> Why do the country's accountants need guns or bullets?
If you've actually inspected a reasonable subset of the multiple sources you found on this, you'd understand that these are purchases for their Criminal Investigations Division, a division with a narrow remit which has been armed for over a century.
The only reason why this is suddenly shocking news is because right-wing media has been increasingly hyping this up as some unprecedented and dangerous overreach since ~2020, cynically playing into the enduring paranoiac belief that govt stormtroopers are just around the corner (yet somehow never actually materializing). You're dancing to the tunes that your echo chambers choose for you.
No surprise at the MS non-response here. Anyone forced to use Teams every day can see that it's being maintained by a skeleton crew (at best) on the dev side. Every single day I miss basic features (like global message linkability) that I came to love in Slack, and suffer 101 little bugs and annoyances that never seem to improve much.
MS clearly thinks Teams is "good enough" - enough of the feature checkboxes ticked that they can focus mostly on aggressively marketing it, making it seem crazy to use a separate third-party chat platform instead of Teams if you're using Azure.. even if does happen to be a buggy bloated beast, with almost unusably wretched mobile apps.
If there's just one area I wish we hadn't switched to MS-brand dogfood after making the move to Azure, it's chat/calling. It's a deceptively tricky domain to get it right in, and one where you really want as little friction as possible for all users.
"We should have stuck with Slack." - every team that ever switched to MS Teams.
I think starting from maybe 5-6 years ago MS got into the mindset of "pushing early and let users be beta testers and do micro patches along the way". Power BI was CLEARLY only barely useable back in 2017 but gradually climbed out of the hole after 2019.
More and more I wish I could work in some company that doesn't use any MS tools. VSCode seems to be the exception here.
> Not that I want to give them any ideas, but surely the best solution would be to just lock the account down to the region the billing account is from?
I'm pretty sure (based on dealing with DRM/geoIP restriction requirements in other spheres) that it's because the media companies are incredibly anal about enforcement on strict geographic lines. They don't care if your account is linked to a US credit card at a US billing address, despite how effective that is at ensuring that you are a US user (and how difficult it is to spoof). They are hellbent on the idea that no US-only content should ever be streamed to an IP address terminating at a non-US location. For them it's absolutely not about people or accounts - it's entirely a matter of geography.
Netflix could easily apply a rule based on the region of the billing account, and I am sure it would be vastly more effective than playing whack-a-mole with individual IP addresses. However, the media companies would undoubtedly still insist that they do strict geoIP restriction as well. And if Netflix did both, anybody who is traveling outside of their home country would find Netflix to be bereft of content; anyone who travelled frequently would find Netflix to be perfectly useless. By going all-in on geoIP, Netflix keeps the geoIP-fixated media companies happy, while ensuring that users see plenty of content even as they move from country to country.
I'd guess that Netflix is only upping their game on residential IPs etc now because the media companies are no longer happy and are leaning on them - VPN services are simply becoming too brazen about advertising the ability to bypass Netflix geo restrictions by clicking flags. Whenever it becomes this obvious to the media guys that anyone with a pulse and a credit card can circumvent Netflix's controls, they'll be pressed to 'do better' or lose their rights to content. Netflix takes some steps, catches some backlash, and the media companies are placated for a while.
I've been in largely the same situation as OP - early-stage startup, rushed work on an MVP requiring far too many bells and whistles, CEO doing a crucial demo before potential investors who would likely make or break the company.
The crucial difference in my case was that the CEO was whipsmart, and a natural salesman; he knew his market, he knew his audience, and he knew our work. He ran through the app enough times in advance of the demo to know it inside and out, and he prefaced his demo with boilerplate warnings that it was an MVP/prototype and that bugs were to expected - he did this so effectively that it almost seemed like he had them excited about the prospect of seeing bugs. When the inevitable faults in the application / backend did occur, he was able to gracefully roll with the punches and sustain the momentum: he joked his way past it and adjusted his approach as he ran through the failed step again (having correctly guessed at what the problem was with his input the first time around). The investors could see - as our CEO had emphasized up-front - that the shortcomings were superficial, and that both the app and underlying system were fundamentally solving the problems they were meant to solve - and doing so in novel ways for the vertical we were in, with much better UX than that vertical was accustomed to.
That company succeeded by any measure, and is still running strong today. And at least 80% of why it succeeded, imo, is because of the quality of its earliest employees, both C-level and technical. A CEO may not need to be a one-in-a-million kind of guy or gal, but they definitely do need to be one-in-a-whole-lotta-thousands, at the very least - if they're just another thoroughly average individual with an oversized ego and a 'fake it till we make it' ethos, you are screwed - no amount of unpaid blood, sweat and tears in the trenches will save you. We were lucky enough to have an inspiring and intelligent CEO who brought in critical voices rather than yes men, and who at the early stages of the company's life would often directly interface with the coders who were designing the apps and systems he and his sales people would be pitching to potential investors, partners, and customers. And when your company has ~5-20 employees, that's absolutely how it should be - all doors should be open. Rigid management hierarchies are no more than adult make-believe at this stage, and indulging in them is inherently toxic.
Anyways, I suppose OP's story is really just an old and universal one: bad management will fail, and it will always find someone else to blame for its failures.
> This [2] post also documents Cliqz being covertly auto-installed with .NET Framework.
No, it documents the same thing as the other link - that unrelated chip.de downloads (including .NET Framework, though I have no idea why anyone in their right mind would source that from chip.de) are by default wrapping any downloads in a "secure CHIP installer" which is chock full of dodgy adware installations, apparently including Cliqz without any mention or option to remove.
Yes, the default installers from chip.de were embedding Cliqz and used malware distribution techniques to have Cliqz stealthily installed along with other software. The important part is that Chip and Cliqz are owned by the same parent company, Hubert Burda Media.
