Posts by JohnFen

Foot lose: Idiot perv's shoe-mounted upskirt vid camera explodes

Re: The real question is...

"whether lady Godiver should be prosecuted for public indecency"

Lady G would be on safe ground in my state -- public nudity is perfectly legal here, except if the nudity is for "salacious purposes".

Google weeps as its home state of California passes its own GDPR

Re: Interesting

"Little did I realise that it could happen so rapidly and (part of) the USA would be the first to follow where the EU leads!"

Since the US has essentially given up on being a leader in terms of things like human rights, it looks like the new leader is the EU.

Re: 49 to go

I live in a state (not California) that has an initiative process. Here's my take on it: it's a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it makes it possible for the citizenry to address issues and problems that for one reason or another (ahem*money*ahem) the legislators don't want to address or don't want to fix. That's unambiguously good.

On the other hand, initiatives are often written by people who don't really understand how legislation works, so it is often inherently flawed, doesn't do what the initiative is trying to do, and so forth.

Re: No 'Meaningful change' in user numbers

"Teens are leaving Facebook because it's harder to be anonymous on FB"

I doubt this explanation, as it's trivially easy to be anonymous on FB.

"If this happens, it's a disaster for today's shareholders. Also if today's new law leads to the decline of the companies and the burning up of their cash piles to stay in business / maintain share price, one day there's going to be nothing left."

That would be awesome.

Re: No 'Meaningful change' in user numbers

" teens are turning away,"

In fairness to Zuckerberg, this trend began well before Facebook's latest adventure, so it really isn't a "meaningful change". Teens are leaving Facebook because they (correctly) perceive that Facebook is for businesses and old farts.

Good

Fuck Google and all the other spy companies. Now, here's hoping that other states will do similar things.

Time to dump dual-stack networks and get on the IPv6 train – with LW4o6

Re: Throw caution to the wind and it will fall upon someone else

But NAT does obfuscate which machine is accessing which server on the internet. Obfuscating the number of nodes behind the router does provide some amount of additional security (although you're correct, it's a small amount), and every little bit helps.

And note that I'm using "security" in the larger sense, not just in terms of preventing network penetration. Minimizing as many data points about my network and the machines behind my router is important to informational security -- that is, its important in terms of minimizing the effectiveness of surveillance by my ISP and the internet locations I access.

Re: "Where does the 4 to 6 interchange take place?"

" I suspect the case for purchase is even better for just the modem."

It is, at least in my case. I paid about $100 for my cable modem and returned the one I was renting from Comcast for (I think) around $10/mo. I've never looked back.

Re: "Where does the 4 to 6 interchange take place?"

"from "the biggest registrar" [no need to mention names but it starts with 'Go']"

GoDaddy has a very well-deserved reputation as a terrible registrar. You might have better results with someone else.

Re: "Where does the 4 to 6 interchange take place?"

I'm not seeing what you're seeing. The user endpoint in those diagrams is "IPv4 LAN". It shows the "IPv4" internet because that's an important part of the use case -- but I don't see anything in the RFC that says you have to have that translation step. I think if you're talking to an IPv6 internet destination, then you just omit that translation step.

"IPv6 at home has two main benefits"

Those two benefits are tiny, though. If that's the selling point for IPv6 at home, I think the cost/benefit ratio doesn't make it desirable for very many people. IPv6 has a clear benefit for outfits that run large networks, not so much for home users.

Re: Big advantage

"but the mail goal of IPv6 is to get away from NAT"

It is?

I thought the main goal of IPv6 was to increase the pool of possible IP addresses. That would get away from NAT in terms of using it as a stopgap measure to cope with the address shortage, but NAT has many uses aside from that. So, in my mind, anyway, getting rid of NAT isn't a goal of IPv6 at all (let alone a main one). The main goal of IPv6 would, as a side-effect, remove the need to use NAT as a band-aid, though.

Re: Throw caution to the wind and it will fall upon someone else

"NAT has nothing to do with security "

Security isn't its design goal, but it does enhance security on an IPv6 system by obfuscating the number of devices sitting behind the NAT. IPv6 has nothing that can accomplish that.

Re: Throw caution to the wind and it will fall upon someone else

"'m not sure if you're now going to praise Microsoft for doing the right thing and criticise Linux, but there you have it."

Huh? No criticism or praise is due either OS for this. They are both reasonable defaults.

