Right, Microsoft have the ability to recover the key, because average people lose their encryption keys and will blame Microsoft if they can't unlock their computer and gain access to their files. BitLocker protects you from someone stealing your computer to gain access to your files, that's it. It's no good in a corporate setting or if you're worried about governments spying on you.
I'm honestly not entirely convinced that disk encryption be enabled by default. How much of a problem was stolen personal laptops really? Corporate machine, sure, but leave the master key with the IT department.
They have a recovery sheet you can print. If you lose your key, you can use the recovery information on that piece of paper to regain access. You put the recovery information in a safe place.
That is also exactly why people like myself are so against passkeys, there are no offline recovery.
I don't think that's motivated by money. The US companies simply solved more interesting problems. Working for a start up in the Bay area trying to invent a new industry, or scale systems to global is generally more interesting than working on a CRM system for mid-size lumberyards in Sweden. The CRM system pays well enough to have a comfortable lifestyle and provide for your family, but it's a little boring if you're 25 with a shiny new CS degree.
Assuming that people are solely motivated by money, which most aren't. You can't pay me enough to put my children into a school system that has "active shooter" drills. After a certain point money stops being a motivation, that point is well within the average EU tech salary band (perhaps excluding places like Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovenia and that general area).
My wife and I have been helping a friend of the family move and part of it was dealing with the hoarding. The part in the article about "just buying a new umbrella" is so relatable. We where moving our friend and she needed an extension cord, rather than looking through her boxes, her first instinct was to just order a new one (she already have 15, but she didn't want to look for them, in her 40sqm apartment).
Deciding on what to keep and what to get rid of it also mental struggle for those helping. In our case we just watched as kitchen equipment, complete, and expensive, dinner set, furniture, art, family heirlooms and new unworn clothes got de- prioritized in favour of unread magazines, hundreds of VHS tapes, and thousands of DVDs and BluRays with endless recording of talkshows and random TV programs. She has been following a second rate pop duo band since the 1970s and the idea of missing an article or a TV appearance is unthinkable, so tossing valuable belongings is preferable to throwing out 5 years of unopened magazine on the off chance that there might be a nugget of information she didn't have. It's mentally taxing seeing someone basically throwing away their life that way. We know that she'll never look through those magazine or even hook up the VHS player to figure out which tapes to keep. When she dies, all that's left is a ton of junk which her family do not care about and it will all go to the dump.
I have such huge respect for anyone spending their time helping hoarders every day, the mental load is just massive.
I have a hoarder friend, who is very cognizant that she suffers from a mental illness.
Her motif is a bit different: she has childhood trauma from her mother secretly throwing away her things, and assigns emotional value to anything that might be usable in the future (essentially safeguarding it against secret destruction by the mental image of her mother).
I've known someone like that too, and in her case it's because she never had anything when she was a kid. So she can take agonizingly long to let go of anything even if it's obviously ruined or worthless because it might be useful in some undefined way in the future.
While I don't think this is trauma in the traditional sense, it might be something similar. My father-in-law, who known her for decades, told me that it's a crush on one of the band members. Basically a teenage crush that never got resolve or replaced by actual relationships.
I don't know about others, but we have special rules for Google, Bing, and a few others, rate-limiting them less than some random bot.
The problem is scrapers (mostly AI scrapers from what we can tell). They will pound a site into the ground and not care and they are becoming increasingly good at hiding their tracks. The only reasonable way to deal with them is to rate-limit every IP by default and then lifting some of those restrictions on known, well behaving bots. Now we will lift those restrictions if asked, and frequently look at statistics to lift the restrictions from search engines we might have missed, but it's an up hill battle if you're new and unknown.
Old scanners were SCSI, which made me wonder if you could use them as boot devices, if you could stuff the scanner driver and OCR software into the BIOS. Might be easier now that we have uEFI.
Shame I used to have an SCSI scanner but I already disassembled it for parts.
One can write a simple bootloader, which reads bytes printed on a paper sheet to memory then boots it. Something like: black (0), white (1) or long rectangle (1), short rectangle (0). Wonder about the storage capacity of the A4 paper.
It's the same as long Twitter posts, strung together by endless tweets a few years ago. People have a platform, they use that. If you don't make it a habit to post long articles, why bother with a new platform when the one you have will suffice?
Making a substack, or an account on Medium is "yet another thing" and many simply cannot be bothered and I don't blame them.
If I understand Kagi's blog post correctly, then here's what happened, chronologically:
Kagi makes deals with many search engines so they can have raw search results in exchange for money.
Google says: no, you can't have raw search results because only whales can get those. Only thing we can offer you is search results riddled with ads and we won't allow you to reorder or filter them.
Kagi thinks Google's offer is unacceptable, so Kagi goes to a third party SERP API, which scrapes Google at scale and sells the raw search results to Kagi and others.
August 2024: Court says Google is breaking the law by selling raw search results only to whales.
December 2025: Court orders that for the next six years, 1. Google must no longer exclude non-whales from buying raw search results, 2. Google must offer the raw search results for a reasonable price, and 3. Google can no longer force partners to bundle the results with ads.
December 2025: Google sues the third-party scraping companies.
January 2026: Google says "hey, the old search offering is going to go away, there's going to be a new API by 2027, stay tuned."
I don't really see any mentioning of a new API, beyond their Vertex AI thing, and I don't know how comparable that might be. Also it is capped at 50 domains (by default).
It is perhaps a clever legal workaround. They must sell access to their index, but the verdict didn't state how much of it you can buy access to at any one time. So they put a limit of 50 domains, because that accommodates everyone who's not a search engine, but effectively blocks Kagi and Ecosia, while not exactly refusing to sell to them.
> I don't really see any mentioning of a new API, beyond their Vertex AI thing
I was referring to the following statement about full web search where they don’t mention a 50-domains limit:
> if your use case necessitates full web search, contact us to express your interest in and get more information about our full web search solution. Your transition to an alternative solution needs to be completed by January 1, 2027.
It's only a "clever" workaround in a captured legal system that isn't interested in anti-monopoly outcomes. Any competent legal system would slap that shit down. Just the thought that they could "hack this ruling with one weird trick" is infuriating.
Among the various rulings, Google is supposed to provide access at market rates... which they are. At least for what is published: $5 per thousand queries is market rate for a product like this - see Brave's Search API pricing https://api-dashboard.search.brave.com/app/plans?tab=ai.
Granted, that is scoped to 50 domains. But we don't know if the enterprise package, which allows full web search, isn't roughly market rate.
Running this on Azure Postgresql, even migrating to CosmosDB, cannot be cheap. I know that OpenAI have to deal/relationship with Microsoft, but still, this has to be expensive.
This is however the most down to earth: How we scale Postgresql I've read in a long time. No weird hacker, no messing around with the source code or tweaking the Linux kernel. Running on Azure Postgresql it's not like OpenAI have those options anyway, but still it seems a lot more relatable than: We wrote our own drive/filesystem/database-hack in Javascript.
I'm honestly not entirely convinced that disk encryption be enabled by default. How much of a problem was stolen personal laptops really? Corporate machine, sure, but leave the master key with the IT department.
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