Posts by DarkWalker 26 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2013
I actually believe this foils the arguments of the "ban encryption" brigade. If ISIS has a support structure dedicated to walking their agents through setting secure communications, then they would be able to set a safe encrypted layer above any government-mandated unencrypted network. They aren't just using default-settings off-the-shelf kit anymore.
Mine lacks a clock. But I can ask any of my portable devices to speak the time aloud.
BTW, I currently use my Android tablet to play music in my car. The difference is that I control it with a generic, very cheap Bluetooth device that has all controls I might need while driving (next track, previous track, play/pause, and volume control) as nice, large buttons I can find by touch without having to glance. Think media controls on the steering wheel without having to pay extra for that.
GOG does this for computer games, but with a longer window: 30 days.
And they sell DRM-free games, which means the consumer would be able to just download a copy of the game and return it without issues.
The fact they are still in business, and growing their catalog, speaks for itself, IMHO. While there are some bad apples that will abuse the system, seems like most of their customers are honest.
(And, of course, if anyone wants a free game, just torrenting it tends to be less hassle than purchasing it and getting a refund.)
In Brazil, there is an interesting judgment ongoing in our Supreme Court to decide if it's legal for companies to contribute to political campaigns. If the expected result of declaring such contributions illegal is reached, any politician taking money from companies for political campaigns from that point onwards will lose his or her mandate.
Seeing the resulting political landscape ought to be interesting.
Well, they got my money. Not being from the UK, and having backed during KS, there is no way for me to force a full refund.
But I'm now making sure anyone I know that shows even a passing interest in the game is made aware of the bait and switch scam Frontier pulled. They might have gotten some of my money, but I will make sure they lose more in lost sales than they got out of scamming me.
Which is just a specialized version of their search engine that displays a small snippet of the news and directs the reader to the original page if he wants to read the full thing.
And, might I add, a specialized version that doesn't display adds.
No matter. Google has already proved that they can play hardball. The publishers that want to work with Google, from countries that allow them to waive any fees to have their content indexed, will continue to receive traffic from Google; the ones that either don't want to allow Google to use snippets from their news stories without a fee, or that are from countries that don't allow them to do so, won't, and thus will be at a huge disadvantage.
Unless the EU can make a news aggregator as popular as Google, with the added handicap that this news aggregator will have to pay to provide the snippets, this plan doesn't have a prayer of a chance of working.
Not to mention that, with the Internet being open and in a global economy, Europeans can keep using Google, but they won't be seeing adverts for European companies anymore. Cue in companies from everywhere else in the world that sell overseas, as well as European companies that are willing to do their contracts outside Europe, drastically increasing their mindshare in Europe. And, if Google isn't operating from Europe itself, then the EU can do absolutely nothing about it.
As soon as I can get one that looks like common (if bulky) glasses and is reasonably affordable I will do so, even if I have to write my own apps.
Until then, my wearable of choice will be a smartwatch. Though not an Apple one; I see any device that I can't root and take full control of as merely a toy.
I might be wrong, but I believe Bluetooth, due to its short range and the way it handles interference, is nearly impossible to jam on a wide area. Not without spending a huge amount of money and power in equipment and jamming about every radio and wireless device — including those that might be in use by government or law enforcement forces — in the same area, anyway.
I prefer to use simple, impossible to forget words, such as supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
(Though when I was using that I did pick a l33tspeak rendition of it and included two misspellings. Well, the misspellings were not intentional, but they did make the password harder to crack.)
Actually, as far as I understand it, you are still fine if you hire a professional to take your photos. In that case the professional is working under a contract specifically to produce the photos, thus whoever hired the professional gets the copyright unless there is some different stipulation in the contract.
Well, if other such countries are like mine, the chance they will go with online and PC is high indeed. Console games, for whichever reason, cost about double the US price here, while PC games are actually cheaper than in the US.
While piracy was still rampant the mindshare of console games was, at least, high. Now that the WiiU, PS4, and XBox One have better anti-piracy mechanisms, most people here have never even seen a game running on those consoles, reducing the desire to get them even for those players that can afford to pay over $100 for a single game.
One of the main advantages I see in using Android is exactly that I'm not tied to a manufacturer.
So, unless Samsung does away with the "exclusive" bit, I will only ever look at completely free apps inside its store, and even then I will give preference to equivalent apps from the Play store, or even from other third party stores that don't attempt to tie me to a single manufacturer.
Well, from what I've read in a different article, seems like Nokia's Androids will be different enough from stock that Android apps aren't guaranteed to run without a recompile, since many of Google's APIs won't be present.
In other words, it's an Android, but one that intentionally breaks compatibility with other Android devices and apps.
Also, if you use BitTorrent, set it to encrypted. Perhaps also help seed legitimate torrents, like Linux distros and LibreOffice installs, with the torrent client set to only accept encrypted communication. Thus, instant background encrypted traffic :)
A few caveats, though:
- With data from Brazilian people stored in Brazil, the internet traffic from creating and accessing that data won't leave the country. No way for the US-based NSA infrastructure to intercept something that doesn't enter the US.
- The US/NSA could start collecting data in Brazil itself, but that would require judicial oversight from Brazilian courts in order to be legally done, otherwise the involved persons in Brazil itself could get jail time if caught.
- Not mentioned in the article, but Brazil is also looking at laying underwater cables to EU and Africa, which would make internet traffic to those places, and perhaps also for a large part of Asia, bypass the US.
For my part, I believe I will stop purchasing Nintendo consoles (or any kind of console) this generation, despite having purchased almost every single Nintendo console, and many of it's games, in the past. I'm fed up with closed gardens; I would rather have a second PC on my living room than have some device where I can only use manufacturer-approved (and grossly overpriced) software.
Now, if Nintendo ever gets to release it's games for the PC, I'm likely to purchase most of them...
"Before the panic starts, it should be pointed out that the Texans are spoofing civilian GPS systems. Cracking encrypted military signals has never been demonstrated, although jamming them is possible, and redirecting cruise missiles in flight will remain in the fictional realm for the time being."
So you jam the military band while spoofing the civilian band, so military kit will only have the spoofed civilian signal (plus internal gyroscopic, inertial, and perhaps image sensors) to go by. At the very least this would make the military kit far less precise, as it turns off GPS completely to avoid the risk of being spoofed; at worst it will use the spoofed civilian signal.
Keep in mind that Amazon is not only the English version of the name of the river. It's also the name of the basin where the river flows, the rainforest that grows around it, and, although erroneously, is often used by English speaking persons to refer to the states where the Amazon rainforest grows in Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela (the correct name in the last cases is "Amazonas").
Imagine a private company getting the "mississippi" gTLD; it would be similar, except that the Amazon river flows through two countries, the Amazon basin spreads across seven countries, and the Amazon rainforest spreads across nine countries.
There are merits if the Android model is used.
In other words, if the self-contained, sandboxed app can be obtained from any number of competing app stores, or even installed from a local file if the user so desires.
Otherwise, just no. Having a single mandatory source of apps is a huge step backwards, no matter what the associated benefits might be.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
