Posts by doublelayer

Go on, hit Reply All. We dare you. We double dare you. Because Office 365 will defeat your server-slamming ways

"It's not possible to set up arbitrary email accounts in exchange server...? You know..... for testing...?"

I'm sure it is possible, but there are far too many caveats to want to do so. First, in order to trigger this, you need to set up five thousand such accounts. I don't know whether it's possible to run a batch setup process for that many accounts and then run a batch delete once testing is completed, but if it is at all painful I'd choose not to. Second, having that many test accounts puts a strain on resources. Five thousand mailboxes would take up a lot of disk space, whereas five thousand aliases going to the same place might not be counted as separate recipients for testing. Third, at least some systems are charged per mailbox, meaning you would pay a healthy sum for the privilege of testing.

Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer

Re: Yes the users are bad

At some point, the world in general must have come to the (incorrect) conclusion that I prefer technical terms babbled out basically at random by users who think they know what these terms mean, but don't. For example, I was helping someone get some remote working up and running when this lockdown got into view, containing the following interaction:

Them: I know the VPN you set up and I'm connected to it, but the network doesn't work.

Me: Do you mean you have no internet access, no access to local resources, or both?

Them: No, the internet is working, but the server isn't.

Me: Ah. Local resources then. Can you go to [internal address deleted] and tell me what it says?

Them: No, that thing works. It's the server that doesn't work.

Me: The server doesn't work?

Them: Yes.

Me: The page you said works is on the server.

Them: I know that. The server is working, but the router isn't pinging the network when I ask it to.

Me: What specifically are you trying to do?

Them: I'm trying to access the network protocol.

Me: What is the end goal for what you're doing?

Them: I have to open the accounting data.

Me: How do you do that?

Them: I open this program and use it to open the database.

Me: And where is the database?

Them: It's online, but the firewall isn't letting me open it.

Me: You read that with an accounting program, right?

Them: Yes. That is working fine.

Me: What happens when you try to open that program?

Them: It crashes with an error message.

Me: What does the message say?

Them: It says the network driver address was invalid. [When finally read verbatim, it says the file couldn't be found]

The issue ended up being a configuration problem in client-side software. I helped solve it. If they could realize that server, router, firewall, and network aren't just catchall words that apply to any kind of technical thing, we could have skipped that and many other sections of that particular conversation. The most useful thing that I think would improve my impromptu support calls would be that error messages are only ever read verbatim and are read fully the first time I ask, without the typical response of "It isn't important" or "That's not the problem". It's surprising how many of these I get given that I don't work in support. These experiences and the many stories here have convinced me to stay away if I can.

Does a .com suffix make a trademark? The US Supreme Court will decide as Booking marks its legal spot

Re: What I'm not clear on ...

Sorry to be vague. I was also referring to ownership in an IP sense. Apple doesn't have any ownership over the word "apple" because that would be ridiculous. Also, there are generally limits on how original and thus long you have to be to have any copyright ownership. So in general I think things getting a trademark don't have any other ownership, physical or intellectual, attached to them. Just using it for some purpose and having nobody else use it for a similar purpose is sufficient to ask for one, subject to some extra restrictions about what you'll eventually get.

The reason I think this is the other things that people have trademarked. As the article points out, phone numbers that are attached to a brand can be trademarked, but they don't own that either. Though there are various reasons to balk about granting their trademark request, I don't think that is one of them--if they relinquished the domain name, then they wouldn't be using that trademark anymore (debatable, but almost certainly), and trademark rights expire automatically if you stop using them.

Re: What I'm not clear on ...

Well, although they don't own it, nobody else does either and they're the only people who are associated with it. Similarly, Apple as a company does not own anything related to the word "apple", but they are able to trademark it for use with computers because they were the first to use that name. In fact, I don't think trademarked things are ever owned--the trademark is the protection because you can't own short sequences of letters or pixels.

It seems simple, but it must not be

The logic would seem to be somewhat straightforward, namely that you cannot trademark an obvious term for an obvious purpose, you can trademark a concatenation of two or more obvious terms as long as that concatenation is not itself an obvious term, and trademarking one term does not give you the rights to terms containing that as a substring. Therefore, Apple can trademark "apple" for computer purposes because it doesn't interact with normal apples, but just by doing that, they don't automatically get the rights to "pineapple".

Since this logic doesn't seem to be completely understood (or possibly completely enacted in the law), there is far too much risk to grant the trademark. If they can, I could do something like register a trademark on short web addresses like g.co or t.co (although those particular ones are already taken by Google and Twitter respectively), and sue bookinG.COm and microsofT.COm for including my trademark in their domain names. So let's find out where the substring rule needs to go in the law or public understand and hammer it in so hard it'll never fall out again.

NUC NUC. Who's there? It's Intel, with a pint-sized 8-core Xeon workstation

Re: Have some Mint instead!

