A1kmm @ A1kmm @lemmy.amxl.com

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2 yr. ago

Wait times are as high as 2 months (depending on how old the phone model is, etc...), and even as a regular Xiaomi customer, their support never seem to allow anyone to skip the wait, even if for example they broke their old phone and want to set up a new one like the old one (ask me how I know). During that period, MIUI is like a data collection honeypot, sucking up your PII and serving you ads.

It might be 'normal' now to Xiaomi customers to wait to be able to unlock the phones that they have paid for and own (perhaps in the same sense someone in an abusive relationship might consider getting hit 'normal' because it has been happening for a while), but the idea that the company who sold you the phone gets some say on when you get the 'privilege' of running what you like on it, and make you jump through frustrating hoops to control your own device, is certainly not okay.

If they just wanted to stop reselling phones with non-Xiaomi sanctioned malware / bloatware added, making the bootloader make it clear it is unlocked (as Google does, for example) would be enough. Or they could make a different brand for phones that are unlocked, using the same hardware except with a different logo, and let people choose if they want unlocked or walled garden.

However, they make money off selling targeted ads based on information they collect - so I'm sure that they probably don't want to do any of those things if they don't have to, because they might disrupt their surveillance capitalism.

If the article (and other sources online) are to be believed, the law she is accused of breaking is failing to provide passwords to her devices following a raid on February 24th.

She was convicted, sentenced to pay a fine, and paid a fine for the vandalism of the plexiglass on February 10. So that matter was settled before any of this went down.

The question then is, what is the justification for this raid by 'counter-terrorist' police - and subsequent orders such as not to talk about Woodside? There is no publicly disclosed evidence she (or her group) have ever done anything violent - so the optics of this are certainly that it is attempting to suppress them for their activism (and it is very reasonable to ask the government to prove otherwise).

Charging someone with something that arises from law enforcement actions without justifying the original action is a classic smokescreen. It's similar to charging someone with resisting arrest without explaining what they were under arrest for in the first place. Now it is possible they had a legitimate reason for the search warrant in the first place (after all, it would have needed judicial approval) - in which case, it is time for that to be provided. That said, I don't think powers requiring handing over information like passwords that are held in the mind, to be used against the person handing the password over, should exist. At the very least, if the ciphertext can be safely backed up, the law should allow both parties to get legal advice and argue in court about whether the credential needs to be given up before it becomes a legal requirement.

Xiaomi phones used to be good for custom ROMs, but now they try to stop you unlocking the bootloader by making you wait an unreasonable amount of time after first registering the device with them before you can unlock. Many of the other vendors are even worse.

So from that perspective, Pixel devices are not a terrible choice if you are going to flash a non-stock image.

he has never once published anything that puts Russia or US Republicans in bad light

I don't think that is true. With regard to Russia: https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/russia/. Wikileaks started publishing stuff about the US during the Bush presidency, and continued into Trump. I think the main factor would have been what was available to them, in terms of leaks not already exposed elsewhere. Certainly the evidence suggests they published leaks provided them to by what is likely a state (Russian) sponsored group, and that formed part of a broader pattern by that state in interfering in the US's elections, but that is not to say they wouldn't have published unreleased leaks in the same circumstances if they had them about another political party.

a country that doesn’t extradite to the US (Sweden) to a country that does (UK)

Sweden has an extradition treaty with the US: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/10-201.22-Sweden-EU-Extradition-Treaty.pdf

There has certainly been a smear campaign (psyop?) against Assange to mislead people into hating him - and reading things like your comment I think it may have been quite successful, at least with Americans.

I once worked for a small ISP that decided to enter the calling card business. I built them a voice prompt system on top of Asterisk that made received PSTN calls over PRI and made outbound VoIP calls, all metered to cards with a unique number and a balance, and a UI to activate them. The business got boxes of physical cards printed, with a plan to sell them to convenience stores.

They hired a salesperson (AKA worst coworker) to sell the boxes of cards. This coworker then sold many boxes of activated cards to many small stores at an unauthorised discount (below the level of profitability), for cash rather than the approved methods for retailers to buy them, and then apparently spent said cash at the casino. The business had to honour the cards (i.e. not deactivate them) at a big loss to avoid ruining their reputation, since the buyers apparently did not know the deal was dodgy. His tenure was, suffice to say, not long, but in his short time there, he managed to put the business under financial strain and it eventually went into liquidation.

A 'Treaty of Versailles' type solution is not a good idea for durable peace though, harsh reparations, despite any sense they might be 'fair', seldom lead to both countries returning to be prosperous democratic countries (and to be clear, neither is a capitulation by Ukraine - that would be seen by Putin as locking in its current gains, with no real incentive not to try again for more despite what the treaty might say).

