I thought I’d share this here to spread more attention to the practices of FlightSimLabs, a flight simulator software shop.
The short version is that they included an executable in their installer that when run would extract passwords saved in Chrome and presumably phone them home. Their reasoning was that this was purely for DRM reasons. They claim that this password stealing tool would not run for legit/valid serial keys.
This was only discovered by someone on reddit recently, and since this has been public the developers have claimed they’ve removed the password stealing malware from their installer. They have again made statements saying that this tool was only used against pirated copies of their software. Not once have they apologized and their users for the most part don’t seem to care.
> They have again made statements saying that this tool was only used against pirated copies of their software.
That's quite a claim. But it wouldn't matter if they did apologize. No apology would take away the malware or cause this publisher to have not used the secrecy of proprietary software (and the implicit trust all of their users had in the publisher) to not do what they did.
Too bad for the users who obtained copies (regardless of how) that this claim is utterly unverifiable and ultimately up to the dictates of an organization that already misrepresented its aim to its users -- I'll bet that people who got a copy thought they were getting a flight simulator, not a credentials copier. There's no reason to trust that they're not lying now. And what if FlightSimLabs (or some organization they trust to hold data) inadvertently leaked sensitive information? That's the trouble with trusting organizations to hold sensitive data; they can end up contributing to harm even if they don't intend to do so, or do so accidentally purely by way of making bad decisions about whether to hold the data in the first place and also by bad design of where and how to store the sensitive data.
Proprietary software hides malware (see https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.html for lots of examples), users deserve software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, modify, and share published software), and users deserve to control their own computers. And this DRM was indiscriminate (as most DRM is): it was installed on all users of the affected program, including on the copies distributed in the manner FlightSimLabs wanted.
Unfortunately, this sort of attitude is not unheard of among proprietary software vendors - see for example FTDI bricking your hardware if they think it's counterfeit:
And as a side effect to that story - I recently needed to purchase a USB to RS232 adapter to program a router and I went explicitly out of my way to make sure the adapter I purchased didn't use an FTDI chip.
FTDI is a name I won't be forgetting anytime soon.
Wouldn’t that be downright illegal? Moreover, someone bricking my hardware would inspire me to forcefully return said “brick” to them, through their nearest window.
Wouldn’t that be downright illegal? Moreover, someone breaking my windows would inspire me to forcefully discuss said behaviour with them, with their nearest brick.
Totally illegal, but while I would feel like tossing something through their window, I would never do it. If only this company had as much of a moral compass!
Actually, it’s “we suspect you may have broken the law, so we’ll break the law.” A distinction no one seems to be hammering on, but that I think makes what they did much, much worse.
Not even sure if users broke the law. Just using a 3rd party cracked software doesn't necessarily violate laws (at least no criminal offence). The distributors and crackers clearly violated laws but any user with a cracked serial number was targeted. That also included people who might've received the number against payment from someone else and thought they had a genuine copy.
For some reason, the ads I’m seeing on Instagram are creepily relevant for me. I just checked and literally it just shows me advertisements for furniture (I like design…) and plants (I like plants…). I’ve actually bought a plant related thing from one of them, and the ads that show up actually do make me stop and look at them.
On the other hand, it’s also showing me advertisements for watches. I have no idea why, because I hate wearing watches and I’ve definitely never googled for watches before.
Maybe it knows you're always late for meetings and appointments and is giving you a subtle hint that you need to up your game and get a watch. ;)
That, or their model has found a correlation between liking chairs, plants, and watches but doesn't account for your unusual distaste for watches. Take heart, facebook doesn't know you well enough to convince you to hand over your wallet to their customers (yet).
I’ve never used IRC before, so I’m honestly curious, what features does IRC have that Slack(/Discord) don’t or can’t have through extensions like bots and plugins?
