Posts by doublelayer

Privacy activists beg Google to ban un-removable bloatware from Android

Re: Android Developer

Just because some phones can be rooted or install a custom ROM, that doesn't mean it applies to all, or a "majority". It just doesn't, plain and simple. Many of the devices on the market are locked down to prevent you from doing that. Even those that can be rooted make it clear to you that you aren't supposed to be poking around there, marking the device as insecure which can make some apps decide not to work.

Compared to every desktop operating system in common use, this is crazy. No matter whose Windows machine you buy, you have the right to be an administrator. You have the ability to boot to an external disk. The same applies to Macs, Linux machines, BSD machines, and pretty much everything except some Chromebooks. And yet, people wishing to root their Android device usually check for that before they buy it because they know most out there won't make it easy if they let it happen at all.

Re: "most commonly found on cheap handsets"

And as we know, to root any phone running Android 5.0 or above, you click settings, scroll to the bottom, click "Root this device", and agree to the prompt. You might have to enter your passcode as well, and the process should take ten minutes or less, ending in a reboot. Oh, wait a minute. I drifted off and was dreaming. What were we talking about again?

It would be anticompetitive to deny them the ability to preinstall their apps. However, I did not suggest that. I suggested that the preinstalled apps would have to be uninstallable and would be subject to the same permission restrictions as any other apps. Google doesn't want to do that for a few reasons. First, they don't want any of that to apply to their own apps, and if they restricted manufacturers but not themselves, that would indeed be anticompetitive. Second, they get paid by the manufacturers, and they wouldn't want to anger any of them. Third, they know that not many people are using the manufacturer-provided apps when the Google apps are also preinstalled, so they get the data anyway.

Re: yeah but

You misunderstand the trust issue. If you build it yourself, we would trust it. If you got it from someone reputable, from Google to the Lineage OS people to someone who has earned our trust in building images, we'd trust it. If the image comes from a user on a webforum, that's a much less trustworthy origin because you don't know what that user built or whether anything else was done to it. The discussion was about ease in building and flashing. It's not a simple task to build Android to run on something, nor is it simple to figure out how to flash it unless the bootloader is very accommodating. Technically aware people such as the ones who read and comment here can do it, probably, but it would take much longer than downloading a Linux image and putting it on a disk. People who are less technical would not find it straightforward at all.

If they cared, the Google-enforced solution looks like this:

1. If you manufacture a device with extra software that can't be uninstalled, you can't be part of our Play Services community on any newly manufactured devices until you update your older devices. If you manufacture devices without Google Play, you must make these modifications on them if you ever intend to run Play Services on them.

2. We have modified the Android kernel not to allow an app to bypass certain permissions, and if you modify the kernel back we will flag your installed apps as malicious through Play Protect.

But none of that is going to happen. Google has no incentive to want this, no reason to spend any time on this, and no interest in taking any user-oriented actions such as this. If they did, their own apps would look very different, and they would have a better system for making sure people got security updates at the very least.

Relying on AT&T, Verizon and T-Mob US to protect you from SIM swapping? You better get used to disappointment

Re: In person show ID?

In the U.S., there are many places where you aren't so close. They have to balance the security of requiring people to go there with the convenience of not requiring people who don't live in an urban area to travel well out of their way. I think that they could handle this by sending a replacement card to the address of the user, which would work for a legitimate request (almost always) and wouldn't require the user to go to the store. Letting someone at a call center change the card without security controls is a very bad decision. The two of those physical methods would work reasonably well for any account with an address or ID attached. Prepaid accounts set up without identification might be different, but I believe they are becoming rarer and rarer.

CES la vie: Shrunken Ultrabooks, muted mobiles and Segway's adult prams at world's biggest consumer tech show

Re: Give me a chunkier laptop

There are lots of laptop users, and for each, a different kind of laptop is useful. I carry mine around quite frequently, so being somewhat light is important, but I don't need it to be unusually thin. Neither do I need one with a desktop's worth of processing inside it; sixteen gigabytes is enough memory for everything I need it to do, and if I need more, I have no problem offloading the task to a server. Those characteristics don't apply to everybody. Similarly, I would be interested in a revival of the netbook, specifically in the sense of a device with a very small screen, keyboard, and asking price. While there are others who might want that as well, the concept doesn't seem particularly popular with the general public. Some people want a laptop with the power of a workstation and others want it to be as thick as a sheet of cardboard. Fortunately, there is something around for both of those people, just not the same thing.

