red_admiral

Back in the day, Microsoft got into trouble for shipping a free browser together with its OS (https://xkcd.com/1118/). Somehow I wasn't expecting 'every app ships its own browser' to be the solution.

To be fair, multi-platform GUI development is _hard_ to do properly, just look at the differences between menu bars on Windows and Mac OS. In theory you could ship electron once as a dependency, similar to the various MSVC++ runtimes, but then you've reinvented 'dll hell'.

Any attempts to fix this probably end up with https://xkcd.com/927/

Shops run by charities (similar to US 501.c.3 'nonprofits'), which are exempt from certain business taxes.

And the one not blocked by stupid url filters.

> man made forest

In other words, a plantation?

As well as 'ls'.

My experience is that 'ls' and the like are fine once you've used them a few times. 'list-files' would just be more typing, and even with tab completion there's probably other things to list so muscle memory would end up at [l] [tab] [f] [tab] or something like that.

The one that constantly trips me up is 'which' vs 'where' but that's for a different reason.

('Get-ChildItem' is an abomination.)

> Guess which window has focus

Used to be a solved problem before some ** messed it up. I hate that game too.

However, this hack could have happened whether sideloading was allowed or not.

In fact, following the OP's link to https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targ..., "the company’s ads were shown on almost 200,000 unique websites and Android/iOS apps in dozens of countries" so it's not just apps but ordinary websites you visit in your android chrome browser.

> Swiss

(Hagelin) Crypto AG.

After the Hezbullah pagers incident, the basic assumption has to be that every possible supply chain attack you can think of is realistic.

What the article actually says: the threshold for "force" rises from "student is actively endangering someone" to "student is being disruptive" (throwing food around the classroom is given as an example).

There is no mention of force as a punishment (such as spanking), and force means things like holding a student's hand firmly to stop them throwing food. It's not whacking them with a nightstick.

Meanwhile Samsung doesn't even need hackers - a firmware update on consumer devices is enough: https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/samsungs-disa...

On the one hand, this might be an escalation of a war below the threshold of "Europe orders general mobilisation". On the other hand, it seems that you just have to sneeze in the general direction of anything 'cyber' to cause an incident, shame on us if we can't get very basic security in order.

These are industrial fridges, the ones almost the size of a shipping container that you find in major supermarkets. But I agree with you that 'smart' home IoT is a shitshow.

That, and why there's not a company VPN in between.

from https://blog.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controll... :

> Our research uncovered a hidden "code-of-the-day" authentication mechanism that could be abused to bypass normal authentication

> Our analysis began by examining the internet exposure of these devices, where we identified thousands of publicly accessible management interfaces

> (shell injection vulnerability in management interface)

This is how we used to vibe-code before we had LLMs.

Common in the UK, which I feel will hit them in the face when the Internet Research Agency knocks the payment processing offline for a few days.

> Intended audience: non-technical citizens of the web

A good description of the design principles behind passkeys, actually.

> They can use passkeys to prevent you from running unapproved software.

Nope, that's attestation in general; passkeys are not required for that. Passkeys have nothing to do with secure boot, for example. Which version of manifest and adblock chrome/edge supports also has nothing to do with their passkey support. Nor does the possible mandatory age-verification flag we might soon get built into our phones: it'll definitely use some kind of crypto but that can still be one in other ways than with passkeys.

Passkeys are a kludge for many reasons, but let's be careful with our terminology.

I wish major software like office and adobe (photoshop) didn't come with mandatory subscriptions, cloud integration, and AI. The most ironic outcome would be a good-enough AI-generated photoshop clone that doesn't have user-facing AI integration.

In a logical world, computer programming would be a trade. I take the point about risk of physical injury of death, hovever.

I think one problem is thinking of the trades as a place where you put people not (good|competent|intelligent) enough to go through college. (Some people's conception of the armed forces makes the same mistake.)

Go a generation or two back and in the UK, we had a much clearer separation between working and middle class, for example one got paid weekly or hourly wages, the other got paid a monthly salary. The trades themselves were divided into skilled and unskilled. While it made a huge cultural difference which class you were from, a good skilled trade could easily make you more money than a clerk job. (Bob Cratchit was middle class!) An unskilled day labourer such as a stevedore might live from hand to mouth, an engine mechanic could usually afford to raise a family and afford a place to live (in a working-class area).

When we hit CVE #-2147483648, it's time to worry.

They're for safety-critical systems, so UI design is taken more seriously - as you can still see in aircraft and railway systems.

