Posts by Gerhard Mack

Plus is king now: Google shutters more products

still there

It's just that YouTube allows the person who uploaded the video to disable them.

Microsoft blames poor Windows sales on PC slump

@Nergatron

I can't tell if you are trolling or just fail at reading comprehension but just in case:

"The figures just released show that of all Android devices activated to date, only 3.3% of them run Android 3.x, aka Honeycomb. Honeycomb only runs on tablets, so the numbers paint an accurate picture of just how few Android tablets have been activated. If we use Andy Rubin’s latest tweet claiming 200 million devices have been activated to date, that 3.3% running Honeycomb only represents 6.6 million Android tablets."

He adding up the numbers for ICS and Honeycomb and assuming those are the total amount of tablets when, in fact, the hottest selling tablet still runs on Gingerbread and his interpretation of the numbers will count those as cellphones rather than tablets.

really

It doesn't matter whose figures they are because they are being used to show something they can't possibly show. You can't extrapolate tablet uptake based on ICS and Honeycomb activations if most of the Tablets being sold are using Gingerbread instead.

@Nergatron two points

1. It's hard to get good numbers when your product is banned in several markets.

2. The most popular Android tablets for the moment (Samsung Galaxy Tab) are running Gingerbread making that Znet article completely pointless.

Woz praises Android, blasts iPhone limitations

Disintegrationnotallowed is right but the problem isn't Android

It's a Blasted Samsung issue and I have the same problem with my P1000 Tab.

They did something strange to their wireless manager and email client. With wireless I am constantly turning it off and then on again to get it to connect to my office and home WiFi networks but my HTC (runs Cyanogenmod) doesn't have that problem. The same goes for email, I can't speak for pop3 but Samsung's clever Email client can't delete IMAP emails from the server so if I delete the message it's gone until the next time it checks the server.

Someone at Samsung thought they needed to modify Android to make it better and they failed badly.

Profs call for harsh taxes on sweet carbonated beverages

no

Corn has been subsidized since before NAFTA was even thought of.

Powerline Ethernet group posts 1Gb/s spec

not just that

In the house I currently find myself powerline easily outruns Wi-Fi even when the signal is good and that's with wireless N on both sides. The issue isn't radio interference either because I only see 1 neighbor's Wi-FI and that is weak signal.

Sir Howard's days as Sony prez said to be numbered

more of the same

What they really need to do is come up with some someone fresh who is NOT from the entertainment division. If this goes as planned we will just see more crippled products and customer shafting in the name of "IP protection".

Nokia: There will be NO smartphone division selloff to Microsoft

@majid

Forgotten about Danger Incorporated (the company behind the Sidekick) already? Every celebrity had to have one them MS bought the company and completely destroyed the brand.

Stratfor so very, very sorry in wake of mega-hack

@Steve Knox

Note the large "citation needed" next to that line in the Wikipedia entry. It's there because the line actually very wrong.

Stratfor is not a security company it's a private intelligence service that keeps it's subscribers up to date on world events and their likely outcomes. While there is the odd video about physical security those videos aren't the majority and aren't the primary reason for the site. I have also never seen Stratfor claim to know anything about IT security.

not so sure

The really strange thing about all of this is that I looked up my password from the website showing off the leak and they had the wrong password for my Stratfor account..

All of this makes me suspect that someone is exaggerating what all got out.

Not that I'm taking my chances mind you, I have double checked that I haven't used a variation of that password anywhere else and my Credit Card is canceled.

Stratfor attackers prep to publish emails

It's true

After working in the online CC industry I can tell you the banks never pass up the opportunity to add a fee and it doesn't help that they view it as the merchant's fault if they get used for a fraudulent transaction and yes, people have been put out of business this way.

So far the outcry has only resulted in the credit card companies issuing a statement that there is nothing that forces the banks to add chargeback fees to their contracts but in practice I don't know of any banks that don't have a clause for chargeback fees.

Visa probes reported security breach of card processor

I wish

If incompetence was a firing offense, a lot of the retail industry and most of the credit card processing industry would be forced to shut down.

Dealing with a processor now that has a system that was designed to use the end user's browser to contact the bank and return the reply to the merchant. Shockingly hard to work around their design and turn it into something secure.

Android malware victims offered free WinPhones by MS

I payed the tax

I have a Windows XP license that I never used because getting a laptop without a Windows license was more expensive.

Nokia exec: Young fashonistas 'fed up' with iPhone

what a load

As an Android phone owner I can tell you that you most certainty do not have to "dick with" anything on an Andoid phone. Downstairs from me is a woman who wanted my advice on a tablet. I helped her pick out a Samsung Galaxy tab and then offered to show her how to use it. Turns out she never took me up on the offer because she mastered it on her own. She is not a techie and all she wanted was GPS and the ability to browse websites and check her email and she likes her Android device because it is easy.

