Bullies tend to pick victims who can’t fight back too effectively, so I doubt they’d go after Microsoft.

All the big tech companies have a bunch of vague patents than in a just world would never exist, and they seldom go after each other, because they know then they’ll be hit with a counter-suit alleging they violate multiple patents too, and in the end everyone except the lawyers will be worse off. It’s sort of like mutually assured destruction. They don’t generally preemptively invalidate each other’s patents, so if Microsoft is not a party to the suit, they’ll likely stay out of it entirely.

However, newer and smaller companies are less likely to be able to counter-sue as effectively, so if they pose a threat of taking revenue from the big companies (e.g. by launching on competitor platforms only), they are ripe targets for patent-based harassment.

I believe it is what Americans call what might be called an Owners Corporation / Body Corporate / Apartment Owners Association / Management Company in other parts of the English-speaking world.

I agree that this is a major concern, especially if non-renewable energy is used, and until the production process for computer technology and solar panels is much more of a circular economy. More renewable energy and circular economies, and following the sun for AI training and inference (it isn’t going to be low latency anyway, so if you need AI inference in the northern hemisphere night, just do it on the other side of the world) could greatly decrease the impact.

The argument seem most commonly from people on fediverse (which I happen to agree with) is really not about what current copyright laws and treaties say / how they should be interpreted, but how people view things should be (even if it requires changing laws to make it that way).

And it fundamentally comes down to economics - the study of how resources should be distributed. Apart from oligarchs and the wannabe oligarchs who serve as useful idiots for the real oligarchs, pretty much everyone wants a relatively fair and equal distribution of wealth amongst the people (differing between left and right in opinion on exactly how equal things should be, but there is still some common ground). Hardly anyone really wants serfdom or similar where all the wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few (obviously it’s a spectrum of how concentrated, but very few people want the extreme position to the right).

Depending on how things go, AI technologies have the power to serve humanity and lift everyone up equally if they are widely distributed, removing barriers and breaking existing ‘moats’ that let a few oligarchs hoard a lot of resources. Or it could go the other way - oligarchs are the only ones that have access to the state of the art model weights, and use this to undercut whatever they want in the economy until they own everything and everyone else rents everything from them on their terms.

The first scenario is a utopia scenario, and the second is a dystopia, and the way AI is regulated is the fork in the road between the two. So of course people are going to want to cheer for regulation that steers towards the utopia.

That means things like:

• Fighting back when the oligarchs try to talk about ‘AI Safety’ meaning that there should be no Open Source models, and that they should tightly control how and for what the models can be used. The biggest AI Safety issue is that we end up in a dystopian AI-fueled serfdom, and FLOSS models and freedom for the common people to use them actually helps to reduce the chances of this outcome.
• Not allowing ‘AI washing’ where oligarchs can take humanities collective work, put it through an algorithm, and produce a competing thing that they control - unless everyone has equal access to it. One policy that would work for this would be that if you create a model based on other people’s work, and want to use that model for a commercial purpose, then you must publicly release the model and model weights. That would be a fair trade-off for letting them use that information for training purposes.

Fundamentally, all of this is just exacerbating cracks in the copyright system as a policy. I personally think that a better system would look like this:

• Everyone gets a Universal Basic Income paid, and every organisation and individual making profit pays taxes in to fund the UBI (in proportion to their profits).
• All forms of intellectual property rights (except trademarks) are abolished - copyright, patents, and trade secrets are no longer enforced by the law. The UBI replaces it as compensation to creators.
• It is illegal to discriminate against someone for publicly disclosing a work they have access to, as long as they didn’t accept valuable consideration to make that disclosure. So for example, if an OpenAI employee publicly released the model weights for one of OpenAI’s models without permission from anyone, it would be illegal for OpenAI to demote / fire / refuse to promote / pay them differently on that basis, and for any other company to factor that into their hiring decision. There would be exceptions for personally identifiable information (e.g. you can’t release the client list or photos of real people without consequences), and disclosure would have to be public (i.e. not just to a competitor, it has to be to everyone) and uncompensated (i.e. you can’t take money from a competitor to release particular information).

If we had that policy, I’d be okay for AI companies to be slurping up everything and training model weights.

However, with the current policies, it is pushing us towards the dystopic path where AI companies take what they want and never give anything back.

Starlink is a constellation of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites, not geostationary satellites. That means that the ground station (i.e. subscriber equipment) talks to one satellite as it comes into view, and over time that satellite moves across the sky, and they switch to another satellite. This means the latency is highly variable as the distance changes, but at its lowest is much lower than a geostationary satellite since it is far closer.

Generally speaking optometrists measure the core measurements of how your vision is and make the prescription.

However, to make glasses as well as the prescription they need the interpupillary distance (IPD); how far apart the pupils in the centre of the eyes are.

The IPD rarely changes much / at all in adults (so saving for certain conditions, once you know it you could keep using that value), and measuring it is not that hard if you have another person to do it (read how to do it properly on the Internet).