The German signalling is built around _Fahrstrassen_, literally 'roads to drive on'. Each one has a start and end point, and the station designer comes up with the ones to implement like 'from entry signal X to platform 1'. These 'roads' are usually a strict subset of the physically possible settings of all the switches.

In the old mechanical lever boxes, there were three kinds of levers: 'elements' (switches, derailers, gates), 'roads' and signals. To let a train move along a road, you first had to set all its elements correctly, and the road lever would only unlock when this was done. Pulling the road lever would also lock the associated elements in place. Then, you could 'open' the signal lever associated with the road, which is only unlocked when the road lever is pulled.

The interface in the page is built of modular components for elements and signals, which behind the scenes are connected to 'road' circuits. You select a road by holding the button at the start and pressing the one at the end. This tries to set up all elements along the road correctly, locks them electrically (with relays) if this succeeds, and then switches the signal at the start of the road. Obviously, the safety property is that you cannot set a road (or an individual element) while it is locked by another road, and no two roads can ever conflict with each other.

Of course, there are 'emergency overrides' for when components are malfunctioning, and strict protocols for using them - for example, not this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Aibling_rail_accident

> I do imagine these panels must have been interactive with all the buttons?

"Spurplan" (roughly "track plan") signalling control panel. To allow a train from point A to point B, you hold down the button at A and then press B. If there's no conflicts, it will set the switches along the way, lock the route (so you can't set a route that interferes) and then "open the signal", as they say in German, at point A.

This was a customizable system built out of standard components, which served its purpose well for a long time. Point your favorite translation tool at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaisstellwerk for more details, or http://www.stellwerke.de/ if you want to go down a rabbit hole.

> Rotte [And I believe this was a way to annotate that something was… fixed, maybe? Or on its way to being fixed?]

Rotte = work gang. Reminder tag to not send a train down there.

> You can't force people to have more children.

"People" here means women, and womens' rights are a very recent thing in world history. With a sufficiently evil and authoritarian government, it might be possible. It certainly has been tried in the 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Honour_of_the_German_...

In theory, iOS has some protection: the security model is that not all apps can be trusted with everything, so they have to ask for permission to access camera, GPS, texts and so on. I think apple even kicks apps out of its store that try and abuse this.

> Companies were paying for more than 30 million Copilot subscriptions as of the end of June. And while individual users are free to use limited versions of Copilot’s chat experience, its most powerful tools are reserved for subscribers to the company’s M365 apps bundle, which has about 90 million paying users.

It needs to be more widely known that if you cancel a (home) 365 subscription, you'll be offered a cheaper version without AI integration.

I don't like this idea, but I do like to get my facts right. If it is the patent linked elsewhere on this page, then

  - I can't find the bit where they monitor you via camera and microphone. (I think the "track your eyes to make sure you don't look away during ads" is already patented for mobile, but has never been deployed as far as I know.)
  - "block" your game/program to show ads - I think "pause" would be a better word here, perhaps. That's how ad breaks/popups work, for example on youtube and on many mobile apps, even on the radio in some sense. Scummy? On mobile apps, probably. New? no.
  - The part being patented here is some kind of machine learning system to decide the optimal time(s) to show ads. 
  - Patent doesn't mean it's going to happen.

Apart from "we inserted some ML into the ad pipeline" there's really nothing new that I can see here.

There are two things the document-oriented approach struggles with, though in many ways it's still the best we have.

The first is creating new documents: Lisa's attempt was understandable, Windows' File/New menu tends to miss out all non-Microsoft file types. Sometimes you just need to open the app, like inkscape, to get started off.

The second problem is with things inherently app-based like games. Sure, one could have 'File/New/Factorio game' in the Explorer menu (although that just copies a template file, it doesn't allow for customization) and one could make it so that double-clicking a save game opens Factorio (assuming .fac or something is associated with the correct program), but the usual way is start -> steam -> factorio -> load game (or, more likely, 'continue game' which the document-based approach also can't handle well).

I like my documents and my music organized into folders, most of the time I'm not fussed where my savegames are stored (steam cloud backups, after all). A sensibly done hybrid approach is best.

How to organize my Factorio blueprints is another question ...

Win 3.11 program manager was application oriented. Win 95 was a mix, you could work document-oriented in Explorer (and most people did) but the start menu was still application oriented, with the exception of the "recent files" part (I forgen when exactly that was introduced). 'Libraries' pushes you from the files-and-folders back into a more application based model, to the point where I have an empty 'music library' and a folder music2 next to it where I can organize things the way I want.