Eldakka 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (782)

• On the post: 'Malicious' Actor Is Wiping The Data Of Countless Western Digital My Book Users

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 01 Jul, 2021 @ 08:02am

  Re: Re: Re: Cheap local storage is cheap!

  They also do not realize that a backup should be one of several copies of a file, and having the only copy on a 'backup' drive is not a backup.

  Right, or phrased another way "they aren't technically literate enough to understand backups". ;)

• On the post: Supreme Court Says Patent Review Judges Are Unconstitutional, But It Can Be Fixed If USPTO Director Can Overrule Their Decisions

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 01 Jul, 2021 @ 12:53am

  Does this decision prohibit the President from appointing an APJ to be confirmed by the senate?

  Could we end up concurrently with 2 types of APJs, "inferior" judges appointed by the PTO Director, and, err, "superior"? judges appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate?

• On the post: 'Malicious' Actor Is Wiping The Data Of Countless Western Digital My Book Users

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 29 Jun, 2021 @ 07:06pm

  Re: Cheap local storage is cheap!

  I feel for everyone who lost their stuff, and perhaps I'm just naive, but with the seemingly ever shrinking cost of storage I have never been able to find a downside to backing up all of my stuff to an external drive that is intentionally only local, and never sees the internet.

  The problem is this device was marketed at people who are technically literate enough to know about one or both: 1) that backups are good;
  2) that they want to be able to remotely access, or share with others, their family photos etc. But they aren't technically literate enough to understand backups or exposing their stuff on the Internet. Ye Olde "A little knowledge is dangerous" situation.

• On the post: 'Malicious' Actor Is Wiping The Data Of Countless Western Digital My Book Users

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 29 Jun, 2021 @ 07:01pm

  Re: Helpful hacker says...

  Ahh yes, the BOFH solution to complaints about running out of storage.

• On the post: Map Of The Internet Exposes The Lie That 'Big Tech' Controls The Internet

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 09 Jun, 2021 @ 04:44pm

  Re: Re: What about hosting

  Cloudflare is there. Just take a closer look.

  It indicates how much traffic goes to Cloudfare's websites, not the CDN it runs that host (caches) other people's data. The way Cloudflare and other similar CDNs work is they take delegation of IPs owned by, for example Walmart. That means that as far as web metrics are concerned, you are visiting Walmart, as it's Walmart's IP addresses, Walmart's DNS, Walmart's website, but the physical hardware the data is coming from is Cloudfare's, as the internet routing tables direct the traffic for that Walmart-owned IP address to Cloudflares infrastructure. Note that Alexa metrics also only care about the 'website', i.e. forbes.com, not the IP addresses underlying that, which might be dozens of pooled addresses underlying that that each runs on a different hosting provider. Even if 1 access load balances/round robin DNSes to AWS, then another access of the same site gets directed to Azure, and yet another gets directed to IBM's cloud service, Alexa will pool them all into "forbes.com" because, well, they are all access of the Forbes website, even though they are hosted in (at least) three different datacenters provided by 3 different hosting services which might be on three different continents.

• On the post: Minister Behind Canada's Social Media Bill Now Says It Will Regulate User Generated Content

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 10 May, 2021 @ 08:17pm

  This sounds complicated.

  Let's choose some arbitrary large number of Youtube subscribers (for simplicitly, could be a per-video viewer numbers, or revenue, or whatever) say 10 million.

  So, will it apply to a Canadian-based channel that has 10 million subscribers? What about non-Canadian channels, say a German channel, it's still 'on' Youtube, so it can be viewed by Canadian Youtube subscribers, it's got 10+ million subscribers, so would it apply to this German users/business/organisation channel?

  Is it 10 million Canadian subscribers? How about a Canadian-based channel that has 1 million Canadian subscribers, but 9 million+ foreign subscribers. Would it apply to them?

  What about a German-based channel with 10 million Canadian subscribers and a buttload of non-Canadian subscribers?

  You might need set theory to start trying to work this all out.

• On the post: Supreme Court Sides With Google In Decade-Long Fight Over API Copyright; Google's Copying Of Java API Is Fair Use

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 05 Apr, 2021 @ 10:50pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Guess it's the lawyers who get the most of t

  there is a bank account containing 6 billion dollars earmarked for the situation that oracle wins their lawsuit.

  So about a 0.3%/year over the last 10 years? Wow, massive hit to their ability to do work /rolleyes.

• On the post: Supreme Court Sides With Google In Decade-Long Fight Over API Copyright; Google's Copying Of Java API Is Fair Use

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 05 Apr, 2021 @ 09:29pm

  Re: Re: Re: Guess it's the lawyers who get the most of the money

  Now they spent 10 years fighting the issue in court when they should be developing new products for the world.

  Are you really saying that a $1Trillion+ company, with more than $150b/year in revenue and over 100k employees can only do one thing at a time?