"small form factor to me means cheap and cheerful and while this one is certainly cheerful....it ain't cheap"

Out of curiosity, why? Sure, you can get much more powerful if you get a large tower, but machines like the one that started this thread and the one reviewed in this article prove you can get really fast with small profile devices. Assuming issues like heat management aren't problems at that profile, and the reviews don't complain about it so it at least can't be overheating all the time, why should small profiles be limited to the lower end of the price and performance range? I think powerful and small devices have some interesting niches, including local servers and those who need more power portably than they can get in a laptop.

Re: Have some Mint instead!

That looks interesting. It's faster than the reviewed NUC by a little bit on single thread and significantly so with all cores running. The MintBox is a bit larger (6.2 cm deeper, 1 cm wider, and 0.5 cm taller), but that's probably not a big deal for anyone. I only have one doubt about it, namely this from the specifications for the processor: "95W, fanless natural airflow cooling". The 95 W is only the CPU (and the Intel-quoted TDP at that, and this machine also has a relatively powerful GPU in it as well. I know they use the metal case as a massive surface for heat dissipation, but I wonder about overheating when under consistent and heavy load.

I don't need that much power near at hand, as most compute-intensive things I might require can be offloaded to a remote server, but if I suddenly get a couple grand I can't use for anything else, this would be very tempting.

Uber, Lyft struck by sue-ball, no, sue-meteorite in California after insisting their apps' drivers aren't employees

Re: Uber and Lyft have yet to show a cent of profit, right?

They'll probably have even higher losses. The only profitable thing they do is to arrange these rides, as they earn more from the customer than they pay the driver. They use all that money, as well as plenty from investors, to pay for projects that don't make any money now but theoretically could in the future, such as their self-driving cars. At this point, they have fewer rides making a small amount of profit, but to the best of my knowledge, they're still paying the engineers on the self-driving project, and they're of course continuing to pay the lawyers and managers. They're going to be even farther from profitable now.

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: It is your duty ^D^D^D^D obligation to install the app

"I'm sure app 'green' screenshots won't be hard to find."

And that will work well for about a week. Then, there will be an emergency addition to the spec:

The QR code on the main app screen must contain the following information:

* The personal ID number of the user.

* The latest test date and result.

* The current health status of the user.

* A compressed representation of the user's criminal history with regards to health testing and app usage.

* The current date and time, using the UTC time zone.

This information must be signed with a device-specific private key whose public key has been registered with the server. Scanning devices must verify this signature. Those that lack sufficient internet access must be frequently updated with new lists of public keys. The suggestion is that this process occurs while charging those devices. Should a signature fail to validate, the attempt to scan must return red.

It has been 20 years since cybercrims woke up to social engineering with an intriguing little email titled 'ILOVEYOU'

Re: Never Learn Anything from History

It is still the default in a distressing number of GUIs. Mac OS does it. Some Linux desktop environments' file managers do it. Many Android file browsers do it. Why did this nightmare get so popular in conjunction with automatically opening files based on their extension. The latter makes sense, but if you're going to do it, you have to be really careful.

That awful Butterfly has finally fluttered off: Apple touts 13-inch MacBook Pro with proper keyboard, Escape key

Re: Apple have lost it

If you're connected to a bunch of desktop equipment, you have other cables you could also use to drag your machine off the desk if bumped improperly, but fortunately you have more space to place them where they're not in the way. The usefulness of a magnetic connector is for those times when your computer is plugged in in a location that would make it easy for something to put force on the cable, so mostly when you are working portably. The suggestion of magnetic USB-C connectors is good, and I'll have to look at them. My main concern is whether they work well with high-powered devices--for example, I really don't want to end up melting something into my USB port by running 87W through a £5 adapter, so I really hope they've been tested to that level. Similarly, the cable that connects to that magnetic adapter should also be capable of such power levels. If I can find positive test results of that, I think I'll be buying a few of those.

Latvian drone wrests control from human overlords and shuts down entire nation's skies

Don't count on that. There are two major reasons to want to look at the tech in a craft like this:

To steal it for your own drones: On this I agree with you. The Russians almost certainly have better and don't want that.

To plan for what you would need if you ever wanted to evade them. This the Russians might want to do. If they want to invade the Baltic states, they can't risk a very rapid NATO response (assuming that could even happen). They can hope for delays in contact to other NATO members, or they can try to do as much as possible before detection. Evading aerial detection would be a good first step. If this drone is meant for combat rather than detection, you could learn to identify and catch it.

All that said, we currently don't know the Russians have stolen it. I'd buy it, but there's also a possibility that the communications system crashed and they have a plane flying off into the middle of nowhere with nobody controlling.

Google Australia says government pulled pin on content-for-cash talks, hands in its homework anyway

Re: Hang on there a minute

Also, their argument is just not true. There have been and still are plenty of publishers who write content and then sell it to other places so those other places can have the right to distribute that content. In fact, it applies to pretty much every kind of content. Wire news services, syndicated television programs, music played on radio stations, movies shown by theaters, plays put on by acting groups, the list goes on and on. Now I understand Google's argument that this is a little different, as they're not placing the ads themselves and thus aren't making any money off the content they distribute for free, which was already basically released for free by the owner, except that most of those parts aren't true either. The search page has ads that never benefit the people listed there. The news pages may have ads that benefit the publishers, except that most ad scripts are forbidden based on Google's technical restrictions so it's mostly Google ads and that they still make plenty of money on those. Also, placement in search results results in visitors to a publisher's page to read the content and possibly continue to read more content by that publisher, which the Google News page doesn't tend to do. I tend not to fully support the news organizations when this argument starts up again, but I don't support Google because they offer these transparently false arguments.

