Everyone's saying progress is slow, but maybe this is just how long it takes to do massive decentralized global migrations affecting billions of people. What are we comparing against? Maybe the ICE-to-EV transition?
For example, compared to migration from 3G to 4G networks. As I understand, from the launch of 4G to complete shutdown of 3G it took around 12—14 years.
One major difference in the 3G->4G and now 4G->5G conversion was that was largely a single-party change in the end to actually implement. The client and the server hosting an application doesn't care about whether that traffic is over 3G or 4G or IP over Avian Carriers as long as the packets get there in a reasonable time. Going from IPv4 to IPv6 requires lots of very different players to all work together to make the transition, meanwhile for a carrier to go from 3G to 4G its largely on them and their direct contractors.
A reasonably fair comparison. The ISPs had a much stronger incentive to finish the migration, though, because the 3g spectrum could just get turned around and used for 4g after rollout. IPv6 doesn't really have that strong of an incentive structure now that CGNAT is a well-developed technology.
World IPv6 Day was in 2011, so 15 years since then. This is also requiring a consumer hardware and software upgrade on both the client and server (resource they're accessing). GitHub doesn't have to implement 4G support.
I don’t think Americans would enjoy the alternative of defaulting on that debt, or the counterfactual of not having raised that debt in the first place
> or the counterfactual of not having raised that debt in the first place
I'm pretty sure most of us would enjoy a different timeline where we didn't sink over $1 trillion in the Iraq war or another $2 trillion on the F-35, where we didn't mindlessly increase the military budget every cycle, where Republican administrations didn't cut taxes on the wealthy every time they won the presidency in the last half century, or where the TSA and DHS weren't created.
Every item I mentioned either increased government spending or reduced its income, both of which contribute to increased deficits and debt.
You're welcome to argue whether I'm correct that americans would be better off without any of them, but it's simple math that every single one of them contributed to our current debt.
Geminispace is a very chill place. It’s definitely not a replacement for the web, but if you can handle the compromises, it feels like both the past and the future.
Remember it said rich-world respondents, not rich people. There are still poor people in rich-world countries that would find it painful to give up any part of what they have.
> the scheme will provide over seven million subscribers with unlimited downloads at just 400 kbps after their data allowances expire.
Does this mean it’s not a universal entitlement as such, because you presumably first have to pay for a plan with an allowance? (Not to mention having to pay for a device).
Yes it does, but you probably need a bit of context.
They already have free Wi-Fi in every bus stop, train stations, government buildings, etc. like clocks, thermometers, air quality sensors, etc. The free Wi-Fi is very high quality, where you can watch 4K videos without stutters in most places (1080p for other places).
This is more about basics instead of luxurious/entertainment purposes, where if they run out of data on their contracts, the companies must provide data, albeit slow, still, where government provided Wi-Fi can't reach. 400 kbps is good enough for AI text streams, so it's a policy blend for their recently trending slew of AI policies.
I should also mention that it's a compromise from the telecom companies for recent incidents.
Haven't been to SK in recent years, but assuming quality as it is Fast, how does the log in system work?
My main problem is not speed with modern public WiFi, especially in recent years enterprise WiFI 6 and coming WiFi 7 have gotten much better with signals and receptions. But simply just to use it.
It is at least 3 - 5 steps to have it log in. And the login only works 95% of the time.
Do we have something where a single click of a button and within 100ms we are in? Or even better without even doing anything? I have yet to seen one in real world.
Here in SK it’s actually pretty straightforward. Places like subways, buses/bus stops either use secured WPA/WPA2/WPA3 Wi-Fi with a shared password or open Wi-Fi where you just tap once to connect.
In most countries you can either sign up for contracts with regular data allowance, or buy pay-as-you go phones which require topups.
It sounds like if you bought a pay-as-you-go sim card in Korea that it would immediately give you the slower unlimited connection without needing to pay for allowance first.
I think despite needing money, it can still be considered a right, IDs cost money but you have the right to have them, and I'm pretty sure it means it could extend to government paying for it eventually (depending on your social class I guess).
The provided rights are called positive rights, and the not infringe rights are called negative rights. Freedom of speech is a negative right and a right to legal counsel is a positive right.
