Posts by Naselus

Wailing kiddies face Xmas Legogeddon

Re: Yeah, right.

"they'll accept them graciously, thank them for them and take care of them anyway. "

... You know nothing about children.

Yahoo! boss! Mayer! promises! shake-up! in! bid! to! save! her! job!

Re: A couple of questions...

"I'm thinking that Yahoo's core business is selling ad space."

I'm not so sure tbh. I think Yahoo! think that they're an ad space firm... but they're not very good at it. IF it weren't for their (extremely fortuitous) Alibaba stake, I don't think anyone would have bothered to mention Yahoo over the past year or two.

Re: A couple of questions...

"What is their "core business"? Even the search is contracted out.... so..?????"

I think that's Yahoo's big problem really. They have no idea. After losing the search engine wars, they've just kind of existed and lived off some fairly good share purchases. Which actually means Yahoo's business model is somewhere between 'hedge fund' and 'pension fund'.

Bosch, you suck! Dyson says VW pal cheated in vacuum cleaner tests

Re: How often does one run a vacuum on a "clean" floor?

In fairness, I never vacuum and simply roll around in my own filth all day. So really, I'm saving even more power...

R&D money for science – from your taxes?

Re: The science of Economics

It's always struck me as rather pathetic how desperately economists want to be treated as a 'hard' science. It's a social science, which is indeed a type of science; it's arguably tougher than the physical sciences (since generally speaking, once you're outside the quantum level, the objects physical sciences measure rarely decide to change their behaviour completely and en masse in a short space of time). But that lumps them in with Sociology and Anthropology and Psychology and Political Science, which economists want to look down on (because they tend to disagree with most of what economists say people are like). Suggesting that they're on equal footing with such lesser being is a sure-fire way to wind up Econ grads.

As to the article... so, it doesn't matter that we're not spending money on science because other people are. That's definitely not an utterly idiotic answer, well done Tim. And the past 30 years of relentless deregulation and opening things up to competition has somehow coincided with average productivity growth falling enormously, with a particular correlation between the places where growth was worst and those industrialized countries which engaged in the most aggressive deregulation. Even if the bleeding edge has remained more or less at the same level of productivity as 30 years ago, that none the less suggests that there's an error in your argument that more competition will solve the problem.

Israel joins EU in spiking Safe Harbour

Re: Wording

"The United States certainly can guarantee the privacy of Israeli citizens' data on servers in the U.S.."

Sony pictures called; they say that's just not true.

Millions of people forget to cancel Apple Music subscription

Re: $10 bucks a month?

"Ps. Radio.. That's what your describing radio on the internet."

And cars with doors that open LIKE THIS, or LIKE THIS.

Our intuitive AI outperforms (most) puny humans, claims MIT

Re: Won't be long before they apply these techniques to business

"This sort of thing could make swathes of manglement obsolete at a stroke."

Which is why it won't be applied to business. Automation is to replace the proles, not the suits.

Re: mind reading still required

"I propose the Ledswinger test, in which a machine qualifies for AI status only when it comes up with a coherent and realistic plan for resolving the complete mess that is the Middle East at lowest cost and minimum inconvenience"

It'd come back with '2 state solution' after about eight seconds.

Now waiting for Davedavedave to declare me antisemitic for that statement.

Microsoft boss Satya Nadella is paid $18m – and would trouser $20m if sacked

"$1.2m (£775m)"

Is that running on Apple exchange rates?

Some like it hot ... very hot: How to use heat to your advantage in your data center

Re: Data centers can be run much warmer

" The problem is that unless you know for sure all devices in your datacenter can handle that, it is better safe than sorry"

That's the real issue, I suspect. Every company has that one box built by hand in 1986 which is, for some reason, still vitally important but impossible to shift onto something newer. It's so inefficient that it's using half the power input of the DC to produce one thousandth of the compute, it requires a temperature 10C cooler than every other box on premises, and it's OS is so ancient that you have to pay the one remaining man in Britain who knows how to use it a small fortune in retainer fees just to service it. But if it stopped working for 30 seconds, then the sky would fall in, so literally everything is designed to take it into account.

