protimewaster

Isn't Denuvo actually implemented in a game by the DRM developers, though? I remember reading that they have a process where the game dev sends Denuvo an unprotected executable, who adds the DRM to that executable and sends it back.

Thus, I believe the poor implementations are directly the fault of Denuvo.

> Those prices seem weird.

I was thinking the same thing. In many parts of the world, even a failing / debt laden business would be worth much more than that.

> Sure, but if you felt you didn't get a good deal you're not going to go back.

If you feel that way about all of them, you're not just going to starve to death, though. If you've got two options and they're both bad, you probably just go to one of them anyway.

I assume this doesn't work with every airline / in every case? E.g., if I am booking with a US-based airline like United or American, to fly between two US cities, do they really bother to offer cheaper tickets based on your international location?

I think, if you follow the airport guidelines (at least in the USA), trains win (or at least come close) for even longer distances than that. Most airports recommend that you arrive at least two hours early to ensure that you can make it through security and get to your gate on time. That means that a 3 hour flight is actually a 5 hour time commitment. And, as you noted, you've also got to get to the airport first, and airports tend to be far away (45 minutes+) from the main part of the city in a lot of places. So, a 3 hour flight might actually require 6 hours of transit time / waiting in many cases.

I don't find it hard to believe that both can be true.

I don't want to have to commute to work by driving, but I do anyway, because there's no public transit to my work.

I don't want to have to use Gmail for my work email, but that's what work wants me to use, so I use it.

Some number of people are using ChatGPT just because somebody said, "You need to know how to use AI to stay competitive."

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the sentiment, but I firmly believe both sentences can be true at the same time.

They offer monthly subscriptions AFAIK, so I'm skeptical they'd upgrade for just any subscription. Otherwise, a person could buy one month, they have to upgrade the car, and then they never buy a second month.

I've seen confusion about this before with people that I know.

You tell them it's against the law to drink, and they'll point out that it's restrictive and controlling. You tell them it's against the law to commit tax fraud, and they'll have no objection.

Why? I think, at least with the people that I know, it's related to what they want to be able to do. They want to be able to drink alcohol, so it feels controlling to tell them they can't. They aren't interested in committing tax fraud, so they're not bothered by that being restricted.

I think one thing that rubs people the wrong way is that Apple has basically infinite money at this point. They're not dropping support for old hardware because they don't have the resources to maintain the support. They're just doing it because they want to, and that's kinda lame.

Especially when I can keep getting both feature and security updates for Windows on hardware that's the same age (or older) as the EOL Apple hardware.

That has not been my experience, at least with Apple laptops. Even when rated for 1000 cycles, I'll get the warning that service is needed (AFAIK that means 80% capacity or lower) well before then. I've seen this on several, but the one I just checked is at just under 670 cycles and has had that warning up for some months already.

Maybe iPhones are better about this, though, I don't know. But I definitely don't have a lot of faith in the laptops maintaining 80% for 1000 cycles.

I'm glad to see this. As much as optical media gets ignored, it does have some serious advantages in terms of durability and longevity, compared to some other archival storage methods.

Blu-ray discs are quite rugged, and can easily survive floods and relatively large temperature and humidity changes, compared to, e.g., hard drives. And the data longevity is also quite good.

Who is the manufacturer for I-O Data's BD Record drive? Does anyone know? Is this actually a new manufacturer, or is it just based on existing but discontinued lines from someone like Pioneer that recently exited the market?

There are many studies that point toward the opposite, so I strongly suspect you're wrong.

There have been other papers that demonstrated LLM ability to reproduce copyrighted text as well.

Will it actually impact the legal landscape, though? It seems like there's enough money being thrown at this that it'll be deemed legal no matter what.

I definitely don't think they've ever been super nice, but I still they still have a few much more user-friendly approaches than others. E.g., one of the reasons I bought a Pixel is that Google is one of the only phone makers that manages to have respectable security practices and still respects users enough support them choosing to modify the software on their devices and run alternate operating systems.

I think Google has done some cool stuff, and I think in a lot of ways they're, at least historically, one of the less evil big tech players.

I gotta say, though, that my experience with trying to get them to sort out any kind of issue with their services makes me reluctant to spend any money with them.

I bought a Pixel phone. As per the sales terms, the phone came with one year of Gemini AI Pro service. Except, the redemption process to get the year of service didn't work for me. I contacted Google, they never fixed it or offered any solution. I simply didn't get the year of service I was promised.

My friend, who bought a Pixel around the same time, also wasn't able to get the year of Gemini they were promised.

That same friend has a Google One subscription, billed through their phone carrier. Recently, Google (or the provider?) discontinued that specific Google One plan, as well as the option to bill via your carrier. This was all covered in an email sent to my friend. As consolation, the email explained, my friend was given the option to switch to a different plan, billed monthly by Google (instead of their phone carrier), with 6 months free. Except, the new plan, and the 6 months free, wasn't selectable as a plan type for their account. So my friend emails Google about it and, to my complete lack of surprise, Google was unwilling/unable to provide any resolution.

At this point, I legitimately don't understand why, unless I had no other option, I would pick Google for services. They clearly put no real effort into resolving any service issues for any customer that's not spending millions with them.