Under construction: CAT lobs bargain-basement rugged mobile that will take a kicking and keep on clicking

Re: Bloody Mediatek

Two reasons come to mind. First, there might not be ruggedized cases for every phone on the market. I am certain there are some for the devices that sell very well, such as the latest iPhones and Samsungs, but there won't be for the low-priced phones which get changed out from month to month, and for everything in between there's no certainty at all. Therefore, one can't choose a phone they like and be guaranteed to find a case that fits it.

Second, a ruggedized case might not give you as much protection as a ruggedized phone. The case manufacturer probably has tried their best. Still, there's less profit margin for them to buy a bunch of another company's phones and try to break them than there is for the original manufacturer to try to damage their own. Finally, if the unit you're using turns out not to have been ruggedized sufficiently, the manufacturer of a phone that claims to be able to handle it is probably more likely to replace it for you than the case manufacturer.

5G signals won't make men infertile, sighs UK ad watchdog as it bans bonkers scary poster

Re: Infertility - maybe not such a real problem in this day and age

"Are you aware that is almost entirely for beef/cattle farming - which is almost entirely exported, in particular to the US?"

Yes, I was aware of that. Are you aware that the people doing the farming are Brazilian businesses, not some international group? And that this applies to myriad other areas where other things are being produced? See how it's still a problem? If it's shipped to the U.S. or eaten there, the forest has still been burned. This isn't necessarily the fault of increasing populations, but nor is it the fault of an eventual consumer. The people making the active decision to take an action that harms the environment are responsible.

You cannot limit yourself to taking only one action or declaring only one perpetrator. It's as if your house was on fire and I came to deal with the problem by pouring water on one corner of the house. I wouldn't be helping anything because the rest would continue burning, and when I ran out of water that corner would also go up in smoke. If you want this problem fixed, you need to evaluate all of the contributing factors and make plans for dealing with any that are large enough to have an effect. You can't focus on only one country or region, whether that's a developed or developing one, because the problem is global.

Re: Infertility - maybe not such a real problem in this day and age

I didn't vote either way, but I think your view is limited. Not wrong, as consumption is a problem too, but limited. Increasing populations also put pressures on the environment, and in different ways. For example, growing populations in areas almost always leads to deforestation of those areas for extra places to live or to grow food. When that happens, even more of the trees that sequester carbon are taken out of commission, and the typical way of doing that is burning them which exacerbates the problem. A good example of this was last year's fires in Brazil which the Brazilian authorities weren't particularly interested in stopping.

You can't treat the issue as only having one primary cause, because you'll end up playing a game of whack-a-mole. If something contributes, it should be considered as important. The single reason I provided wasn't it, either; that was just one example. There are lots of moving parts in this system, and you can't just point at the big, obvious one and think that you can simply make it stop or that making it stop will stop the system.

GSMA report: Sorry, handset makers, 5G is not going to save the smartphone market

Re: "There haven't been many earth-shattering breakthroughs over the past five years."

I don't think the innovations have been very important, but until 2015 or so, you could at least notice them. The new phone would have a better screen than the last one, would load apps faster, maybe last a bit longer on battery*. The same being true of communications--data over 2G was nearly unusable, 3G was good, 4G was great. Now, although processors in phones get faster and faster, I don't really see any effects on my general usage. I'm sure some people use more processing and have noticed the changes, but I doubt it's their major consideration. A logical response from the manufacturers would be to try to experiment with new things or to compete on price. They've made a couple attempts at the former, but their treatment of the latter is strange and doesn't seem to be helping them all that much.

*New phones running for longer on a battery: I am only comparing like for like here. I know that non-smartphones ran for longer, and that a new phone with a larger screen will run shorter. For a while, phones using new chips and the same quality screen would improve their battery life. Now, every saving in battery is used to allow an even bigger or higher resolution screen.

Re: "It just so happens that there's something better."