The best outcome for everyone is if Russia ends up being a genuinely pluralistic democracy (i.e. anyone in Russia can have political views, and the public selects its leadership in free and fair elections). Then Ukraine can normalise relations with Russia, and Russia stops being a threat to democratic institutions across the world as a whole.

I think the best way of thinking about it is not that Ukraine has a Russia problem, but rather that Ukraine and Russia have an oligarch problem (with Putin chief amongst them). Therefore, in a fair world, the oligarchs, and not the Russian people, would pay. It is true that Russians (and indeed some Ukrainians in occupied regions) have been radicalised by the oligarchs, so some kind of deradicalisation would be needed even if the oligarchs disappeared.

Solutions that look to negotiate how to reduce corruption and authoritarianism in Russia from the top are therefore the most likely to succeed long term. Shorter term solutions could include a negotiated end to hostilities coupled with agreements for Ukraine to join a defensive alliance that the oligarchs wouldn't consider provoking - which could be followed up by a carrot approach to easing sanctions in exchange for progressive movements towards genuine Russian democracy. This might give oligarchs enough push to take off ramps to cash in what they have plundered already, and slowly be replaced by less corrupt alternatives going forward.

Recovery from oligarchy for Russia might also by costly for Russia though - essential assets plundered from the USSR are now in private hands through crony capitalism; the best solution would be for many of the major ones to go back to or be rebuilt under state ownership, under genuine democratic leadership. But that is likely easier said than done given the state of Russia.

My retailer does at least charge the variable charges at cost based on the half-hourly rates (they make all their profit off a monthly fee), so I do see some of the benefit of it immediately (although we do have to make sure we don't use much power during price spikes).

I think it is more a drip pricing scam to increase revenue for the airline, especially when it is for things that don't have an incremental cost for the airline. Can't compete with other airlines? No problem, advertise a lower price than your competitors, but then dream up things your competitor offers as included that almost ever customer wants (and perhaps even try to create problems for customers but charge to make them go away). Now you get customers in the door for the lower initial price, but almost all customers end up paying more than if they had just gone with the competitor.

It is not beneficial to the customer because it reduces the efficiency of the market (and hence competition) by making it harder to quickly compare prices and get the best overall offer.

Other industries do the same - insurers with exclusions, retailers trying to make warranties an optional extra (where regulations allow them to do it), ISPs trying to drip price extra charges.

If a business has absolute upfront honesty about all extra charges, but they genuinely have a reason to charge extra for some customers doing things that cost them significantly more, then that is a different matter, and not necessarily bad for their customers. But the second they try to conceal part of the price and progressively reveal it, it really is a form of scam.

The problem is that negotiation only means something if the parties trust each other to follow it (or an agreement will be enforced by external parties with credible ability to do so).

Russia and Ukraine already have an agreement - the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances signed in 1994. It opens with this: "The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine". Note that the 1994 borders of Ukraine include Crimea and the entire Donbas region.

If agreements only apply until Putin feels it is ready to take more of Ukraine, and then Putin can just take more by force, but not risk what it has 'locked in' through Ukraine upholding its previous agreements, then an agreement is meaningless for Ukraine - at best, all it does is lets Russia recover economically and rebuild reserves so it can prepare for a large push and take more of Ukraine next time.

The only ways this could meaningfully be settled would be:

• Ukraine leaves Russia in a materially worse position than before the war, and remains prepared to do it again for ongoing deterrence, so that game theoretically it would be a bad idea for Russia to attack Ukraine again ever.
• Major political upheaval in Russia moves them to legitimately democratic, pluralistic and trustworthy leadership, and Ukraine and Russia then come to a new agreement that both sides will genuinely uphold.
• An agreement includes other countries who will credibly enforce the agreement - e.g. Ukraine agrees to give up some of their territory, and the rest of NATO agrees that Ukraine immediately will become part of NATO and be protected by Article 5 - so that Russia cannot take any more territory from Ukraine ever without unthinkable consequences for Russia.

People contributed to HashiCorp products - the software is not something solely made by HashiCorp. This might technically be legal under their CLA and indeed even in the absence of the CLA, under the Apache License, but it certainly isn't fair to people who contributed to it voluntarily in the expectation it would form part of a Free software project.

I think maybe the best way to combat this type of thing in the future is if F/L/OSS communities (i.e. everyone who contributes to a project without being paid) starts: 1) preferencing copyleft projects over BSD/MIT type licenses, and 2) refusing to sign any kind of CLA (maybe with an exception for obligate non-profit organisations). Then, companies will either have to pick developing entirely at their own cost, or to accept contributions on the incoming=outgoing model, meaning they are also bound by the copyleft licence and are forced to keep it as Free software. That would end the bait-and-switch of getting people to work on your product for free and then saying "surprise suckers, it's no longer Free software!".

