Google squashed most of the competition in a lot of sectors, and the few remaining competitors aren't any better often.

Aside, even if you do not actively use google, google will still be in your life, by tracking and selling you. Already there is realistically no way to entirely "ungooglify" your life as long as you live and partake in some modern western society.

And soon it seems, you will be using a Google browser because you have to, because your bank or employer website or whatever will require their web "attestation" DRM, and will not accept your Firefox, Brave, Chromium, Vivaldi, Opera or whatever attestation.

And if you're hoping for other attestation vendors... Try streaming anything that needs a subscription without using Google's widevine DRM. You will be surprised on how few options there are, not just in implementations but in streaming services that support anything besides Google's widevine.

Google and probably Microsoft and Apple will be big enough browser vendors to be widely supported "attested environments" and attestation providers. Everybody else will bite the dust on that front.

E.g. "x% of websites do not accept Firefox's attestation" will drive more users away from Firefox, and that in turn will lead to even fewer websites supporting Firefox attestation because why spend the dev resources to support it with that measly market share when people can just use one of the big browsers?!

And google knows this very well, from the "works best/only in Chrome" to widevine. They were even able to make MS abandon their browser engine and jump on the google engine train, after all.

This to me is very clearly an antitrust issue that needs antitrust suits and regulation.

You can detect indicators of stress... or hot weather... or stage-fright (admittedly a form of stress)... or too much caffeine... or an underlying (maybe undiagnosed) medical condition, etc. So it does not even necessarily measure "stress".

It's about as useful as the so called "fruit machine" which they used to test for homosexuality[0], in that it is utterly useless while at the same time can be quite ruinous for people. People have been fired over polygraph "fails", and while not admissible in courts, people probably have been fingered for crimes after they failed polygraphs. Also, criminals have gone free after passing polygraphs[1].

>But everyone knows that it's not very reliable in almost every circumstance it's used.

You and I may know that. But a lot of people actually do not. That's why it's still used. Either because people administering those tests think it's "good science", or because those people administering it know that while it's all bullshit the person they are testing might not know that and break down and admit to things. Remember that fake polygraph on the show The Wire, which was just a copier they strapped to the suspect. If I remember correctly that was based upon true events.

A quick google shows e.g. you can hire "polygraphers" to e.g. "test" if your partner was unfaithful, making claims such as: "However, assuming that you have a good polygrapher with a fair amount of experience in working with betrayal trauma, you're going to get results that are at least 90% accurate or better."[2]

The US (and probably a lot of other) government(s) like their polygraphs very much, too[3].

> you can often tell (i.e. with better accuracy than chance) whether or not a subject is able to give a confident, uncomplicated yes-or-no to a straightforward question in a situation where they don't have to be particularly nervous

Uhmm, if somebody sat me down in a room, strapped all kinds of "science" to my body and then asked me questions, I'd be quite nervous regardless of whether I am truthful or not. In fact, I'd be even more nervous knowing it's a polygraph and bullshit, because I cannot know if the person administrating it would know that too.

If that somebody then asked me "Have you ever killed a prostitute?", or "Have you ever colluded with the enemy?", or "Have you ever cheated on your partner?", or "Have you ever stolen from your employer?", for example, my stress would certainly peak despite being able to confidently and truthfully answer "No!" to all of those questions. And I am sure the polygraph would "measure" my "stress".

[0] Yes, that was a real thing too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_t...

[1] E.g. the Green River Killer Gary Ridgway passed a polygraph, so the police turned their resources to another suspect who failed the polygraph. That was in 1984. Ridgway remained free until his arrest in 2001. He killed at least 4 more times after the investigation stopped focusing on him after that "passed" polygraph.

[2] https://www.affairrecovery.com/newsletter/founder/use-abuse-...

[3] https://support.clearancejobs.com/t/the-differences-between-...

This new twitter incident could well be a result of layoffs and the resulting loss of institutional knowledge, but that's hardly a foregone conclusion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_outage

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-outage-on-june-21-202...

If Disney wants to spent time and money and reputation to figure out if they legally need to delete the data they collected about you and only do so when that's the case, then that's their choice. Same as it was their choice to collect data in the first place.

