The military industrial complex, endowment funds from large colleges and academic research created Silicon Valley.
American corporations are fading into irrelevance through "financial management". Manufacturing powerhouses like Boeing and Intel are a shadow of their former selve and are really just coasting on inertia.
Pretty much everywhere you see "innovation", you will see government money. Look at the pharma industry. I doubt there's a drug out there that wasn't created by researchers using federal grants.
I'm often reminded of the story of Tetris. A handful of Soviets created the game. What was capitalism's contribution? Licensing agreements, sub-licensing agreements and so on. Put another way: building enclosures. That and rent-seeking is really all American corporations do anymore.
What's surprising to me is that this sort of query traffic from Google to the root nameservers would imply that Google isn't running with its own copy of the DNS root - something which I would think would be trivial for them to do. The root zone file is around 2.5MB in portable text format and 1.75MB in bind 9's "raw" form, is entirely public, and is available by DNS zone transfer from a subset of the root name servers.
BTW, if you run your own local DNS resolver and want to do this, see RFC8806 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8806). I use the setup operated by localroot.isi.edu (register with them and they send you a TSIG-protected DNS NOTIFY when the root zone changes).
That post has provided no proof this is indeed a MAC address conflict issue, and as other comments suggest even an actual MAC address duplicate should only cause connectivity issues for said MAC address and no other devices.
MAC addresses belong to the NIC and not the machine, and while the OS can override them, it won't do so without express user intervention. I'm especially skeptical of the Ethernet MAC being a duplicate of the Wi-Fi MAC, as this would cause obvious issues (especially considering both Wi-Fi stays up even in the presence of Ethernet, it's just that the routing table is configured to prefer the Ethernet over it) - if this was indeed the case, he would never have had network access on that machine.
However, it is known that some Realtek USB Ethernet controllers have unexpected behavior when powered but no longer enumerated on the USB bus, and they send some low-level Ethernet frame that effectively causes all traffic to stop on that L2 network segment. I'm not sure who is at fault (whether the controller or the switch it's connected to mistakenly rebroadcasting that frame), but here are more details: http://jeffq.com/blog/the-ethernet-pause-frame/ and https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2020/7/6/usb-c-network-hubs/.
In my experience, government is indeed much slower in approving outlays. There may of course be exceptions to that pattern. One of my interview questions for prospective bosses of mine, is something along the lines of:
- Suppose I am on your team , and I want to develop a prototype/PoC, which costs $1,000, and you're okay with it
- What is the process to get approval for it?
- How much time elapses between starting the approval process and receiving funding/greenlight to start spending?
In my current job, the answers were "if I'm okay with the idea, you can start immediately".
In a previous one I left, it required CEO approval (hence why I ask now).
From a package maintainer standpoint, trying to support both ESM and CJS in the same published package is a _nightmare_.
I wrote an extensive post a few weeks ago detailing all the pain that I've dealt with and problems I've run into this year trying to modernize the Redux packages to fully support ESM and CJS:
Ha-ha, but seriously: Society seems to have lost the ability to curb "annoying, mildly belligerent, but not strictly illegal" antisocial behavior. Used to be, if someone did some taboo thing that irritated everyone around them, the community would shame him for it. Now, you say something to them, and everyone whips their phone out and you're suddenly the Village Karen, butting your nose in where it doesn't belong. From loud motorcycles to cutting in queue, to abusing retail workers, to holding up traffic to take a selfie, to TikTok "pranks", everyone can basically get away with being a narcissistic asshole, and everyone else just keeps their heads down, desperately minding their own business.
On the contrary, continuously applying fresh duct tape to a fundamentally broken system allowing it to limp along allows the opponents to point to it and say "see, the system works as is" and the bias in favor of upholding the status quo wins out. By allowing things to fail, you force people to get engaged to do something to fix the problem, at which point actual change becomes possible.
I realized a while back that a hidden factor behind the rise of the "you are the product" model could be inequality. There may not be enough purchasing power remaining in the middle class to sustain honest straightforward business models, causing businesses that mostly market to the middle class to look elsewhere.
In particular they are looking at ways to get more money from corporations, wealthy individuals, and governments, all of whom are totally flush with cash. Thus we have surveillance capitalism, which is about marketing the customer as the product to the people who actually have money.
