The video mentions that drivers were needed to get the full speed on Windows, and that the Realtek Linux drivers didn't compile on a modern kernel. So it's probably software.
Realtek makes some pretty affordable networking chips but their Linux drivers can be a real gamble. Either it works out of the box or you're in for years of messing around.
> Realtek makes some pretty affordable networking chips but their Linux drivers can be a real gamble. Either it works out of the box or you're in for years of messing around.
And that's when it's a legitimate Realtek chip. Many years ago, I bought a 100M Realtek Ethernet card, expecting it to work out of the box on Linux; but it was actually a counterfeit, using a Silan chip instead of a Realtek chip, and the out-of-tree Linux driver (for Linux 2.4) that came with it on the CD was actually a driver for the Silan chip with the numbers filed off. I ended up writing and submitting a Linux 2.6 driver for it, just to make people stop blaming the Realtek driver for not working with the unrelated Silan chip.
They studied AI and are building an AI company. I doubt the idea for the business structure come from a lawyer, to be honest. Especially such an overcomplicated setup with so many real-world issues that they're running into right now.
Sometimes criminals do put pressure on people to register companies in their name and show up to these meetings. Whether that's addicts, people with mental disabilities, or young people looking for a quick buck, the fraud mechanism is the same.
However, that does put the company in their name. On paper, they have full control over it. That's a risk to the criminals trying to use the company as a financial asset for laundering money.
Registering a private limited liability company in the Netherlands costs around 400 euros. If you can file all of the taxes and other legally required paperwork yourself, you can be set up in a week or two. You will be a salaried employee of your own company, though, with a minimal salary you will need to rake in.
The combination of "no personal risk whatsoever, minimal funds/risk coverage, maximal profit extraction" doesn't lend itself well to places with basic regulations.
Capital investments in Europe are definitely not as easy to obtain as in the US for various economic, cultural, and historic reasons, which all led to some pretty weird laws here and there, but the extra week it takes to set up a business isn't the cause.
The reason this all took so long and was so expensive is simple. As the author states:
> I wanted real limited liability
They wanted two different companies with different setups to get out of having to save up the funds or find investors while also paying the least amount of tax possible. They set up a two-company system with all the risk in one and all the earnings in the other. It's like one of those tax dodging schemes the multinationals like, except within a single country. That comes with overhead.
Funnily enough, they then end with:
> Which leaves the only real question. Why 25,000 at all? It is my company and my risk.
Weird to think it would be their own risk if they spend so much time, money, and effort setting up a system that explicitly removes all the risk from them.
All of this feels like it was based on a business plan generated by some over-eager AI that tried to optimize to tick as many boxes as possible, ignoring the real-world consequences of those choices.
> If you can file all of the taxes and other legally required paperwork yourself, you can be set up in a week or two.
Is realistic in the Netherlands to try and fulfill all formal paperwork requirements?
In my native Belgian city, outsourcing that be from ~3k€ excluding VAT/year for the very simplest CIT liable structure. That's excluding 409.3€ corporate social security contribution and 148€ provincial tax. That makes for about 300€ ex. VAT before you can start to earn anything at all. Unless you can fulfill all accounting yourself.
People do it. I think the time and learning resources it takes to do it all yourself is probably not worth it for a company trying to make it big, especially if you stack your BV inside of a holding inside of a stichting to get something similar to the OP tax-avoidance-cum-risk-reduction strategy.
The risk of making a mistake and getting hit with a huge fine, as well as all the time wasted on crunching numbers and reading tax code, probably makes it very difficult to justify doing it yourself if you have a profitable business. If you do not make the money you need to make paying an accountant make sense, I think setting up a BV would probably not be the best approach.
Getting things like payslips right (you have to pay yourself a defined minimum wage and that means paying income tax and getting all the payslips correct if you set up a BV) may seem simple, but there's a reason companies pay good money to have that all taken care of. Just simple things like the possibility of a 53 week year can trip up someone who is just starting out.
But at the end of the day, plenty of people do their own paperwork, deliver the taxes themselves, and file the yearly required documents. It's neither impossible nor illegal to do it all yourself, just often unpopular.
Of my many many acquaintances with Belgian CIT liable companies, exactly one used to do their own taxes. They still outsourced salary payment though. That is even trickier than taxes. There's an entire sector specialising in wage administration...
> I don't understand why big tech and EC want to scan messages
I believe that's a form of corporate greenwashing. If you can prove your claims that you do everything in your power to prevent abusive materials, you're going to get less attention from annoying authorities next time a pedo network/terrorist cell hits the news.
Aside from that, there are a lot of well-meaning people who want to try every little thing to help stop horrific abuse. Police investigations are happening too slowly (if at all); if the police won't help solve the problem, going the civil route may help, even if just a little. I think it's an act of desperation rather than malice. Plus, just like there are plenty of people who say "they've got nothing to hide, I don't need encryption", there are plenty of people who feel like a tech panopticon is worth it if it catches some abuse cases. Besides, in cases like these, scientific evidence often doesn't matter as much as the emotion behind proposals, and most messaging providers couldn't appear more devoid of emotion if they tried.
I don't agree with the idea to scan every message for various reasons. If the police won't investigate criminals with the massive amount of power they already possess, overwhelming them with "abusive" material from an algorithm is only going to make it harder to filter out the real criminals. Plus, if a few large providers do it, that will put pressure on all the other providers that don't do it (see, for instance, that time they arrested the CEO of Telegram for not volunteering information without a warrant, like other messaging providers seem to do).
But, as much as I disagree, I do understand where those people are coming from. And then there are also the blatant comic-book villains that just want totalitarian government control over all information exchange, of course.
LLMs are finding bugs where there aren't any and wasting human time trying to disprove the slop.
If all LLM reports were accurate, they'd be of any value. However, that's not what is happening. If you have even mentioned something about a bug bounty anywhere, waves of slop peddlers will flood you with fake reports marking every minor bug as a critical problem, hoping to catch a handful of dollars in the process.
These models do find some problems and may even provide decent suggestions to fix them (though they really want to add code above anything else, quickly leading to spaghetti if you accept it all). That's not the issue at the moment, and as long as people try to incentivize people to report bugs, the issue will remain.
I do expect this to be temporary, though. Not because LLMs will fix all the bugs, but because the flood of slop will shut down most public bug bounties.
Thanks to the incredible combination of Lenovo and Nvidia, I cannot remove the Microsoft keys from my laptop. Not because Microsoft backdoored my computer, but because the Nvidia boot ROM is signed by an MS cert and that runs before you can access the UEFI setup.
I hope the firmware either doesn't check the expiry date or that the firmware itself has been upgraded, or several years worth of Thinkpad are about to stop booting in the near future.
App developers will often choose not to sandbox their applications because it's a lot easier (and sometimes faster) do to all file management yourself, but the APIs are there and ready to be used.
Flatpak is probably the worst way to "have" this possible. It's completely opaque to both app and user. If you ever tried to run an .exe through flatpak'd bottles, you'll run into an issue where .dll's aren't found because you didn't install flatseal first to configure permissions. That's not operating-system level integration. That is actually very poor design that a user requires a separate app (flatseal) to configure how the sandbox works.
I was thinking about desktop OS's, actually.
You don't need to use that Windows API. You can just access any file you want. There is no reason a music player, for example, needs to access ~/Pictures. An arbitrary program requiring access to all your files is a huge red flag, but it's a red flag that users aren't allowed to see. Proper filesystem permissions would fix that.
Realtek makes some pretty affordable networking chips but their Linux drivers can be a real gamble. Either it works out of the box or you're in for years of messing around.
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