One is under your control. The other is being passed through a script on the server that may be doing who-knows-what in addition to redirecting you.

(Better if you just drop Google altogether.)

You realize what this suggests about Trump’s hair . . .

I have the cables I might conceivably need again some day sorted into labeled plastic bins (USB, ethernet, etc.) The serial cables and other stuff I doubt I’ll ever touch again unless something odd happens are coiled, bound neatly with twine, and stuffed in a cardboard box in a semi-inaccessible corner where I don’t have to worry about them.

This is one of the few times I’ve thought it unfortunate that we have a loser-pays system in our civil courts. That means we can only bankrupt at most one of them. But in this case, SOCAN seems the lesser evil. By a very narrow margin.

So once it’s bankrupted you, where does it ship you off to?

I wouldn’t put one in charge of a water treatment plant or a set of traffic lights, but even if it stuffed up and killed people, the responsibility would still not be the AI’s. The responsibility would lie with those who built it, trained it, and prompted it, just as, if a bunch of people are fried by a nuclear missile, the responsibility lies with the person who pushed the button rather than with the missile itself. It’s a piece of software. It does what it’s told. It may be complex enough to display unexpected emergent behaviour, but so is Dwarf Fortress. Any destruction it accomplishes is just the real-world version of !!Fun!!, disgusting concept though that may be.

The short version: Most of them spammed people, except possibly for the one that slept 70% of the time. None of them came up with a product or service anyone sensible would buy even if a human was providing it. Alas, none of them ordered tungsten cubes, either. It was a bunch of particularly boring fails.

All this money, all these resources, to produce artificial con artists. As though we didn’t have enough of the natural organic sort.

Startpage uses Google’s index, or used to. At very least, it seems to have more and different results than DuckDuckGo.

Given the memory requirement, my guess is that they’re not removing anything, just hiding it. And adding more useless crap on top.

I apologize for phrasing things so poorly that several people seem to have missed my actual point, which was: no one else with an auto-update feature requires any information about you, therefore if they claim that’s their reason for asking for users’ personal information, they’re lying. They may have other reasons, which they have not stated. They may even be good reasons, although I’m not holding my breath.

And yes, I have compiled my own copy with that nonsense switched off, thanks for asking. However, it’s the job of people who understand that this is overreach to push back against it on behalf of the people who lack the knowledge, time, or energy to investigate it. I don’t like throwing even Windows users under the bus.

Why would I want an auto-update mechanism in the software? That’s what my distro’s package manager is for. And it doesn’t care who I am or where I’m from. Nor has any other software I’ve encountered with such a useless-to-Linux-users mechanism demanded any information about me.

In short, that rationale is obvious nonsense. That may be why they claim they’re doing it, but it doesn’t hold up.

Also, their website actually works.

[Hits “Zap style sheets” bookmarklet to make it possible to get at least a minimal amount of information out of the page]

Ugh, they still actually think the cloud shite is a feature.

Thus making their vehicles even more difficult to sell outside their own country.

If a person knowingly goes out and buys an illegal service, they will usually be guilty of at least conspiracy. I can’t think of any way this guy could have advanced in the queue that’s legally okay, short of offering the people ahead of him masses of money to leave the queue (or, y’know, waiting). Maybe you’re more imaginative than me. But I still think he should have been aware that what he was asking for was shady at best.

Is the company that furnished the AI agent also guilty of providing a tool without enough warnings and safeguards? Quite possibly.

Exactly who holds how much responsibility before the law in this specific case can only be determined by a judge, and I am not one. Plus, the details of the law in Australia aren’t going to be the same as those of the law where I am.

There’s nothing wrong with the language that I’m aware of, but some aspects of the ecosystem seem to have not been thought out with Linux packaging in mind, let’s say.

Just give the source away. Don’t package it at all (or at most, do so for your own distro). If your software is good enough, others will do the packaging for you. You’ll have to field a few inquiries, maybe, until someone steps up, but if you’ve got a canned response already written those don’t take long to handle.

This dev’s problems are twofold: first, he’s in too much of a hurry to get this thing out everywhere, instead of waiting for others to take the burden off him. Second, he wrote his code in Rust, which is difficult to package correctly in a self-contained manner because it tries to force you into using its own language-specific dependency system. He picked up a footgun and shot himself with it, in other words, and is now hopping around cursing.

The system is broken by design. Notice-and-notice is much saner than notice-and-takedown, but would have given the big media mills the vapours.

The person giving the order to the software tool without fully understanding its capabilities and inability to weigh actions ethically is responsible. That person may or may not also be the owner of the device it was running on.

Has anyone done a study yet to see how many managers’ insecurities about remote work can be handled by placing mannequins in chairs at the office?