If they instead want to be nice and consumer-orientated, as they like their public image to suggest, or at least save some bucks, then they will hit the delete button. They gotta have such button by now anyway for legal requests from Californians.

What I am trying to say is that both things are very different in details where it matters, so I think this is a rather flawed analogy.

Maybe a closer analogy would be landowners who rent out land. Should a person who bought land 10 years ago be able to generate revenue from renting it to a farmer?

Then you have in the GPS tags: GPSTimeStamp, GPSDateStamp

And those are just the common tags...

Next question is, what format do these tags use. DateTime, while it's supposed to be "YYYY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS", is generally a free-for-all in practice when it comes to the order of the date components, the format of the components, or what separator to use.

I've seen software write DateTimes e.g. like "1-12-23/1:13pm" instead of "2013:01:12 13:13:00". Whether it was actually M-DD-YY or D-MM-YY, etc in this case is more of guesswork when all the values are below 12 :P

And if I remember correctly there was one piece of software which wrote UTF-16-BE strings instead of the mandated ASCII.

Granted, I am a bit older, a millennial (as much as it hurts me to admit) and an older one at that, but I regularly take the tram in my city at times when all the teenagers are going to school or coming from school, and you can see a damn lot of whatsapp on all those phone screens, a lot of tiktok, and a good amount of discord.

I feel C#'s nullable has helped me personally to avoid a lot of potential bugs and also changed the way I write code in a lot of places - like creating `bool Try...(..., out var)` style APIs instead of "old school" returns-null/throws style stuff, which I think make a lot of code cleaner and more easy to read.

Sometimes nullable can get a little messy and annoying, especially when retrofitting old code to make use of it without breaking existing APIs, and all in all the way C# does it is a clear net win in my opinion.

>>Minimum< 40 hour work week. 100% office work.

Those are the norm for most fulltime people in most jobs. You know that, right? Right?

I don't really see the "constructive dismissal" argument either that others brought up, as that would require the employer deliberately creating a hostile work environment. Just saying "we're going into hardcore mode" and taking away some perks that weren't guaranteed wouldn't yet fulfill that. There might be of course other shit that twitter/Musk pulled/pulls that may legally satisfy a constructive dismissal. The email, in my laypersons view, wouldn't be enough.

However there is a strong point about the "missed the email" argument, and the non-affirmative nature of the "resignations" it creates. I think that's a rather strong point in favor of the employees. But then again, never underestimate courts ability to render "surprising" rulings.

My guess is though that twitter would not just "dismiss" everybody who did not respond. At the very least HR would get in touch with those people anyway, at which point employees can say "oh wait, what email?". I'd think the email is just meant as a pre-filter to save time by filtering out what people you do not need to talk to because they want to stay anyway.

I'd be rather careful with that, and not just proclaim these people were terminated. I see a rather good chance court could rule very differently.

So, an artist eeking out a living on something they worked hard on and released a month ago or two years ago gets sympathy from me. An artist who released a thing 20 years ago and still wants to eek out a living off that, such an artist doesn't really have my sympathy. The great-grandchildren who want to get paid for something an ancestor released 120 years ago[0]? Hell no, go do something yourself to make money.

If you're Lars Ulrich in 2000 and sue Napster over songs you released 10-20 years ago, while sitting on a net worth of maybe around 100-200M USD (now 350M), then my sympathy is with the pirates.

This doesn't touch the issue of how a lot of artists are not making much money, not because of pirates but because of predatory music labels and publishing houses.

It also ignores the problems with the "lost sales" theory. A lot of the pirates would have never paid for stuff they downloaded in the first place. And a lot of pirates started paying after pirating some stuff. E.g. I remember discovering a lot of artists from songs I illegally copied on LAN parties back in the day[1], usually artists too small to be on a lot of rotation on radio and MTV (yes, MTV used to have music, crazy) which I probably would have never known about otherwise. And I gave lots of money to these artists, buying their CDs, going to their concerts when possible, and so on. In the same vein, I discovered artists on whatcd and similar pirate places later on.

