Comments for The Silicon Underground

Comment on The spy in your living room by garyohuk

garyohuk — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 05:35:06 +0000

In reply to Jon.

Jon, I’m in the UK too. GDPR is great (no question I’m glad we have it than not) but there are gaping holes in it. One of the biggest is the fact that the person collecting the data decides what the specific purpose is (and also how long they can keep the data).
I think you’ll find that you have ticked a box somewhere, or by using some software acknowledged the rights of someone to collect data. That said there should be ways (as Dave says) of turning it off and backing out of it, but maybe the service will cease if you do. Interesting article here: https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/smart-tv-manufacturers-face-uk-data-protection-probe
Where maybe the TVCo”s are having their collars felt??

Comment on The spy in your living room by Jon

Jon — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 21:54:12 +0000

I’m not sure what the legal framework is in the US – presumably it’s pretty laissez-faire – but here in the UK and EU we have a GDPR rule that “data collected must be strictly limited to what is necessary for the specified purpose.”

I can’t see how a smart TV harvesting data on your other personal devices is at all compliant with this, although obviously I’m not a lawyer.

We’ve come to accept a certain amount of compromised privacy, personal tracking and ad targeting from the likes of Google and Facebook in return for their provision of free services. That’s the deal, right? But I PAID for my LG G5 TV, I shouldn’t expect the product I purchased with my own hard-earned cash to be compromising my data security.

Comment on The spy in your living room by Gary O

Gary O — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 16:56:14 +0000

Most Smart TVs running a ‘TVOS’ do this not just LG. You need to have a good dig about in the privacy settings of these (and your fire stick, Apple TV or Roku) to be able to put the drawbridge back down.
They also use auto content detection to detect what you are watching, and network enumeration to find you.
Fwiw for many years at least one major TV operator in the US has been selling by-the-minute ad tracking data to Google (this is all legal btw).

Comment on Adobe Systems IPO August 20, 1986 by JD Mathewson

JD Mathewson — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 17:59:36 +0000

I don’t think anyone on the outside thought Quark had the capital to pull off an Adobe takeover. It was a bit of a joke at the time.

Comment on When the RIAA sued a 12-year-old for MP3 piracy by Jon

Jon — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 11:29:53 +0000

My kids are also less interested in music than I was as a teenager, but I don’t think this is a legacy of the RIAA lawsuits.

Music used to be central to youth culture, but video games and later social media both came along to compete with and then displace it. Games were seen as a nerdy or immature hobby until the PlayStation was launched. Sony’s superb marketing – and good quality games – made gaming a legitimate leisure activity for older teens and young adults.

The internet has also destroyed the mass culture of TV programmes, radio stations and magazines which used to be cultural taste makers and gatekeepers for young people. The NME and Melody Maker were huge in my day, and would frequently make or break bands’ careers. No one cares about them anymore, in fact I’m not sure whether either still exist.

Everything is flat these days. Virtually all music from all eras and all genres is available simultaneously and on demand. Mozart is on par with Marillion and Bob Marley. Young people discover things through algorithms, Instagram and TikTok rather than DJs or music journalists. They could be new releases, 20 years old or 200 years old. It’s all the same now.

Comment on The ill-fated HP-Compaq merger by Frank

Frank — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:42:22 +0000

We were Compaq customers and I can tell you, we were not amused. We also had HP printers with HP JetDirect boxes. The service experience was like day and night while HP was the night (before the takeover).
To me the merger only made sense in the eye of management and probably some share holders. To much synergy. And as a customer I didn’t want the bad HP service. But well at the end they hold on to the Compaq services for a longer while than expected, at least in Switzerland.

Comment on What happened to Compuserve? by slim

slim — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 01:58:14 +0000

I used it back around 1970 and 1971. I can’t recall if they were the ones who sold Xtran timesharing or the ones who sold Fortran V timesharing. Anyway, it was fun with a 150 baud acoustic coupler and a paper tape reader and punch on a real teletype machine. Look at the early history of the internet, and they were on there, too, about the same time.

Comment on What happened to Compuserve? by Karl Wilcox

Karl Wilcox — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:21:44 +0000

I visited Compuserve HQ in Columbus in the early 1990’s to buy several thousand IDs for airline pilots to use dial-up to bid for their rosters, replacing a cumbersome paper process. Part of the deal was unlimited usage credits for us Admins – I used to run training courses for the pilots so was pretty familiar with all the services. Does anyone remember the 2d virtual world with little cartoon avatars that could meet up in a town square to chat?

Comment on What happened to Compuserve? by Jon

Jon — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:42:36 +0000

I also remember the Compuserve brand. They entered the UK market sometime around 1990 and were pioneers of e-commerce in Britain.

Before Compuserve, we had an early online service called Prestel, which was set up by British Telecom – at the time, still a state monopoly. Prestel used Ceefax-style pages with blocky graphics navigated via page numbers, but there was also a subscription service within it called Micronet 800 which had chat forums, games and downloadable software.

These kinds of thing were very obscure, and with prohibitively expensive phone charges only the affluent tech-savvy few ever used them (tens of thousands in a country of 50m to 60m people at the time). My personal exposure to Prestel and Compuserve was limited to seeing them demo-ed on TV on programmes like “Tomorrow’s World”. Thank you Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the world-wide web and bringing the internet to millions more of us!

Comment on What happened to Compuserve? by frankwilhoit

frankwilhoit — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:24:21 +0000

So happen I can answer your question, because I was there. CompuServe pioneered the basket of ideas that has now become the Internet, except that they made it all proprietary and designed it — superbly — to run on fantastically limited resources. They could have pivoted; they were working on it; their hearts were in the right place. Two things killed them: 1) the immaturity, 1991-95, of Windows NT, especially its multiprocessor support, which was pure vaporware for the first few years; 2) unreliable commodity hardware, notably (2a) RAM, (2b) multiprocessor motherboards that had been released without testing because there was literally no software in existence to test them with; and (2c) network infrastructure, namely routers that dropped 10% – 15% of packets below a certain size threshold. So when they came to introduce “WOW!”, which would have been their AYCE dialup Internet offering and would have had a decisive advantage on the content side, for every person who actually succeeded in signing up for an account, ten others tried and failed.