The British rail system releases as open data(JSON over AMQP) all train movements down to indidvidual signal blocks
You can view some of the the live maps here: https://www.opentraintimes.com/maps, but this is unique as far as I know.
I don't think it's really down to super-tight security as such, rather that there's no reason to release the data publically.
Ships and airplanes broadcast data because it's useful for collision avoidance and tracking. The international maritime and aerospace system is far too complicated and large that you could ever build a private network of every ship or plane operator sharing encrypted data, or that one company could set up receivers for the tracking data worldwide. A closed system wouldn't work.
Rail is both physically and legally a finite closed space. The network operator knows definitively where every train in their network is because they have sensors in the tracks. The network is responsible for preventing collisions, not the individual trains. They have contracts with every company which operates on their tracks and if these need their internal data they can get it. So there's simply no good reason why trains should be publically broadcasting their information, or why network operators would want to expose all their internal data.
And against the no positives there are negative sides - apart from a couple of famous cases I've not heard of it in Europe, but stealing from cargo trains seems to be big business in the US: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-17/los-ange...
In the UK the open tracking data also brought complaints from freight companies who feared competitors would use it to analyse their movements, figure out which traffic flows were the most profitable and use it for commercial advantage.
The determinant is the amount of money invested in infrastructure.
No matter whether the train operators and the network operator are private or a state monopoly, all decisions about major upgrades and new lines are made and funded by the government. The network operator just deals with the maintenance.
Nationalisation(or sometimes privatisation!) is seemingly seen by many as panacea, but it won't help you if your network runs at 150% capacity every day.
Sometimes it's because you need to support ancient esoteric hardware that's not supported by any other tools, or because you've built so much of your own tooling around a particular tool that it resembles application platform in it's own right.
Other times it's just because there are lots of other teams involved in validation, architecture, requirements and document management and for everyone except the developers, changing anything about your process is extra work for no benefit.
At one time I worked on a project with two compiler suites, two build systems, two source control systems and two CI systems all operating in parallel. In each case there was "officially approved safe system" and the "system we can actually get something done with".
We eventually got rid of the duplicate source control, but only because the central IT who hosted it declared it EOL and thus the non-development were forced, kicking and screaming to accept the the system the developers had been using unofficially for years.
There's the police and the criminal justice system for that.
I suggest you post your e-mail login details and here and a dump of the contents of your phone, then all of HN can all check through and see what crimes you're guilty of.
I'm sure you'll say you haven't committed any crimes, but why should we be expected to believe you if you don't share all your information with the world?
> There's the police and the criminal justice system for that.
Well yes, however there was an orchestrated effort to convince people that the system is not working. That effort was successful enough to generate public interest we observe now. Beyond morbid curiosity, there is a belief that the exposure may force the system to do now what it was supposed to do in the first place
This is all supposedly Epstein's property. Dead people have a very short list of rights or things that resemble rights that belong to their estate. Privacy and protection from slander aren't among those rights. You could argue that digging him up and gratuitously posting pictures of a postmortem would violate the right to dignity for corporeal remains. But apart from that, if you emailed Jeffrey, he has no power to keep that correspondence private.
When you sue someone, you can subpoena for evidence. Any evidence from that presented to the court is then public record. The police and criminal justice system doesn’t usually enforce privacy like that in criminal proceedings.
Are you trying to say that these documents shouldn’t be public because it violates someone’s right to privacy?
But there's no reasonable indication that the person you're replying to has committed any crime, while there is evidence that some of the people on Epstein's list, including Trump, have committed crimes. In fact, Trump made a big deal of asserting this, back when he didn't expect this to blow back on him.
It's not the same to ask for public disclosure for people likely to be involved in a crime, for which there is at least some initial (albeit inconclusive) evidence than it is to ask the same of a random person for which there is no evidence at all.
I would agree that anyone who is specifically named in an Act of Congress requiring that to happen, which Act is then duly signed into law[1], should release their information. That doesn't currently apply to anyone other than the late Jeffrey Epstein, so we are all good.
This system works by launching an official Windows image in Docker and then making an RDP connection to it. There are a couple of others too now like WinBoat
What all of them avoid mentioning is that the images were intended by Microsoft for test and development purposes on Windows and the license clearly states you need a valid Windows license to use them: https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/windows#license
I wonder if Microsoft will take some action to enforce this if these projects become popular.
Edit: This comment is incorrect, see below comment from
doctorpangloss
Microsoft doesn't care if a home or hobbyist user uses this, because enforcing the license against such a user is not worth it as the payout wouldn't even cover their own effort/lawyers.
Microsoft may absolutely care if you use this at work (even by accident, by bringing your personal machine to the office) since that's where they can collect a decent amount of money for a license breach.
speaking from office / work perspective microsoft is actually not the company that cares either, you receive a bounty/payout for reporting license violations within your company.
IANA (iamnotamerican) so cannot really confirm except for 2nd hand knowledge, but in my european country every company I've been around in just uses pirated everything.
