• The great thing about blockchain applications is that they are completely resilient against certain types of attack.  If someone doesn't have your private key, they have no way to steal your Bitcoins...  Except, of course, the old-fashioned approach of a big guy in a mask threatening you with a pipe wrench.
  
  The not so great thing about blockchain applications is that they are completely irresilient against certain types of failure.  If you forget the password to your wallet with 50 Bitcoins in it, haha fuck you that's half a mil you'll never see again.
  
  
  
• Repealing DMCA Section 230 is just a form of regulatory capture.  (TechDirt)
  
  That's why Facebook is in favour of doing so.  It would be a sort of reverse SMOD that leaves the huge dinosaurs intact and kills off all the scrappy little egg-stealing proto-mammals.
  
  Don't go after the social networks.  Go after the payment processors.  Force them to treat all customers equally, and the problem will solve itself.
  
  
  
• UCLA decides that maybe it doesn't want to turn itself into the village from The Prisoner after all.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
• Yes, things at Google really are as bad as we feared.  Their Cloud Vision API has spontaneously developed one of those neurological disorders that Oliver Sacks wrote so many entertaining and terrifying books about.  (Business Insider)
  
  It can no longer distinguish men from women.  There's no telling what it might not be able to distinguish tomorrow, once Google's new Department of Cybernetic Lobotomization is done with their work.
  
  
  
• To be honest, I forgot there even was a 12Mbps NBN plan.  (ZDNet)
  
  NBNCo is rolling out three new pricing tiers, which unfortunately are kind of garbage.  The fastest plan will offer gigabit download speeds - but only 50Mbps up, only a little faster than what I already have.
  
  That article led me to this page which lists other tiers I wasn't aware of: 250/100 and 500/200.
  
  In fact, NBNCo has offered gigabit speeds for at least five years but priced them insanely high, so that no-one bothers to offer them.  (Lifehacker)
  
  Oh well.  100/40 - or really, 80/40, which is what I actually get - is still a big step up from 15/2.
  
  
  
• Google has released the first developer preview of Android 11.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  I have devices that have perfectly working hardware that haven't received an update since 6.0.  My PCs of the same age are quite capable of running the latest version of Windows 10.
  
  I do not anticipate Google solving this problem.  I do not anticipate Google even recognising this problem.  They will probably mistake it for a hat.
  
  
  
• ICANN is looking into maybe using that newfangled internet thingy they've heard so much about.  (CircleID)
  
  No junket to Cancún for you!
  
  

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, February 21 2020 05:57 AM (cTMj+)

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