I don’t know the law in Canada around what they have to disclose. I believe Canada has privacy legislation that says that people have access to private information about them held by companies in at least some cases, so that might be something to look into, and then request all the information they hold on you if you ever need the information again.

In the modern sense, I think most people would take the word “democracy” to include universal suffrage - at a minimum, all adults born or granted citizenship there should have the equal right to vote for it to be considered a democracy.

In practice, Israel has substantial control over the entire region from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, between Egypt and Lebanon (that is not to say that they should, just the reality) - in the sense that anyone in that area’s lives are significantly controlled by Israeli government decisions, and the Israeli government and military operates over that entire area.

So the minimum bar for it being a democracy is that adults - including the people with ancestral ties to the area that it controls - get an equal say in the governance. That is clearly not the case, and has not been for quite some time; it not being a democracy is not a recent development (maybe it’s never actually been a true democracy).

that’s abuse of regional pricing

More like regional pricing is an attempt to maximise value extraction from consumers to best exploit their near monopoly. The abuse is by Google, and savvy consumers are working around the abuse, and then getting hit by more abuse from Google.

Regional pricing is done as a way to create differential pricing - all businesses dream of extracting more money from wealthy customers, while still being able to make a profit on less wealthy ones rather than driving them away with high prices. They find various ways to differentiate between wealthy and less wealthy (for example, if you come from a country with a higher average income, if you are using a User-Agent or fingerprint as coming from an expensive phone, and so on), and charge the wealthy more.

However, you can be assured that they are charging the people they’ve identified as less wealthy (e.g. in a low average income region) more than their marginal cost. Since YouTube is primarily going to be driven by marginal rather than fixed costs (it is very bandwidth and server heavy), and there is no reason to expect users in high-income locations cost YouTube more, it is a safe assumption that the gap between the regional prices is all extra profit.

High profits are a result of lack of competition - in a competitive market, they wouldn’t exist.

So all this comes full circle to Google exploiting a non-competitive market.

Probably more likely they dial more calls than they can scam on the basis that a silent hang up call costs them only the cost of connecting the call, but their scammer’s wages cost them more if not enough people answer and there is no one for the scammer to speak to.

It’s essentially putting the cost of uncertain numbers of people answering onto the victims rather than the scammer - selfish, but so is scamming people!

Telemarketers do the same thing, although at least they often have to fear their local regulators in many countries if they do it too much, while scammers are criminals who are going to break the law anyway, so I suspect most silent calls are probably scammers.

This seems extreme for the long tail of hobbyist apps. Finding 20 testers seems like a huge commitment for an unproven app, and I’m sure it would be a hurdle many apps currently in Google Play would not have gotten across if it existed then.

I wonder if this is a deliberate attempt to shut out hobby apps from their app store for whatever reason, rather than a good faith attempt to improve app quality.

In parallel they are also forcing people to publicly attach their real name to apps (people have long had to tell Google who they are to get in the app store, but not to make it public) - which might be another thing that is no big deal for big companies, but many smaller hobbyist app devs might think twice about doxxing themselves given how hostile people are on the Internet these days and how many crazies there are out there.

This would be very hard to protect against; if the attacker controls Linode and Hetzner, it is likely they also have access to the disks and memory for the virtual services, and not just the network. So extracting the private key for the real certificate is probably also on the table as an option for the attacker, and would be much harder to detect.

As they say in the article, end-to-end encryption such as OTR is probably important to avoid getting caught in dragnets like this.

Data being public (and privacy in general) shouldn’t be ‘all or none’. The problem is people joining the dots between individual bits of data to build a profile, not necessarily the individual bits of data.

If you go out in public, someone might see you and recognise you, and that isn’t considered a privacy violation by most people. They might even take a photo or video which captures in the background, and that, in isolation isn’t considered a problem either (no expectation of privacy in a public place). But if someone sets out to do similar things at a mass scale (e.g. by scraping, or networking cameras, or whatever) and piece together a profile of all the places you go in public, then that is a terrible privacy violation.

Now you could similarly say that people who want privacy should never leave home, and otherwise people are careless and get what they deserve if someone tracks their every move in public spaces. But that is not a sustainable option for the majority of the world’s population.

So ultimately, the problem is the gathering and collating of publicly available personally identifiable information (including photos) in ways people would not expect and don’t consent to, not the existence of such photos in the first place.

which absolutely drowns out the ability to find information about the negative health effects of a typical vape user buying name-brand products from reputable suppliers

It is true that the 2019 EVALI outbreak linked to tocopheryl acetate contamination got a lot of media attention, but there is evidence of other vaping-related harm.

The review article summarises some of the more recent evidence from across a lot of different studies: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/19/6808.

Phones have a unique equipment identifier number (IMEI) that they share with towers. Changing SIM changes the subscriber ID (IMSI) but not the IMEI (manufacturers don’t make it easy to change the IMEI). So thieves (and anyone else) with the phone could be tracked by the IMEI anyway even if they do that, while leaving the phone on.

