* Posts by gnasher729

2551 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Oct 2014

Apple fixes zero-click exploit underpinning Paragon spyware attacks

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: "keep updating their devices and turning on Lockdown Mode"

"keep updating their devices and turning on Lockdown Mode"

“Lockdown mode” removes functionality from your iPhone, and with that it removes attack vectors. That is a decision you, as the user, have to make depending on how much you are it risk to be targeted.

Apple-Intel divorce to be final next year

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Does anyone know: Will developers be still able to submit Silicon + Intel apps in one package to the App Store?

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I worked at a company where thd top dogs had Apple laptops with windows installed. These machines didn’t run macOS in their life. If they were a bit more expensive that was the whole point, showing you were worth it. Apple didn’t mind the extra money.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Royalty

Apple is one of five or six companies that has a fully paid perpetual license to use ARM processors. They paid lots of money many years ago and will never have to pay again. I think Qualcomm might be another company.

Blocking stolen phones from the cloud can be done, should be done, won't be done

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“ Many such proposals make the assumption that governments will always and ever work for the good of the people.”

Many such proposals know that the government will not work for the good of the people.

gnasher729 Silver badge

There is a very small market for vloggers and film makers who want to show iPhones being destroyed without paying too much. Like YouTube video “idiot buys brand new iPhone, unpacks it, drops it, and a truck drives over it”.

Cops want Apple, Google to kill stolen phones remotely – so why won't they?

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Re: It's not changed account

“ So if your phone gets stolen on a train, you just need to find a kind soul letting you use their phone. ...... and nick their phone?”

Excellent idea on a train full of people. Where railway police will wait for me at the next station. I think I live in different circles than you do.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: For no reason whatsoever...

My SIM card was cancelled for the simple reason that I switched to an another phone company. Maybe they believed you had done that (likely wrongly).

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: It's not changed account

“ If I'm away from home and it gets nicked, then I can in theory log into my Apple or Google account from my laptop and lock the phone almost immediately.”

You can actually borrow anyone’s device with a browser to do that on an iPhone (don’t know about Google, but it works for them probably as well). So if your phone gets stolen on a train, you just need to find a kind soul letting you use their phone.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Maybe...

Surely you wouldnt amputate a thief’s hand? That’s what swords are there for.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Do the opposite

If for example Apple makes money from you buying a replacement for your stolen iPhone, how would apple not make money if that iPhone was blocked? Which it is anyway unless you were too stupid to enter a passcode.

Do you think car manufacturers should be able to block your car? (In case it is stolen). Or TV manufacturers?

gnasher729 Silver badge

Unless you are too stupid to set up a password on your phone, thieves can’t unlock it. They can only sell it for parts, so blocking the IMEI makes no difference.

Apple also has a feature that changing iCloud etc. must be done at your home or is blocked for some time.

Tariff woes equal US smartphone price hikes, shrinking sales

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Re: Only gets better...

If Trump charges tariffs that US citizens have to pay, and Europe doesn’t join in with that particular idiocy, thats MBit preferential pricing.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Only gets better...

Now if UK customers found out that Apple wants them to pay tariffs / taxes that go straight home the US government, there would be hell to pay. Same for Samsung and others obviously.

Whodunit? 'Unauthorized' change to Grok made it blather on about 'White genocide'

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Re: Zim

The. British land owners also had very much the monopoly on an education that taught them how to run a farm. And people who know how to use guns to recover stolen land are obviously not the ones best suited for running farms on the land.

Shouldn’t have thrown them out but forced them to run training courses for potential black farmers. Minimum wage + jail if you try to run away. Still better than USA 180

Years ago.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Conclusion has nothing to do with security. What you should notice is that this AI can be manipulated, so you must expect results that are blatant propaganda not just through programming errors, (unintentional) hallucinations, but intentional manipulation.

In this case the propaganda is recognisable to anyone but Musk and Trump. But there is no reason why someone cannot produce a more subtle propaganda.

Tesla FSD ignores school bus lights and hits 'child' dummy in staged demo

gnasher729 Silver badge

If your child died because my self-driving car didn’t brake is identical to the brakes on my ordinary car failing. The manufacturer can lose the road license for the car, then it’s like my brakes failing after an urgent recall.

For accidents, your insurance should pay as it does now. The insurance company will set the premium according to the amount of money they have to pay out.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Theoretical Liability vs True Liability

As a driver, you are not allowed to drive into pedestrians who just made a mistake. And with a school bus present, you must be prepared for school children making mistakes.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: It is problematic.

I had thought about that when I was a kid, and my solution was to drive the cars bumper to bumper, no gap, always touching. So if the front car brakes, everyone else brakes, but no collision.

