Posts by a_yank_lurker 4138 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2013
@James O'Shea "May the fleas of ten billion camels infest Larry Ellison's crotch." - You are too kind for Leisure Suit Larry. While users of Linux and Solaris are generally technically literate and can figure out how to uninstall older Java versions, With Linux, one should know how to use your distro's package management tools. I suspect most Apple users are not.
Your points are all valid. But I think the FTC was more concerned about Grandpa and cousin Bubba who can barely turn on a computer. The software they have installed is likely to be consumer oriented not business oriented. And they are not likely to understand that nuances of updating something like Java or the JVM. At best they would be lucky to know they Java on their systems.
Android phones already have a voice activated system which apparently most users are satisfied with if they even use it. So why would they consider installing Cortana or any other similar app. This functionality is consider a core feature of the system so the developers will try to tightly integrate it into the system.
@Cynic 999 - If so, I would say it is an incredibly stupid strategy when the unwashed masses really do not need a specific OS or application set. If the technically literate migrate to Linux for example, they can assist their family and friends in their migration. Would you trust family member who has been running Linux for about a year or so successfully when they suggest Linux?
My take is W10 will have poor market traction and in a couple of years there will a noticeable uptick to Linux/BSD/Apple as people evaluate their options and get advice from their informal IT department.
Let's see, the POS terminals are provided by a vendor, the software is provided by a vendor, most likely the install ans set will be done partially using vendors. So the problem is it is too hard to talk to your vendors or is it you are too lazy and cheap to fix your kit.
To the retailers who are having problems: May you go out of business before destroying innocent customers' finances by your laziness and greed. Better yet, if any hack is traced to you, the owners and CEO's go to prison for aiding and abetting fraud.
Quoting the Verge :
http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/19/10628208/hillary-clinton-back-door-debate
"Democrats have strange ideas about the internet, too. At tonight's ABC News presidential debate, candidates offered a number of vague, borderline-illiterate thoughts about technology, especially Hillary Clinton. It all started when ABC gave her an inane prompt, characterizing encryption as a "terrorist tool used in the Paris attacks." In response, Clinton suggested that, instead of breaking encryption, the US should launch a "Manhattan-like project" to "bring the government and tech communities together" so that law enforcement can "prevent attacks."
It seems anyone moderately knowledgeable about encryption is saying Hildabeast is a loud-mouthed moron proving Mark Twain's observation - "It is better not to speak and have people think you are a fool than to speak and remove all doubt."
That solution sounds good but the weakness is there must be a centralized storage of encryption keys for that to work. If one completely encrypts one's hard drive then one must provide a password, key file, etc. to decrypt the data. This is something that the presumably only the user knows. For a spookhause to decrypt a drive in this scenario they either guess the unlock information or brute force decrypt. Either could be time consuming.
About the only solution that might actually pass any reasonable muster is for the user to be served a warrant to unlock the drive so the police can rummage around. Any other system risks crippling security.
Any weakening of security via backdoors or weakened encryption is a dare to others to find the weaknesses. They are likely to find weaknesses, whether the deliberate ones or others. Either you allow strong security, state of the art security techniques or all communications is essentially send plain text.
Remember we are talking about someone who rolled their own "secure" email server.
There are numerous questions about were did the code come from. Rummaging around it appears the licensing is a mixture of proprietary and BSD. So the question was which part was corrupted. Also, who did it; fingers seem to point to China. But as stated, one should be wary about this since many spook agencies would love to have this kind of back door.
The spooks are very good at bending people to do their will. Also, the bit about a skilled attacker would not leave any trace in the log files of their presence tends to point a spookhaus doing this. But which spookhaus?
The real problem in the media is it tends to be an echo chamber. When one is knowledgeable about a subject it is relatively easy to spot the bogus stories. However, most of us are only really knowledgeable about a few areas - professionally and personally. Thus we all rely on the integrity of the media to get the story right; a task they generally are very dismal at. If the media as a whole is obviously failing in these areas then what does that say about other areas and their overall accuracy and reliability.