Thanks, yes I didn't really think about that distinction. I would say that "positive rights" is a fairly modern concept, for example the right to legal counsel was not originally a positive right, that was something that was determined by a series of court decisions in the mid-20th century. Most rights are still in the "negative" sense, i.e. things that cannot be prohibited or limited, or only narrowly so.
But in this case, a "right" to mobile data is just an entitlement that the people/governemnt decided to provide. The article isn't loading for me but I'm assuming this was not a constitutional change establishing this new specific right.
> I would say that "positive rights" is a fairly modern concept
Not really. “To no one will we sell, deny, or delay right or justice” in the Magna Carta has long been interpreted as much a positive right requiring the Crown to actually provide for justice rather than just a negative law to refrain from abusing it. There's also several clauses requiing royal justices to hold assizes in the counties and set procedures for hearing disputes which is a duty to maintain legal machinery. Heirs, widows, and wards were promised specific legal treatment, such as a widow’s immediate right to her marriage portion and inheritance, and limits on abuse by (non-state) guardians which are affirmative entitlements within feudal law.
Even Rome had the grain dole (the bread of “bread and circuses”).
Ah, so it's like the right to own jewelry (historically, there have been places where only nobility could legal own and wear it): you have the right to buy them, no one would stop you or take them away from you, but you still need enough money to buy it.
I imagine the same applies to the rights to live, to have access to water, and to receive medicine help (which is IIRC is why the Soviets claimed they refused to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: they argued for their version of the declaration that would actually bind the stated to make sure those goods/rights are actually universally provided; incidentally — and it's one of the examples they've actually used — that would mean that e.g. printing political leaflets for distribution, falling under free speech and political distribution, would also have to be paid for by someone. As you may imagine, most of the other countries weren't particularly fond of the idea that they'd end up themselves financing the printing and distribution of Communist propaganda).
The USA has affordable broadband schemes (I think current setup the gov pays $9.25/mo towards your connection) and IIRC pretty much every broadband provider has a plan at exactly this cost to provide the minimum legal definition of "broadband".
"The Affordable Connectivity Program stopped accepting new consumer applications and enrollments on February 7, 2024....On January 11, 2024, due to a lack of additional funding from Congress" [1]
I think SK did the right thing. Access to information is important even at 400kbps which is pretty darn fast considering some people grew up running 56kbps and never complained.
That was before websites were 40MB or more of garbage though so keep that in perspective. Also broadband here is supposedly 100mbps and giving more people access should drive cheaper Internet but also being America we have ISP monopoly by choice per city so I'm not sure any of the economics pans out.
Imagine how wonderful it’d be if the US had fiber to the home that would trickle at 1-10mb/s even with no subscription- but you could subscribe with any provider for more.
Kinda surprising so many in the thread have no clue the US has the lifeline program and there's a few providers that will sell 'free' basic lines. It even became a meme when Obama was president: https://www.wikihow.com/Get-an-Obama-Phone
yeah 400 kbps is almost the easy part. you still need a line, a handset, and apps that still run on the cheapest phone around. hard to call that universal in practice.
they gave you a slow lane on their network, whether you can get onto their network is your issue. Phones aren't particularly expensive, I bought mine used for $60 and I've found plenty of working smartphones literally on the curbs. Should they buy you a car and a house too?
Not fair take, cpuz and hwmonitor are often used on new installations of PCs (or at least for me) to verify hw specs and stuff. Or when I need to do some upgrade work for a desktop computer.
I just go to the trusted site, download what's there and get going. This is not an npm package that a dev is updating on day 0 of its release for being a "human shield", it's literally the first version which comes up when DLing the new software.
Seems like the kind of thing to just have on a bootable thumb drive, to inspect any machine without requiring installation on the fly.
In fact, I think I used to use memtest86+ this way as it is a baked in boot option on Fedora bootable ISO images. (Or at least was in the past, I haven't checked this recently.)
CPU-Z gets updated to recognise new CPUs and memory configs and thus must be downloaded new to recognise the new hardware in a new machine (otherwise it can’t recognise it properly). With Memtest sure but CPU-Z is something you actually need the latest version of when you first fire up a new PC.
OK, so a bootable thumb drive rather than a read-only ISO image?