Singapore to require smartphone check-ins at all businesses and will log visitors' national identity numbers

Re: oh, id checks, welcome back!

""As a thought experiment, consider a hypothetical government that demands that every citizen wears a biometric bracelet that monitors body temperature and heart-rate 24 hours a day. The resulting data is hoarded and analysed by government algorithms. The algorithms will know that you are sick even before you know it, and they will also know where you have been, and who you have met."

And nothing bad can ever come from that. For example, if someone with some power, or a criminal organization, want to track people who they don't like, they only have to read from that database to have perfect tracking information for their soon-to-be victim. And if they're worried about that victim having given information about them to someone else for prosecution or publication, they can use the "who they met" section of the data to get a shortlist and find any possibilities. If the one doing the tracking is a little further up the ladder, being a government member rather than a hacker or a corrupt cop, the person can also be arrested because you can pretty much guarantee that they forgot to charge their permanent tracker sometime, and it would surely be a crime to go about without your monitor in working order. I can solve lots of current problems for you if you don't mind me creating much worse ones.

Re: In Singapore, 1984 has arrived.

"OK, but how would you do contact tracing, as it has been shown to be an effective way of containing the spread of COVID-19?"

I favor the complete approach. Make a really big grid of buildings and keep everyone in a specific room. Don't let them leave. Use cameras to monitor the halls so you can see if anyone leaves. Those cameras are watched by a set of guards, each of them in their own room as well. Each camera will be watched by at least two guards and be attached to motion sensing software. Should a person try to leave, they should be presumed to be willing to murder by coming into contact and imprisoned for that crime. Since they probably only bother to do this if they have the disease, you cannot safely detain them, so they should be shot. Follow my advice, and I guarantee COVID will be extinct in your area within a month of full participation.

You can do many things to solve a problem. Instituting a surveillance system that seems straight out of North Korea and, incidentally, in no way guaranteed to have an effect is a very bad way to solve a problem.

But that's not enough. I've stated why it's a bad idea from a human rights perspective, but let's talk about what effect it would actually have from a health one. If you know who went where and when they went in, you know ... not all that much really about who they might infect. You don't know who they passed versus who was on the opposite side of the building. You don't know whether they had a long conversation with anyone. You don't know whether they were wearing protective equipment while inside there, as even if you recorded a picture of them going in, they could remove it a minute later. You don't know what route they used to get to that place from the last place you tracked them. You technically don't even know that they are the person they say they are, if this only involves scanning QR codes; it's easy to copy someone else's QR code and display it, so unless there's an employee whose job it is to take ID cards that have been touched by random people and bring that card close to their face, lying should be somewhat easy.

All privacy issues aside, this plan doesn't really work at all for contact tracing. Tracking apps do, but this doesn't. Now bringing the privacy issues back, this is a perfect method of oppressing a population. There's a reason it's been tried in many a dictatorship--if you can get it working, you can do a lot to your citizens. We now get to see the high tech implementation of a dictator's dream.

It looks like you want a storage appliance for your data centre. Maybe you'd prefer a smart card reader?

Re: Bit like Amazon at the moment

Are they different hits? If so, they're probably beating Amazon. My searches often go like this:

Enter search terms: Random things that don't match what I was looking for because the descriptions specify what something has but not what it can do.

Retry search terms: Some actual results pop up. Well, three things. These must be three very good things because they each appear at least four times in the results list. Sometimes this is because there are four different colors and the sellers don't understand how to use the item color selector on one product page. Sometimes, they seem to be identical including identical prices and I have no clue why they're listed multiple times. The rest of the list consists of sponsored unrelated things and refurbished items, which often are not very desirable for many of the things one might want to buy online. Often, the three possible results are all overpriced, which leads to

Sort by price: I think that, for every possible set of search terms, someone has made a product to show up first on a sorted price list. The most frequent tend to be cases or straps. If it's electronics, it can at times be components, but never the kind of component you want to have extras of. Even when there's no real need for a case for something, somebody has made one and published it on Amazon. I don't know if anyone ever buys them, but I wouldn't recommend it as I have no proof the case will actually fit the thing it's being advertised for, assuming they actually tried to advertise for a specific product rather than a class of products. So I realize that I'm just going to have to use the price filter until I am at the lower end of possible prices and see what those look like, which leads to

Price filter: I don't know what Amazon's frontend office looks like, but I know it must have someone there (I imagine it as two laughing interns) whose job it is to monitor my searches and make sure there is never a price filter option on the page when it would be useful. I've seen it on other searches where I didn't need it, but for some reason it will disappear off the page from time to time, and that always happens when I've reached sufficient frustration. I try to find the set of parameters I can append to the query string to put a filter in place, and if I can remember it, it tends to work, but often I give up around now and go elsewhere.

