Not every pocket thief or drunkard who finds your phone has cellebritr. Security measures consider the threat model.
More specifically, another commenter in this thread says it's to make sure the user is aware of the configuration of a VPN which, if done maliciously, funnels all your traffic toa a hostile place.
A pocket thief will bring the phone to a friend with a laptop and black market software. If the phone has no theft protection, they will factory reset it; if it has, they will use paid software to remove protection. I have not used that software and do not know if it is actual now, but Internet search shows that older phones are completely unlockable.
Good thing is that some of the aforementioned exploits can be used to work around locked bootloader and liberate the phone.
Do not rely on any security in Android. It has lot of mistakes, poorly coded high privilege vendor software, so it would be dumb to use it for anything valuable.
> More specifically, another commenter in this thread says it's to make sure the user is aware of the configuration of a VPN which, if done maliciously, funnels all your traffic toa a hostile place.
I do not see how PIN protects the user, especially if user had PIN before installing a malicious VPN. Also, isn't Google Play supposed to check every application for malicious functionality?
Scrap the current forms of elected representation with one that encourages multiple parties instead of a forced dichotomy. Create some kind of constant recall mechanism for elected officials. And other things.
SpaceX is amazing, and he may receive due credit for the "vision" of pushing forward the state of the art in electric vehicles and rockets.
We (society) often glosses over personal failings of popular figures. But given the level of outright lies he has funded in elections and how much money he has spent to get anti-democracy politicians in power in the US, one should not waver in their condemnation of the man's character.
Fascism and racism are more than personal failings when you splash around hundreds of millions of dollars to, for example, get neofascists elected in a German state.
Glad we agree. I can't tell if I'm being downvoted by anti-Musk people who didn't read the whole comment, or pro-Musk people mad that I called him out for funding disinformation campaigns.
Musk has pulled off a reverse von Braun. Von Braun was a Nazi who used slave labor, but whose past was overshadowed by later building cool rockets. Musk built cool rockets, but his past has been overshadowed by association with similarly evil people.
Yes, there is an expectation in the history of free society that the government is not proactively observing every person on every block, asking for ID, and following them down the streets, then documenting that and correlating it with other people's activities and making it accessible to law enforcement personnel without a warrant across the country.
I retch when people say there is no expectation of privacy in public as some naive defense of the panopticon.
My suggestion is to not try to idolize individuals. Products should be judged independent of the individuals involved in creating them, especially when many individuals participate in their creation.
The number of so-called liberals in my life who didn't vote in 2024 because "both sides suck" is greater than zero, and this gnaws at me every time I think about it.
I am not offended at the idea of countries decoupling from cloud- and AI- laced US business software. Dunno how manageable Linux DEs are via enterprise MDM but KDE rocks these days.
There is a 100% chance that someone in Broadcom exec team is making money shorting themselves.
Or else some insider assurance that they'd get so much money from government or some big customer that they could run their products into the ground no matter what. But enterprises are not as locked in as people think.
Broadcom has absolutely zero interest in the long-term future of VMware. Their only goal is to squeeze as much money out of it as possible before it goes bust.
Let's say that VMware had a $10B revenue with a $9B operating cost. If 0.1% of their megacorp customers is responsible for 20% of that revenue while only being 1% of the support needs, then ditching the other 99.9% of customers reduces revenue to $2B while the operating cost can be reduced to $90M - increasing profit from $1B to $1.91B.
Those huge customers are quite locked in, so you can squeeze them for a couple of years before they leave. They have their own in-house support teams, so you can cut all L1/L2 support people. You're killing the product, so you can cut all developers except a handful to patch CVEs. The smaller customers who are leaving are doing some after a massive price hike, so you get a nice one-time renewal bonus while they desperately try to move to alternatives.
No need to do any shorting when you're generating massive profits for a couple of years. The plan when VMware is dead? Cut up its corpse in tiny parts, sell them off, buy another company, repeat the same strategy. As long as the total money they manage to extract from VMware is more than its acquisition cost, Broadcom has succeeded.
Unlike Hock Tan, you forgot to raise the prices 5-10x. Then your 0.1% of customers generating 20% of your revenue turn into 0.1% of your customers generating the same amount of revenue as 100% of customers were before with lower operating costs and thus higher margins.