Surely not if I certified that the car was never going to be used on the road?

My thinking is that I'd pick this, because I can't just plug a Mac into a slot in my server and have it easily integrate with all my other hardware across an ultra fast bus.

If they made an M4 on a card that supported all the same standards and was price competitive, though, that might be a good option.

Maybe, but I don't think that distinction matters here. Surely you're not contending that it counts as doxing every time someone collects data from multiple public sources?

I've always understood doxing to be PII, which aliases aren't, AFAIK, unless they're connected to a real person. And, to my knowledge, everyone is contending that the names in the blog post are all aliases. And, regarding aliases, I've never understood it to be doxing for someone to say "FakeNameX and FakeNameY appear to be the same user."

So, to me, the thing that makes it not look like doxing is that it simply doesn't meet the basic definition of doxing. It provides no PII.

I'm also skeptical that it's impossible to get an LLM to reproduce some code verbatim. Google had that paper a while back about getting diffusion models to spit out images that were essentially raw training data, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same is possible for LLMs.

There was a security auditing firm that came out a few days later claiming they'd found a chip, similar to the one Bloomberg described, during a security audit.

It's still nothing concrete, though. Their CEO basically said that they'd found one and that they couldn't say much more about it due to an NDA.

There also was a CEO of a hardware security company that came out and said that his firm had found an implanted chip during an audit. IIRC, he was convinced that it was very unlikely to be limited to Supermicro hardware.

It depends on what you consider confirmed. It was kind of corroborated, at least. There was a CEO of a hardware security firm that came forward after the original article. He claimed that his firm had actually found a hardware implant on a board during a security audit. It wasn't exactly as Bloomberg described, though.

His take was that it was very unlikely that it impacted exclusively Supermicro, though.

It was covered various places, including The Register https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/09/bloomberg_super_micro...

They did dumb things like limit memory availability in dev mode, though. Also they require a government ID to enable dev mode (but at least the quit charging $100 for it!). And they made it so you can't enable dev mode on consoles that are banned from Xbox services.

I understand it's still more than most console makers do, having dev mode at all, but it's maddening to me that Microsoft made dev mode so annoying and limited. I'd honestly just rather a hack be available so we have the option of using the entire memory or repurposing banned consoles.

I'm confused about that. I was pretty sure that Google's policy was that, while they'll delete inactive accounts, the addresses don't become available for use. I thought those addresses were basically dead.

But at least one poster says they're reusing addresses.

My thinking is that it's very unlikely the people actually responsible for implementing it were the same as the ones in court arguing it would be easily reversible. From a strictly technical standpoint, if your boss says "Make this happen ASAP, even if you have to cut corners", and then a year later says, "Undo all of that", it's gonna be a shitshow.

I completely agree that it's malicious, but I'm thinking the people actually responsible for implementing it (the software, procedures, etc.) probably weren't themselves malicious. I think the technical people responsible for implementing it were intentionally put into a position, by their bosses, where they'd basically be the fall guys and provide a reasonable technical excuse for their boss's maliciousness.

While ridiculous, from a technical standpoint, it's not hard to see how this scenario arises. On the one hand, there was probably pressure to implement the tariffs as quickly as possible. Consequently, there likely wasn't much effort put into the "what if we have to undo all this in a year" use case, because that wasn't strictly necessary to get the tariffs implemented.

On the other hand, now that the "we need to undo all this" use case actually needs to be used, they've gotta go back and solve the problem after the fact. Unsurprisingly, it's going to take a while to develop that solution.

I'm not excusing it, but I do think it's interesting to think about the technical and political issues.

> But the risk of a bunch of litigation isn't a ban, right?

Funny enough, I've known some people over the years who have explicitly viewed litigation as a reasonable alternative to regulation. Their logic was that we should just let people and companies do whatever they want. Then, if it turns out a company is dumping mercury in the river or whatever, you litigate based on the damages. Better than regulation, they assured me.

It just doesn't seem super well written. It presents a story from 2018 as if it's the impetus for the decline, and then talks about a decade long decline. If it's been declining for a decade, how is a decision from 8 years ago responsible for it?

I mean, it does sound like it was a bad decision, but not so bad that it could retroactively be responsible for 10 years of decline.

> Samsung had waterproof phones before Apple, and they still had replaceable batteries and, gasp a headphone jack.

Also, Apple (and I assume others) were building stuff with non-replaceable batteries before they were building stuff that was waterproof. Clearly they're not sealed off in order to make them waterproof, because they were sealed off back when they weren't waterproof too.

> As far as I understand the person behind archive.today might face jail time if they are found out. You shouldn't be surprised that people lash out when you threaten their life.

One of the really strange things about all of this is that there is a public forum post in which a guy claims to be the site owner. So this whole debacle is this weird mix of people who are angry and saying "clearly the owner doesn't want to be associated with the site" on the one hand, but then on the other hand there's literally a guy who says he's the one that owns the site, so it doesn't seem like that guy is very worried about being associated with it?

It also seems weird to me that it's viewed as inappropriate to report on the results of Googling the guy who said he owns the site, but maybe I'm just out of touch on that topic.