India makes contact-tracing app compulsory in viral hot zones despite most local phones not being smart

Re: so what *is* the solution?

I appreciate this clarification. While I haven't used the quote before (at least I don't remember ever having used it), I've heard it used many times and always assumed it to have been meant in the typical context. I learned something today. Have an upvote.

However, I must point out that the sentiments, different though they are, still have parallels to this. The liberty being spoken about in the quote were about a government, sure, but they were about a government against an effective power broker, not the people. Meanwhile, the government concerned was democratic. So to some extent, it was still the people (via representatives) against less representative power (big landowners). The same logic can apply with the people against those who have power over them.

Spyware slinger NSO to Facebook: Pretty funny you're suing us in California when we have no US presence and use no American IT services...

Re: But..

How is it any different? Well, they're too different bad things. Facebook's collection is unwarranted and should be illegal everywhere. There's a good case that it is illegal in some places based on how the GDPR specifies they're supposed to do this stuff, but that hasn't yet been tested. Elsewhere, it's legal though extremely odious. NSO's is clearly illegal everywhere, and there is no openness about what they're doing, which we at least have a little bit for Facebook. They both deserve to be fixed. Ideally, my schedule would look like this:

May 2020: NSO finally brought into court.

June 2020: NSO found guilty, made to pay a heavy bill.

July 2020: NSO goes bankrupt.

August 2020: Facebook simultaneously pursued with legal action by those who never agreed to data collection and by data protection authorities.

September 2020: Fines build up to catastrophic levels for Facebook.

October 2020: Facebook files for restructuring bankruptcy.

November 2020: Judge rules against petition to restructure because of illegal activity.

December 2020: Facebook starts dissolution bankruptcy process.

Unfortunately, the legal process doesn't go that fast. I can still hope, can't I?

Re: But..

I think you pointed out the problem already. Users agreed to Facebook's snooping. They didn't agree to NSO's. Facebook didn't agree to NSO's. Nobody agreed to NSO's. NSO's is obtained by breaking into systems including user phones and possibly including Facebook's servers. In addition, NSO's malware spies to a much greater extent than does Facebook's. NSO's can reportedly turn on cameras and microphones to record background information. Facebook isn't believed to do that, though I wouldn't put it past them to do so eventually.

I hate Facebook too. Everything about them. I refuse to use any service they run. At least people expect that Facebook will be spying on them if they do choose to use their services. NSO's is worse.

Quibi, JetBlue, Wish, others accused of leaking millions of email addresses to ad orgs via HTTP referer headers

Edwards said he doubts these leaks are accidental.

And they definitely aren't. Just look at the responses. Companies are encrypting their addresses now. Yay. Except the response for someone who doesn't want to leak them would be to change the page source so referer [sic] headers either aren't sent or exclude that information. I can think of three different ways to do that that each can be implemented in about an hour. Nope, they'll encrypt them. They won't bother stating that they've already sent the keys to the provider; they figure we already know that.

Xiaomi what you're working with: Chinese mobe-flinger proffers two Redmi Note phablets for UK market

Re: This is more than a little disturbing...

Xiaomi has some positives and some negatives. Among their negatives are that their variant often comes with a lot of bloatware and has advertising throughout most of the included apps. This tracking would be another one to add to that list, and it wouldn't surprise me all that much that one of the bloatware apps they installed is doing it. I usually consider Xiaomi because I'm planning to put Lineage OS on it, rather than for the included software.

Re: Play Store?

The entity list which blocks manufacturers from American products only has Huawei on it. Other Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi, Oppo, and Realme can buy anything they want from the U.S., and they do. If you want Google Play Services, any of these will be fine. If you don't want them, Xiaomi's devices are most likely (though not guaranteed) to be supported by AOSP-based variants like Lineage OS.

ICANN finally halts $1.1bn sale of .org registry, says it's 'the right thing to do' after months of controversy

Re: Missing the point

I'm afraid your comment misses the point more than does the article, and although your comments lead to the same conclusion, they're well off the mark on how each step got there.

"ICANN org is strictly constrained. The ICANN community would cry bloody murder if it tried to make policy."

The community was informed because that was required, and the community immediately cried bloody murder. ICANN tried to ignore it, then rationalize it, then downplay it. Even though that didn't work, they soon hid any further comment from the public to try to keep the yelling down. And they eventually released the required document to move the approval process along. You will please note that community pressure against the sale started strongly right at the beginning of this fiasco, and yet ICANN only stopped when under legal pressure.

And yet, you say "In this case, it listened to the community.". No, they didn't. They didn't at all. They eventually did what the community wanted, for now, but they didn't do it because they listened to us. They tried to ignore us and they would have continued to cheerfully ignore us had we not gotten legal assistance from someone outside the community.

Your comments about ISOC, though, are completely accurate. They also deserve to be under a blade that neatly sheers off the topmost layers of any organizational chart.