Yes, the majority does. But the companies want to sell to everybody, including the minority. In addition, the majority who live in cities sometimes tend to leave their cities. They may go drive or take other transport to another city, or go away from the city for recreation, or move into a suburb, which might be in an area with obstructions to easy coverage. These conditions increase the size of that minority, and depending on the area, they may make it a majority.

In a desperate bid to stay relevant in 2020's geopolitical upheaval, N. Korea upgrades its Apple Jeus macOS malware

Re: "Believed to be operating out of North Korea"

Attribution is hard. It's. possible that someone's been framing North Korea for an unspecified length of time, and they either are responsible for everything attributed to that country or are very good at mimicking characteristics of their malware to do the framing. If so, they're really good at fooling everybody. However, we've seen what it's like when people try to blame North Korea--someone who is probably Russia but theoretically could be someone else tried to do that a couple years ago, and they didn't stay hidden for very long.

As for solid proof, there are several types. The basic type of having found assets in the malware relating in some way to North Korea applies to most of them, but could obviously be faked given some effort. This runs from the simple string frequently used there to a network address that has been operated by Pyongyang interests at some point. There is also the tactic of code comparison. If a group uses a similar module (similar in the sense of similar compiled code) that was previously reliably attributed to North Korea, then it's probably North Korea doing it again. They're the only ones with the source, so it's extremely unlikely that someone went to the effort of reverse engineering their codebase just so they'd produce similar binaries. And finally, we can have extra confidence in some of these tactics because there are some pieces of malware to which the North Korean government has admitted. Using these tactics, researchers who have spent years looking at malware from different groups can do a reasonably good job of telling when one of those groups spins up again. Nothing is guaranteed, and attribution is very tricky, but don't presume they don't know what they're talking about.

Beset by lawsuits over poor security protections, Ring rolls out 'privacy dashboard' for its creepy surveillance cams, immediately takes heat

The problem is that you can apply that logic to anything at all. If a parent installs a desktop that has a camera on it, for example an all-in-one machine, they have now recreated the same environment. A malicious actor who gained access to that machine would have the same capabilities as one who gained access to this IoT device. They can't easily keep moving that desktop around with them.

I don't think we'd believe them totally blameworthy if that computer got infected with malware to their detriment. Yet if it did, they're likely much more responsible for the problem than someone who installed this IoT device. From the sound of it, the cameras could be accessed with relative ease online by guessing a password, while getting malware onto a desktop usually requires the user to fall for a fake download or phishing email. On this basis, attempting to blame the parent for something the manufacturer could prevent seems limited at best.

I'm considering the statement "Joke icon yes, but part of me actually wonders if this would be justified in some odd way." as cancelling the sarcasm. That's a terrible idea. There are cameras, microphones, and speakers on lots of things, including laptops, phones, some desktops, and various other devices. If you include those devices that lack a camera but do have a microphone and speaker, that's almost every consumer electronic device.. And somehow, it's the users' fault when that device gets hacked? Instead of the manufacturer who could have made the device more secure? When it's already been pointed out that no matter how much the users might want to spend time and effort on a more secure configuration, they don't have the option?

Having trouble finding a job in your 40s? Study shows some bosses like job applicants... up until they see dates of birth

Re: driving down costs

That presumes several things:

1. There are ranks.

2. The managers want to move this employee up the ranks.

3. This employee wants to move up the ranks.

However, in most cases, one or more of those things won't be true. For example, I don't want to move up the ranks of most employers, because my job is software development. Some places will have a "senior developer" role, which is effectively the same as my current position but they're paid more and have a bit more independence. Others don't bother with that; there is one rank and you just get pay raises if you've done well. Many of those places also have the concept of going up the ranks, and if you do so, you stop writing code all day and start managing others who do that. I don't want to manage, and therefore I don't want to go up.

In this case, however, the problem is that the employer wouldn't want to move the employee up the ranks. Doing that wouldn't help them at all; they'd still be paid a higher amount, in fact they might deserve another raise which a discriminatory company wouldn't want to provide. In addition, a good helpdesk worker elevated to a new position wouldn't even be doing the helpdesk job they were so good at, and their superiors might now have to deal with their management, which is untested. Do you think a company that is already willing to discriminate based on age is going to take that risk, or will they try to get rid of the risk and hire a replacement at much less cost to them?

