dodobirdlord

> If you have an internal chat app that never logs messages -- say, the sender looks up the recipient's IP address on the VPN and connects to them directly -- then a court can't order you to write new code to enable logging.

No, they absolutely can. You may be confusing this with various first amendment cases about compelled speech, given the focus on a court ordering code authorship. A regulator does not have to concern themselves with the mechanism of storage, they can simply designate communications as requiring storage. And they have done so in the case of electronic transmissions. The relevant law allows regulators to compel retention of written communications. Storing a communication in memory and sending it over the network to the memory of another computer for display is by itself sufficient to qualify as a written communication.

> Companies could set up internal chat solutions where conversations aren't logged.

No, transient storage of chat records has specifically been categorized as unacceptable in exactly these ongoing Google litigations.

This is a process for refining iron ore, as opposed to using a blast furnace, or using the same process with decomposed natural gas instead of just hydrogen. In steel production it would be subsequently smelted.

Many jurisdictions around the world have laws that allow police to compel you to decrypt data, particularly at border crossings.

Most of the worst issues with C++ can't actually be fixed without backwards incompatible changes that would break large amounts of existing code. Google spent several years advocating for the approach that you're suggesting, but was unable to persuade other members of the C++ standards committee and recently announced that they're working on a replacement language. The rationale for Carbon goes into great detail on why fixing C++ isn't a viable option.

https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/do...

https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang

Memory unsafety makes securing large codebases difficult because even minor errors in unimportant parts of a codebase have the potential to compromise an entire binary if an attacker can figure out how to get execution to reach the unsafe code and exploit it. Human code review is fallible and junior engineers exist, so if you want to be confidant that your codebase is free of such vulnerabilities you need to depend on static analysis. Rust makes this a lot easier because a lot of the guarantees you'd want to make using static analysis on your C/C++ codebase are built into the language, and the language helpfully flags for you the sections of code that need careful human scrutiny.

Unnecessary use of unsafe blocks is stylistically discouraged in Rust, so there's a lot less code that has the potential to harbor a memory safety bug, which makes bugs both less likely to exist and easier to spot when doing a code audit before introducing a dependency on third-party code.

Yes, but Minecraft isn’t real life, it’s a fake world made for kids.

If it’s entirely self-hosted servers on the user’s own hardware, then how could Microsoft ban them? What would that even mean? Microsoft’s systems must somehow be involved for a ban to have any meaning.

The main reason is that you can’t, because only a work produced by a human is eligible for copyright.

For example, it has previously been litigated that nobody has IP ownership of an image taken with a camera by an animal.

There are a lot of goofs out there running goofy binaries for which they have lost the goofy source code. These people are unfortunately also the committee’s problem.

Citizens of middle eastern countries that are hostile to Israel would care the most, but other international travelers also benefit from avoiding the Israel passport stamp to avoid unnecessary difficulties if they need to visit those middle eastern countries in future.

The US values many things in its foreign policy, and some of those things are spreading democracy and self-determination. That doesn’t mean the US values them to the exclusion of other interests like trade partnerships, energy security, regional stability, and military alliances.

Countries in the US sphere of influence tend to drift toward becoming democracies, in part because of the influence of free trade. Both Taiwan and South Korea started off as dictatorships propped up by the military backing of the US to contain the spread of communism, and eventually transitioned to democratic government.

As for Tibet, if it were on an island and could have been defended by the US Navy, I’m sure it would still be independent. Even if it were merely coastal it might still be independent. But it’s landlocked and mountainous, and hard to defend from the other side of the world. The invasion was also rapid, and happened at the same time the international community was responding to the invasion of South Korea.

Yes, local communities across the United States have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with control over local zoning, so the power should be moved to a regional political body. Voters will of course vote in their own best interest, and everyone wants their property values to increase, resulting in every local government restricting housing construction and a general lack of construction across the board. This creates regional-level economic problems that should be addressed by regional-level government bodies.

Maybe not even then? GDP dropping while employment, spending, and demand increase indicates an economic expansion coinciding with a decrease in labor productivity, which is extremely weird and not at all like a conventional recession where the economy contracts. Different terminology might be required.

