mjthompson

Very interesting stuff to read from the perspective of an unenlightened outsider.

Clearly he's got some issues given the reaction. However, was he informed of the bug? Was there an expectation he would fix his own mistakes?

I don't work in IT/Software Engineering - I work in law. But when I find fault in other's work, it's a courtesy to let them know and give them an opportunity to address it. It's part of being a team player. I am not trying to be critical of you. It's just reading this reminded me of similar experiences where I was in a similar position to you. They were important experiences. People can feel bad when other people fix their mistakes when they aren't given the opportunity to be heard about it. It's so tempting to just say 'I will just do it myself' but you might find other people react poorly to this.

Of course, maybe things are different in the IT world where it may be challenging to identify who committed a buggy change to the code repository, or perhaps just a radically different culture of work. But at the end of the day we are all human.

It does appear you have developed an awareness of this, given what you noted in your reply to him (and props to you for that!). From there on, his behaviour was misguided and not appropriate.

The attention to detail is breathtaking.

Oracle - of all businesses - got this right. I know, I'm in shock too.

In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, after your credit is exhausted, you have to explicitly opt in to billing or else they stop all paid services for you.

Moreover, you can choose to keep billing disabled and use their free services without fear of unknown costs.

AWS have just decided to run with a policy of offering refunds when people make mistakes. Unfortunately, some people are ignorant of this, or too timid to ask for their money back.

Possibly a disassociated elastic IP address?

The big issue I see with IoT devices is the absence of routine and long-term software updates. When these devices run Linux or Android, they are generally outdated. I don't really see this as being a result of the specific operating system, just laziness and contempt on the part of manufacturers.

In the meantime, a simple mitigation for consumers is to create an isolated guest Wi-Fi network on their router, and connecting IoT devices through that, so that they are kept well clear of the rest of the network. This is becoming commonplace on consumer grade equipment now.

Makes perfect sense to me. Hats off to the attorney that thought of that.

Corporations enjoy signficant benefits of being in the state, including, for example, a police force that protects them from attack, and a legal system that will resolve disputes they have both internally and with others.

They should pay reasonable (not low) taxes in any event, not subject to the caveat you identify.

Can browsers please just disable tracking pixels already? I look forward to the day of reckoning.

Also very confused by this. I was waiting for a part that explained how data was being accessed and managed during that window.

I wouldn't really want a different, likely subpar system responsible for queuing and serving requests during that window.

I can only think they are directing it to a different cluster.

Thanks. I might have a look into doing it for mine, since that seems to make sense. I guess like you said you can just mount the fs rw, and then chroot in to run updates.

I use 1Password and still pay for a Bitwarden licence to support development of a viable open source alternative.

I think what was being said is the fact an app uses Electron rather than being native can diminish UX. I think it was clear enough from the post, at least from context.

I'm actually a bit confused by 'the same UX across OSes'. What does this mean? The mobile UI is completely different to the desktop apps and web app.

Why would you mount read only, out of interest? How do you keep packages up to date? And what about logging? I'd want to be logging connection attempts.

You might want to add a qualifier to 'package managers', like 'good package managers'... which the Windows Store is not. It barely fits the bill as a package manager.

I seem to recall at one point Sony tried to upstream stuff and it was knocked back for not being up to scratch.

Netflix contribute back without any obligation to. But they track the development branch closely, making upstreaming easier than with the PlayStation OS, which presumably is a bit more 'frozen in time', making it much harder to submit patches.

I've recently switched my home network jump box to OpenBSD. Still learning the basics. I didn't even know about authpf. I'm reading the docs now and it looks great. Thanks for sharing that.

Terrifying

I know solicitors a fair bit older than me (is, in their 40s) who made the jump and find they more readily gain the respect and trust of clients, and senior lawyers within the firm, by virtue of their maturity.

I should have said that I don't blame any individual dev or sysadmin for failing to respond. It's a deeply entrenched organisational issue.

