A MiniDisc community member based in Japan contacted Sony just a few months ago and confirmed that they were still producing one model of blanks (the MDW80T, which is (was?) still sold at retail in Japan and are the blanks used for most Bandcamp MDs (which themselves are usually prepared by a company called BandCDs in the UK)
Happy to discuss MD more if people have questions!
1) China is a country, and in that country people use Windows and make /stuff/ that runs on Windows. A flash tool, which was only intended to be distributed to OEMs, only being found on obscure forums is in line with what I've experienced with similar NAND or BIOS flashers.
2) Any USB storage can contain malware. The driver that this one stores is digitally signed by Microsoft as mentioned in the article.
3) If there was a MBR boot block or EFI file, sure. But there isn't. See 2. And that would still require the user to have Secure Boot disabled and USB as the first boot option.
4) So any device with a universal USB controller is "prove[d] backdoored"?
So it's all going down now eh? For those not on the pulse of CdnPoli, this is a primer I wrote a few weeks ago but is still widely relevant:
What we've been watching for the last 18 months has been the slow collapse of the governing Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau (LPC) - Polling and projections have been turning heavily against the LPC since last summer (2023), and the internal party cracks started showing after a by-election (special election, to fill an empty seat) loss in Toronto this summer and then one in Montreal not long after. Both Toronto and Montreal are considered the LPC's "heartland" and losses there suggest that the polls are correct in predicting a huge defeat for the LPC in a general election. A few Members of Parliament (MPs) began pressuring Trudeau to step down as party leader (and therefore Prime Minister (PM)) and some announced that they would not run again. At time of writing, a third by-election has just been lost by the Liberals.
The next Canadian general election must be held no later than October 2025. That is because the last election was in late 2021. That 2021 election led to a "minority government" in which the Liberal Party won the most individual seats (districts, ridings, constituencies, etc.) but not more than half of them. As a Westminster Parliament with plurality voting (First Past the Post, winner-takes-all) coalitions are not common in Canada, and the minority government usually operates on a vote-by-vote basis with other parties, while allowing their party to form the government. Some votes, notably ones about the budget, are called "confidence votes" and if one fails, the government has "lost the confidence of the House of Commons" and must either call an election or allow opposition parties to try to gain the confidence of the house and form a new government.
Minority governments do not usually last the full length before another general election must be called by law. This one has lasted longer than average because the LPC signed an agreement with a smaller party called the NDP. The NDP demanded some new welfare policies such as subsidized dental care and some medications and in return would support the LPC in confidence votes. The NDP's leader, Jagmeet Singh, announced this fall that he was ending the agreement with the LPC and would only support the government on a case-by-case basis. This is likely to save some of his party's own polling numbers, as they have also faltered (the junior party in coalitions or similar situations almost always fall more than the senior party, worldwide) but do result in the NDP looking weak as they heavily criticize the LPC government yet vote to keep it governing the country. The NDP do not want an election right now for several reasons: their own polling numbers are not good, they can squeeze more out of a minority LPC than the Conservatives who are strong favourites to win the next election (we'll get to them, don't worry), the party machine is short on money (they recently spent a lot of their funds on a close provincial election in British Columbia) and possibly because Singh wants to ensure himself and a few of his MPs have been elected long enough to meet the minimum requirement for a government pension. This last point has been heavily debated and used in Conservative attack ads, so make of it what you will.
So, what are Canadians unhappy about? The biggest item is cost of living - most things boil down to how much it costs for a roof over your head and food in your fridge. Housing costs have been astronomical in Vancouver and Toronto for decades, but have been rapidly increasing across the country. Another is immigration - like many countries, Canada's population is aging and there has long been a cross-partisan consensus that immigration is a great way to counter this. But since the pandemic the LPC increased immigration levels massively, especially in 2 sectors: student visas which were being taken advantage of by "diploma mill" shoddy private colleges that promised immigrants a pathway to residence, and low-skill temporary foreign workers (TFWs) who are employed in fast food or other entry-level positions. Not only has this put much more strain on the housing supply in major urban areas like Toronto or Vancouver, but it also brings down wages and facilitates abuse of these unfortunate people who just want to build a better life for themselves and their family. The LPC has also faced a lot of scandals. Every government is corrupt and has scandals, but there have been a lot from this government: from SNC-Lavalin and WE Charity earlier, to ArriveCAN and a cabinet minster lying about indigenous heritage to win government contracts more recently. As in the US, opioids have been devastating to Canadians, with tent encampments and overdose deaths no longer limited to just Vancouver's infamous Downtown Eastside. Police departments complain that the justice system is not responding well to repeat offenders either due to bail reforms or bleeding-heart judges. Finally there's the anti-incumbent bias we've seen in elections worldwide throughout 2024 and the Canadian trend of voting out a government after around a decade in power.