Additionally, with inflation at such a high level (9% or so), the last two quarter's real GDP growth estimates (-1.6% and -0.9%) are small percentages compared to the size of the error bars on the required inflation adjustment to compute the real GDP. Computing inflation is tricky and requires a lot of hand waving and boiling down different price changes across different sectors of the economy to get a single number, and if the calculation is off by even 1% (i.e. inflation is actually 8%), then the real GDP growth for last quarter would be positive at 0.1%.

This is also happening at the same time that the US dollar is getting increasingly valuable vs most foreign currencies, so measured in terms of foreign currency value the US real GDP is still increasing, which just compounds the weirdness.

Putting all of this together, I don't think the term "recession" is a good fit.

I think you may have slightly misread. I think what’s being said is that a single logical AZ may actually be multiple physical datacenters in close proximity.

Squash your commits once you've finished prior to sending them for review? Code review of individual commits generally stems from a workflow that expects that each individual commit will contain a change that is complete in and of itself, along with the corresponding tests for that change, so that the project builds and all tests pass at every commit. This makes exploring the change history easier and reverting changes cleaner, and simplifies bisecting the commit history.

The main motivation to not reprocess fuel was nuclear nonproliferation, because it frees up the plutonium for nuclear weapons. But on the off chance that governments ever want to build a giant pile of nuclear weapons it’s sensible to not get rid of the nuclear waste, since if it ever turns out you do want it again it’s very expensive and time consuming to produce. Since you’ve already gone to all of the effort of mining the uranium and producing a bunch of plutonium, best to just keep it around somewhere in case you ever do want it for some reason.

Many people also hate renewable energy for ideological reasons. People can be persuaded, or, in a democracy, simply outvoted by a critical mass of supporters. Nuclear power has been losing the propaganda war for decades in the United States, but that’s not a reason to give up on it forever.

The long term plan is to reprocess it, which is why we need to keep it around in the meantime. If we just wanted to get rid of it that would be trivially easy. But we don’t want that because we know in future we’re going to want to get it back from wherever we put it.

Facebook tried successfully to do this in 2019 by misusing their internal corporate app certificate, and only stopped because Apple noticed and revoked their certificate. So we already have proof that in the absence of Apple’s ability to punish and ban companies for asking users to sideload to bypass tracking restrictions, they will ask and users will accept.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18203551/apple-facebook-b...

As for Android, many Android app stores (especially ones in China) impose no restrictions or barely any at all. The only one that imposes meaningful restrictions is Google’s Play Store, and the restrictions are much less than in Apple’s App Store, so the incentive to bother circumventing them is much lower. For example, unnecessarily harvesting user location is not a blocker for access to the Play Store.

I want to continue using Apple’s App Store, but most people are less aware of things like location harvesting, and are less privacy-sensitive than I am. Today, Apple can set policies that benefit users without those users having to be aware of those policies or understand why those policies benefit them. In a world where Apple’s policies can be sidestepped simply by asking the user to sideload the app, many, even most users will likely agree to do so without any awareness of what they’re giving up. The shady app developer certainly won’t tell them!

Users unambiguously benefit from most of Apple’s App Store policies (the payment rules less so, but even then there are benefits such as mandatory subscription cancellation support), but often in ways they can’t or don’t see. Apple’s policies are obviously negative for app developers, but I don’t care and nobody should care that Apple chooses to benefit its consumers at the expense of its third-party corporate partners. That’s just normal business behavior.

Step 1 of that process violates the law, if it adds new “core messaging capability”. Perhaps the EU considers “core messaging capability” to refer exclusively to functionality that already exists today, and it could not even in principle refer to anything that doesn’t already exist, but that seems vague and unlikely. If support for Unicode emoji did not already exist, would a vendor be allowed to unilaterally add it? It seems uncertain.

Security needs to be a default though. It will be a serious problem if this law ends up being interpreted as requiring encrypted messaging systems to accept insecure messages by default.

It doesn’t, it’s been carefully boundary-set so that it only impacts a small handful of large US tech companies. They probably would have just come out and written their names in explicitly into the law (like Australia did a while back), except that sort of thing is frowned upon.

The EU has other industries.

If I am using, say, Signal, I do not want it to be possible to send me an unencrypted message at all. That philosophy of security sounds likely to run afoul of this legislation.

Ah, so now nobody can ever launch any new messaging features without reaching a consensus in a standardization body. Progress!

Well, I wouldn’t, and people who wanted the former could already go buy an Android phone. Why does the iPhone need to be the same?

If push comes to shove, I imagine Google will just not sell chromebooks in the EU.