Posts by fidodogbreath 1020 posts • joined 23 Sep 2009
I think it varies by device and charger. Fast charging will heat up the battery, and excessive heat will shorten its life. That said -- my understanding is that the specific fast charging method, battery controller, ambient temperature while charging, and thermal design of the device itself can all influence the amount of actual harm to the battery.
"It is blind to the fact that as millions of us march in the streets [...] we've never been more dependent on secure communications and devices."
The bill is not blind to that particular fact at all. The government's primary security goal is not to protect the people; it is to protect itself from the people.
Back in the 90s I worked for a company that published books and magazines for farmers. Our subscription department had assiduously collected fax numbers in our subs database (running on AS/400 IIRC) and thought it would be brilliant to save on postage and send out solicitations by fax. Further brilliance ensued when someone realized that calling rates were cheaper in the wee hours, and the die was cast.
The first broadcast fax went out, and the next morning our inbound lines were flooded with complaints. In all the above-mentioned brilliance, no one had ever stopped to think that our customers were mostly small growers whose "office" was their house -- y'know, the place where they needed to SLEEP AT NIGHT so they could get up early to grow stuff. Many (most) also didn't have a dedicated fax line...so basically we were calling the shit out of their home phones in the middle of the night to offer them a $5 discount on a magazine that they already received.
In our navel-gazing brilliance, we thought of everything; well, except for WHO THE #$%& IS OUR CUSTOMER?!? The response rate on that promo was one of our highest ever...if you counted all responses. The positive response rate, however...not so much.
"Most of the issues with GTP protocol relate to roaming networks because operators use a 'friendly' model – which assumes all of the users accessing their networks as legitimate and authorised and that attackers will not appear in their network," Novikov explained.
Since there are no threat actors looking to monitor or disrupt cellular comms, that seems like a perfectly reasonable security posture. Ditto for continuing to rely on SS7.
the cost of the setup was nudging $1,600. A mere snip as far as Apple fanbois are concerned.
Or Microsoft fanbois, for that matter. $1600 is the same price as the lowest-spec Surface Book 3 (i5, 8GB/256GB); the top-spec model is $3400.
The A12X Bionic (2018) and A12Z (2020) iPad Pro CPUs bring considerably more horsepower than a mobile i5, and stack up very well against the mobile i7 in the $3000+ Surface Books.
For more of a tablet-to-tablet comparison, a Surface Pro X 8GB/256GB runs $1300 -- sans keyboard & mouse, of course. However, the A12X Geekbench 4 scores are 50% higher (5030/17995 vs 3492/11493). Battery life is about the same.
Obviously iOS is not Windows; but you can do a hell of a lot with an iPad Pro, and for the money "iPad onna stick" compares pretty well to MS' "Windows onna stick" offerings.
Agree. I use the native iOS apps for my work and personal email & calendar. They're fine. Mail comes in, I read it; reminders work as expected. An added bonus is seeing my personal and work calendars on the same display.
I know there are better calendar solutions, but they involve spending money, having my private info data-mined, or (increasingly) both.
it can be made to do *almost anything* to varying degrees of success.
Many, many moons ago I was rental manager for a stage lighting company. The tech guy for the company liked Macs (we had even had a Lisa before that) and he bought a stonkin' expensive Mac IIx for the rental department "so we could keep track of our bookings." Problem was, there was NO rental tracking software for Mac at the time.
Enter Excel. I sat down with the printed manual (!) and figured out how to write macros that would subtract units from inventory over a selected time frame. Over a year, that evolved into a relatively mature and stable system with custom menu bar, dialog boxes, etc. that anyone in the department could use with minimal training. The company used it for years, even long after I left.
All done with Excel for Macintosh (1.0 & 1.1 IIRC), half a decade before Windows 95.
So yeah; I can see people being loyal to Excel. Sure, it makes everything numeric look like a nail; but you can accomplish a lot by hammering on things.
All Windows error messages have been reduced to "Oops we're sorry but something's gone wrong there. Please try again later or talk to your administrator who's somehow supposed to know what the fuck this vague message means."