It will also still give you a recipe for endangered animals: https://saveymeal-bot.co.nz/recipe/IbNrpwYOUeRb5ULlE1eiHuRS - although I couldn't get it to accept whale.

It will give you a fugu (pufferfish) recipe and at least sometimes only tell you to remove the skin and bones: https://saveymeal-bot.co.nz/recipe/I63jcVYZhZYgmUio7nwuMPJp (a very bad idea given parts of it are lethally poisonous)!

I think they've attempted it, but playing around with it a bit, it doesn't really work.

It will use cat biscuits in a recipe and say it serves people: https://saveymeal-bot.co.nz/recipe/SCES7COOU7KYhLYGcrPdzSjP

If you give it a list of mushroom types by scientific name and include death caps in there, it will give you a recipe: https://saveymeal-bot.co.nz/recipe/ipR5mmn79QVFDEQYlnaTOhZy

Nettles are food, but definitely not raw! I got it to give me a milkshake recipe featuring raw nettles by asking it for a recipe with nettles, ice cubes, and milk: https://saveymeal-bot.co.nz/recipe/LnCEe8WmN4MGUV8ixuVYdNLZ

Food ingredients modified sometimes seem to work - "peanut butter with a bit of polonium-210" seems to still work as an ingredient! https://saveymeal-bot.co.nz/recipe/uQzBD07cIHBQR8YjEl6me4OI

Once mine fell on the floor next to my computer, and the arms camouflaged perfectly with black mouse / keyboard cables etc. It took me a long time to find them that time - if you haven't found them yet, good luck!

If your threat model includes Google doing dodgy stuff (which it should), I think this is really only that useful if they also have reproducible builds, and parties other than Google can verify that Google hasn't done anything dodgy in the build, by creating a build with the same hash.

I guess the US wants to deter journalism that they don't like. An even more apt comparison is Assange vs Donald Trump - Trump allegedly tried to overturn democracy in the US from a position of trust, inciting events that killed people, and stole classified documents for his own private benefit. Assange just worked with whistleblowers as a journalist to try to serve the public interest. And yet Assange is locked up ahead of the US wanting to try him, as he has been for years now, and Trump is free.

Definitely a feel of Guling (one of the traditional Kulin seasons for those who haven't seen them: https://science.unimelb.edu.au/engage/alumni/alumni-newsroom-stories/cosmic-creatures has an explanation) in the air!

There's also the fact that GPL is ultimately about using copyright to reduce the harm that copyright can cause to people's rights.

If we look through the cases that could exist with AI law:

1. Training can legally use copyrighted materials without a licence, but models cannot be copyrighted: This probably is a net win for software freedom - people can train models on commercial software even and generate F/L/OSS software quickly. It would undermine AGPL style protection though - companies could benefit from F/L/OSS and use means other than copyright to undermine rights, but there would be nothing a licence could do to change that.
2. Training can legally use copyrighted materials without a licence, models can be copyrighted: This would allow companies to benefit heavily from F/L/OSS, but not share back. However, it would also allow F/L/OSS to benefit from commercial software where the source is available.
3. Training cannot legally use copyrighted materials without complying with licence, models cannot be copyrighted (or models can be copyrighted, outputs can't be copyrighted): This is probably the worst for F/L/OSS because proprietary software wouldn't be able to be used for training, but proprietary software could use a model trained on F/L/OSS by someone else.
4. Training cannot legally use copyrighted materials without complying with licence, models can be copyrighted, outputs can be copyrighted: In this case, GPLv2 and GPLv3 probably make the model and its outputs a derivative work, so it is more or less status quo.

Feeding a family of any size (even one person really) on that seems extra unlikely if it is a gift card that stops you from using it anywhere except at a major supermarket!

What were they trying to get you to do to be allowed to enter?

Apparently there is a PRC smear campaign against Adrian Zenz - https://www.mandiant.com/resources/blog/pro-prc-information-operations-campaign-haienergy, including by creating what Mandiant describes as what they "suspect to be at least three fabricated letters based on obvious grammatical errors and typos" to smear him - so I'd take anything that is ad hominem attacks against him rather than debating his actual work with a grain of salt.

However, even if you don't accept his writings, there are plenty of other people who have done credible research into the plight of the Uyghur people - e.g. resources contributed to https://xjdp.aspi.org.au/, such as articles like this one by Gene A. Bunin: https://livingotherwise.com/2021/01/04/the-elephant-in-the-xuar-ii-brand-new-prisons-expanding-old-prisons-and-hundreds-of-thousands-new-inmates/.

I knew Russian state endorsed journalists had been saying that sort of thing, but I thought they had a layer of plausible deniability by not having their actual ministers say things like that. But it turns out he is right, Medvedev did threaten to use nuclear weapons if Ukraine successfully regains the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territory: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-medvedev-wed-have-use-nuclear-weapon-if-ukrainian-offensive-was-success-2023-07-30/.