www.reuters.com
> U.S. President Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden has agreed to plead guilty to two charges of willfully failing to pay income taxes in a deal with the Justice Department, according to court documents on Tuesday. > > The federal charges against Hunter Biden arose from an investigation by David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in the Democratic president's home state of Delaware who was appointed by Republican former President Donald Trump. > > According to the deal, Biden also entered the pretrial diversion agreement on one firearm offense.
Zombo Now • 66%
Are you suggesting China’s military would readily buy encryption chips from, say, Raytheon or Northrop Grumman?
I suspect they would not.
arstechnica.com
> “I appreciate concerns with using Chinese technology, but we’re very confident that even though we’re using these chips, our products cannot be hacked, even by Initio or Hualan,” iStorage's CEO John Michael says. (Michael also noted that some of iStorage products use a chip sold by Taiwanese firm Phison instead of Hualan or Initio, but didn't specify which products.) > > Even if a bridge controller chip doesn't create a secret key and isn't intended to store it, however, it still has enough access to it to enable a backdoor, says Matthew Green, a cryptography-focused computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University.
www.esquire.com
A bit pretentious, but I always enjoy Esquire's "Best Bars in America" list
Zombo Now • 100%
Wait till you google Richard M. Stallman.
Whether it's biotech or software, there's always tension between creating incentives for innovation vs fostering wide availability and openness.
The Free Software / Open Source world exists on the openness side, and while some business (including Apple) have made a business while contributing to open source projects, there is sometimes a catch. For example, Google gives away the core of Android (the Android Open Source Project), but if an OEM wants Google Maps, Google Play, etc, they have to play by Google's rules.
Anyone who tells you it's just as easy to make a living selling free software (what GNU calls it) as it is selling proprietary software is full of shit. It's not as easy. It can be done, and Open Source can be a selling point, but it's nowhere near as straightforward as just selling a thing for a price. Copyrights, like the copyrights protecting iOS and macOS, let companies just sell a thing for a price. No bullshit.
Apple, like any corporate interest, has reason to support or oppose various laws. I'm an Apple fanboy as much as anyone, but I'll readily admit they're on the wrong side of history with right-to-repair. Apple's an excessively litigious company. They're bullies in some markets. But I still prefer their simple transactional value proposition, which is that you pay for goods and services. Software is a good.
Open Source software is great too, and often as good as the proprietary stuff, but a world without copyright (basically what he is suggesting) would have a very hard time promoting the useful arts. For that matter, Open Source licenses typically function through copyright law. The GNU GPL, for example, only works because it has copyright as a backstop if you refuse to accept the license.
www.techradar.com
Well, shit... In truth, it's a new highest end product, and presumably you can keep buying the lower end ones, but still.
Logging in, seeing who else logged in, to a small community that controls its own destiny. Lately I've been nostalgic, I guess, about how tech was in the 90s. It was less glamorous, less usable, but also way more human and civil. Everyone was just into technology and sharing cool stuff. This little corner of the web kind of feels like that sometimes.
