Posts by SL1979

Back to the Fuchsia: The next 10 years of Android

Re: What fragmentation?

Seriously? I said something here that merited three downvotes? Did I say something that was factually inaccurate, or is it just knee-jerk fanboy-ism at play here? I think I was being fair to both sides, not taking one. Let's face it, Google does slurp a lot of user data. That's how they make their money. Apple makes money selling hardware. I guess I'm not understanding what I said that makes it worthy of three downvotes, because I'm pretty sure that my facts were right before I spoke.

I'll link to another article about how Android is sending location information to Google even when the user disables it, and how there's no way to stop the data from being sent: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/22/permissionless_data_slurping_google/

Re: What fragmentation?

It depends on what you consider to be a "considerably worse company" than Apple. If you're okay with Google slurping your personal data at an alarming rate, and selling off your tastes and personal data (which you have no control over) to other companies, then I suppose everything is okay. Google is in the business of advertising. Google advertises by collecting data on its users as its primary business model. Apple is in the business of selling hardware, not advertising. Apple already knows their customer well enough. They're two very different takes on the same market.

You know what's coming next: FBI is upset it can't get into Texas church gunman's smartphone

Re: FBI can't unlock smartphone

"Something must be done, and getting a law passed that the FBI can unlock iPhones is the least we can do"

Riiiiight. Because he used his PHONE to kill innocent people, not a gun.

Put down the crack pipe.

Re: FBI can't unlock smartphone

Not at all, because the FBI is barking up the wrong tree. They need to be figuring out why this fucktard was able to skirt around all of the red flags that, by all accounts, should have prevented this sick fuck from getting firearms (legally) with the rap sheet that he already had. Unfortunately, even if he had been legally unable to get firearms, he would have still gotten them on the black market anyway. That's the problem. It's always these hot-headed rage-a-holics that end up with firearms. Inevitably, innocent people pay the price with their lives. What the fuck difference will it make if the FBI can look at his phone? It certainly won't solve anything, because the American government doesn't want to admit that it has a gun-related violence problem, not an encryption problem.

Don't worry about those 40 Linux USB security holes. That's not a typo

Meanwhile...

The rest of us are absolutely *SHOCKED* that you can actually compromise a machine if you have physical access... Who could have predicted that? </sarcasm>

Take that, creationists: Boffins witness birth of new species in the lab

"What they will want to see is a frog becoming a giraffe before they are convinced....."

This is a really good point, and one that gets pushed aside quite frequently when debating occurs between the evolutionary scientists and creationists. It seems as though creationists are in some way convinced that macro-evolution is the type of evolution that's being touted by science as "fact". In reality, they're just making a claim that tries to discredit evolution by way of science being unable to prove that macro-evolution has ever taken place. This is a logical fallacy at its core.

Evolutionary science, to my knowledge, has never operated on the premise that macro-evolution is the holy grail of evolutionary science. Evolutionary scientists, biologists, and anthropologists have always backed the theory that evolution has taken hold over millions, possibly billions of years, and has done so on a micro-evolutionary scale. Yes, that means adaptation eventually leading to the divergence of different species. The creationists are playing the wrong card, in the wrong game, while being wholly convinced that their side is "winning" the argument. That's the difference between the arrogance of faith, and the empirical evidence on which science operates. Evolution may be wholly compatible with the theory of "intelligent design". The problem, however, appears to be that those who espouse the idea of "intelligent design" seem to suffer from a complete lack of the intelligence from which they claim to have been created.

Wow. What a shock. The FBI will get its bonus hacking powers after all

This may be helpful, or at least reassuring...

I'm a Private Internet Access customer, and I use their VPN for anonymous web browsing and other related tasks. I asked their customer support how they're approaching the new Rule 41, and this was their response. This may help others on here who subscribe to privateinternetaccess.com for their VPN service.

"The recent change to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure would allow a federal magistrate judge to issue a search and seizure warrant for electronic media if the location of the information is concealed through technological means or if it is a hacking case that involves computers in at least five judicial districts.

