I was under the impression that the Mickey Mouse Protection Act 1998[1] extended the copyright protection for works retroactively (though already public domain works were excluded).
That being said, I guess the act had precautions to stop it from reducing the copyright protection for edge cases like these?
As someone who has caught DB a fair number of times over the years, I think DB is most hated by Germans (who love to complain) and German locals.
Maybe I've just been lucky so far, but as an Aussie it is hard to overstate the fact it is even possible to travel almost anywhere within the country and between several other countries by train for fairly cheap is already quite miraculous to me. Yeah, I've run into a fair few issues and it was annoying but that goes for every country I've been to (Japan had the least by far but trains still get delayed there more often than people think and I've also run into situations as in TFA where if I didn't speak Japanese things would've ended up worse).
I'm not sure I'd even put DB in my "bottom three" in terms of overall experience. Should it be much better? Of course. But if you listen to Germans it sounds like DB is the worst train network in the universe by a clear margin, and that's just obviously not true.
I appreciate you sharing the positive experience as a neighbor, but unfortunately, the Deutsche Bahn is as bad as presented here. (I spend several years commuting to college via DB). Once my train stopped in a small village with the announcement "the train ends here". Thankfully, kind people picked me up.
I used to complain about the French SNCF, then I discovered DB and stopped complaining. I've been a Bahncard 1. Klasse holder for a few years.
Last time I took the train in Germany I was 30h late and had to spend a sunday between Cologne and Karlsruhe (not that I was really surprised).
The punctuality is a joke, ICEs are unpractical, train management comically incompetent (remember when the ICEs cars would never come in the announced order and there was luggage room for maybe 15% of passengers?).
The cars are very dirty, especially in 1st class where eating a full meal at your seat is encouraged but the cars are cleaned once every two days.
However, the train attendants are usually very arranging for every aspect of the trip on board.
Cheap tickets are cool, but have been there for so long (the regional ones) Germans take them for granted.
As a French I feel that the SNCF is pretty good. We like to complain about it but I have had a few minor problems (3 hours pause from locomotive breakdown, or 2 hours stop to allow cleaning after a suicide) but nothing too bad.
There are on times and rarely canceled.
The major issues are with pricing and lack of investment outside of TGV but it's not too bad.
I live in Berlin but grew up in the US. Yep, Germany has much more train coverage than where I'm from originally. And that's great. But to understand the complaints you really have to spend some years living with the uncertainty created by the DB.
It depends which route you take, but for a wide swath of the German population, your chance of an absolutely wretched experience seems to be around 1 in 4. That means that people are constantly weighing the desire for affordable, sustainable, comfortable transport that may go horribly wrong, against the (similarly unpredictable) endemic traffic jams and exhaustion of driving, and often choosing wrong. If you have no car, you're weighing more reliable but slow and uncomfortable and traffic-jam-prone buses, or simply avoiding the travel. Constantly making decisions on penalty of deeply unpleasant consequences without any way to actually reasonably judge your decision is a special form of miserable.
At least in the US, most of the time, there is no decision to make: you drive.
A lot of the issues are local, some are time constrained. There is a CCC talk on youtube "BahnMining - Pünktlichkeit ist eine Zier (David Kriesel)", that concludes that any train traveling through certain trainstations will most likely end up significantly delayed. Then you have certain train models failing during summer. Or my recent favourite planned construction work with no apparent plan for a reliable replacement service beyond "here is a train, it might leave at some point".
> See also "instagram is spying on you through your microphone". It's not, but I've seen people argue that it's OK for people to believe that because it supports their general (accurate) sentiment that targeted ads are creepy.
I used to be sceptical of this claim but I have found it increasingly difficult to be sceptical after we found out last year that Facebook was exploiting flaws in Android in order to track your browsing history (bypassing the permissions and privilege separation model of Android)[1].
Given they have shown a proclivity to use device exploits to improve their tracking of users, is it really that unbelievable that they would try to figure out a way to use audio data? Does stock Android even show you when an app is using its microphone permission? (GrapheneOS does.) Is it really that unbelievable that they would try to do this if they could?
If they are using the microphone to target ads, show me the sales pitch that their ad sales people use to get customers to pay more for the benefits of that targeting.
