Apple stock is up 3%, strongly implying that this ruling is good for Apple as well. That is in contradiction to a lot of folks saying that this ruling means Google won't have to pay Apple. While the terms of the deal with Apple will likely change, based on the stock price increase, Apple will likely end up with a different deal (if not better).
Another thing to note, contrary to some comments, is that Google is still allowed to make a deal with Apple to be the default search engine, but with extra rules.
```
Google also would be permitted to pay Browser Developers, including Apple, to set Search as the default GSE, so long as the Browser Developer (1) can promote other GSEs and (2) is permitted to set a different GSE on different operating system versions or in a privacy mode and makes changes, if desired, on an annual basis.
```
> Apple stock is up 3%, strongly implying that this ruling is good for Apple as well.
It's been decades since stock market represented reality. If that was the case TSLA wouldn't shoot up on every report showing massive revenue loss. The stock market is one big meme wheel.
To add on: a 3% stock shift means that the search-engine deal was worth >=3% of the stock. That is massive free cashflow. In 2022, Google paid Apple $20B (full profit bec negligible costs) while Apple's total profit was around $100B. 20% of Apple's total profit came from Google's search deal. Based on this, I am sure the stock price worth would be much higher than 3% (actual numbers are complicated because stock price accounts for future growth of things).
I’m not necessarily suggesting that this content was written by AI, but the use of side headings for each point does make it seem AI-generated. That shouldn’t be an issue, though, since that’s exactly how I use AI myself.
I followed this case when it happened. It was $16M at the time, not sure how it became $65M now. I suppose it doesn't matter - any number above $100k probably grants the same punishment*
Interesting side-note : the people he took/stole from - they offered him 10% if he returned the rest. He said no in a tweet trolling them.
Contrary to the opinions in this thread, I think he was smart to run away. Remember that he did this from Canada, not the US. Countries don't have the same extradition treaties with Canada that they do with US.
If he had stayed, he would almost certainly be convicted. No court can possibly understand "code is law". Courts' job is only to interpret the law, not make the law. And the law was not written for crypto. You cannot fit a square in a circle without distortion.
What I think would have happened is the courts, rather than introducing novel precedent, would have preferred to just rely on existing case law and declare him a criminal.
Another interesting side-note : the judge presiding the case made a public comment asking the guy to come back to Canada promising him a fair trial. The guy didn't show up - maybe he didn't receive the message.
Overall, even with the benefit of hindsight, we still can't be sure if he was smart to exploit this or not. Forced to live in a few countries but with a lot of money.
* It's because (1) laws were designed when numbers were lower (no one had $16M to steal); (2) humans can't visualize big numbers (individually, $16M is just as big as $65M in my head)
Doesn't seem worth it. Live as a fugitive, with your face publicly known, so you always have to watch your back from criminals who'd jump at the chance to extort you once they found out who you are.
"extort" is a pretty benign word for torture. I'm pretty sure there are criminals that will kidnap him and then cut off fingers one by one and do worse things until he gives up the money.
Incredible coincidence. I was making a new tab extension for myself today. Well, more accurately, I was making ChatGPT and Claude to make a new tab extension for me. Wonder if this is frequency bias or just an incredible coincidence.
I think Chrome should include a way for users to customize their home page a lot more - with custom greetings, calendar, tasks, etc integration.
> Uber or Lyft are more convenient for the customer
Gross understatement!
1) You can find a cab wherever (almost) and whenever (24x7) - you don't have to hail a cab for minutes/hours (even worse was not knowing when/if the cab would even arrive).
2) Much safer. Emergency support + seeing the route on GPS (can see the path on the driver's uber app) + rating system.
3) Better behaviour, enforced by rating system. Yes, it's not perfect, but much much better than cabs. Cab drivers were regularly abusive, knowing there were no repurcussions. Unfortunately, humans only behave when there's consequences.
4) No scamming vulnerable un-informed people. Cabs were known for scamming foreigners or un-informed people.
I can point out a few more things.
Calling it `more convenient` is a massive understatement.
> but the drivers are being abused by Uber or Lyft. Which is less than ideal.
This can be fixed by regulation. Just because a new technology brought a new problem, that doesn't mean we should discard the technology and go to its worse predecessor.
