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Comment Re: For them, an arms race with no risk (Score 1) 41

Even after criminal disaster. No one goes to jail. Ever.

Elizabeth Holmes must have missed the memo.

She only missed the memo because she was new to the game. Had it been directed by a more established CEO instead it would have been brushed under the rug. They always protect their own kind, and she wasn't (yet) one of them.

Just wait until we get to see how hard CEOs will pull to defend Elon when Tesla fails to turn in the earnings his bonus is dependent on.

Comment For them, an arms race with no risk (Score 4, Insightful) 41

The CEOs aren't spending their own money. If they somehow don't win the arms race, they can always look back and say they needed to spend more. If they can declare themselves winners, they will look brilliant and be able to demand huge pay raises from their companies. Even if they nearly drive their companies to bankruptcy on the matter, they'll have other execs from other companies to point to as examples of people who either did worse, or won by spending more.

It was a good time to be a CEO in January of this year. It's an even better time now.

Comment CWA is not a very strong union (Score 1) 32

I was a CWA member throughout grad school. It may be that they just put a lot more effort into the larger companies where their members were employed (think Verizon as one great example) but we didn't see much help from them as grad students. I remember one meeting my first year where we were reminded we could always ask for a union rep anytime we were talking with our PI, and that was about it.

Comment Good luck with that (Score 1) 83

These laws they are referring to, they are only fooling themselves when they pretend that they might apply to the richest people in the world. It doesn't matter how "clear" one might think trademark laws to be, when the other side can spend more on lawyers than the GDP of many small nations, you don't have a chance of winning.

Comment Re:Just don't tell the administration ... (Score 1) 201

Actually, Times Roman, new or not, is named for the Times of London.

Thank you for the correction on that. I had always heard it was for the NY Times, until I looked it up on wikipedia.

I would counter though that even with the Times of London being considered a "centre-right" newspaper in the UK, it is still a "far left" paper compared to anything Trump associates himself with.

Comment the low activity of Slashdot these years (Score 1) 1

the low activity of Slashdot these years

That's an understatement. I know I've been predicting the fall of this conservablog for years now but seriously how will we know if there's even someone left to turn out the lights? Some front page articles generate discussions now that are barely longer than ones I've had with my dog.

Comment Drudgedot rides again! (Score 1) 163

Some conservatives who are rich beyond measure are spending a trivial portion of their wealth to offer to help kids at some time in the future. On top of that, it comes with so many strings attached that few will be able to cash this in. But they are good friends with our Dear Leader, so of course they deserve front page accolades here for doing this. The main stream media is also drinking this up and plastering news of this - with a beaming photo of the happy couple - on the front page of nearly every news site around.

The GOP would give thanks to drudgedot for helping to spread the word, if only the GOP cared about drudgedot. I'm sure the conservative supermajority here though is happy to see it.

Comment How much did they pay for this level PR? (Score 1) 163

I can't load a news feed anywhere and not see another article celebrating their "gift". Of course the devil is in the details and the details show us this gift won't make much difference to many people.

Even if you ignore the political aims here, $250 is not a lot of money. Being as it is $250 for kids born between 2025 and 2028 - but not available to them until they turn 18 - it likely won't even buy them a weekend's worth of groceries by the time they can access it. Yet it is supposed to help them buy a house? I don't see how that is going to move the needle.

It certainly bought them an avalanche of positive media coverage though. Not bad considering how small a portion of their overall wealth they're spending. One can't help but wonder if they are trying to cover something up, either for themselves or for a friend.

Comment What happens to other MD11 pilots? (Score 0) 89

Don't pilots usually train and certify on just one type of aircraft? In other words, Airbus pilots don't fly Boeing, etc. If all the MD11 planes end up permanently mothballed by the two main operators of them (FedEx and UPS), what happens to the pilots who are trained to fly them? Will they have an opportunity to train on another aircraft type, or will they end up without a job? Are there other planes sufficiently similar to the MD11 that their training won't be too lengthy? Wikipedia mentions it last flew for passenger service in 2008, but doesn't mention it having been developed into anything else.

Of course it doesn't seem like this is a great time to be a pilot, given the ATC issues we're facing in this country - but that's a different issue.
Privacy

Manufacturer Remotely Bricks Smart Vacuum After Its Owner Blocked It From Collecting Data (tomshardware.com) 123

"An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device," writes Tom's Hardware.

"That's when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn't consented to." The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after... He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again... [H]e decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again...

[He discovered] a GD32F103 microcontroller to manage its plethora of sensors, including Lidar, gyroscopes, and encoders. He created PCB connectors and wrote Python scripts to control them with a computer, presumably to test each piece individually and identify what went wrong. From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware. From this, he looked at its software and operating system, and that's where he discovered the dark truth: his smart vacuum was a security nightmare and a black hole for his personal data.

First of all, it's Android Debug Bridge, which gives him full root access to the vacuum, wasn't protected by any kind of password or encryption. The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it. He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home. This isn't unusual, by far. After all, it's a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer's server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers.

Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader registrations_suck for sharing the article.

Comment Re:Before you dunk all over this van... (Score 1) 93

You made a rather huge leap there, and I'm not sure why you committed to doing so.

I've never heard of this van. I work in several metropolitan areas on a regular basis and I've never seen one anywhere. I fully acknowledge they exist, but I've never seen one. I could well be unique in having never seen one, but if they aren't in any of the markets where I frequently drive then there are likely a lot of other people who have never seen them in the wild either.

The point I was after is that there are a lot of people who love to dunk on the automotive industry - particularly the American Big Three - any time they can. The Big Three are far from blameless. However, ripping to shreds a discontinued vehicle that you've never seen isn't exactly a fair thing to do.
Republicans

Journal Journal: The under-discussed MAGA broken promise 2

The Epstein files are still - to King Donald's disappointment - getting quite a bit of attention. He is paying his government quite a bit of money to try to bury that "problem" but the people aren't falling for it.

However I'd like to shine light on a different promise that has been cast aside.

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