Re: California AG should open a full investigation into ICANN

Sounds like a good idea, but how would we run the election? Who gets to vote? How do we prevent certain subsets of the voters from being compromised. For example, Nominet of the U.K. registries had a voting system but they changed it so you got one vote per registered address, meaning the massive registrars got effectively all the power. The ICANN election system must be different. Let's get all the details down so that when we reestablish ICANN we don't have to debate any of this and can put these rules in an immutable charter.

Re: Only profit motivated scum

I thought the original post was sarcastic, praising people while using terms like "scum" and "envy" to talk about the same people. The people voting on that post don't seem to agree though. If that post is not sarcastic, it's one of the weirdest ways to argue for an opinion I've seen.

Re: Shame on you, Kieren

"To clairify.... I was and still am dead against the opening up of .org to non-charities, and .net to non-ISP's etc."

Why? Well, not exactly why against .net, as an ISP-specific domain makes sense, but why against .org? For one thing, it was never restricted to charities even if some national .org.[country] domains have been. If you would like to see it restricted, where are the following supposed to go:

1. Personal sites that aren't commercial.

2. Nonprofits that aren't charities because writing useful software often doesn't count.

3. Noncommercial groups' sites, such as organizations for specific interests.

4. International groups that wouldn't make sense to use a country-specific domain.

Android trojan EventBot abuses accessibility services to clear out bank accounts – fortunately, it's 'in preview'

Re: And google/android will get the flack

I'm usually quick to jump on the bandwagon of complaining about Android's security model and the way Google has delayed any improvements, but in this case, they really can't be blamed unless they fail to find it when someone eventually pushes it to them. An app using this functionality will have at least five security warning screens. The screens can't be bypassed. The screens are very clear what is going on, with no technical language or waffling. At this point, the users have quite a lot of responsibility if they read this and click yes.

If Google lets this into the Play Store, they will have blame to take. There are other things we can attack them about for which they are completely blameworthy. In this case, there's little more they can do other than block it from their store--there is pretty much no change to Android that can cure stupid user syndrome.

You can get a mechanical keyboard for £45. But should you? We pulled an Aukey KM-G6 out of the bargain bin

Re: I splashed out on a Keyboardio, and love it

When I read this, I was quite excited as I have recently been attempting to find a keyboard that has a programmable firmware layer (as in I can write code in a complete programming language to run on it natively*). This sounded perfect. Then, I went to the site and read this:

"The default layer is where you'll find your letters and most of your standard punctuation. Tap or hold the Fun key and your Atreus will shift to the Fun (Function) layer, where you'll find numbers, arrow keys, and the rest of your symbols. From there, press the Upper key to get to the Upper layer, where you'll find media keys, F keys, and other similar stuff."

Uh, no thank you. I'm out. I want my arrows and numbers right where they were before, because I'm planning to write things like "for (int i=0; i<10; i++) {" a lot. Then, press shortcuts using the function keys to run the build scripts. The search continues.

*I want to run a complete program on a keyboard because I'd like to have it read certain series of keystrokes and pass characters along, but not on a one-to-one relationship. For example, intercepting certain strings and replacing them with characters less traditionally found on keyboards. A macro keyboard can do that, but in a less convenient manner than can one where I can upload and run Turing-complete firmware.

More than one-fifth of smartphone sales evaporate in China as pandemic grips Middle Kingdom

But that smartphone doesn't have to be a new one. You already basically had to have one for many services in the cities, so this is not really a driver of more smartphone purchases unless the battery on an old one keeps dying. Maybe it will sell more backup batteries, but probably not new phones.

Guess who's back, back again. SE's back, tell a friend: 2020 reboot looks like an iPhone 8 and even shares components

Re: all they got to do now is....

Well, the Pixel is larger than the iPhone. The case is only a bit larger (14 mm longer and 3 mm wider), but for people for whom the original SE is good, that's still large. The screen is much larger because there are smaller bezels, meaning that this device has a 5.6-inch screen (142 mm) as compared to the iPhone's 4.7-inch one (119 mm). If someone desires a small phone for a small screen (for example, to use with one hand), that might be a feature. My personal requirement for smallness only concerns how small the physical device is, although this is probably as large as I could take.

In other details, there are various differences. The iPhone is water resistant, while the Pixel isn't at all. The Pixel has a headphone jack, as you've noted. The iPhone's storage can go up to 256 GB, while the Pixel's is stuck at 64 (no card slot on it). If you want to shoot video, the iPhone can record 4K at 60 FPS, while the Pixel can only do so at 30 FPS.

For nearly any user, there are probably only two of those specs they care about. It really depends which two. For me, it's basically only size that matters, so these both seem basically fine. I'll see what the market looks like when my older but smaller phone finally breaks.

Re: It's still the fastest Apple iPhone at the lowest Apple price

Statistics are a little tricky to calculate accurately from information I found online, but here are some from the U.S. only. Keep in mind that this is 2014-2019, but the SE only was sold from 2016 on.

Re: It's still the fastest Apple iPhone at the lowest Apple price

Good point. That one looks nice. I'm not sure if a two-year-old device is still being manufactured or sold, but that seems like good competition. The problem for me and those who want small smartphones is not exactly that there are no options, but just that there are few good options. This one and the one described below make three that seem worth consideration, which is not that many. I know why this is, but unfortunately I'm in that subset who doesn't agree with the majority.

