Posts by fidodogbreath

Apple, Samsung feel the pain as smartphone market slumps to lowest shipments in 5 YEARS

Re: Their attempts to wring the maximum amount of cash out of their customer base backfired

The last three iPhone cycles have been about taking things away and making the experience worse, while increasing the price. I have a 6s that works fine. Were I to "upgrade," I would get a dramatically more fragile all-glass device that has no headphone jack, a dumb-looking notch in the screen, the same OS I have now, and a scorched hole where my wallet used to be.

What would I get that I don't already have? Animojis, Face ID, some stupid AR/VR shit I'll never use, worse cell reception due to inferior modem and antennas (XR), the same or worse battery life...and that's about it.

I'm ragging on Apple here, but Samsung and Google have fallen into the same trap. The article makes it very clear that "premium" materials, a 1-2% improvement in some obscure camera spec, and a few pointless features just aren't compelling enough for most people to part with major cash.

There's NordVPN odd about this, right? Infosec types concerned over strange app traffic

Anomalous traffic that specifically catches the attention of security people seems like an odd way to hide from security people.

Brit spy chief: We need trust or we won't have a 'licence to operate in cyberspace'

Animal House said it best

"You f-cked up. You trusted us."

Tesla touts totally safe, not at all worrying self-driving cars – this time using custom chips

This time for sure?

Maybe their new chip will have enough CPU power to recognize giant trucks stopped in the road. Oh, and barriers.

Strong-willed field support op holds it together during painful customer call

Secret transmitters

Back in the early 90s I worked in technical sales for an Apple dealer. We were a smallish company, so the sales folks like me helped out with support stuff.

One of my customers brought in a Mac II that he said had been crashing. He was vague about the exact sequence of events ("it does it all the time") and we weren't able to reproduce the issue on the bench, so I called him to pick it up.

'Howard' was an old hippie with a very dry sense of humor and we had always gotten along well. When he came in, he asked me, "how come this thing never crashes when you guys have it?"

Displaying my mad skillz as sales-trained, highly professional relationship seller, I pointed to an ultrasonic motion alarm sensor on the ceiling. "That's a service transmitter. All the stores have them. When a computer is in range of those, it won't crash."

Howard's head snapped up, he smacked his fist on the counter and went ape-shit. "WHAT?!?!? WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU HAVE SOMETHING LIKE THAT?!? THAT'S BULLSHIT!!!"

The other employees drifted closer to enjoy the show, and the store manager (aka The Dragon Lady, of whom we were all terrified) appeared out of nowhere. I hastily stammered out an apology -- "no, sorry, bad joke, that's just part of our burglar alarm" -- and comped his diagnostic fee. After he left, the manager reamed me out for comping the charge, even though the guy was a good customer.

Epilogue: Howard called me later and confessed. He knew I was joking, but he was short on cash and figured if he acted pissed and made a scene I'd probably comp him. Age and treachery, for the win...

Why Qualcomm won – and why Tim Cook had to eat humble Apple pie

Re: 5G - beyond the hype

Seriously, what is a 5G phone going to give you that you don't have already?

The ability to brag about having a 5G phone.

Just a little FYI: Filtering doodad in Adblock Plus opens door to third-party malware injection

Re: RTFA?

IE not so (no support for the $rewrite function?)

Probably just no one bothered to look.

Re: default filter lists

They could run an ad that says "Download AdBlock uOrigin Plus to block this ad."

If they really want to drum up business, they could include an autoplay video and a script to turn the mouse cursor into sparkly stars.

Either Facebook is building yet another massive bit barn in Iowa, and doesn't want you to know about it....

Re: Justifiable ?

Photos and conversations that are stored and which I would guess most are never looked at again.

Think of it like the mining industry. Before you can mine something, you have to find a place which contains the resource, and then obtain access to it.

Data is not finite, and the same data can be mined over and over again. You just need to build places to keep it. Every photo, post, like, click-through, etc. is just raw material that can be "extracted" and sold over and over again.

Facebook and their ilk don't give a shit whether you ever look at any of that stuff again; but if you do, they'll be watching.

Re: jobs for all

Because they mostly have Democratic mayors & councils.