And doesn't touch on the "please take my money" issue... There are a lot of things that are out of print, etc, that you cannot pay for. E.g. large companies holding licenses to content may even take works out of print deliberately in tax avoiding schemes - I am not a Hollywood accountant, but from my limited understanding they can declare a loss when doing so which is worth a lot more in tax reduction than keeping a title in print.

And it also doesn't even touch humanity's need to preserve important cultural artifacts for the future.

[0] Remember, up to artists death + 70 years copyright term. While this exact scenario has probably not happened yet, as these rules are too new, you get a glimpse of what will happen in the future when you look about all the legal fighting still happening over Sherlock Holmes - a figure and body of worked created mostly before copyright law even existed.

[1] Yes, I am old. If you have no idea what a LAN party is, it's basically a bunch of people actually meeting in some venue with their computers, wire everything together into a temporary LAN, to play games and swap files, which back in the day really was the only sane way to do mulitplayer and filesharing stuff as internet speeds were so limited, and internet was usually very expensive, often still paying by the minute.

I can see it entering special markets first, like long haul trucking, and become more widespread from that. Time will tell if that actually will happen.

I didn't check the code corresponding to the submitted article, but I'd guess it would be infeasible even for an advanced or even state adversarial actor to automatically check lots and lots of images (unless there is some kind of "signature" that can be detected) just in case there might be some LSB-based steganographically hidden secret inside.

If the adversary is doing a targeted attack against an individual/group of individuals, it might be more feasible, but then I'd wonder if other means of attack, including the good old monkey-wrench-to-the-knee aren't still more efficient.

That guy or gal calling your grandparents about that "fixing that virus" or "refunding that amazon purchase" begs to differ...

Some platform does a high profile ban, and then the PR inboxes of the other platforms are set ablaze with journalists asking for comment on how your particular platform wants to handle that person - high profile bans make nice clickbait articles after all - and the twitters and reddits and youtubers and so on of this world talk about what those other platforms are doing/are not doing/should be doing. At this point the other platforms have to do something, either issue a ban as well, or issue some kind of statement why at this time they won't be issuing a ban. Usually the option to just issue a ban as well is a lot easier and PR-wise "safe" than trying to come up with a "defensive" statement of why such a ban is not (yet) appropriate.

Back in school (in Germany[0]) we had a case of a teacher, who among other things taught PE, and who was falsely accused of "inappropriately touching some girls". The girls in question told everybody (except the teachers of course) that they will be fabricating such a story as "revenge" for the PE teacher actually trying to make them take part in PE instead of just sitting around. As soon as the police got involved, they backed down and recanted, apologizing and basically claiming they considered it not "a big deal" and just a "prank", but by that time the damage was done.

The teacher in question had been suspended during the investigation and of course that was the talk of the school and everybody including their parents knew about it. After being cleared, parents would constantly ask to take their kids out of his PE class "just to be sure", so he ended up not teaching PE at all anymore shortly after. Afterwards we usually saw him eat alone, as the other teachers seemed to avoid him, and roam around alone in the halls during breaks instead of going to the teachers lounge like everybody else. He retired as early as he could.

Not directly related to "cancel culture", but to the mindset that goes with it, my mom told me later in life that back in elementary school, one couple took out their kid of my sisters' class before school even started, because their kid had been assigned a teacher who... was male. That was enough. There was no allegation, no rumors of inappropriate behavior, no nothing. The parents in question had never met him before either. He just was male.

[0] Germany has (had) very strong labor protections for teachers. All teachers, including the one I am writing about, used to be "officers of the state" (Beamte), and therefore in order to be fired they'd either have to commit treason, an act against the democratic order, or a crime resulting in a felony conviction of no less than 1 year in prison. These days, a lot of teachers do not automatically become "officers of the state" but are merely employed.

Sorry, when it comes to passwords, in particular plain text ones, this is not good enough.

Then you repeatedly say "hashes", which may mean anything from md5 to argon2id and whatever. Given that Okta stores plaintext in some cases, the generic use of the term "hashes" is a bit of a red flag to me, to be honest.