Everything from dog fighting rings to child trafficking has dedicated non-profit organizations with paid or volunteer staff doing investigative work. They collect OSINT, do surveillance, and yes, pay informants. As long as you don't break the law in the process (like doing surveillance from private property), you can build evidence to turn over to law enforcement to help open a case.
Something important to note here is informants aren't always in the organization or participating in the activity. It could be a truck stop attendant who texts you when the same guy stops in to buy a case of water and then slips it under the roll up door on his cargo van, or a dishwasher at a cafe who noticed a group of guys with the same tattoo. Things that on their own don't rise to the level of someone calling the police. Payments help people who otherwise would keep their mouth shut because they are in financial situations where they can't afford to lose their job.
They were paying people to infiltrate the KKK and Nazi groups. It is the same as the arson investigator paying someone to hang out with the kids who play with matches to see who is starting the fires.
The only "criminal" thing they did was encouraging non-white people to use their right to vote. How dare they do such a thing before the mid-term elections!
Imagine if one day someone came up with a "better" way to chew food, but you had to learn how to do a super complex jaw movement and it wouldn't work in restaurants. It has no obvious benefit to you. The only motivation is that a small group of obsessively passionate (but not in a good way) people say at some unknown point in the future food won't be edible anymore.
IPv6 just tried to do too much so it failed at everything. Putting letters in IP addresses made it near impossible to remember what your network settings were supposed to be.
It is nothing short of a miracle that devices can even get IPv6 addresses. SLAAC was supposed to replace DHCP, but it couldn't provide DNS server addresses. DHCPv6 was introduced to replace SLAAC, but this time they forgot to add a way to communicate a default route. This lead to Cisco, Microsoft, and Google all taking completely different approaches, and the IETF helpfully blocking any efforts at cross vendor standardization because of v6 zealots.
Meanwhile, everybody else is using a plastic skull that they carry around with them to pre-chew the inedible food, which is the majority of the food you can get these days.
"It's not inedible," they say. "Just let me get my skull out."
> IPv6 just tried to do too much so it failed at everything. Putting letters in IP addresses made it near impossible to remember what your network settings were supposed to be.
People said the same sort of thing about v4: that it was hard to configure because you needed to know four separate addresses (IP, netmask, default route AND the DNS server) and if you mix up any of these it doesn't work.
As it turns out, in both cases it's just a lack of familiarity, not actual difficulty. The super complex jaw movement is just a regular bite, but you puff your cheeks out a bit. Or er, something.
> This lead to Cisco, Microsoft, and Google all taking completely different approaches [...] but this time they forgot to add a way to communicate a default route
"There should only be one way to do things... wait, no, not like that."
It is an app that sits in the background and provides connectivity. Occasionally you need to change a setting. Absolutely nobody wants a rich windowed UI, or a menu bar widget that drops down a complex detail card.
I hope they can see this is exactly what killed desktop anti-virus: something that was supposed to be quietly doing its job in the background started getting in the users way. It needed to poke its head up and scream "hey remember me?" at the behest of some product managers or growth hackers. Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.
I have too many toolbar icons, so I do actually want the window to switch to so I can copy and paste IP addresses. I already keep it open so I can just command-tab to the window, and it's way better this way.
You're the one losing the plot. It's optional, still closes to the system tray without you explicitly docking it. It doesn't emerge at random like McAfee.
> Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.
So Apple are going to bake Tailscale into the OS? Also, read the blog. It's a response to Apple's bad user experience.
This is a very common misconception. The issue is not IPv4 or CGNAT, it's stateful middleboxes... of which IPv6 has plenty.
The largest IPv6 deployments in the world are mobile carriers, which are full of stateful firewalls, DPI, and mid-path translation. The difference is that when connections drop it gets blamed on the wireless rather than the network infrastructure.
Also, fun fact: net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_* applies to IPv6 too. The "ipv4" is just a naming artifact.
It all seems like a backdoor to let tech companies build power generation on site without all the red tape and sell the excess power to consumers. This indirectly allows them to offload some of the fixed operational costs onto consumers.
We just approved the first nuclear plant in 20 years to a company owned by Bill Gates and in a state that has basically nothing but farmland and a Microsoft datacenter.
Price of power goes up and the local people are not connected to the benefits. You might think they will receive a lot of money in taxes but you would be wrong because they have tax breaks.
Because on-site powerplants owned by datacenter operators are not "just another supplier".
The threat is: This "datacenter power" disincentives buildout of "free" powerplants (by eating up significant demand at very low margins thanks to basically vertical integration); this slows down buildout of "normal" infrastructure (possibly both grid connectivity and power), and the electrical energy market becomes worse for consumers than it is now.
I personally think all of this is very speculative for now, but allowing industry to rely on the grid (which they still would!) while almost exclusively "buying" their own power is a risky proposition from a consumer perspective.
Not to mention the danger of energy production, even nuclear, becoming resource-constrained to the point where datacenter power plants leave no room for municipal plants. We're seeing it happen with consumer hardware; make no mistake on who will get preference.