Re: They produce jobs, but indirectly

Iowa leads the US in per capita wind energy

Interesting. I'd assumed it was Washington, DC.

iOS 13 leaks suggest Apple is finally about to unleash the iPad as a computer for grownups

User control over installed app versions

There is a setting to turn off automatic app updates.

No way to revert an app to a previous version, though. Sadly, that feature is missing from most app stores, regardless of platform.

Re: buying a Ferrari and fitting it with four space-saver spare tires

Fair point. I was thinking primarily of use cases that involve large amounts of data.

The comments on this article make it clear that people use iPads for all manner of applications, and one person's deal-breaker is someone else's non-factor.

Re: An idea...

I'd call the new hybrid device the iKneeBook

We are no longer the knights who say "iKnee..."

Two more obstacles

multiwindow application support [...] the biggest remaining obstacle to using the iPad as a productivity-class machine

I would argue that mouse support and direct access to external USB-C storage are also pretty significant obstacles for some users.

Apple's ludicrous internal storage prices -- $350 for 512GB, $750 (!) for 1TB -- make the iPad Pro line non-competitive for editing large video or multi-channel high-res audio files. They also make it hard or impossible to have multiple active projects at hand. The classic setup for this is a moderately-sized boot drive and massive internal or external data drive(s). Not possible on the iPad Pro, though, because you can only open files from built-in storage.

It's pretty funny that the "Starting at $999" base model comes with a mighty 64GB of internal storage. That's like buying a Ferrari and fitting it with four space-saver spare tires.

Mouse support! Trying to do any kind of fine selection or editing -- text, photo, video, whatever -- by poking my big, fat fingers at the screen is an exercise in frustration.

New UK counter-terror laws come into force today – watch those clicks, people. You see, terrorist propag... NOOO! Alexa ignore us!

Re: No doubt coming to the USA

I'll be sure to stay away from any Pentagon web sites, or the CIA, or ICE, or Fox News.

Probably good advice in any case.

Be wary, traveller: There is no going back if you step over the Windows 10 20H1 threshold

Abandon all hope, ye who enter 20H1.

Uncle Sam charges Julian Assange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion

Re: Bah!

The cat will be fine as long as s/he refrains from political activity.

Amazon woes and wins, IBM thinks it's solved employee happiness and Duplex phony phone calls everywhere!

Re: Alexa and sensitive patient data

HIPAA means that while your data might be handled by Alexa (i.e. AWS) it would effectively be in a tunnel between you and your provider.

Unless the TOS includes a HIPAA waiver.

"Defendant moves for summary dismissal, Your Honor. The HIPAA waiver is clearly stated on page 38 of the Terms Of Service. At [exact date and time], the plaintiff asserted that he had read and agreed to this binding contract in its entirety. On page 47, the plaintiff further agreed to resolve all disputes by binding arbitration only, using arbitrators that are selected and paid for by the defendant."

Re: Alexa and sensitive patient data

"Protected" health data is far more valuable to credit bureaus and their clients, big pharma, pharmacy chains, medical-equipment sellers (hmmm, Amazon sells some of that...), etc.

It's only a matter of time before an unfavorable diagnosis will result in your credit cards being cancelled before you get home from the doctor's office, for just one one dystopian example.

Quote-unquote

This week Amazon also released a toolkit for developers to allow its digital assistant Alexa to access and transmit sensitive patient data "privately" for healthcare companies.

Forgot the quotes around "privately."

When a tech company claims that something is private, or deleted, or covered by a tracking option that users naively think they can turn off, that just means that said data will no longer be surfaced in the customer-facing part of the UI.

Everything that passes within view of the panopticon is stored and monetized forever, and there is exactly jack shit that any of us can do about it.

Scare-bnb: Family finds creeper cams hidden in their weekend rental by scanning Wi-Fi

I would have been tempted to stick a piece of tape over the lens and see if I mysteriously got a call from the owner.

The microphone would still work.

Hackers don't just want to pwn networks, they literally want to OWN your network – and no one knows they're there

Re: Insert anti-Chinese anti-Iranian and anti-Russian propaganda

Have these companies ever considered not exposing their secret intellectual property to the public Internet.

