Disqus - Latest Comments for florean

Re: Court Denies Bungie’s Attempt to Dismiss Destiny 2 Red War Lawsuit, Refuses to Consider YouTube Videos and Wiki Pages as Proof

florean — Sat, 03 May 2025 01:18:12 -0000

From the ruling:
“[A]t the pleading stage, the Court is limited to the facts alleged
in the complaint; it is not acting as a factfinder. A decision on the merits based on the
Court’s judgment of the similarity” of the Original Work and Destiny 2 “is inappropriate
at this stage of the proceedings.”
During the trial or in a motion for summary judgment, the judge will do a side-by-side comparison and Bungie will eventually win.

Re: What Does the Future Look Like If Net Neutrality Goes Away?

florean — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 18:17:40 -0000

Yes. Last mile infrastructure should be like electricity, water, or roads. It is extremely capital intensive and a text book example of a natural monopoly.

Re: What Does the Future Look Like If Net Neutrality Goes Away?

florean — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 18:13:51 -0000

Consumers can choose ISPs 1-3. Netflix signs exclusive deal with ISP 2 - customers of all other ISPs can only have one stream active. Customers leave other ISPs for ISP 2. Of course, it can be a lot more subtle than features, like what Comcast did to Netflix - bandwidth is throttled so the quality degrades often and stream failure rate increases for ISPs that don't pay. Or a requirement that partner ISPs degrade the quality of Netflix's competitors, such as Hulu.

Currently, Netflix will give free hardware to any ISP that wants it that allows the ISP to stream Netflix to their customers without hitting the Internet (all content served on ISPs network, bandwidth close to free). If Netflix had more market power, they could charge a lot of money for that service or withhold it. You're just flipping who has the ability to affect what content is affected. Net neutrality solves this problem at the last mile.

Re: Let Us Now Praise Apple (Sort Of)

florean — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 17:00:35 -0000

I would tell them not to give their usernames and passwords to hackers: https://www.theverge.com/20...
Unfortunately, phishing is a very difficult problem to solve, as we saw with the recent Google Docs phishing attack that even a lot of very savvy tech people fell for. But it's not something that can be blamed on Apple.

Re: Let Us Now Praise Apple (Sort Of)

florean — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 16:49:30 -0000

I'm such a sucker for your Apple trolling. Your Samsung has also had facial recognition for longer. And it also has its own version of Siri. But I guess Apple just has better marketing. Stupid people.

Edit: Wow, you can't even tell that those are links. So putting them here.
http://www.businessinsider....
https://arstechnica.com/gad...

Re: Nancy Pelosi Is the Most Effective Member of the Resistance

florean — Fri, 05 May 2017 09:21:25 -0000

It's a bold statement to say that Nancy Pelosi is a large part of the Democratic congressional leadership? I don't think we're going to be able to have a good faith discussion.

Re: Nancy Pelosi Is the Most Effective Member of the Resistance

florean — Thu, 04 May 2017 19:36:44 -0000

[W]e are not giving her credit, because she’s a woman.

[T]he reason for that is Pelosi is a woman.

That's a bold statement that you provide no evidence for. Is Steny Hoyer getting credit that should go to Nancy Pelosi? Chuck Schumer? I haven't seen it. It's also fascinating for you to make those claims while describing Congresswoman Pelosi as "a petite woman from California who favors simple, but elegant clothes and matching strings of pearls". First rule of accusing others of misogyny: don't describe powerful women by their physical appearance or fashion choices while doing it. That's quite the own goal.

I don't think one needs to reach to misogyny to be unhappy with Pelosi. After all, she's been the leader of a Democratic caucus that has seen massive losses in the House while enjoying consistent leads in the presidential popular vote. That alone is reason to want a change. At some point the Democratic Party leaders have to take responsibility for their electoral failures and for allowing Trump to get elected.
I'm certainly not happy with how Democrats have run away from Obamacare. I and a lot of people feel like they didn't do nearly enough to promote it. Part of the responsibility for the AHCA passing lies with the Democratic congressional leadership. And Nancy Pelosi is a large part of that. So there are a lot of purely political reasons to disagree with Pelosi.

Re: 6 ways to make the most of 1Password for iOS and Android

florean — Tue, 02 May 2017 16:25:29 -0000

I would die without it on my phone. The Mac app is nice for autofilling websites, but I'd survive if I had to type it from my phone. Without the phone, though... ugh. I keep gate security codes in there, credit cards, one time passwords, everything.

Re: Unroll.me Is Latest Victim of Two Minutes Hate

florean — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 17:11:33 -0000

The problem is that people don't understand how easily "anonymous" data can be de-anonymized. They also don't understand that the adtech industry isn't interested in truly anonymized data. It makes it much less valuable. And I say adtech, but that now includes politics and most other businesses. Read this: https://arstechnica.com/tec...
The solution is a privacy bill of rights, where companies have to disclose exactly WHAT information they share, HOW they anonymize it, and allow you to completely ERASE your data when quitting a service.

