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Comment I like FF, still (Score 1) 55

Disclaimer: I'm a web dev so I kind of have to keep up with Blink/Gecko/WebKit. Still, for the most part I'm comfortable using FF for a number of tasks. I will say that the Android mobile team have been dragging their feet on implementing some things because they can't decide which toolkit to do it in.

Comment novelty of patent in question (Score 1) 56

The use of a nonce to prevent record/replay attacks was not new in 2011, it had already been a practice for preventing Flash streaming media playback from being spoofed by that point and I doubt Adobe were the first to think of it. The PTO were idiots to grant that patent but they're clear that they don't take responsibility for establishing novelty. To be blunt, most of the IP patents related to the Web between 2000–2015 are questionable at best; the Microsoft Word XML patent splitting raw text from formatting has direct prior art in Nisus Writer (which used plain ASCII text files, storing formatting in the files' resource forks; its former developers refused to comment on all requests regarding this) and many of the rest are submarine patents from noncoders.

Submission + - SPAM: More And More Humans Are Growing an Extra Artery, Showing We're Still Evolving

An anonymous reader writes: An artery that temporarily runs down the center of our forearms while we're still in the womb isn't vanishing as often as it used to, according to researchers from Flinders University and the University of Adelaide in Australia. That means there are more adults than ever with what amounts to be an extra channel of vascular tissue flowing under their wrist. "Since the 18th century, anatomists have been studying the prevalence of this artery in adults and our study shows it's clearly increasing," Flinders University anatomist Teghan Lucas said in 2020. "The prevalence was around 10 percent in people born in the mid-1880s compared to 30 percent in those born in the late 20th century, so that's a significant increase in a fairly short period of time, when it comes to evolution."

To compare the prevalence of this persistent blood channel, Lucas and colleagues Maciej Henneberg and Jaliya Kumaratilake from the University of Adelaide examined 80 limbs from cadavers, all donated by Australians of European descent. The donors raged from 51 to 101 on passing, which means they were nearly all born in the first half of the 20th century. Noting down how often they found a chunky median artery capable of carrying a good supply of blood, the research team compared the figures with records dug out of a literature search, taking into account tallies that could over-represent the vessel's appearance. Their results were published in 2020 in the Journal of Anatomy. The fact the artery seems to be three times as common in adults today as it was more than a century ago is a startling find that suggests natural selection is favoring those who hold onto this extra bit of bloody supply.

Link to Original Source

Comment Re:Apple's reply to the EU (Score 1) 70

Allowing a third party App Store means "software that gets around our API and/or uses undocumented APIs living in the same ecosystem of user data" which is ironically less threatening on desktop/laptop systems than a handheld device which is increasingly becoming a centralized key, payment system and proof of identity. iOS/iPadOS' exploits make it clear Apple is not paying enough for security audits prior to release, and ignoring all of that, Apple still wants the console game economic model where the real income is a third of application revenue AND the right to block an application for entirely arbitrary reasons.

If they relaxed sufficiently on one or more of the other points, they wouldn't be as attractive a target by legislators pretending they care about equal opportunities.

Comment Re:Apple's reply to the EU (Score 0) 70

If she hasn't successfully directed a software team never mind coded herself, her opinions on what's possible are second-hand at best. I don't trust Tim Cook much, but he at least has been in charge of teams capable of telling him "We tried, but X isn't possible with current resources" (e.g. the AirPower) and he isn't Steve Jobs who believed tantrums change reality.

Ballmer had the cojones to tell the DoJ "you're asking for something we can't deliver and we won't comply with demands for it" during an actual antitrust trial. Apple told the FBI "we won't give you a backdoor into someone's phone, fullstop" and reiterate the same point regardling legislation demanding backdoors, and in both cases the companies continued to do as they intended to.

The issue here isn't privacy, it's Apple desperately trying to cover the shortcomings in their platform by gating what applications are allowed to run on it. For example, the recent M1 exploit that allows any two processes to communicate without triggering any security mechanisms whatsoever; it was discovered on a MacBook Pro but it's inherent to any computing device running off that chip (which now the iPhones and iPads are) and is so inherent to the architecture it can't be corrected with a microcode update.

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