How do we know Google knows they stole Android from Oracle-Java?

The E-Mail That Google Really Doesn’t Want A Jury To See:

“Lawyers defending Google against a patent and copyright lawsuit brought by Oracle are trying desperately to keep a particular engineer’s e-mail out of the public eye-but it looks like they’re unlikely to succeed.

“The e-mail, from Google engineer Tim Lindholm to the head of Google’s Android division, Andy Rubin, recommends that Google negotiate for a license to Java rather than pick an alternative system….

“The second paragraph of the email reads:

“‘What we’ve actually been asked to do by Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] (Google’s founders) is to investigate what technical alternatives exist to Java for Android and Chrome.

“We’ve been over a bunch of these and think they all suck. We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need.’”

Except Google never did negotiate for Android “a license for Java under the terms we need.”

But they released Android anyway.

That’s not legal.

I welcomed Google’s friendly advice for a few days, but after a while, I would be caught entirely off guard by it. When focusing deeply on a task in complete silence, my Hub would abruptly shout at me and scare the crap out of me, causing my heart to skip a beat. Not only did it break my peace, but it caused me to lose my train of thought as well. When this happens several times a day and every single day for weeks, you realize that it’s more of a nuisance than a help, I promise. //

The worst part is that since the feature is called ‘Workday Reminders’, and since Google Assistant has about a gazillion settings packed into one wall of text, I kept searching for the settings to disable them in various places other than Routines. I checked Reminders (because duh), I checked my Nest Hub settings, and so on all to no avail. After a few weeks of torture, and having only attained peace by unplugging my Assistant devices, I finally located the Workday ‘routine’ blandly mixed in with the other routines. No longer did it feature the colorful icon it had when I set them up – instead, it was a simple blue outlined icon mixed in with the rest. It was completely indistinguishable. I really am beginning to see what people are saying about Google’s design becoming less attention-grabbing and more ‘same-y’.

1. They praise the process
   When you praise the process (e.g., the kid putting effort into a math assignment), instead of the talent or outcome (e.g., the kid's natural ability to solve math problems quickly), kids are more likely to develop a positive attitude toward future challenges. //

2. They never make it a competition
   Parents love to compare — we can't help it! And sometimes, we'll even tell our kids that they're better than others ("You scored more goals than all your teammates combined!").

Often, it's done with good intentions. We want them to feel as proud as we do, and to be motivated to do even better the next time ... but for all the wrong reasons.

It's not healthy to be trapped in a vicious cycle of competition. Social comparisons can teach kids to always measure success based on the outcomes of other people. //

The better approach? Encourage them to compare their past efforts with their present efforts, rather than with other people. This gets them into the habit of shifting their goals away from being better than everyone else and toward self-improvement. //

3. They use observational language
   Instead of saying, "That's so good!", you may want to say, "I love the colors in your painting. Tell me more about why you chose them." (This is what it means to praise the process.)

Another example: Instead of saying, "You looked like a pro riding that bike!," parents of motivated kids might say something like, "You were so careful and focused while riding your bike. Even when you wobbled a bit and almost fell off, you kept going! That was cool to watch." //

Lastly, it's important to create an environment of emotional safety. If your child failed a spelling test, refrain from telling them they should have studied harder. Instead, ask them what they think they can do to improve next time.

Kids need to know that they can come to their parents not just when they've done something well, but also when they are struggling with a specific task or challenge.

“At least 36 batches of mail-in ballots from the November election were double counted in Fulton County. That’s a total of more than 4000 votes. Those numbers come from a group called VoterGA, which along with Bob Cheeley sued to get them. The final tally from the double counts we know about amounts to more than 3300 votes for Joe Biden and 865 votes for Donald Trump,” Carlson said. //

Voter GA had tried to get the audit tally sheets but Fulton County wouldn’t release more than 100,000 of them initially. But Voter GA finally got some of them. They said that they found 7 audit tally sheets that were falsified. For example, a batch containing 59 ballot images for Joe Biden and 42 for Donald Trump was reported as 100 for Joe Biden and zero for Trump. The seven batches of ballot images had 705 votes — 554 for Biden, 140 for Trump, and 11 for Jorgensen. However, the tally sheets showed a higher vote total and had 100 percent of the votes going to Biden – 850 for Biden, 0 for Trump, and 0 for Jorgensen. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution doesn’t address that tally sheet problem in their article on the matter.

Carlson notes other issues but makes the greater point that the way to quell concerns is to address the questions, not to shut them down.

KiwiSDR is hardware that uses a software-defined radio to monitor transmissions in a local area and stream them over the Internet. A largely hobbyist base of users does all kinds of cool things with the playing-card-sized devices. For instance, a user in Manhattan could connect one to the Internet so that people in Madrid, Spain, or Sydney, Australia, could listen to AM radio broadcasts, CB radio conversations, or even watch lightning storms in Manhattan.
On Wednesday, users learned that for years, their devices had been equipped with a backdoor that allowed the KiwiSDR creator—and possibly others—to log in to the devices with administrative system rights. The remote admin could then make configuration changes and access data not just for the KiwiSDR but in many cases to the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, or other computing devices the SDR hardware is connected to.

