Posts by timcroydon

Rejecting Sonos' private data slurp basically bricks bloke's boombox

Contempt for users

Sonos are showing huge contempt for their users. I love the core system, and it works well for my listening habits so made perfect sense when I bought into it 7-8 years ago (been working faultlessly and sounds great btw).

Where I take great issue with them recently is:

- lack of SMB2+ support. They're STILL insisting on SMB1 for network shares despite all the security concerns and they fact their support line is going to get hammered when MS drop it shortly and everyone updates their NAS boxes.

- privacy creep and focus on a million streaming services rather than making them plugins you add to support just the ones you want to use

- I had a Sonos device stolen in a burglary. I reported the serial number (which is the MAC address) asking them to disable the device or report it to me/police if they saw it. They refused, saying they'd only get involved if they got a request from law enforcement. I consider that an absolutely appalling attitude.

- they bullshitted me about compatibility of an IR remote against their soundbar thing, claiming it used a non-standard frequency, despite me showing them evidence that wasn't the case by building a IR test thing with a breadboard and RaspPi

Customer service is not their forté - they're going for the easy money from streaming platforms I guess.

What should the Red Arrows' new aircraft be?

Sonic BOOOOOOOOM

Wow, just imagine the sound of 9 Typhoons in formation! That would be awesome in the true sense of the word.

How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript

Re: Timing

Timing has little to do with trademark infringement, it's more about perceived good will in the brand and whether the brands could be confused, i.e. whether they cover the same 'class of goods'. Don't know what either Kik does though really so no idea if that's the case or not.

Re: Copyright infringement ?

No, that's wrong. Every package has its own license, which may or may not be permissive. E.g. often see GPL, MIT or Apache licenses.

I notice that the left-pad utility in question actually has no explicit license so is covered under normal copyright laws which could raise interesting questions for users who haven't checked they've got explicit permission to use it anyway.

Streaming speaker biz Sonos lays offs workers as it finds its voice

Not sure about this

Not convinced this is a sound move at all. Think they'd be better focussing on the premium high quality audio market. New hardware to add support for 24-bit audio and higher resolution cover art would be good for starters.

Twitter goes titsup

Tweetdeck too

Looks like Tweetdeck is affected too. Get nothing but a 503 response.

Cops turn Download Festival into an ORWELLIAN SPY PARADISE

Hippies?

Hippies at Download? Somewhat unlikely I think!

The Shock of the New: The Register redesign update 4

Whitespace above masthead

Much prefer the grey sidebars, although could possibly use a smidge of El Reg red so it's not pure monochrome? Say #eeeaea?

There's a white bar between the #topbar and the masthead that could be removed to save a few pixels (remove margin + border.bottom?)

Blu-ray region locks popped by hardware hacker

Bluray on Linux

Still waiting for an easy and free way to play legit Bluray disks on Linux.

We're not making this up: Apple trademarks the SHOP

Re: Prior art ?

Prior art is for patents not trademarks