"Attempt" is doing a lot of work there. Companies are driven by a profit motive, and are practically required to renege on promises that are not legally enforced.
In a different world they would have earned trust and deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is not that world.
You'll notice that I did not advocate against building and grid reconfiguration. Indeed, my company does microgrids. I do, however, believe strongly in being aware of tradeoffs.
In short, I'm very much in favor of building the right solution to a problem.
I am unsure what cognitively triggered an unhealthy response of "this is NIMBYism!" and would welcome a follow up comment to understand your train of thought.
> A keyboard backlight is such a cheap and useful addition to a keyboard
Useless LEDs that burn battery budget.
The thing everyone seems to be missing is this isn't a laptop for you or me. It is to compete with Chromebooks in the educational market, and to have a SKU to sell in developing countries.
Thank goodness they removed this fantastic thing everyone wants to give you an extra fourteen seconds of use time per battery charge. Come on man.
As for the importance of it, if you want to give these to kids, you should have something more rugged, more replaceable, and more built for all kinds of environments (including kids who don’t have a conveniently well-lit place to focus on schoolwork at home).
A large school could have thousands upon thousands of broken Chromebooks waiting to be shipped off - literally multiple pallets. I’ve seen it more than once. Absolutely nobody is begging for an unrepairable, unexpandable, more-expensive version of what they all already have. It’s garbage for school, dead out of the gate.
I wouldn't normally comment on such stuff as it's clearly a personal preference, but just to underline that it is in fact a preference vs everyone, I have used keyboard lighting exactly once in the ~decade it's been available to me. On a laptop with predictable keyboard, it genuinely doesn't matter to me.
(On a laptop with unpredictable keyboard, light is mitigating, not fixing the problem :)
Touch typing is a useful skill for everyone to have and doesn't take long to acquire.
Not to mention even the light of the display should be enough for you to be able to read the key caps if you really need to. Keyboard backlight seems like a gimmick with limited use to me. I always thought it was purely aesthetic.
You're sitting back in a chair watching YouTube in the dark. Hit F for fullscreen. (OK, that was the easy level because of the key bump.) Now hit L to skip 10 seconds forward. Now hit < and > to adjust speed.
The backlighting is useful. But no, it's not for typing, for most people.
Also I don't understand what would be hard about your challenge. My hands automatically move to the home row, feel the key bumps and I instantly know where every key is. I never need to look at my keyboard. Not to mention having to move my eyes down from the displays would be annoying.
I mean people like backlight keyboards. So if it fits your use case great. Still makes sense to not include in a base model. I actually actively avoid keyboards with any lightning.
The fact that one in ten million people is annoyed by one of the softest lights ever invented by mankind is not a good reason to not include said feature in a product my guy.
Most people don’t have the touch typing skill and do not care to learn it. It literally matters zero per cent if they would benefit from learning that.
Isn’t the iPad already competing in these segments? Because unless reality has changed dramatically, this is still fairly pricey and a full-fledged laptop that doesn’t make for direct competition with Chromebooks.
Even in my home country of Portugal 700€ is a lot to throw at a ‘laptop’ that will be somewhat obsolete in 3–4 years, assuming Apple continues the trend of graphics-intense, memory hungry OS releases. An iPad seems like a better candidate for students or those on a budget.
I’m actually not sure who the Neo is for. Unless it’s a 3-model trick to price the Air upwards.
And a less incompetent government interested in protecting the environment, citizen's rights, and finite resources will have outlawed artificially locked computing machinery for the same reasons as single-use Lithium e-cigarettes.
Somebody had to die of cancer at the FAB to give you that CPU, only for the manufacturer to brick it with an eFuse N years after sale. All to protect an unsustainable business model, underpricing the hardware and rent-seeking on zero-cost distribution.
Oh and in both cases, whose rights does the DRM protect?
Sure thing, as long as it doesn't require any permissions. I have installed multiple apks on my phone from unknown people. Note that Google's requirement is also for completely permissionless apps like games.
Nice strawman. People want the ability to decide for themselves whether or not to install some APK, they are not saying every APK under the sun is trustworthy.
If you want to make the decision to install Hay Day, the user should be able to know that it is the Hay Day from Supercell or from Sketchy McMalwareson.
99.9% of apps should have no issue with their name being associated with their work. If you genuinely need to use an anonymously published app, you will still be able to do that as a user.
Android already tells users when they're installing software from outside the Play Store and shows big scary warnings if Play Protect is turned off. What else do you want? If I want to install something from Sketchy McMalwareson after all that, that's my phone and my business.
Something important to note here is informants aren't always in the organization or participating in the activity. It could be a truck stop attendant who texts you when the same guy stops in to buy a case of water and then slips it under the roll up door on his cargo van, or a dishwasher at a cafe who noticed a group of guys with the same tattoo. Things that on their own don't rise to the level of someone calling the police. Payments help people who otherwise would keep their mouth shut because they are in financial situations where they can't afford to lose their job.
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