Posts by doublelayer

Get in the C: Raspberry Pi 4 can handle a wider range of USB adapters thanks to revised design's silent arrival

Re: Power to the Pi-ple

I'll admit I was thinking about the older micro USB connector, which is rather easy to find. I don't have many USB-C cables, but I expect that's because all my portable hardware is older. As the standards change, I'll probably start to gather some USB-C cables. In terms of providing the high amounts of power the pi needs, that is becoming a greater issue but doesn't really change the availability of power adapters. If I have to find a USB supply with sufficient amperage, I probably can in a local area in an hour if I don't have one on me. If I have to find a specific barrel adapter, I'm not so confident. I don't yet have a version 4 board, so all of mine are using the older connector, and those adapters are available nearly everywhere. It's also the case that those older pis do not require as much power and can therefore run from most USB wall PSUs.

Re: Power to the Pi-ple

I see your reasoning, but I would prefer them not to change the power port because my use case is quite different from yours. I like to power these in many locations and from many sources, and a USB cable is often easier to find than an arbitrary barrel adapter, let alone having to set up my own power supply each time. It also makes it very easy to power them from USB batteries. Although the pi is useful in many engineering setups, it was designed for classroom and hobbyist use, and the hardware demonstrates this in many places. For me, that's more convenient, though that's not for everyone.

Re: Recall a $40 device to re work it?!

No, no, no. USB-C doesn't mean "PD", but it does mean "compliant with USB-C spec". USB-C spec says that, if you connect a PD-capable adapter to a non-PD capable device, the device requests a certain amount of current through various mechanisms and the adapter provides that current at 5 V if possible. The pi misidentified itself, and thus didn't get its current. The adapters did what they were supposed to do.

Consider what you would think if the problem went the other way. If you had an adapter for USB-C PD which was expecting to deliver about 60 W, and didn't rigorously follow the spec. You plug in a pi, and the adapter sees it and starts firing 20 V PD at it. That would fry the pi, and it might even be a fire risk. You wouldn't be happy at all. This issue was less destructive, and has now been resolved, but it was a problem.

Breaking bad... browser use: New Mexico accuses Google of illegally slurping kids' private data via G Suite

Re: Acedemic?

That's all true, but somehow we have to indicate this to the students. When you're young and don't know how all the tracking and data collection work, you probably assume that you're safer than you really are. And, as a student, you probably don't have a large supply of alternative machines to use for anything private. This might be changing due to increased smartphone use, but they probably don't have their own computers, and home computers for the whole family's use are less prevalent now that laptops are more popular. The first problem we can help fix by increasing education about the dangers of online data collection, while the second one is trickier but we could still help by showing them how to use trustworthy software and maintain good security behavior.

"As a School admin using Microsoft and Google clouds, I've at least been informed by Google we need parental consent, else T's&C's say we block the rest or breach contract."

That may not be as positive as it seems. That sounds like a minor legal measure that ensures that Google can blame you, the parents, or the children if ever something goes wrong because they got some forms. While it ensures that the parents have a chance to see what will be happening, it doesn't provide them or you with extra opportunities to do anything about it, and a privacy-conscious parent will probably instruct their children on how to use normal, privacy-respecting replacements for these Google services anyway, meaning that those who are most at risk get little or no protection from showing them some legal text.

London's Metropolitan Police flip the switch: Smile, fellow citizens... you're undergoing Live Facial Recognition

I think we would know about that, but fine, let's assume it's comparable. So what? Looking for someone specific and getting it wrong is a lot different from looking at everyone just in case and arresting a big chunk of them. One is not speaking well of the police's competence; the other is a violation of various rights. Oh, and the other one also means that all the police's time is spent tracking down people who the cameras get confused by, meaning they are less useful at preventing crime or catching criminals.

When the air gap is the space between the ears: A natural gas plant let ransomware spread from office IT to ops

Re: Paranoia mode on

It's true that the best-case scenario is not to get caught, but in the case that you know or have a strong suspicion that you will get caught, it's helpful* not to let the victim know what you were doing. Consider the situation where you break in to a place to still data by copying disks and you find out that they have a silent alarm and you've set it off. You can run out with the data you have, running the risk that they figure out that's why you were there, or you can steal a couple of harmless encrypted laptops, hopefully convincing them that you were a street thief looking for something expensive. Spies who don't manage to always stay in the shadows find ways to pretend not to be doing what they are in fact doing.

*The above comment is written from the point of view of an attacker. I am not an attacker. Don't be an attacker, or we won't like you.

Paranoia mode on

"It appears the spear-phisher was more interested in holding files to ransom than specifically disrupting plant systems. Still, as a result of the infection, the plant had to be shut down as the monitoring systems were cleaned up."

Let's say I'm a person who wants to be able to control a natural gas plant. Maybe I want the ability to turn it off. Maybe I'd even like to blow it up. Unfortunately, I don't know how to bypass their security. Therefore, I spearphish their IT people to get access to their systems, hoping to find technical documents and information about security procedures. I do, but while I'm in, I also find that their operations network is linked. Hurrah! Well, onto those machines I go, looking for even more information. How do I access the controls? What could I set them to to cause the most havoc? Maybe I can find some manuals and procedure documents used by the operators.

