder of how easy it would be to log in. Yeah, easy for *anyone* to log in as me and, if I were foolish enough to put important information on POF, to mess with my life. And, of course, if I were foolish enough to use that password for my bank account... well, I think anyone on this site knows the rest.
So I'm not at all surprised that someone found a way to hack POF. Sending a password in plaintext is bad, but not uncommon. Heck, T-Mobile does it. But sending it every week, unsolicited? I'm sorry to be rude, but that's just stupid.
I know the comments so far follow the easy pattern -- either "what could possibly go wrong, lol" and "doesn't evolution kinda favor *longer* lives?" And I'm not entirely comfortable with human populations being used as guinea pigs for disease research -- cf. Tuskeegee et. al.
But Dengue Fever is some serious stuff. It's called "break-bone fever" for a reason -- the muscle and joint pain is debilitating, and lasts for weeks or months. It's one of those things that keeps poor communities impoverished -- each person infected requires care-giving, taking two or three healthy people out of the economy for every one infected.
There's no vaccine, and nothing on the way until 2015 at least -- like many tropical diseases, there's more money to be made from lengthening a rich white guy's m@nh00d than there is in lengthening a poor brown woman's life.
So as leery as I am of making random modifications to the DNA of an uncontrollable pest... I can at least understand the motivation.
Awesome idea, and I'd love for a minefield in the spring to look like beautiful-but-deadly Warhol painting.
But I really don't like one aspect of the plants that my tax dollars are paying for. From TFA:
If the plants are going to detect things that blow up, wouldn't it be a Good Thing for us average citizens to be able to use them? Allowing civilians to become projectile-absorbing materials is something terrorists do... not letting us know that we're walking past a dangerous area seems hardly better.
Oh, but the true purpose becomes clear:
They're NOT developing this in order to make us safer. There are very few landmines on US soil, after all (though Civil War battlefields might resemble a game of Pac-Man). They're just trying to find a cheap way to put more potheads in prison, so they can learn how to be real criminals. (Damned if I can figure out how that makes me more secure... guess I should just let Big Brother do my thinking for me.)
It didn't happen in my case, but my attorney posted on her own Facebook about using Facebook in a divorce case. I don't recall the details, but I think the ex-wife needed to prove that her ex-husband was not deserving of joint custody with the kids. His Facebook posts went a long ways towards helping her case -- they were full of rants about "that bitch", and pictures of him and his new girlfriend in non-family-friendly situations. The judge was not pleased with the ex-husband -- and getting dressed up and talking purty in court doesn't mean a lot when you're known to be a thug IRL.
Obviously, the dangers of hacking a FB to make someone look bad are real, and judges probably don't know a lot about IP address tracing (even if it is something FB does, which I don't know). But for most of the family law cases out there, where it often boils down to he said vs. she said, Facebook is a dream for the good guy's (or gal's) lawyer. Not so much for the other side.
I tried to look up information on the Ouachita National Forest last year, and was warned by Google Chrome that the site was a potential malware host, with parts of the site coming from a .cn domain. I didn't push forward to the site to find out exactly what part of a .gov site would require .cn content.
It looks like they've fixed it now, though I'm really not sure... this sensible URL expands to a hundred character monstrosity that's just begging for a reverse-engineering attack.
From TFwA:
Curiously, the duration of the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) coincides very closely with the reign of King Louis XIV of France (1643-1715), known as the Sun King.
The conclusion is obvious. It's France's fault! Now, pass me a mess of those Freedom Fries.
That's... awesome. You don't have to know the players to recognize a good old-fashioned troll-and-flame war, 1980s style. Boil it down, and you've got a typical bash.org conversation. I'll add that to the stories I tell my kids about how things haven't *really* changed since character-based-display days.
The other one is how I was doing tech support via direct modem dialup to someone's PC in Helsinki, using "Carbon Copy"... while fixing the DOS problems, the (mostly non-technical) lady on the other end was flirting mightily, 20 years before online chat became part of society.
There is a whole industry dedicated to trading on familiar names to sell new (and completely unrelated) ventures. Why waste years building credibility when you can buy it?
IOW, if its not the same BYTE, its not the same BYTE. Does anyone really care about the "brand" so much that they are excited to see it back in use regardless of what that use is?
Completely agree. BYTE was a pioneer, something unique, a computer magazine back when computers were an oddity, not ubiquitous.
BYTE had its time. Like all of us, it lived and then died. The arrival of some gadget-review "Zombie BYTE" should be an occasion for sorrow, not celebration.