Re: It's still the fastest Apple iPhone at the lowest Apple price

It measures 138 by 67 mm. I'll grant you that we've seen plenty of smaller devices. Unfortunately for those like me who like smaller devices, we haven't seen them recently. I did a search on a phone database for devices released in the last two years smaller than those dimensions, and 73 results came up. Then I adjusted the list to remove watches and feature phones. Only seven results came up.

It would seem that there's at least some competition, but then I checked out each of the others. Each is an Android Go edition device, which is a reduced feature-set version of Android for devices with limited specifications, and they really mean it with the "limited specifications". The most specced phone in the list has 16 GB of flash and 1 GB of memory. Several only have 8 GB of flash. One only has 512 MB of memory! Not a single one supports 5 GHz WiFi. Most are on Android 8.1. I think we all know even those running 9.0 go edition aren't getting any updates. Not to mention that I'm doubting you can even buy many of these in your country of residence--though I could see one or two making it there, these mostly seem aimed at developing regions.

So if you want a smartphone, you want it to be new, and you want to have one smaller or equal in size to the iPhone 8, the newest iPhone may be your only reasonable option.

Florida man might just stick it to HP for injecting sneaky DRM update into his printers that rejected non-HP ink

Re: HP printers

There might be, but if I had a printer, I wouldn't trust it. I'd figure that that option would be similar to the "don't collect my location" option for Google Mobile Services (where there are several switches in different places without documentation and only one combination actually results in the requested behavior). Alternatively, it could be one that flips itself back when power fails or the cartridge is changed. It only takes one firmware update from demonstrably untrustworthy manufacturers to render a stock of cartridges useless. If I had to put it online, I'd have a Raspberry Pi attached to do that part, with the printer's own network isolated. Manufacturers, this is what your untrustworthiness does to us. Cut it out.

Hey bud – how the heck does that stay in your ear? Google emits latest Pixel Buds, plus extra bloatware if you have the matching phone

Re: An open letter to Google

You are correct. I don't own a Pixel. And I evidently misinterpreted part of the article. But not the part where random code was pushed to all Pixels, without an icon, for one company's devices. Do other manufacturers push their device-control apps? No, they don't. They make sure to tell their users to install those apps. It works great.

An open letter to Google

Hey guys. I need to alert you to something about your users. Well, specifically the users of your phones. They understand how to type words in a search box and press an install button. They've got this. So next time you release an app, you can count on them to go to the store and install it if they have any intention to use it. If they don't want to use it, they won't bother, but even if you push it to their phone, they still won't bother. They'll just ignore the icon or try to uninstall it. The only apps you need to preinstall for people are the ones needed to use core functionality. A keyboard, the store app itself, a file browser, and settings would probably be enough. Some basic utilities wouldn't be bad either. An app for managing devices they don't have though, not so much.

Spyware maker NSO can't claim immunity, Facebook lawyers insist – it's time to face the music

Re: end user

Well, this needs some analysis. We'll start with the easy part:

"Your original post makes no mention of NSO, only knives, nukes, and exploits/malware."

Well spotted. I was referring to spyware. The article referred to spyware too, wouldn't you know. And the group making it was NSO. The original comment in this thread was making an analogy about holding NSO responsible. My reply was making a counter-analogy to that. I figured that link was obvious, but evidently not. For clarity, the rest of this comment will be discussing NSO and the legality of its spyware.

Now, let's talk about tanks. Lots of considerations. The first one is easy: making a tank causes no damage to anybody. Operating it might, but creating one is not much different from manufacturing some other type of vehicle. Malware creation often involves finding vulnerabilities in a system through penetration, which happens to be illegal. So manufacturing a tank has no intrinsic criminal elements but manufacturing malware does. For the analogy, manufacturing nukes or nerve gases may not in themselves be dangerous activities, but they would be contrary to various laws in most nations, including, for the nerve gases, the Geneva protocols.

Now, when tanks are made for militaries, they are made at the specific request of the military, under a contract. Sometimes it's a contract from an international military and the laws permit this. This means the production of the tank can be attached for determining responsibility to the manufacturer and the military that is on the other side of the contract. If the manufacturer does something illegal that the military has the right to allow them to do, the military can essentially make that legal. NSO did not create their products under contract, and they can claim no such immunity.

Certain countries may modify the laws allowing them to create and use malware. That does not make it legal in the way you're arguing. If Israel wrote a law allowing their government to create malware, which they have done, it doesn't give NSO the permission to do so unilaterally--only places controlled by or under contract to certain parts of the Israeli government have the special permission. If Israel's government did allow NSO to make the malware under that special legislation, which they don't appear to have done, it wouldn't make it legal for them to sell it to other governments or individuals. And if Israel's laws allowed NSO to do anything they wanted including break into systems to create malware for any purpose, which is not at all the case, it would not stop those actions from being illegal in other countries such as the U.S., which they are. If I start my own country, and my laws say that I can hack into your bank account and steal all the contents, I can still be arrested should I ever leave my country, because bank theft isn't legal where you are.

