waon

> In this article the rights of a photographer was successfully defended

The rights of the photographer was respected from the very beginning. The attribution was still there for anyone to see. The “problem” was that it wasn’t included in the thumbnail, because it unsurprisingly didn’t fit in.

> so the system is a least working in some cases

No, this case represents a spectacular failure to protect people’s right to privacy and fair use. Why this is the case is already explained throughout this thread, so I don’t think we need to repeat this here.

Japan desperately needs a competent organization that can stand up for the digital rights of its people now. They lack organizations like the EFF that are willing to do this.

> (6) Your original message said that you believed they weren't using an a12z for the demo

I never claimed this

> (7) The comment below yours suggest that "One can certainly write software that virtualizes another machine". They were more than likely referring to para-virtualzation in their comment.

Well, yes and no. Virtualization (in the context of VMs) is about sharing the hardware between multiple OSes, so the statement about "virtualizing another machine" didn't even remotely make any sense. This led to my original comment, "emulation isn't virtualization."

And one small thing, it was the comment above mine, not below.

> (8) You responded saying you didn't know what software virtualization was, it is almost always para-virtualization.

Where can I find refereces to this term that supports this statement? I looked, and found the term "software virtualization" being used to refer to containerization and programming language runtimes, but not VMs.

> While there is full-hardware virtualization

I couldn't find anything about this either.

If you really want a formal definition, you could read this:

https://profsandhu.com/cs6393_s14/popek-goldberg-1974.pdf

Though some details may arguably be outdated, the general concept applies.

That's hardly the point. Many virtualization systems do indeed use QEMU for device emulation, but they don't use it to emulate the entire CPU functionality itself. A key point about virtualization is that most code run native while privileged instructions are trapped and handled by the hypervisor, allowing multiple guest OSes to coexist. This gives guest OSes the illusion that it's in sole control of the hardware.

From the Xen paper:

> VMware [10] and Connectix [8] both virtualize commodity PC hardware, allowing multiple operating systems to run on a single host. All of these examples implement a full virtualization of (at least a subset of) the underlying hardware, rather than paravirtualizing and presenting a modified interface to the guest OS.

And no, I haven't forgotten about binary translation. As you mention, it was only used to replace privileged instructions and not a full-blown CPU emulator. VMware VMs still ran native CPU instructions, and the overhead incurred by translation is a whole different matter unrelated to my original point.

> Visit Wikipedia, in the search field type "virtual machine" but do not hit enter or search.

Wikipedia is useful tool, but it's wrong to rely on it for preciseness or the as absolute source of truth, especially on highly technical topics.

> This says nothing about whether the virtualization is entirely software, assisted by hardware, or entirely hardware.

Again, what does this even mean? What's your specific example for an "entirely software" virtualization or "entirely hardware" virtualization?

> A "software virtual machine" is a disambiguation that I chose indicating that the "machine" is implemented entirely in software with no help from special silicon (contrast with [2]). I can't fathom why that would be so controversial.

You can't just invent a new term without any explanation and wonder why people wouldn't just "get it."

> The entire thread comes down to this: the demo of x86 Linux running on Apple Silicon could very easily have been running in a virtual machine made entirely of software

Are you sure of this? I was assuming it was ARM Linux.

> No one claimed, as I recall, that Silicon implemented any hardware assistance for executing x86 code.

No one claimed that you claimed such a thing either.

If you look at the original post, it says "virtualization" in big bold letters. The precise definition of the term "VM" may perhaps be debatable, but I don't think it's fair to market your system as supporting Linux VMs, when in fact, you're emulating the CPU instead of virtualizing.

More importantly, I still haven't got the slightest idea what a "software VM" means, either. It's a term that I've never seen before. I even did an online search and found nothing.

You may be confusing the concept of hardware-assisted virtualization with full virtualization. Moreover, the famous Xen paper you've linked to never claimed that x86 didn't support full-virtualization because it did thanks to VMWare.

I'm confused, are you sure you've responded to the right comment? No one is talking about paravirtualization in this thread. As I take it, the parent comment was suggesting that Apple was faking virtualization with some kind of software trick in the demo, which isn't what paravirtualization is about.

Paravirtualization is a general optimization technique for VMs that allows the guest OS to better communicate its intent to the hypervisor through the use of hypercall APIs, sparing the guest OS from having to issue many series of privileged CPU instructions that each have to be trapped and handled by the hypervisor. It saves time because going back and forth between the hypervisor and the guest OS is an expensive operation, and reducing the number of times it happens helps a lot. It's not a simple replacement for hardware assisted virtualization or the other way around.

Not sure what you mean by "software VMs," but if you mean CPU emulators, they're fundamentally different from VMs. Emulation is not "virtualization."

I looked into GNOME's gitlab discussions linked here and in the article, and I was appalled at GNOME maintainers' behavior on each and every one of them. Whenever app developers raise concerns that they don't have the adequate means to integrate with the GNOME desktop, GNOME maintainers consistently fault the developers and close the ticket without addressing the issue at all.

The worst part is that despite all this, a GNOME Foundation community manager even lied about the whole thing [1], claiming that MPV never even contacted GNOME before dropping support. He also talked about how the lack of cooperation was hurting the FOSS community [2], even though many app developers including MPV did in fact share their concerns on GNOME's gitlab issue tracker [3][4] and it was GNOME maintainers that chose to ignore them.

I've been using the GNOME for quite some time, but it's time for me to switch. Some applications didn't look quite right recently, and now I know the reason why.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/hn1s3r/mpv_is_not_an...