US to deny visas to foreign officials it says 'censor' social media

gnasher729 Silver badge

Germany _did_ get one guy who shipped Nazi propaganda to Germany and put him in jail for two years. And what did Germans say? Not “But but but free speech” but “f**k all Nazis”.

And as a general rule, Germany will prosecute you for crimes that take effect in Germany. And in the last four months the opinion “f**k all Americans” has got stronger and stronger.

German court parks four Volkswagen execs in jail over Dieselgate scandal

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78 year old defendant- does Trump go to court?

Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

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Re: Cuckoo land

Please come to London. You pay daily. Speed limit 20mph but you won’t get near that. No parking; last time parking all day cost me over £30.

Apple's alleged UK encryption battle sparks political and privacy backlash

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Re: GAFA may have the upper hand here.

“ Apple can simply go nuclear and temporarily brick every Apple device and system in the UK to stay within the letter of the law.”

No need to. Apple has disabled the feature in the UK. So if it is of interest to you, you will know what is going on. If Apple bricks every Apple device, thats a huge lawsuit to happen and people will have no idea why.

gnasher729 Silver badge

The situation is actually quite simple, and we know everything even if the court tries to keep things secret.

The Home Office wants access to “secret” data of terrists without telling them. I’m afraid they might want access to my “secret” data next year because I talk about Fararse, or about a rapist, racist, grifter and convicted felon who is the son of a racist slum landlord.

We know that Apple has no ability to give them the secret data of terrists _without also having access to every citizens data_. And with their secure iCloud storage they have no ability to deliver that data without lying to all their honest customers. So Apple turned that feature off in the UK.

So whatever they try to hide in court, we already know it. Apple is not legally allowed to tell you, but they don’t have to. And would they be allowed to tell you “if we were ordered to hand over your data we wouldn’t be allowed to tell you”? Surely yes. And even the least intelligent customer would ask themselves “why would they say that”?

Trump threatens to add formal Apple Tax on top of the 'Apple tax'

gnasher729 Silver badge

“It’s tax deductible” - first it isnt, second the cost is much much higher than the tax deduction.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: F-47

In the case of Donald Trump, F-47 doesn’t stand for “failure”. F for “felon”.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Perhaps ...

Who says paying US workers would be a hit on profits? It would be increased cost.

Anyway, the EU just managed to send Trump back with his orange tail between his legs, just as China did. I bet Apples lawyers are ready to pounce of him when he tries to put illegal tariffs on one company only.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Perhaps ...

They were talking about AirTags, not phones.

gnasher729 Silver badge

There is no way for Apple to build iPhones in the USA for only 25% more than in China or India. I’d offer a deal to Tesla. 10% over Chinese prices, all parts and work in the USA, same quality. And see Musk run.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Of course it worked. A million dollars for two or three months time. Which is about 60-90 times Trump’s attention span.

So what would you have done? Paid no bribe, but 25% tariffs for the last month at least? Brilliant sense of business you’ve got.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Apple spent a million dollars which bought them a two or three months delay. So first, it was no waste. Second, a million dollars was no colossal waste even if it was a waste.

That was three months time to figure out legal and financial strategies to stop Trump.

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: FTFY

That said, what actually happened was quite in the open. Apple always had “normal” security that required you to trust Apple. Then they introduced “really secure” security so nobody except you could read your data. (Then we assume the government wanted access to that really secure data, without you knowing, which meant Apple would have to lie to its customers). Then apple stopped offering “really secure” security in the UK.

Technically there would have been no problem, except that Apple decided not to lie to its customers.

Windows reports two CPU speeds because one would be too simple

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: CPUs don't have a "speed" anymore

My Mac has eight performance cores and two efficiency cores. Each core separately has one of 10 possible speeds, from about 600 MHz (lowest speed) to whatever the maximum speed of the processor is. All M1 chips, all M2 chips, all M3 chips, and all M4 chips have the same 10 possible speeds. There is no overclocking (and none of the Intel processor where clumsy overclocking can damage your chip).

Now fact is that the energy needed grows with the square of the clock speed. So with this processor, if you don't need the full power but only the full power of two cores, it is most efficient to run all 8 cores at a quarter of their maximum speed instead of two at maximum speed and six doing nothing. The OS will do that if possible. Another aspect is heat - the more processors run at highest clock speed, the hotter the machine gets and at some point the OS has to slow it down. The OS will try to save energy first, and if it can't, it will move the work to different cores from time to time. Next are you on battery or plugged in? On battery you want to saye energy so you may keep the clock speed down, especially once your battery empties. With 25% battery left, running for the longest possible time becomes more important than running at top speed.

All in all it's a bit complicated.

Trump announces $175B for Golden Dome defense shield over America

gnasher729 Silver badge

175 billion dollars f or a golden dome. Give the man some golden rain and you can save about 174,999,999,000 dollars.