Re: Throw caution to the wind and it will fall upon someone else

"Use ephemeral IPs with your IPv6"

Ephemeral IPs halfway address the issue, but are certainly not a solution.

Re: Big advantage

"how will your machines get access to v6 without resorting to a proxy?"

What's wrong with proxying? It can be done in a way that is transparent to everyone behind the router.

"More often than not that is done via cookies or similar technology"

Netflix may use cookies as well, but they definitely do IP address tracking for this.

This is my thinking as well. I would be unhappy if I have to rejigger my home network to be IPv6, but a solution like this that mitigates that is fine.

Re: "Where does the 4 to 6 interchange take place?"

"In the US, cable companies rent out their home gateways"

Yes, but an increasing number of people aren't renting them -- they're buying their own in order to stop having to pay the extra fee.

The cybercriminal's cash cow and the marketer's machine: Inside the mad sad bad web ad world

Re: Goodness me

In the US, anyway, a shockingly large percentage of every dollar we spend goes straight into advertiser pockets, especially when it comes to prescription drug prices.

"And yet we all seem to regard ads as annoying nuisances"

Personally, I don't regard ads as annoying nuisances. I regard them as straight-up attacks.

Agreed

""It is one of the biggest ways bad guys have of pulling money out of the online economy,""

I agree -- online advertising is one of the biggest ways that those bad guys in the advertising industry are pulling money out of the online economy. Worse, it's one of the biggest ways that everyone is being spied on.

Git365. Git for Teams. Quatermass and the Git Pit. GitHub simply won't do now Microsoft has it

Easy

It should be called "GitHub".

Ready, get Sets... no? App-grouping whizzery for Windows 10 killed

"KDE have moved onto 'Activities' "

Yes, my understanding of Sets is that it's basically KDE's Activities, but made worse via a tabbed interface. Since I've never found a use case for Activities, Sets is certainly nothing that I want.

Google Cloud CEO admits: Yeah, we wanted GitHub too. Whatevs

" you use the free version of VS + Git = your code is public."

What if you don't want to use VS?

" it definitely would make my current and past employers more likely to do the same"

I have no doubt that the fact the Github will be a Microsoft operation will make it more attractive for business use. However, that's pretty much beside the point, in my opinion.

"Google buying an OSS repository is questionable because their track record suggest they'll forget they own it and shut it down completely."

I think it's questionable because of Google's fetish for collecting All The Data.

Re: "Completely neutral"

"it's meant to be slurped."

What is? While the public code repositories are, Github also holds code that is not intended for public distribution, and holds account information and usage data for members. Neither of those things are meant to be slurped.

Re: "Completely neutral"

Sure, I'll comment. I jumped ship, and I have no reason to think that was the wrong thing to do. What Google planned, says, or thinks isn't relevant. If Google had bought them, I'd have jumped ship as well.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft scolded for tricking people into spilling their private info

Re: The default should be no slurp whatsoever

That this argument is nonsense is indicated by all the websites that continue to use paywalls.

Also, you're presenting a false dichotomy. Ignoring the fact that there are ways of generating revenue that don't require data slurping or paywalls, there's nothing to stop sites from offering users a choice -- pay and don't be subject to spying, or use it for free and be spied on.

I'm not aware of any sites that actually offer this choice, though.

Yup, and they're not alone

If you want to know how prevalent manipulative and deceptive techniques are, just spend some time reading articles in the leading UX developer sites. They're absolutely chilling and infuriating.

Microsoft has another crack at fixing Chrome problems in Windows 10

Re: Clusterfuck

"MS should spend a little longer testing the crap they emit"

Come on, get with the times. In our forced-updating, rapid-release world today, there isn't time for pesky things like "testing" anymore.

Pointless choice

"Windows 10 contains a perfectly serviceable web trotter in the form of Edge so why would anyone need to sully their system with Google's wares?"

If the choice is between Edge and Chrome, Chrome is clearly the better option. But my question is -- why would anyone use either of those things when there are better alternatives available?

IBM memo to staff: Our CEO Ginni is visiting so please 'act normally!'

Re: Desks should be clear anyway,...

When I worked at places that had "clean desk" policies, the "clean" referred to leaving company data unsecured on your desk, not to things like family photos.

When I hear stories like this, I am always amazed that they can find people willing to work in such places.

