I can't feel bad when the subscription circumvention uses the same method they use to get their stuff to rank high in search results. News pages want their content indexed, so they can pull a bait and switch.
In browser plugins and mobile apps (and maybe WordPress plugins?), it's pretty well known that malware attackers buying those is a frequent thing, and a serious threat. So:
1. So is there an argument to be made that a developer/publisher/marketplace selling such software, after it has established a reputation and an installed base, may have an obligation to make some level of effort not to sell out their users to malware/criminals?
2. Do we already have some parties developing software with the intention of selling it to malware/criminals, planning that selling it will insulate them from being considered a co-conspirator or accessory?
Before browsers were up to this, I implemented something related, using Google Earth Plugin.
You could load up the flight data recorder data (which contains more parameters than ADS-B), and watch 3rd-person view animation of a 3D model of that aircraft's movements as it flies over terrain. With instruments, plus visual annotations of flight path over terrain.
One kludge I was proud/relieved to find: At the start of the flight, there's a zoom in to the aircraft on the ground, from the Earth view, and then a particular dance of the camera around the aircraft itself. The purpose wasn't to try to look cool at the time, but to make sure that the plugin would render the aircraft model at all, before we started to change the position or orientation of the model. (The plugin was overly aggressive about deciding some annotations weren't in the scene. Once this camera dance ritual forced the plane into the scene, it stayed in the scene, even as it moved and twisted, and as the camera moved with it.)
I saw Balint Seeber demo this at Dorkbot in Sydney, which must have been in the early 2000s, definitely before he left Sydney in about 2010.
He was using live ADS-B data from an SDR, because this was way before global ADS-B websites and APIs existed.
(I wonder what he's up to these day, he was a fascinating person and presenter, and used to be a prolific blogger on interesting subjects. I also wonder what Pia van Gelder who used to run Dorkbot Sydney is up to?)
This post looks artificially buried on page 3 now, and the topic is one of the most important things that tech company workers should be thinking about right now.
75. Team from ETH Zurich make high quality quantum swap gate using a geometric phase (ethz.ch)
231 points by joko42 1 day ago | flag | hide | 54 comments
76. The disturbing white paper Red Hat is trying to erase from the internet (osnews.com)
153 points by choult 6 hours ago | flag | hide | 51 comments
77. Code is run more than read (2023) (olano.dev)
137 points by facundo_olano 1 day ago | flag | hide | 102 comments
Besides external PR, does anyone know how this affects internal morale?
Some of the earlier Red Hat people I knew would not be OK with working on weapons systems even under the most legitimate circumstances. And they'd be much more opposed to collaborating with fascist regimes. And I think horrified by the idea of shoveling AI slop and grifter hype into life&death decisions.
Of course the tech industry makeup has changed (overall culture transitioning from hacker idealists, to finance bros), and some IBM-ification of Red Hat has has also happened. But I'd like to think Red Hat still attracts a more principled pool of talent than FAANG.
I was characterizing the objections I think some people would've had, from their perspective. Not trying to make a persuasive argument to people not already onboard with those perspectives.
But to one of your points: in some cases, it's not name-calling, but an objective assessment. And "fascist regime" and "collaboration" have historical meaning. I suggest that people of integrity would do well to consider the connotations. Especially at IBM, which infamously was a collaborator with one of the worst fascist regimes. "Never again" should still be in the minds of every executive and board member.
Indeed. Despite their many glaring flaws neither the Israeli nor American governments are fascist so the former Redhatter is right in that you should discount the associated opinion when encountering that phrase.
Given that a number of professors on authoritarian politics staunchly disagree with that assessment, I will trust them and their years of research experience over the unwarranted confidence of some HN anon.
ITA Software integrated with the mainframe network, and was acquired by Google.
An exec made a public quote that they couldn't have done it if they hadn't used Lisp.
(Today, the programming language landscape is somewhat more powerful. Rust got some metaprogramming features informed by Lisps, for example, and the team might've been able to slog through that.)
> Those flouting regulations and bringing extra pins from home could, notoriously, find one of them pricked into their backside by an irate supervisor.
Sounds like there's probably a side story here, that even workers who made space suits were still subject to sexist workplace abuse.
> (The company learned that lesson in 1967, after a single pin was discovered between the layers of a suit prototype, leading to the installation of an X-ray machine on the shop floor that would regularly scan the suits for errant fasteners.)
This is also a thing in consumer mass production now. An outerwear factory that our startup worked with had a needle scanner as the last step of the process, before shipping. There was basically a window that finished units had to pass through, to shipping, so that the needle scanner wouldn't accidentally be skipped.
Metal has the marvelous quality of showing up well on X-ray, and clothing has the marvelous quality of never getting cancer from X-rays.
Pieces of cotton do not show up on X-ray, and humans do get cancer from too much ionizing radiation.
Of course miscounts happen sometimes, and sometimes both the initial and final counts are one short of the true number, but the vast majority of undetected retained items are sponges made of cotton. Not tools, not even tiny needles. That’s why there is a radiopaque strip embedded in the sponges intended for use during surgery.
