Heh. At that time I was more of a Watcom / DOS/4GW-man. Of course, that wasn’t cough entirely legal.

gcc

Well, if your desire is seeing people breaking those chains rather than enjoyment of the collar being welded shut, I wouldn’t call it a toxic focus - quite the contrary. Personally, injustice and abuse - even taking into account the catharsis of it being overcome - angers me too much for it to be a favorite. My blood pressure is already driven high enough by real-life events without it creeping into my much needed escapism, but to each their own. :)

That’s why a said static webhost, i.e. paying for the ability to serve files, not run scripts or manage the webserver configuration. Sure, the hosting provider could be made responsible for the implementation, but now they have been encumbered with the burden and liability of policing which hosted sites needs this bullshit enabled and which are just a blog about making strawberry preserves or something.

Point is, it’s complete and utter twattery of the highest order. Never mind enforcement, I don’t even see how it would be reliably or consistently implemented.

And all that is in any case absolutely futile, because there’s still the matter of people being perfectly able of obtaining those self-same ISO’s from any number of other sources that are even more difficult to police, like the ones I originally mentioned, and about a thousand more where they came from.

Well, good for them. I’m not Australian, get to vote for Australian lawmakers or host websites in Australia.

Is Australia going to pay every single website admin for the burden of implementing this wonderful magical logic to detect a given source IP(v4) belongs to a VPN provider? What about IPv6?

If I host a simple static website on a static webhost in Denmark say, and provide some otherwise perfectly legal OS ISO’s for download, how would I implement any logic at all? Why the fuck should I be subject to Australian laws?

The cookie acceptance of the GPDR was already bad enough and ruined so much of the Internet with no appreciative improvement of the privacy of visitors. If every Tom, Dick and Harry are going to place spurious demands on every website, it’ll do nothing except raise enormous barriers to entry and ensure that only huge players with the capacity to comply with demands from legislators all over the world will even be able to “legally” run websites at all. And then we can’t have an Internet or FOSS for that matter.

Maybe legislators should stop writing half-baked laws the consequences of which they apparently cannot comprehend.

That may be the best thing to deal with the potential legal liabilities introduced by this unmitigated abject idiocy.

Good thing everybody can still torrent whatever they want from where ever they want. Or use IPFS. Or IRC DCC. Or Usenet. Or just a VPN.

Looks suspiciously at the cold remains of my last cup of coffee.

…Yeah, probably.

Sucks teeth. I suppose that would be a rather tall order without tool assistance. On a completely unrelated note, I just had the oddest flash of somebody having welded a golden(ish) bull to the front of a surplus APC ramming the resultant amalgamation into the nearest stock exchange and / or AI data center. No idea why.

No, I don’t think I will.

Of course you did. Or else.

Drink a verification can to continue, consumer-slave.

At least that way I’d get to enjoy it while dying from my aneurysm.

What’s going to be their next trick? Launching a service that’ll watch the latest Netflix series for me and give me a summary when it’s done?

It’s Oracle: It’s not like they deliver value either way.

Was the headline AI authored?

I agree, and there are a number of other biases to consider. Here’s some I can think of:

• Firefox will mainly be running of desktops, laptops and smartphones. I would expect QA to be significantly better for this type of device than, say, consumer grade routers or TV boxes. But more concerning to me is stuff like cheap ATMs, industrial control systems (although Siemens have great QA) and elevator control systems etc. Infrastructure, not consumer toy, and Mozilla obviously aren’t the right people to say anything about the state of any of that.
• While Mozilla is currently estimating approximately 200 million installs, some of those - especially on Linux - will have disabled telemetry. I know I do. With that said, I can’t recall the last time I had a FF CTD (crash to desktop) but I suspect when I did, it wasn’t even a bug but an OOM (out-of-memory) kill because I was browsing on something like a 2Gb RAM micro-portable with insufficient swap. FF is one impressively stable piece of software these days.
• Firefox usage is not evenly globally distributed, and I have no way to reliably assess whether FF has a larger or smaller proportional usage in regions that may rely more on older or refurbished hardware, which I would expect to have higher HW error rates (although I cannot prove that either - I can’t find any good public aggregate data for RAM MTBF trends over time, but I’d be very interested if somebody else knows where to find authoritative answers on that).

(Un)fortunately, this may be the most Mozilla can provide in terms on insight. Their users tend to be particularly sensitive of perceived or practical privacy violations, so I understand - and appreciate - their caution in gathering data.

For reasons I cannot quite rationalize or justify, let alone clearly articulate, this reminded me of grandma-ma from Duckman. It was probably the smell.

Fair question. I find it unnerving, because there’s very little a software developer can meaningfully do if they cannot rely on the integrity of the hardware upon which their software is running, at least not without significant costs, and ultimately if the problem is bad enough even those would fail. This finding seems to indicate that a lot of hardware is much, much less reliable than I would have thought. I’ve written software for almost thirty years and across numerous platforms at this point, and the thought that I cannot assume a value stored in RAM to reliably retain it’s value fills me with the kind of dread I wouldn’t be able to explain to someone uninitiated without a major digression. Almost everything you do on any computing device - whether a server or a smart phone relies on the assumption of that kind of trust. And this seems to show that assumption is not merely flawed, but badly flawed.

Suppose you were a car mechanic confronted with a survey that 10 percent of cars were leaking breaking fluid - or fuel. That might illustrate how this makes me feel.

Ah. That’ll teach me to read the fine print. Thank you.

I can guess what it is well enough from the context, but for future reference, what does “MRA” stand for?

Well, that’s unnerving.