Re: "Act normally! Ginni and the team are here to see what Austin is really like."

If they're aware of it and allow it to continue, then they are truly terrible at their jobs.

Wow

Are IBM employees really so bad-mannered that they require such condescension? That must be a terrible place to work.

Google kills AdWords!

Re: Be thankful for the lack of symbolic explanation

"mentally replace all such occurrences with the name of a type of bun or pastry."

Decades ago, I developed the mental habit of replacing all marketing adjectives with "lemon scented", and all marketing nouns with "doohickey". Works for me.

The stupid lie advertsiers keep telling

"and had plans “ to enhance the user and advertiser experience.""

Advertising never "enhances the user experience". It only detracts from it. I really wish that ad companies would stop trying to push this nonsense about ads being something that makes the online experience better.

So you're doing an IoT project. Cute. Let's start with the basics: Security

Re: The biggest problem

"so there is a fair probability that your TV won't work properly if you never give it a connection."

In which case, the TV is not fit for purpose and should be returned.

Re: The biggest problem

It's pretty easy to buy dumb. Just buy a monitor rather than a TV, and use an external box to provide the video to it. The external box can be as inexpensive as a Raspberry PI, or if you don't want to go that route, there are dozens of commercially available solutions.

Re: The biggest problem

"yet you are lucky if you get security updates for your TV after 2 years"

If you don't connect it to the network, you don't have to worry about whether or not you get security updates.

A volt out of the blue: Phone batteries reveal what you typed and read

Yet another reason

Yet another reason to avoid the cloud. I swear, every week my decision to avoid the cloud when at all possible looks more and more justified.

Amazon staffers protest giant's 'support of the surveillance state'

Re: Hmmmmm @JohnFen

"Until a principle has cost you something important, it's just an opinion, and everyone has a shedload of those puppies."

Then we agree. I was just nitpicking at bringing "monetary cost" into it. The "something important" might be money, but usually it's something more valuable than money.

"The CEO is legally responsibility is to generate as much revenue for the company as possible."

This is an often stated thing, but it isn't really true. The job of the CEO is to implement the will of the board of directors (who represent the shareholders). That will may be "profit at all costs", but it doesn't have to be -- and often isn't. For instance, many corporations forgo near-term profits in order to enhance long-term profits. And every corporation has a charter that lays out what the purpose of the corporation is. The purpose is usually profit, but not profit alone.

Re: Not Really New

"Large corporations are pretty much all moral black hole's"

Exactly.

Corporations are not living things that have stuff like ethics, morals, compassion, or anything recognizable as human. They are (and are intentionally designed to be) engines of economic production, and that is their sole concern.

Expecting moral or ethical behavior from a corporation makes as much sense as milking a cow and expecting that it will produce beer.

That said, the fact that they're engines of economic production means that they can be made to adhere to expectations of ethical behavior. All it takes is to ensure that they'll make more profit that way.

Re: Not Really New

This. It's amazing how many people forget that the US government is no longer really distinct from corporate america. We are a corporate state, rapidly devolving into a corporate dystopia.

Re: Hmmmmm

"a principle is not a principle until it has cost you money"

What nonsense. Perhaps the sentiment that you were trying for was that the true test of a principled stand is if you continue to hold them when holding them is disadvantageous to you. That could be monetary disadvantage, but usually it's something worse.

There's something to be said for staying and trying to effect change from within. There's also something to be said for leaving. The right action depends on the person.

For my part, since I don't work for Amazon (or Google or any of the other awful companies), what I'm doing is trying to make sure as little of my money goes to them as possible, and encouraging others to do the same.

We need to stop feeding our corporate overlords, especially when they work against, or help those who work against, us.

Schneier warns of 'perfect storm': Tech is becoming autonomous, and security is garbage

Re: 'Security is failing just as technology is becoming autonomous'

"Marriott hotels announces they're installing these devices in guests bedrooms. WTF???"

They are? Well, I guess I won't stay in Marriotts anymore.

MOS-SAD: Israeli govt weighs in on Facebook privacy, promises action

I disagree

" It’s better to “pay in privacy than pay in human life,” Diskin asserted."

I disagree with Diskin here.

While this is more of a spectrum than a binary choice, and I actually fall more toward the center of that spectrum, I do generally agree with the sentiment that I'd rather live as a free person in an unsafe world than an unfree person in a safe world.