Well, now that I have everything I need, there are just two problems. Problem one: I don't want to cause damage to the system now. Maybe I want to have this ready if ever my country of employment wants it, or maybe I want to make sure this will work on other plants before I make my move. Problem two: I am not impressed with their security right now, but there's no telling what they might have that I've never thought of. If they find that I've been here, there will be all sorts of warnings and I might even get tracked down. What's the solution? I infect all the systems with ransomware. All the evidence of my activities has just been obliterated in an avalanche of encryption. And at the cost of revealing my successful phish rather than hoping that nobody notices, I remove most suspicion about why I was here. I now have quite a nice vulnerability database in the bank, and if I don't have a discovered or installed back door, I at least have information about what I'd need to get in again to use the stuff I've found.

I really hope that's wrong. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to reset my paranoia circuit breaker again.

Now Internet Society told to halt controversial .org sale… by its own advisory council: 'You misread the community mindset around dot-org'

Re: poison pill time?

That's not sufficient. That would prevent the scenario you've discussed, but they have another option, which already seems more likely to me. That is to buy it and start a massive price increase program until they finally do manage to drive all the customers away. That'll take a while since it's such a popular domain, so it will probably make them quite a tidy profit. Meanwhile, at least a couple million places, many of them individuals or charitable organizations, get hurt. It's not enough that they must keep it intact. If you want a reliable poison pill, make it a requirement that the prices not change for twenty years, and is limited to some low value after that point. If you do that, I guarantee they won't be buying.

Re: The bloody obvious

Do you really not get it? I'll walk you through it. Take the last thing you said it couldn't be. I'll paste it here for you:

"it isn't the organizations registering their .org names (they still get their registrations at a competitive price)"

See that parenthesized claim? Why do you assume that? Why do you assume that the price won't change? Why do you assume that the competition exists? Because the competition doesn't exist for everyone who already has a .org, as they will have to either pay whatever price is quoted or go through the turmoil of switching domains. That involves moving systems around, reconfiguring mail and other communications, ensuring that all their customers, clients, or visitors know this is happening, and worrying about someone else grabbing the .org they just abandoned. They have to worry about that because, in the absolute best case scenario, that person will make it even more expensive if they should ever want to get it back. In the scenarios that will actually happen, people will grab the .org to impersonate them, either riding off the goodwill they have generated (and eroding it for the place that still exists) or stealing information, money, or credentials from their former customers, clients, or visitors. So we've proven that there isn't much competition.

Now, you already know that ICANN has removed restrictions on how much .org domains can cost. Technically, there's a possibility that a for-profit entity with lots of debts to pay down will buy up the domain that is a nearly perfect monopoly property and then keep the prices the same. Just like it's technically possible that I'm a master of magic, have snuck into your house, and slipped some money into your pocket without you noticing me. Go and check if I've done that.

Re: "this board already works in a very transparent way”

"Why are people talking about the ICANN Board when the topic in the story is the ISOC Board?"

It's this little thing called comparison. People are alleging that ISOC's board is acting corruptly or at least self-servingly, and they compare this to actions performed by ICANN's board which they allege to be similarly corrupt or self-serving. They state this comparison outright. As comparisons go, this one is somewhat apt, as the current .org sale has been dramatically affected by decisions made by both boards.

"They [ISOC] met daily (by teleconf) for two weeks to discuss a proposed $1.3B deal. It would have been incredibly sloppy not to take it that seriously."

Sure. You are alleging that this statement contradicts or explains part of the quote you were responding to? I don't get it. The closest thing I can think of is that the quote says that ISOC "claimed to have met" and you're stating that they definitely did meet. But if that's your point, you are missing the important part of the sentence where it is alleged that the members and chapters were not brought into the discussions, I.E. that ISOC claimed the reason for meeting was to discuss the deal, but they had already made their decision and didn't allow any other parties to interfere. The quote you responded to clearly indicated that more discussion with more people should have happened, and your reply seems to be attacking the idea that no discussion was needed.

"And it was kept secret because the buyers insisted, which is hardly unusual for a deal of that size; anything else would have been remarkable. And the Board decided, because such a matter is evidently a Board decision."

No, it's not remarkable for a large deal to have some public scrutiny. I'll concede that a lot of high-value deals are kept undisclosed, but not all of them. Not to mention that, when an organization has a lot of subunits like chapters and an ostensible public service purpose, there's often a culture of more openness, both in information and governance. That's not required, and ISOC either doesn't have it or decided to abandon it, but stop trying to make that out to be standard procedure when it's simply one option among many.

Glue's clues: Samsung Galaxy Z Flip dissection reveals a pholdable mired in adhesive

Re: I've said it before...

And here I am to suggest yet another possibility: the functionality that comes with convenient personal internet access and the ability to write apps to make use of it. The old PDAs might have a phone connection in them, but it wouldn't be a data one. Then, there was enough data to receive and even send email, as long as you were a business and could afford the plan, but the typical consumer was still stuck on voice and text only. The smartphone also ushered in the revolutions of 3G and apps that expected to have it. True, it wasn't there on the early models, but adoption of those was primarily a small group that could afford the expensive hardware and still not cheap data plans. By the time the general consumer had a smartphone, they also had a data plan and a couple apps they used when away from home.