I wasn't referring to the official .NET Framework installer either that's shipped by Microsoft.
I got it wrong the first time, then got it at the second take, thought I had it wrong again reading your comment and turned around again. The writing was weirdly misleading.
> Solar panels, even at high noon, usually only produce about 200 watt-hours per square meter.
> The most efficient production electric vehicles today (probably the Hyundai Ioniq and the Tesla Mod 3) would only be able to travel 2–4 miles on that amount of electricity…in an hour. Most people could walk faster.
From what I get:
- in the best conditions the panels could produce 200W in an hour
- 200W would allow for 2-4miles on the most efficient cars
The author's point seems to be that if the solar panel was the only source of energy the car would be slower that walking. It's different from seeing it as an additional source of electricity, just like regenerative braking is for instance.
> - 200W would allow for 2-4miles on the most efficient cars
Sorry, but that's wrong. They meant 2-4 miles per 1 kWh, not per 200 Wh.
Very good EVs get about 4-4.5 miles / kWh at optimal speed (usually between 25 and 35 mi/hr). So, best case, 200 Wh is good for about 1 mile, assuming you can deliver the 200 Wh over a period of 2 minutes.
However, 200 W can't push the car at 1 mi/hr because of "vampire" losses: Power for accessories and vehicle systems (like power-assisted steering, power-assisted friction brakes, the ABS controller, the airbag monitor, etc). 200 W of power isn't just slower than walking: In a normal-sized car, you will literally go 0 mi/hr.
More importantly, 200 W/m^2 is the best-case scenario at noon, in the tropics, on a cloudless day, with no shadows, using expensive, high-efficiency panels aimed squarely at the sun. As soon as any of those qualifiers is not met, power drops precipitously.
In particular, the atmosphere absorbs a large amount of light: In space, solar insolation is about 1300 W/m^2. At earth's surface in the tropics, solar insolation is about 1000 W/m^2 at noon. At higher latitudes, or other times of the day, solar insolation is lower.
A good rule of thumb is that (for Europe and North America) the total insolation over a full day is about 5000 Wh/m^2. So, a solar panel on a sun-following mount is limited to about 1000 Wh/m^2/day, again assuming no clouds. For a fixed solar panel, such as on the hood of a car, you'll get about half of that: 500 Wh/m^2/day. Remember, you need 1000 Wh to go 4-5 miles.
That "4-5" implies a lot of accuracy, but I would have thought that the distance you can travel on 1000 Wh would vary by orders of magnitude depending on the speed, terrain and road surface.
However, if you are moving a 1 tonne vehicle up a 5% gradient then you won't do more than 4.5 miles on 1000 Wh, if I've calculated that correctly.
The specific UK mechanism that is the subject of this subthread was introduced in July; it's not what your wikipedia link describes (social engineering to get a number ported).
I'm also in the UK, I've had the same phone number for at least a decade. It has been easy to carry your phone number to a new provider for as long as I can remember.
You just contact your existing provider, tell them you wish to leave and need the PAC code. After they beg to stay and throw you a sweetheart deal. They'll send it via text or post.
you have been ABLE to do that for as long as I can remember (I've kept the same number since 2005 now on all the major networks. I only didn't keep my number prior to that because it was a work provided contract) but depending on which you were dealing with would put up a number of different obstacles when you contact them to make the process as painful as possible (to keep you as a customer... THREE I'm looking at you!)
so the new automated SMS process introduced in July is a welcome addition
You're really reaching now. People were regularly using phone cameras long before smartphones. By the time smartphones were a few gens in it was ultra common, and a big benefit of them (that even non-technical people could understand) was that you could use wifi whenever possible and avoid data charges (which really weren't much higher then than now in most markets; "unlimited" plans were more common too). Also the 3g has a 2mp camera, so we're talking about pictures that are 2-3MB at most. The suggestion that people were shy about uploading relatively small photos to Facebook circa ~2008, and that this supports this flimsy story in any way, is sheer nonsense.
I'm no fan of Facebook - am a long-term outright refusenik actually - but the conspiracy theories are getting out of hand. There is zero substance to this article, it's wildly speculative clickbait.
In 2008 Facebook itself was in its infancy. Orkut was still the largest social network, only toppled around 2011. The majority of the world was definitely not uploading any phone pictures anywhere.
That's quite an overstatement, to put it very mildly. Facebook was allowing open non-.edu signups by 2006, and the buzz around it from it's school success was immense. By 2008 it certainly wasn't seeing a critical mass of boomers and other late(st) adopters, but it was still huge by any measure - 100 million users, and growing with unprecedented speed.
People were absolutely already uploading phone pictures to FB and other sites by then; I think there may even have been Facebook apps shipping on non-smartphones by that time, it was one of the earliest things carriers used to flog data plans. I agree that "the majority of the world" wasn't uploading phone pictures anywhere by then, but then I'd be surprised if that rather high bar has been reached today either.
The matter at hand is collecting user pictures for mass scale machine learning. I and everyone I know didn’t even join FB until 2011-12. 100m is nothing compared to the current 2.2B user base who is posting annotated 10 year old pictures of themselves. This is to counter the parent comment that “they already have this data anyway”, not an absolute statement on FB growth.
If you've actually inspected a reasonable subset of the multiple sources you found on this, you'd understand that these are purchases for their Criminal Investigations Division, a division with a narrow remit which has been armed for over a century.
The only reason why this is suddenly shocking news is because right-wing media has been increasingly hyping this up as some unprecedented and dangerous overreach since ~2020, cynically playing into the enduring paranoiac belief that govt stormtroopers are just around the corner (yet somehow never actually materializing). You're dancing to the tunes that your echo chambers choose for you.