the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot “arrest their way out of the problem”. They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.

Even though I fully expect the police here aren’t doing as much as they could (I mean come on, are they expecting phones to come with wiimote hand straps?) , I’m at least glad their public rhetoric is that they can’t “arrest their way out of the problem”.

I imagine that’s poor compensation when you’ve just had your phone snatched, however.

making sure everyone is okay.

Given the current state of the world, that would be progress.

Silence is nice.

It also allows e2e encryption with other Silence users by exchanging keys via SMS.

Microsoft is pivoting its company culture

Oh yes, the thing they’re well known for succeeding at.

Not necessarily cash, but definitely a bit of luck. Some lawyers, if they think a case is guaranteed to go your way, will do the work for free in exchange for receiving a portion of the damages the final judgement will award you. Even rarer, some lawyers care enough about some issues on a personal level that they’ll work for free, or reduced rates, on certain cases.

In this case, I’m not sure there are any damages whatsoever to award to OP - a “win” is forcing the company to abide by the GPL, not pay up money. The EFF and the FSF, as others have brought up, are probably the best bet to find lawyers that would work on this case for the outcome instead of the pay.

Right?

“Protecting vulnerable individuals” - they must mean Putin and Bibbi, not actual victims of political intimidation, sabotage, etc.

In light of the recent forays by AI projects/products into the reason of coding assistants, from copilot to Devin, this reads to me as a sign that they’ve finally accepted that you can’t make an ai assistant that provides actual value from an LLM purely trained on text.

This is Microsoft copying Google’s captcha homework. We trained their OCR for gBooks, we trained their image recognition on traffic lights and buses and so signs.

Now we get to train their ai assistant on how to click around a windows OS.

For clarity’s sake: I have been daily driving Linux, specifically ArchLinux, for the past 9 years, across a rotation of laptop and desktop computers. I do almost everything in the command line and prefer it that way.

I still think if you want people to try Linux you need to chill the fuck out on getting them to use the command line. At the very least, until they’re actually interested in using Linux on their own.

Kinda disappointing.

The article is really trying to sell us, the reader, that using Linux without knowing how to use the command line is not only possible but totally feasible. Unfortunately, after each paragraph that expresses that sentiment we are treated to up to several paragraphs on how it’s totally easier, faster, and more powerful to do things via thé command line, and hey did you know that more people like coding on Linux than windows? Did you know you can do more powerful things with bash, awk, and sed than you ever could in a file manager?!

FFS vim and nano are brought up and vim’s “shortcuts” are praised… in an article on how you can totally use Linux through a gui and never need to open up the command line.

Who is this written for? outside of people who not only already use Linux but are convinced that using any other OS is both a moral failing and a form of self-harm?

I think the point is to scold Google for the harm they cause or fail to prevent. When the law is written so as to genuinely prevent harm (data protection, for ex) then I will scold those who don’t follow it. When the law is written so as to be ineffective at best and harmful at worst, I will scold those who do follow it.

The point isn’t to be consistent with regards to the law, as the law itself is not always either consistent nor “good”.

… unless it is me that isn’t understanding your own comment?

There was a good (albeit short) conference at FOSDEM2020 that gave an overview of a bunch of different “prior work” with regards to government using open source: https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/municipal_government/

With regards to other comments about Munich, the speaker touches on that case starting at 7 minutes into the conf, and highlights how it differs/differed from other, more successful, cases.