“Dark patterns” is a term coined to describe user interfaces designed
to manipulate people into giving up time, money or personal data that
they didn’t intend to. A common example is the obstacle course you
often have to go through to cancel a subscription to something online.
Another example is the use of countdown timers to rush buyers into
hasty decisions. They may not be out-and-out deceptive, but they do
come close.
Now, the US states of California and Washington are looking to pass laws
to restrict this practice.
<https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/lawmakers-take-aim-at-insidious…>
'With Mozilla's release of Firefox 85 on Tuesday, Adobe's once
ubiquitous Flash technology is really gone for good. The software had
been widely used to expand gaming, video and animation on the web,
though Adobe stopped supporting it at the end of 2020. Firefox was the
last major browser to support Flash. From a report:
Apple, whose late boss Steve Jobs helped sink Flash by banning it from
iPhones and iPads, ditched Flash with Safari 14 in September 2020.
Google Chrome, the most widely used browser, completely excised it on
Jan. 19 with version 88. Microsoft's Edge 88 followed suit on Jan. 21.
The schedule of removals shows just how hard it is to advance
technology foundations as widely used as the web. Browser makers for
years wanted to remove Flash, replacing it with more advanced
standards built directly into the web. Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash"
letter in 2010 solidified the opposition, and Adobe started
recognizing the software's doom by scrapping the Android version of
Flash in 2011. It's taken years of effort to drop Flash completely.
Adobe took until 2017 to announce that Flash would be completely
unsupported at the end of 2020, and still some are willing to jump
through lots of hoops to keep Flash around a little longer.'
-- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/01/26/1618254
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 577-5304
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
'Google has threatened to disable its search engine in Australia if
it's forced to pay local publishers for news, a dramatic escalation of
a months-long standoff with the government. From a report:
The proposed law, intended to compensate publishers for the value
their stories generate for the company, is "unworkable," Mel Silva,
managing director for Australia and New Zealand, told a parliamentary
hearing Friday. She specifically opposed the requirement that Google
pay media companies for displaying snippets of articles in search
results.
The threat is Google's most potent yet as the digital giant tries to
stem a flow of regulatory action worldwide. At least 94% of online
searches in Australia go through the Alphabet unit, according to the
local competition regulator. "We don't respond to threats," Australia
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Friday. "Australia makes our rules
for things you can do in Australia. That's done in our parliament.
It's done by our government. And that's how things work here in
Australia."'
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/01/22/0339236
However, in related news:
"Google Agrees To Pay French News Sites To Send Them Traffic"
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/01/21/2316209
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 577-5304
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
Just been watching this review
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyEpshm16HY> of the TinyPilot
KVM-over-IP box. It’s purchasable from the maker’s website for
US$300-plus, which is a fraction of the price of most other KVM-over-IP
products. It’s built around a Raspberry π 4, using the camera adapter
for HDMI in (no use made of the GPIO connector at all). Of course this
means it can only support a connection to a single server machine. The
source code is on GitHub if you want to build that yourself. The base
product offers insecure HTTP-only access; if you want HTTPS, you have
to pay extra for the TinyPilot Pro software licence.
For comparison, some reader comments mention an alternative “PiKVM”
product -- has anyone heard of this?
CERN wanted to come up with the hardware equivalent of open-source
software licences. Such licences don’t really work well with hardware,
because they use terms (like “linking” and “system libraries”) that
aren’t applicable to hardware.
So they worked with the Open Source Initiative (the custodians of the
Open Source Definition) to come up with a selection of three licences,
allowing for a choice of strong copyleft (GPL-equivalent), weak copyleft
(LGPL-equivalent, I guess) and no copyleft at all. It seems these
licences could actually be used for a combination of both hardware and
software.
<https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/29/cern_ohl_approved/>
FWIW: My recent experiences with copying SSD's...
I recently installed Ubuntu Mate from USB stick to a 120GB SSD. I then updated with all the latest patches. This took about 30 minutes.
I then tailored my preferences of Firefox, Terminal, Pluma, etc. Created a Guest account. Installed the NZ dictionary, and added some applications. This took me another 30 minutes.
I then needed to do this to 5 more computers. So, to prepare six computers would have taken me a total of about 6 hours.
I considered using the utility "dd" to copy a clone of my master disk. Looking through stackoverflow<https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/144172/full-dd-copy-from-hdd-to-hdd> I found the suggestion to use "cat". I.e. Boot Ubuntu from a USB stick and assuming sda is my master disk and sdb is the clone, then issue the command...
$ sudo sh -c 'cat /dev/sda >/dev/sdb'
I found this copying took about 15 minutes. However, it didn't give me any progress report during the copying sequence. I then...