Re: end user

Nuclear power ≠ nuclear weapons. No, really. You can't just pick up a power station and use it as a bomb if you like. There is a very good reason that possession of things like enriched uranium or plutonium are tightly controlled and monitored--they aren't needed for generating power but are needed for making weapons.

Re: end user

It is legal for militaries to own those things. It is not legal for companies or individuals to own such things. NSO is not a government or military organization. Its clients have included individuals. Your technicality does not change the situation at all.

Re: Missing something here

If it's true that the malware can't be used against any U.S. number or any other device in the U.S., then they can't be guilty and would inevitably win the court case. However, you have to take into account several parts of your comment that aren't necessarily the case. I'm going to chop it into its components and go over each one:

"But if it's true that [it can't be used against anything in the U.S.]": This is supposition, and Facebook is alleging that it can and it was. If they have at least a little bit of evidence, this supposition would be destroyed.

"NSO's spyware can't be used within the US or against US-registered numbers (as they write in thair reply to El Reg)": Watch out for misleading language. It's possible that they check for U.S. numbers in their malware and block them. It doesn't make sense to me that they would, but let's assume they do. They could still attack a U.S.-owned server, which has no number, a phone with an international number that is operated inside the U.S., which would not have a U.S. number but would still be under the jurisdiction of American law, or network traffic going into or out of the U.S., which wouldn't be attached to a number. Any of those would continue to be illegal under American law.

"that leaves only the country of the perpetrator, doesn't it?": No, it doesn't. If a crime took place, and NSO played a part, then they can be charged in either location. The victims concerned come from various countries, but both a company and an individual in the U.S. have claimed to be victims. Either a crime took place, in which case the country of the victims, in this case the U.S. has some jurisdiction, or no crime took place, in which case the case cannot occur anywhere. NSO can decide to ignore the court case, claiming they can't be sued there, but their ability to do that doesn't make it illegal to sue them there.

"If this passes, the family of everyone that's been killed by US-made weapons sold to foreign governments would have standing to sue the weapon manufacturer in the US...": This is arguable, but it probably would not. The claims here differ from the claims that could be made against a weapons manufacturer, as follows:

Facebook alleges that NSO penetrated their systems in order to create a tool. The manufacture of weapons does not in itself involve committing a crime, depending on what weapons we're talking about.

It is alleged that NSO knowingly supplied their malware to people who would use it unlawfully (and basically there's no other way). If a weapons manufacturer knowingly sold weapons to a group on an international terrorist list or to someone who informed them they were going to use it for illegal purposes, then they definitely could be legally sued for that. Sadly, there are various organizations that should be on those lists but are not, leaving loopholes that weapons manufacturers are eager to exploit. However, selling weapons to international militaries is not considered illegal, even if their use later by those militaries is.

However, even though these legal situations are a little different, there are parallels here that are somewhat useful. There have been some court cases arguing that weapons manufacturers and other outfits (places like defense consulting), have knowingly assisted committing crimes, including war crimes. I am not an expert on any of these and cannot supply all the details, but these cases are probably mostly in one of a few legal grey areas. I would not be at all unhappy if this case sets a precedent that cases against crimes of that nature can go ahead with more frequency.

Re: Missing something here

This argument has been made frequently and it's always wrong. The U.S. presence has been proven, but the fact remains that it would be legal to launch a court case against them even if they didn't have a U.S. presence. I wrote a comment about this last time there was a step in this case, so I've taken the liberty of copying that comment below. It remains accurate.

Not really true [the argument that NSO can't be charged in the U.S.]. There are two places laws can be applied:

1. In the nation of the perpetrator.

2. In the nation where the crime took place.

If I am an Australian citizen, but I go to India and commit a crime then leave for Australia, I can be sent back to India to face my charges. The same applies if I am in Australia and use a network to commit a crime in India. So if it can be proven that improper access was obtained to computers in the U.S., then the U.S. courts have a claim to jurisdiction about that crime. Now, there are other provisos about that. For criminal matters, you get into the area of extradition, but this is a civil matter. So, if NSO is found guilty, they can manage not to pay the bill. However, if they don't pay, they may be restricted against operating or storing money in the U.S. as the U.S. can then be required to confiscate the money to pay the judgement.

This rule applies in any country pair. If an American company violates a law in another country, let's use GDPR as an example, they can be sued in the courts where the violation took place. It does not matter if they have a local subsidiary. It does not matter if they have anything physical in that country. It does not matter if any of their employees has ever set foot in that country. If they violated the law there, they can be sued there. The same logic applies to this case.

Re: end user

I sell nuclear weapons, aisle one. Assorted nerve gases are in aisle 2. Instructions on using them against others can be found in the racks near the register. Should I be blamed for everyone poisoned or converted into protoplasm?

Knives have peaceful uses. Nukes don't. Spyware doesn't. Also, knives are legal. Nukes and spyware are not.

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word

Re: What's next?