Re: Unroll.me Is Latest Victim of Two Minutes Hate

florean — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 17:03:45 -0000

If you don't understand how hard it is to get No 2 right, even if you are trying, which is what you demonstrate when you say "No 1 is what people should be concerned about", then you don't understand technology, statistics, or analysis. Working in ad tech, it's quite simple: the more information you strip away, the less valuable it is. The less you strip away, the fewer users you'll get. So to maximize profits, you strip out the bare minimum of information while keeping your users happy (or ignorant, which is actually the vast majority of services). If you are able to keep the fact you are selling your users' information secret, then you can easily maximize your profit. Since Unroll.me has just said "trust us" that they strip out your PII and they have directly lied to their users in the past, I think it is very fair to be concerned about their usage.

Even if your No 2 was completely, perfectly anonymous (for argument's sake), there are also multiple ways to accomplish No 2. Other reports claim that Unroll.me downloaded and stored every one of your messages and, like most startups, didn't have the best security practices. So even if they weren't selling your data, it was still available to hackers and law enforcement agencies.

But, they explicitly say "does not permit direct association with any specific individual", which means they're doing No 1. Probably poorly. Here's a good article with some great examples of No 1, including how it can reveal all of your medical records: https://arstechnica.com/tec...

Re: Unroll.me Is Latest Victim of Two Minutes Hate

florean — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 16:36:40 -0000

You're wrong about this.
What did you think Unroll.me was doing to make money?
Well, they include ads in their roll-up e-mail, so a lot of people thought that was their revenue stream. And as this tweet points out, they have been telling people they just used access to your inbox to scan for subscriptions. The actual ToS is very broad, so who knows what it could mean? We do know what "anonymized" means: nothing. If you look at my Lyft ride receipts, for example, one receipt gives you about a 70% chance of having my home address. Are they using k-anonymity with a high k or differential privacy? When ad companies aren't scrutinized, they generally just replace any PII with a UUID. So all of your data is still all associated with one user and it is very easy to de-anonymize it from there.

Let's not pretend this is only about Uber and Lyft receipts. Unroll.me is storing copies of all your e-mails on their servers. It isn't clear that they delete these archives when you close your account, which is something nobody seems to have picked up on. Ever get or send a password in e-mail? Ever get a bank statement? How about your Amazon purchases? Or every online service and group you belong to? Has the FBI read all of your e-mail? How would you know? They could get an NSL or subpoena and unlike Google and Gmail, Unroll.me isn't going to fight them.

Why has Unroll.me been so secretive about this? Why have they lied to users? Why are their presentations with their real customers (advertisers) under NDA? Seems like they know this wouldn't be very popular with their users.

No, this isn't about Uber. It's about the fact that it isn't "a harmless bit of aggregate data."

Re: Revolutionary New iPhone Set to Debut Someday

florean — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 15:26:49 -0000

Kevin continues his trolling of Apple fans. It does work, because these are the only posts I consistently post on.
First, please don't conflate Apple "analysts" with Apple, Inc. Apple has nothing to do with these people, which is why their wild speculation, based on whatever sketchy information they can get from Apple's manufacturing partners, are horrible predictors. Apple, like every company with an R&D department, is constantly experimenting. Some things make it to production, some things don't. They may have different tradeoffs than you prefer, but whether they choose use any particular technology or not is a conscious decision.
Two things about your iPhone criticism:
"Two years behind everyone else". I'll just mention one counter point: their silicon has consistently been closer to two years ahead of everyone else. You may not place much importance on the brains behind your devices, but some people do.
Security. It's hard to put that in a timeline, but if you talk to any security expert, they will tell you to use an iPhone and they will have done that for years.
https://twitter.com/tqbf/st...
https://twitter.com/tqbf/st...
https://twitter.com/TheGruq...
https://techsolidarity.org/...
Etc.
Some people care about performance and security, some people don't. Different tradeoffs.

Re: Swamp Watch - 5 December 2016

florean — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 13:05:20 -0000

Why do you think that?

Re: Swamp Watch - 5 December 2016

florean — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 12:30:43 -0000

I think if you know someone who is LGBTQ or a woman of child-bearing age, Mike Pence is very scary.

Re: Apple buying McLaren would make perfect sense

florean — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 15:03:58 -0000

Not sure what McLaren gets from it.
A massive payout. Last year McLaren Technology Group made $27.6m net income. In 2009, 40% of the company sold for about $660m. Apple would pay billions. It would easily be worth twice as much as Beats to Apple, if they are serious about building a car. Not sure Ron Dennis would sell (he's been busily buying back shares), but if he could retain some leadership role, Apple could probably sell him on their vision.