I realized this as my own income has increased a bit in the last decade, and I'm finding myself perfectly willing to look up-market for products that among other things have stronger security and privacy guarantees. In many cases this means buying "business grade" networking gear, flat panel monitors as TVs, DIY home security surveillance (Blue Iris + business grade cams), etc., and all those things cost a lot more up front. Then I realized I was buying privacy, and that privacy is now a privilege for the upper middle class and above.
The solution to surveillance capitalism may be recapitalization of the middle class more than any techno-fix or even specific regulation of surveillance practices. The latter I think will fail for the same reason that much of the GDPR is empty: the legislators do not understand the tech well enough, and there's too much surface area anyway and thus too many ways to work around the law.
Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly and other CDNs should disable FLoC by default for all customers, and provide a toggle to those customers who explicitly wish to enable it.
But until they do[1]:
Apache:
Header always set Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()
Caddy:
header Permissions-Policy "interest-cohort=()"
Cloudflare Workers (not free as there are limits):
addEventListener('fetch', event=> {
event.respondWith(handleRequest(event.request))
})
async function handleRequest(request) {
let response=await fetch(request)
let newHeaders=new Headers(response.headers)
newHeaders.set("Permissions-Policy","interest-cohort=()")
return new Response(response.body, {
status: response.status,
statusText: response.statusText,
headers: newHeaders
})
}
With a parent working 3 jobs (probably just to make ends meet), they at some point have to rely on the implied social contract (as dictated by the law):
- That the school will teach what they are required to teach
- That the school will track absences/lates
- That the school will notify the parent if they see that the child is falling behind at either of those
Having seen similar cases myself, I can say almost definitively that one of the other huge parts going on here is that at some point the student fell behind and was ashamed to speak up. If no one is being accountable, students in this position can show up every day and still fail because they simply don‘t have the foundation to understand what’s being taught. It doesn’t take much at that point for them to simply disengage and stop showing up. By not being “disruptive” I would argue that they are more at risk of failing as these issues fly under the radar.
Brian Acton selling to FB is in a way a tragic story.
I understand why he did it, at some point it becomes irresponsible not to take the money given the opportunity cost (and he did give $50M to signal). Steven Levy has a funny bit about it in his excellent book Facebook: The Inside Story. When someone offers you 19 billion to violate your principles, you have to wonder what you can do with that money and maybe you can do more good than you could with whatsapp.
Philip was quiet for a moment. He pointed across a vast vista to a large castle in the distance adjacent to that of their own Earl Zuckerberg’s. “That is the castle of Sir Brian Acton of the former Earldom of WhatsApp. Sir Acton was an idealistic farmer who rejected the ways of our earl. He promised the serfs he would take no part of their data harvest they produced from the land he provided them, and instead the serfs even paid him a small cash fee for his protection. He had no knights to watch and report on his people and no heralds spreading pronouncements.”
“What happened?”
“He was too successful. Earl Zuckerberg saw many of his serfs begin to leave his lands to work the lands of Sir Acton (at the time he was known as Farmer Acton). This was a risk to the power of Zuckerberg’s earldom, since an earl without serfs to tend to the data fields has no harvest to interest others. In the end he offered Sir Acton a knightship and such enormous wealth that he could not refuse. It’s said he now lives in that vast castle alone, is rarely seen, and rarely speaks. The serfs that were in agreement with him now belong to Earl Zuckerberg as they had before, their deal was broken, and once again they tend to our earl’s data harvest.”
“Are there no others?”
“Sir Acton was just the most noble, and his fall the most tragic. Others like Sir Chris Coyne of the former Earldom of Keybase promised their serfs protection and then cruelly sold them to the Earldom of Zoom, which is closely tied to the Eastern Kingdom, a hostile land ruled by a tyrant king where the earls are weak and only serve to do the king’s bidding. There the serfs are forced to grow only what the king has allowed and serfs that refuse are dealt with swiftly and harshly. While in our kingdom farmers can choose to try to strike out on their own (though most choose not to), in the Earldoms of Zoom or TikTok, nothing can happen without the blessing of their king.”
This is also what Matt Stoller is writing about, the "monopolisation" of the world, particularly in tech of course:
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
Funnily, I've recently read "Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism" by Lenin. Multinational companies were called trusts, monopolism was called imperialism, and train, coal and steel was since replaced with telcos and internet but it's incredibly apt at describing our world. Even the "systemic banks" were mostly the same 100 years ago : BNP, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, JPMorgan...
This is still happening? I'm sorry but that's hilarious!
https://www.wired.com/2009/04/fleetcom/