In practice, the bigger reason they don’t get caught every time if they have inadequate opsec practices is that in places where phone thefts are common, solving them is probably not a big priority for local police. Discarding the SIM probably doesn’t make much difference to whether they get caught.

Here’s another source about 2 month wait times sometimes, if you don’t believe me: https://www.xda-developers.com/xiaomi-2-month-wait-unlock-bootloader/. It has never personally been 2 months for me, but it has been over a week before for me, and their support team refused when I asked nicely to shorten it despite the fact my daily driver phone was broken and I couldn’t restore my LineageOS from backup - I just had to wait. That’s why I don’t buy Xiaomi stuff any more.

The wait time is determined by their servers, which sends a cryptographically signed certificate specific to the serial number of the device that the bootloader reads. The key to sign the certificate stays on their servers, and the client just calls to the server, and either gets a response saying to wait for this much longer, or containing the certificate. Xiaomi explicitly call it ‘apply for unlocking’ (e.g. see the title of https://en.miui.com/unlock/index.html), as in, they think it is their right to decide who gets to decide what runs on my hardware I’ve bought from them, and us mere consumers must come begging to them and ‘apply’ to unlock.

You don’t even have to use it

The bootloader is designed not to boot anything except MIUI without the certificate from the unlocking tool. While there are open source clients (like https://github.com/francescotescari/XiaoMiToolV2) they still work by calling Xiaomi’s server to get the unlock code, so if you want to run anything except Xiaomi’s MIUI (which is a bad idea from a privacy perspective), you kind of do have to use it (at least their server). The only way around it would be if someone found a vulnerability in the bootloader or the processor itself that allows for the ‘treacherous computing’ aspect of the boot to be bypassed without the certificate - and as far as I’m aware there isn’t a reliable approach yet for that.

Wait times are as high as 2 months (depending on how old the phone model is, etc…), and even as a regular Xiaomi customer, their support never seem to allow anyone to skip the wait, even if for example they broke their old phone and want to set up a new one like the old one (ask me how I know). During that period, MIUI is like a data collection honeypot, sucking up your PII and serving you ads.

It might be ‘normal’ now to Xiaomi customers to wait to be able to unlock the phones that they have paid for and own (perhaps in the same sense someone in an abusive relationship might consider getting hit ‘normal’ because it has been happening for a while), but the idea that the company who sold you the phone gets some say on when you get the ‘privilege’ of running what you like on it, and make you jump through frustrating hoops to control your own device, is certainly not okay.

If they just wanted to stop reselling phones with non-Xiaomi sanctioned malware / bloatware added, making the bootloader make it clear it is unlocked (as Google does, for example) would be enough. Or they could make a different brand for phones that are unlocked, using the same hardware except with a different logo, and let people choose if they want unlocked or walled garden.

However, they make money off selling targeted ads based on information they collect - so I’m sure that they probably don’t want to do any of those things if they don’t have to, because they might disrupt their surveillance capitalism.

Xiaomi phones used to be good for custom ROMs, but now they try to stop you unlocking the bootloader by making you wait an unreasonable amount of time after first registering the device with them before you can unlock. Many of the other vendors are even worse.

So from that perspective, Pixel devices are not a terrible choice if you are going to flash a non-stock image.

he has never once published anything that puts Russia or US Republicans in bad light

I don’t think that is true. With regard to Russia: https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/russia/. Wikileaks started publishing stuff about the US during the Bush presidency, and continued into Trump. I think the main factor would have been what was available to them, in terms of leaks not already exposed elsewhere. Certainly the evidence suggests they published leaks provided them to by what is likely a state (Russian) sponsored group, and that formed part of a broader pattern by that state in interfering in the US’s elections, but that is not to say they wouldn’t have published unreleased leaks in the same circumstances if they had them about another political party.

a country that doesn’t extradite to the US (Sweden) to a country that does (UK)

Sweden has an extradition treaty with the US: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/10-201.22-Sweden-EU-Extradition-Treaty.pdf

There has certainly been a smear campaign (psyop?) against Assange to mislead people into hating him - and reading things like your comment I think it may have been quite successful, at least with Americans.

I once worked for a small ISP that decided to enter the calling card business. I built them a voice prompt system on top of Asterisk that made received PSTN calls over PRI and made outbound VoIP calls, all metered to cards with a unique number and a balance, and a UI to activate them. The business got boxes of physical cards printed, with a plan to sell them to convenience stores.

They hired a salesperson (AKA worst coworker) to sell the boxes of cards. This coworker then sold many boxes of activated cards to many small stores at an unauthorised discount (below the level of profitability), for cash rather than the approved methods for retailers to buy them, and then apparently spent said cash at the casino. The business had to honour the cards (i.e. not deactivate them) at a big loss to avoid ruining their reputation, since the buyers apparently did not know the deal was dodgy. His tenure was, suffice to say, not long, but in his short time there, he managed to put the business under financial strain and it eventually went into liquidation.