Now, that's just crazy talk.

Re: Unlikely to change anytime soon

I am firmly of the opinion that absolutely nothing will change until businesses feel a direct, immovable financial impact from failing to secure their systems. [...] When businesses feel fear -- real, brown-trousered fear in the C-suite -- then they act. Until then, nothing much.

These are the kinds of attacks that might cause a Code Brown on Mahogany Row.

You're right that most execs don't shit themselves over a few million customer credit cards or PII records getting hacked. They'll run a PR campaign, offer some credit monitoring that >90% of the affected customers won't sign up for anyway, and in a few weeks it's back to business as usual.

IP is a different matter. It costs a shit-ton of money to design and engineer things like stealth fighters, rockets, supercomputers, cutting-edge chip fab tech, cancer drugs, etc. Having a 9- or 10-figure investment stolen by a competitor -- especially one backed and protected by an untouchable nation-state -- might soil a few top-grain leather chairs and well-tailored trousers.

Googlers, eggheads urge web giant's bosses to kick top conservative off its AI ethics council

Re: Articles of Faith

And no evidence why association with the Heritage Foundation implies one is intrinsically evil and should be excluded from ethics committees. You are asserting it, where is your argument?

???

This anonymous comment is the only one in the Articles of Faith thread that includes the word "evil."

Office Depot, OfficeMax, Support.com cough up $35m after charging folks millions in 'fake' malware cleanup fees

Not just fraud; it's fraud with quotas

Another article I read detailed how OfficeMax / Office Depot had detailed quotas for the number of scans that should be run per day, and that at least 50% of those scans had to be converted into paid "repairs." Employees who failed to meet these quotas received poor reviews, and managers of stores which failed to meet them were berated and punished by corporate HQ.

Re: PC Health Check Program

They didn't need to reverse-engineer anything. A TV station took brand-new PCs that had never been connected to the internet into Office Depot for "free" scans, which then magically found that the PCs malware.

Huawei's half-arsed router patching left kit open to botnets: Chinese giant was warned years ago – then bungled it

Consumer routers are a trash fire

Most consumer routers use ancient versions of open-source software libraries -- even newer models with supposedly updated firmware.

I gave up and replaced my consumer networking crap with a Ubiquiti router and Unifi access points. UBNT fixes exploits promptly, and (at least under home loading conditions) the gear is rock-solid. I can't remember the last time I had to reboot my router or APs for any reason other than to install an update.

My low-end commercial-grade system cost about the same as a "high-end" consumer router. Configuring commercial gear does require more networking knowledge than, say, setting up a Linksys device; but that's not likely to be a problem for most people here.

As any UBNT user will tell you, their software updates can be "of variable quality." Fortunately, there's a large online community of canaries who seem to enjoy installing every update on release day and posting about problems. Thus, it's easy to determine whether to install a release or wait for the next one.

The completely rational take you need on Europe approving Article 13: An ill-defined copyright regime to tame US tech

Re: Really?

Maybe it's time it was made law that Copyright stays with the creator(s), is not assignable in any circumstances, and if any media company wishes to use any part of it, they must negotiate and obtain a licence themselves.

If creators are not allowed to sell their copyrights, then they do not really own or control them...

Confusing language doesn't stop politicians enforcing a law, it just makes them enforce it wrong.

Unless that was the intent all along: write an ambiguous law to avoid accountability, then direct the bureaucracy to interpret it in the preferred manner.

What bugs me the most? World+dog just accepts crap software resilience

Re: My new Audi A5 has a passenger window which goes down at unexpected times,

Buggy software and electronics in a VW-Audi Group car?!? I'm shocked, I tell you; shocked.

-- Former Passat owner

Re: I love the ubiquitous Marketing attack

And management sets the development budget. If marketing specs state that the software must be of "high quality" but management only budgets for "good enough," the budget wins. You can finesse specs; finessing the budget will get the dev manager fired.

Re: Utterly fatous article

Unless you are writing software for a very heavily regulated business sectors like avionics

Avionics might not the best example at the moment.

Re: Reliable code

Speaking of "big outs" -- how can a EULA / TOS be a legally-enforceable contract when one party to the agreement claims the right to change it at any time, with no notice? In most other areas of contract law, a clause like that would be considered "unconscionable"...but every #$%! website TOS has something like that.

