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Julien Voisin blogs:
Today, I updated my Firefox, and had a new icon on my toolbar: pocket. I took at quick look at the ToS and privacy policy; here is my tl;dr:
Read it Later, Inc. is collecting a lot of intimate information and is tracking you.
When you share something through Pocket with a friend, the emails contains spying material using malware-like techniques to track your friends.
They are sharing those information with trusted third parties (Could be anyone they are doing business with.).
The policy might change, and it's your responsibility to check Pocket's website to see if it has.
[...] The Pocket implementation is not an extension (while it was available as an extension), it's implemented in Firefox. You can not remove it, only disable it, by going in about:config, since this option is not available in the preferences menu.
What the hell is pocket? on Mozilla's site:
The Pocket for Firefox button lets you save web pages and videos to Pocket in just one click. Pocket strips away clutter and saves the page in a clean, distraction-free view and lets you access them on the go through the Pocket app. All you need is a free account, an Internet connection and the Pocket button.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:14PM
I read the PDF. Looks damning on the surface, but it's all undocumented allegations and quotes out of context. That it's a class action suit and not an actual investigation causes me to eye its credibility and interpretation-of-events well-salted and from a safe distance.
It's important to remember that class action suits are not about exposing wrongdoing or making things right. They are entirely about making lawyers rich (one plaintiff gets rich as a byproduct, everyone else gets a token settlement and ultimately higher prices -- where d'you think the money comes from to pay for all this??) Remember that the lawyer got 30-50% of the core settlement, in cash. As a rule the lawyer picks the target (here being Intel), then basically hires someone to be the plaintiff (get 'em to claim they were wronged and they both make out like bandits... funny how sometimes a given lawyer and plaintiff have an ongoing relationship). Class action suits are so inherently crooked as to invalidate whatever they're supposedly meant to redress. Remember there is no one investigating whatever evidence is presented, other than the defense's lawyers. There's absolutely no independent corroboration of anything. There's no way of knowing if maybe AMD and the lawyer had an understanding on the side, either. You sue them, we look good in the marketplace.
Intel was the target because they had the deep pockets. If AMD had the deeper pockets, they'd have been the target instead (doesn't take much to give a class-action suit an opening that will hold up in court, because it's not about proof as we'd think of it, only about convincing the court to make someone pay, not so hard in today's legal climate). Consider that this is about events going on 15 years ago, and if that's really relevant to anything today. One reason you do class-action over old events is that by now a lot of the evidence that could nix your suit is gone to the bit bucket -- makes it hard to disprove even if what you've got is totally out of context. Sometimes it comes out years later that the evidence presented was bogus, too (eg. Erin Brockovich case).
And once there's a class action suit, the company being sued *cannot* admit wrongdoing, even if they might otherwise, cuz that would be legal suicide.
I suspect if you had access to the same level of documents out of AMD, you'd be twice as shocked (especially considering how much massaging of their gaming benchmarks was going on back in the K6/K7 era, tho looks like more of same today, to me). I can tell you for a fact they hid fatal bugs like the won't-do-32bit-OS bug I mentioned before. Ever wonder why Windows insisted on running in 16bit mode on some AMD boards? That was it. I wouldn't know about it either except a 13 year old friend had nothing better to do than harass AMD engineers til he got an explanation (and a replacement chip) ... under the table. "You didn't hear it from us." Back then, AMD didn't publish errata at all.
That there wasn't as much effort put into AMD boards? Not so from what I saw -- when you get high-end companies like Tyan supporting AMD in their server-class boards, well, that argument kinda breaks down. Cheaper tends to attract cheaper, and AMD was pursuing the lower end, so we got all those AMD+VIA pieces of shit to satisfy the cheapskate end of the market, but that's the same market force that puts cheap all in the same box together everywhere, not just tech. Go to Walmart and look at cheap tools, you won't find any German carbide tips in the made-in-China set.
Dunno if it's the bug you're talking about but about 5-6 years ago I was at a friend's shop and he was having hell's own time with an AMD64, not sure what model but whatever was their top-of-the-line at the time, on a primo Tyan server board ... put a high-end nVidia card on it and use Windows magnifier, and the thing would lock up every time. Put an AMD32 on the board, or anything but an nVidia, and the problem went away.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.