UK biz email slinger Mimecast files for $100m IPO in US

Re: The world's gone IPO mad...

Because most British firms with $33m in sales would be losing 4-5 times that. Mimecast is a real British success story.

So just what is the third Great Invention of all time?

Re: The first great invention

"Language is the transfer of information through communication. The sound-carried version we *primarily* use as humans is by far not the only one, nor, in fact, the most sophisticated in terms of efficiency and accuracy. Language as a system to communicate evolved from the first single-celled organisms up, so you can hardly call that a "human invention"."

Not really, no. Language and communication aren't synonymous, and single-celled organisms do not have 'languages'. Bee dancing is communication, but I don't know of a single linguist who would call it language either - a language needs to follow Saussure's clinical definition of the concept, and almost no animal communication does so (it's been argued to exist in higher mammals, like chimps or dolphins, but even that is pretty contentious. Biologists in the 1970s liked to say it does, but linguists, on the whole, didn't agree, and most modern biologists are increasingly coming round to the idea that describing animal communication as language is anthropomorphism rather than science).

In fact, the more that the structure of language is looked at, the more it seems plausible that its use for communication may be a fortunate by-product. Language - by which I mean all 'natural' languages - is actually structured very inefficiently for the transfer of information.

It seems to have evolved more around the articulation of complex abstract concepts than for actually talking to people - so language actually developed for thinking, and just happens to be something that can then be used in communication. It's a bit suppositional, but this might explain the 60,000 years or so between the evolution of anatomically modern humans, and the 'great leap forward' when they start making cave art etc.

In which case, yes, language is the first and greatest invention of mankind, as it allowed the transfer of knowledge between people. Then agriculture, which allowed the control of the food supply; then writing, which allowed the storing of knowledge externally; then we're probably onto the scientific method and the use of fossil fuels. Economic toys like limited liability and double-entry bookkeeping are not remotely important compared to these - they're of no value in themselves if they're extracted from the capitalist world system, which is why they weren't invented by the Romans or the Egyptians. Tim's amazement at how they were able to run an empire without accountants tells you more about Tim's assumptions than it does about ancient societies, tbh.

Junk your IT. Now. Before it drags you under

How many IT departments can say they are the most important element of the business?

I work for an architect. Amazingly, the most important element in our business is the architectural design guys. I strongly suspect that they always will be, on account of the fact that they're where the money comes from. No matter how much we 'disrupt', unless we decide to jack in this whole 'drawing buildings' thing and become a cloud provider, we're still likely to be taking a back seat to the guys who do our core function.

Junking all our existing systems and replacing them might change that, very briefly, because no-one aside from IT would have the slightest idea how anything works. That might not be a positive move from the business's point of view, though.

Most of the rest of the article was similarly idiotic tripe; I just couldn't let this pass.

Re: Is author using "anti-virus" per chance?

tbh, not for me either, and I'm on a windows system with an antivirus.

Hell, the first thing I did when I read that line was open up a word doc and timed it. About half a second from my finger hitting the mouse button to Word springing up, fully-loaded and ready to go. I don't think that that half-second is crushing my productivity. I'm not rushing to ditch Office 2013 and shunt to 2016 because of it, and I'm not really going to be appalled if I find that the half-second delay hasn't reduced to a half-picosecond delay in the new suite.

The author's attitude falls into the trap of not realizing that there's change that NEEDS to happen, and then there's change for the sake of it. Moving from a frame rate of 20 to a frame rate of 40 is a necessary optimization. Moving from a frame rate of 150 to 300 is not. Replacing an elderly, mission-critical system that you can no longer get the parts for is necessary. Replacing on that is still doing it's job and can be repaired just because 'it's old' is not.

Kill Flash: Adobe says patch to fix under-attack hole still days away

"How much liability can a producer shed using an EULA."