Imagine fixing an issue on a Model 204 mainframe, with a perpetually dwindling number of people you can rely on for help, knowing that if you don't fix it, people don't get their welfare cheque.

High stress, low reward. Unsung heroes in my books.

Not the first time they've ignored issues in myGov. This guy tried endlessly to contact them about a XSS vulnerability to deaf ears:

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/revealed-serious-flaws-in-...

I'm a lawyer. Very different, I know!

I love IT and programming, but I knew if I made a life long career of it, I'd grow to hate it.

I really like doing IT related things in my own way. I'd always want to do things to best practices and not just get the job done as I was told.

Opening that documentation page gave me flashbacks.

I made the switch out of IT to another field. Configuring a Shibboleth IdP was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do in my IT career, it really pushed my capabilities. SLO wasn't the only hard thing, the whole thing was immensely challenging and every time I'd restart Jetty I'd be holding my breath hoping it would come up again.

I think your point answered by this: 'Businesses' are 'consumers' in the app distribution market. Again, you are looking at it from the perspective of phone users, but that's not the market which I'm saying is potentially anti-competitive.

Serving a 'text file' from a web server module seems to overcomplicate things in my view.

More code || complexity == greater likelihood of bugs (including security bugs).

As ironic as a security bug in a security.txt serving module would be, it's probably best we avoid that possibility and let the ordinary, highly scrutinised file serving code handle it instead.

It is true that as a consumer, I can avoid Apple products. The real issue relates to the options open to app publishers, that is, people who want to distribute an app.

There is no viable alternative for a company wishing to publish an app: you have to target iOS or you perish. Many companies today need to have an iOS app. For example, a bank, or a big chain grocery outlet, probably needs an iOS app to exist in the market. This isn't a tiny niche area which can be avoided.

The only way you can publish an app is with Apple's approval. Therefore, Apple are exercising a significant degree of market power.

In the US, the idea that because a company is private it can trade however it pleases has been rejected since 1890 when the Sherman Act was introduced. It's the same in most capitalist economies. The conduct of companies is subject to reasonable regulation to ensure healthy competition.

I've established earlier that Apple has significant market power in the mobile app space. Because of that, it's fair that we ask Apple to be reasonable when deciding what apps to approve, and the conditions on which they approve them, because they are exercising a significant degree of market power.

This is a space calling for regulation. Apple and Google should not be free to reject or impose conditions on apps as they wish. We have a right, as the people who make rules about how companies may trade, to ask for them to be regulated when they are exercising a significant degree of market power.

Breach of contract claims, beyond the most simple scenarios, often involve difficult normative questions. It's unlikely a simple dispute capable of being resolved by a computer would wind up going to trial. It would be settled or be the subject of summary judgment.

Sure, you might have word state -> boolean in a simple scenario. But what if the party alleges the contract, or a term, is void or unenforceable because of the existence of a vitiating factor? What if there are two competing interpretations of a term which depend upon considerations such as the purpose of the agreement?

It would be a very difficult task asking someone to agree to a contract which requires no value judgements. Even more so in the Nordic countries where such agreements are governed through a lens of 'good faith'.

We then wind up making value judgements, weighing the benefits of holding parties to a bargain capable of being determined objectively, on the one hand, and the elusive and complex notion of 'fairness' on the other.

We are then well and truly outside the boundaries of the capabilities of contemporary thinking machines.

Taxation is an area of back end law where lawyers should be worried about automation.

MIT licence? Haven't they learned from others' mistakes? This sort of stuff should be AGPL licenced.

Syndicated or unlawfully copied? This site doesn't look legit. Why would FT syndicate their content to a random WordPress blog? Very confused.

Yeah, but suppose for argument's sake that your name is John Smith. I suspect pretty much every variant of that name is taken.

So, unless you resort to an unreasonable suffix of digits, or a potentially unprofessional moniker, you've got no choices.

Then again, email may not be a viable personal communication method in the future. Looks like the future is chat apps.