Remember : there is a reason the new technology took over its predecessor.
I think we can have both : the benefits of digital ride-share + good regulation for drivers to ensure they can maintain their livelihood.
PS : that's until driverless waymo/tesla take over everything...
> I think we can have both : the benefits of digital ride-share + good regulation
Not in the US, who don't believe in regulations. But yeah, my point was that the best would be the convenience of those apps without the abuse. It seems possible outside the US, though: I believe Greece had banned Uber from the beginning on, and Taxis ended up building a similar app.
> that's until driverless waymo/tesla take over everything...
Oh right, it's the year of the fully autonomous car! Or was it last year? Or 2016?
> Oh right, it's the year of the fully autonomous car! Or was it last year? Or 2016?
Just because CEOs have been hyping this tech up to raise valuations doesn't mean it will never happen. They said the same about landing rockets - now, it's a regular thing.
It's pretty clear that driverless is coming - exact timeline is unclear. Whether in 3 years, 5 years, or a decade, but it's coming.
I have faced this exact problem with Canadian govt forms.
Evince doesn't support them. They are so specific about only adobe acrobat to fill out the forms.
I can open them in firefox but can't update them properly
The only option is to use my barely hanging on 10-yr old windows machine.
Let's hope that eventually they move on to a simpler web form.
I see a bunch of comments about whether gambling should be banned or not. But what about enforcement : can you ban it?
Nowadays, gambling is on 2 fronts : in-person and online. I am not sure about % distribution between them but I suspect online is not too small.
In-person gambling operations should be fairly easy to ban.
But online is a different problem because there will always be some country where gambling websites are legal.
And what's stopping gamblers from bypassing online restrictions (VPNs, cryptocurrencies, etc)?
I think an un-enforceable law holds no value and shows naive idealism. I agree that banning gambling would save the in-person gamblers but eventually, we risk them converting to online gamblers. (If vast majority of gambling is in-person, then maybe it's worth it).
It's an interesting coincidence that gambling laws are becoming more permissive in most places now that online gambling is becoming more prevalent. Another comment wonderfully put it as a possible prisoners dilemma. If place#1 bans gambling, gamblers from that place would go to place#2 that has gambling : now place#1 has both gamblers and less-tax-revenue while place#2 has same gamblers but more-tax-revenue.
> And what's stopping gamblers from bypassing online restrictions (VPNs, cryptocurrencies, etc)?
You ban financial institutions from facilitating illegal transactions and treat use of cryptocurrency to attempt to bypass restrictions as money laundering. In any case there's a large difference between "download the ESPN betting app" being advertised during games and "use a VPN to send monero to sportsbetting.ru" being info you can find from a dedicated scene. You don't really have to enforce things war-on-drugs style to keep it out of the mainstream/prevent major corporations from pushing it.
My understanding is that online gambling starting growing a lot more after legalization (and subsequent mass advertising), not the other way around. Disney has an official betting app now. Public schools push it on students.
A text-to-speech (TTS) model. Most good TTS models are closed-source. I intend on making this one open-source.
All the decent open-source ones are fairly basic with limited fine tuning and no alignment (RLHF).
I plan on adding those things. Although I am not sure if there will be any demand for it. Plus, there's a decent chance meta will make llama 4 speech output making this one obsolete.
I have often wondered : Why don't they attach a transponder on each athlete's center-of-chest (using some objective definition) and use that to time each athlete? That can be much much more accurate than any camera.
We can still use cameras for visual confirmation but transponders are much more accurate than any camera.
I'm not convinced they don't. If you look at Lyle's bib when he takes it off and shows it to everyone, there's something on the back. I thought it was another YuGiOh card at first, but then I thought, "That'd be the perfect place to put something to trigger some sort of check at the finish line."
I suspect it's probably just easier for them to print all the race numbers the same way, but only use the transponder on races where it doesn't need to be accurate, or they need to take several measurements throughout the race.
For the longer distances, the lap times and finish times show up almost instantly when there's a big gap between athletes, although I believe there's a laser at the finish line too.