Another gripe along those lines: if you manage to discover that the TOS changed, and you disagree with the change, your only "remedy" is to stop using the site or product -- even if you paid for it, and paid subscriptions are not refundable.

Ever heard the phrase "perfect is the enemy of good"?

It should be obvious, but I think the author's point is that "bad is the enemy of good."

Software will never be perfect. But think how much less annoying life would be if some of it just sucked less.

Well, you could keep using the old, buggy versions.

Yeah, you better, you... you better tell us how you're misusing people's data, privacy, watchdog suggests to US telcos

Too specific

But as EPIC put it, the issue for the FTC Republicans beholden to their corporate overlords is not lack of tools but lack of will.

FTFY

Spyware sneaks into 'million-ish' Asus PCs via poisoned software updates, says Kaspersky

Re: How did the bad actor identify the MAC addresses?

I'm wondering about how the bad actor here identified the MAC addresses it wanted to target

Supply chain. MAC addresses are often printed and/or bar-coded on the outside of the computer box.

Re: Laptop Measles

Buying an OS-free machine won't help you if the firmware / PBE is compromised.

Re: @Jack

[MAC addresses] are also incredibly easy to spoof.

They're easy to spoof to other devices on the network. Not sure they're as easy to hide from the machine itself (or privileged software running on it).

Re: ?

Why not just publish a list of affected macs/ first few bits of the mac addresses

The first three bytes identify the manufacturer of the interface. In this case, they might be the same for all targets.

Publishing the whole list would announce to the world that those interfaces belong to a high-value target -- or, at least, that they did at one time. One would expect that such targets have security people who've "retired" all their Asus machines by now; but have some pity for the poor sods who buy them used on eBay or Craigslist...

Re: Modern times

I have a machine running here which has been connected to the internet 24/7 for about 10 years, and running an operating system that hasn't had any updates for (what in 2 months will be) 25 years.

I'm guessing you work for either Equifax or the US Office of Personnel Management.

Nation-state operation

In a way, it reminds me of Stuxnet: a sophisticated attack, capable of breaching almost any Siemens PLC system in the world...but which only activated on a specific target.

This isn't exactly the same, of course; but why would a criminal hacker infect millions of computers with a powerful backdoor that can compromise the system at the firmware level, but which only triggered against 600 specific users? Plus, it chose targets by MAC address, so the attacker needed to know in advance the MAC addresses of its targets.

As Rain Man might say, "Definitely nation-state. Definitely. Definitely."

Chap joins elite support team, solves what no one else can. Is he invited back? Is he f**k

Re: not neccessarily very good at brown-nosing...

The real issue is that "ambition" is defined as "wanting to be a manager."

Of course, those reviews are designed by management types; so I suppose it makes sense that they would assume that everyone aspires to be just like them.

I thought I did -- until I got promoted into management. I absolutely hated all the HR crap, discipline issues, performance reviews, budgeting, interminable agenda-less meetings, PowerPoint all the things... basically, everything that I did all day.

Never again. I'm happy to take a bit less money and not dread going to work every day.

manager's favourites = manager's favourites

best techs = best techs

manager's favourites <> best techs

Let's spin Facebook's Wheel of Misfortune! Clack-clack-clack... clack... You've won '100s of millions of passwords stored in plaintext'

Mr Zuckerberg's password for his social media accounts was dadada until it was leaked in 2016.

Meanwhile, Dadada_1 meets Facebook's requirements for a "secure" password: eight characters, upper case, lower case, numeral, and special character....

Facebook is a trash fire

That is all.

Apple bestows first hardware upgrades in years upon neglected iPad Mini and Air lines

Re: Issues

Locked eco system. I don't want to use Apple Cloud or app to transfer,my content

???

You don't have to use iCloud to transfer content. Or at all, really.

DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, etc. all work with iOS. There are also OTG-type drives for the Lightning port. You do have to use a companion app to access them, which is admittedly less convenient than mounting the volume directly as Android does. But the point is that there are numerous third-party hardware and software methods to transfer content to and from iOS devices.