I, on the other hand, have rooted my company assigned Galaxy tab and replaced the OS on my HTC but I love doing that sort of thing. My point is that just because you can doesn't mean that you have to.

Fuel taxes don't hurt the world's poor - they don't have cars

mostly true on point 1

At least in Canada the rich are more likely to be driving a new car while the poorer you are the older your car will be. Older cars will have less efficient engines to begin with along with the normal losses of efficiency from a worn engine.

'I'm the first to admit that we've made a bunch of mistakes'

nuts

It's clear that anonymous and friends have no idea (or don't care) how the banking system works. If they donate money from a stolen card to a charity then not only will the charity not get to keep the money, they will be charged a chargeback fee by the bank as insult to injury. The banks are _NEVER_ on the hook for the money, only the merchant and this stunt will only hurt the people they are pretending to want to help.

Google: We're not pushing our gear over rivals

because it's all still search?

The only thing Google is replacing are sites that provide localized searches for information and very interesting to note that most of the companies backing this complaint are people I already had entered into my "block from search" before all of this started. When I'm doing a search I want to find the product I'm looking for and not find myself in some product search site that offers no more information than the search page I just left.

Android upgraded to be more resistant to hack attacks

it doesn't copy

@trevor 3 you are close but Android doesn't do it the CPU does. On any modern CPU architecture the CPU can map memory however you want so a given resource can be relocated anywhere regardless of it's physical location in RAM. This is the same virtual memory function that gives us Swapping but someone has discovered a way to re-purpose it as a security tool.

Dubstep ringtone wins Nokia compo

@Emer Phud

Can't speak for the radios but at least boomboxes had real speakers. Most of the complaint I have with the cellphone music crowd is that even good music sounds terrible on a tiny speaker too small to have any decent frequency response. To make it even more annoying it seems that a lot of what the kids are listening to tends toward Base heavy and the speakers just can't handle it.

Crooks beat anti-fraud cops with old-school bank scams

At least it's not email Interac

In Canada we have a service from the largest banks called Email Interac and the *only* way to get the money youve been sent is to click on the link in the email they send.

Check your machines for malware, Linux developers told

@Voland's right hand

Mostly true but you give far too much credit to OpenBSD, a lot f things got replaced (sendmail, WUFTPD etc) but even then in the early days OpenBSD's daemons had their fair share of exploits as well.

Thankfully these days the system software people pretty much have their act together and most Linux root kits are either password guessing or exploiting a web app.

Don't bother with that degree, say IT pros

degree doesn't mean the guy can do his job

I've run into several University grads who are useless as programmers. The attitude of "This should work so it's no my fault if it doesn't" is a problem on both sides of the fence.

Schmidt ducks antitrust questions lobbed from Congress

I *hate* price comparison sites

I really hate them, they pollute my search results with sites that only link to other sites and are a royal pain when trying to find ratings or technical info on a product. Several of the companies listed here are already on my block list inside search settings.

Facebook deletes hacked Pages, destroying years of work

that happened to my aunt as well

Some Nigerian cloned her Facebook profile and started trying to get money out of her friends and family. The solution is to use the report button on the bottom left side of the coned page and report it as someone pretending to be someone else. I got my aunt's friends to all do that and they had the cloned page down a few hours later.

Hackers crack crypto for GPRS mobile networks

@velv

The call is decrypted once it hits the carrier's network anyways so it can be monitored no matter what encryption is used between the cell tower and phone.

Anonymous, LulzSec go legit with PayPal boycott

easy to fix

No one says they need access to an account you actually keep money in. I have an account I transfer money into when I want to make purchases on Paypal but the rest of the time it's empty.

X-COM UFO: Enemy Unknown

if only

That is why I have given up on the newer generation of games entirely and just buy old games and play them in DosBox. Hours of fun, cheaper and better game play.

Hey! My friend is sending spam

I doubt they send an email

I'm betting they just lock the account out so any future logins fail with no notification emails needed so the real owner just has to contact them to get reinstated.

Ballmer's breaking point: Is Windows 8 already too late?

er

The downside to windows 2000 was the abysmal USB support. I had a customer on it and every time he changed his plugs around someone had to login as admin to let windows redetect everything.

Parmo v poutine: The ultimate post-pub nosh deathmatch

@lester

Agreed, there is a reason none of my favorite restaurants in Spain are owned by Spaniards.

The Poutine was made wrong

As someone who has spent 7 years in Montreal, I can tell you that the cheese goes on first and then the gravy.

As someone currently living in Madrid I can tell you that the Spanish are some of the most unadventurous people I've ever met when it comes to food.

LulzSec dumps hundreds of Arizona Police documents

yeah, its racist

There are plenty of good reasons for not having your papers on you such as doing work where they are likely to get wet in your pocket (ie sweat from outdoor work, or kitchen) or stolen if left out.