$ sudo apt install pv
...pv stands for "Pipe Viewer". For the next SSD drive to be cloned I issued the command...
$ sudo sh -c 'pv /dev/sda >/dev/sdb'
...which then provided a progress bar that updated every second.
With Samsung SSD 120GB drives I found the operation took 13 minutes 13 seconds with a transfer rate of 153MB/s.
I later had built another master SSD on a Kingston 120GB SSD and cloned this to another Kingston 120GB SSD which took 10 minutes and had a transfer rate of 200MB/s.
I found with the system still powered on, I could unplug the cloned SSD and plug in another blank SSD and start another cloning. Probably not a recommended practice.
After booting the clone, I edited /etc/hostname to make each clone unique. Maybe there's something else I should change???
In summary, allowing for a bit of time to physically move the SSD's between machines, I was effectively completing the installation/updating/tailoring at a rate of three PC's an hour.
I dunno if this was the right way or the best way, but, so far, the masters and all the clones seem to be working OK.
cheers,
Ian.
'Ryan Smith, writing at AnandTech:
Following plans first unveiled last year during the launch of their
DG1 GPU, Intel sends word this morning that the first Iris Xe video
cards have finally begun shipping to OEMs. Based on the DG1 discrete
GPU that's already being used in Intel's Iris Xe MAX laptop
accelerators, the Iris Xe family of video cards are their desktop
counterpart, implementing the GPU on a traditional video card.
Overall, with specifications almost identical to Xe MAX, Intel is
similarly positioning these cards for the entry-level market, where
they are being released as an OEM-only part. As a quick refresher, the
DG1 GPU is based on the same Xe-LP graphics architecture as Tiger
Lake's integrated GPU. In fact, in broad terms the DG1 can be thought
of as a nearly 1-to-1 discrete version of that iGPU, containing the
same 96 EUs and 128-bit LPDDR4X memory interface as Tiger Lake itself.
Consequently, while DG1 is a big first step for Intel -- marking the
launch of their first discrete GPU of the modern era -- the company is
planning very modestly for this generation of parts. The first DG1
GPUs were shipped in the fall as part of Intel's Iris Xe MAX graphics
solution for laptops. At the time, Intel also indicated that a desktop
card for OEMs would also be coming in 2021, and now, right on
schedule, those desktop cards have begun shipping out.'
-- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/01/28/1649204
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 577-5304
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
'Four European apps which secure user data via end-to-end encryption,
ProtonMail, Threema, Tresorit and Tutanota, have issued a
joint-statement warning over recent moves by EU institutions that they
say are setting lawmakers on a dangerous path to backdooring
encryption. From a report:
Last month the EU Council passed a resolution on encryption that's
riven with contradiction -- calling for "security through encryption
and security despite encryption" -- which the four e2e app makers
believe is a thinly veiled call to backdoor encryption. The European
Commission has also talked about seeking "improved access" to
encrypted information, writing in a wide-ranging counter-terrorism
agenda also published in December that it will "work with Member
States to identify possible legal, operational, and technical
solutions for lawful access." Simultaneously, the Commission has said
it will "promote an approach which both maintains the effectiveness of
encryption in protecting privacy and security of communications, while
providing an effective response to crime and terrorism." And it has
made it clear there will be no 'one silver bullet' as regards the e2e
encryption security 'challenge.' But such caveats are doing nothing to
alleviate the concerns of e2e encrypted app makers -- who are
convinced proposals from the Council of the EU, which is involved in
adopting the bloc's laws (though the Commission usually drafts
legislation), sums to an push toward backdoors.
"While it's not explicitly stated in the resolution, it's widely
understood that the proposal seeks to allow law enforcement access to
encrypted platforms via backdoors," the four app makers write, going
on to warn that such a move would fatally underline the security EU
institutions also claim to want to maintain. "The resolution makes a
fundamental misunderstanding: Encryption is an absolute, data is
either encrypted or it isn't, users have privacy or they don't," they
go on. "The desire to give law enforcement more tools to fight crime
is obviously understandable. But the proposals are the digital
equivalent of giving law enforcement a key to every citizen's home and
might begin a slippery slope towards greater violations of personal
privacy."'
-- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/21/01/28/1724250
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 577-5304
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
'Gregory Kurtzer, co-founder of the now-defunct CentOS Linux
distribution, has founded a new startup company called Ctrl IQ, which
will serve in part as a sponsoring company for the upcoming Rocky
Linux distribution.
Rocky Linux is to be a beneficiary of Ctrl IQ's revenue, not its
source—the company describes itself in its announcement as the
suppliers of a "full technology stack integrating key capabilities of
enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud and high-performance computing."'
-- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/rocky-linux-gets-a-parent-company-w…
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 577-5304
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/