caskstrength

No, it doesn't "clarify" anything like that. If google doesn't have phone numbers of some subset of the accounts requested... they will just specify so in their response to law enforcement since it is completely legal and google is not currently obligated by law to have phone numbers of all users of Youtube. Sundar isn't going to prison because of that or anything.

Saying that some PM at Google decided decade ago something like "hey guys let's build a database of our user's phone numbers to satisfy some theoretical future dragnet surveillance request from law enforcement and tell our users that it is for their own security" is actually quite ridiculous conspiracy theory if you think about it.

> It's not the cookies that people object to, it's the tracking. Tracking provides no benefits to visitors

Sure it does. Visitors get to use all those great sites and apps without paying for the services directly.

> The article tries to make the point (perhaps fails), that companies do this intentionally to get the "consent" of people against their will, therefor running the tight line of breaking the law without breaking it.

That X button is right there at the top near the tab name. Not sure how a user could be forced against their will into staying on the site presenting them with a cookie banner.

The problem is that most people don't want to pay for any of the internet services they use either.

Someone bought roids from India and didn't get busted by DEA in the process?! The horror!

Why do you need to take down Egyptian pharmacy in the first place?

> Cloudflare again has a pretty hardline stance that "the courts need to come to us and force us to take it down"

"Hardline"? To me it seems like quite reasonable approach as opposed to "we will just take down anything someone on Twitter didn't like".

What do you mean by "directly"? I'm not familiar with Nanos internals, but after skimming their FAQ[0] it seems that Nanos is kind of VM that can't run on bare metal and still requires hypervisor (presumably Linux, unless your CTO plays a lot of golf with MS salespeople):

Nanos is a single process operating system designed to run as a virtual machine and has no support to run on hardware.

[0]: https://nanos.org/faq

I wasn't arguing that Switzerland is not a democracy, just noted the its political system is nowhere as immune to enacting things like "patriot act" as OP suggested.

> Case in point: Patriot ACT. SOPA attempts. Asset Forfeiture. In contrast, see the most unruly place in Europe: Switzerland.

I'm not so sure about that. Swiss public like all westerners seem to turn off their brains and vote for any authoritarian bullshit as soon as someone utter the word "terrorism" in 100km radius around them [0][1]:

"Voters have endorsed a series of measures allowing police to crack down on militant extremists and apply preventive detention methods, giving Switzerland one of the strictest anti-terrorism legislations in Europe ."

"The Swiss government has proposed new legislation aimed at preventing extremist violence and forcing people deemed a threat, including children aged 12 upwards, to be registered with the authorities. House arrest could also be applied to suspects as a last resort in some cases. The idea is to target people who have not yet committed a crime but who are considered to be a risk."

"The experts are concerned that the draft law’s new definition of “terrorist activity” no longer requires the prospect of any crime at all. They fear it may target “legitimate activities of journalists, civil society and political activists”."

[0]: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/controversial-anti-ter...

[1]: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/un-experts-criticise-s...

edit: spelling

First of all bunch of countries in Europe straight up have Starbucks where Americans can order their usual "americano", "sugar with caffeine" and "sugar with caffeine on ice" drinks that you call coffee. Second of all you definitely can get iced coffee in Ukraine (including Lviv), I guess the place you went to just didn't serve it.

I'm not sure I'm following. You are proposing to bring the lunch from home and hide in some conference room the whole day, but why go back to the office at all then?

What hammer? You want US president or supreme court to compel Chrome developers to implement every image format in existence and every JS API proposed by anyone anywhere?

Unless it is some kind of anti-competitive behavior like they intentionally stiffening adoption of standard competing with their proprietary patent-encumbered implementation that they expect to collect royalties for (doesn't seem to be the case), then I don't see the problem.

> This matters way more for video (where you are decoding 30 images per second continuously) than it does for still images.

OTOH video decoding is highly likely to be hardware accelerated on both laptops and smartphones.

> For still images, the main thing that drains your battery is the display, not the image decoding :)

I wonder if it becomes noticeable on image-heavy sites like tumblr, 500px, etc.

> So stuff like pocket, VR or FirefoxOS where needed tries of FF to gain some feature with which you can gain users. Tries they lost but I would say failing to try would have been worse leadership.

You know what else could have gained them new users? Best in class mobile browser supporting full range of FF extensions! Instead they dragged their feet on extension support for years and its performance on Android is still inconsistent for me.

> Oh look, it's my least favorite HN trope...

You don't need to copy/paste this to all your comments. Some people may disagree with you and dismissing them like that will only lead to resentment.