So let's get into who are likely to come next - the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), led by Pierre Polievre since 2022. The CPC was last in power under Stephen Harper from 2006-2015 and has a lot of support in the western provinces of Canada, plus competes with the LPC and NDP in the suburbs of major cities. Polievre is a pugilistic career politician who has very successfully channelled the anger Canadians are feeling into a commanding polling lead. Polievre has been called a populist because he has levied much more criticism of the LPC government than policy suggestions, and for his schtick of reducing issues into "verb the noun" such as "axe the [carbon] tax", "build the homes" and "end the crime." But listening to his earlier speeches in Parliament suggest that Polievre is much more of a policy "wonk" than his current campaigning suggests.
When Parliament returns in March with a new Liberal Party leader (and Prime Minister), it is almost certain to be defeated immediately and an election will be called.
> When Parliament returns in March with a new Liberal Party leader
Trudeau will ask for, and likely get, a prorogation to give them time to choose a new leader. Add the 51 days for the election and it's likely to be a fall election.
> The government(s) went way overboard with Pfizer proof of purchase QR codes to get lunch. Especially when uptake was 80%+
> They also went overboard by locking down again over the holidays when everyone was already catching the most contagious Omicron. People not being able to go to a gym to stay fit, that already needed a barcode, swayed a lot of the public that things were going on too long.
> But the obnoxiousness of the truckers also went too far for too long. The news of rifles and arrests in Alberta was (obviously) too far.
> I don't have a citation on hand, but at one point more than a third of Canadians did support either the truckers explicitly or their aims, and that's a higher percentage than voted for the current governing party. Support was higher among younger people, sometimes over 50%. But this percentage decreased as time went on.
> The government also completely failed to act diplomatically or to de-escalate the situation. Instead we had inflammatory rhetoric and a focus on some silly flags (which should be condemned, but a lot of people have doubts as to their sincerity, and I've seen some pretty gross signs against the unvaxxed too)
> Some people, even in this comment section, take their rhetoric and opposition too far.
> There is no doubt in my mind that the more time passes, the more we will look at Canada's response to the pandemic (especially in its later years) as a horrendous failure that harmed trust in public health, harmed social cohesion, and harmed our democratic and civil institutions. Everyone failed and everyone suffered as a result.
You mentioned specifically restrictions on lunch. Do you just mean that there are more office workers eating lunch because it is during the day? Or were the vaccine passport rules different depending on what meal or time of day?
It was just an example - in most places the vaccine passports were required for any sit down service where you have a server (not fast food or to go orders)
Quebec did impose curfews, and overall had the strictest restrictions by a long way. Around the time of the protests there were plans to tax or fine the unvaccinated and big box retailers were already restricting access to all parts of the store save for the pharmacy.
I guess what I'm not getting here is this: the rage about the "everyone that went too far" doesn't seem to have extended to the people who actually did that. By which I mean our provincial governments, with their ad hoc dubious and last minute irrational responses. Specifically, Doug Ford who seems to have suffered not a bit in terms of support but enacted the most draconian of COVID restrictions and lockdowns, all at the last minute and after numbers were skyrocketing, not before...
Meanwhile Trudeau did what... airports and borders. The feds influence here was not high. ArriveCAN was a debacle, obviously. But the trucker thing was US initiated.
I don't think there's anything the feds could have done to head this off. They couldn't make the trucker vax thing not happen, not with Biden insisting on it. They had no control over what was happening in workplaces and schools across the country. Their biggest fault, I think, was being weak -- which the opposition took advantage of to create mayhem and try to bring the govt down.
