Re: Excellent Idea!
My Mate cant get his M3 off his drive in the snow :)
4013 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009
Its not Icahn's money any more than its CalPERS. One is a reputable pension fund fronting for thousands of pensioners, the second is a Carpet Bagging front man for a lot of shallow and short term 'investors'.
FWIW I suspect she meant Icahn is small potatoes compared to the combined might of institutional investors such as CalPERS.
So assuming any aliens who can build a flying saucer capable of extra-solar travel must be at least 100 years more advanced than us today, and in the last 60 years "transistors" and their ilk operating in computer chips today are almost unrecognisable compared to those used in Baby what makes you think we could even get close to cracking 160 years more advanced tech in a mere year from1948?
Cant speak for anyone else but Project spring wouldnt have been necessary if they had continued the level of investment they had in their network 3-4 years ago.
They lost me as a customer the second 3's network coverage bettered theirs for my particular part of the world. Particularly as they somehow actively managed to reduce the coverage I enjoyed.
IOS 7 on my Iphone continues to run like a dog regardless of updates. Just ordered a Nexus 5 as a result. Seriously considering reloading v6 before I Ebay it. Ironically any App including the Ebay one - that lets say is less than effecient on how it uses data - starts like an arthritic snail. Evem day to day apps like contacts and calendar are appreciably more laggy than on IOS 6.
Unlike the french who either dont try hard enough when adopting a new word le computer or try too hard that nobody cares - l'ordinateur, you've got to hand(y) it to the Germans.
Handy has always raised a snigger from my inner Finbar Saunders. Handy-gate conjours full scale Fnnarrr Fnarrss from me.
I suspect they know it too. Its all linked to the same gene that makes them love Benny Hill.
And when they are stuck for a word - simply contatenate 10 descriptive words together - splendid!
Slightly tangential - Im looking forward to seeing the giant Facepalm our glorious leaders perform when they realise blocking something as fundamentally trivial as TPB actually educates the unwashed masses in avoiding blocks of all kinds, and the benefits of encrypted connections etc etc.
Hopefully before they realise it they'll have educated an entire generation in how to avoid the tools of state control of the internet. (Fingers crossed anyways)
I always find it amusing when our MP's critique something on moral grounds - when most of them must have demonstrated the morals of an alley cat on heat to get to parliament in the first place.
I do have a grudging respect for David Davis though who is the only MP who has ever demonstrated some awareness of the need for privacy against the surveillance state. Looks like he should stick to what he knows best.....
Or to put it another way. If you dont 100% trust the recipient of a message or are not 100% confident that the contents cant bite you on the ass dont send it.
To be fair that kinda missed the point. The point is not to have a 100% secure solution, its to raise the barrier of entry against passive attacks, an active attack against email whether by a single person (the recipient) or a state actor is always going to succeed.
Nice sentiment but you are somewhat missing the point. Name one purely FOSS product that actually user friendly enough for public consumption by the average joe. Im desperately trying to think of one but cant.
Fact is in lots of cases Corporates exist and make money by taking something fundamentally complex and implementing it in a way the average pleb can use.
Amazon's notorious 1-click button for instance - how many other websites have you wished for that on and not had it or an equivalent.
So you're saying a reasonable level of secured comms should only be available to the techo-elite who have the time, background and understanding to manage it all themselves?
Bravo Sir /slowhandclap.
The only valid point you have - and its somewhat oblique to your post - is that the accessability for ordinary users to the current state of encryption controls is piss-poor. If Virtru are taking steps to make it better - even if there are gotcha's that make it unsuitable for the truly paranoid - they deserve all the encouragement they can get.
Having said that it looks a little like a "me to" product thats only getting funded due to the current Snowdon debate to me. The fact that its US based also counts against it.
But if they can "do an apple" and make encryption easily accessable to the masses I would probably overlook some of their downsides.
It seems there are 2 areas of debate we should be having and only 1 is being pursued so far.
1. Robust End to End encryption including masking of metadata, origination and destination.
2. An encryption product that "just works" like an Apple product. Preferably without even mentioning the word "key" to the average joe user.
Infact if I runningin Blackberry, Apple or Google right now I would be beavering away on as many simplified encryption functions as I could get away with.
