Author Archives: pappp

Tech Companies Are Ruining Their Apps, Websites, Internet

Posted on 2023-03-27 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I don't even need to comment, it's exhaustively correct. Tech incumbents are engaging in dumb fad chasing for market manipulation purposes, and fucking up everything they do in the process.
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The TikTok ban is a betrayal of the open internet

Posted on 2023-03-27 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: We don't need to "Ban TikTok!" because it's likely a Chinese intelligence op, we need real data-protection laws that ban _everyone_ from engaging in that kind of invasive data collection behavior. But our government is broken and the interests of the domestic competitors to TikTok, the interests of the domestic intelligence agencies, and the interests of the domestic public manipulators are all aligning to make the discussion about setting up some kind of national ban/firewall on TikTok and fucking up the Internet by letting the US government censor "undesirables" (determined by those currently in power) online, instead of fixing the Internet and forbidding the problematic data collection behavior for all players.
Shou Zi Chew is seated for a hearing. Portraits of American political figures hang on the wall behind him.
Image: Becca Farsace / The Verge

There’s cause for alarm with TikTok — but is it enough to justify building America’s own Great Firewall?

Continue reading…

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Arduino Uno R4

Posted on 2023-03-26 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Calling a device that isn't based on an ATMega 8/168/328 compatible an "Arduino Uno" seems like a bad decision ecosystem comprehensibility wise. Especially with a Renesas part, they are not known for their accessible high-quality documentation.
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The Internet Archive has lost its first fight to scan and lend e-books like a library

Posted on 2023-03-25 by pappp

Source: OSNews

Article note: Thom elucidated my take more cleanly than I'd managed to.

A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit brought against it by four book publishers, deciding that the website does not have the right to scan books and lend them out like a library.

Judge John G. Koeltl decided that the Internet Archive had done nothing more than create “derivative works,” and so would have needed authorization from the books’ copyright holders — the publishers — before lending them out through its National Emergency Library program.

As much as we all want the Internet Archive to be right – and morally, they are – copyright law, as outdated, dumb, and counterproductive as it is, was pretty clear in this case. Sadly.

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An EEVDF CPU Scheduler for Linux

Posted on 2023-03-25 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Responsiveness-oriented schedulers are super tricky. AFIK modern Windows does some clever things like giving preferential treatment to processes woken by IO interrupts or belonging to a foreground window that in principle give it a bit of an edge, but somehow it doesn't seem to actually get an edge.
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“Click-to-cancel” rule would penalize companies that make you cancel by phone

Posted on 2023-03-23 by pappp

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: My own opinion that if you can't cancel via the same medium you use to sign up, it's at very least fraud adjacent might be getting formalized into policy.
Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan standing on a stage.

Enlarge / Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan listens during a President Biden speech on the economy on October 26, 2022, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Anna Moneymaker )

Canceling a subscription should be just as easy as signing up for the service, the Federal Trade Commission said in a proposed "click-to-cancel" rule announced today. If approved, the plan "would put an end to companies requiring you to call customer service to cancel an account that you opened on their website," FTC commissioners said.

The FTC said the click-to-cancel rule would require sellers "to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up," and "go a long way to rescuing consumers from seemingly never-ending struggles to cancel unwanted subscription payment plans for everything from cosmetics to newspapers to gym memberships."

The FTC said the proposed rule would be enforced with civil penalties and let the commission return money to harmed consumers.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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D-Wave hello to another quantum pioneer warned over possible delisting

Posted on 2023-03-23 by pappp

Source: The Register

Article note: Yeah, that's not surprising. Everyone has determined the specialized quantum annealing model machines are largely useless, but are still holding out hope the gate-model ones.

Share price slides below $1 for 30 days straight, but company vows it will comply with NYSE regs again

D-Wave Quantum Inc is being warned by the New York Stock Exchange that it no longer complies with the regulations that govern listed businesses because its share price has been sitting under $1 for 30 trading days.…

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My old ass is having the hardest time with the Linux 6.2 series, we were looking at 2.6.x from 2004-2011 (and then for years after on ancient Debian Stable and RHEL-like systems that remained in production forever; I think I … Continue reading →

Posted on 2023-03-23 by pappp | Leave a comment

Dpreview.com is coming to an end

Posted on 2023-03-21 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Oh, that's really disappointing, DPReview is a good site with a great community. I had sort of forgotten that Amazon absorbed them.
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A wunderBAR story

Posted on 2023-03-20 by pappp

Source: OSNews

Article note: Neat historical scholarship. I'd occasionally wondered why some old systems drew pipe as a broken bar, but I'm happy to let someone else do the archive work. That's quite a silly tale of standards shenanigans.

In fact, the broken bar barely even exists anymore. In the days of DOS, the character used for the pipe symbol (on the DOS command line) or for logical OR (in C/C++, for example) used ASCII code 7Ch (124 decimal), which was rendered as a broken vertical bar by the fonts used at least by the IBM MDA, CGA, EGA, and VGA cards. But nowadays that is no longer the case. The same ASCII codepoint is rendered as a solid vertical bar in Windows 10 or Linux, and also shown as a solid vertical bar on contemporary keyboards. What happened?

Who doesn’t love some great character and ASCII archeology?

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