That the people organizing the protest were in part former oil industry lobbyists and had previously been involved in climate change denying anti-carbon tax protests should also make one pause about what the motivations might be and where the money might be coming from, as well?
Regardless, I think we agree: by January with Omicron showing that it would transmit like crazy regardless of vaccine, mandates everywhere should have been dropped.
The protests in Ottawa and the two border crossings ballooned from just being about the trucker mandates (which really didn't impact that many people, since trucking industry reps reported rates of vaccination in line with the general population) to being an all-out protest against restrictions in general. I did see several protests in BC, including at the legislature.
What the federal government could have at least tried, in my opinion, was to be humble and release the tension. Trudeau's sanctimoniousness manifested itself too strongly and only escalated the situation, which he had seen coming earlier in the year by calling mandates "divisive" - presumably before polling numbers showed that Canadians are mostly a compliant bunch who didn't have much time for tinfoil hat types (research by UBC and VCH later showed that those already disadvantaged, such as the homeless, were vaccinated at a lower rate than the general population and disproportionately impacted by mandates. I'd love to link citations here but finding 2-3+ year old studies and articles is painful) Instead, several of Trudeau's statements at this time, including "do we tolerate these people" became rallying cries for the populists.
Ok: what could the feds do to release tension, concretely? They had no ability to undo any mandates, since 90% of them came from the provinces, not the feds. Likewise, the trucker thing was coming from the US.
I guess they could have maybe done some changes in tone -- but they may also have been seen by the population as giving into what were frankly seen by most as fringe radicals.
And finally, the actual leaders of the convoy would not have been interested. This wasn't their first rodeo. They wanted to bring the govt down, and not because of COVID but because of everything -- they had previously been in Ottawa trying to pull a similar thing around "pipelines" and carbon tax.
Did it? Stickers or posters saying "keep our Pound!" were common on bus stops and street lights as a kid in the Home Counties in the 90s. Newspapers ran (mostly untrue) stories about market fruit stands needing to sell bananas by the KG rather than by the lb. Both the Tories and Labour had Euroskeptic wings since the 1970s.
Rightly or wrongly, the undercurrent of Brexit was there from the start of the EU and ebbed or flowed based on events of the day.
That's a great point; I'm glad you added that context and I'll take back that characterisation. I was mostly speaking through the lens of Farage's antics, and lacked the viewpoint of someone from the UK proper.
Interesting points, articulated much better than I could (or dare risk.)
However I don't think the author is particularly familiar with Vancouver despite the example given, in part due to the awkward "Vancouver, Canada" (missing the province is a surefire way of telling someone isn't from Canada) but also because BC is rife with the type of performative land acknowledgements and guilt mentioned in the rest of the piece. The Squamish Nation developments are fantastic and I support them wholeheartedly. But they are a minority case in a sea of government-endorsed (mandated?) performative gestures.
/e/ uses MicroG, which is a reverse-engineered re-implementation of some Google services. It requires spoofing the signature of the original Google apps, which official Lineage does not support for security reasons.
That is not true. MicroG works just fine on Lineage and there are no Google services on their AOSP distribution until you add them yourself. You have to manually Google the OS; not de-Google it.
Google servers and services are hard coded into the AOSP distribution at various points. These could be used to facilitate identification and tracking.
e/OS/ removes, replaces and/or anonymizes these. LineageOS does not.
> Why do we need a custom build of LineageOS to have microG? Can't I install microG on the official LineageOS?
> MicroG requires a patch called "signature spoofing", which allows the microG's apps to spoof themselves as Google Apps. LineageOS' developers refused (multiple times) to include the patch, forcing us to fork their project.
> Wait, on their FAQ page I see that they don't want to include the patch for security reasons. Is this ROM unsafe?
> No. LineageOS' developers decided not to include this patch for various reasons.
The signature spoofing could be an unsafe feature only if the user blindly gives any permission to any app, as this permission can't be obtained automatically by the apps.
Moreover, to further strengthen the security of our ROM, we modified the signature spoofing permission so that only system privileged apps can obtain it, and no security threat is posed to our users.