Nowhere near as much as they attempt to tbh; generally speaking, when a EULA is examined by a court, it's found to contain dozens of unlawful clauses and so can't actually be enforced. Steam ran into this in Europe; their original EULA rejected any sort of refund out-of-hand, which is flat-out illegal in the EU. Steam then climbed down. Similar things are probably the case for most others.

I'd be interested to see what happens to, say, Google if someone challenged their end-user agreement, since the amount of data they keep is probably far outside the boundaries of European legislation (hell, in Google's case there's successful cases where people have shown it's outside US law).

Apple may face $900m bill after A7 CPU in iPhones, iPads ripped off university's patent

Re: Apple thieves - what a surprise

"There is some theory that one among the thousands of people who independently came up with the idea should be able get a monopoly on its implementation. "

Unlike the clear-cut, once-in-a-lifetime idea of making the corners round.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty also cool on EMC/Dell

Re: Cloud vs Hardware

Except that cloud vendors aren't running AWS or Azure on a bunch of Dell boxes. Dell aren't gonna pick up a major amount of business from the big players in cloud, so yes, it's generally a threat to them - how much of a threat is almost certainly massively overstated, since there's just a lot of things the cloud offers no serious advantage for, but a company like Dell (which is basically just a distributor of commodity hardware) hasn't really got much hope of picking up big sales to MS or Amazon.

I have one thing to say to MacBook users at EMC: Whoops

Re: EMC guys who transitioned away from using Dell laptops to various MacBooks

"The numbers of Macs being sold year on year is IMHO increasing."

May we have a recent citation on that, too, please?

Apple's own stats generally show Mac sales hovering around 5mil /quarter worldwide for the past 5 years... compared to >70 million Windows-based computers per quarter. The OS market share figures still basically have Apple's total users at roughly the same number as those still using basic, hated Win 8 (not 8.1).

That said, I agree that Apple probably won't attempt to merge iOS and OSX - there's no particularly good reason to do so, and frankly O/Ses for desktops and O/Ses for phones need to do different things. If IoT takes off, I'm going to have a processor sat in my toaster. That doesn't mean I really want it running Windows 10, though.

Microsoft offers sneak peak of Hyper-V containers with Win 10 nested virtualisation

Re: Who cares?

"If you're concerned with the tone of the message"

I suspect he was more concerned over the fact that the OP is talking absolute shash, tbh. Hyper-V is used in thousands of production environments successfully, and if you know Powershell then deployment and administration are considerably easier than Vsphere (tho if you don't know PS, then stick to VMware). You don't even need to have it as part of a windows install, it can run as a standalone hypervisor.

Even if you do run it as part of full-fat Windows, MS have recognized that their patch-heavy approach is unpopular, and have been going out of their way to cut down on reboots for 2016 - and to reduce downtime generally. MS are currently claiming that uptime on a win 2016 box is going to be higher than an equivalent RHEL box; 1 reboot a month with 40 seconds boot time. Whether that's a realistic metric for production boxes is debatable, but still shows that things have moved on a bit since Server 2003/XP environments (which appears to be about the level of Windows knowledge that the OP is running with).

Besides, modern DC environments with clustering, HCI etc kinda makes the uptime/downtime thing a bit irrelevant, no? I can happily shunt VMs around between boxes, shut down random hosts, and even knock my filers over without end users even noticing. We're using VMware, but I use hyper-v for my test environment because really, there ain't much difference between the two in terms of day-to-day features and being able to just rattle off instructions in PS to a dozen boxes at once is more convenient that mucking about in the horrible VSphere web app.

BLABBERGEDDON BEGINS! Twitter lays off 8% of its workforce

Re: 4000 employees?

"Never underestimate the number of workers required to thoroughly fleece the punters. "

What has thoroughly fleecing ANYONE got to do with Twitter? They'd actually make money from time to time if they were capable of that.

Facebook's UK wing paid just £4k in corporation tax last year

Re: The usual scheme...