Also this is a tool that breaches several agreements and laws, including the particulary nasty one of DMCA (breaking digital locks) if anything this is the one thing microsoft should care about rather than individual users breaking said license.
no, this system does not work by launching the windows containers on windows mcr.microsoft.com/windows images
it works by using dockurr, which is a great project but a worse way to distribute windows in the sense that it gets installed instead of downloaded and executed
I don't get it. Is it a VM in a container? Skimming https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/windows I would have interpreted that as a native Windows container, which I vaguely recall being a thing, but that would require an NT host, not Linux.
I remember Windows containers have two modes of operation as a Hyper-V VM and some sort of container-like isolation. I think the reason is that they had to quickly ship "containers" initially and that Windows does not have a kernel backwards compatibility the same way Linux does
The container is a Linux container running a virtual machine inside.
WinApps needs a Windows RDP server to work. Most of the functionality doesn't care where that Windows RDP server is actually running as long as its FreeRDP client can connect to it. The container or libvirt VM options are just ways to accomplish that via virtualization.
I imagine the container part makes it easier to automate QEMU virtualization using bash scripting without worrying about distribution specific differences in the environment. These kinds of scripts become fairly ossified to their environment. Making them run consistently on different Linux distributions is its own adventure unrelated to installing and running Windows, so the containerization eliminates the need for a lot more bash scripting to account for those differences.
The container's bash scripts download the Windows installer ISOs and run them in an unattended mode inside a QEMU VM. The unattended installation is configured to skip activation:
Once the container is running, WinApps configures RDP via some scripts and registry settings exposed into the container via a volume so the container's scripts can copy and run them in the Windows VM:
I haven't seen any of this before, but I think it's a pretty clever use of scripting and containers on top of some fairly mature but hard to use pieces of software.
It is a container in a VM. I'm not even sure what, if anything, the container achieves. But their installation instructions are pretty clear that you start by creating a Windows VM.
> By accepting this
agreement and using the software you agree that Microsoft may collect, use, and disclose
the information as described in the Microsoft Privacy Statement [...]
There's a couple of terms in contract law, like fairness of obligations, unconscionability, disproportionate penalty, excessive advantage, etc. that the US seems to have forgotten. In the EU and other countries such... aberrations are struck down and unenforceable. People are still scared silly, but the ones that protest are usually left alone.
Those aspects of contract law mean that if MS included "you owe us your first born child" or "if you have not uninstalled this operating system within 2 weeks of installation, you owe Microsoft an additional one million dollars" then that clause wouldn't be valid.
They don't however mean that MS choosing to put adverts all over Windows is illegal, or a breach of the contract, just because users would prefer the OS be ad-free. The EU could legislate in various ways that would mean MS had to stop doing so, but they haven't yet and there's no aspect of general contracts law currently that prevents it.
One could argue that, and like I just wrote in my reply to your sibing comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087142) I would agree with you with regards to ethics, but it's not a valid argument from an actual legal perspective.
I'd love to be proven wrong about this, because I'm not blowing smoke up your ass I really do agree with you in that I wish MS could and would be sued over this, and lose, and have to stop making Windows shit like this. But I'm fairly confident that the only possibility would be for EU (or individual nations) to write new legislation addressing it.
If you bought and paid something (not a subscription) that was ad-free and then all of a sudden in a mandatory update you start to get ads, well, maybe someone already tried and failed to sue MS but personally seems pretty predatory.
From an ethical point of view I completely agree that it's predatory, I just don't believe any EU laws exist that mean anyone would have a chance of success trying to sue over that, I don't believe it to be illegal. And while I'm not all-knowing, nor am I someone who knows every single relevant law like the back of my hand, my opinion is somewhat backed up by the fact that I'm not aware of anyone with actual legal knowledge having ever suggested this behaviour of Microsoft's could be considered illegal the way you want it to be, it's only ever people who are users who think it should be considered breach of contract. (And considering how much money it would be worth if you could sue MS for this and win, if it were even a 50/50 question you'd get lawyers trying.)
Umm actually, you did. You also waived off the right to name your firstborn, and if you disagree, you’ve waived off your right to anything except arbitration. Sorry, I didn’t make the rules.
(Friendly reminder that legality, once again, ≠ morality. Victimless crimes can be illegal, and Enron fucking shit up and filing bankruptcy can be legal.)
In that case you are using a network protocol but one could argue you are still accessing the VM in the same local system the OS has been licensed for. It is a remote access from a software perspective but a local access from a user perspective.
Is this a new thing? That windows docker images can run a UI? It's been a while since I looked at them (we're talking 2017-2018?), but back then, one was limited to CLI/Server apps without any windows graphical interface.
I'm wondering when it changed? (or perhaps I missed something back then)
There's plenty of semi-technical tinkerers out there, doing things like building flight sim cockpits, scraping by on copying ready made code, doing minimal changes and asking forums or LLMs if they get stuck.
They just want something that works, and ideally to keep using the same thing they've always used.
They know what Arduino is, as long as it does the job they aren't interested in researching alternatives. They don't want to get involved in adapting someone's instructions for a different pin layout, or risk that anything they've done up to now stops working.
