Posts by NatalieEGH

Top cop: Strap Wi-Fi jammers to teen web crims as punishment

I agree an ankle worn signal jammer is easy to overcome with simple aluminum foil essentially putting it inside a Faraday cage. Further there is still wired connections but those are much easier for a parent/guardian to monitor.

The idea that the strapping of the jammer to ones legs is a health hazard must have already been addressed as the use for adult criminals appears to already be in place. That therefore is a non-issue.

I do question the statement that such a jammer is a violation of any type of right, human or otherwise. I do not know the laws in England, the UK, or Europe so please explain how a technology that did not exist when I was a child has become a right. Does this mean that driving a vehicle is a right? I can see a statement that one should have access to good free medical and dental, a warm dry place to live, water, and food as rights but to me, being able to place a telephone call or to text someone should at the highest be considered a privilege. A privilege that is paid for. Should it be a right, that would indicate the government should be providing the endpoint devices and providing the connectivity, for FREE, further there should be 100% fully powered coverage. Rights are free. Privileges can be purchased.

Hacking for purposes of criminal activity is a crime. It does not matter if the criminal is an adult or a child. Should they be disciplined the same? No. But both must be disciplined and the form of the discipline should fit the crime. I can make no recommendations on what forms as that will vary based on laws, beliefs, and attitudes within each jurisdiction. I do think it should be more effective than something overcome by a primitive Faraday cage.communication???

The top doc, the FBI, the Geek Squad informant – and the child porn pic that technically wasn't

I do not know about the policies of Best Buy but the computer repair store I used to take my system to has a big sign saying they scan all hard drives for illegal content. I asked what all they were looking for and was told any pirated software, pirated music, pirated videos, software used for pirating, and any pornography, the town did not even allow the sale of Playboy. I would say having that big sign and you turning over your system with storage media in it, pretty well is giving permission to search it including unallocated space.

At least at that time, the local Best Buy had the same sign. Of course that was close to 15 - 20 years ago.

Some suggest the search of the hard drive was not part of his the Geed Squad person's job. I do not know Best Buy policy, but I know where I used to take my computer for repairs there was and still is a BIG sign that says any hard drive brought in will be scanned to find pornography, any pornography. Because of this article, I even called them and asked if they still did it. The town has laws against even Playboy.

If they tell you they are going to scan drives, and you give a system to them and they discover illegal material, that is kind of like driving your car to a police station and telling them they can search it knowing you have got 20 kilograms of cocaine in the front seat. Do they really need a search warrant if you give permission?

And yes, I remember having a program, I think it was called Webcrawler that would download entire sites and even follow links downloading those sites. I once found a picture I thought was child pornography and called the police. They came and declared it was not but did take the trace information (site and complete path on the site) which the downloader kept for every file.

Again I do not know about Best Buy but a Best Buy tech planting evidence would be really suspicious if one employee is finding a lot of illegal material and no one else was, unless he was assigned to look for illegal material. So planting files, I do not think so.

Those online ads driving you bonkers are virtually 'worthless for brands'

To be honest, I basically ignore most advertisements. The exceptions are the youtube presentations I watch like JayzTwoCents on computer builds or those on Revzilla when looking for bike parts. Basically if I am looking for something, I pay attention to the ads presented on the site that are related to my object of interest at the time. LIke I just had to look around the page to discover their are ads for Revzilla, a infosec conference, and a follow with a bird icon, facebook, google, and a speaker(???) icon. Sorry I am retired and only use the programs I need/want so I do not know all the types of social media. I do not need to stay connected.

As to e-mails, I trash anything I do not recognize without opening. When they start filling up my mail to fast, I will open, go to the bottom and unsubscribe, not that I subscribed to start with.

For me junk mail goes directly into my trash can. Electronically I do the same thing.