Anyone ever get the feeling that DaveDaveDave is extremely anti-Semitic, and just projects his loathing onto literally every other subject? After all, he's declaring tax evasion to be fine here because anything else would be antisemitism... which implies that he thinks all Jews are tax evaders...

Maker–NOT: 3D printer upstart Makerbot jams, cuts extra 20% of staff

Re: Top of the bubble!

"They've already been bought by long time (and expensive) 3D printer maker Stratasys."

And that was 4-5 years ago, IIRC.

Makerbot had already lost most of it's credibility and talent even then. Repeated shifts in direction that isolated it from the 3D printing community, a number of decidedly half-baked products, a couple of humiliating climbdowns and a CEO who pretty much pissed off everyone who ever met him (before being parachuted out to Stratasys in the buyout) all mean it's been a failing company for a while now.

Singapore Post tests drone delivery services

Re: Not Ideal

"Pigeons provide a proven method for secure message delivery and have no issues negotiating an urban environment."

You do realise that your link provides an example of a pigeon that failed to deliver a message in an urban environment, right?

HP creates laptop for SITH LORDS

Kinda shitty specs, no?

Mozilla to boot all plugins from Firefox … except Flash

"he only way Adobe can bring stability and security to Flash would have been to start over 10 years ago."

Tbh, the only way Adobe could bring stability and security to Flash would have been to sell it to a different company who understood what those words mean.

TRANSISTOR-GATE-GATE: Apple admits some iPhone 6Ses crappier than others

Re: So Iphones are really Samsung phones?

No, of course they aren't. They have an Apple painted on them, which everyone knows makes them go 50% faster and magically scares away malware.

Re: Apple is deflecting from the truth a bit

"Also, if a chip uses less power under load, that doesn't necessarily mean that it uses less power when idle.

In other words, the Samsung chips might actually last longer in real-world scenario"

I'd expect the inverse tbh; the 14nm process chips would have greater leakage when idle but should have lower draw when active.

Re: I don't think the vast majority of people would even notice

"Curious comment. Of course any modern device will stop charging its internal battery once it reaches 100%."

Ish. They usually charge to 100%, stop charging, runs on battery to 95%, and then begin charging again. The display remains fixed on 100% at this point (mostly to stop users questioning why their phone isn't charging even though it's plugged in and only on 96%). So while it's not charging constantly, it IS charging for about half the time it's listed at 100% and plugged in; the phone isn't running off the mains.

And yes, that still saps the battery life comparatively aggressively. Of course, given that most flagship phones are probably replaced after just a year to 18 months (as opposed to budget models, which are usually used for much longer and usually have replaceable batteries), it's probably not overly noticeable to anyone who's not still rocking an iPhone 4; the other flagships from that period pretty much all had user-swapable batteries. And really, how many Apple fanboys would still be using a phone that's 2 1/2 generations old?

Understand 'Safe Harbor', Schrems v Facebook in under 300 words

Re: Kicking Uncle Sam in the nuts

"Any Eu country "falling in line" will get dragged in front of the ECJ for public whipping"

Unless it's the UK, Germany, or France. If they do, it'll either be ignored, or the ECJ's mandate will be changed to permit them to bypass it.

Microsoft, the VW family sedan of IT, wants to be tech's new Rolls-Royce

Re: Their (lack of) privacy stance will strangle this in the crib.

It won't.

It *should do*. But no, it won't. 90% of consumers won't care. It's easy to forget in the tech echo chamber, but really, Google is infinitely worse and yet still absolutely dominates in markets that are not simply limited to 'people who can't afford an iPhone'.

If you were right, then DuckDuckGo would be the most popular search engine on the planet. As opposed to Google and Bing having about 80% of the entire world search market between them (and I'm still fairly sure the percentage Bing has spend about half their searches looking for Google).

People don't care as much as we wish they did, and if the Surface is seen as a cool piece of kit (which it increasingly is) they wouldn't give a damn if it sends Microsoft nude pictures of their grandparents in an envelope made of bank statements.

