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Comment Re:They're gonna make NAT illegal (Score 1) 23

Well, that'd be one way to increase IPv6 adoption!

That's always been a curiosity to me - why haven't the big industries pushed for IPv6 adoption? I mean they lost their cases because of NAT hiding families or more behind a single IP address (mobile users are hidden behind CGNAT).

You would think they would push for the rapid adoption of a technology that would let them individually identify a device which would let them for the most part identify a single user. (Sure some people still have shared computers - the poor, for instance, but the kind of people the RIAA and MPAA go after are generally single device used by a single person).

Especially after some ISPs even turn their routers into "guest WiFi protals" so they can provide a blanket of WiFi coverage.

It's always been strange they aren't pushing technology that would let them resume suing people again.

Comment Re:What are they stealing? (Score 2) 41

Red Bull is at least $3/can.

A trailer full of Red Bull is about 70,000 cans. That's around $200K.

Sell for 1/3rd value and you have a good year's tax-free salary from one truckload.

They're $3/can retail. The store pays at most $2 each. Most likely $1.50 from Red Bull but there are many variables. So a trailer full of cans is around $140k if it's $2/can.

Grocery store margins are thin - the $1 margin is used to pay for transport, storage, store operations (utilities/etectricity, staff wages, etc), so the actual profit per can will fall down to 25 cents or so.

Comment Re:So... (Score 2) 42

.... and that would seem to indicate that IPv6 is currently handling around half of Internet traffic.

Question is, is it actually making it out on the Internet or just being used to tunnel IPv4 through it?

It's a serious question because LTE and 5G networks only handle IPv6 data - all data packets are IPv6. IPv4 traffic must be tunnelled through the mobile IPv6 network. (This is because obviously there are too many mobile devices). It's why CGNAT exists - to provide the IPv4 gateway to the Internet from the IPv6 only LTE and 5G networks

So yes, technically IPv6 is used for your cellphone data traffic, but it's just carrying IPv4 inside of it.

Comment Re:So we are about 3 to 5 years (Score 1) 77

Or think of it this way, OpenAI had revenues of around $10B. But you already saw spending commitments of $100B+. And countless billions have been sunk into OpenAI by people who are expecting to 10x their investment

Even the most generous estimates don't have OpenAI making more than $50B in revenue by 2030, and they'll have to make more huge investments so it's still in the negative.

At the same time, those datacenter processors are extremely perishable in that in a few years what you have now is worthless.

It's a bubble that's going to pop. We'll still have AI - the dot-com bubble popped but we still have the Internet, and many companies survived it, notably ones like Amazon, eBay, and Google. ChatGPT will likely be around, but most of the others which aren't so popular will likely disappear unless they can find a source of revenue.

Comment Re:Who gets the royalties? (Score 2) 27

If AI-generated music can't be copyrighted, who gets to collect royalties?

No one. Except maybe a minor amount to the person who wrote the prompt (the only copyrightable part of the process). That's why streaming services are so keen to promote it heavily as it means they don't have to pay anything for the song.

That's probably the real reason why the song is being re-recorded. The AI generated version would technically not be under copyright, which means this very popular song could be used freely as it was in public domain and they would get no money out of it.

It's all about money in the end.

Comment Re:Lawyers are making bank (Score 2) 10

How much money would Apple save if it just fired their legal teams and instead modified their policies to abide by the law?

They are abiding by the law right now. The EU is examining if Apple Ads and Apple Maps are "big enough" to qualify under the law where previously they didn't.

Of course, I'm not exactly sure what it means - Apple Ads really applies only to Apple's services (App Store, Music, TV, etc). Are they expecting Apple to open those apps to supporting other ad networks? That would be like forcing a website to use other ad providers just because?

Ditto with Maps. Not quite sure what you get when they're "opened up"? Closest I can think of is maybe the embedded maps must be switchable, but then you'd think that would force Google to have to let their maps use some other maps as well (given Google Maps is a lot larger)?

I'm just confused as to what is being "opened up" in the end. Especially since you can use any navigation app on iOS, no EU needed. I mean I can choose from Google Maps, Waze or Apple Maps easily enough, and they all provide turn by turn navigation and Siri controls them all already, so I'm not exactly sure what Apple is "gatekeeping". Or does the EU expect to force Apple to produce an Android version?

What does an "opened up" maps app do?