You can age discriminate either way. The article talks about discrimination against older people, which is certainly seen and quite a bit in tech specifically, but there are also examples of discrimination against young people, usually in different fields. It's often because the young are believed not to have sufficient experience or to be unreliable. Either way it's done, it's a very limited generalization. It's wrong to do, and it's usually not at all productive anyway.

Re: What jobs did they try to get?

They say what jobs they were talking about, and they never claimed that the percentage was representative of anything else, only that it was significant. All this says is that age discrimination happened in the dataset they used at a high enough level that it's worth considering doing something about it. It doesn't necessarily mean that it happens everywhere, but when you combine this research with the many other times age discrimination has come up with varying levels of proof, it seems pretty obvious that it's pervasive and needs extra looking into.

Bruce Perens quits Open Source Initiative amid row over new data-sharing crypto license: 'We've gone the wrong way with licensing'

Re: Admittedly a fan of a new license

As with the last license, after having read the one you mention, I have little objection to its content. However, I see no particular merits to this license and a few annoying aspects. The first is that this license includes many phrases that sound like this: "Nothing in this Licence is intended to deprive the Licensee of the benefits from any exception or limitation to the exclusive rights of the rights owners in the Work, of the exhaustion of those rights or of other applicable limitations thereto." It's reasonably clear what this sentence means, but it is by no means the clearest way to say that and the whole thing is written like this. Compared to the clarity and terseness in many other licenses, this is worse.

Second, I note the geographic limitation to where this license can be argued; if I produce a work licensed under this in Canada and someone in India violates that license, I can only pursue some types of actions in Canadian or Indian courts, and must pursue some types in Belgian courts. That might never be a major problem, but I see no benefit to the restriction.

Re: Am I missing something ?

I think the point of not needing a lawyer is that the people writing the code shouldn't need a lawyer to figure out what they are and aren't allowed to do with existing code. Just like you probably wouldn't hire a lawyer to read the terms of service documents, you shouldn't have to before you contribute code to an existing project.

Take this example, which I recently did. I had an open source project that was a bit fiddly to get running, but less technical users wanted to use. I wanted to package up a version of it in binary form. However, you needed to link with some libraries that were under different open source licenses. Furthermore, I wrote a small skin around the main project to make the process of starting it easier. The following questions could be asked about my final package:

1. Do I have to list the licenses for all of these libraries somewhere, along with their original source locations? If so, where do I have to put this and do I really have to include four copies of the MIT license that differ only in the copyright line at the top?

2. What license is my extra code? Am I required to put it under a specific license based on what I'm doing with it? Do I have to set up a repo for what is a very small chunk of code that isn't very important?

3. Does any part of this cross the line into "derived work", and do any of my licenses have an extra requirement for those?

Depending on the specific licenses involved, the answers to those questions might not be obvious. Fortunately for me, all the licenses I needed were permissive, so I didn't have to worry that I was violating a more specific one. I think that the original sentiment was that licenses should remain simple enough that questions of this nature can be answered without needing to spend a lot of time considering legal language or checking definitions in legal texts or case law. Admittedly, I don't know if that's a problem we have seen, but I can see the theory of why it might be.

Re: Mixing freedom and money - or obligation

I'm not disagreeing with you, but there are also reasons people choose to use less permissive licenses. Linux is GPL, for example, to keep the community benefiting from the code that was given away; the original authors aren't demanding anything from users, but if their work is extended, they ask that the results are similarly given away. I frequently find it irritating to decide exactly what license I should put on some code, and I often feel, after reading some license comparisons, a desire to simply release the thing, say "do what you want with it", and call it good. Unfortunately, that approach usually doesn't work because potential users are unsure about what is allowed without a specific license and I haven't included those indemnifications that every standard license has.

Re: Am I missing something ?

Having an external critic who can at least review licenses is a little useful for people who don't want to read the text of a long license or who might miss a thing that turns out to have a legal meaning but looks innocuous, and as such they could protect people from an intentionally hobbled license or one flawed by someone's imprecise legal language. It's unimportant to you if they approve of your license, but it could be important if they approve of someone else's license that you're using, and what they think of yours could be important to potential users or developers of your thing.