I mean, it should be possible to give it an update function which you can run from any utility host, rather than requiring a live install at the moment you want to test a new machine.
That update function could do normal package management and repository things with digital signature checks, etc.
And it could be done ahead of time to support sneaker-net scenarios, i.e. where you won't have networking on the new machine that is being burned-in/validated.
Is there a tool out there that you can put software releases into and it will tell you how safe it is? I don't seem to be able to buy anything to do this. Crowdstrike and other modern antivirus may react to it once it's on a device, SAST / SCA tooling will help with CVEs, but there's nothing I can give my users where they can put in some piece of random software and get a reputation metric out the other side, is there?
> put in some piece of random software and get a reputation metric out the other side
Well, the enterprise version of ms defender will not only react to it if it does something "weird", but will specifically look at its "reputation" before it runs at all.
However, as another commenter pointed out, this generates a ton of false positives. Basically everything that's "brand new" is liable to trigger it. Think your freshly compiled hellow_world.exe. So, all in all, people may no longer pay attention to it and just click through all warnings.
I run software downloads through VirusTotal before installing or using. And I scan all releases I make on PortableApps.com through it as well. (Except those that are bigger than the max size in which case those get scanned with Defender, ClamAV, and at least one commercial Windows antivirus.)
Not exactly for software (although there is such section) but I use end of life [0] website. Besides time when certain software will be outdated it also tells you their release time.
I’m not one to chase the new and shiny, but how do you know a nominally months-old software package isn’t a newly compromised version at the time you download it?
I don't know about other managers, but nixpkgs has hashes of the package I'm installing, and is a git repo, so I can easily detect a history rewrite, and I have the full history of package changes over time. Since it's a git repo, I can also easily install things as of a given time.
You probably know this, but a note for the benefit of people who don’t. The entire git history, including metadata, can be modified. Unless you have an independent offline remote to compare to, this method is not 100% guaranteed to detect tampering in all cases, for example if the nixpkgs repo is compromised (or your machines’ connection to your git forge is being MITM’d)
Windows has this thing called digital signing with certificates that Linux users like to pretend doesn't exist or in the case of yesterday's Wireguard / VeraCrypt discussion, think it's an evil capitalist scheme to control the world.
Digital signing on Windows predates Mac developer certificates by years but arguably wasn't widely used outside of security-paranoid organizations.
Before someone says Linux offers GPG signing it's mostly useless without a central PKI. Developers offer the public key for download on the same server as the software. If someone uploaded compromised software, surely they would replace the key with their own.
I hope you don't think that waiting a month will protect you. Malicious software can wait to be triggered months or years before anything malicious happens.
It helps. If I were a malware/backdoor author, I have the choice to make it lie idle for a couple months; this would help me get more victims, BUT it gives more time for someone to notice it BEFORE I get any victims at all.
Whereas if it is active immediately, I'm likely to get at least a few victims.
Seems like any activist org should have two audiences:
1) Supporters who may become donors
2) Neutrals/opponents who may become supporters.
If you only ever communicate in forums where people already agree with you, you’ll probably have optimized your fundraising, but will probably never achieve your actual purpose.
Activist orgs have to reach and turn the non-supporters somehow, and the absolute best way to achieve the opposite is to brand them as The Enemy and cut yourself off from them. Joining the omnicause is the icing on the cake, signalling the end of focused goal-oriented activism in favor of the dilute, general grievance mire.
The left are always looking for someone to expel, and the right are always looking for someone to recruit. Guess how this ends.
You might want to read their post before commenting. They seem very much aware of the need to reach people who aren't supporters and have always actively engaged with the platforms they are critical of. It's just that X isn't really an effective use of their time anymore.
> Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year.
Their YouTube channel reports 2,759,491 views in total, since 2006. So while X may be a fraction of what it was, it's still a significant multiple of at least one of the other channels they are happy to use.
What kind of activist org turns down the opportunity to reach 13 million people for essentially zero cost? One that has a different reason for doing so. The subtext is clear.
I imagine the new pay per use pricing for the X API has something to do with it. If you're reaching single digit percentage impressions and now you have to pay for that as well ...