• On the post: Federal Court Says Sanctions Are On The Way For Portland PD Over Violations Of Protest Restraining Orders

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 08 Dec, 2020 @ 06:05am

  Unfortunately, if this comes down to fines, the City of Portland will just dig into its bag of "Other People's Money" and pay them.

  How about the sanctions be stripping qualified immunity from any officers - and their supervisors - for any incidents considered in breach of the restraining order?

• On the post: 2K Sports Could Have Avoided Its Un-Skippable Ads Backlash If The Ads Were Better Content

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 26 Oct, 2020 @ 10:28pm

  accurately reproducing the sporting experience

  When it comes to pissing off your own customers, who are often paying $60 for your product, there is no more comprehensive way to irritate them than by forcing advertisements upon them that are shitty and not useful. While this practice would be irritating for any game, it is especially so for NBA 2K, which is a retail game customers pay for and which already is chockablock full of in-game sponsorship advertising to go alongside microtransactions. And making the ads un-skippable seems to indicate just what media the 2K Sports folks think they're delivering, because this is more of a television thing than a practice for video games.

  Just like going to a real game!

  They are just trying to accurately replicate the sporting experience:

  Buy your tickets ("paying $60 for your product", "game customers pay for").

  Going to the stadium and being bombarded with buying overpriced food and drink, team merchandise being pushed - flags, banners, track suits, jerseys - ("being micro-transactioned ").

  Having all the advertising signs, banners they spread around the stadium, on teams clothing, and so on ("full of in-game sponsorship advertising").

  The advertising announcements, sponsored events/shows before, after and during the game ("making the ads un-skippable").

  Just like being there in real life.

• On the post: FBI Tracks Down Cop Car Firebomber Using Info The FBI Claims Is Way Less Useful Than An Encryption Backdoor

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 24 Sep, 2020 @ 05:14pm

  The key element here was the suspect's iCloud account. Videos showing the man building his Molotov cocktails, as well as videos showing him throwing them at cop cars, were found there. An image taken later in the day showed the suspect with his mask removed, allowing investigators to identify him. The account also contained a screenshot of a website providing the list of things needed to concoct the Molotov cocktails.

  Absolute criminal genius this one. I'm surprised they caught him with him leaving all that self-incriminating evidence around.

• On the post: The Next Generation Of Video Game Consoles Could Be The Beginning Of GameStop's Death

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2020 @ 05:10pm

  Re:

  it only has 500gig drive space.

  storage is expandable through standard USB external HDDs or by proprietary SSD plugin modules.

  if every xbox ,ps5 game is gonna be 4k and hdr the game files will be very large.

  The cut-down xbox is way cut down from the X version, 20 1.5GHz CUs vs 52 1.7GHZ CUs, not only is there no way in hell it'll be able to do 4k, MS has said it is intended for 1440p play. Therefore while the games are still going to be large, I would imagine the 'S' games will be smaller than the X version of the games. Even if they aren't significantly smaller, I wouldn't expect many games in the early release year or two to be over 100GB, still that's only 5 games without storage expansion or deleting completed games until one can purchase additional storage. Also, both the new Xbox and the PS5 are designed from the ground up for games to be delivered and stored compressed, with embedded hardware uncompression engines. Therefore newer games should all come in at far less than 100GB in their now native compressed storage format. But the S console is aimed at those on a budget anyway, therefore purchasers will have to make some sacrifices if they want the budget $299 console vs the full-fat $499 one. As is always the case with people wanting the budget version of something. But the thing I expect is that most of the people who want and can afford the X will most liklely not be people on a budget, who would either have decentish broadband (enough at least to download overnight) anyway and/or be the type of people (like me) who don't bother with 2nd-hand games (Gamestop's bread-and-butter) and just buy new games at full price or when on special. And are just as likely if they do buy physical discs to do that online as well anyway direct from a Steam or GOG (or Kickstarter) that offer physical purchase options.

• On the post: Regulators Are Ignoring How Low Orbit Satellite Broadband Is Trashing The Night Sky

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 22 Aug, 2020 @ 03:20pm

  Re: Re:

  Even with 100,000 satellites in LEO, all improbably in the same orbital plane (~428km for my calculation, but obviously they will be spread across several planes from ~250km to about 1300km depending on the particular companies plan, not all lumped into the same plane, thus the separations will be even greater because there will be far less per plane than I've calculated, but more complex as there will be several nested spheres of orbits with greater separations to pass through), that still puts them at an average separation of 140km. Plenty of room to launch a rocket through.

• On the post: Regulators Are Ignoring How Low Orbit Satellite Broadband Is Trashing The Night Sky

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 22 Aug, 2020 @ 03:24am

  In the short term this is going to be a huge problem for astronomers. But not in the medium (10-30 years) or longer term. Why you ask?

  Because the primary thing that all these launches are doing is bringing down the cost of entry to space. SpaceX has already brought it down massively from $200 million for a large satellite launch (sole use of the launch vehicle) to something like $60 million for sole (reusable) use of the launch vehicle. And it's still coming down. It's even been reported (not sure if this is from SpaceX or just speculation) that it costs SpaceX less than $60 million/launch, but since everyone else is still paying $100-200 million at present, i.e. lack of competition, they have undercut their rivals enough for the time being, leaving a comfortable margin for themselves.