This is on Cracked.com were they found many bogus, well known stories in the media worldwide:
http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_1864_the-29-biggest-news-stories-2015-that-werent-true/
If the function is internally critical it must be done in house. Working for a multi-national company, we learned this lesson years ago. My colleagues out of country ultimately report to the same manager as my group. If resources need to be used on a critical internal project some of us can be readily assigned. Also, routine matters will be handled by all in timely manner because there is no third party who has a more critical contract managing the staff. In reality there probably is less management direct interaction because there less to manage. Routine matters get handled by the staff internally without fuss and important matters get management's attention it deserves.
While the issue of corporate cyber security is important, I doubt Congress critters collectively have enough grey matter to write plausible, workable law that would actually improve this. I fear a Titanic mentality of meeting the letter of the law but not the intent of the law by companies.
It is a legitimate concern since grub2 is used by many distros for multi-boot configurations. Just how critical it is depends on the distro and how it is configured. I will be watching for a some updates in the next couple of days and installing them.
Also, the bypass appears to require physical access to the box to hit enter 28 times in a row.
Some information is available, legally, through various directories such as residence. Some is probably available by peruse a person's posts on Facebook. Now one is left with getting SSN/national id, credit card data, etc. that should be available.
Another thing a customer loyalty cards, the initial information is accurate but how often is it updated. Some of mine, the address, phone, and email are totally wrong - they are that old.
I may have missed something but it sounds like Netlix is trying to match the screen size and maximum resolution of the stream. In photography, size of the photo is directly proportional to the maximum size it can be printed before artifacts become noticeable and annoying. Not strong on video resolution and screen sizes.
I doubt the Nine Seniles will take this case. I am not sure how many of them can use a computer or smartphone. The real problem is the design patent on phone is ludicrous because there really a few very similar ways to design a phone. This is due to human anatomy which the last I heard was not changing. All smartphones will strongly resemble each other, human anatomy and functionality forces this.
Truthfully, most "upgrades' are trouble free. It is the ones that bork a driver or an application that cause noise. How many are there - no one really knows. The other issue is clean are the W10 updates. Slurp says they are rolling out new features, etc. which means it is functionally a rolling release. Weird things will break and most users do not have the skills to fix them over time. That may be the rest of the ice berg Slurp is attempt to side swipe ala the Titanic.
Nah Ford Pinto moment, Pintos had a bad habit going up in flames when rear-ended. Or GM Vega aka Vaguely moment - a car so badly designed and built that you could vaguely see it through the smoke screen it produced. VW is barely low minor leagues compared to those two.
Respectable is not an adjective I would use to describe Slurp; criminal is better. The problem with foisting an update on unsuspecting users is many wonder what broke particularly if some important application fails to work. Not good for customer relations but great for a few weeks of extra cash while moonlighting to upgrade to W7 or Linux.
The proper strategy is not to foist it on the masses but make it available to users at their convenience it obtain.
If the application is critical to public's trust in something, elections in this case, then the code must open sourced for anyone to inspect. Test cases only mean for those cases the code appears to give the correct result. By extension, it is assumed the code will always give the correct result. If one knows the test cases, one can game the system, ask VW.
It appears there is one Swedish charge left, statute of limitations expires in 2020 according to Wikipedia. However, given the Manning leaks there has always been a nagging suspicion that the Swedish charges were more a means to get him custody until some feral TLA figures out what charges would stick. Assange is an Australian citizen and the US may not have any charges that would stick. Ecuador did grant him political asylum which implies some in the Ecuadorian believed the Swedish charges at best were a serious stretch and probably politically motivated. Many Latin American and South American governments have a love-hate relationship with the US and like embarrass the US when they can.
I remember talking to a store manager while they going through a remodel. One of the major problems was none of the electrical drawings were remotely correct unless by complete accident. And the plumbing drawings were almost as bad. So it is possible for the sparkys to be very competent but be totally misinformed about the actual wiring.
I suspect Slurp PHBs never bothered to consider that the usage would follow a Weibull probability distribution. Most users would be clustered in the low usage end by there would be a large tail of users who would use much more than the average. The Weibull distribution was developed/discovered when monitoring the length of customer phone calls. Most cluster around an average but there is large tail of calls that take much longer than the average.
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