Don't want to compromise on the security of your Linux server? Install these six tools to set up an impenetrable network.

To summarize, the flow of information likely went from McFarland to Hill to Wallander. Once inside the White House, it went from Wallander to Rice to Obama (and later onto Ignatius at the Washington Post).

The Bottom Line: Wallander possessed a virulent anti-Trump sentiment, motive, access, and credibility because of her senior position and experience – she had it all. She’s the leaker. Prove me wrong.

So you need a cell signal booster? This is our definitive, 7,000+ word guide on exactly how to find the right cell phone signal booster.

How the FAA is Working to Reduce the Impact of Aircraft Noise

By Tom Hoffmann, FAA Safety Briefing Managing Editor

In a scathing response, Jack Pelton called the new interpretation a “solution to a nonexistent problem.” //

Pelton concluded by writing, “This entire episode is a scary example of how new interpretations of the regulations can upend the entire community. While this short-term fix allows operations to continue, it never should have come to this point. Creating more than 30,000 new LODAs and exemptions is a paperwork exercise that does nothing to advance safety.”

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If you still don’t have any internets after power-cycling and your modem showing everything sync’ed and online, you may be falling afoul of a weirdness in OpnSense’s default gateway configs. By default, it will mark a gateway as “down” if it doesn’t return pings… but many ISP gateway addresses (not the WAN address your router gets, the one just upstream of it) don’t return pings. So, OpnSense reports it as down and refuses to even try slinging packets through it.

As it turns out, the problem is that Dovecot—which handles IMAP duties on the server—doesn’t notice when the certificate has been updated on disk; it will cheerfully keep using an in-memory cached copy of whatever certificate was present when the service started until time immemorial. //

I created a new root cron job to restart Dovecot once every Sunday at midnight:

# m h dom mon dow   command
0 0 *   *   Sun   /etc/init.d/dovecot restart

Since Certbot renews any certificate with 30 days or less until expiration, and the Sunday restart will pick up new certificates within 7 days of their deployment, we should be fine with this simple brute-force approach

zfs destroy has a dry-run option, and can be used to delete sequences of snapshots. So you can see before-hand how much space will be reclaimed by deleting a sequence of snapshots, like this:

root@box:~# zfs destroy -nv pool/dataset@snap4%snap8

Quick and dirty cheat sheet for anyone getting ready to set up a new ZFS pool. Here are all the settings you’ll want to think about, and the values I think you’ll probably want to use.

I am not generally a fan of tuning things unless you need to, but unfortunately a lot of the ZFS defaults aren’t optimal for most workloads.

I tend to be pretty firm on how disks relate to vdevs, and vdevs relate to pools… but once you veer down deeper into the direct on-disk storage, I get a little hazier. So here’s an attempt to remedy that, with citations, for my benefit (and yours!) down the line. //

The zpool is the topmost unit of storage under ZFS. A zpool is a single, overarching storage system consisting of one or more vdevs. Writes are distributed among the vdevs according to how much FREE space each vdev has available – you may hear urban myths about ZFS distributing them according to the performance level of the disk, such that “faster disks end up with more writes”, but they’re just that – urban myths. //

Also note that the pool’s performance scales with the number of vdevs, not the number of disks within the vdevs. If you have a single 12 disk wide RAIDZ2 vdev in your pool, expect to see roughly the IOPS profile of a single disk, not of ten!

There is absolutely no parity or redundancy at the pool level. If you lose any vdev, you’ve lost the entire pool, plain and simple. Even if you “didn’t write to anything on that vdev yet” – the pool has altered and distributed its metadata accordingly once the vdev was added; if you lose that vdev “with nothing on it” you’ve still lost the pool.

It’s important to realize that the zpool is not a RAID0; in conventional terms, it’s a JBOD – and a fairly unusual one, at that. //

Even if you’ve done your homework and are absolutely certain that your disks use 512B hardware sectors, I strongly advise considering setting ashift=12 or even ashift=13 – because, remember, it’s immutable per vdev, and vdevs cannot be removed from pools. If you ever need to replace a 512B sector disk in a vdev with a 4K or 8K sector disk, you’ll be screwed if that vdev is ashift=9.

It seems like a stupid question, if you’re not an IT professional – and maybe even if you are – how much storage does it take to store 1TB of data? Unfortunately, it’s not a stupid question in the vein of “what weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of bricks”, and the answer isn’t “one terabyte” either. I’m going to try to break down all the various things that make the answer harder – and unhappier – in easy steps. Not everybody will need all of these things, so I’ll try to lay it out in a reasonably likely order from “affects everybody” to “only affects mission-critical business data with real RTO and RPO defined”. //

TL;DR: If you have 280GiB of existing data, you need 1TB of local capacity. //

8:1 rule of thumb
Based on the same calculations and with a healthy dose of rounding, we come up with another really handy, useful, memorable rule of thumb: when buying, you need eight times as much raw storage in production as the amount of data you have now.