Re: This strategy avoids pissing off their OEM partners

"Your examples show a company that does not have a real strategy."

This. Just this.

MS don't really have one, and haven't more or less since Gates left. Gates concentrated solely on strategy, and while he built a company everyone loved to hate as a result, he was insanely successful. Since Ballmer took over, and just as much under SatNad, MS spent more time desperately trying to get people to LIKE them than outlining a serious business strategy. Sure, they still make a lot of money from their pre-2001 business strategies, but these haven't been developed much since. When asked about what the strategy is, SatNad just lists products ('Office 265, Windows, and Azure'); this isn't focusing on a sector or thinking ahead. This is just three things that you hope are going to sell well, without outlining HOW YOU'RE GOING TO SELL IT.

I still remember when any MS event would be all suits showing up, presenting you this product that you were quite simply going to have to use (it wasn't even questioned, they knew it and we knew it too, even if we hated it), and then informed you how much more per year every person in the room was now going to be paying them. Now, it's all excited balding men in T-shirts giving out USB drives and talking excitedly about, well, crap.

Bill Gates was never 'pumped' about anything... He just worked a lot, made a lot of money, and was kind of a dick to everyone who worked for him. MS should remember that their core segment is not consumers. It's enterprise. Serious men in suits who have been professional purchasers for 30 years and who will be making their decisions based on compatibility, price, licensing deals etc... they're not the guys who go in for Apple-style cult meetings.

Basically, MS need to go back to doing what they do well - being about as likable as Oracle, and caring just as little about that as Oracle do. Ruthless corporate strategy and to hell with their brand image. It's too late to try and salvage their position in the public imagination now, MS will ALWAYS be considered an Evil Suit, regardless of how much they try to appear as a huggable teddy bear now.

Re: Huh?

"n my time you had to dope germanium yourself atom by atom using nothing but a screwdriver and a hammer and gramps was building wired-or logic gates with nothing but crystal detectors cobbled together from a sharpened graphite pencil lead and rusty Gillette blades*!"

Luxury!

When I were a nipper, we had to clump hydrogen together BY HAND until the density reached such pressures that thermonuclear fusion process began, then wait WITHOUT OXYGEN until enough heavy elements had been formed to begin the planetary formation process, usually with two or three supernovae interrupting the whole thing and scattering it all over the show, until we were able to begin hand-mining the individual atoms on the still-cooling surface of a newly-born planetoid. We used to DREAM of getting pre-formed individual Germanium atoms...

etc etc.

Team Microsoft: Device Police... 'Are you pumped? I'm pumped'

Re: Oh dear

"Who ever thought there would be a Microsoft conference where Microsoft software was the elephant in the room everybody was studiously trying to ignore?"

Anyone who picked up on the theme of the event being hardware...? I for one would've been somewhat surprised if an event billed 'device day' had started with a 3-hour showcase of a desktop O/S. Complaining about the shortage on software is like going to a Google event on self-driving cars and complaining that there was no Android showcase included.

The Surface book is the big ticket item, there's no denying that - and tbh it's a very good big ticket item. The Surface unit has been increasing in revenue enormously since 2010, and while Andrew may not have met anyone that's bought one I know a lot of people who have - and I don't know anyone who's used a Surface 3 Pro who actually dislikes it. They're good machines, and the Book honestly looks like a very solid option at a very attractive price from this distance.

The Lumias will undoubtedly continue to be a ludicrously niche device, even though I don't share Orlowski's pessimism about Continuum (I for one have enough monitors lying around my house that the ability to convert a phone or tablet into a PC on the fly is genuinely interesting). But MS might as well accept that they're never, ever going to win a big slice of the consumer pie in smartphone land, and would do better to concentrate on taking up an enterprise-centric, AD-integrated strategy, adopting the niche that currently just contains the corpse of Blackberry.