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 2) 91

But 20 million cells? That seems ridiculous. Why aren't they using a database for something that huge?

Because I can bet it started out as a way for an engineer to track say, the parts of their little piece of the plane. Maybe it was just all the mechanical bits associated with the inner flap on the right wing. It started as a manual tracking system on pieces of paper and post-it notes.

Then the guy gets handed a spreadsheet, realizes all those little pieces of paper can be consolidated in a nice table that fits in a nice small file. The guy starts using features like colors and such to make tracking easier and boom, he's gone from needing dozens of pieces of paper, risking their loss, to a spreadsheet table that holds all the same data

Slowly it accumulates features and other engineers on other parts of the plane start asking him for a copy of the spreadsheet to simplify their operations. At the same time, people start realizing they could get a better overview if they put all their information into one document instead of it being spread out across dozens of spreadsheets.

And now you have a spreadsheet with 20 million rows which provides remarkable insight into all the parts going into a plane.

Could a database do it better? Of course it can. But it likely wouldn't have happened - it just started as one engineer's way of keeping track of parts, that then grew organically until it became the behemoth it is. I'm sure when it started they decided it was 100 odd parts, the effort to use a database wouldn't be justified, if they learned how to use a database.

But now, it's difficult because now you need to create a database and program it to how the spreadsheet works now, then import all the information over. It's likely something that's going to take some time for a developer to properly develop and deploy it and make it work the way the people using the spreadsheet used it. And then deploy it so it works with dozens or hundreds of users.

And it all took place over 20+ years so it's likely for many users it was always how it worked when they started.

Comment Re:This is fantastic news (Score 1) 18

As usual, reality is less glamorous. Social Media company will only be liable "if itâ(TM)s clear that they failed to remove an online scam that had been reported". (source: TFA) Which just means it's another obligation of removing contents, which they already have to remove in short order sorts of violent, obscene, or otherwise illegal contents. Meta will add "financial scams" to the list, hire a few more third-worlders in their WFH moderation team, and continue their day of obscene profits.

Except it was shown that Meta profits heavily from the scammers buying up ads. If it means they have to take down scams a few minutes after posting, this is a plus as it greatly narrows down the window of victims that can be exploited. This can also make Meta not worth scammers time and money reducing their profits.

It just means Meta will have an incentive to quickly bring down scams than to slow-walk them down because they make big money off scams.

Comment Re:Annoying but actually reasonable (Score 1) 195

The easy way is to check the odometer reading every time you renew. If you decide to lie, well, it's easy to verify because eventually you'll either have to scrap the vehicle or you'll sell it to someone else and they'll have to report the new odometer reading. And it all catches up from there (because the new owner will likely not want to pay for the difference in taxes). And scrapping the car likely needs paperwork so they can cancel the title and deal with tax issues. Of course, if you find a scrapper who is willing to fudge the mileage information maybe you can save some money.

It also makes odometer tampering all that much more criminal since they can then get you for tax evasion.

Comment Re:OPTION (Score 4, Informative) 15

The reason is simple, Android already offers 2.4/5 GHz. When you go to the hotspot option, the 2.4GHz option is marked "Compatible". Unselecting it means the hotspot will operate at 5GHz.

The reason it generally can't do dual 2.4/5 is because that requires dual radios to operate simultaneously. Your router that does 2.4 and 5GHz has two separate WiFi adapters, one operating at 2.4GHz and the other at 5GHz. These are independent and the underlying software bridges the two with the Ethernet ports.

Phones, generally only connect to one or the other so they only need one radio. This means hotspot mode can only work on one band or another as there's no hardware to work on both simultaneously. (There are two analog sections - because it's hard to re-use the transmitter/receiver hardware for each band. This lets it do a periodic scan of available access points even while connected).

This option lets the hotspot be moved to 6GHz, and depending on the phone hardware, it might be able to do 2.4/6 simultaneously since a lot of 6GHz units have a separate radio unit. But if it's using a single radio triple band, then it can only work on one at a time.

Comment Re:Mysterious (Score 1) 15

Depends. If it results in people spamming you with AirDrop requests because they can have a tool that just sends AirDrop requests to everyone all the time on Android, Apple might start doing stuff about it.

Of course, if it's because of the DMA, they'll likely leave that as a feature saying - the law makes it impossible for us to prevent this, Too bad so sad. Everyone else though, gets the ability to filter AirDrop spam out.