Or my personal favorite: "Something happened."
Good to know; thanks for sharing.
I couldn't give a rat's ass about people hacking into, say, my commentard account on The Register
Shirley you're not suggesting that commenting on Reg articles is somehow unimportant? How else will randos know that a bunch of other randos don't trust Google / Facebook / *cloud* / MS / gubmint and that IoT is shit?
Users have a habit of using software in ways the designers never thought of.
Most devs test their code against how they know it's supposed to work. They then tell the test engineer how it's supposed to work; s/he tests that and also runs a regression suite against it.
I'm a tech writer working mostly on end-user docs. I treat every product as a black box and document the behavior I see in response to stimuli. If something is clickable, I click it; if it's not (supposed to be) clickable, I click it. If a field expects integers, I try to enter decimals / text / emoji / SQL / paste in a GIF / etc. If there are start date and end date fields, I enter a start date that's after the end date. If the intended action runs a long javascript that produces an output file, I hit Reload in the middle of it. Because some rando out there will do any or all those things (and more that I can't imagine); but when they do, the product should handle it or fail gracefully.
Let's just say I report a lot of bugs...
On the contrary, we will likely be urged to adopt it permanently. For our own safety, of course.
Don't assume that it will remain optional. This issue sits at the nexus of surveillance capitalism and governments protecting themselves from their citizens. It is in the self interest of all of the stakeholders* to populate their "social graphs" with ever more intrusive and inescapable surveillance.
* Except us, but no one in a position to decide cares what we think; we're just the batteries that power the matrix.
Performed by the lowest bidder, of course.
In the article photo, SatNad looks like he's force-choking somebody.
The iPad can't do general purpose computing. General purpose computing by definition requires that you be able to run arbitrary software from any source of your choosing.
That's one definition, but it's not the only one.
I can run a variety of office suites (including MS). I can save and load files in any format to/from local storage (including a USB-C external drive), or multiple cloud platforms -- and/or print those files to either of two wireless printers in my house.
I can connect a USB-C audio interface -- the same one I use with a desktop PC or Mac -- and record high-bitrate multi-channel audio. I can edit and mix that audio, and output it using any of the above-mentioned storage methods. I can edit video. Play games. Manage my network. Etc., etc.
Those are the same things that I (and most people) do on desktop PCs and laptops with Windows or MacOS -- and yes, I have those as well.
Obviously some computing devices are better-suited to some applications, but that's more a matter of form factor. To say that an iPad is "an overpriced toy, nothing more," solely on the basis of not running code from arbitrary sources, is (a) doctrinaire, and (b) not reflective of how most of the world uses computing tools.
I have a 2018 iPad Pro 12.9 that I use for general-purpose computing, and as a digital music stand on stage. I bought it mostly for the latter application, because it can display music sheets at 100% size. Given the cost, I wanted to make it as useful as possible -- without paying Apple prices for add-ons.
* iPads work fine with 3rd party BlueTooth keyboards and mice. I use a Logitech keyboard that I already had and a generic $5 Chinese mouse. (Hoping that iPadOS 14 will make the mouse more useful; the current Accessibility support is crap for general use.)
* I don't need the pressure sensitive feature of the Apple Pencil, so I got a Logitech Crayon for $50. It supports palm rejection, and it's fine for scrawling quick notes and such.
* The iPad is wrapped in a really nice $30 leather case from Amazon.
Even if I'd had to drop $50 on a good-quality keyboard, the whole accessory package would have come to maybe $150, tops. My hodge-podge is not as sleek as Apple's magic thingy. But it does all of the same stuff for a tiny fraction of the cost, and I rarely need the keyboard and mouse anyway.
In other words, Google is a monopoly in search and video sharing, ie there is no competition that can keep their products trustworthy.
And should any competition appear, they will do everything they can to squish it like an insect. So that's at least one thing that we can trust Google to do.
They should be forced to support them for a least 5 years after the last one is sold - not from when it is first released.