Even if a warrant was issued to PIA about searching and seizing electronic media, because we do not log internet activity, there is no way to trace the activity to a specific user.

Because this rule change allows the government to hack individuals outside of the United States, it is ever important that our subscribers remain vigilant and maintain best practices for protecting their privacy. That means not letting yourself be socially engineered and protecting your network against potentially malicious traffic.

While a VPN can help protect your privacy, it is only one of several tools that when used together protects the privacy of you and your family. If you would like more advice on how to secure your privacy, you can view our Best Practices Guide which is available at https://helpdesk.privateinternetaccess.com/hc/en-us/articles/229655847-Security-Best-Practices"

My thoughts about this are basically that it's really very important to use a VPN provider that is as "off the record" as possible, and doesn't keep log files. It might not solve the whole problem, but at least it helps to thwart the FBI's best attempts at de-anonymizing VPN users.

Huawei Mate 9: The Note you've been waiting for?

Firmware?

I suppose the first thing that crossed my mind when reading this was, "Does it still contain backdoored firmware that phones home, and gives all of your data not only to Google, but to some random Chinese IP address?".

Vegans furious as Bank of England admits ‘trace’ of animal fat in £5 notes

Re: Vegans are hippocrites anyway

*AHEM* Some of us vegans are as much humanitarians as we are for animal rights. Many of us see the two as being inextricably intertwined.

And I believe that the correct spelling is, "hypocrites". A "hippo" is an animal. As am I.

Re: Fighting your way to the top of the food chain?

No, what we should be doing is phasing out the most wasteful animal agriculture practices, in order to sustain the rest of the world's population. Sound reasonable? That 50 pounds of grain and 500+ gallons of water to yield 1 pound of beef? Yeah that's what I'm talking about when I refer to wasteful animal agriculture practices.

Re: Fighting your way to the top of the food chain?

There's a difference between inustrialized agri-business, and herding. The results are still the same - Eventual slaughter, either way. However, the science behind it is just a matter of numbers. It's inefficient to funnel roughly 500 gallons (I'm American), and 50 pounds of grain into an animal to produce one pound of beef. Just to give you a rough idea, you're talking about roughly the equivalent of running your shower for a couple of weeks, without stopping. That's how much water is involved in producing one pound of beef. In a world that is having a population crisis, in conjunction with a clean water crisis, from a purely analytical point of view without taking into account one's personal definition of suffering, this is an inefficient, and irresponsible use of resources.

But to state what should be obvious, since it's easy to anthropomorphise how "content" animals may look relative to their mental, physical, or emotional state is not an accurate way of gauging the levels of suffering that an animal is forced to endure. Just because Temple Grandin came up with a way to make cows less anxious while they're having a cannula inserted into their stomach, or to be tagged or branded, doesn't mean that the cow suffers less. It only makes us feel better about the suffering that we're inflicting on others.

Either way, I'm not trying to turn this into a pro-vegan vs. anti-vegan thread. I'm personally vegan. It's the right choice for ME. I have been since 2002, and don't ever see myself going back. People have to do the research for themselves and provide themselves with the most objective view of everything before settling with the facts and figures that support one theory or another. It's called deductive reasoning. We as humans have that ability. It's one of the reasons why I choose to reduce the suffering that I cause to the sentient beings with who I share this planet. Notice I said, "reduce" not "eliminate", because reduction is the goal. Elimination of suffering is impossible. However, we vote with our money for the kind of treatment that we are comfortable with toward others. I'd like to be one less person contributing to the problem if at all possible. Nobody is perfect -- vegans included. We all share a bit of responsibility by virtue of our very existence, for creating the suffering of another creature on this planet. The goal of veganism is the reduction (as much as possible) of our inflicting suffering on others -- Not unattainable perfection.

Fighting your way to the top of the food chain?

Let's get real. Nobody posting here "fought their way to the top of the food chain". Let's put anyone who says that in a cage with a hungry lion, see who ends up getting out alive, and let's test that theory. Anyone willing to volunteer?

