Yeah, I think so.

At first, Xockets sounded like a legit tech company to me. But a closer look at their website reveals that it’s actually run by a bunch of patent attorneys.

https://www.xockets.com/our-team/

Part of it is the community. I really like the OpenWRT community, but it’s harder to engage with them when you run a downstream distribution.

But also I’m a bit of a hacker (in the traditional sense). I like to experiment with custom builds of OpenWRT. (And FWIW, their build system uses the same menuconfig as Linux.)

I love my Turris Omnia!

I got the one with the WiFi 6 card. The cool thing is that you can easily open it up and replace parts.

I run the upstream OpenWRT rather than the customized version by Turris. They are good about submitting patches upstream.

+1

From an order of magnitude perspective, the max is terabytes. No “normal” users are dealing with petabytes. And if you are dealing with petabytes, you’re not using some random poster’s program from reddit.

For a concrete cap, I’d say 256 tebibytes…

Where I work, everything is on IPv6. Both the infrastructure for the software services that we run, and our own internal corporate network.

My ISP also provides publicly routable IPv6 prefixes over DHCP. Any layman in my city with this ISP will be on IPv6 by default.

I also use IPv6 for my LAN.

Like, it’s just kind of the default in my neck of the woods…

[S]hareholders said they learned that CrowdStrike’s assurances about its technology were materially false and misleading when a flawed software update disrupted airlines, banks, hospitals and emergency lines around the world.

I don’t see how they can make this argument.

Falcon is a kernel module. When kernel modules fuck up, you get kernel panics.

Sure, the layperson may not know enough about computers to recognize this, but it’s a basic enough fact about operating systems that an investor in a company like this should take the time to learn. It’s not like they hid that fact.

If you invested in a company without knowing how their product works, that’s on you.

However, Linus’s kernel was more elaborate than GNU Hurd, so it was incorporated.

Quite the opposite.

GNU Hurd was a microkernel, using lots of cutting edge research, and necessitating a lot of additional complexity in userspace. This complexity also made it very difficult to get good performance.

Linux, on the other hand, was just a bog standard Unix monolithic kernel. Once they got a libc working on it, most existing Unix userspace, including the GNU userspace, was easy to port.

Linux won because it was simple, not elaborate.

There are still issues with WearOS, but I think some of that is hardware. Last I heard, Qualcomm’s wearable SoCs were trash, but Samsung is in a good position since they have both the SoC fab and make the watch itself.

Many industries are shifting to a model where Android is the de facto OS for consumer-facing interactions. It’s not well optimized outside of phones yet, but it is rapidly improving. Many cars run Android now, for example.

I’m moderately optimistic about the next generation of WearOS devices.

Even if they were such a thing as a cookie banner law, and there is none, companies in the USA would not have to comply in their country.

It would be only for Europe.

This is a pretty naive take.

If you operate in Europe, you must comply with GDPR. To selectively show a cookie banner, you have to be able to identify the (location of) the user.

It is totally reasonable for a company to operate in Europe but not wish to implement a full identity or location detection system. And so they just show the opt-in prompt to everyone.

And you can’t just implement that by using the browser’s location API, because European users can totally choose to not share their location with you using that API. But you still need to comply for those users.

There has been for years a proposal for a standard, designed in 2009 (!), still available in all the popular web browsers (except safari) that can make for a seamless experience: the DNT header.

The diversion about the DNT header is irrelevant.

Firstly, it is not codified in law that the DNT header is canonical. What if a user forgets to check the box? What should the default be? What kind of UX should be presented to users? This stuff needs to be spelled out in law for DNT to be a valid way to express opt-in.

Secondly, it’s not a robust per-site permission. Browsers only let you set it globally.

Thirdly, it’s actually bad for privacy. By making your headers different from the majority, you are easier to fingerprint. This is why Safari does not implement it.

Be mad at companies

I get the spirit of the article.

But the GDPR has pushed the problem of consent to the users, and they haven’t done anything to make this easy or convenient. Therefore cookie banners are inevitable. Like, you can’t blame companies for acting in their own self interest; that is entirely counter productive.

The EU needs to solve this.

First, go after the data brokerage industry so that it is no longer profitable to sell user data.

Second, regulate how websites can seek permission. Ideally by specifying a consent API and requiring browsers to implement a sane UX.

It will be much more productive to try to solve this with the handful of Browser vendors than trying to regulate each and every consent banner.