And Band is about as exciting as other wearables, meaning 'not remotely'. Seriously, is anyone who's actually really tech-aware (i.e., genuine techies as opposed to journos and analysts) excited about ANY wearable yet? Has anyone found any real reason for their existence? Watch/Wear are most useful for saving you 3 seconds to remove your phone from your pocket; most of the rest are little more than pedometers and 1980s calculator watches. Hololens has more promise in this area, but suffers from making the wearer look like a prick, needing to be plugged into a PC, and being prohibitively expensive.

Surface Book: Microsoft to turn unsuccessful tab into unsuccessful laptop

Re: Fastest... for a week!

"Since Intel CPUs have been getting faster by a mere 5-10% per generation the last few years, I suspect by being "twice as fast" this laptop has twice the cores of the Macbook"

Or it might just be that it's using the latest architecture with more cores, higher frequencies and way more graphical grunt and RAM. Funny thing; Macbooks aren't automatically faster becaues there's an Apple logo on the front.

It's hard to judge either way though, given the differences between the OSes. Hackintoshes often perform worse than Windows 10 on equivalent hardware, though.

HP won't squeeze itself into 3D printer consumer market

I remember when they said Autonomy would definitely be worth 9 billion, and there was simply no way that an acquisition could blow up in their faces.

Potent OWA backdoor scores 11,000 corporate creds from single biz

Re: So how did it get on there?

It's obviously true that yes, this requires a precursor hack to get the dll in place - an in any environment where the admins have any training at all, installing a dll onto the front-end MX should already require domain admin creds.

But this might still be relevant for 'after the breach' hacks - everyone changes password, the CISO is fired, the firewall is swapped for one that costs six times as much etc, but the exchange server remains compromised so the attackers can easily re-acquire credentials.

US Treasury: How did ISIS get your trucks? Toyota: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Hmmm

"They want to know where the trucks came from, but don't ask about the guns or the ammo in the backs of those trucks."

They already knew were those came from; they still have the receipts.

The tyranny of choice: Why enterprise tech buyers are confused

Oh rly?

"If Google opted to turn Android into a notebook operating system, “we can see this product making real headway.” "

Hands up anyone who'd seriously agree with that? Making the jump from PC/notebook to mobile/tablet hasn't exactly worked well for anyone else who's tried it, and I've not seen much evidence going the other way either really. There's a good reason Steve Jobs kept iOS and OSX separate and never took suggestions that the two should be merged seriously.

The devices are for different purposes and analysts would do well to remember that, rather than lumping together everything with a CPU in it. When the IoT picks up (and when they're stopped masturbating furiously over the profit projections from it), are we going to have idiots at Canalys or Gartner claiming that a buoyant self-aware refrigerator market is likely to factor into reduced PC sales?

Autonomy 'poisoned the well' for businesses seeking VC cash

Re: Fail

"Additionally what was the autonomy buy go to do with VC's any way. As I recall both Autonomy and HP were public quoted companies at the time of the deal so any VC's originally involved would have been long gone with their pound of flesh."

Indeed; surely any VCs who were still hanging around in Autonomy will have made out like bandits from the over-valued sale anyway?

Search engine can find the VPN that NUCLEAR PLANT boss DIDN'T KNOW was there - report

Re: Why are industrial control systems designed by babes in the woods?

"Updates to nuclear systems will always be infrequent because they're not the sort of systems where you can just dump the responsibility for finding bugs upon the end-users."

'Infrequent update' vs 'uses systems that are now older than 90% of the people working there' are different things. Amongst other things, several silos have had hardware faults that cannot be repaired properly - hence the security door being propped open with the brick. No-one makes the electronics tat are compatible with the security system anymore. The result? The security is bypassed by users, and so may as well not be there at all.

And this is where we keep the things that can end civilization as we know it. If the lock on my front door stops working, I replace it. If the lock on my nuclear weapons silo stops working, I just stop locking the door...

Re: Why are industrial control systems designed by babes in the woods?