> Can we at least acknowledge that most of the side projects did lead to improvements in the browser and web ecosystem?

Indeed, a lot of the stuff you mentioned _indirectly_ improved some things in Firefox-the-web-browser. Now image how much better it could have been be if all that resources had been invested in the browser quality directly.

> Even though cars increasingly look like laptops on wheels, the actual computer bit is relatively minor and the user interface is mostly the wheel and pedals, not so much the screen.

Ha, it seems like that to you because you are obviously a car person! For someone like me ideal Apple car would be something without any kind of wheels or pedals. Instead, I should be able to crawl drunk into it, mumble "Siri, take me home" and pass out snoring loudly on the back seat. I guess several years ago when it seemed that (true) self-driving cars are just around the corner Apple had something similar in mind.

> I don't think it's the case. If you have truly free energy then transformation of matter in whatever you want it to be becomes a purely technological question.

Some purely technological problems are hard to solve. There is already a market for (very expensive) meat substitutes and they taste like crap. If you are talking about some sci-fi "replicator" tech that will just "synthesize" you and avocado, then I'm not sure how achievable that is in short or medium-term irrespective to energy prices.

> And in any case, having spaceships and no avocado is much better than the inverse.

Much better for whom? OP said they like "nice things". I would also prefer avocados to spaceships since I'm not that interested in space travel without FTL.

Yes, in surveys everyone is always generous and ready to sacrifice their own interests, then price of gas increases some 10-20% and you have protests and riots.

There would be some significant tradeoffs necessary for maintaining a trillion people population on Earth no matter the energy cost. Even if you assume cheap and abundant cold fusion energy source, living in mcmansion and eating avocado toasts with wild salmon is likely out of the question.

> As a human, I have a human-centric mindset. I don’t want to live in the forest with rain filling up my mud floor. I like nice things.

I think the whole discussion is about which amount of humans on this planet would maximize the probability of having nice things for each individual. Certainly it would be hard for you to have nice things when there is only a million humans on Earth, but probably even more so if there is a trillion of them around.

It seems you are confusing USSR with China. There was no "Authoritarian State-Capitalism" in USSR, no free-ish market with some level of competition, no entrepreneurship, no shareholders, no nothing and yet somehow car quality was significantly inferior to Ford, BMW, etc. and TVs were much worse than Sony ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You seem to parrot a take that is popular these days in western internet ("cApiTaliSm bAd!!1"), but let me tell you as someone born in USSR that quality of everything starting from simple things (shoes, etc.) to complex things (cars) was atrocious. The problem with modern software quality is very simple - no one is going to buy stable and polished iPhone app for 500$ when there is bunch of similar apps that may have some bugs and even crash once a week but cost 5$ (or even better cost 0$ and contain ads).

From his linkedin: Senior Director of Product in Gemini, VP WeWork, "Advisor" VSCO, VP of advertising products in Pandora, Product Marketing Manager Google+, Business analyst JPMorgan Chase...

Jesus, that fcking guy is literal definition of failing upwards and instead of hiding it he spends his days SJWing on Twitter? Wonder how its like working with him...

I agree, but that brings us back to my original question: why can't same smart organized crime people unlock my smartphone then? Because Apple/Google give a damn about security and car manufacturers do not.

> Phone thieves will watch over peoples shoulders for them to input a passcode, which isn't that dissimilar to a lot of the replay/signal extension attacks.

You have any reference regarding how prevalent that is? Everyone I know switched to biometrics a decade ago.

> What do we know about computer security and physical access? If I can touch the machine, I can hack and own it.

Can you hack and own my fully patched Pixel phone? Or my GF's iPhone? Sure, sophisticated state-sponsored actors can sometimes do it by burning several million dollars worth of 0days in the process, but some two-digit IQ riff-raffs? Probably not so much.

EDIT: just to be clear - by "two-digit IQ riff-raff" I meant OP's neighborhood car thieves, not you :)

With several millions of dollars from selling your house? Those Cali homeless are apparently quite rich...

> Also I only buy products second hand

I would assume that popularity of second had Apple products increases their resale value and indirectly benefits Apple since people consider their products to be a better investment and buy more of them.

> I don't know what the catalyst for this was, but a lot of 20 years olds and younger seem to use the word hacked so casually.

It is a mechanism of shifting responsibility. If your password is "1234" and you gave it away to a totally legit MS support center employee that called you recently because MS has detected that your iPhone has a virus, then it is on you. But if North Korean hackers compromised your watch via elaborate hacking campaign to mine bitcoin on it, then it is "not your fault".