Posts by Jonathan 27 451 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jun 2010
Even if DJI was the only company that made drones, they couldn't stop this. Sure, software hacks are really easy, but if you couldn't do that you could do hardware hacks instead. Say, hack the altimeter to display all values over the limit as their high - the limit. You can't really totally control a product that's out in the user's hands. This is a job for law enforcement.
You'd have to write your own script/application to distribute the certs. I don't think there is an available OSS solution. Let's Encrypt is targeting personal and small business sites that don't care to pay for a more-expensive cert provider, so I'd guess that anyone with multiple servers can probably afford to pay GoDaddy, Verisign or whoever.
I personally use Let's Encrypt on my personal sites, which are run off one Amazon EC2 instance. But for work we use the more expensive certs and will continue to. What's $100/year if the company makes millions?
I'd recommend not using any public Wi-Fi, they're not secure. A VPN is a minimum, but even then I'd be wary because anyone on the network gets local network access to your device (except in the most expensive Wi-Fi devices, which they're probably not using).
I think you bring up a good point. The majority of people don't understand what a TLS (secure) connection actually secures and just think it's vaguely "safe". I don't know how we could communicate that what it means is that the communications between your browser and the website are encrypted and verified.
Browser manufacturers are doing a really bad job of communicating that right now. Chrome, for example has made it increasingly difficult to check certificates, you can't even get them from the lock icon anymore. They're hidden in the page inspector.
I'm cool with it.
1. This is the most minor thing in the world, this only affects a very specific use-case and you can get around it by converting your drive to NTFS.
2. Some of us have 1Gbps bidirectional fibre.
3. Haven't yet, I've had OneDrive (SkyDrive) since the beginning.
In case you plan on saying anything else, I do have local backups as well, but I want an extra set of copies in case the place goes down in flames.
Besides, who's "more trustworthy"? Google? Amazon? All the giant multi-nationals would sell you out for a nickle if they thought they could get away with it.
It's the #1 desktop OS, so it's the biggest target. Although there have been some interesting ransomware attacks for Mac OS too. Very few people use Linux as a desktop OS and those who do are on average, fairly technically adept. These attacks require the user to download a fishy file to start off, so Windows is the primary target.
That number is just as ridiculous as the web statistics companies that claim 90%+ of web servers run Linux. Their methodology is bunk, because SpiceWorks has no way of knowing what servers people who aren't their clients are using. Just like the web statistics companies only detect the OS on edge node servers so if you use a Linux-based web balancer (like almost everyone does regardless of app server) they think you're running Linux.
You're right to be skeptical of statistics like this, because they're in general, totally unreliable. No one has enough data to compile such wide-ranging statistics.
"So installed Slack has tight integration with Skype and I have yet to figure out how to remove it."
No, it doesn't. It uses Windows associations to launch your assigned phone software. Numbers in my Slack launch 3CX for phone calls because that's what I have assigned. You can change the association or you can remove Skype. Either will fix your problem.
Oh man is the new Skype app terrible. Those cards just keep getting in the way, and it's SO SLOW. How is it SO SLOW? I liked the old Skype app. The new one doesn't really do any more and the interface is constantly getting in your way.
I'm so happy that we use Slack at work so I'm not forced to use Skype's new app on a regular basis. I think this will probably be enough to get my friends who do use Skype to switch to something else.
I don't know about Elementary being similar to Unity, I think it looks more like Gnome 3.0. Last time I tried to use it I ran into driver issues with the installer and it wouldn't work regardless of how hard I tried. Maybe I'll give it another shot. A new user-focused Linux distro is generally a good idea.
You're probably right, self-driving cars have to be massively better, near perfect, before they'll be popular.
And yes, some people definitely consider themselves bad drivers, and a lot of them are actually wrong. It seems more based on that person's level of confidence than their actually ability. Although lack of confidence or overconfidence can both be really dangerous on the road. I should know, every accident I've ever had has been caused by overconfidence.
You're right, but you missed laundering through exchanges. You can take your bitcoin and trade it for Ethereum, Litecoin or whatever, trade that to another exchange and keep going through a few cycles. It becomes near impossible to trace, especially because most exchanges aren't willing to reveal their records. And there are plenty or exchanges located in uncooperative or highly privacy-law gated countries.
I really disagree with the conclusions here, why is it the manufacturer's duty to guard against the possible evils of third party hardware? It's the customer's choice to go which cheap knock-off parts and guarding against them is explicitly anti-consumer, plus it costs the manufacturer more money for the additional components.
For the vast majority of customers this would be a negative.
Very few people care about Atari games, even if this is a great product I don't seem them selling vary many. Look at the Sega throwback system sales, and the Genesis is a much more marketable property than the 2600 (or any other Atari console).
The NES Classic was an unexpected, runaway hit for 3 reasons. 1.It's a cute little NES that a lot of people want to have even if they don't want to play it. 2. It's Nintendo, they're the Apple of the console world. 3. NES nostalgia is really hot right now, spurred on by popular YouTube shows about collecting NES games.
You guys are me curious about this, and it turns out it is illegal to "make, use, transfer, display, transport, store or dispose of" almost all CFCs, including Halon (all 3 kinds) in the part of Canada I live and has been since 2011 after manufacturing was made illegal in 1994. So that probably explains my I've not seen one.
Every time I read one of these long threads about punch cards it makes me so happy that I was born after the invention of the IBM PC and never had to deal with those things. I don't think anyone has ever said anything nice about punch cards.
P.S. Visual Studio automatically converts tabs to spaces by default, and I'm sure other IDEs do too (didn't bother checking, not worth it). This makes the metrics used in this story totally worthless.
If legitimate companies have to put back doors in all their encryption schemes doesn't that just mean terrorists will buy their encryption from criminals or roll their own? All this is going to do is degrade the encryption used by regular law-abiding citizens.
Not only that, I feel like it will backfire spectacularly, like the "Clipper Chip" fiasco. When technical issues are decided upon by people who do not understand them at all we always end up with a ridiculous and unworkable solution.
This story implies the people involved were so stupid it makes me think it might be a troll. If it is real, the idiots who think it's a good idea to print product credentials in training materials should be canned, along with the people who supervise backups (or rather don't) and probably the CTO for being a totally clueless fool. This is just an after-affect for massively incompetent management, you can't blame the first-day junior dev for it.
"It's a real threat"
No, it isn't. If it really was then all similar devices would be banned from planes entirely, including checked luggage. This is just another fake security measure that's been implemented as an attempt to convince pudding-headed simpletons that airport security is excellent and air travel is just as safe as ever. It's totally pointless and only serves to annoy, but they think it will put simple minds at ease so they do it. I personally think they shouldn't be wasting time and money on things like this, because air travel genuinely IS as safe as ever, but the powers that be seem to think the public are a bunch of idiots (and I'm not sure I disagree).
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