Forcing us to get consent before selling browser histories violates our free speech, US ISPs claim

Judgement

"“Maine cannot discriminate against a subset of companies that collect and use consumer data by attempting to regulate just that subset and not others, especially given the absence of any legislative findings or other evidentiary support that would justify targeting ISPs alone.”

As the judge in this lawsuit, I must admit this point by the plaintiffs contains some logic and legal effect. Therefore, to prevent discriminatory legislation, it is my duty to remove those components of the legislation likely to lead to discrimination. In my reading of the law and the most able one provided by the plaintiffs, the discriminatory part of the legislation appears to be the words "internet service providers"--to limit the legislation to this subset is clearly unacceptable and must be altered for justice's sake. Therefore, it is the considered opinion of this court that the law shall be edited to replace all instances of "internet service providers" with "companies of any description using or holding user data". With this alteration made, the remainder of the case submitted is no longer applicable, and the issue is now resolved.

Going Dutch: The Bakker Elkhuizen UltraBoard 950 Wireless... because looks aren't everything

Re: El Reg shitty photography

I'm guessing they just enabled the function+arrow combination because some longstanding small laptop users are familiar with that layout. If the users are used to using function+up to perform a page up, they might do that by muscle memory rather than pressing the dedicated key for that even though they have it now.

Tutanota cries 'censorship!' after secure email biz blocked – for real this time – in Russia

Backdoored encryption isn't for censorship. It is for surveillance. Neither is good, but it's worth keeping in mind that these are two different bad things and countries can be good on one and terrible on another. In general, most countries are far too eager for more surveillance, which needs to be stopped. Still, dictatorships have far more pervasive surveillance systems; they're the possibility we must stay away from, not an alternative.

As for censorship, there are democracies that would like it, but the most censoring democracy doesn't hold a candle to even the light dictatorships. The lines can be blurred somewhat, such as whether we consider Singapore a liberal democracy or not, but most of the major democracies in which we readers live are clearly not in the same camp. We need to prevent censorship whenever it is suggested, but we should probably focus on surveillance more because our governments have already pushed surveillance on us while they haven't gotten very far with censorship.

Don't Flip out or anything, but the 'flexible glass display' on Samsung's latest pholdable doesn't behave like glass

I'm not sure if heat is enough to make the glass flex back, and depending on how much you use, you could damage the display panel under the glass. If a small amount of pressure can make the glass move, I believe it unlikely that the glass will regain a useful equilibrium without direction. I wonder how this will handle people using styluses to write on the screen or light bumps and jostles in general use.

C'mon SPARCky, it's just an admin utility update. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Haven't we all?

Well, I haven't yet done an rm that killed my own files, although I can take the blame for someone else running an rm that lost them their files. When at university, I was helping a younger student in the second programming course who was getting disk quota errors. The reason was that their code was not working very well and had been dumping a lot of cores, which had not been deleted. We used a couple tools that produced different core filenames, so "rm core.*" wasn't enough. So, of course, I spoke the required command for the user: "rm, then a space, then asterisk core dot asterisk". Unfortunately, another space got entered, and not in a good place. And now I no longer read code or commands aloud.

For the record, I had some extra access to things and I was able to get the student a relatively recent copy of their work. I'm not sure how they felt about me after all was said and done, but as this was the due date for the assignment, I believe there was much panic from everyone.

Google burns down more than 500 private-data-stealing, ad-defrauding Chrome extensions installed by 1.7m netizens

Re: Google already requires a credit card on file for extension developers

The extension developers could be found guilty of fraud as they alleged true visitors when there weren't any. As for finding these developers, I'm guessing they used a prepaid credit card without a name on it. Either that or a stolen one (I'm not sure if they ever had to pay with it). Some criminals are dumb enough to use their own ID, but ones that set up a fraud operation using so many site copies probably go to the relatively minor effort of getting an anonymous one.

Re: LOL

I wonder--it seems unlikely that Google lost money due to these. In fact, if they used Google ads at any point, Google probably got some as an indirect result. The ones who lost were the people advertising, and they could theoretically have a claim against Google for being negligent in the prevention of crime and possibly possession of money obtained unlawfully if it can be proven that Google failed to prevent the fraud in a timely manner. It would be nice to see this investigated. So that'll never happen.

Best buds? Apple must be fuming: Samsung's wireless earphones boast 11 hours of listening on a single charge

Re: Powered what?

This is a good point. I have a pair of earphones similar to these. The difference is that I got the really cheap ones, which cost about as much as the wired ones being costed above*. Of course, that price is rather expensive for the average wired set, but they said it so I'm going with it. My main consideration was all the previous relatively cheap wired earphones I've broken, usually by moving around a lot and putting stress on the wires. It's quite a few sets. When I'm in one place, a larger set provides higher quality and some improvement in comfort, but I can't easily pocket that when I'm going elsewhere. These are more convenient for me because I haven't yet pulled them out and found the wire broken in such a way that they only work when the wire is held at a specific angle.

*Specifically, the Redmi AirDots. The price appears to have risen since I bought them, but there are probably lots of places they can be purchased. They are cheap enough that, if I end up losing one, I can handle it.

After just one phone, Essential Products ascends to the great venture capitalist in the sky

Re: I have an Essential Phone

"The add on bus is unique."

