I bet they still have some good devs who are continually thwarted by management.

They’re just making themselves look trashy and desperate.

What might work is making their software better than everyone else’s. But that requires effort and skill and managerial competence.

I’d like to see people rebuild something like that inside i2p or something similar. But with modern browser fingerprinting it’s very hard not to be identifiable even there, unless you take precautions most people absolutely won’t do.

I guess bullshit is easier to make than shoes.

Overregulation and underregulation are both problematic, so it’s not an easy thing to get right. But sometimes you get the impression a regulation is all agenda and very little thought (e.g. this one in California, and the FCC’s recent banning of foreign-made home routers).

The FCC ruling prohibits the sale of new models of consumer router. It doesn’t forbid the continuing use of existing routers or, if I understand it right, the continued sale of models that were already on sale. So you can continue to use existing models as WAPs or routers. But when the tech and the security moves on the FCC wants the USA to be left behind.

Yes, OPNsense is excellent if you have a spare computer to run it. Then you can repurpose your consumer router as a WiFi access point. I still feel safer flashing the old WiFi router with open firmware before using it even as a WAP.

If it’s a desktop PC you can buy a PCIe card with multiple Ethernet ports pretty cheap, especially if you buy used.

Time to flash the old Netgear router with some open source firmware.

Netgear likely agreed to some backdoor shit

If that’s how you win Trump’s favor, count me out forever.

It’s not clear what makes Netgear’s currently foreign-made routers safer than, say, an Amazon Eero 7 or a Google Nest WiFi Pro.

This is all evidence that it’s not really about safety. It’s a clumsy attempt to strongarm tech companies into setting up factories in the USA. It may also be an attempt to create an environment in which it’s easier to install US government backdoors on every home router.

Frey told Ars he was shocked to see a platform as big as Discord relying on such poor support infrastructure.

It’s exactly what we can expect from tech companies these days.

If a physics simulation doesn’t agree exactly with experimental data, it is often difficult to figure out why and tweak the model until they agree. With AI, incorporating a few experimental examples into the training process is a lot more straightforward, and it’s not necessary to understand where exactly the model went wrong.

That’s not too bad if it’s only ever used as a rough guide in the early stages of design, with proper testing done later. But do we trust corporations not to get lazy and pressure their engineers to skip the accurate tests altogether, especially when they can then brag to their investors that AI is replacing expensive engineer time? What would Boeing’s management want to do with this tech?

It’s like the US official who told the Pope he was wrong because the USA has more weapons than he does. Fascists don’t appreciate truth or morality, just force.

Or they just noticed how sexy the fish always look.

There is a port to C++ underway, which still seems to be active:

https://github.com/attermann/microReticulum

It’s possible that the kernel and core components are still robust, having been developed in a time when engineering standards were higher. As far as I know, the kernel is still basically Dave Cutler’s NT kernel, adapted by his team to 64-bit in the early 2000s, and his stuff was always well reputed for stability, though other teams were producing unstable code.

The problems of Windows today always seem to trace back to the early 2010s when Satya Nadella took over and nuked the QA and testing team. That’s borne out by what we learn from the current article series, which describes how those test engineers who weren’t fired were parachuted into roles they often weren’t prepared for. And in Windows this seems to have led to a culture of hasty, undertested patches, shoved out to users and re-patched when users report problems, but not before. Also, again borne out by this article, a managerial culture of pressuring devs to add new features (that users don’t even care about) instead of solidifying what’s already there. You end up with demoralized devs and a teetering tower of technical debt growing ever higher.

If the core of the OS is robust but everything on top of it is flaky, then the user experience is still going to be of an unreliable OS.

Maybe we need a movement for fully hand-coded software, as both a political statement and a baseline of quality. I doubt it will even take longer to develop and maintain, once you count all the overheads of supervising AI.

The “advanced flow” with a one-day wait is just Google realizing they need to boil this frog a little more slowly to prevent a backlash. They still want a fully boiled frog in the end.

I’ve been using NewPipe without problems. Is it supposed to have gone away?