It's what I think too, BUT curiously is not the case for China. Imagine if the DeepSeek breakthroughs were patented and closed instead of published in the open. And here we are, and they're not patented and not built on patented technology.
Probably because DeepSeek creators were afraid government would just come and take it from them. The only solution was to open source it which is kind of a big middle finger to the Chinese government.
What code? An on-prem VMWare deployment is all about hardware, storage, networking, and fuck-tons of planning, budgeting, and approvals. There is little to no customer-written code in a typical VMWare farm, except maybe some Ansible or whatever for minor customizations and automation.
Only to the extent that the team is competent enough to properly test all that boilerplate code, which is very far from a given. A relative of mine in IT has had a large internal-tooling migration get dragged on for years by the persistently bug-ridden code of one of the groups working on it.
No PoC exploit, no real exploitability. I propose we use the term "CVE Kiddie" until this bullshit stops. It could even be a fake-advertised version header.
The vast majority of web servers out there¹ support partial download and have done for years. That the most common UA for accessing them (web browsers) don't support the feature² without addons, is not a server-side problem.
Sometimes there are server-side problems: some dynamic responses (i.e. files that are behind a user account so need the right to access checked before sending) are badly designed so that they uneccesarily break sub-range downloads. This could be seen as a “poor server” issue, but I think it is more a “daft dev/admin” or “bad choice of software” problem.
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[1] admittedly not all, but…
[2] wget and curl do, though not automatically without a wrapper script
Many sites also had an ftp server behind it. E.g. ftp.id.com and ftp.cdrom.com were two off the top of my head. Another I remember was downloading high resolution images of Tyan motherboards from ftp.tyan.com. Supermicro also had an ftp server you grabbed bios images from. I dont really recall ever having to download anything big via http. Mostly images, pdf's and small zip files.
Anyone remember DAP, Download Accelerator Plus? The colorful bars were nice. A part of my childhood, downloading shareware Windows games through dial-up.
Finding that piece of software around 2001-2002 was what allowed me to finally download a specific piece of, ahem, 'shareware', that was about 400 MB, zipped, that I would never have been able to finish on a 14.4kbps modem on a single very noisy phone line that usually dropped the call every 2 hours or so. It eventually took three days but the file came across uncorrupted. It wouldn't have been possible without the ability to resume downloads after dropped connections.
And that software download went on to allow me to start the path learning what I wanted to learn about, and that paved the way for my engineering degrees and thus setting me up for the last 20-some years. Wild how little pieces of the puzzle like that drive so much of your life.
(also a great app to download everything you wanted from a site, regex selections, etc.)
Makes several connections and downloads chunks in parallel, for some sites with limited upload (their, your download) speeds per session it really speeds up the downloads.
Sadly, not much development recently (9 months ago was the last commit)
You're right, except for the last sentence. Lack of financial literacy has some levels. One could refuse to use Credit Cards because they don't perceive the benefits (point programs or cashback) they could individually attain, but one can also refuse to use Pix because "I only have to pay my credit card invoice once at the end of the month and can spend without worries during the month" (which is even dumber, but is the reality we're living on).
The cashback you are given back is taken from a fraction of the fee levied on merchants by the Payment Processing company they use.
The only thing holding this system together is the lobby (also funded by a part of the aforementioned fee on merchants) by the Payment Processing industry to uphold laws that prohibit more expensive payments for more expensive payment methods, and also the extensive marketing (funded by guess what).
It's an extremely simple yet ingrained system, and the only way to topple it and stop paying hidden costs thinking you're getting an extremely good deal on cashback, is to peel back the curtains and realize it, and make most of the politically-active part of the country's population to do so too.
Credit card isn't more expensive than its main competitor, cash, though. It's just the costs of credit card acceptance are transparently added to each transaction, while the costs of cash are distributed over the whole day's cash transactions and so more opaque.
Merchants have a psychological (and in some countries, legal) barrier to charging more for cash than other payment methods, even though it's the least efficient. Given this, cash-back is the best way to share the efficiency gains with the end user. Maybe if Pix or Twint or debit cards or what-have-you are so efficient, they should also give consumers cashback.
Cashback is just giving part of the profit margin of the fees charged on the transactions to the customer. I would rather that profit margin gets split between the customer (lower prices) and merchant. Also, didn't the EU eliminate cashbacks by precisely price capping transaction fees?
I've seen merchants giving a discount for payment with Pix. And a few stores refuse credit cards and only accept debit and Pix (and cash?).
Also, isn't the main competitor to CC the debit card? And now in some countries instant payments? Is debit that rare in the US?
Although to be honest I'm not 100% sure if it isn't some tax evasion thing.
It could give cashback if it cost 3% of the transaction. But it’s it’s actually much cheaper. For credit cards you have to pay for the brand, the issuer and the acquirer. And each gets a nice cut.
Reducing merchant fees seems like a mistake if you are in competition with both cash (which has high intrinsic merchant costs) and credit cards (which has low intrinsic costs, but which are padded so they're closer to the costs of cash, with consumer cashback coming out of this padding). I'm certainly not going to _choose_ to receive less cashback, as a consumer.
Pix costs are very low and the fee for the merchant as well. They pay less for it and get the money instantly. That’s why many small merchants only accept pix and some big merchants offer discounts for payments using it.
Discounts for Pix vs cash sound cool and a fine alternative to cashback via the payment system. Though I can imagine this might be hard in some countries, where there is a strong pro-cash lobby.
I mean, the cashback is paid for out of the fees you pay for the service. In a world with low capped charges (EU etc) then you'll just pay less, which is equivalent to cashback and much fairer.
So long as the price is the same for cash and card (and Pix?), then you should pick the one that gives you the best kickbacks. I don't think capping CC fees will actually lower prices for consumers much (because merchants prefer round prices for psychological pricing). For evidence, see the fairly uniform pricing of products sold in euros between countries, despite varying vat rates between eurozone countries.
> see the fairly uniform pricing of products sold in euros between countries, despite varying vat rates between eurozone countries.
Huh, not sure I agree with that (the uniform pricing thing). I mean, one should believe that, but it doesn't appear to be true. For example, recently I saw a tablet for 208 euro (converted from GBP) on amazon.co.uk, approx 220 euro from amazon.de and 360 euro from amazon.ie, for the same item.
I was really surprised because I figured electronics would be pretty similarly priced across the EU/UK, but apparently not.
Suspicious transactions are a legitimate use-case for payment processing. If you don't fully trust who you're buying from, the scam preventions, chargebacks, refunds etc. work fine. But buying lunch or small chocolates, cigarretes etc with credit cards is INSANE.