Calyx is good but not officially available for as many devices. LineageOS is the most supported one. I don't trust random forum builds of smartphone OS - and they're too old/never existed anyways in case of my devices.
I only speak English, but I have found and theorized that one's ability to learn and retain a L2 is heavily affected by your society's "need" to communicate outside of the national language. This article largely reinforces that theory.
If people do not have a need to learn another language, it becomes an uphill battle. People in Finland report higher levels of English competency than people in France (despite French being much closer to English than Finnish is) because there are so many fewer Finnish speakers. Finns wanting to experience warm beaches or global cities need to communicate when traveling to those places outside of Finland. France meanwhile has mountains, beaches, a big domestic market, ample media, and international reach.
Japan is much more like France than Finland - the geographic diversity allows one to ski or sunbathe within the same country. The domestic market for goods and services is huge. Japan creates and exports so much culture that English speakers wish to learn Japanese to consume more of it. When there is little "need" to learn another language, it is not only less enticing but actually harder to do so.
This culminates in anglophones being at a disadvantage in acquiring a L2 compared to nearly anyone else. A lot of people worldwide do want to practice their English with a native speaker. Many international institutions use English as the lingua franca. Even during a layover in Montreal, my (then) girlfriend ordered a smoothie in French and was replied to in English (this could be a commentary on Canadian bilingualism, but I'll leave that for another day) - it's hard for an anglophone to practice and perfect another language when the world around them already speaks better English than their L2.
So considering Japan's strong domestic market, culture, and the stark differences between the languages, it was never a shock to me that their English proficiency isn't where one would immediately expect it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and the deep experience behind them.
Suomi mainittu. As an English speaker who moved to Finland and has been steadily learning Finnish over the last few years, I definitely have to agree: My progress would probably be faster (and more painful) if I actually had any immediate need to speak Finnish.
Don't twist my words here, I am still extremely grateful that Finns speak such excellent English. It's the only reason I felt like I could make it finding a job here after moving right after completing college. And it's definitely a cornerstone of Finnish success in international markets. I would very, very gladly take this tradeoff again. But, yes, trial by fire usually sets learning alight.
It's about as hard as you think, yeah. Its quasi-isolate nature means that both its vocabulary and its grammar structure are pretty alien to anyone from the outside looking in.
On the other hand, Finns are super active on the Internet. There's a lot of Finnish content out there if you know where to look. ChatGPT writes passable, if clearly English-word-ordered, Finnish, as confirmed by my native speaker wife. So it's a long climb to the top -- but at least you have a lot of comprehensible input to work with. Can't quite say that for, say, the Algonquian languages.
I have a somewhat related theory about English in Europe: The smaller countries are better at English partly because they subtitle rather than dubbing. That means that when they see English-language movies or watch English-language television, they're hearing English rather than their native language. I think this helps people maintain some level of English proficiency years after they leave school.
AIUI the available evidence is that that doesn't help (and that matches my experience of watching a lot of Japanese content with subtitles in my younger years). What goes into memory is the semantics you understood, and when you're taking in translated content you take in the version in your native language and discard the foreign sounds that didn't contribute to the part you understood.
I felt this from working in the Netherlands. One thing that may change it in larger countries is digital TV, the broadcast can have both original and dubbed soundtracks available.
That's probably most of it, but the way Japan typically teaches English is sort of notoriously bad. That probably doesn't help either.
> If people do not have a need to learn another language, it becomes an uphill battle.
You do see some Japanese companies talking up the need for English competency; I suppose if more and more companies there use English competency as one thing they're looking for in job applicants, that might cause a shift elsewhere, as suddenly there's a 'need' (and thus a motivation).
I would wager that most diplomats come from a very privileged upbringing. As the article indicates, wealthier families can afford private English tutoring, which causes some friction with proposed changes to testing standards.
They can and do, but struggle with the following problems:
- Assessing English proficiency. It's hard to do if you can't speak English yourself, and so they tend to fall back on numeric measures like test scores (which someone who has grown up overseas and speaks English at a native level might not bother to take, and someone who has grinded for a test might pass while having mediocre communication ability).
