Posts by Quxy 417 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Oct 2009
In my experience (even my computer-illiterate relatives have been using email encryption since the early 90s) there are two major "user friendlyness" issues with existing public-key email encryption that have limited its widespread adoption:
1. Secure distribution of public keys.
2. Anonymising meta-data (e.g. headers).
Since Virtru doesn't claim to address #2, and doesn't seem to do anything to make #1 easier, it's hard to see what this product does, other than introducing more proprietary, unvetted technology into an already Balkanised email ecosystem.
Unfortunately, as Huxley noted, the alert minds which correctly note this creeping tyranny "fail to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. Western society has already become obsessed with conformity to mass consumerism; conformity to police-state dictats should be relatively easy, as long as the growth of social media and popular entertainment doesn't slacken.
I was only running 64-bit Windows 7 (one standalone, one in a VM), and my browser was Chrome in both cases. No flash (although the OSX flash problems seem to have eased up lately). But most of that time was spent in CAD software (i.e. lots of little files) and Microsoft Office, not web browsing. The improvement in power management must have been provided by the host OS, not by the applications.
As an speed test experiment, I installed Windows 7 on both a bootable partition and as a VM on my MBA. While I found that most benchmark speeds were about the same between the two (graphics is slower, file access is faster), battery life varied remarkably. While I get 8 hours of battery life using the VM, I get less than 6 hours booted into Windows 7.
My impression is that Windows has always had lousy power management, but simply comparing one Windows laptop to another provided no real frame of reference (quiet down there in the back, you penguins). But Microsoft is attempting to enter a field occupied by competitors who both have OSes with several iterations of serious power management refinement behind them, so it's hard to hide their (relative) inexperience in mobile computing.
The headline should read "Experian got caught selling names and address to another fraudster".
Unfortunately, with most of middle and upper-class Americans in their (presumably compromised) records, this has the potential to turn into a *much* bigger problem than it is at present...
Free? Who said anything about that? As I said, I *own* the Microsoft development tools needed to do the job.
It's just that trying to use VS to quickly write a simple USB driver and device GUI is like using a city bus to drive to the corner store. It's possible, but a bicycle is quicker and easier.
It's hard to fathom why Microsoft sets the bar so high to software development on Windows. Between killing third-party tools and raising the price (and complexity!) of their own bloated offering, I get the feeling they're trying to lock out everyone but the developers who *have* to develop for Windows and those who see a bigger reward for Windows programs.
Just today I had to quickly write a simple GUI to control some weird USB devices we received. Although I have a VS licence, it was quicker and easier to install Linux in a VM and use Qt and libusb to develop an application. Total time: about 4 hours. Why must every bit of code in Windows turn into a huge, fscking development project? Even OSX is easy by comparison.
No indication of what they actually DO, but they tick all the IT manager boxes:
"Sky Giraffe can generate a powerful task-specific app in 15 minutes and immediately deploy it to specific end users to increase productivity... Our platform is built with best practice encryption standards in order to protect all of your sensitive data... Employees with different mobile devices, versions, and operating systems are no match for SkyGiraffe... The SkyGiraffe Studio, Mobile App, and Cloud components all work together in concert to provide exceptionally powerful and up-to-date information to your workforce."
No kidding. I designed wildlife telemetry gear back in the 70s, and the best that we could do for fish (a common requirement) was HF frequencies that only worked when the fish were near the surface.
More recently though, I put together a proof-of-concept system using audio-frequency OFDM modems, and we were able to get 14,400 baud TCP/IP over PPP for several km in the north Atlantic. That's certainly the tack the UB researchers are taking.
However, given the attenuation issues we ran into, I suspect that the (~1 baud) submarine VLF folks aren't feeling threatened yet.
Yes, I'm quite familiar with these "grants", having worked on several school committees to apply for them. They *always* have strings attached, which *always* involve formally exposing students to Microsoft products.
As an AC recently remarked, Microsoft's primary responsibility is to their shareholders... and it shows.
If Microsoft expects to drum up any interest in their touch-enabled Office apps, they're going to have to turn out something several orders of magnitude more advanced than OneNote. I gave it a try, but compared to something like the popular Note Anytime app, OneNote feels more like an example from a "how-to-write-touch-enabled-apps" programming tutorial than a real product.
When it came time to retire my T61P (1920x1200), the best replacement I could find at Lenovo was the heavy, expensive W520, with a lower-resolution (1920x1080) display. So I switched to a 15" MacBook Pro, with a 2880x1800 screen, better build quality and battery life -- at a lower price. Fedora installed and ran without any issues... the only downside is working around the lack of a middle mouse button!
When you parse their actual statement, it becomes clear that it's nothing more than meaningless noise:
"not yet" (but they're just about to)
"handed over" (because it's self-service)
"the content" (but metadata is fine)
"any Skype conversations" (what about video and text messages)
"to regular" (of course, no one who asks is "regular" LEO)
"law enforcement" (but the NSA isn't a LEO)
"requests" (why make a request when you already have a back door)
"in the last six months" (before that, well...)
The subhead is a bit incongruous, innit? The Middle Kingdom has long had its human rights issues at home, but since when has it ever showed particular interest in weapons proliferation? The USA and Russia are (by far) the big weapons manufacturers for the world. OTOH, China seems to be more interested in leapfrogging the West on emerging technologies, so space medicine seems perfectly reasonable.
Sigh... Congress (especially, but not limited to the Republicans) used to at least *pretend* that its proposed legislation was for the benefit of the average person. Now they've even dropped the pretense. Guess they figure that with single-digit public approval ratings, the PR isn't worth the effort.
The USA is a republic of largely self-governing states with widely divergent cultures and parochial self-interests. In the US, local and state interests will almost always trump national interests. For the Seattle-area jurors, Motorola and Google could just as easily have been Korean, when compared with well-known and admired hometown companies like Microsoft.
Trust me, it's even more bizarre than reported. Like Jake, I have ties to DPRK, and the information that emerges quietly is stranger than what is published in the media. We all know that it's just a matter of time before it implodes dramatically; but everyone's question is how many innocent people that process will take with it.
31,250Hz was chosen because it was a unit fraction of the 4MHz clock used in the cheap 8-bit MCUs of the early 80s. I designed several commercial instruments with MIDI interfaces, and recall that we didn't use a separate UART chip (which required odd, higher-frequency crystals), but simply divided by 128.
Honestly, after Microsoft's recent anti-Android campaigns and scorched-earth litigation against Android OEM licensees, what sort of response do they *expect* from Google? Why would Google offer them any concessions whatsoever, instead of strictly following the letter of their published rules? I'm no particular fan of Google, but it's rather rewarding to finally see Microsoft come up against someone that they can't simply push around.
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