""by now" is indeed true: "by then" alas is not."

It does go some way to highlight the incredibly low priority hardware upgrades get in around nukes - both reactors and missiles. There was that silo in the mid-west where the (3 foot thick) security door had been propped open with a brick for the last ten years and they were still using 8" floppy disks because that's what was current when the computer system was installed... the US government is shockingly cavalier with these things.

Re: Ideal vs Reality

"I'd prefer the guys stood next to the the hot bits to have full and unfettered access for speed and ease."

In a world where you need a 4-digit code to enter the shared laundry room, I think that we can perhaps expect the nuclear reactor control room to at least adopt a similar level of security to the machine you use to clean your y-fronts.

If you wanted Windows 10, it looks like you've already installed it

Re: People don't like being forced into something

"Windows of old was the slightly annoying but attentive waiter in a restaurant."

Really?

I seem to recall that, at the time, we all felt Windows was the antisocial halfwit proprietor, who pissed in the soup, swore at customers and tended to either spit at them or ignore them when they asked him to do anything, but we had no choice but to put up with him because he owned all the restaurants in town. Well, aside from the weird restaurant with the penguin logo that you could only get into through a secret tunnel over an assault course, and once you were in all the other clientele sneered at you. And the Apple cult, who grew their own food that tasted dreadful, but got away with it by telling the devoted that they shouldn't like other food anyway.

Thinking about it, computing pre-2003 was basically horrible.

Re: Are Win7 users not upgrading because of Win8/10's tiles?

If your reasoning for not upgrading to Win 10 is due to tiles, then you're not paying attention. There's a lot of good things to be concerned about with Win10. This is not one of them.

Microsoft's big Tuesday reveal: New mobiles and slabs? Win 10 shock?

"Adding a third model introduces too much complexity, "

And as anyone who's ever had to sit through a three hour lecture on how MS's enterprise licensing model is changing knows, Microsoft just LOVE simplicity...

Ever been burned by a bad IT decision? Of course you have!

Never been burned on a purchasing decision

But I did work for HP once, so I'm guessing I still qualify as getting hurt by bad IT decisions. And bad exec decisions. And bad marketing decisions. And bad engineering decisions. And bad hiring policy. And...

iOS malware YiSpecter: iPhones menaced by software nasty

Re: Heavy on doom and sensation, light on detail

"Wake up, Apple is a target and is being breached."

Have an upvote for sanity, to balance out the hundreds of downvotes you'll get for implying Apple aren't perfect.

Apple's approach to security assumes they're smarter than the enemy. That's exactly not how security professionals are taught. Always presume there's someone brighter than you who can crack anything you build.

Don't want to fork out for NAND flash? You're not alone. Disk still rules

Not a big surprise

Chris has pointed this out a few times in the past couple of years. HDD isn't going anywhere, as it's the only thing which is both fast enough for mid-performance storage and can be produced in large enough quantities to keep up with the accelerating rate of data creation.

Apple CEO Tim Cook: Email keyword sniffing? We'd NEVER do that!

Re: I get the impression that this is very personal for Cook.

"I wish they'd figure out a way I could use iCloud with a key that only I hold, "

Or, rather than wasting time doing that, they could just use standard public/private PKI encryption like everyone else, which seems to have done the trick for the last twenty years.

This doesn't need some 'Think Different' re-invention of the wheel. The security standards have all been there for years and work fine for this. Apple just haven't implemented them, out of a mis-placed fear of damaging the 'user experience'.

It was the same thing which lead to the iCloud hack last year (or rather, not a hack - just lots of private data being taken by unauthorized people. Which isn't a hack when it happens to Apple. Apparently); Apple could've implemented 2FA from the start, and they rolled it out in a matter of days afterwards. But they didn't put it in beforehand, because security pisses users off.

Apple don't take security seriously. They're getting better, but it's still way down their priority list, behind 'User experience' and 'looks cool' - so whenever there's a conflict, security takes a back seat.