There's no good reason to expose animals to more suffering by using them as a commodity, when the need for their use, particularly in the manufacture of currency, is not justified by any reasonable, scientifically sound "need".

And for the record, vegans aren't just having a fit over nothing. This is the year 2016 (almost 2017), and yet we have only gotten MORE vicious and cruel toward the animals that are tortured every day in factory farms and feedlots, and yet we continue to create more of a demand for their suffering by calling for the use of more animal products when it's completely unnecessary. You're not just talking about the suffering of animals here, you're talking about funneling more food and water into a "resource" that yields a net loss in resources. That's inefficient use of resources by first-world countries that, due to their demand for meat and animal agriculture, are depriving impoverished countries of the resources that THEY need to survive. Let's not also forget that one of the top causes of world-wide deforestation (the lungs of our planet) is animal agriculture.

And for those suggesting that the animals farmed in factory farm settings / feedlots are living "happy lives" up until the point of slaughter really ought to visit a factory farm at some point in their lives, and see for themselves. The truth is a lot more complicated than the idyllic picture that's been painted for us.

Decade-old SSH vuln exploited by IoT botnet armies to hose servers

SSH and Internet Facing Devices

Why would someone run an internet-facing device with SSH open to the world, in the first place? This should be protected by VPN and a firewall, or at least behind some type of firewall. I can't imagine why anyone would have SSH facing the whole internet. That's just asking for trouble.

Devs! Here's how to secure your IoT network, in, uh, 75 easy pages

For starters...

I'd just be happy if the phrase "Internet of Things" would die already...

'Please label things so I can tell the difference between a mouse and a microphone'

I'm really not trying to one-up anyone's tech support stories, because there are some real gems in here. However, I once looked on in equal amounts of horror / amusement as an end-user that I supported attempted to set up her new (evidently first ever) PC, and couldn't figure out why the "foot pedal" wasn't working. I realized that she had connected her mouse, put it on the floor, and was attempting to use it like it was a sewing machine or something. I had to excuse myself, find the nearest restroom, and laugh until every orifice in my body was leaking. At least I was in the right place for that kind of thing.

Actually, yes, Samsung, you do have to pay Apple $120m

Re: Charles Dickens posted:

"3) people will argue over whether Apple cars are better than Samsung branded Google cars"

Well, I hope for everyone's sake that Samsung doesn't use the same consumer safety review process for their cars that they have been using for their phones as well as their washing machines!

"It's okay, you just have to drive it under a certain speed, and make sure that the interior lights are turned off at all times, in order to lessen the chances of the car spontaneously exploding". ;-)

Big data and the cloud: It's not even that scary

"So what do you do with your data? ®"

I keep it far, far away from the "cloud", where I still have some level of control over it, where it doesn't have a direct feed to the NSA, GCHQ, FBI, or others who want to use my data in order to, "better serve me with relevant advertising".

It's open season for bug hunting – on Microsoft's Azure cloud

You totally beat me to the punch.

"Here, run your virtual server on our Azure platform. Find the bugs. Tell us about it, so that we can patch our proprietary, buggy code, and refuse to release the source code, which would probably make debugging our security-nightmare-of-a-platform much easier. But we don't want to do that, because in the grand scheme of things, security is still an after-thought in all of our products, and has been ever since we abandoned Xenix, which was a real OS that actually had redeeming qualities such as file permissions, file ownership, and presumably would have been a much better code-base on which to base the rest of our products."

Yeah, let me get right on that, and install a vastly superior OS like BSD or Linux on your cloud platform that you've developed over the years on modified, spaghetti-fied code that still (more or less) has its roots in DOS, which was a single-user, neutered, watered-down imitation of UNIX (perhaps Windows actually would have been more aptly-named "Microsoft Eunuchs") that had nary a trace of built-in security, permissions, or file ownership, not to mention stability, so that when you do get around to fixing the bugs, you can release a binary patch whenever you feel like getting around to it. And because you won't release the source code for us to audit, when the next zero-day exploit comes around, you can say something like, "We had no way of knowing THAT would happen!". Uhhhh... Yeah, no thanks.

