strooper's comments

"This week we filed a lawsuit in Arizona against Namecheap, a domain name registrar, as well as its proxy service, Whoisguard, for registering domain names that aim to deceive people by pretending to be affiliated with Facebook apps."

Wasn't Facebook supposed to request for information through the legal system instead of suing the registrar itself? Isn't Facebook publicly and unreasonably flexing muscle? So long justice...

Few days back, I installed the last version of Microsoft Encarta (2009) in an old PC (CPU E5200, RAM 4GB). To my surprise, all the millennial around me were astonished how fast and smooth that software was running and searching for information on a typically (very) slow machine.

It would all make sense to me, if they wouldn't charge $800 and $1000 for 24" and 30" monitors (with keyboard and mouse) respectively. Are they designing the monitors from ground up as well?

Business around privacy is a thing going on for at least a decade. However, we often forget that our data flow is controlled, monitored, and stored by those who we try to protect our data from.

It will be interesting to see the implementation of three dimensional drone traffic.

Who is working on the drone path guidelines, and traffic control policies?

Western companies have been bending blatantly a little too low to save assets and market shares in China. With trade war, human rights abuse in Xinjiang, and Hong Kong protest, this is probably a good chance for the West to stand against China's invasion.

All android smartphones data are exploited by Google through google services, by manufacturers through uninstallable bloatwares and by app providers through apps. If a user disables a permission, the app refuses to work.

The cheap smartphones are sold mostly in the Asian and African markets where the mass can afford that, and data privacy means nothing to those users.

So, Your data, my data, all are up there somewhere, no matter how cheap or expensive devices we use. Why do we still live in the illusion of data privacy? Is there any?

From “Climate Change: How Do We Know” from NASA, mentioned in this article, there is a carbon level rise and fall graph which looks almost periodic. Perhaps the previous cases of cause and effect help us to be aware of the present situation?

For example- Do we know what took the carbon dioxide level high during 400000 and 320000 years ago, aftermath and things that brought the level down eventually in next few thousand years before the rise (again)?

[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

I have seen the army in my country to emphasize on having total control on each and every equipment they have. They boast on being able to completely disassemble and reassemble all the mechanical war machines.

I wonder how that works for software heavy war equipment, such as F-35. Does the seller provide full source code and control (and probably training?) over modification of the software? Do they agree on the paper only that the buyer can never get to use those weapons against the seller? Or, do they set those policies right inside the control units of those weapons?

If the seller country have significant control on the control units of the war instruments sold to another country, and if the seller country is able to update/modify/ control/restrict devices over the air, won't that make the buyer country just an outpost of the seller country?

Stopping Apple from listening to Siri, stopping Google from listening to Google Assistant, stopping Amazon from listening to Alexa, stopping Google from collecting data from android devices - these sort of articles and arguments seem flawed right at the title.

Those companies have created those devices to listen to you, and your surrounding, to understand you better and serve you the right product or service or their ads. You can not have both smooth service and complete privacy if the data is restricted, as the system will not get to learn you.

Is there a way to know that the present chips are not backdoored? Or, backdoored by US? Why should the world be concern about Chinese backdoors and not US ones?

This housing crisis is going on for long time. I was wondering why don't these tech giants build housing complex for their employees.

It would definitely solve a lot of issues, including controlled and balanced housing cost for the employees, group/public transport, and above all a vibrant community.

Is it a permit issue? Or something else?

Dear Iranian devs, let's learn to take advantage of the situation instead of complaining about it. Why not learn from the devs in China?! To my knowledge, China blocks no less online service than Iran. China monitors citizens' online activities in ways that very few other countries can. Yet their internet services flourish and engage users in ways nowhere else is seen.

Let's build/clone fancy/popular services locally instead. Haven't we seen how big opportunity that is financially? Doesn't that bring freedom from both the controlfreak regime and sanction-imposing regime?

> "Palantir software is instrumental to the operations of ICE, which is planning one of the largest-ever targeted immigration enforcement raids this weekend on thousands of undocumented families. Activists argue raids of this scale would be impossible without software like Palantir."

Once and for all, it is the policy makers, not the tech industry, who are responsible for these operations. Tech enables people doing things easily, which can be good or evil. It is people, who should decide, be concern and push the lawmakers towards the right/justified path.

> If you're intellectually driven then looking after two young children isn't fascinating. However, I love them and they rely on me.

I feel you. My wife and I are managing two kids and I work from home, meaning I am home almost 24x7. I help my wife taking care of our children and I often get annoyed by the whole bunch of dumb or repetitive things we need to do to take care of them. Still, I love them more than anything in the world.

Apart from the article, Pew research center data is full of made up numbers [1]. I remember one particular research on sharia law [2] where it mentioned that 82% people in Bangladesh support making sharia the official law, yet, the fact is, no Islamist parties came close to power in the ~50 years history of the country.

Once again, Pew research is just full of hokum.

[1] https://www.econlib.org/facts-opinions-and-the-pew-research-... [2] https://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-relig...

"I" of IoT literally means internet. How does barring your IoT devices from communicating over the Internet make sense? Wouldn't it make total sense to get rid of all your IoT devices instead?

Web crawling by search engines shouldn't be far from web scraping in terms of data collection. I am wondering what is the legal boundary of web crawling for search engines? While web scraping sounds sneaky, why isn't web crawling?

Its an interesting project. I wonder how they keep earthworm or other insects out of home.

Not related to this package delivery drama, but the way we are observing the live demolition of the world largest networking equipment maker and second largest smartphone maker (by number) in the name of trade war will never bring back the confidence in those who are flexing muscle.

The illusion of the rule of law, free world, globalization and the reality of control is simply frightening, and worrisome.

Sometimes it feels like the conflict is partially about the 5G technology implementation.

What does 5G technology have that is making everyone so sensitive? Will it require complete overhaul of the existing hardware (so big business opportunity)? Will it enable something extraordinary, apart from the data speed, that can not be done with the existing network technologies? I am curious...