Why do you use this service? My dream for the site would be that the most value would come from the comments section where people could ask questions, discuss ideas, expand on the background of papers, or debate whether the results justify the conclusions. I'm also hopeful that much like HN, the site wouldn't track the newest and shiniest thing but also would highlight older work that is worth revisiting.
You cherry-pick results and polish them to look super flashy so everyone hears about your work over Twitter, Facebook, and r/MachineLearning cause that's how everyone learns about new papers these days.
If you add comments, then you get to the problem of maintaining comment quality which will likely lead to some form of moderation. IMO that leads back to the "cliquey" issue just on another level.
Good that thing national laboratories and research in general don’t have to show profitability then. Because otherwise we’d get nothing done and funded due to the likes of people like you.
i don't even know where to start understanding this remark
i am questioning why they are using immensely popular and commensurately overpriced but yet woefully underspecced components instead of something better and/or cheaper
is it just because 'raspberry pi' makes for a hot title in a press release?
Your question might be answered if you offered an example (or two) of something more capable and/or cheaper. I'm really interested in what you think would be cheaper.
Keep in mind the goal seems to be to build something with a high node-count, rather than just core count so small size is important.
Because someone who understood the available resources and the actual user needs performed an analysis and determined that this would be sufficient. Commodity hardware eliminates the need to spend a year or two engineering a custom board, dealing with vendor BSPs, etc. It also eliminates the FTE that would be required to support all this.
They could also have chosen to use a reference design from another manufacturer but it's basically like using RPi but 100x more expensive. There's a good case to be made that this is the most cost-effective design for what they're trying to accomplish.
They could also just have bought 12 Epyc 64 core Servers to get equivalent performance assuming they are exclusively compute bound. If they are IO bound even just 3 nodes with 100gbit NICs would be enough to outperform the Raspberry Pi cluster.
If they really wanted to develop a competitive cluster they'd need at least a SoC with 4 A72 cores, 10gbit NIC, 8GB RAM, and a local 128GB SSD.
Edit: I misread the article it's not a cluster with 3000 raspberry pies. It's just 3000 cores. 3 Epyc Nodes are faster than this cluster.
It's not necessary about speed, it's about how to write code that runs efficiently, concurrently and/or in parallel on that many nodes.
IIRC, that's kinda how ethernet came to be, ther were working on the computing world of the future at xerox PARK, they had to create clusters to emulate the cpu power that would be available in the coming years. Looking at the current trend, from phones to servers, they go from two cores to I-don't-have-enough-fingers-except-if-I-count-in-binary cores. A 3000 cores raspberypi cluster can be an emulation of the computing environemnt of tomorrow, not in term of raw power, but in term of distributed computing, and lead to unforseen invention as the ubiquitous ethernet.
Please do tell us about these better specced, better supported off-the-shelf commodity components!
Unless they're planning to fab 100 of these, chances are high that the retail margin on a Pi still leads to one of the cheapest BOM for a one-off project like this
you do understand that 'better supported' in the case of the raspberrypi means that you are running a 32bit os? that's all they officially support - and have no plans to change
do you really think something or better and cheaper is impossible? the rpi is _the most overpriced sbc on the market_ particularly if you're not using it for raspbian (32bit only) and the module ecosystem
nanopi neo2 and rock64 are better and cheaper alternatives
I’ve hidden friends before who I have close relationships with, simply because the content they post is trash:
- reshares of “inspirational” and “motivational” memes
- post frequency too high
- constantly posting pictures of their kids
- unfortunately a close aunt is into MLM and I can’t just unfriend her without causing drama
- generally only posting things I don’t care for enough to see like guns, cars, etc
Like, just because we are friends, doesn’t mean we have to share the same interests nor does it mean I want to hear everything you have to say on every topic.
I think this highlights how out of touch you (and the Facebook developers) are.
I’ve had a Facebook account since the days of needing a edu email account to register. During my college years Facebook was a very important thing and all of my friends were very active and it was nice being able to see what people were up to and doing.