Re: Apple buying McLaren would make perfect sense

florean — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 14:56:57 -0000

It's important to note that McLaren Technology Group (of which McLaren Applied Technology and the Formula One team are wholly owned subsidiaries) and McLaren Automative are completely different companies (MTG has a 3.6% stake in McLaren Automotive). McLaren Automotive simply makes the high-end, limited-production cars. It sounds like the denial came from McLaren Automative, but it makes much more sense that Apple would be trying to buy McLaren Technology Group. None of the reporting makes that distinction clear.

Re: Apple buying McLaren would make perfect sense

florean — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 14:43:43 -0000

If you want to understand why this makes sense, here's two articles you should read:
Wikipedia's article on McLaren Applied Technologies and this BBC article.

From the article:

"In the car industry as a whole, almost all companies work on a seven to 10-year cycle for new cars," said Jim Holder from Autocar magazine. "McLaren has proven it can work on a three to five-year cycle. It can do that because of its racing pedigree. Every two weeks in Formula 1 they turn up with a newer, improved car. Never missing a deadline, and always seeking constant improvement."

Re: Apple buying McLaren would make perfect sense

florean — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 14:33:49 -0000

How are you going to get PC performance into a phone? - Everyone before 2007

Well, if you sell enough of anything, the R&D costs become insignificant. And now the iPhone 7 has CPUs rivaling laptops.
In 2014, McLaren made less than $20m, pre-tax. They spent $122m on R&D in 2015.
McLaren couldn't mass produce cars with their technology if they wanted to, they simply don't have the capital. Apple has the capital, but not the technology. It seems like a perfect match.
Apple has hired executives from companies mass producing cars (Chrysler, Tesla). That's not what they want from McLaren. They want tech and relationships.
Also, Formula One is not just internal combustion.

Re: Late Morning News Roundup

florean — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 16:07:07 -0000

I seem to only chime in here on Apple/technology topics, but here goes:
Presumably Apple is creating simulated bokeh with software
Yes and no.
the same way I can do it in Photoshop.
Definitely no.

Apple uses the two cameras to generate a 3D depth map and then apply the software bokeh only to the background. That is info that simply isn't available to Photoshop. It does its best (and it's able to do a pretty damn good job), but Apple is able to use the extra 3D data to get results that are almost exactly like what you would get from a DSLR. Pretty cool stuff.

And it's just trolling to pretend that Bluetooth headphones don't exist.

Re: Apple and Netflix

florean — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:08:53 -0000

Apple Music is Beats Music. They needed streaming licenses and infrastructure. They obviously decided it would be easier to buy it and integrate than build it themselves. I doubt you have more information about this than Eddie Cue and the Apple board.

Re: Judge Orders Apple to Help FBI Crack San Bernardino iPhone

florean — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 13:32:38 -0000

I hope you do reconsider. Remember, anything the US government can do, so can the Chinese government, the Iranian government, and so can criminals or terrorist organizations. Digital data is fundamentally different than physical property.

Re: Judge Orders Apple to Help FBI Crack San Bernardino iPhone

florean — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 13:28:42 -0000

This is specifically for the iPhone 5c and earlier. They didn't have a Secure Enclave chip on them (which was introduced for TouchID and the Apple Pay), so a lot of the protections are handled by the OS. It would be impossible on the iPhone 5S and beyond with iOS 8+. Apple could always be forced to add a golden key before it hits the Secure Enclave in new versions of iOS, but iPhone 5s and beyond running iOS 8+ (until iOS NSA.0) will never be able to be cracked (other than a brute force attack that would take millions of machine hours). And even then, it wouldn't work retroactively. It would only apply to data created after iOS NSA.0 was installed.

Re: A Closer Look At Alabama's Driver License Office Closures

florean — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 13:43:44 -0000

Unless black people are poorer than white people. Which they are. Targeting the poor is often a great way to target minorities without seeming racist.

Re: A Closer Look At Alabama's Driver License Office Closures

florean — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 13:39:46 -0000

"In any case, the overall impact doesn't appear to be much heavier—if at all—on blacks than it is on whites"*
* If they have the same economic status and ability to access alternative locations.

That's a really big caveat. Lower paying jobs generally have less flexibility, so traveling the hours to reach another location during business hours might not be practical. Someone else can dig up the figures, but my general understanding is that blacks are still economically disadvantaged in Alabama. So it would in practice seem to have a much larger impact on African Americans.

Re: Carly Fiorina Now Even Wronger About Planned Parenthood Video

florean — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 11:57:13 -0000

I'd love to see a citation for that. "Cunningham says he is confident the procedure was an abortion, and not a miscarriage." If the very biased provider of the video isn't even sure, I'd bet you're right. Another relevant question: was this even taken in the US?