That might have been a problem. If the bus is unique, that means three things. 1. Nobody else can put that bus on their phone easily, assuming that the original designers license it out at all, because the bus would require lots of new hardware and software. 2. It is not easy for other companies to produce add-ons to connect to that bus because the tech behind it is unusual, so they'd probably have to implement new protocols to make use of it. Both of which lead us to 3. nobody has an incentive to support the bus, so the only place doing anything with it is the original manufacturer, which means there are no add-ons for a while and only one eventually, which means that users feel cheated by a feature that never became useful and potential customers think it's pointless to buy the product.

I can see lots of great possibilities for a hardware extension system, but one company alone can't do it. I'm unsure if it can be done, but if it can, it would require a standard freely available to device and peripheral manufacturers, so the abandonment of the concept by one won't render the idea pointless.

Not a Genius move after all: Apple must cough up $$$ in back pay for store staff forced to wait for bag searches

Re: Court

The appeals system has a point. If a case doesn't proceed properly, the appeal can correct that. It covers everything from new evidence introduced to lawyer didn't do their job. If you limit appeals, it will hurt everybody. Sure, it would reduce the power of people who have a lot of money, but they'd just shift that money to doing other things in the legal process that make it similarly hard for their opponents to keep up. Meanwhile, if the company (assuming the company is in the wrong) wins the case and the same appeal limitations apply to the plaintiffs, they would similarly be restricted in fixing anything that was done improperly. It's an imperfect system; you're right there. When you have all the details for a better system, come back and we can discuss it. What you've suggested so far isn't good enough.

Re: Minimum wage?

What about non-"genius" workers, such as the people who explain the differences to a customer, process the sale, or coordinate the people providing support? I'm guessing they get paid less. And it's already been pointed out that the figures you cite aren't known to be correct.

Sprint-T-Mobile US merger: Bad for competition? Good for standing up to Verizon, AT&T? NYC court goes with the latter

Re: Innovation?

You are correct that the carriers don't create much of the technology. However, you are incorrect about them not harming. Let's consider each thing the quote says they would harm:

"consumers": This is the most obvious one. Without the need to compete on price, there will be fewer plans, and each will be more expensive. No doubt they will hide this by making the specs of each plan slightly higher, but dropping all the lower-end ones. This harms consumers who cannot afford expensive service, as well as consumers who don't need much and would still have to pay for capacity they don't use. Eventually, the prices would start to rise even for people who are frequent users.

"workers": This one is a bit harder to argue. Of course, by merging, some of the employees of these companies are bound to lose their jobs. That happens a lot, though, and it's rarely enough to rule against a merger. This could also be a rephrasing of the "bad for consumers" line again; if the company is spending a lot more on the more expensive phones, the workers won't get as large a pay increase.

"innovation": I assume this is the one your comment was targeting. While you are right that these companies aren't building the new tech, they are the people whose investments make the development of that tech possible. If these companies have less pressure to compete with one another, they are unlikely to bother investing in new tech that increases range, lowers power draw, or the like. Why should they bother? You could argue, probably correctly, that the rest of the world provides enough competition for the innovation to continue, but that's in the realm of supposition as we don't have comprehensive figures describing who paid how much for each innovation in mobile telephony technology.

Aw, look. The UK is still trying really hard to be the 'safest place to be online in the world'

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it

Unfortunately, it doesn't. This is mostly because the net has lost much of its ability to route around damage of any kind. If I want to cut off certain areas, there is usually a relatively small set of cables I have to cut or interfere with to do so. Of course it's difficult if I want to take out a continent, but if I'm a government and I want to interfere with my country's networks, I have a lot of power to do that. I can't find the context for the quote, but I'm wondering if it might refer to an individual node on the network deciding to censor, which is a small enough problem that it likely would be routed around.

Because the internet is so complex, it can be tricky to achieve perfect censorship. But that's just because there are so many things the end-user can do to try to get around whatever is put in place. The tough details of getting past the censors are almost never handled by the network; they're done by the person who wants to get at the other end. The global internet may be a resilient beast, but the local internet that each of us relies on is fragile. We need to prevent the people running around with hammers from hitting something important.

Re: Inevitable

You need to consider the downsides of that. What you're asking for, however indirectly, is destruction of anonymity. That sounds great when you first think about it. But when you don't have anonymity, you can't have privacy. Anything you do that leaves a trace can be linked to you, and anything you do that is merely passive (E.G. paying for and reading content but not writing comments) can be linked if the providers' records ever get released. You may think this kills the advertisers and analytics monsters, but you are wrong. In fact, it may strengthen some, because there is now less difficulty in creating a model of user activity that tracks more of what they do online. Even if advertising on the internet were made entirely illegal everywhere, someone would be willing to buy that data and use it for advertisements offline. And that's the positive scenario where the most they want to do with your data is convince you to buy something. If you think too much about it, lots of other possibilities unfurl from there. Some are nice. Some are very, very bad.

Re: Inevitable

They aren't thrilled with the personal prison terms part, but it doesn't worry them for a few reasons:

1. They plan on making a few edits to the law before it goes into effect. They were able to do that in California, why not the U.K., Australia, or anywhere else who tries it?