If you think it is "essentially zero cost", I'm going to respectfully suggest you do not understand what you read. If you think they reached 13 million people on X last year, you do not understand social media.
They have made 399 posts to YouTube over the life of their YouTube channel, so that's an average of 20 posts a year.
Their posts on X are getting multiple millions of views. Yes, that has declined, but I need to see whether their viewership on Facebook has declined similarly before I can pass judgement on X.
People don’t use social media in the same way they did ten years ago.
And in any case, they’re still getting massive viewership on X by most people’s standards, surely?
I’m not convinced “X is declining” is a good faith argument here.
The post feigns outreach but the "Facebook and Tiktok are Evil" section blatantly panders to EFF supporters. It frontloads identity-group-affirming language to justify using platforms its supporters dislike at while saying nothing critical about platforms its supporters enjoy (Bluesky / Mastodon). That selective scrutiny suggest the EFF either doesn't care or is ignorant about the hang-ups of non-supporters, e.g., conservative and center-right folks.
I'm neither a supporter nor opponent; I only see the EFF's rhetoric as way for themselves and their supporters to lie about their mutual contempt for their opponents.
It's really weird that the EFF would post something on their own site to speak to their supporters, and that it would employ "identity-group-affirming language".
Just because they issue one post that is targeting their supporters doesn't mean that they don't care or are ignorant about the broader audience. That's ridiculous.
Agreed, I'm dismayed that the parent comment is currently the top comment, because it seems to be completely clueless as to what was actually in the blog post. EFF highlights that an X post gets less than 3% of the viewership of a tweet from 7 years ago. They also highlight that they are staying on platforms that they have strong disagreements with like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
I personally don't understand how anyone can use X anymore. I mean, even before the Musk takeover, there were plenty of loud (or, IMO, extremely obnoxious) voices from all sides, and I was generally not a fan because it just seemed designed to amplify the extremes and petty disagreements. Now, though, whenever I go there it is just a steaming pile of useless shit. Like I would look at a tweet or two from people whose perspectives I find insightful (even for folks I sometimes strongly disagree with), and the top comments under any of these people's posts is now the equivalent of "But your daddy is a giant poopie head!!" It doesn't even have any entertainment value, it's just pointless drivel where I can feel myself losing brain cells for every post I read.
In this case, dealing with The Enemy is not only funding them, but lending your credibility.
Maybe it would be worth it if, as you say, they are finding ways to reach non-supporters, but Twitter has been X for almost four years. If the EFF finds that they're not recruiting people from among their opponents, then they can reasonably say that they've spent enough time trying.
Credibility with who? We’re so polarized that a single binary label will shift all credibility.
Experience, success, credentials none of it matters anymore. The left thinks everything on the right is stupid and evil, the right does the same, and everyone drinks their own kool aid.
If we all spent more time listening the guy who called someone a pedophile because he suggested the guy's plan to save people was ridiculous, would that improve discourse? I am skeptical.
This is the fallacy. These organizations no longer have any ability to “legitimize” as trust is fundamentally eroded. Leaving will simply remove any engagement with the very people they want to influence- people that are unengaged and people that actively disagree
It sounds like they don’t really get meaningful engagement/views on X anyway though. It sounds like it’s not a useful platform to reach any audience for them.
Not having an official account doesn’t mean that people are blocked from talking about EFF, only that it’ll happen by directing attention towards their website. URLs still work great for letting people talk, but there is a real question about whether you encourage people to look for you first on someone else’s property–effectively supporting their business by giving them your content and audience.
X, the non-consensual nudes app, surfaces the dumbest comments in any discussion by design. It is not a serious site, having a presence there is not meaningful.
It's like saying organizations should have a branded presence on 4chan otherwise they might not reach the very online and meme-poisoned demographics.
I do not see how being on a platform literally chasing away people with hate, sexism and outright CSAM is somehow making a wrong decision about audiences to attract...can you drop your political bias red colored shades and address this?
It would be illegal to post such rhetoric, and I can't name a single social network CEO who's been investigated and found guilty of posting such rhetoric. Perhaps I missed a court case somewhere?
Wait, you think it's illegal to post something racist online? That is absolutely not the case in the US, and I have no idea why you'd think it was. It's also pretty confusing why you think simple descriptors are "slurs".