If the advertisers were to have a site that allowed looking at ads by subject, and the ads provided at least reasonable information not superlatives or exaggerations or out-right lies, I would be more than willing to go to that sight, review the ads for the product I desire, and then do more detailed comparison on vendor sites for final product selection. I think that is why I like JayzTwoCents. It tells me what all is out there and gives a mostly unbiased review, that I use as a starting point. I do not want hype. I want information.

US cops seek Amazon Echo data for murder inquiry

Re: Interesting...

1. Not all areas allow only 1 party knowing recordings are being made. In the state of Illinois in the United States of America, the law requires both parties be informed recordings are being made.

2. That said, probably there is a statement in the EULA to the effect that the device is always on and listening (not that it takes a lot of brains to realize that if it turns "on" and "off" with a voice command). By agreeing to the EULA the users, from a legal standpoint, may be giving full rights to the device listening at all times and to the remote party being allowed to use any and all data received in any manner they choose including selling it to others, recording, data mining, and possibly even use in criminal investigations.

3. For myself, I have only 3 things that can track any of my activity and I know when they are on and when they are off. My microphone for my computer (I plug it in when I am using it, and unplug when not using it), my GPS in my car, my GPS for my motorcycle. My GPS can stay home if I want no one to be able to track. I do not use a cell phone. My car predates all the fancy electronic stuff like On-Star and a EPU.

4. While I do not trust of the government to keep its nose where it belongs, I have absolutely no trust of big business. I consider them liars, manipulators, and greedy far beyond Midas or Avarice. Most of my distrust of government is because government employees and elected officials can be swayed by the bribes of big business. No, I choose to keep my personal business out of their hands.

PC market shambling towards an unquiet grave

Development has slowed

I do not know that much about the general desktop computer sales but I imagine the main reasons for slowing of sales are:

1. The technology for new systems is not growing as fast as in recent years. I am retired and consider myself an enthusiast. I used to spend a thousands of dollars every year or two to keep my system current or near current. My current system is 2.5 years old. The only recent update as been to switch from using two NVidia 760 GPUs to two NVidia 980Ti. My 3 year old processor is still runs at about 90% of the processing power as a current Intel i7 5930 processor and only slightly slower than the current i7 170 generation processors.

2. As previously indicated, new processors are not providing significant increases in processing power. While workstations can be replaced with systems that have the lastest instruction set and more processors, the software has not been modified to take advantage and automatically scale to the number of virtual processors available to the system. Most programs still only reside in one processor at a time. Until programs useful to the specific businesses are written to take advantage of the latest instructions or designed to scale with number of processors, most businesses will see at best a 3% increase in processor speed. This increase is generally not sufficient to even be noticed by the individual users as most are using very little of the processors they currently have. The increased speed is therefore useless to the business world and there are only so many enthusiasts out there.

3. There have been no significant increases in storage technology. Yes, Seagate has come out with their 8TB and 10TB drives but those are really only useful for long term archival. They are not suitable for constant reading, modifying, and writing. Further the speed of the drives has not significantly increased even in the SSD category with the only real exception being drives such as the Intel DC P3500 series which plug into a PCI-e slot and the m.2 SATA III drives.

4. Memory speed increases provided by DDR4 compared to DDR3 are again not noticeable by most users outside the enthusiast community. Unless the user is processing a lot of data or doing CPU/memory intensive processes, like video editing, the speeds gained by the new memory, I would guess might save the 30-60 seconds in a day. Again not enough for the user to notice.

5. No new technologies have appeared in the last year that call that call to businesses or to enthusiasts. The only real changes have been in software such as Windows 10, which will almost surely be an anathema to extremists that like full control over their system, and cloud processing and storage that actually reducing the processing requirements of workstations and home systems.

To sum this all up, at present there is little to no reason for businesses to upgrade the workstations in the individual work areas in the current machine is less than 3 years old and probably less than 5 years old. Private users fall into the same category. Desktop systems are not on the way out. Businesses must just scale to reduced change over as systems now have a much longer life/duty cycle before replacement will be required. It is much like automobiles, once everyone has a good car they only replace when it starts having problems or they feel it is just time to replace their old but still functioning system.