That said, since they don't provide answers to various questions because that would be too close to legal advice, their usefulness ends there. The same provisos apply to other major players in the legal side of open source, such as the FSF and the places that actively search for license violations. They have some useful purposes, but it's important to know what they're doing and the many useful things they won't do.

Re: Admittedly a fan of a new license

I don't have an objection to this license per se, but I don't see the merits you have described. It seems about as easy to read as other similarly-sized licenses, and more complex than many shorter ones. Furthermore, I note the following potential problems.

First, there is a clause allowing the original author to dual-license the thing, letting a proprietary version exist. This may sound fine in that a company is unlikely to pay someone for something they can get for free, but it might also allow them to produce an increasing number of different versions under different licenses that will prove in future to be a pain to reintegrate. Worse still, it's not exactly clear who gets the right to dual license. Theoretically, only the original author gets that right. But since this license applies to all parts of a derived work a la GPL, what happens if I update the work of someone else. I might be able to dual license my additions while keeping the original code open, or I might be in violation if I try. I'm almost certainly not allowed to dual license the whole thing, but if I'm able to dual license my additions, I could be able to effectively nullify the requirement to release them under the same license by applying two licenses and then not distributing a version under the original license.

Second, you have expressed that you like the sunset clause. That clause reads as follows: "The conditions in sections 2 through 5 no longer apply once fifteen years have elapsed from the date of My first Distribution of My Work under this License." This looks problematic to me. What does "first distribution" mean? If I release an update, does that count as a subsequent distribution of the original thing or does it start the clock over again? These questions may seem pointless, but it's this type of difficulty with licensing that can hamper innovation or rights to source. If I don't know whether or not I can do something, I'm less likely to work on a project, and companies who wish to take open source and turn it proprietary will jump on a license that has problems allowing them more leeway than was originally intended.

Snakes on a wane: Python 2 development is finally frozen in time, version 3 slithers on

It's not only Python that does this. Perl and PHP both have made breaking changes between versions, in fact quite a bit more frequently than Python did. Nobody likes breaking changes, and I'm sure the PSF would have chosen not to if they could get around it. However, by forcing the tricky unicode handling parts to be made clear, they unearthed many potential future bugs, which would have been found later on in less pleasant circumstances had they not broken that. For the same reason, if you designed a C-like language today, you could probably suggest some improvements to it that can't be implemented in C itself to preserve backward compatibility. Not everything about the update was necessarily a good thing, but I think there is sufficient merit that the language shouldn't be counted out.

Re: More lazyness than anything

I haven't really found that. For everything you could do with strings, you can do the same things with byte arrays. Just remember to open all your files as binary and prepend b to your strings (s.split(b"\n")) and you won't encounter any unicode problems. There are many very annoying things with handling unicode strings in python, but I view this as the fault of our many text encodings rather than the language itself. It's not the PSF's fault that there are at least five commonly used methods of encoding unicode characters and at least seven non-unicode encoding tables used on typical systems.

We live so fast I can't even finish this sent...

Re: Now you know what 2020 is going to look like

Even they would subdivide things. Early Victorian, mid Victorian, and late Victorian were all used when needed. The decade time unit is pretty useful because the average person will live through a small number of them, and their parents lived through two to four before they came around. If things are changing, the changes are noticeable across the decades when they wouldn't necessarily be as obvious from year to year. I couldn't say there were really obvious differences between 2014 and 2015 in many realms (except things like geopolitics where a boundary occurs whenever a crisis happens), but doing the same between the 2000s and 2010s is very easy.

IT exec sets up fake biz, uses it to bill his bosses $6m for phantom gear, gets caught by Microsoft Word metadata

Re: Greedy and careless

I think that would still be a conflict of interest, forbidden in many contracts, and intentional misconduct. If you took efforts to hide this from the company, that would be fraud. Not being a lawyer, it's possible there'd be fraud even without trying to hide it from anyone, but even if not, you'd definitely be fired and have action taken to recover as much of your pay as possible under breech of contract. That said, it'd probably be easier to hide that fraud than the kind this guy attempted.

Smart speaker maker Sonos takes heat for deliberately bricking older kit with 'Trade Up' plan

Re: "my CD player and turntable are still going after more than 30 years."

