When the 22nd century history books are written, this "Chinese lag" will probably be seen as the key reason for the subsequent Chinese ascent to global hegemony—they didn't get distracted by bullshit engine pyramid schemes. https://astrodon.social/@profabelmendez/112445203691289321
@cstross Or perhaps the lure of the forbidden will make them redouble their efforts, as with the Soviets and mercury propergols in your story "A Tall Tail"...
@cstross@bsdphk Xi Jinping is only nominally an engineer. He was admitted in 1975 as a “worker-peasant-soldier” 2 years before the ferociously meritocratic gaokao exam was reintroduced by Deng Xiaoping after Mao had abolished it. For more, read this informative article comparing him with his late premier Li Keqiang: https://andrewbatson.com/2023/10/29/the-education-of-li-keqiang/
Seriously, a family with "Money" as part of their surname who own not just any bank but the bank that the King keeps his current account with is like, what fantasy author was phoning in their world-building that day?
@cstross I am doing my taxes, and calculated Chuck the Third's inheritance tax break cost me personally £350. As for the villainy of the parasites descended from parasites descended from thugs that is the English feudal aristocracy, Chthulu or the Black Pharaoh would glance at them once and run away gibbering in terror.
Every security service in the world is doing this. (Or they are now, as the possibilities percolate in.) Assume the xv effort is the RCMP; what's GCHQ done?
It will always be possible to run a secure server, but the cost, and the cost of having justified confidence that it's secure, can be made unbearably high. That's one of the goals of this kind of effort.
VLSI was a surprise. That doesn't mean incumbent power structures have to tolerate the results indefinitely.
@dangillmor it’s not specific to telecoms. Companies pay the cost of security, but consumers pay the cost of breaches. It’s perfectly rational for executives to prioritize bonuses over security. This externality won’t be resolved until Congress passes laws with statutory fines for data breaches, e.g. $10,000 for a stolen SSN, and prison time for reckless negligence. A company like Equifux would have been bankrupted by such, which would only be fitting.
"THREAD: What is happening in UK universities is astonishing. Right now about quarter of universities are laying off staff. Almost all universities expect to make a loss this year. And the entire thing is happening in an effort to deceive the population about migration statistics.
It's true that migration to the UK is high right now. We have a government with a headline policy of reducing immigration. But the only way they have found to do it is to try to discourage international students from taking up places in UK universities. Why this makes no sense:
Foreign students are a straightforward benefit to the UK economy. Each international student brings in tens of thousands of pounds. Broadly, these people are consumers not just of education, but also of all sorts of other goods and services. More specifically, you can imagine as an export …"
@cstross@rayckeith more like cosplaying at ideology, without even understanding it. Which is what you can expect with intellectually lazy people like Boris Johnson who emerged from the Marketing, PR and Media industries where it is axiomatic that Perception is Reality.
And then you have walking Dunning-Kruger poster children like Kwasi Karteng, who let Centrica close the depleted gas field at Rough, which accounted for 40% of the UK’s natural gas storage capacity, because the Omni benevolent Market’s ability to provide shall not be questioned. Then the Ukraine war happened and spot prices went up 500%. Oops!
That’s how you end up with eye-wateringly expensive Potemkin policies like Rwanda, that would even if successful only take in a few hundreds of refugees, or efforts to knife the BBC, one of the major levers of soft power for the UK (even though the BBC was thoroughly brought to heel), or refusing the EU’s offer of liberal visas for touring artists (another of the dwindling sources of UK soft power).
The irony is that this is the same government that out-Corbyned Corbyn by effectively renationalizing the rail industry, but is still hesitating to put Thames Water out of its misery as a thoroughly looted shell (and Labour, a.k.a. the neo-Thatcherite party is just as loath to undo one of her marquee policies).
Want to read an article but website permissions go: 'Suuuure. Just give us permission to access your camera, your location, and your toaster, no biggie!’
The Vivaldi browser gives you better control over these pesky permission request notifications.
Go to Settings > Privacy and Security > Website Permissions > Global Permission to get a full overview of websites permissions request settings.
@Vivaldi What we really need is the ability to grant fake permission, e.g. if the site asks for geolocation, give it a fake location the user can specify.
Hobbycraft refused to sell paint to black man as ‘he may use it for graffiti’
A black man shopping for paint with his four-year-old son says he was racially profiled and refused service at Hobbycraft after staff said he may use the paint for “doing graffiti”.
Louis Gray, Sport Wales equality, diversity and inclusion manager, said he wanted to buy spray paint in order to make over his son’s bicycle helmet in the colours of his favourite mountain bike rider.
@cstross in my native France there is a specific criminal offence for this, "refus de vente". I hope they are prosecuted for this as the Pontins travel company for blacklisting Irish traveller names as undesirable.
@publicvoit@alex reminds me of Equifux using their own security breach to sell their credit monitoring services. The chutzpah and sense of entitlement to people’s private data is stunning.
@wonkothesane I’m not sure Apple’s RCS does e2ee, isn’t that a Google extension, and Apple explicitly stated they will only support vanilla RCS with no extensions. Just goes to show how shit anything associated with telcos is.
@wonkothesane like all telco protocols e.g. SS7, RCS is piss-poorly specified, and thus Apple needs to verify interoperability, and Android’s RCS implementation is the biggest (only real?) deployment, so they need to liaise with Google. I do hope they relent and enable e2ee, but it’s not a given.
@wonkothesane the point is malicious compliance with the EU’s DSA and DMA’s requirement for interoperability (they are disputing the EU’s ruling on iMessage being a platform covered by the DMA, but know it’s at best a stalling maneuver).
@wonkothesane Apple is not offering RCS because they want to, but because the EU forced their hand. From their point of view, RCS being as bad as SMS is a feature, not a bug…
Totally agree on Signal (disclaimer: I work for WhatsApp)
@gadgetgav@molly0xfff it’s unfortunate the prosecution felt it had to offer equally guilty Caroline Ellison a deal to testify against her erstwhile beau, given how slam-dunk of a case it was.
Born in 1910, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin perfected X-ray crystallography, a type of imaging using X-rays to determine a molecule’s three-dimensional structure.
She determined the structures of insulin, penicillin & vitamin B12, leading to tremendous advances in medicine.
@Sheril
She also had a student then known as Margaret Roberts, better known under her married name of Thatcher, who was prouder to be the first British PM from a science background than the first woman PM.