Especially BB as they have previous forn in this area and are completely failing to take advantage of it - think a global network of BES nodes all chosen at random at send time, and a peer to peer comms systems that means the decrypt key moves between nodes on a random basis or upon decryption request.
That was my thought too. Regardless of the asshattedness of King trademarking CANDY, hsu is obviously a complete chancer looking to cash in on searches for any similar game rather than coming up with a good name himself - even King managed to avoid using the word Jewel when they ripped off bejeweled.
In short both entities involved are tossers. King merely got there first and took it to a higher level of tossery-ness. Hsu is merely penny-ante third rate copy artist - King have the saving vice of being complete megalomaniacs and first rate copy artists.
Im sure these rumours can be put to bed fairly easily. It wouldnt be hard to put some traffic analysis on mid-senior level mgt's laptops and wait to see what happens.
Im pretty sure that the scale of it makes it difficult - why nobble a laptop when you can nobble a server, router or switch? Why nobble a router when you can nobble a firewall appliance. Why nobble a firewall when you are tapping the cables and network end points anyway.
Given that it would have to be at bios/component level on a laptop anyway - Im fairly confident that when state actors need to target a laptop they do it by actively attacking it instead of relying on some passive measure pre-installed.
After all if even 1 rootkit, backdoor is found soley in 1 manufacturers kit on an industrial scale - that manufacturers business instantly goes down the pan.
Sales may have declined recently due to the general slump in PC demand but I hardly think the US Govts buying decisions hurt Lenovo much as their PC sales have been on a general upward trajectory since the Thinkpad buy.
But never let the facts get in the way of a good Leftpondian view of the world.
Really - how many PC's in your office have been replaced by Chromebooks, Ipads or mobiles?
None? thought so. With the exception of the chromebook which is essentially a discounted Netbook/Ultrabook with an ad supported OS all of them are complementary devices to the PC rather than replacements.
In the consumer world they are Replacements - not in the enterprise.
Ironically MS have probably exacerbated a temporary slump in PC demand by producing such an abortion of a product.
So for £40 more than the suggested rrp you can get the 256gb/8gb/i7 version of the 13" macbook air. Chuck in £30 more for usb3/thunderbolt extensions for the missing ports. You have an allround better laptop. MBA has a 1440x900 screen but slightly slower cpu. Same battery life too.
3? years on into the Ultrabook debacle it seems there's very few machines out there that beat the MBA - mores the pity - coz it shouldnt be that hard to build a MBA with a few more ports.
How much will the Tosh be discounted by?
Indeed - given that Intel have managed to mostly see-off AMD with their Tick-Tocks after a nasty fright from Athlon/Opteron I suspect their default approach will be the same with ARM, the difference being that that Venn Diagram of use cases is merely overlapping on Intel vs Arm and whereas AMD were a near total subset of Intels use cases.
If you look at it in cold revenue terms the battle is not Intel ($12bn) vs Arm Holdings ($500m) but its Intel vs Arm + Fabs + Oems which is a very disparate target to hit/buy. I suspect plans for either buying ARM and starting/buying an Xscale2 get mulitple repeated dust offs at Intel but in reality they aint actually hurting that much as yet.
Time will tell if they go the route of a declining Microsoft (desktop vs mobile) or if they are ultimately shielded from the Desktop vs Mobile effect and just go on churning out chips and cash. If indeed Microsoft are declining. Stupid Balmer inspired purchases to the contrary MS havent actually done a Nokia-like implosion yet........
It would be interesting to know whether by the terms of the court settlement he was tasked to be a watchdog or an auditor. The difference being a true watchdog would be justified in pro-actively chasing down "leads" whereas an auditors role is more like a review of whats been submitted, in which case any chasing down should be purely related to more information requests around the submission.
It has to be said though - how was this guy chosen? It sounds like a pretty sweet gig that he's milking for all its worth. I would love to understand the trail of influence application process that got him the job........
I spent a semi frustrated Xmas working around the heavy handed Site level blocks on various torrent sites looking either for non-copyrighted/FOSS stuff that just happens to be torrented and bits and bobs I would claim under fair use (eg format shifted versions of stuff I already own).
Even on TPB there it stuff that is not copyrighted - these blocks are sledgehammers.