But chances are Google just reverse engineered the protocol, either with or without Apple's permission. It might even be Apple just gave Google the protocol specifications because it was silly for it to be limited and it's much more useful to be cross platform. (Plus, by giving the specs to Google, it means Apple doesn't have to do any work implementing anything.)

Comment Re:Who would dare opt in? (Score 1) 31

Who would opt in to this? No matter how well the company tries to police this, there will be AI generated slop of artists singing terrible lyrics that they would never do in real life. Does is matter that the company can issue take down request after the fact when your new hit single "Adolf's Solution" featuring your likeness adorned with a silly mustache has already gone viral? Maybe that's on the nose enough for an LLM to shut down, but there are plenty of other terrible things that can be made with this and 4chan will try to make them all.

It's a license between an AI music generator and WMG. Presumably someone can ask for it to be generated and it probably gives you a 30 second sample before you have to pay for it. At that point the artist likely will have the ability to veto the creation, or to take it as their own,

And I suppose it's a way for smaller artists to make some money because obviously the AI maker is going ot have to pay WMG for the license to do it.

If the artist approves then whoever created the song presumably just has to pay up for it and they get the download. And chances are it's non-exclusive, so WMG and/or the artist get the ability to have that song for them as well.

And there's likely to be logs to, so if someone did do a deep fake, you have their billing address and know who actually created it so you know it was AI generated. The fact it's not anonymous is likely a huge guardrail in what can be preduced

Comment Re:First hand knowledge (Score 2) 108

Funny you should mention badge removal: Chinese manufacturers will send out response teams to remove logos and badges from EVs that catch fire in mainland China.

Which is fine, because we have non-Chinese influenced EV data as well. China exports a lot of their EVs to Europe and Australia, so if they had a habit of catching fire, we'd know about it.

And starting in January 1, 2026, China would require an export permit to prevent exporting low quality EVs, the sale of such has brought down their reputation (see a recent French EV crash test of a Chinese EV which was miserable compared to other EVs).

So if they're keeping the crap for themselves and exporting the good cars, we all benefit.

The BYD Dolphin, which is among the smallest and cheapest EVs you can buy (except in North America) reviews quite favorably - https://arstechnica.com/cars/2...

It's not flashy, it's not fun, it's an EV that'll get you around town like any other car.

Comment Re:Ah, well. (Score 1) 45

It might not even be necessary to fork much. Genuine Arduino hardware is so expensive most people use clones, lots of people use Platform IO instead of the Arduino IDE, and the Arduino core for the newer microcontrollers is not made by Arduino anyway.

The "magic" Arduino bit is the Arduino bootloader. That is also open source and anything that can speak the protocol can upload new firmware.

That's why Arduinos encompass more architectures than just AVRs - you can get ARM based Arduino compatible boards, I believe there are a few RISC-V ones, and at least one ESP32 based one.

The fact it's just a bootloader is why clone boards exist - there's nothing special about the official Arduino boards. It's easy to make your hardware "Arduino compatible" which makes it often much easier to develop with as you can easily update it without needing the AVR programmer.

Comment Re:CO2 is a virus? (Score 1) 49

That said VOCs is a better proxy. With VOCs you can approximate CO2 as well, but also pick up other things such as someone's farts, though I suspect you don't need electronics to tell you to open the window then.

The problem is VOCs are a poor proxy for ventilation. By VOCs, most people mean benzene based substances (6C rings) - which are things like paints and plastics and polymers. And in smaller quantities as perfumes and such. Flatus, is mostly stuff like methane and hydrogen sulfide, which doesn't usually show up as VOC - methane is classified as a hydrocarbon and hydrogen sulfide an acid gas. VOCs also dissipate, which is why "new car smell" is named such - after a car is manufactured the seats, fabric treatment, plastic, etc, all offgas and into the enclosed cabin of a car causing that scent. But once it's done, it dissipates.

CO2 is a better proxy because it means there are living things in the space and thus can be used to determine how well the ventilation is working. If the CO2 is rising, it means there are more people than the ventilation system can handle as it can't replace air fast enough.

Problem is many older buildings are designed to maintain temperature more than circulate air around as air quality is a more recent thing. Made all the more relevant due to recent events that raised awareness.

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