While it's not word's decision to make, let's try it.

do we really need capitalization to tell words apart? even proper nouns are clear enough that it's not needed. punctuation makes a clear separation in sentence parts, so we have no need of capitalization to start them. the only problem i can see is distinguishing acronyms that someone has made use the same letters as an actual word from that word would be tricky, but since most of those acronyms involve tortured word choice, that might actually be a benefit.

Yeah, it looks weird to me too. I'm not going to do it again, but maybe we could do without capitalization.

Cosmo Communicator: Phone-laptop hybrid is neat, if niche, tilt at portable productivity

"If only separate peripherals was a thing"

It is a thing. It's one of the things people to whom these devices appeal are trying to avoid. Extra keyboards can be convenient, but not all the time. There are obvious downsides, such as having two batteries to check and two devices to carry, but there can be other problems as well. For example, try finding a good portable bluetooth keyboard. There are many available, but they often fall into a few categories without a good middle ground. There are full-sized ones that you cannot carry with you in your jacket. There are some folding ones that are quite large for a pocket, but are usually good, but which don't fit well when unfolded in a low-space situation. Then there are tiny ones with weird key placement. If someone wants to do a lot of typing but doesn't necessarily expect to have much of a surface to place a keyboard on, it's possible none of those categories will work well for them.

Let's authenticate: Beyond Identity pitches app-wrapped certificate authority

Re: Let me see

The description above is no different. It still relies on storage on a phone. Now that may use a shorter passcode, relying on a phone's hardware to maintain control on how many attempts you have before an unstoppable erasure. If you trust this, there is a simple answer: get a phone, configure it for the security you can withstand, get a password manager on it, set the master key to "a". If you don't have complete trust in the phone's hardware to maintain access controls, then you remember a longer password and trust to much more provable encryption. This service does not have any more trustable security than that. It might be more convenient, but it also comes with negatives as detailed above.

Google says no more shady anonymous web ads – if you want your billboard up, you've got to show us some valid ID

Re: A Good Step

"So a Delaware corporation needs to have a "registered agent" for service of subpoenas, etc."

Great. Except we can't start sending out subpoenas, because we aren't a court. Even if they are breaking a law, we can't subpoena them. We could file complaints, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything will happen. In this situation, though, it doesn't matter about that either because we're after transparency, not enforcement of a law. The corporate subpoena-receiver has no legal duty to tell us things we want to know, such as who put the money in the bank account and who took the money out again to get an ad released. They won't tell us, and there's no requirement for them to do so. So we will get pretty much nothing from this.

Re: Malicious ads

I like your optimism, but I am far too cynical to think that has any chance. It wouldn't be that hard to scan the provided scripts and see if they bounce users to other pages. A list of regexes would take out all the easy ways of doing that, requiring a sneaky method of doing so. Yet, if I read the scripts of such ads, they're not bothering to do anything sneaky. That means Google isn't checking. Why should I believe they're going to act differently with this information?

The rumor that just won't die: Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length in 2021 with launch of 'A14-powered laptops'

Re: No surprise then

I don't think running Windows was one of their primary considerations. It was enough of one that they made Bootcamp, but they did that quite a while after making the transition. I think it was mostly about getting a faster laptop that neither ate through a battery in an hour nor caused burns, given the power requirements of the G5 PowerPC chips.

However, even if Windows was one of their primary considerations then, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is one now. There's a discussion further down about whether an iPad is similarly capable as a laptop. While I've been arguing that it isn't, my arguments have been for specific use cases. For many users, the applications they need do function at a certain level on an iPad. Most of the time, that's not because the writers have decided IOS is great and they want people to switch to it, but instead that many companies either put resources into cross-platform applications or have switched to web ones. In either case, they will probably have something that works fine on Mac OS. I bet Apple doesn't think their users care much about running Windows on their hardware, and they're probably right for quite a lot of their users. They'll be wrong about some, just as there will be some people who need an Intel-compiled binary which doesn't get emulated right or just never gets updated, but I have this feeling that Apple doesn't really care about those people.

Re: enabled?

"So your complaining that Apple consciously decided to omit the ability to connect to the terminal in iOS and has restrictions on applications file access because you might want to do things on the cli on an iOS device."

Way to not connect posts in a thread. I was disagreeing with the contention that an iPad with a keyboard was similar in feature set to a laptop. The person who made that assumption was willing to argue that it should be possible to do dev work on one. I pointed out that it's very difficult at the moment and provided examples. Whether they choose to change that is not really relevant to me--if I want an Apple-made portable device to do dev work, I'll buy a mac.

Canada's .ca overlord rolls out free privacy-protecting DNS-over-HTTPS service for folks in Great White North

Re: "Cops, Feds, and ISPs have been vocal opponents of the technology"

I suppose that makes sense, but you have to trust at least one group with it. No matter how far you push your own DNS setups, something has to make the queries and those queries are going to be sent through an ISP. If you set up your own resolver, then you can still be tracked based on its queries. The benefit of using someone else's resolver is that, as long as you trust them not to spy, nobody who watches their traffic knows what you're doing because your data is mixed in with everyone else's. So if you don't trust them, do you have someone you do?