The EU's "E-Evidence framework" allows authorities in any member state to compel entities doing business in any part of the EU to produce and/or preserve communications data, completely by-passing cross-border barriers.
_e.g._ Victor Orban could have wiretapped any communication within the EU. Supporter by an EU directive
Dithering as a mechanism to reduce/remove banding can be very impressive.
The color Next machines only had 12 bit displays, 4 bits per channel, but with careful use of dithering it was often indistinguishable from a 24-bit display (so called "true color")
There are so many ways to produce sierpinski gaskets.
It you specify n points and the pick a new point at random, then iteratively randomly select (uniformly) one of the original n points and move the next point to the mid point of the current point and the selected point. Coloring those points generates a sierpinski triangle or tetrahedron or whatever the n-1 dimensional triangle is called
FWIW, the Next color machines had 12bit (4096) color and in practice it didn't make much of a difference. I was using one fairly extensively in the late 90s (by which time 24bit was the norm -- albeit not yet ubiquitous) and for anything other that photo/video work it was perfectly reasonable. It's amazing how far a good dithering algorithm can get you.
I've also worked with engineers who have raced LMP. It's largely pay-to-play and this is one of those professions where if you're the right person, in the right place, at the right time, you might be able to afford it.
For the title holder, in this case the Earl of Lovelace, they are often referred to ("styled") simply by the place name. So after William King-Noel was created Earl.of Lovelace he was styled "Lovelace". She would have been styled "Lady Lovelace" in society, and "Countess of Lovelace" in formal contexts
The sidebar about pirate radio, while factually correct, seems to heavily imply that pirate radio started in the jungle era, but Radio Caroline was broadcasting in the 60s
Just that thinking about the "floppy drive in 1998" question.
I can think of a couple of things at play
The system was likely designed a long time before 1998, because of how this type of contract works
Even in 1998 USB was very new, so thumb drives weren't an option
CDs were ubiquitous, but cd writers were not
Proprietary tech was available, Zip and Jazz drives come to mind, or maybe even minidisc in that timeframe, but any would have been a poor choice in hindsight
Tape would presumably have been considered, but was already notorious for long term compatibility (in 99 I had to restore from a tape backup that was only a couple of years old and we couldn't easily find compatible hardware)
There were other proprietary optical storage media in the market, but they were expensive and aimed at the long term storage market (heaven help you if that's how your archives are stored)
If they needed a cheap, easily written, and distributable media, they didn't have a lot of good choices.
We still don't have a good choice for this if you want your system air gapped. I sure as hell wouldn't let anyone plug a USB device into a safety critical system
I've always thought of this as being equivalent to "work hardening"
My concern with it is more about legitimately old code (android is 20ish years old, so reasonably falls into this category) which was written using standards and tools of the time (necessarily)
It requires a constant engineering effort to keep such code up to date. And the older code is, typically, less well understood.
In addition older code (particularly in systems programming) is often associated with older requirements, some of which may have become niche over time.
That long tail of old, less frequently exercised, code feels like it may well have a sting in its tail.
The halflife/work-hardening model depends on the code being stressed to find bugs
The tech trivia related to this that springs to mind is that the DEC Alpha processor was known internally by the code name EV, which stood for "Electric Vlasic" — although the suits backfit this in to "Extended VAX".