2. They're pretty sure the people responsible for enforcing that law won't go after someone as high-profile as they are; the regulators might target their businesses but are unlikely to try to penalize the officers personally. Given who has been getting GDPR fines and how big they are, they probably have good reason to think this.

3. These people don't live in the countries which have been instating such restrictions. They'd certainly prefer not to have to avoid some country, but it's not like they'll lose the place where all their expensive stuff is.

4. Such regulations must be scary to the small company that might compete with them, so it has some pretty nice upsides when you come to think of it, doesn't it? If any one of the above points happens, their companies now have extra security on their monopolies.

Dual screens, fast updates, no registry cruft and security in mind: Microsoft gives devs the lowdown on Windows 10X

Re: Not a desktop replacement for Win 10 then

I'm afraid you missed the point. RDP can let you interact with it, but only if the processing occurs on the remote machine. It does not allow you to inform the remote machine that you have a GPU and it is welcome to compute on it. Therefore, the assumption is that programs running in a container connected via something like RDP won't be able to access the device's GPU.

However, although that was the original point, I'm not certain about it. I could see the container itself having access to the GPU, as if it was on the remote machine, and therefore allowing such programs to run. I don't know that that's the case, but I could see it. If it is structured that way, then programs requiring GPU acceleration would likely continue to work, although given the scale of the device the GPU is probably not the fastest thing around.

Re: Dual screen?

I don't see a contradiction there. They state their opinion that the design as it currently is suits them, and provide a reason why they like it. However, they acknowledge that not everyone likes that, and suggest multiple options so people can select the one they'll like the most. These seem logical and connected to me.

Whoa, France. Take it easy. Wow. You're out of control. Fining Apple 55 minutes of revenue for secretly slowing down iPhones? Maniaques!

Re: I never understood why ...

I'm aware that batteries age and decrease the peak power they can provide. And yet, we don't see devices without this throttling, such as other companies phones, laptops, and Apple phones before this happened, shutting down in this way, even with old batteries. That implies that those manufacturers looked at the peak power they were going to be using and selected their batteries to be likely to be capable of providing that power for quite a while. Meanwhile, Apple didn't, so their devices do shut down unexpectedly when not particularly old. In this case, Apple devices are not performing to the standard used by multiple other competitors, including some made by Apple. The shorter form of saying this is "design flaw".

And now you're telling me that I caused this by leaving my phone connected to the mains while its battery was at full capacity? You know so much about batteries, so you'd also know that it is virtually necessary to have overcharge prevention circuits on lithium ion batteries to prevent fires. Apple has those. And yet, the circuits they have are somehow unable to realize that the power has reached full capacity and take measures designed to prolong the life of the battery? Despite knowing that many users will do what I do and charge the device while they sleep, meaning that it is very likely that the device will be at full capacity for quite a while before the cable is disconnected. I have to say, I've never heard Apple making this argument. It's a very good thing for them that I haven't, because that would probably be an even worse design flaw.

Re: The problem that's being solved is not well understood

I have such a device. It's worth keeping in mind a couple things.

First, there is no indication, even now, that this has happened. It simply throttles for you. Since this became such a big issue, you can now see that it happened if you go into Settings, select Battery, and from in there select Battery Health, which will contain a notice if it happened but won't provide other details of any kind. I'm sure we can all agree that we do this at least once a week anyway because the information in there is of such usefulness, so no warning or even a notification from the app is needed.

Second, it's worth keeping in mind that sudden shutdowns, while possible with ancient batteries on many things, aren't being reported en masse for other devices. Also, this process can start rather soon after the device is put into operation; I believe mine throttled after about eighteen months of ownership though I didn't check that settings page so it could have been earlier. This suggests that the system drawing power from the battery may have been designed incorrectly to require far more peek power than the battery they chose can provide for very long. I think this is likely a design flaw, but can you see the reason others might assume, possibly correctly, that Apple did that deliberately to increase the number of people buying new devices or replacement batteries? Can you see why, even if it is a design flaw, the general consumer has a reason not to be thrilled with it?

Third, unless you tell someone that the battery is wrong, they don't know what the problem is. Before they were mandated to put in this warning, they didn't tell anybody. Meanwhile, we're all familiar with the concept of new software requiring more resources and running more slowly. While many will complain about this, we all realize the reason for it and most of us will generally accept it with only a little grumbling. The way they built their system seems well-designed if the goal was to convince users that the device was, in fact, becoming too slow to run the system well, with the battery as a convenient excuse should they ever get caught. I'm not alleging that this is actually what happened, but there's far too much logic in the arguments of those who do to dismiss the possibility out of hand.

Re: I never understood why ...

One other option is to do what nearly every other electronic device does: run the same but the battery doesn't last as long. I have rarely had devices simply shut down because their battery is old, but they often will last for shorter. That Apple's devices manage to crash even when the battery isn't empty sounds like a design flaw, and their solution sounds more like a quick patch to avoid people hearing about it than a reasonable solution. Yes, Apple got some bad optics when people thought it was intentional and only for commercial reasons, and they don't deserve all of that. That doesn't make it a good thing to do.

