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I disagree, most podcast episodes and ads mention a few popular options plus “or wherever you get your podcasts” and the proprietary gated stuff hasn’t been doing that well!

All the native storage systems at Google do it at every level (block, file, database); I would assume the same is true at AWS and Microsoft.

Yes that’s one of the sites they bailed on:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/02/google-ends-agreement-with-l...



Try not worrying about as much stuff?

100 years ago well before the invention of so-called surveillance capitalism, people were making soft drinks out of radium, and inhaling asbestos.

Many things are better since then. Some new things are probably worse, but every reasonable measure of human welfare suggests we are better off than we were previously.

Something some subset of us are worried about right now, whether it’s WiFi or 5G or Covid vaccines, will turn out to have had horrible consequences and you can’t really fault the rest of us that we didn’t listen to the crazies.

Just embrace panglossian optimism because the alternative is to just be angry and exhausted and indignant all the time and then you’re no fun at parties.


When you go across a long enough timeline variations occur. Nothing over time in human history is a constant linear improvement. We may be better off than we were in 1924 in terms of health and safety, but we're definitely not better off than we were in 1994. Legislation hasn't kept up with chemical science and social engineering, and enforcement has been tentative as fights between executive power and judiciary power create years long arguments that get in the way of preventing harm. For example Red 40 is a dye that's well known to cause cancer with a high degree of certainty (not probability, certainty), while the artificial sweetener sucralose is genotoxic. You go drink a can of Faygo Cherry and it's got both. The FDA hasn't been able to regulate either because they haven't been legislated the power to do so, are now even more crippled thanks to the overturning of Chevron, and companies keep funding "alternative studies" that they can present to lobbyists.

It's hard not to be angry and exhausted when you have to be a chemical engineer just to know what's even safe to eat.


People like you are part of the problem.



That’s a very different thing. These are basically sponsored placements in App Store search results based on keywords and not targeted ads based on tracking or cookies.

(That’s also why they are often very bad and not relevant, a common complaint from app developers)



Any idea if that works in modern VMware Workstation? It's currently on version 17, whereas that post was for version 6.5.

VMware Workstation has such disjointed development spurts that it wouldn't surprise me if the feature had been ripped out at some point. Other useful features such as machine groups have been. :(



I guess we can say it was too cool.


Thanks. Yeah, I kind of expected that. :(


It was removed in 2011.


> When's the last time ls, cat, date, tar, etc needed to be updated on your linux system? probably almost never.

Bad example: http://www.slackware.com/security/viewer.php?l=slackware-sec...

They find stuff like this fairly often in GNU coreutils even to this day.. it’s the main reason there’s a Rust coreutils effort.


It's probably still a good example. Looking up the CVEs for various search terms:

coreutils: 17 results

linux kernel: 6752 results

x11: 184 results

qt: 152 results

gtk: 68 results

docker: 340 results

rust: 455 results

python: 940 results

node: 110 results

javascript: 5657 results

firefox: 3268 results

chrome: 3763 results

safari: 1465 results

webkit: 1346 results

The large monolithic codebases have a lot more CVEs. I'd also argue that patching a fix on code made up of small, modular parts is much easier to do, and much lower hanging fruit for any casual developer to submit a PR for a fix.


The large ~~monolithic~~ codebases have a lot more CVEs

Who would've guessed. Also the older ones also got more CVE's than newer ones, even if they aren't that big.


> This is to let the military use AI to help kill people.

So are your tax dollars, and some portion of any money you spend or any productive engagement you have with the economy wherever you live on this planet.


My tax dollars are used to bomb the middle east and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. Voting is useless.


Donate to humanitarian aid organizations to offset your tax bomb dollars


Almost universally those funds are stolen in the name of administrative overhead


This is not a convincing argument for not engaging in voluntary trade with the morally bankrupt.

It is, however, a pretty good argument for the moral basis for tax minimization and avoidance.


> And gradual rollout of config files quite often seems like overkill.

Indeed, but it is still mandated at large companies (e.g. Google) because of exactly this scenario.


The timeline backup is encrypted clientside before upload.

Meaning no casual FBI or police warrant is gonna vacuum it up (at least not from Google, they’ll just go to the cell providers / towers instead as siblings have pointed out).

Obviously yes NSA and CIA and various other nation state attackers will just get it directly off your phone or evil maid you or surveil you in any number of other more traditional ways.


Someone mentioned geofence warrants, i.e. cops/feds asking "Hey Google, tell us which accounts had devices found in these time-space coordinates!", I guess they'd be asking mobile providers to do more logging as an alternative.

A Google account is probably more useful than a SIM card, which might be anonymous or have exchanged hands from the registered buyers, if you as a cop can ask Google to hand over the emails or IPs used by this account, you can find the person's identity and address (if using home IPs subpoena-able by asking the ISP).

I wonder if it's not just American police, imagine this question being asked by Russian FSB, or the "good guys" in the form of the Israeli authorities.


The cell providers actually do erase this data. I tried to subpoena it for a murder suspect to help show he wasn't at the scene, but he left it too late, and Verizon said that they delete their data after 5 years. I don't know the timescales of the other networks.

Not to say that the NSA don't have it all backed up -- I'm sure they do -- but for warrant (i.e. legal process purposes) it probably has a shorter timespan than the Timeline data stuck on Google's infra.


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