ntauthority

I would agree, to the extent that terminology may matter - it ideally wouldn't.

This scenario OP sketches sounds an awful lot like it can be extrapolated to 'no matter whether I try and fail, or don't try and fail, I'll fail anyway. as such, why even try?' which may indeed match the hopelessness associated with depression more, which may itself trigger more acute anxiety when trying anyway.

Isn't it a bit ironic that a site - or its operator - 'going public' means all the content on said site actually 'goes private'?

The Windows-specific 'vulnerability' is weird. For one, it's part of the uninstaller, which isn't a common scenario, and secondly... C:\Windows\Temp isn't even writable by unprivileged users by default, it's not even readable by unprivileged users by default (on my relatively fresh Windows 11 system, at least).

NFS is a Sun thing. If you consider Sun as the canonical historical Unix, this is still correct.

Sun had a few interesting early views on networking.

With modern x86 or ARM CPUs, you're doing the exact same. The OS you're running on the high-level OS cores being perceived as less unfriendly doesn't change this state about your hardware's monitor OSes (AMD PSP, Intel ME, Qualcomm QHEE/QSEE, other ARM TrustZone, ..) at all.

You can do the same on Windows, though this isn't done for client editions as they're mostly for interactive use - and on Linux you might run into issues the more complex dbus-y GUI bits you use too. There's even kernel hot patching, although it's exclusive to some cloud server editions as they're a known environment compared to desktop systems.

That is, assuming something is even packaged as a .deb for your distro's age in the first place.

Trying to get something written using new, say, C++ runtime libraries shipped as a binary working on even a two year old Linux distro is a struggle in itself, meanwhile on Windows, the VC CRT bundled with VS2022 with C++22 support even runs fine as a bundled portable .dll down to Windows 7 (2009) and probably even before.

Running modern libstdc++ (as a binary, mind you) on an otherwise 2009 distro on the other hand - unlikely. Even more so if you stray out of the GNU libc option, or want to deal with libc++ for some reason (such as cross-platform parity, as it is better behaved on Windows/Mac than libstdc++), or any other edge cases out of the usual /lib, especially for GUI apps or worse, GPU apps.

MSYS2, rather, which often seems to be bundled with a hybrid mingw install, but itself is based on a patchset to the main cygwin DLL and generally is a 'saner cygwin'.

Adding to this historical reasoning, it is to be noted that in traditional Unix, /usr was pretty much the equivalent of /home in Linux systems: the parent directory for user home directories, i.e. 'usr'.

The existence of /usr/bin can probably be explained by the reasoning that, just like nowadays Linux systems often have a really big /home partition, early Unix systems eventually ran out of space for whatever volume would hold /bin, and with 'reinstalling' not remotely as easy an option as it would be these days, storing an extra 'bin' etc. directory in the 'larger partition for user directories' became commonplace.

Thanks, now I know this 'personalized feed' seen in the Google apps on mobile actually has a product name!

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/mobile/go...

Some of the content on there is, however, fairly obvious clickbait, but there's also a super easy (working!) 'not interested' button in there.

There's what I consider the 'hierarchy of legal arguments' when it comes to patched software distribution:

1. Trademark infringement. Easy to prove even in a court, often can get an injunction approved with no further effort.

2. Copyright infringement. Requires some effort to convince a judge that, yes, this is your content, code, or art, and that they did indeed copy and redistribute it, which would cost a few hours of legal professionals' time to draft up in layman's terms, and lead to a few dozens of pages in a court filing. Easier for visual stuff (such as images) than, say, decompiled code, especially as with decompiled code you may even 'accidentally' be violating the patched app's authors' copyright.

3. Anti-circumvention. This is a bit more of a stretch, but if someone doesn't want (or can't afford) a defense, it's easy to spin something in this way. For YT, since there's some obfuscation applied (see the YTDL takedown attempt), one could also easily argue this. Similarly, one could also argue the same if, for example, a video game modification 'works with pirated copies'.

4. 'The far stretch', such as 'runtime patches make a derivative work in memory', some antitrust violations ('their free patches are devaluing our paid subscriptions/microtransactions'), and other 'less' gray-area stuff.

5. Outright challenging the legality of specific types of reverse engineering. This one is tough as it may go the wrong way as well, and this could attract the attention of big financial sponsors (e.g. the EFF) to steer this into 'dangerous precedent'.

Now, this case is of course just referring to a C&D, but a lot of companies only send/distribute C&D letters once they also have a court filing for e.g. an injunction ready to go in parallel, for example if the C&D is explicitly refused.

Even if that's not the case, refusing it may just as well lead to a court case in a few months, based on another 'technicality' somewhere in this hierarchy.

(statement of authority: I've dealt with numerous of these cases in the video game industry, some of them being the accused myself, sometimes involving others telling me their experiences and/or asking for advice other than 'get a lawyer')

One could argue it does, one could also argue it does not. If a company wants a quick takedown of something it feels 'isn't right', having to rely on something like that with limited precedent (and a high risk of setting the wrong precedent for them) is a lot more difficult, so you're more likely to not get C&D'd/sued over such - but if you then do something that is easier to sue over, like trademark infringement or more outright copyright infringement, you're likely getting hit for one of those whenever a company 'disliking you' notices instead of them trying the 'hard' arguments.

Not exactly. They use a different calling convention (for systems where 'this' pointers are normally passed in a special place) from usual C++ classes to match C-ish, and there's a few other restrictions for things (overloads, inheritance) that otherwise differ across C++ ABIs and wouldn't map well to other non-C++ languages.