Built to last: Time to dispose of the disposable, unrepairable brick

Re: Reduce, re-used, recycle

It depends what you're upgrading from. When it's something five years old, you're right that the power savings aren't particularly notable compared to the other power expenditures. However, when it's something older, the power savings can be surprising. I did the calculation a few years ago on a switch I made. A friend was running a system where people had to fill in a web-based form using a machine running a browser. As this didn't have any requirements other than a simple browser, they had used an old machine from 2002 running a processor using about 130 W. I suggested we replace it with a raspberry pi because XP was getting a bit worrisome around that time, and we did so. The pi we used ran at about 1.5 W, and that was the whole system while the figure for the desktop only included the processor. The fans, hard drive, and ancient graphics chipset probably weren't running low-power either. In addition, I believe there were also some power savings because we swapped out the monitor (the pi only had HDMI, and we found a monitor with an HDMI connector in a closet, so no extra expenditure there). If they ran the old machine for eight hours a day and didn't bother powering off the pi, we still saved 788 WH per week. This could be replicated everywhere else they were doing something similar. Power savings like this can add up to some extent, and it's useful for people to consider that when they decide what hardware they need.

Google Chrome to block file downloads – from .exe to .txt – over HTTP by default this year. And we're OK with this

Re: Annoying tho

"What kinds of places CAN'T we walk away from?"

Places that don't have an alternative but you need them. Places whose assistance you need to continue living (E.G. employment unless independently wealthy). Places with people who tell you you can't leave, E.G. prisons. In addition, there are places you might want to leave, and technically you can leave, but you won't because it's a bad idea. It's often not a good enough option, and it's not one here.

The original idea was "write your own browser". That's not tenable. It's quite obviously not tenable. A browser needs lots of components to work with most of the sites out there, and a single person isn't going to get a perfect implementation of all those things. A skilled person might be able to replicate a basic browser, but they could just use an old one. If the situation arises where the old ones are no longer functioning and not being developed, it will not be feasible for a person to fix that problem themselves. For that reason, the original suggestion was a bad one.

Astroboffins may have raged at Elon's emissions staining the sky, but all those satellites will be more boon than bother

"1. LEO latency sucks for FP shooters"

And I care? Because I really don't. I figure that's a problem for the people who play them.

"2. Given the shear volume of the sphere relative to the size/amount of the satellites, the "useful" space around Earth might be .00000001% more crowded than it was 10,000 years ago."

You have not defined any of the terms in that statement. You haven't decided what the size of the useful space is. You haven't decided whether you're including the full orbits or simply the volume of each satellite. And you don't seem to think of astronomy as a case requiring space, despite the fact that any ground-based astronomy does require a certain amount of open space above it so it can see.

"3. The biggest hazard to satellites and space stations of all types are still going to be the tiny particles of natural space junk - the earth moves through many paths of comets that litter the orbital environment each year, for example."

Yes, but you don't help by adding more junk. Especially as that debris exists at all levels while all these satellites will be in relatively close proximity.

"4. Any Ham worth their salt still learns morse code, and has a 100 ft tall antenna in their back yard that screws with their neighbor's tv reception."

What? I don't even know what your point is. If your point is that radio astronomy doesn't work well near those people, that's been common knowledge for decades. You can go away from those people and have a better reception. You can't go far away from satellites because they keep moving. I'm guessing you meant something else, but I haven't a clue what it is.

Re: Junk Facts

Thanks. Have an upvote. I figured that the example wasn't made up entirely, but I didn't know what was blown out of proportion to get us there.

Newsflash to this author and any other aspiring reporters out there: if you make up or exaggerate things to the point that your statements are factually incorrect, it means we don't trust anything else you say, fact or opinion.

Re: This is a small cost for saving the world

"I think almost any non-dystopian future requires that [...] have the Internet in their toolkits."

Let's look at who you think needs it, and whether they're going to get it.

"kids in Botswana": The primary issue here is cost. Both the cost to get the hardware in to access it and the cost of providing sufficient bandwidth. So I take it the transceivers and service plans you need for this will be next to free, then? And somehow, this incredibly low cost won't simply be taken advantage of by people in developed countries who can afford a large amount of that and used to consume all the bandwidth?

"Aleutian Islanders": Here we're talking about inaccessibility. Somehow, we can't provide fiber, and we need satellite to work for these people. It's a better example, but not a great one. In this area, a couple cables would provide sufficient bandwidth for the sparse population. In addition, it's worth keeping in mind that the northern Pacific Ocean is a very cloudy and stormy place. That will make it very easy for clouds and precipitation to occlude dishes and cause disruption in line-of-sight transmission, not to mention the kind of damage strong arctic winds could do to the dishes themselves and the chaos that inevitably happens when the concepts "aurora borealis" and "radio communication" come too close to one another.

"HK cyberpunks": Is this a cute way of saying "protesters"? If so, you should know that they have already planned for compliance with local regulations, which is the cute way of saying censorship. Not to mention that, if they or someone else didn't, China could simply ban them from having any frequency bands. In that case, the ones citizens would have to use could be detected by radio surveillance and actually lead to easier oppression.

Re: This is where we are now

"Not directly related to the article but I am interested in how the service will deliver compliance to all the national regulations, particularly for site/link blocking and retention currently operated across the world. e.g. how will the system stop someone in Australia accessing the gambling sites in the UK?"

It won't. Just as you can access websites in other countries, even with blocking in place, by using a VPN, you could do so with this system until such time as they get sued by whatever government blocked the links and they block them for you. Then, you could start using your VPN again, and we're back to normal where the ISP doesn't care much and the government can go after you if they don't like what you're doing.

