To call this "cheating", you have to assume that car manufacturers are more knowledgeable about car safety in general than NHTSA, to be able to spot the loopholes. It may be true, they have more resources to invest in research and to hire experts in this domain, after all.
Still, I prefer to follow Hanlon's razor, and not assume malice. This kind of mistake always seem obvious in hindsight, but if it was, why was there no one warning about it at the time?
uMatrix can block frames and js requests on a domain/sub-domain level. afaik, it can't block at url level, if that's what you meant.
That said, uMatrix, from what I remember, uses the webRequest api which does work from urls. So if you know JS, you can always create an extension and add your own filter.
I think there's an assumption that the default DE gets more attention from the distro; it's more polished, and "just works" (or at least, something approaching the concept on Linux).
e.g. from what I remember, when installing xfce in debian, you get the ugly barebones defaults from upstream. Compare this to Xubuntu...
WebM uses more memory, it is less widely supported, uses more resources when playing, and is currently less efficient compression-wise than WebP.
About FLIF, I was recently checking it and it's indeed a very interesting format. Notably because it can be used on any type of image. I assume it hasn't pickep up steam because it doesn't have the backing of any big sponsor. Google is pushing WebP, and introducing another format at this time is probably not worth it.
Who cares about deniability or skepticism in an apocalyptic scenario as described? Do you really think cool heads would prevail if China was put in a such a situation? Chaos, and desperate people would be the result, with a nuclear arsenal in the mix. And they would, most likely, blame whoever they want, proofs and rationality be damned.
Keep in mind, I don't deny that the military can find uses for what the article describes. But, to go from this, to deliberately provoking WW3 by massively launching such a weapon on China is suicide. It would provoke a counter-attack, guaranteed, no matter the political arguments.
Plausible deniability is fine when the targeted countries can't counter-attack, or the matter is relatively minor. But, directly against China and with world-ending repercussions? No way.
> Within 6 months half the worlds population would be gone.
Within 6 months, a country with nuclear weapons is forced in a desperate situation.
What could go wrong?
Is there really a point to such a scenario between nuclear powers? It doesn't make much sense to me. The US might as well launch all its warheads from the start.
Call me cynical, but in my opinion, any company using the service of such agencies, have to know the possibility of abuses and unethical practices that might happen. They may even count on it, but with the great benefit that they now have plausable deniability.
Champagne is literally the name of the area where the product comes from. It makes perfect sense that anything that doesn't come from the region Champagne, isn't champagne... Call it sparkling wine, it's fine, but not champagne. And it applies to most local products. Camembert? Comes from a specific town, which is called Camembert. Beaujolais? The name of the province. And the list goes on. It doesn't sound "absolutely ridiculous" to me.
> What might be worse is it's quite possible Boeing is finding out through this reporting.
_If_ Boeing really is behind all this, they may well be unaware of the specific details, sure. But so what? This doesn't make them any less responsible. So I don't understand what makes this "worse".
This is what Bloomberg's article refers to as "unrelated reasons" for Apple cutting ties with Supermicro in 2016.
> Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Apple severed ties with Supermicro the following year, for what it described as unrelated reasons.
And then as an "unrelated and relatively minor security incident" later on.
I won't deny that the tech crowd can influence things, but it's become quite hard for regular users to quit the whole Google panoply of services and tech products. Mail, browser, maps, dns, search, etc... It isn't painless and easy to abandon all of this and I have doubts even tech-savvy influencers can counter it at this point, only by word of mouth.
And about how Chrome got a foothold in the first place, I distinctly remember Google agressively advertising their own product on their search engine page, and bundling the binary with everything under the sun (Adobe Reader, anti-virus, etc...). Every time you installed software, there was a good chance Chrome was included with it. Tech influencers had their part in the success of Chrome, but it definitely wasn't the only factor, or maybe even the most important one.
Why not use a browser extension? uBlock Origin is pretty good from what I hear. I use uMatrix by the same dev, and it serves me well. Both work on major browsers (FF, Chrome, Opera, etc..).
Nothing surprising: Google's revenues come from advertisers. Advertising is its main focus. Not developing browsers, or even providing search results. Those are merely means to an end. And of course, all the users are targets for ads, NOT customers. A farmer's cows aren't his customers; same logic here.
Still, I prefer to follow Hanlon's razor, and not assume malice. This kind of mistake always seem obvious in hindsight, but if it was, why was there no one warning about it at the time?