Yes, we all know it's a massively out of date platform easily outclassed by much cheaper and more flexible solutions, and if you must use the Arduino IDE it can build code for all sorts of boards. But for non-technical people by far the most important factor is to stick with something safe and known.
It was trains from Hamburg to Copenhagen used to run on the Fehmarn Ferry until the line was shut for reconstruction, they now run via Padborg.
The Snalltaget sleeper train from Berlin to Malmo used to run on the ferry from Sassnitz to Trelleborg avoiding Denmark altogether, that stopped because the ferries don't run on that route any more, and the train also runs via Padborg.
The EU Commission is a group of permanent employees who sit in an office and write reports, administer projects and draft legislation. They have no voting rights. They are organised into departments, each headed by a politically appointed Commissioner.
Your country has an identical group of people with a similar role who you also do not vote for, organised in just the same way.
For some reason it's only "undemocratic" when the EU does it, even though literally every country in the world has some kind of permanent establishment of administrators and no country could function without them.
Every country in the world has a "Commission". It's no different to the UK Civil Service or the various US Federal Governments. If it didn't exist then the EU would be unable to implement any of it's policies.
Can you explain how MEP's directly proposing laws would affect this? I really don't get it.
In parliamentary systems it's normal that virtually all legislation originates in the executive. In the British parliament at least, that a law is privately proposed and then becomes law is rare and normally restricted to very simple legislation on specific issues.
The EU doesn't implement any of its policies by itself, ergo it should not require an executive branch of its own. There is no EU army, no EU police. We already have an instance of that in each member state which is required to implement EU laws on its territory, the Council of Ministers coordinates on that afaik.
The general process is a bit like this, simplified:
- the Council of heads of state appoints the Commission
- the Commission proposes laws
- the Parliament approves laws
- the Council of ministers implements them
- the Court blocks any unconstitutional laws
The problem has been for the longest time that the Commission appointments are not elected, somewhat mired in cronyism, and they keep proposing nonsense laws while the elected parliament can just stand there and vote no while not being able to suggest any legislation we actually need.
France has the lowest retirement age of any EU country, the second highest expenditure on social benefits, and a large debt burden.
Raising the retirement age by a couple of years is obviously unpopular, yet arguably sensible - but trying to do that was what caused the last set of violent protests.
If France wants to support Ukraine and rebuild it's army, it will be required to borrow heavily to purchase arms.
If France wants to rebuild manufacturing supply chains domestically, it will be required to borrow heavily to invest in infra.
The above two will be in the tens to hundreds of billions of Euros range.
France ALSO spends tens to hundreds of billions of Euros on social services.
France ALSO needs to pay it's existing interest on debt, which is in the tens of billions of Euros a year and rising.
France needs to cut 2 of the first 3 choices - they cannot cut the 4th one due to EU regulations and if France does not want to become the next Argentina.
Of course it doesn't sound bad but what do you do when you run out of money to pay for it?
Do we decide policies based on what sounds good or what we can actually afford? Because getting paid to do nothing but our hobbies would sound even better.
But hey, if you wanna give boomers luxury retirement while immolating the economic prospects of future generations of workers in order to pay for it, go for it.
> Love it. the previous two parent comments place the cognitive dissonance of Anglo-Saxon economic narratives in stark relief.
For sure, the cognitive dissonance between those who understand basic economics and those who don't. Those who do understand that some of these facts are indicators of a coming crash, and the ones who don't think they're good because they like "free" stuff and don't understand how anything works or gets paid for. We can see where this goes, whether we want to or not, by watching France over the next two decades as it drives the leading edge of the upcoming long-term recession across all large Western economies.
I mean you could just say ‘insert infantilizing Hayekian quip here’ and be done with it. And you don’t know the future any better than anyone else in the planet, so prognosticating that doesn’t serve as reinforcement of your argument.
That might be easy to say to people with office jobs and good pay, but it is absolute dog shit for people with physical jobs who already have overall reduced lifespans.
I don't think it's really down to super-tight security as such, rather that there's no reason to release the data publically.
Ships and airplanes broadcast data because it's useful for collision avoidance and tracking. The international maritime and aerospace system is far too complicated and large that you could ever build a private network of every ship or plane operator sharing encrypted data, or that one company could set up receivers for the tracking data worldwide. A closed system wouldn't work.
Rail is both physically and legally a finite closed space. The network operator knows definitively where every train in their network is because they have sensors in the tracks. The network is responsible for preventing collisions, not the individual trains. They have contracts with every company which operates on their tracks and if these need their internal data they can get it. So there's simply no good reason why trains should be publically broadcasting their information, or why network operators would want to expose all their internal data.
And against the no positives there are negative sides - apart from a couple of famous cases I've not heard of it in Europe, but stealing from cargo trains seems to be big business in the US: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-17/los-ange...
In the UK the open tracking data also brought complaints from freight companies who feared competitors would use it to analyse their movements, figure out which traffic flows were the most profitable and use it for commercial advantage.
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