You could be sued for doing something that was potentially considered unsafe by some studies. Business wise it's better to just "play it safe" here with low sodium meals.

Since they also do it in countries where lawsuits are not a risk you need to care about I doubt this is the reason.

From the first paragraph:

> the experience in Australia was that [Facebook's] removal [of news link sharing] had little impact on user engagement.

Serves me right for commenting on the headline alone.

But it did have a major impact on the traffic of those sites.

Good or bad?

I don't know how that value (looks like -50?) was chosen, but it seems to correspond to the launch failures.

> which effectively prevents you from installing linux

This was going to be the state when Microsoft first proposed secure boot. But the backlash lead to (1) being able to disable it and (2) being able to load customer keys.

Are any motherboards actually locked down to where you can't install another OS? My older Gigabyte motherboard, my Thinkpad laptop, and my HP business line desktop all support both of these.

UEFI was definitely a pain point for booting Linux when it was first available. The same Gigabyte motherboard mentioned ended up having it all turned off and just used legacy boot for years. But everything works great with UEFI USB boot installers and the OS. I'd recommend giving it a try again.

I personally use secure boot for Linux through custom keys and a kernel install hook that resigns the EFI+kernel+initramfs+cmdline blob. It's quite nice in combination with LUKS unlocked by TPM2 (similar to Bitlocker). Secure boot actually lets you be more selective in which PCRs to verify for LUKS unlocking, meaning it's much less fragile during updates.

> The apps, which are used for calls and text messages, send information including phone numbers, time stamps and call duration to Google

I’m not surprised they collect telemetry on these actions. I am quite surprised that they apparently collect raw phone numbers, though.

This may be in response to the concerns raised from their announcement of Russian service termination, discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812

I had concerns about this yesterday, and shared in that thread. Doing things to support Ukraine is vital, but so is doing things to support Russians.

They're the only ones that can stand up to Putin without (we hope) causing WW3.

As I said yesterday, the people he's terminating in Russia are the engaged ones that read western papers and go to western tech conferences. They're currently putting everything on the line to protest.

I get the anger and frustration, but every move is critical now.

Here's the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.06324.pdf

The tl;dr:

“Pool-party” attacks work by manipulating pools of browser resources which are limited (i.e., the browser restricts how many of the resource websites can open or consume) and unpartitioned (i.e., different contexts consume resources from the same pool). While the examples focused on in this work utilize limited-but-unpartitioned pools of network connections, browsers include many other limited-but-unpartitioned resource pools that could be similarly exploited, such as pools of file handles, subprocesses, or other resource handles.

A “pool-party” attack occurs when parties operating in distinct contexts (contexts the user expects to be distinct and blinded from each other) intentionally consume and query the availability of the limited resources in a resource pool, to create a cross-context communication channel. Each context can then use the communication channel to pass an identifier, allowing each party to link the users behavior across the two contexts. We note again that most commonly the two contexts considered here are two different websites running in the same browser profile, but could also be the same (or different) websites running in different browser profiles.

Uhm, cooperative cross-context channels are a dime a dozen just running on any CPU, nevermind in a browser. I don't see how this is interesting, or surprising. Modern computers are not MLS-style systems where it's supposed to be information-theoretically impossible to pass information unless permitted by a formal model.

Is there no room for middle ground between "information theoretic formal proof" and "open the floodgates"? I don't run any MLS systems, so is my fate to just give up, drop my pants and take it?

There is, you can for example use Qubes OS. That's pretty ergonomic and you get a reasonable amount of separation between stuff.

That's not how DownDetector works. It just relies on reports from users. The real failure case is users not understanding why they can't access whatever end service. Maybe they blame that service, maybe they blame their ISP, maybe they blame something else.

It's still there now, on the top of the page, just marked resolved:

us-west-1:

7:52 AM PST We are investigating Internet connectivity issues to the US-WEST-1 Region.

8:01 AM PST We have identified the root cause of the Internet connectivity to the US-WEST-1 Region and have taken steps to restore connectivity. We have seen some improvement to Internet connectivity in the last few minutes but continue to work towards full recovery.

8:10 AM PST We have resolved the issue affecting Internet connectivity to the US-WEST-1 Region. Connectivity within the region was not affected by this event. The issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally.

us-west-2:

7:43 AM PST We are investigating Internet connectivity issues to the US-WEST-2 Region.

8:01 AM PST We have identified the root cause of the Internet connectivity to the US-WEST-2 Region and have taken steps to restore connectivity. We have seen some improvement to Internet connectivity in the last few minutes but continue to work towards full recovery.

8:14 AM PST We have resolved the issue affecting Internet connectivity to the US-WEST-2 Region. Connectivity within the region was not affected by this event. The issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally.

Discussion of Reuters article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28322550