"How will police execute Warrants when each country has it's own, often conflicting, rules and it's probably a given that US law will govern the system."

Option 1: This is the police. You gave access to the internet to a person in [insert country name]. We demand your compliance with our national data collection laws. We want the following data. Here we are? Yes, it arrived. Thank you. Talk to you later.

Option 2: This is the police. You gave access to the internet to a person in [insert country name]. We demand your compliance with our national data collection laws. We want the following data. You aren't going to send it to us? How would you like to be sued, be indicted so you can never come here or anywhere with whom we have an extradition arrangement, and have your local subsidiary shut down? Here we are? Yes, it arrived. Next time, you better not do that again. Talk to you later.

Re: Junk Facts

I want to know what the author is talking about when they say this:

"If you push the boat out and get a dongle or two, you can send HD TV via a geostationary satellite to half the world at once."

I'm not aware of a free-to-use satellite for massive data upload and broadcast. I can do this with great ease if I buy a satellite internet plan or contract with a television satellite, but that's significantly more expensive and has more technical requirements than a couple of dongles. Where do I get the magic dongles that, without massive dishes, can upload all the way to geostationary orbit? Where is the satellite that apparently is content to let anyone broadcast using it? How much can I use it for my own selfish ends before my bandwidth occupation gets annoying to the provider who is operating it for who knows what reason? If this exists, why hasn't someone used it already to provide internet to areas that desperately need communication such as disaster zones, as apparently all they need is a box full of dongles and there aren't even any bills to pay? Did you just make the example up or are you extrapolating wildly from something else?

Re: Jamming

Yes, the world would know. As we know, the world doesn't like it when they become aware of such things, and they put a stop to them. That's why the following things happened:

1. The world found out that China censored web traffic, so they put a lot of pressure on China and China doesn't anymore.

2. The world found out about many countries such as Turkmenistan and Eritrea banning, confiscating, and destroying satellite dishes for television. So those countries were prevented from doing so.

3. The world found out about the activities of fourteen countries against wikipedia, so they made it clear that such actions were to be ceased at once. All fourteen immediately complied.

4. The world became aware that many countries jammed radio signals coming from outside their borders and confiscated the receivers that could receive those signals. The world said "stop it", and this they did.

There must be something wrong with my post. The factuality checker plugin I'm writing has highlighted the above statements in red. What do you think that means?

Tech can endure the most inhospitable environments: Space, underwater, down t'pit... even hairdressers

Re: Surprisingly ...

My suggested solution is to change the keyboard layout change command to something else (my usual is alt+shift) so the shift key is back. That's usually the default on Windows, but I had the fun experience of some ancient and probably dead Linux that thought shift alone was the best key for that; well, I had that experience for about two hours. I can put up with lots of minor annoyances, but try and take my shift key and expect to be hit with a keyboard with little gentleness.

That's what makes you hackable: Please, baby. Stop using 'onedirection' as a password

Re: Password Services

"The other thing that people don't seem to have mentioned is the password vault is only as good as the password protecting it (or 2FA). You could use a password generator to generate the most complex passwords in the world and store in a vault with a password of Password1 and it's all been for nothing. In some ways the password vault industry might have made hacking more devastating than before."

Not exactly. That's a good point, but you've still got the attack landscape to consider. If your passwords are stored insecurely on a local password vault, someone could get all of them if they have access to your filesystem through local malware. That's a concern. But if that makes your passwords better, it lessens your vulnerability to compromised online services. If you had some method of knowing you'd never get infected with malware, the encryption password on the vault wouldn't matter but you'd still want to use one to protect you against loss of hashes elsewhere.

It's also worth considering what malware can do to those who don't have a password manager. If it has access to your system, it can watch as you enter your password on the keyboard, redirect you to a fake login page, send password reset emails to the account you have in a mail client and intercept them, or come across the text file containing passwords. Stealing an encrypted password database is a concern as well, but compared to the alternatives, is not as worrying as it could sound.

Oh ****... Sudo has a 'make anyone root' bug that needs to be patched – if you're unlucky enough to enable pwfeedback

Re: SUDO and +s is a design weakness

If you want, you can make it very easy for nonroot users to do lots of things, including adding restrictions to exactly which users can do those things. The utility of sudo is that, should you want to change what they can do, it's a lot easier. Say you do want to allow some users to modify /usr/local, but not to have other root permissions. We're using this as an example, but in reality that would be a terrible thing to let them do as that would provide them a great deal of access to mess up everything.

If you do it the old way, by adding them to a group and assigning /usr/local to that group, it's easy. Anyone in the group gets the access you set. If you want to remove that permission, you kick the user out of the group. Easy. Unless you left the company and I'm running the system now, because I don't necessarily know all your groups and what you let them do. You've probably documented it somewhere, but that might be for some systems but not others, or somebody lost your documentation, etc. So now there are users whose access I can't cut off because I don't know it exists. I could do a global check of the filesystem to see if there are any unusual owners or groups, and after I find this first one I probably will, but it's not at all something a new admin would be expecting.