Over time Facebook started optimizing away to whatever it is now. I’ve deleted the Facebook app because it’s simply garbage. My friends don’t really post personal things anymore (most don’t even post anything anymore) and the influx of users and this “retweet” culture has made it so my Facebook feed is essentially spam. Why should I have to bother and waste time to curate what I see? Why should I have to hide so many individual pages?
Furthermore, the recent(?) addition of these marketplaces made it just way worse. My news feed activity is constantly telling me about new things for sale here and I just don’t care. I thought I’ve disabled these notifications but apparently I haven’t because they still show up. To be honest I don’t even know how to disable these messages because everything is hidden under 20 layers of options.
Not to mention the whole age/generation issue:
I’m 30, and my sister is 20. I’m at that age where I don’t really meet a lot of new people anymore, so my friends list has been very stagnant. I really just keep a Facebook profile just to let the occasional old friend/family contact me or find me. My sister and her friends look at Facebook and think it’s something old people use. For her everything is Snapchat.
I love how many people are acting like their own personal experiences and gripes are highly representative of some large segment of the userbase. Frankly, I don't think disgruntled HN users are their core demographic.
I'm also 30 and registered in 2005. Lots of my friends post frequently. Curating by hiding people I don't want to see takes a negligible amount of time and effort. I've barely even noticed the marketplace. The idea that 30 is "that age" where you don't meet many new people is bizzare to me. I regularly make new friends and the standard way of exchanging contact info is FB.
Do you have wife and kids? or maybe you are single? I think you are not representative for your demographic. I agree with OP here, it matches my experience and experience of most of my friends and their friends.
I am single, and very social. My point, though, is that you can't really determine what is representative from your own anecdotal experience, as real as it feels to you.
Even adding the experience of a dozen HN users (and discounting the ones that disagree) still represents a small and very biased sample. And have you honestly gathered that much information about the experience and usage of your friends' friends? Or is it possible you are applying a combination of projection and confirmation bias? Also, the news cycle is currently mostly negative about FB, so it's popular to be bashing it, but many of those people continue to use it daily anyway.
I just think there is a very common pattern here on HN of people acting like "this product/service doesn't really work for me, therefore it is shit/out of touch/etc," when there are likely many people who do actually get value out of using it.
I keep hearing that my age group don't use Facebook but this clashas with the multiple relentless group chats and the dozens of notifications from groups that I engage with every day. On the other hand, I post things about myself about once a year, which could make someone on my friends list think I never log on. I wonder if this shift from social network to content aggregation and chat is a significant reason for this perception.
The most powerful feature for me at the moment is "On This Day" - highlighting to me how my engagement there has changed, and how it was (not to sound too old) better in the old days.
Luckily I'm quite "friend light" on there, but most of my social interaction has moved to WhatsApp (including groups for nights out/sharing photos, organising, and engaging with different people - all of the things I used FB for). Guessing one of the main reasons they bought them.
While arguably anecdotal, I see pretty much what you do. Nobody is posting to Facebook regularly any more. I can pretty much browse my entire news feed in 10 minutes once every two weeks.
What I believe keeps people on Facebook is Messenger. Even people who never post on Facebook is available via Messenger and given that Facebook makes it pretty easy to find people, it's slowly devolving to a "better phonebook".
It’s Sarajevo and this blog post is about the only thing I can find on this with quick google searches, and you said it yourself that you’re not a lawyer, so I really think you’re just misunderstanding something and are making a big deal out of nothing.
I'd agree with you if this was only interpretation of the law. However, the city council actually took steps to contact the administrators of various Facebook pages with the request to pay for the name.
Regulating speech is a very big deal, including when people or companies fabricate property rights they don't have. Most people, when confronted with strong language asserting such rights, will comply with it -- as you say, they're not lawyers, so how should they know which legalese is and isn't valid? This stifles full usage of the common good of ideas.
