I'm confused about that. I was pretty sure that Google's policy was that, while they'll delete inactive accounts, the addresses don't become available for use. I thought those addresses were basically dead.
But at least one poster says they're reusing addresses.
While ridiculous, from a technical standpoint, it's not hard to see how this scenario arises. On the one hand, there was probably pressure to implement the tariffs as quickly as possible. Consequently, there likely wasn't much effort put into the "what if we have to undo all this in a year" use case, because that wasn't strictly necessary to get the tariffs implemented.
On the other hand, now that the "we need to undo all this" use case actually needs to be used, they've gotta go back and solve the problem after the fact. Unsurprisingly, it's going to take a while to develop that solution.
I'm not excusing it, but I do think it's interesting to think about the technical and political issues.
> While ridiculous, from a technical standpoint, it's not hard to see how this scenario arises. On the one hand, there was probably pressure to implement the tariffs as quickly as possible. Consequently, there likely wasn't much effort put into the "what if we have to undo all this in a year" use case, because that wasn't strictly necessary to get the tariffs implemented.
No, I disagree. It is actually quite hard to see how this scenario arises without intentional malfeasance. This isn't something that was overlooked, the government was specifically asked in court it they would be able to issue refunds quickly if the tariffs were overturned. The government lied and said they could.
This isn't some surprise thing where we can just forgive these guys in the government for not accounting for the potential need for refunds. They were asked. They lied.
My thinking is that it's very unlikely the people actually responsible for implementing it were the same as the ones in court arguing it would be easily reversible. From a strictly technical standpoint, if your boss says "Make this happen ASAP, even if you have to cut corners", and then a year later says, "Undo all of that", it's gonna be a shitshow.
I completely agree that it's malicious, but I'm thinking the people actually responsible for implementing it (the software, procedures, etc.) probably weren't themselves malicious. I think the technical people responsible for implementing it were intentionally put into a position, by their bosses, where they'd basically be the fall guys and provide a reasonable technical excuse for their boss's maliciousness.
> My thinking is that it's very unlikely the people actually responsible for implementing it were the same as the ones in court arguing it would be easily reversible.
I would generally be surprised if the judge just accepted the attorney's answer without instructing them to have that conversation. I can't imagine a judge saying "Yeah, sure, I'm sure you're the right person to ask this technical question".
> But the risk of a bunch of litigation isn't a ban, right?
Funny enough, I've known some people over the years who have explicitly viewed litigation as a reasonable alternative to regulation. Their logic was that we should just let people and companies do whatever they want. Then, if it turns out a company is dumping mercury in the river or whatever, you litigate based on the damages. Better than regulation, they assured me.
It just doesn't seem super well written. It presents a story from 2018 as if it's the impetus for the decline, and then talks about a decade long decline. If it's been declining for a decade, how is a decision from 8 years ago responsible for it?
I mean, it does sound like it was a bad decision, but not so bad that it could retroactively be responsible for 10 years of decline.
> Samsung had waterproof phones before Apple, and they still had replaceable batteries and, gasp a headphone jack.
Also, Apple (and I assume others) were building stuff with non-replaceable batteries before they were building stuff that was waterproof. Clearly they're not sealed off in order to make them waterproof, because they were sealed off back when they weren't waterproof too.
> As far as I understand the person behind archive.today might face jail time if they are found out. You shouldn't be surprised that people lash out when you threaten their life.
One of the really strange things about all of this is that there is a public forum post in which a guy claims to be the site owner. So this whole debacle is this weird mix of people who are angry and saying "clearly the owner doesn't want to be associated with the site" on the one hand, but then on the other hand there's literally a guy who says he's the one that owns the site, so it doesn't seem like that guy is very worried about being associated with it?
It also seems weird to me that it's viewed as inappropriate to report on the results of Googling the guy who said he owns the site, but maybe I'm just out of touch on that topic.
> is that there is a public forum post in which a guy claims to be the site owner.
Which forum post? The post mentioned by the blogger, the post on an F-Secure forum (a company with cybersecurity products) was a request for support by the owner of archive.today regarding a block of their site. It's arguably not intended as a public statement by the owner of the archive, and they were simply careless with their username.
I don't understand how that's a retort against the claim that they've "been left in the dust on autonomous driving". Are you contending that autonomous driving is the only reason that Tesla owners would like their cars?
I feel like the "that's just a few coffees" metric is getting out of hand. By this metric, my current work laptop, purchased used from a local used reseller, was "a few coffees".
Also, I'm surprised how often on here I see people argue about price differences that are literally as I spend on entire computers.
> That's why you still have 20 year old Mac Minis still running as home servers etc.
I often see statements like this made as if it's an exceptional characteristic of Macs. I've found that almost all computer hardware I buy has made it 20 years, though. Sure, a hard drive or something dies every once in a while, but most stuff gets retired because I just don't care to use it anymore, not because it doesn't work.
Exactly. Of all my hardware since 2003, which includes 5+ different GPUs that were mining and later training AI models almost non-stop the only things that stopped working and not just discarded for being too old/slow are 2 OCZ 2 SSDs which my guess would be had a bug in their firmware that caused a lockup.
I honestly don't know if this is sarcasm or not, but I would think, just based on the fact that 96% of users are free users, they shouldn't try too hard to piss them off.
But at least one poster says they're reusing addresses.
reply