It only takes one quick google search to show that he helps promote white supremacist rhetoric:
I just don’t find it plausible that there is a living human being who is capable of turning down a $70bn+ payday, hence Satoshi must be dead, hence it was probably Finney, and all the counter-evidence is easier to explain than a superhuman act of restraint.
How do we know these were dice rather than some other type of tool? I can imagine all kinds of uses for carefully shaped hard bone fragments, and the picture in the article shows objects that seem like they might be almost anything.
That’s not terribly definitive evidence, considering that a great many tools will produce random outcomes when flipped and will have just as much color differentiation as the objects on display here.
The original paper addresses this question thoroughly
> This omission stems in large part from uncertainty about whether prehistoric artifacts in the North American archaeological record can be confidently identified as dice. As DeBoer (Reference DeBoer2001:237) observed, “Identification of [ancient Native American] dice is problematic.” This article attempts to address this problem and dispel some of this uncertainty through a two-step process. First, it develops an objective, morphological test for identifying prehistoric Native American dice based on diagnostic attributes shared among 293 sets of historic Native American dice from across North America documented in Stewart Culin’s (Reference Culin1907) ethnographic compendium Games of the North American Indians. Second, it applies this test to trace the origins and antiquity of these artifacts in the published archaeological record. This analysis has yielded two key findings with intriguing implications.
> First, the evidence developed here suggests that Native American groups on the western Great Plains of North America were making two-sided dice (binary lots) and using them as randomizing agents in games of chance and for gambling by the closing centuries of the Pleistocene, no later than 12,000 years ago.
> Second, the evidence developed here shows that artifacts exhibiting the diagnostic attributes of historic Native American dice appear in archaeological assemblages from diverse groups throughout all periods of North American prehistory—from the Late Pleistocene / Early Holocene (aka the Paleoindian period), around 13,000–8000 years before the present (BP); through the Middle Holocene (aka the Archaic period), around 8000–2000 BP; and into the Late Holocene (aka the Late Prehistoric period), around 2000–450 BP
> METHODS
> The ethnographic dataset that forms the basis for the present study is Stewart Culin’s (Reference Culin1907) magnum opus Games of the North American Indians. This 809-page volume, containing 1,112 illustrations and 21 plates, catalogs the results of Culin’s nearly 14-year effort to compile a “classified and illustrated list of practically all the American Indian gaming implements in American and European museums, together with a more or less exhaustive summary of the entire literature of the subject” (Culin Reference Culin1907:30).
> His final report includes illustrations and descriptions of 293 unique sets of Native American dice from “130 tribes belonging to 30 linguistic stocks,” and it notes that “from no tribe [do dice] appear to have been absent” (Culin Reference Culin1907:48). In addition, Culin cites and quotes at length 149 ethnographic accounts of how these dice were used to power games of chance and for gambling. Based on this record, Culin suggested that “the wide distribution and range of variations in the dice games points to their high antiquity” (Reference Culin1907:48).
> A careful examination of the historic Native American dice documented by Culin reveals common diagnostic attributes that can form the basis of a morphological definition that can be applied to prehistoric artifacts. As illustrated and described by Culin—and discussed in more detail below—historic Native American dice share four key diagnostic attributes (Figures 2–4). First, they are two-sided objects made of bone or wood. Second, their two sides are distinguished by applied color or markings. Third, their appearance in section is either flat, plano-convex, concave-convex, or convex-convex (with the latter in all cases being a peach or plum stone; Culin Reference Culin1907:45–46, 51). Fourth, they are of a size and shape such that two or more can be held in the hand and cast onto a playing surface. Each of these attributes is considered below.
So TL;DR: they spent decades studying this to develop a morphological definition
Thank you for citing relevant passages. However, I find it all very unconvincing. The conclusion that these objects must have been dice is leaped to based on that very flexible morphological definition, and there is no consideration of alternative explanations. He even includes objects that don’t meet his own definition and still calls them “probable dice”!
Tally marked counters, coins, scrapers, prizers, jewellery, weapons, biface hand axes, totems, chisels, measuring devices… there is a huge array of possible tool types that meet this morphological definition.
They may well have been dice but the certainty expressed in the paper is unwarranted.
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