  Once Starship and New Glenn and all the others come online (e.g. follow-on to Ariane 6, ULAs project, etc.), prices will come down even further.

  In the last 20 years, there has only been one major optical telescope launched into orbit, Hubble, due to cost. With its replcement, JWST still not launched, not until next year at the earliest.

  In a decade, I think it will be relatively cheap to launch 4m(Hubble)-8m(JWST) class telescopres into orbit. Might not sound very big, but Hubble at 4m is better than any of the existing 8m-10m ground based telescopes, like Keck of VLT (operating independantly, one the hook em up into their interferometry configurations, combining 2 Kecks or all 4 VLTs into a single scope they are perhaps better). Therefore even small collaborations will be able to launch these types of telescopes into orbit themselves. With the larger launch vehicels like Starship, 10m-class telescopes could be launched into orbit relatively cheaply for larger colloborations such as 30m-class scale collaborations. Sure, they don't have the serviceability or upgradeability of ground-based 'scopes, you can't just add more experients to them, but you may be able to launch a new scope per colloboration every 10 years or even more often with the newer instrumentation.

  And long term 30+ years, with this declining cost in access to space, they may be looking at building even larger telescopes on the moon. Perhaps even bigger than the 30m-class that are currently under construction that a lower gravity would allow.

  I see it as a short term pain for the astronomers for a medium to long term atronomical (pun intended) gain with routine space-based or even moon-based 'scopes.

  And, hey, if the costs to space don't come down much, then the satellite swarms won't be profitable. They'll cost too much to maintain the swarms in LEO, they'll all just deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere. ~3 years after they stop replenishing the swarms due to cost, their LEO orbits will decay and they'll all burn up, thus opening up the night sky again.

  So either it'll be profitable because access to space is cheap, thus opening up other realms of possibilities cheap space access allows, or they won't and they'll remove themselves from the night sky in a few years anyway, bringing us back to the status quo in 10-15 years.

• On the post: From The Stupid To The Bizarre: Trump Demands That His Government Should Take A 'Substantial' Cut Of TikTok's Purchase Fee

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 04 Aug, 2020 @ 09:56am

  Trump to Microsoft: "That's a nice deal you've got going on there. Shame if something were to happen to it"

• On the post: Why Is The US Trying To Punish Hackers For Accessing Vaccine Research We Should Be Sharing With The World?

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 21 Jul, 2020 @ 09:37pm

  Why Is The US Trying To Punish Hackers For Accessing Vaccine Research We Should Be Sharing With The World?

  Because, oviously, health and medicine isn't a social good, it's a capitalist profit-making opportunity.

  (/s in case it's not obvious, health and medicine should be social goods, even though they aren't treated as such.)

• On the post: Internal Investigation Shows The Houston PD's Narcotics Units Was An Unsupervised Mess

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 17 Jul, 2020 @ 08:37pm

  they found 404 errors

  evidence pages not found?

• On the post: As Expected, US Surveillance Of Social Media Leads To EU Court Of Justice Rejecting EU/US Privacy Shield

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 16 Jul, 2020 @ 05:30pm

  Now, there is some argument here that EU surveillance is just as bad, and it's perhaps more than a little silly that the CJEU basically ignores that as if it's not important.

  Even if EU surveillance is just as bad, the point is though, that the CJEU has power to hear cases against such surveillance and issue legally enforceable rulings against (or for) those EU spying agencies if an EU citizen does bring a case.

  This is not the case in the US. As has been demonstrated many times over, a non-US citizen has no standing in the US to bring an enforceable legal case against US Government surveillance.

  Basically, this is about whether there are remedies available to EU data subjects against such surveillance. There are in the EU, but there are not in the US.

• On the post: Appeals Court Strips Immunity From Abusive Cops Who Assaulted A Compliant Black Man… And The City That Allowed This To Happen

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 27 Jun, 2020 @ 03:32pm

  Ironic?

  The offensive statements and depictions in the training contradict the ethical duty of law enforcement officer “to serve the community; to safeguard lives and property; to protect the innocent against deception, the weak against oppression or intimidation and the peaceful against violence or disorder; and to respect the constitutional rights of all to liberty, equality, and justice.”

  Surely the Justices meant this ironically? Isn't there a SCOTUS case, a precendent, reported here on Techdirt a while ago, that rules that the police don't have a duty to "serve and protect"?

• On the post: Trump Campaign Is So Pathetic It Claims CNN Poll Is Defamatory; Demands Retraction

  

  Eldakka ( profile ), 12 Jun, 2020 @ 11:13pm

  Re:

  If he does not like the CNN poll he should just make his own poll showing how popular he is with the voters, he could call it The Alternative Poll.

  All he'd need to do that is a sharpie and a chart.

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