[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/hn1s3r/mpv_is_not_an...

[3]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/wm4

[4]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217

Mozilla's arewefastyet.com used to show daily benchmark results for all major browser engines. Sadly, it ceased to include Safari after they scrapped the system in favor of a new one.

https://github.com/mozilla/arewefastyet

> I did not [demand] that anyone do anything.

But you repeatedly criticized him for voicing his objections to being de-anonymized. When asked how he could’ve done so differently, you said that he should’ve wrote about how terrible his blog posts were instead. How is this different from demanding that he shut up?

> It's silly to jump from what I actually said to what you inferred.

That’s an explanation of what you’ve been doing all along with the whole “making suggestions” nonsense.

> I would have said, "I am archiving the blog until further notice because I need to think about what kind of content should be made publicly available because words have power and it's important to think about what information and inferences we make available to others through those words".

That's not a way him to raise objections. You're demanding that he shut up.

> His suggestion wasn't civil

The fact that you keep repeating this doesn't make any of this true. He didn't make any suggestions to harass anyone.

> I don't understand how people can look at all this evidence

Your "evidence" is unrelated to Scott himself, and it doesn't show any sort of harassment taking place either.

What you argue for matters as much as how you do it. I don't see anything wrong with criticizing people who advocate for racism. Peaceful marches for racism doesn't make racism just, you know.

> He pointed to several channels including a twitter account, phone number and email. Are all of these channels equally appropriate ways to pursue civil discourse with the appropriate parties?

Um, yes? How does using any of these methods turn civil discourse into harassment?

> Also, he only asked followers to be polite in parenthesis after this

That's a real twist. He wouldn't want to sound like he assumes his readers are rude people, would he?

> Suppose I have a big following. Suppose I know that some of those followers are prone to exaggerating some things that I "suggest". If you know those two facts, would you have written the same letter?

By your standards, any form of activism is a harassment campaign unless you can control the actions of every single individual in your group. I see this line of argument a lot recently, but frankly it’s nonsense.

> Even in this thread, any kind of actual discussion is almost impossible. The general opinion is very skewed by very specific interpretations of Scott's persona (which I don't think is actually valid because in my opinion he was not a benevolent person).

We’re talking about non-debatable facts here. You keep saying that the blog take down post “suggested” people to harass NYT. That post is there in plain view, and it clearly does not.

He was pointing to the appropriate channel for reporting such an issue. How else do you think people can signal objections? At least not by writing in their own diaries for sure.

Scott encouraged people to raise objections in a civil way, and he really stressed that point. And yet both you and the article somehow accuse him of orchestrating a harassment campaign despite evidence to the contrary. Honest question, what else could he’ve done? Are you suggesting that he’s a villain for raising objections?

That wouldn't solve the root of the problem, though. The real solution would be to use other distros.

Besides, there are quality concerns with browser forks maintained by an understaffed project. The fact that ungoogled-chromium asks for internet randos to provide its own binary releases doesn't inspire confidence either. If someone desperately needs to use Ubuntu, they'd be better off using Firefox.

I was under the impression that the said system works more like a compiler than a interpreter.

Even if you ignore the problem of self-modifying code, a completely static translation of x86 binaries is impossible. Things get hard real quick when indirect branches are involved, so you have to rely on a runtime solution when ahead of time solutions won’t work.

Taking an "I was just following orders" sort of stance doesn't really mean you're apolitical, and this is the point. It doesn't really matter that you have a "neutral" stance against, say, producing spyware, the fact that you actually do tells the whole story.

Actually, he did have a choice. He decided to sacrifice an objectively better living to alert the public of what was happening in their names without their consent. He also decided not to go home because he believes it is best for his country. If he goes home, he won't be allowed a fair trial under the Espionage Act, which would set a terrible precedent. He has repeatedly voiced his intent to face trial at home if he's allowed a public interest defense in front of a jury.

From the article:

> Emulators can run a different architecture between the host and the guest, but simulate the guest operating system at about 5x-10x slowdown.

I think this is a misleading statement because it implies that there is a constant performance overhead associated with CPU emulation. In reality, the performance relies heavily on the workload, more so with JIT-ed emulators.

Regarding this specific benchmark, I think there are two main factors contributing to the poor performance. The first factor is that the benchmark completes in a short period of time. With JITs, performance tends to improve for long running processes because JITs can cache translation results allowing you to amortize the translation overhead. Another factor is that your benchmark is especially heavy on I/O, meaning that it spends a lot of time translating syscalls instead of running native instructions.

I'd also like to add that CPU emulators sans syscall translation should work for any binaries, even those targeted for Linux. It would require a copy of the Linux kernel, but Docker won't work without it anyways.

If you're genuinely confused, you really should get yourself informed on the concept of an independent court operating under the rule of law, and how it's implemented in our current systems. There are well-established legal procedures for requesting information on other parties that doesn't involve megacorps deciding to do whatever they please.

That's certainly ideal, and for the most part, Safari content blockers work reasonably well. However, there are things you currently can't block using Safari content blockers that can be blocked with uBlock origin. One of the most prominent examples are CSS classes, and the inability to block them becomes a real pain if you open the mobile Reddit website. Their mobile website disables scrolling if you block their pesky "use our mobile app" popups.

I'm sure your doctor would've told you if there really were other options on the table.

The fact that you need public exposure to find a donor is the problem, not the solution. Going to social media doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to find a donor. Worse, you could be targeted by online scammers and trolls, which is the last thing you want in a difficult situation.