Apple is actually pretty good about long-term device support. iOS 13 fully supports phones back to the 6s (released 9/2015, discontinued 9/2018). Rumor online is that the 6s/6s+/SE will be supported by iOS 14 as well. That's not quite five years from last sale, but it's longer than you get with even a Pixel.
Premium Android phones tend to have a longer support life than the landfill variety, but they also cost just as much as iPhones these days. If you prefer to keep a device for a long time but also care about security, the longer support lifespan for iOS means you get more value from the iPhone.
Not necessarily. These systems were developed to address specific conditions that are not always apparent.
A pilot flying a jumbo can't see directly below or above the aircraft. Also, two jets approaching each other have a very high closing speed, and thus not much time to react. Hence TCAS.
In poor visibility conditions, and especially if combined with a secondary instrument failure, a pilot might be a lot closer to the ground than s/he thinks. Hence GPWS.
Autoland was not created because pilots do not know how to land planes.
“Bringing DSCOVR operational again shows the unique skills and adaptability of our NOAA and NASA engineers"
Quite a contrast in methodology and results vs. their supposed star contractor.
This is why I avoid financial aggregators like Mint, Yodlee, etc. It's bad enough that each individual bank, brokerage, etc. seems to struggle with data security. But with aggregators, an attacker can get all of their customers' data for all accounts in one breach. That's way too big a risk -- especially since these companies don't do anything that you can't do for yourself with a spreadsheet.
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It also appears that Ethos Capital is going to extraordinary length to shield the name of one individual.
A scorpion, which cannot swim, asks a frog to carry it across a river on the frog's back. The frog hesitates, afraid of being stung by the scorpion, but the scorpion argues that if it did that, they would both drown. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung the frog despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I couldn't help it. It's in my nature."
The analogy falls down in that Google will, as usual, face no consequences. However, the point remains: they can't not collect data. It's [in] their nature.
Two large legacy companies that continue to exist mostly due to inertia. Combining them will mostly ensure that the inevitable collapse will be one giant job-implosion instead of two large ones.
Has anyone else noticed that ALL of Boeing's problems seem to come from either a) Management (we dont want to recertify what's in effect a new aircraft because it will be expensive) or b) Software.
It was a few years ago, but I think the self-immolating Dreamliner batteries were actually an engineering fail.
Ibrahim Balic revealed he had managed to match 17 million phone numbers to Twitter accounts by uploading a list of two billion automatically generated phone numbers to Twitter's contact upload feature, and match them to usernames.
Why would they allow an end user to query two billion phone numbers? Rate limits and quotas are API security 101.
Oh. Security 101. Never mind; answered my own question.
iOS 13 supports FIDO2 in Safari. I understand that's not the same as using a watch or phone as the token, but it's a positive step.
Hardware tokens kind of scare me. Suppose I'm traveling. My options are to take both tokens with me and risk losing both; or take one and risk getting locked out of accounts on the road if it's lost or fails.
I use an OTP Auth, which is a TOTP code app that can sync codes between devices using iCloud. Phone lost? Get another one, restore the backup, good to go.
As a previous poster mentioned, most 2FA implementations (all kinds, not just hardware) have an account recovery method if the token is lost, which is another attack surface that could undermine 2FA. Necessary evil, I suppose; but still.
Does anyone think for a second that any country would actually honor unenforceable "rules of the road?" Governments will do whatever they perceive to be in their own interest, period. Large, powerful countries such as Russia, China, USA etc. can freely ignore so-called norms because, well, they can and what are you gonna do about it? Pariah states such as North Korea will continue to do what they do because why not?
NATO allies claim that they don't spy on each other, but of course they do. Intel on internal deliberations of allies can be as important as intel on opponents, because you have to know if your allies will really have your back when it hits the fan. Biometric scans at ports of entry and big data digital footprint analysis are making human intel harder, so hacking is becoming even more important. It's a very small step from spying to weaponized hacking, since they by necessity target many of the same vulnerabilities to gain access.
So who exactly will observe such norms? Anyone? Anyone at all? As Will Rogers observed, "diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggie until you can find a rock."
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