Criticize Donald Trump, get your site smashed offline from Russia

Re: Is Trump the only story they posted?

In all fairness, it's no secret that Putin and Trump have cozied up to each other. And it's also no secret that Trump actually asked the Russians to hack the US Government's networks. You're absolutely right, the DDOS may not be conclusively blamed on Russian hackers, but the circumstantial evidence sure does make for a compelling argument. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.... The US also has a ton of vulnerable computers as well. I'd be willing to bet that most of them are running some iteration of Microsoft Windows, just like most of the PCs existing elsewhere in the world. Sure, you can run a C&C server for a Russian botnet anywhere in the world. But it doesn't change the fact that the bulk of the attacks came from Russian IP address space. I'd be willing to bet that the bulk of the addresses that were involved weren't all IP addresses of proxy servers, or VPN providers from Russia, either. But we'll probably never really know the truth. So in all likelihood, the sensible thing to do in this kind of situation is probably for us to say, "We just don't know.", and keep digging.

Re: Despair

This is exactly why I get simultaneously excited and depressed when I think about someone like Neil DeGrasse Tyson running for President. Yeah, he would in all likelihood, be one of the most sensible, logical, rational candidates that I could ever hope for in a contender. However, that being said, most Americans, judging by the lack of critical thinking during this three-ring circus of an election process, don't have any desire for logic, reason, sensibility, moderation, or diplomacy. That's seriously one of the most depressing things about the human race, at this moment in history. We can send a man to the moon, but we can't harness the power of critical thinking when it comes to electing people who are, one way or the other, chosen to represent us. You know, the government that exists to represent our best interests. We've forgotten about the government that was designed, with the intention of said elected officials actually being elected to be representatives of their constituency -- of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Re: Why are these things not being shouted from the rooftops?

"She has a WAY higher chance to start a war with russia based on her previous actions as she has supported plans which have strained US Russian relations. So her given power would more then likely start a war which would lead to nukes being lobbed with Russia."

How so? I seem to remember the last time that a Clinton was in office, we as a nation, didn't have any wars. We also had an economic surplus at the end of Clinton's term. Sure, he wasn't perfect. We also had NAFTA, Don't Ask, Don't Tell, an oval-office BJ, a stained blue dress, a Lewinsky, a cigar, and some other pretty ethically questionable things going on as far as the White House was concerned, but over all, I don't seem to remember anything with Clinton that came anywhere NEAR the mess that we had to clean up after GWB left the White House. If you don't believe me, pick up a history book. Well, I guess to be fair, the history books are all a tool of the lame-stream liberal media too, right?

(Can you hear my eyeballs rolling back into my head? Because that's what they're doing right now.)

Re: Why are these things not being shouted from the rooftops?

"because the liberal lame-stream media has BROADCASTING and PRINTING instead... [to echo what you've parroted from them in your post]."

Um. No. It's not called "parroting" when you're simply stating facts. And I clearly said that I was no fan of Hillary, however given the choice between the two, I'll take Hillary over a hot-headed, psychopathic, man-child who wants to play with the nukes that we have, and asks the Russians to hack our government networks. Really? Try researching the first, fourth, and tenth amendments. You might learn something, instead of just (very typically) blaming the "lame-stream liberal media", whatever that means. Last time I checked, Rupert Murdoch is one of the most right-wing, conservative news moguls on the planet. And he's responsible for slanting everything that Fox News spews forth on the trog-tube way far to the right. Fox is a major, syndicated, television network, in case you didn't already know. But then again, more facts.

Why are these things not being shouted from the rooftops?

Okay, here's the deal. There are things about Trump that should be deeply troubling to, well, EVERYONE! However, for whatever reason, American voters are totally okay with ignoring certain parts of the constitution in favor of others.

