Amazing what happens with adequate funding. How long until Republicans open some sort of bullshit Congressional investigation that won’t find anything but waste time and money, and as usual try to reduce funding by obviously punitive levels?

Surprisingly fast for a government organization to react to something new.

Oh I’m sure that’s the case for nearly all large social media and network systems based on the US. I’m also willing to bet that for some of these companies, almost no one even knows it’s there, either because a 3 letter agency put it there themselves without being noticed, or an employee implemented it for them without corporate approval.

The US is worried about other countries doing this because we 100% are doing it ourselves. From a national security perspective, it’s basically common sense. Ensure you have access to everything, even if you don’t use it now, you might in the future and it will save time.

A wiretap is different than having something like backdoor access at will for military use.

The problem is that not all of those terminals are being purchased by Ukraine, or supplied through official channels. There are tons of equipment being donated from third parties not directly affiliated, including Starlink terminals.

That’s great if the Ukraine military were the only users in the region, but they aren’t. Regular Starlink service is available in the country, outside military use. Even though the Ukraine military is using it, Starlink is not designed to be a military network. It is a civilian network that just happens to be available and extremely useful in this case, even with the Russian attempts to interfere with signals in the region.

Yeah, but it’s not a government satellite system, it’s an independent Internet provider. It is always possible that the US government/military has access on the back end, but that’s not guaranteed. And since Ukraine is using Starlink, they can’t exactly just disable all access in the region.

Kind of makes sense for Russia to try and use Starlink at least a bit to test the waters and see what sort of Intel the US has access to directly through it.

They do, but Ukraine uses Starlink, so they can’t really disable usage entirely in the contested areas. They could disable the individual terminals, but that would require knowing which ones the Russians were using in the first place.

Not disagreeing, just pointing out it’s not a traditional copyright claim like so many others we see.

Except this isn’t a copyright case. They’re claiming patent infringement.

Not really bad if you use a power-only cable. If the data pins aren’t even wired up, can’t move anything other than power.

Not sure if that works with USB-C at anything other than legacy 500mA power draw though, probably not since the device can’t communicate for what it supports.

You know guys, I’m starting to think what we heard about Altman when he was removed a while ago might actually have been real.

/s

It’s also worth it to point out that, for people that care about supporting content creators but don’t want to or can’t afford to do so individually through services like Patreon, Youtube Premium views pay creators far more than a regular view.

If you’re impacted, it makes YouTube Premium more expensive than Spotify Premium and Apple Music.

I find this particular comparison interesting to bring up. A Youtube Premium subscription also includes a Youtube Music sub (at least in the US, not sure about everywhere else). Which theoretically makes those subscriptions unnecessary as well (ignoring differences in catalog, device availability, etc. of course).

Welcome to Software Patents 101.

Tariffs in general aren’t new, but Trump’s tariffs were applied haphazardly and poorly determined because he doesn’t understand what they are. Avoiding that uncertainty entirely is a good idea.

That won’t stop them either. They’ll just use it anyway. These companies never delete anything they might be able to use. At least not willingly.

You think that will stop them? They’ll just do it and pay a comparatively small fine to the government in a decade after they get around to investigating it. And that’s the best case scenario. More realistically nothing will ever happen.

They stopped his vehicle after he fled the scene and have him in custody according to the CBS article I read a while ago.

For all we know it could have been requested years ago by developers who have apps that get pirated but there was no mechanism in place to implement it at the time, and wasn’t a priority.

Just because it’s beneficial to Google maintaining more direct control now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the origin.

This has almost nothing to do with Google, it’s a feature that has to be enabled by the app developer. Meaning they want to exclude users getting the APK for their app from elsewhere.