Freshly discovered bug in OpenPGP.js undermines whole point of encrypted comms

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Re: Never roll your own encryption...

The encryption is not the problem. You can write unbreakable encryption. The problem is preventing a million different ways to get round the encryption. Like here: You create a signed and encrypted message, then you add another plaintext message with a false claim that it is signed and encrypted, and the receiver accepts this claim without any check.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Whoops

“ Only Superman wears his pants on the outside!”

I thought that was Tony Blair?

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Whoops

When macs started in Germany, there was a debate whether the shortcuts for undo/cut/copy/paste were z, x, c and v or “left of the lower row” (not the same on a German keyboard). Z,x,c,v won.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Whoops

“ With the current morons in charge that could get you locked up :(.”

You mean he has an exclusive? And which way round?

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Surely simpler to stick with correct English

“ A pint of Real Ale for you, not (US) Budweiser”

What about a real Czech Budvar.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Divers log

My experience was that books for English learners in German schools had to be updated from pound / shilling / pence to pound and pence. And pounds with two decimals became a thing.

Uncle Sam claims H-1B fraud crackdown is working as registrations drop 25%

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Re: Scam

How would that work, paying less taxes? Does some idiot go around and fire IRS employees?

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

gnasher729 Silver badge

Just thinking… What kind of nonsense is this? If HR had a concrete use case to help them doing HR work more efficiently, by all means go to some development manager who sends you someone to record your requirements. But the company’s business and what software they create is none of HRs business.

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

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Re: Far be it from me approve whatever the orange baboon decides

They give them money so they can improve their land, improve irrigation and so on. Maybe they build warehouses to store harvested goods.

And then quite inevitably someone will use the improved infrastructure to grow poppies. It’s illegal in Afghanistan. You better not get caught.

For some similar, but much worse whistleblowing: Doge found out that the USA was paying to prevent AIDS infecting babies in Gaza. They quickly concluded that the whole money was turned into condoms given to Hamas fighters to have a good time. Then it turned out the money went to Gaza, which is a desperately poor province in Mozambique. With a huge HIV problem. Stopping that money kills babies in Gaza, Mozambique. Hamas has never, ever been anywhere near that place, so they _can’t_ have received money for condoms, so that part of the story was an absolute lie.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Hmm

Maybe you just showed yourself up as a bigoted arsehole and outside the USA they don’t like bigoted arseholes.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Hmm

I’ll tell you something. All my life I’ve got jobs because I was good at what I’m doing. And most places where I worked had no problem with any minorities. My last job I worked with one black guy, one real Aryan (he came from North Iran, nothing to do with stupid Nazis), one guy from Libya, one very very obviously gay guy, another guy where I would never have guessed he was gay, and one very young hongkong Chinese lady, who is now about 25 and one of the three best software developers I’ve ever met.

All of them were hired on merit. All of them were very, very good at their job. I was always good enough to compete. But you, codejunky, I’ll just guess that your toxic attitude comes from the fact that _you_ actually have nothing speaking for you other than your skin colour. Maybe it’s an attitude problem, aptly demonstrated by your username.

You'll never guess which mobile browser is the worst for data collection

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Targeted ads

I once worked four weeks in Sydney and obviously googled for restaurants near my workplace. I think it took three years until ads for restaurants in Sydney about 10,000 miles from home, finally stopped.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Targeted ads

These ad pushers apparently want details about me yi push ads specifically targeted to me. And pay lots of money for it. But I can’t be the only one spotting targeted ads, and I find them absolutely creepy. So with a targeted ad, you just make sure I’ll never be your customer.

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

gnasher729 Silver badge

Deutsche Bank doesn’t deserve to be pwned for Computacenter’s security breach. Not their fault. They fully deserve to be pwned for trying to sweep the problem under the carpet, for not stopping the breach, and for attacking and firing the person reporting it.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: It sounds like he's got a case

No, it’s not insanity. There was a serious breach of Deutsche Bank security. The breach could cost them an awful lot more than 20 million. Any sane person would stop the breach instantly (not let her in the server room), investigate, and give the man a medal.

These people here did the opposite. They not only refused to do anything about the breach, but fired him. The punishment should be so high that everyone involved in this gets fired.

FBI steps in amid rash of politically charged swattings

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: no swatting but

I knew someone in Germany who played his music so loud that he called the police. Police knocked on the door but they figured out the music was too loud to hear them. So they decided to do a welfare check in case the guy was lying on the ground with a heart attack.

So they kicked the door in - always good fun - went to the living room, guy was sitting in a chair without even noticing the door or the police, turned the music off, and said “looks like you’re ok, goodbye”. He didn’t play music that loud afterwards after repairing the door.