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Comment How about the unbanned? (Score 1) 64

Forget the kids, they don't vote so they can be safely trod upon. Who cares what their experiences are.

But seriously, what about the not-kids? Australian adults, are you having to show your ID when you get a DHCP lease? Do a lot of websites who didn't have mandatory logins, now have 'em?

How does it work, and what has changed for you?

Comment Re:Won't work but needs to be done (Score 1) 64

Europe is now eyeing similar bans, as well as proposals for a late-night "curfew", curbs on addictive features, and an EU-wide age verification app.

LATE-NIGHT CURFEW?!

If Europe isn't careful, they're going to teach a generation of kids that it's ok to do their FTPing during business hours.

Comment Re:I assume you are joking, but ... (Score 1) 155

We are only a year out from the murder of a health-insurance executive, so the police are more on edge than usual.

Then we need to threaten such things much more often, so that the cops will eventually get used to it, and relax. ;-)

Debian never tried to kill me through my computer. I'd appreciate it if my car manufacturer made their car as safe as my computer.

Fuck it, I just want a Debian car. Then I won't need to extract bloody vengeance from beyond the grave, as my zombie revenant tracks down the CEO of Subaru, and the rotting flesh of my hands tightens around his throat as payment for the time a popup distracted me.

Comment There's no consensus definition of E2E encryption (Score 1) 90

Some people are busting out "definitions" of "End to End Encryption" but people were already using that as in informal descriptive term long before your formalized technical jargon was made up. Nobody should be surprised if there are mismatches. Have faith in our faithlessness.

I personally view the term as an attempt to call semi-bullshit on SMTP and IMAP over SSL/TLS. In the "old" (though not very old) days, if you sent a plaintext email (no PGP!), some people would say "oh, it's encrypted anyway, because the connection is encrypted between your workstation and the SMTP server, the connection from there to some SMTP relay is encrypted, the connection from there to the final SMTP server is encrypted, and the recipient's connection to the IMAP server is encrypted."

To which plenty of people, like me, complained "But it's still plaintext at every stop where it's stored along the way! You should use PGP, because then, regardless of the connection security, or lack of security on all the connections, it is encrypted end to end. Never trust the network, baby!"

Keep in mind that even when I say that, this is without any regard for key security! When I say E2E encrypted, it is implied that the key exchange may have been done poorly/incorrectly, mainly because few people really get to be sure they're not being MitMed when they use PGP. You can exchange keys correctly, but it's enough of a PITA that, in the wild, you rarely get to. You usually just look up their key on some keyserver and hope for the best. Ahem. And I say "usually" as if even that happens often. [eyeroll]

Indeed, every time I hear about some new secure messaging app/protocol, the first thing I wonder is "how do they do key exchange?" and I'm generally mistrusting of it, by default. And sometimes, I'm unpleasantly unsurprised, err I mean, cynically confirmed.

But anyway, if my E2E definition matches yours, great! And if it doesn't, well, that's ok and it's why we descend into the dorky details, so that we can be sure we're both talking about the same thing.

Comment Re:Death Robot (Score 2, Informative) 35

Fun fact, Weller trained with world-class mimes to do a very fluid, fast, bird-like robotic physical language for RoboCop.

Then he put on the suit for the first time, and couldn't move.

So they carved huge chunks of the suit out, and he could barely move.

So he had to work to come up with a new physical language that was more heavy, slow, deliberate, and tank-like.

Comment Re:"more semiconductors expertise on the board" (Score 1) 126

Yep, I had writeups from those flame wars. They *REALLY* did not want it discussed. Governors Brown and Kotek continued the pay-to-play system, which is what lost Oregon the Ohio CHIPs foundry campus (before they realized that Biden wasn't going to pay out CHIPs act at all).

Comment Re:Wow... (Score 1) 69

There is zero value in some big scary climate risk number also being disclosed, because A that risk accounted for if you are studying the details anyway and does not help you make a rational decision, because it literally does not affect you beyond the places where it is already baked into the numbers.

If you don't care why the insurance is so expensive or unavailable (e.g. high risk of flooding) then maybe you also don't care about why the house's price is so high (e.g. nice location, good construction, etc). No need to even look at the house. Just treat the whole damn thing as an abstract exercise in numbers.

OTOH, some people might actually care about details. Maybe because they're considering living there?

Comment Open Source just can't keep up (Score 4, Insightful) 95

Once again, Open Source is embarrassed and left behind.

mplayer and mpv still, after all these years, don't have a way to prevent things from working if the content origin happens to be Netflix. It just plays on, stupidly Just Working, instead of breaking the way that Netflix realized their users want it to break.

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