So if you’ve got 1TiB of data, buy servers with 8TB of disks – whether it’s two 4TB disks in a single mirror, or four 2TB disks in two mirrors, or whatever, your rule of thumb is 8:1. Per system, so if you maintain hotspare and DR systems, you’ll need to do that twice more – but it’s still 8:1 in raw storage per machine.

The billionaire Richard Branson went 53.5 miles into the sky on Sunday, short of the Kármán line, which is 62 miles above sea level and where it is generally agreed that space begins. Branson did surpass 50 miles above sea level, above which NASA gives out astronaut wings. But come on, man, Branson’s stunt only barely cleared that. //

let’s accept the 50 mile rule for argument’s sake, anyway, and say that Branson was indeed in space, where he spent about a minute-and-a-half before falling back to earth, which is the functional equivalent of having a layover at JFK and then claiming you’ve been to New York City. That might technically be true but simultaneously be complete hogwash.

Instead, I hereby propose a simple, achievable definition of “going to space,” which is that you must orbit the Earth at least once while you’re up there, something that Branson did not do. And, while Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom might be a little mad that their first flights will no longer count, in Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom’s day there weren’t weirdo billionaires engaged in pointless space races.

It is true that in the Jewish Talmud and other Jewish documents we find statements such as “When a child experiences the taste of wheat (i.e., when it is weaned), it learns to say ’abbā and ’immā” (Berakot 40a in the Babylonian Talmud) (= our “dada” and “mama”).

However, even if the term abba began as a childish babbling sound (and this is far from clear), at the time of Jesus it was a regular adult word meaning “Father” or “my Father” (as terms of address) or “the Father” or “my Father” (as terms of reference).

That is, abba was not a childish term of the nursery comparable to “Daddy.” It was a polite and serious term, yet also colloquial and familiar, regularly used by adult sons and daughters when addressing their father. Ideas of simplicity, intimacy, security and affection attach to this household word of childlike trust and obedience. So to bring out the sense of warm and trusting intimacy that belongs to the word, we could appropriately paraphrase it as “dear father.”

They recount the story of Amy Medina, an American missionary in Tanzania, whose husband was teaching a class on developing a biblical worldview. Somehow, the subject of tattoos arose, and the class reacted so negatively to the idea of a Christian getting a tattoo that the missionary asked: “Which would bother you more: if your pastor got a tattoo, or if he committed adultery?” The class was unanimous. The tattoo would be more disturbing! //

In this case, as the conversation progressed, the missionary acknowledged that the Scriptures explicitly forbid both tattoos and adultery (Lev. 19:28; Deut. 5:18). The majority of American Bible-readers believe the tattoo prohibition to be irrelevant today, but the Tanzanians believe both commands are binding, and surprisingly, the tattoo represents something even worse than adultery. Muehlhoff and Langer explain the students’ mindset:

“Tattoos are associated with witchcraft and evil spirits. A tattoo, regardless of personal intentions, is a mark of ownership placed on your body that either confirms the influence of a witch doctor or an evil spirit over your life, or at the very least implies or invites such influence. Adultery is wrong, but surely even Americans think it is worse for a pastor to publicly identify with an evil spirit.” (69) //

Beginning with common ground helps us find greater clarity on where the real disagreement lies. One area presents itself quickly: the principles we use in applying biblical commands across historical and cultural contexts, as well as the difference between the covenants. As the discussion unfolds, it becomes clear that the debate isn’t over the authority of Scripture, but how we interpret this Old Testament command.

A second takeaway is the emphasis the students give to spiritual warfare. Faithfulness to one’s spouse is a moral mandate, for sure, and to break one’s covenantal vows is to fail morally. The tattoo, however (at least in this culture), is a public sign of allegiance to a witch doctor, evil spirit, or something supernatural. The Americans may object that we shouldn’t read African cultural concerns into every tattoo, while the Tanzanians may object that Americans too often underestimate or neglect the dynamics of spiritual warfare. (This cross-cultural discussion of how much or how little we should emphasize the powers and principalities is a subject I devoted several columns to last year.)

A third area of disagreement arises from the difference between living in a guilt/innocence culture versus an honor/shame culture. That’s the primary reason the students believed the tattoo was a greater scandal than the adultery. “Guilt before the law as opposed to shame before the community is valued differently in the two cultures,” Muehlhoff and Langer write (71). //

“The conviction spectrum does not eliminate disagreements but rather locates and clarifies our disagreements. The goal is that appreciating the common ground lays a foundation for respecting differing convictions. This opens the door to further conversation and hopefully to respectful compromises along the lines which Paul suggests when he exhorts those who are stronger in faith not to flaunt their freedom and those who are weaker in faith not to judge their brothers.” (72)