The C wrappers generated by MIDL are also fairly similar to raw C++, compare (where pUnk is an IUnk *):

    pUnk->Something(&bA);

with...

    IUnk_Something(pUnk, &bA);

which expands to something like this:

    pUnk->lpVtbl->Something(pUnk, &bA);

This feels exactly like why Microsoft (and others) during the 90s started to define a well-defined subset of C, with some fancy IDL stuff, and a C-like ABI where all the C stuff needed could also be generated from the IDL, as standard somewhat-object-oriented interfaces like COM and other DCE RPC-likes.

Of course, the POSIX-likes never adopted this, whereas Microsoft nowadays has some fourth generation of this IDL stuff (WinMD) that they are also slowly porting all the old C API definitions to (see win32metadata, also used for defining stuff like the Win32 package for Rust).

Also, of course, this all has its own issues too, for one COM's definition of reference counting is a bit picky, and there were a lot of advanced 'implicit RPC' features that were also more inherent footguns, but at least it doesn't involve what is ranted about here.. mostly.

On macOS, there's a prominent top banner in 'System Preferences' for 'Apple ID, iCloud, Meida & App Store', where if you click the 'Apple ID' button there, you are then one click away from a button labeled 'Payment & Shipping'.

A similar UI exists on iOS. Android is a little different in that the 'Google' option in Settings is a bit hidden on Google reference devices and OEMs get to customize the main app, too.

This is very much par for the course.

New captcha question: "What is the should of 20?"

It's a little ironic that this application actually does not run on Windows[1] apparently due a bug in a library[2] unfixed since 2018, which is owned and maintained by a $83B publicly-listed company[3], last updated 14 days ago, but unwilling to fix that little cross-platform bug.

[1]: https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84/issues/13

[2]: https://github.com/uber-go/zap/issues/621

[3]: https://github.com/uber-go

> I think the worst part though is the bit about prohibiting future re-downloads for users who bought perpetual licenses in the past. The sort of company that pulls that nonsense is very precisely not the kind of company I expect to provide a good customer experience in a subscription product/service.

IDA never offered redownloads past the end of your 'support period'. As their last renewal email to me said:

> Please check our web site and the protected area for new files. If you find anything interesting or useful, feel free to download it immediately. Once your support period is over, the server will not prepare new download links!

It's interesting to see that 'joining' is apparently a modern-day euphemism for 'murdered by'.

It's a shame that even the underlying compiler tech seems to be proprietary and intended to be commercially licensed once 'finished'. I feel like a lot of creativity (and optimization?) could be possible if tech like this were available to the commons rather than a years-long pre-announcement of a future commercial product.

With Windows being componentized, this is often a lot easier than it used to be - there's official minimal editions like the forgotten Nano Server (or an attempt at remaking it like remin-core: https://github.com/replisys/remin-core), IoT, Factory OS and whatnot, but even adding the legacy GUI subsystem you can get somewhat small when building Windows PE variants like used for the default setup/recovery images.

At least a few years ago some of this trend was still alive making little PE images that could almost be used for real desktop use on sites like reboot.pro and other spin-offs, though it seems to be a lot less mainstream than the piracy heydays during the XP era.

Remember OpenID (from before it became a OAuth variant)? The premise of an universal identity from any IdP usable anywhere would've worked just as well.

There's no global search across all your DMs and guilds you are in either.

Why is DNS resolution even part of the libc and not, say, the base OS, a service on the base OS, or if need be, an external library like c-ares?

In fact, I thought Node already depended on c-ares, why is it failing on this?

Slightly offtopic, but is there any open source/fair-code equivalent of Parsec that doesn't fail blatantly on non-standard aspect ratios such as 32:9 or have lots of other failure modes that they seemed entirely uninterested in fixing (marked as known issues for years, and no public source code available so I can't diagnose or fix them myself)?

I looked and there didn't seem to be much at all that didn't rely on just one vendor's as-buggy encoding stack - such as NVIDIA Experience software instead of just their drivers, and it's sad to see the closest tech to this this be part of some acquisition instead now by a company that seems uninterested in open sourcing anything even if it doesn't endanger any of their commercial market (e.g. Unity and their Burst LLVM compiler thing)... I don't even need all the matchmaking and team sharing stuff, I just want NVENC/etc.-based desktop streaming that doesn't bomb itself over the slightest system anomaly.

Personally, I love 'tracker music from the 90s', and it's great to see things resembling it pop up in my streaming app's recommendation list every so often.

Even for platforms that Chrome can't easily be ported to, WebKit itself has a very simple and actually reasonable porting API which led to it for example being used on Sony PlayStation platforms, but also being the most important browser engine on the Haiku OS.

In fact, Chrome originated as - and a lot of its code structure post-Blink-fork still signifies it as being - a meta-platform of its own with a WebKit port to it.

Slightly offtopic: does the article link not work for anyone else? It briefly opens, shows a cookie warning, then I get redirected to Facebook(???) showing a 404 page in a language I don't have configured in my browser preferences at all with the same cookie warning on top.

iOS 15 beta w/ Safari.

It is amazing that the output of a random number generator can be considered a core part of a DMCA-style 'illegal to work around' anti-circumvention solution.

These days there's a self-service panel on the Microsoft 365 sign-up/admin page once you've set up a tenant. I've not been asked for any formal business registration numbers via that process, but the old days of needing to acquire these licenses via a partner seem to be somewhat gone.