Because there's no practical way to do it on the scale of an entire factory. It works for surgery because you only do a single surgery in a single room on a single person with a countable number of supplies.
Clothing doesn't get cancer. Also a lot of what can get left in a patient doesn't show up super well on x-rays, so more general solutions like counting in and out are preferable.
Idea of something that undergraduate colleges could do, to encourage reflection about ethics in careers:
Annually poll all the students, to get rankings of how the ethics of well-known companies/brands are perceived by the students.
Then publish the results to students, in a timely fashion, before they're deciding job offers and internships.
I speculate that effects of this could include:
1. Good hiring candidates modifying what offers they pursue and accept -- influenced by awareness, self-reflection, and/or peer-pressure.
2. Students thinking and talking about ethics, when they didn't before. Then some of them carry this influence with them, as part of their character and intellect, going forward (like is one of the ideals of college education).
Also, maybe the second year of the poll, the sentiments are better-informed, because a lot more people have started paying more attention to the question of ethics of a company.
The perception breakdowns by college major would also be interesting, but maybe don't publish those, to reduce internal incentives to game the results. (Everyone knows some majors tend a bit more towards sociopathic than others, but some would rather that not be officials.)
They already have ethics classes in college. The unethical already don’t care. Students already do basic research but when the market is so shit, do you really expect them to permanently hamstring their careers by torpedoing their only offer? Especially given that as a fresh college grad, it’s not like anyone cares about your opinion anyways. So let’s guilt the vaguely ethical ones into never getting involved and leaving all the sociopaths to run the show. This is an idea destined for success.
Ethics classes (and certifications/trainings, like for doing human subjects research) are another thing that students are incentivized and conditioned to cheat on, rather than to reflect upon.
I'm talking about a poll that raises awareness across the entire student population, in a low-cost way, with no incentive to cheat nor to do anything other than give honest answers.
Regarding whether awareness of ethics would penalize those with any ethical tendency:
We can already see the last 2 decades of rampant unethical behavior throughout tech companies. Virtually every tech company knowingly sells out its users to data brokers, for example. Sociopaths already dominate, and have conditioned everyone below them to behave in an at least compliant way even when doing something unethical.
It's too bad we're starting late on that absolutely pervasive ethics problem, but we can't make the problem any worse by trying an education intervention now. And it's the traditional job of colleges to do this -- not to pump out oblivious worker drones.
If there's a way to read the book, the book can and will be copied. It doesn't matter if it's DRM protected with 84 bazillion bit encryption, if there are dead trees involved, or anything else. You can make it harder to copy, but copied it will be.
Mass piracy will continue full steam ahead at current rates.
Most of these sites allow you to read on a computer screen and those can be captured and OCR'd. And if they don't allow that, you can take a photo of your device and OCR that. And if you can't do that, you can manually type in the book. There's always a way, and it will always happen to any books that publishers are making any kind of profit on.
I love ebook readers. I just don't put any DRM'd books on them. But I also buy all that stuff used. No more money to Bezos, and it saves the landfill, too.
I'd like to be the person with the massive shelf of pretty books in a bookshelf.
But alas, I don't have the square meters for that. Also I tend to like THICCC books and carrying around a 1600 page monster daily on my commute isn't it.
I agree that Amazon getting even more control over the ebook market would be bad for authors and publishers.
But how would (hypothetical) more formidable DRM constitute even more control over the ebook market?
(Do you mean more control by preventing more piracy? Or by preventing more good-faith circumvention? Or more control because ebooks might be published even more Amazon exclusive than they already are, because of superior anti-piracy protection?)
That control is only held by Amazon with their drm scheme. It’s not held by the publishers or authors. It does nothing to prevent piracy and only helps Amazon consolidate more control.
Long ago, for a few years I would occasionally buy ebooks from Amazon when it was trivial to strip the DRM with basically my credit card number and a script.
Once they started trying to lock things down further, I completely stopped buying, moving to piracy mostly, and occasional scanning of physical books.
Being more technically capable than typical, I’m hardly a normal customer to try to target, but the way I see it all this does is piss off the minority who care and are capable of getting around restrictions. Those who don’t care or aren’t capable will just continue getting cluelessly fucked over as always. These measures less about effectiveness, and more like a money themed emotional support affirmation for someone in a suit. It helps them feel like they are accomplishing something, but that’s it.
I haven’t checked lately, but I expect that “AI” tools that easily and accurately rip and format data from a picture feed of a screen will become the way to go for bypassing whatever clever encryption schemes come along. This also has the benefit of ignoring the steganographic tracking data hidden in paid files, making piracy ultimately easier for the uninformed. This sort of thing was always possible, but was a bit janky and laborious.
Same here - I'll only buy books I can read on any device of my choosing. Kindle+dedrm was an option. https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/p/drm-free is another option I have used a lot. But if it's not available, I will go to the modern day library of alexandria. I will not pay for crap that will just stop working in a few years - a book can sit on my shelf for 15 years before I get around to reading it.
When it comes to piracy and anti-piracy, there is greed and stupidity on all sides.
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