Problem #1: Donald's complete lack of understanding of what the US Constitution is about. He has no clue that his entire platform that he's running on is based on one humongous violation of the first amendment - religious freedom. You can't discriminate against (or deport, or block entry into the US) people of any faith because of their religious beliefs, alone. And yet, his frothing-at-the-mouth supporters all seem to understand what the second amendment is about. Cognitive dissonance, anyone? Selective memory?

Problem #2: Donald's complete lack of understanding of the fourth amendment, and due process. We don't build back doors into gadgets and encryption ciphers, because we have something called due process, which typically involves obtaining a warrant (and not the FISA Court kind).

Problem #3: Donald's complete lack of understanding of how the US Government is structured, and how government representatives are not above the law, but rather subject TO the law. We have a system of checks and balances, and three branches of government which are designed to maintain the aforementioned checks and balances. You don't get to become president, and do away with those things just because you're some kind of "rogue, maverick, straight-shooting reformer", as he seems to view himself.

Problem #4: Donald asking why we can't use the nuclear weapons that we have. Enough said there. This terrifies the shite out of me.

Problem #5: We know that Trump asked the Russians to hack the US Government's networks. In the real world, if anyone else were to do this, there would be one word to describe this kind of action: TREASON. Why is no one pointing out what a treasonous psychopath this man is?

Problem #6: Trump's cozy friendship with Vladimir Putin. Enough said there.

Problem #7: Donald is a psychopathic, misogynistic, malignant narcissistic, xenophobic, racist megalomaniac who thinks that he's always right, even when he's obviously wrong. A little diplomacy goes a long way. Trump has no idea what diplomacy even means, because it doesn't exist in his world. He's also a card-carrying birther, and has operated in quite a few legal gray areas involving things such as his income taxes, his 4 bankrupted businesses, his side-stepping of the immigration process for his wife, his view of illegal immigration (which, by the way, is at its lowest rate in years at the moment), and his hatred for anyone who isn't a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Problem #8: Donald doesn't have a clue who ISIS actually is, because for the most part, none of us do. How can he expect to fight against an enemy who conducts themselves with subversive, hidden, underground tactics designed to, well, terrorize people by exploiting the element of surprise. This is why you can't fight a war on an idea. Have we learned nothing from the GWB years?

Problem #9: Did I mention that he's a dangerous psychopath who quite possibly would have access to nuclear arms? Seriously. Nuclear. F*****g. Weapons. And Trump. Nuclear apocalypse, anyone? Thanks, but I'll pass.

I guess I could go on, but really, I think I've covered most of the important stuff. I'm no Hillary fan either, but compared to Trump, I'll take 1,000 Hillarys over just one Trump any day of the week.

Australian Banks ask permission to form anti-Apple cartel

Re: Life's hard choices

Well, on this one, I'd have to go with "screw the banks". Opening up access to Apple's NFC, is also opening up the chip to not only the banks, but potentially anyone ELSE who obtains the technical specs for Apple's NFC technology, and has rudimentary coding experience. I'm not one for lobbying for any proprietary technology per se, but in this case, were Apple forced to open up access to their chips, it could feasibly be opening a huge can of worms with a label on it that reads "iPhone NFC Payment Exploit Kit". Meanwhile, millions of iPhone users could suddenly wake up one day to a bank account with a big fat balance of ZERO. Yeah. Perhaps if the day ever comes when security and encryption have become unbreakable, bulletproof things, this idea might be a good one. But we're not there yet. Not by a long shot.

Zero-day hole can pwn millions of LastPass users, all that's needed is a malicious site

Stallman said it best...

"The term “cloud” means “please don't ask where.” - Richard Stallman

Combining the words, "cloud", and "password manager" makes me recoil in horror. If you aren't in control of the security of the service that hosts your private data, you might as well consider it all public data.

Microsoft ordered to fix 'excessively intrusive, insecure' Windows 10

Re: To think that...

Um.... Last I checked, systemd does do one thing, and does it well -- Manage services.