I didn't realize how addicted some orgs were to VMWare until Broadcom bought them and I witnessed zero people migrate to alternatives. It's been one of the single biggest shocks to me in my career. Watching them get squeezed openly and ruthlessly and just accepting it. I've only ever seen Microsoft pull that off before.
I guess that means that VMWare are very skilled in calculating exactly how much they can hike the price / squeeze. Same with oracle, and all the other vendors that play this game.
It kind of makes sense, if you're using VMWare, your choice is to pay a ridiculous but fixed/certain sum, or embark on a risky migration project that probably involves hiring a bunch of people, could take longer than expected, might fail, etc.
VMware Workstation has historically been the most "it just works" option if one needed solid USB passthrough support. I've bought my own license for about 15 years because of that. Obviously I won't be doing that anymore because I refuse to subscribe instead of buying a permanent license.
I've been out of the infrastructure engineering space for a long time, but when that was still my career, vSphere was extremely reliable and easy to manage. When I've poked my head back in during pen tests since then, it's seemed like that was still the case.
Feels like Broadcom wants to use the Microsoft/Oracle/Cisco business model. They'll probably get away with it (at least for awhile) in the enterprise space, but they seem to have reached the same conclusion as me - Workstation and Fusion don't have enough exclusive aspects to be make the consumer market worth pursuing.
They tend to be large complex enterprises outside tech. They don’t have the people (from the cto/cio down) to execute a migration well. They tend to have a very poor to mixed history with other tech migrations, and the risk here would be even higher.
I’m not sure that it’s addiction, it’s just not feasible for most large organizations to pivot from a core solution like VMware without years involved. Every company I know of is formulating an exit plan away from VMware. They just have to do it in a way that offers the least amount of risk and in stages.
Some software companies sort of stumble into treating their customers as hostages while others make an art form of it. Computer Associates, which is part of Broadcom now, has been doing that for decades.
Note that execs are usually given stock grants in part to ensure they are long rather than short.
But you'd not be making money shorting Broadcom (AVGO); they're up on the year and YTD. They're an "AI stock" now, doing custom silicon for AI companies, and that's all that matters.
VMware is just going to be squeezed, rather than trying to acquire new customers. The entire corporate market is almost a rounding error compared to how big the datacenter boom is.
The problem then doesn't have to do with AI specifically, it requires human intervention and vetting. If the problem is "someone submitted an AI-written request that got rubberstamped", the problem is the stamp, not the AI.
Interesting, your observation on societal structures changing is very close to mine regarding laws: A lot of "laws" were created with the assumption that they would be applied as warranted by circumstances, and I think universal AI surveillance and perfect enforcement of laws will be a huge problem in the coming age.
It's not a binary. If you expect to receive 90 meritorious complaints and 10 bad ones, a review procedure with no false negatives and 10% false positives will give you the wrong outcome 1% of the time. You might be OK with that depending on the cost of a false positive. But if the rise of AI means you get 100 meritorious complaints and 100 bad ones, and you apply the same process, now your processing costs have doubled and your error rate has quintupled.
But if it requires human vetting, and AI massively increases the volume of requests, then it also massively increases the effort to properly vet those requests.
I get the idea, but this isn't necessarily useful as advice and toys with definitions. It's ESPN levels of conversation-baiting. Lots of assumptions can be reasonably made about residential LANs without being true of enterprise LANs/DMZs.
If a residential LAN is RFC1918 and has no NAT, then it is still a LAN... without internet access.
Then the "A & !A" fallacy of "MAC addresses can’t be changed. MAC addresses can be changed."
Just kind of a mess. Would be more interesting to explore the edge cases rather than throw out half-truths and 0.05% instances.
Perhaps the centralization of governance and the asymmetric power of government over the people is the problem.
If a village of 20 people found out one of their members had been poisoning them for years, knowingly, to attain status as the mage/technocrat/leader, I suspect their punishment would be severe.
Instead, any one person or small group of people feels powerless against a seemingly infinite bureaucracy and a justice system that would sooner punish "vigilantes" than hold powerful people to account for their malice and damage to society.
You give more agency to the modern individual than I do, I think.
More specifically, another commenter in this thread says it's to make sure the user is aware of the configuration of a VPN which, if done maliciously, funnels all your traffic toa a hostile place.
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