I get your point, but can you point to a sales pitch which included "exploit security flaws in Android to improve tracking"? Probably not, but we know for a fact they did that.
Also, your own blog lists an leak from 2024 about a Facebook partner bragging about this ability[1]. You don't find the claim credible (and you might be right about that, I haven't looked into it), but I find it strange that you are asking for an example that your own website provides?
I have already experienced the benefits of sending this to several family members, and I'm thankful for the hard work you put into laying everything out so clearly
On paper, USDT probes are the best way for libraries (and binaries) to provide information for debugging because they can be used programmatically and have no performance overhead until they are measured but unfortunately they are not widely used.
Yeah, I really have to wonder what the thought process is behind leaving such a comment. When people first started doing it I wondered if it was some kind of guerrilla outrage marketing campaign.
Maybe I'm getting too jaded but I'm struggling to be quite that charitable.
The entireity of the human-written text in that comment was "From ChatGPT:" and it was formatted as though it was a slam-dunk "you're wrong, the computer says so" (imagine it was "From Wikipedia" followed by a quote disagreeing with you instead).
I'm sure some people do what you describe but then I would expect at least a little bit more explanation as to why they felt the need to paste a paragraph of LLM output into their comment. (While I would still disagree that it is in any way valuable, I would at least understand a bit about what they are trying to communicate.)
My thought process was that the original comment was based on their personal experiences and since ChatGPT is trained on a large dataset, it may offer a different perspective derived from experiences of a lot more people.
> "you're wrong, the computer says so"
My thought: you're knowledge may be limited, this is what a computer trained on a lot more data says:
SmartOS constructed a container-like environment using LX-branded zones, they didn't create an in-kernel equivalent to Linux's namespaces which it then nested in a zone. You're probably thinking of the KVM port to Solaris/illumos, which does run in a zone internally to provide additional protection.
While LX-branded zones were a really cool tech demo, maintaining compatibility with Linux long-term would be incredibly painful and you're bound to find all sorts of horrific bugs in production. I believe that Oxide uses KVM to run their Linux guests.
Linux has always supported nested namespaces and you can run Docker containers inside LXC (or Incus) fairly easily. Note that while it does add some additional protection (in particular, it transparently adds user namespaces which is a critical security feature most people still do not enable in Docker) it is still the same technology as containers and so kernel bugs still pose a similar risk.
As a maintainer of runc (the runtime Docker uses), if you aren't using user namespaces (which is the case for the vast majority of users) I would consider your setup insecure.
And a shocking number of tutorials recommend bind-mounting docker.sock into the container without any warning (some even tell you to mount it "ro" -- which is even funnier since that does nothing). I have a HN comment from ~8 years ago complaining about this.
You really need to use user namespaces to get this kind of security protection -- running as root inside a container without user namespaces is not secure. Yes, breakouts often require some other bug or misconfiguration but the margin for error is non-existent (for instance, if you add CAP_SYS_PTRACE to your containers it is trivial to break out of them and container runtimes have no way of protecting against that). Almost all container breakouts in the past decade were blocked by user namespaces.
Unfortunately, user namespaces are still not the default configuration with Docker (even though the core issues that made using them painful have long since been resolved).
This might depend on the country you're in, but I'm quite certain I've gotten locked out of the signup flow in the past when I refused to provide a phone number.
I just tried it from my Android phone (GrapheneOS) and it still asks to verify a phone number when trying to create an account via a web browser. (Strangely, even though it's a private browser session it just asks to confirm my number by sending an SMS, not asking me for my phone number like it does on desktop -- I wonder how that works...)
If you're saying that the account creation flow through the system accounts application doesn't require a phone number, how are you sure that Google doesn't just collect the phone number directly from your device (they could even silently verify it through a class-0 silent SMS)?
Does it also not ask for a phone number if you factory reset, remove the SIM card, and do not register the phone with a Google account? Maybe they track the IMEI instead?
In the case of Twitter, there is evidence that the initial implementation was meant to just be a security mechanism but later someone else noticed they had a handy database of user phone numbers and decided to treat them as free marketing contact information.
TFA mentions this option and then goes on at some length to explain that this doesn't help for transitive dependencies, which is how these attacks usually work.
That being said, I guess the act had precautions to stop it from reducing the copyright protection for edge cases like these?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
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