Interesting side effect of having to choose calendar years is that it misses the break between Xmas and New Years' Day that is often a good-value time to take off (and many people would take off anyway).
I also don't know if the crowdsourced skiplist works for podcasts as well as for youtube ads, since I think a larger proportion of podcasts use dynamic ad insertion - do they have consistent length? Might mess up ad tags/flags
Agree that it could be seen as excessive, but this was not just in response to these commits, but also to the university's failure to act once they were informed of them.
They university, and indeed, the researchers, only acted once the ban was imposed - i.e. they were getting away with it without reputational damage, and only once it was stained did they actually do anything.
> We just want you to know that we would never intentionally hurt the Linux kernel community and never introduce security vulnerabilities. Our work was conducted with the best of intentions and is all about finding and fixing security vulnerabilities.
Either this is a bald-faced lie or they didn't think through the implications of their research, neither of which bode well for their trustworthiness in future. However, if it's the latter, then they possibly deserve additional leeway.
On the other hand, I wonder whether this letter would have eventuated without the ban - if not, then they've likely been forced to write it, in which case any remorse is either selfish (i.e. they've been professionally reprimanded and feel bad about getting caught, or making such an egregious error in judgement), or hollow.
> I agree, but let's give them a little extra benefit of the doubt. I thought as I was reading it that it seemed stilted and forced, then I wondered if the author(s) don't speak / write English as a primary language.
I think that it's straightforward enough in Australia, but that's partially because we file and pay only federal taxes, with states levying payroll tax, land tax (or stamp duty), etc, but those are less frequent transactions and generally accountants are involved.
For federal taxes, payroll systems typically transmit your data to our taxation office on each payrun, and then a few weeks (or sometimes, immediately) after the end of the financial year, your details are already in the system and you just need to hit the button to submit.
Our tax office has also tried to make it easier for individuals with simple requirements to keep records of work-related tax deductions, etc, such that you can use a mobile app to record them, and then it can also be imported into your return with a single click.
I think for many people - myself included - it's easy enough that you can (and I have) complete it on your phone on the way to work on July 1st (the first day of our income tax year, and the first day you can file for the prior year).
On android, Firefox beta (and maybe stable; haven't used stable in a while) allows you to have bookmarks as well as open all links in a private tab by default.
On desktop I use multi account containers and wipe history on exit, and have a handful of bookmarks for convenience.
For both, I use the bitwarden add-on/app to manage passwords.
> If you show up at the polls to intimidate voters you get arrested.
Yes, if this is consistently and fairly enforced, I agree - only doubting that it is because I honestly don't know, and hopefully never have to find out firsthand.
> many of the voting machine vulnerabilities are as a result of submitting specially crafted ballots
Yeah, fair enough. I don't know enough about the vulnerabilities, but if this is the case, I agree.
I don't quite understand why the expect that there would be ~6x the number detected, though, assuming that the ~8500 cases detected is accurate. It would be very (and probably statistically naive) if the minimum total cases was simply because they have only ~1/6 of the total number of state pairings.
I think the other major concern I have, other than the methodology, are the definitions - I still don't know whether 8500 represents 8500 people who voted twice (17000 total votes cast), or 4250 people who voted twice, or something in between, or some thing completely different. Perhaps I missed this.
I'm not sure that refusing a gay wedding cake to a straight person would avoid your action as being discriminatory toward a protected class, since that's the effect. Perhaps it would.
I also don't know that I would want Trump to be silenced, since he's often his own worst critic.
I don't think Twitter is stopping him from saying bad things, either; in fact, they're pretty explicitly letting him say things, and they just happen to have something to say about what he's said, too.
Not sure where 15,000 to 45,000 comes from, as the report itself concludes only c.8500 cases of duplicate voting.
I'm also not sure about the methodology there, so perhaps someone could explain it to me.
From what it looks like, GAI started with 60,000 matches from the state data. Then they... added additional identifiers and confirmed c.7000 of them? How do you get from uncertain data to more certain data in this way?
There seem to be c.15,000 instances of prohibited addresses being registered, which I don't believe alone indicates voter fraud.
Interestingly the most... clever, if not necessarily convincing, phishing attempt I've heard of, went like this:
1. Phishers call someone and pretend to be from their bank. If they've guessed the right bank and the person gives away their details, they win!
2. If they don't, and question the phishers authenticity, the scammers say "sure, just call us on the number on the back of your card".
3. The cardholder hangs up, and then dials the number for their bank, which they know and trust, because they've called it before or it's come from their card.
4. They get connected to a service representative, answer security questions, confirm that the transactions are valid, and then can relax.
5. A few days later, they get a call from their bank saying there's a whole lot of fraud on the account.
The trick to this one is that the phishers (a) call the cardholder on a landline and (b) when the cardholder thinks they've hung up, they haven't - the phishers just play a hook tone and then a dial tone.
In Australia at least (not sure about elsewhere?) if you call a landline number, the caller must end the call, or at least it used to be that way (I haven't owned a landline phone for a _long_ time. There's probably also a significant skew towards the elderly in landline owners, and in susceptibility to scam calls.
I get these calls from time to time, and any bank with proper training should be 100% okay with you questioning their authenticity. There are some replies which indicate that the agent is annoyed... That's just poor training.
As for them initiating a phone call, it still does remain the best way to contact someone urgently, usually falling back to SMS and/or email when/if you don't answer (this was our SOP when I was in a fraud detection team years ago). We'd also usually tell them to call the number on the bank of your card (because not everyone is able to look up the bank's website, shockingly, so this is the most universally applicable way to give people a number) but my usual spiel was "call us on the number on the back of your card or from our website".
There's also no real way for you to know that they're legit, but an interesting reassurance one bank I know uses is to provide your month and day of birth and ask you for the year (as just part of the verification process). The partial info probably helps some people but I still wouldn't go for it - too many people know my birthday.
[2] If the gender of the antecedent/referent is not known, using singular they/them speeds up comprehension. If gender is known, it slows it down compared to using the known gender pronoun: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293036/
1. Not sure where these passengers came from, but sure, if you can insert entities into the referent then any pronoun is potentially invalid.
2. Of course you can, but (a) context will fill in the gaps and (b) if that doesn't work, you can usually interrogate the author/speaker (and (c), if you can't interrogate the author/speaker, then yes, they've failed in their composition - but that doesn't necessarily mean that singular they/them is the problem, or is infeasible in all contexts.
3. Sure, there are many things that are acceptable colloquially and not professionally, and vice versa. Does writing on an internet forum fall more in line with formal or informal writing? I don't think it's clear.
4. See the above; sometimes it "confuses" people, sometimes it doesn't (and the unqualified assumption that it does is perhaps an indication that there's some motivated reasoning at play)
5. I don't myself have any issues with writing to avoid pronouns, however if you pointedly avoid pronouns with one person and then use them with another (let's say you use them with a cis-female and then avoid them with a non-binary person) that's not really welcoming or sensitive, and it seems apt to brand them as such. If you're avoiding pronouns equally in all situations, that's different. But if you're selectively avoiding pronouns where they don't line up with your personal viewpoints, then you might be seen as insensitive or hateful, and you might not be welcome everywhere. That's kind of how life is, and you just need to deal with it.