There's another classic way to expose functionality to users: a program running as root that receives user commands. The program itself has root capabilities, but the user doesn't. They issue the command they'd like, and that program determines if they have the rights to execute that command and does so. This works well too, and it lets you introduce even finer controls on what someone can do. So, for example, you can block them from installing a compromised copy of a utility over an old one, but continue to allow them to write new files in there. This is harder for the user, as they'll have to learn how your program works. It's also harder for you, because you'll have to write the program. It's a little easier for me, because your program will either have to have a server component which gets started on boot (thus I can easily see it) or at least it'd be in a directory on a path. Of course, if I don't have source code for this program, my life is really annoying.

Now, we have sudo. Sudo is limited, and it can have flaws. No question about that. But it allows you to relatively easily define who is allowed to do what. It can require their password, so even if someone gets access to an open terminal of theirs or one of their SSH private keys, they can't elevate easily. Your program could do that, but only by replicating sudo's functionality to a certain degree, and the owner and group solution doesn't give you that option at all. It's easier for the user because the commands are nearly always the same. It's much easier for me. If I want to know who has special access, specifically what, and what they do with it, I can find all of that in the sudo configuration files and logs. It's one place, and it's now common enough that it's a typical place to check when administrating a new system.

Boss planning to tear you a new one? Google Glass is back: Weird workwear aimed at devs, but on sale to all

Re: 640x360 display??

Admittedly, it's a really small screen, so the pixel density will be a lot higher. As I've never used one, I don't know whether the low resolution is evident when looking at the screen.

RIP FTP? File Transfer Protocol switched off by default in Chrome 80

That's a perfectly fine method of file transfer, but you have various other options that don't require uploading or long URLs. Here are a few:

1. On a machine, put up a simple webserver pointed at a directory in which the file is placed. Type the IP address only, and click the link on the directory listing page.

2. Use an SSH client to SCP the file over.

3. Access a local network share if you run one.

4. Use a Bluetooth file transfer system (in many cases, bandwidth is surprisingly good).

5. Use a cable if supported. It would work well on Android phones or media servers I've used before, but I don't know if you have that option with the Android TV device.

Basically, any of these should be equally fine because you trust the network and both devices. Therefore, go with whatever's easiest at the time. It's only when you are operating over a network where interception or modification of the data is a worry.

Things I learned from Y2K (pt 87): How to swap a mainframe for Microsoft Access

Re: help!

An alternative method is to store a salted hash for the full password that you and an external attacker would have to provide, plus three randomly-selected characters that they can use to verify you. That does reduce the number of possibilities for an attacker who has both the hashes and those letters, but by far less than a rolling hash or simple encryption.

Where do you draw the line? Escobar Inc doubles down on cut-price gold phone buying demographic with second pholdable

Well, as mass murderers go, he had a pretty good PR department. He invested a bunch of money into making people's lives better so they'd protect him, and when your worth is measured in the billions, you can inject a lot of money into an area without noticing much. He also was a prolific briber, willing to give large sums if he wanted something from you. Of course, his slogan was "Plata o plomo" (silver or lead), so it was not very fun when you didn't take the bribe. Still, unless you personally received the lead and you lived in an area he needed support from, you would be more likely to know him for the investment and good publicity. The result being that some still think fondly of him. Oh, and Colombia wasn't the most entertaining of places in the 1980s, so he had a lot of well-skilled competition for person who people fear and hate the most.

Google's OpenSK lets you BYOSK – burn your own security key

Re: Doesn't work in settings where devices are banned

One method I can think of is to use some of the codes, then generate some more (I can usually replace codes I've used as long as there are only a total of ten). The better method would be to have a separate unconnected hardware device approved by the security department so they can be taken in. That would fix all problems and be very logical, so I think we can assume that it will never get approved.

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

Re: 3 laws for AI

It's also worth keeping in mind the various risks of such an absolute law. A robot using these laws and intelligent enough to know these things would probably refuse to do most things on the basis that it wants to dedicate itself to preventing harm to humans, and if it isn't doing so, it is by inaction allowing them to come to harm. That would probably be a good thing for a while, but after about a week of this, the manufacturers would realize the problems in the business model of making robots who can and do decide to abandon their original tasks and try to form a volunteer harm-reduction squad. And that's only if you can find a perfect way of implementing these laws in software or hardware, if you have very clear definitions of "harm", and if the robots are capable of making the connections between possible actions and probable results. If you don't obtain perfection in any of those aspects, you have many more problems.

BSOD Burgerwatch latest: Do you want fries with that plaintext password?

Re: web browsers are hugely complex systems

And the original comparison was to an OS kernel. That's massive and very complex, but it is pretty small as disk usage goes. The DVDs usually include lots of much bigger things. For example, you'll probably find the following things on most desktop OS distributions' install media:

1. The default applications, which are probably at least a hundred megabytes. Since many OS distributions include a browser of their own, make that at least two hundred megabytes.

2. Foreign language translation files (not always). Those can range dramatically in size.

3. Fonts. There can be very many of these.

4. Hardware drivers so you don't go through the awful search if a generic driver is sufficient.

5. Extra image data such as icons, desktop backgrounds, etc.

6. Documentation files about various aspects of the system that never get read.

Take all of these away, and the disk usage of the distribution will be cut by a very healthy chunk. There's almost certainly even more to remove before you're left with the kernel alone.