After having lived in Spain for a bit I've noticed some interesting things:

1. Identity documents wear out rather quickly in your pocket.

2. Police only check the ID of people they don't like. I've been let through multiple blockades just based on my skin colour and the only time in three years I've been actually checked it was because they stopped the black guy I was walking down the street with and I stayed rather than leave.

Oracle seeks 'billions' with Google Android suit

short memory?

Right up until Oracle purchased SUN they argued that the open Apache Harmony project should be certified as properly Java compliant. Now, not only have they changed their minds about that, most of the code that is in question in their lawsuit is from Harmony.

Samsung to refresh 7in Galaxy Tab this September

done?

It was released but I suspect they forgot about carrier free users or expect you to take it into the shop for the update. Personally, I just downloaded the official update from a third party and installed it myself.

I can confirm that gingerbread his a huge improvement in battery life.

World IPv6 Day fails to kill the internet

compelling feature?

It's hard to find a compelling feature for anything as low level as a network protocol so the only actual reason to change over would be to avoid running out of addresses. That means that managers will do exactly what they did for Y2K and that is push the fix to the last possible moment when it's complexity and costs go through the roof.

Now that the central registry has run dry I'm seeing management finally clue in to the need for a change and both home and server hosting ISPs are promising IPv6 by the end of the year.

@Tim Brown 1

Of they will just do what Telefonica Spain is about to do and that is a mass flash of all of their DSL modems. If you locked Telefonica out of your modem, have a non Telefonica modem that doesn't support IPv6 or have an OS/device that doesn't support ipv6 you get IPv4 behind an ISP level NAT.

Intel teaches machines to build own device drivers

nuts to that

Wouldn't it be easier to make devices conform to a set standard and write drivers for that only?

Notorious Russian spammer 'admits child abuse'

not knowing Leo...

Thing is I knew the guy 10 years ago and this seems like a classic idiot Leo move. I quit after he started into the Spam game and met some other former employees who told me that before I worked there he liked to argue that child porn was harmless and a good way for otherwise poor children to make money.

It also sheds a whole new light on the time I walked into his office and found whois info for a child porn domain on his screen but at the time I assumed he had come across it and was reporting it to their ISP but now ...

Sony restores PlayStation Network in full

doesn't need to be large

As soon as it handles financial info it has to be PCI-DSS compliance and that adds so much paperwork to each update that it becomes easier just to delay security updates.

IP registry goes to Defcon 1 as IPv4 doomsday nears

@Anteaus really?

On simple setup with Linux the entire output for all systems with ipv6 fits into one window unless you have a ton of virtual ips added. IPv6 is exactly one line of output per interface.

@djberriman bad assumption

You are assuming that the same organization owns all of the SSL certs but in many multi domain cert cases (any shared hosting) that's a really bad assumption.

There is a way to properly virtual host on SSL called SNI but Microsoft has not back ported that change to XP so for any browser that uses the OS system SSL libs (IE, Chrome) they won't get SNI support. As far as I know the only browser on XP that supports SNI on XP is Firefox. The upshot: as long as there are a significant number of Chrome/IE users on XP I can't implement this technology on my servers.

wrong

The problem is the entire freaking industry waited until the absolute last moment to start IPv6 deployment. Right now there are many companies scrambling to deploy IPv6 and hopefully it will be ready somewhere before next year.

UK is a closed source 'stronghold'

@Peter Jones 2

How would having open source somewhere on a (probably unrelated) system cause even the slightest bit of their financial systems code to become public?

Microsoft Kinect powers DIY Eye of Sauron

not really

The Kinect uses infrared to better detect your position meaning this will work in poor contrast conditions or poor light.

Google teaches Microsoft's IE9 to love open video codec

@Tom Visser eventually

Adobe has already agreed to support VP8 in flash but the problem is they never do anything quickly.

http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/05/adobe_support_for_vp8.html

SHOCK research reveals Wi-Fi not as nippy as Ethernet

all of the above?

The people I rent from use 802.11 N to connect to their ADSL (7MB down /750k up) but don't get anywhere near the speed I do with my more direct connection.

Remember that unlike WIFI, Ethernet and ADSL are full duplex(can send and receive at the same time) and that will make a large difference in both throughput and latency.

Pr0n stars to demo against .xxx

I'm guessing it's because they don't care about your job

These are the people who go out of their way to find ways to make you stumble on it by accident. Remember this is the industry that brought us whitehouse.com and nasa.org(found both at different times by accident while in class a decade ago when I was at school).

I don't mind that porn is out there since what consenting adults want to spend their time and money on is their own business but I really do mind accidentally bringing up porn sites at inopportune moments when someone seeing me bring the site up can have unfortunate consequences (work, school etc).

Google guilty of copyright wrong

@xman sortof

What you describe would only really block the top few songs/TV shows/ movies etc that are well known and popular but the rest of the artists would still be out of luck.