- Paying fluent English speakers enough to attract and keep them. Japanese salaries are low, and they tend to start all new hires at the same level and give gradual raises over time, with little consideration for special skills such as English ability. Fluent English speakers often either go overseas or work at international companies that pay more and also have better work-life balance.
- Many Japanese companies are rigid and formal in culture. Japanese people who have spent significant time overseas struggle to adjust, and they are not given the cultural leeway that a foreigner might be given.
- Control. There's a significant number of managers who are either micromanage-y or insecure about their own English ability and therefore can't just let a fluent speaker do their job without burdening them with nitpicky rules or insisting on rewriting things themselves.
Genuinely bilingual people, if they primarily come from the elite strata of Japanese society as the parent alleges, are not coming in as entry level employees, or even as middle management, but as upper management or consultants to upper management.
I’ve never heard of there being a shortage of vice presidents or managing directors before in any mid-size or larger company.
The usual reasons organisations find it impossible to do things: inability to maintain incentive alignment within the company, manifesting as unwillingness to reward genuine bilingualism with enough money/status to incentivise it.
That is my experience with Brazil as well, it is very uncommon to find people who speak good english there in part because nobody ever travels outside the country.
French is widely spoken throughout the world. If you speak French you can travel to Canada, the Caribbean, Africa and parts of South America without needing to speak another language. Also French is an official language in Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg as well as being widely spoken and taught as a second language in contentental Europe. Japan is spoken mostly in Japan and expat communities.
You're right that the simile starts falling apart when you look at it deeper, but on the whole I think it does provide a reasonable example: when you can experience international travel and business opportunities in your mother tongue it is less appealing and more difficult to learn another language. And this is what we see from French-speakers vs Finnish-speakers. Yes, French is much more global than Japanese is, but the end result is the same: if you speak French or Japanese, there are many more economic, cultural, and travel opportunities available without needing to learn a L2 than if you speak Finnish or Dutch or Hungarian. That's part of speaking a language with 100+ million speakers compared to 5 million speakers.
Ok, but what difference does that make in practice? Japanese people do not feel any compelling need to go outside Japan (many do not have passports) - they go on holiday within Japan (which has ski resorts, tropical islands, and everything in between) and consume entertainment in Japanese. I suspect many French people would still content speaking only French even if it wasn't spoken outside France, for the same reasons.
I think you're greatly overstating the usefulness of French; I've noticed that French-speaking people seem to have this misconception about the importance of their language, not grasping that it's no longer the late 1800s or early 1900s. French is only widely spoken in former French colonies, which are all generally economic backwaters (which probably has a lot to do with how poorly France treated its colonies). I'm not aware of any significant parts of South America where you can speak French, outside French Guyana: anywhere else, and you need to speak Spanish or Portuguese, though you might be able to get by with English just due to its popularity as an international language (which French is not).
French might be "official" in Belgium and Switzerland, but that's about as useful as it also being "official" in Canada. Good luck speaking French to people in British Columbia or Alberta; only people in Quebec speak it. The same is largely true in Belgium or Switzerland: go outside the French-speaking area and you're going to have trouble. Luxembourg is a micronation.
That's an interesting observation, and entirely correct from my experience in the Netherlands and other countries. Thank you for making me think!
In a more general case: it is hard to do hard things without a true need, and people consistently underestimate this. Learning a language is a great example; virtually everyone that moves to the Netherlands does not learn Dutch, because there is no need, but the Dutch speak English, because as a society we must. Many people that get rich, particularly in sales or banking or business, do it because they "have to" - socially or even financially. Plenty of people in relationships have problems and promise change to their partners - but don't really change until they must, when the divorce or breakup looms - and by then it's too late. Or, people wait until right before a deadline to do things; for more mundane daily things like work or cleaning, until it's late at night.
If you really want to do something, you need to be conscious about the doing. Routine and desire are important, but the best is to structure your life such that you must have the thing. You want to start a business? Schedule meetings, sign deals, find a cofounder that will get on your ass. You want to learn French, move to rural France and you simply will learn because you must. You want to get in shape? Join the military or the fire department. Extreme, yes - or not extreme enough? Shackleton, Grant's memoirs, Apollo 13 - Time and time again we as a species see that man rises to the challenge. One must only put the challenge in front of the man.
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