Even if that is technically feasible that wouldn’t account for the lean, neck length etc. the center of the chest isn’t an accurate measurement given the current rules.
Can you explain what you mean by that? The only thing I can think of is that GPS has 2 modes : one civilian and other military use. But military use-case uses encryption so civilians can't use that mode anyway.
GPS was built primarily for the military and the signals available for civilian use were crippled to reduce accuracy. GPS receivers that provided high accuracy fell under the ITAR rules (ie you needed proper licensing to trade them)
Over time such restrictions have largely been lifted, but there are still US export controls on GPS receivers with particular features, such as those designed for use in high speed aircraft, those able to decode the still-military-only encrypted signals that piggyback GPS and provide greater positioning precision, or those designed for use in rockets/UAVs.
So, it's reasonable to assume that if you were to build your own, and do too good of a job, you would accidentally become subject to arms trade regulations, and that's probably not a place you want to unintentionally find yourself, particularly if you're publishing it as open source on the Internet :)
> those able to decode the still-military-only encrypted signals
How? I was under the impression that military-only signal was encrypted. And if someone breaks that encrpytion, blame should go to the poor handling of encryption rather than the person breaking it? Analogy : if you leave a classified document on the train and a passenger reads it, whose fault is it?
The Kraken RF project, which has multiple SDR radios next to each other, had demo code of a passive radar: the slight time delay by which signals arrived at the antennas could be used to detect large metal bodies (IOW: planes) in the sky.
They took down the demo code they were informed that they were violating ITAR regulations.
I'm relatively certain that the US government will be unmoved by your argument that it would be their fault if you built a GPS receiver that could decrypt the precise positioning signals ;)
Well, consider another analogy: a person leaves their door unlocked and another person goes in their home. It is still trespassing, even though the physical barrier has been intentionally disabled.
I'm not sure even what section of US code to check but it is certainly plausible that you can (for example) find a surplus device that decodes the signals on EBay and it's actually illegal to do it. You can find radios on EBay that broadcast on bands that are unlawful to use (or unlawful without certain licenses, &c).
I never really thought of that. That's a pretty interesting restriction. Although any party with access to warheads that can fly 1000+ mph probably can bypass the GPS restriction, no?
There was a guy in NZ (Bruce Simpson) who detailed on his blog how to make a DIY cruise missile. I think he got politely asked to stop doing so at some point.
BPS.Space on youtube is working on a DIY space-capable rocket and in a recent video he mentioned that he is not doing this as a tutorial and that his guidance system likely already wanders into ITAR territory, and thus he's self-censoring which parts he shares and which parts happen off-camera.
Ultimately these kinds of regulations are fairly silly because a sufficiently determined smart person can recreate the covered technologies from scratch, but here we are.
Any sufficiently smart person can accomplish the same original work as any other sufficiently smart person.
But when the details of these things are published or otherwise made openly available, it doesn't take nearly as many smarts to duplicate these accomplishments.
Quite often, that's good: It's easy for a dullard like me to build a circuit or to re-use some clever assembler code when someone else has published it for my own tinkering around the house. In this way, it's a pretty great world to live in; it is often very simple to stand on the shoulders of giants and get some things done that I could probably never do on my own.
But sometimes, that's bad: We don't live in a perfect world. Enemies exist. Things like ITAR can't prevent a sufficiently smart person from doing anything, but they do make it a lot harder for them to get started.
correct. and the idea here is to put up at least some form of barrier to entry, because any good guidance is also nuclear warhead delivery guidance at a certain point.
I launched a high altitude balloon as part of a summer school program over a decade ago and we checked on edge cases. Off the shelf GPS are supposed to not work beyond a certain height 18,000 m and/or speed 515 m/s to be a barrier for use as a weapon. Some hardware treat that as AND; some treat that condition as OR. The term to look up is “CoCom Limits”.
Another thing to note, contrary to some comments, is that Google is still allowed to make a deal with Apple to be the default search engine, but with extra rules.
``` Google also would be permitted to pay Browser Developers, including Apple, to set Search as the default GSE, so long as the Browser Developer (1) can promote other GSEs and (2) is permitted to set a different GSE on different operating system versions or in a privacy mode and makes changes, if desired, on an annual basis. ```