It has nothing to do with the fuel source. The kind that use fuel pumped into a tank can have connected and brickable firmware, and the kind that plug into a wall can have firmware that runs without connecting to request updates. The problem is not with EVs, and blaming them specifically distracts us from the real problem, which is cars that require connections. A car that can receive an update, including one that could brick it, is not the major problem because intentionally bricking a car would be illegal in most areas. But one that will install updates without user approval or would stop functioning as well if the updates were blocked are very bad.

El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail

Re: Deleted

Prompting the user won't work unless we also make it impossible to read messages in the folder. Most of the time when people do this, they are just going in to read something. If they can do that without restoring, they'll never see the prompt.

We might also consider changing the client so there is an archive folder and deleting a message from the inbox or sent will send it there, with deletions from the archives folder going into the trash. Reconfiguring this would of course be an option. I will admit that I'm an abuser of deleted items, in that I will delete messages from my inbox when I'm confident that my responsibilities with regard to that message are fulfilled, and then someone will come to me a couple weeks later requesting information from that message and I'll go into deleted to search for it. Now that we live in a world of very large disks, I think we could manage an archive-by-default policy.

Re: Deleted

Windows won't let you either, at least not with the normal interface. Mac OS makes it a little easier to edit the files in their hidden trash location, but you have to go to way too much effort to do so.

Huawei's P40 and P40 Pro handsets will not ship with Google Mobile Services, Richard Yu confirms

Re: It's a Global Market

Theoretically, that could be possible. But that's not currently the law; it is still legal to sell Huawei equipment and to operate that equipment that is currently possessed. The only thing that's currently illegal is for businesses to sell or buy from Huawei. For the FCC to mandate that carriers disable access to Huawei devices would take either a new law or the FCC going far outside their typical permit, as they are usually allowed to forbid equipment only if that equipment is allowing violations of radio frequency regulations, which these devices aren't. While the FCC has proven itself willing to do stupid things, this would be another step forward and it would instantaneously be challenged in court. I expect that, when the U.S.-China trade war eventually winds down, Huawei will be taken off the list and will once again be able to buy software and sell hardware in America. They might still not be able to sell parts of a communications system to U.S. carriers, but they'll be able to license Google services and sell phones to consumers.

Re: It's a Global Market

Sure, but I don't know what your 3.5 million refers to. If you're talking about the population of the U.S., that's 330 million, and they can still buy Huawei equipment if they want to; it's businesses who can't. The number of people who use Google Play is quite a bit larger, but the number of people who want to use it is unknown. Even if they were limited to just the Chinese market, it's already a really big market. I think they'll be fine.

Re: if they provide a good alternative to the Play Store

I fully expect those resources in a matter of weeks after the phones are launched. Sadly, I also expect that there will be identically worded posts with APKs with malware included*. This is a perfect opportunity for criminals, and I think they'll be taking it.

*Or, depending on your view of Google Play Services, additional malware included.

Re: Maybe not such a bad thing

I am very happy with FDroid. However, first, Huawei doesn't need to assist it; they're already doing fine and, second, it wouldn't help with the app problem. The general user wants a relatively small set of apps, including their banking and shopping apps, apps from companies they use frequently, and maybe some games. None of those companies are at all interested in making their apps open source. FDroid is great primarily because it requires all the apps on it to be open source and to submit to analyses of potentially unwanted functionality that get listed right there in the results list. That's why I always try to find an app there before anywhere else, and why nearly every popular corporate app won't dream of listing itself there.

FYI: FBI raiding NSA's global wiretap database to probe US peeps is probably illegal, unconstitutional, court says

Re: Read the 14th amendment

That's true, but as a subset it can mislead people into thinking that the law only applies to the subset. For an example, Linux machines are a subset of computers. But if I said "The Python programming language is generally supported on all Linux machines with sufficient resources", which is true, it may sound as if I'm saying that it is less likely to run on BSD, Windows, or Mac OS machines, which is not true. Your original statement was factually correct, but not phrased in a clear way. I appreciate the correction having been made.

The IoT wars are over, maybe? Amazon, Apple, Google give up on smart-home domination dreams, agree to develop common standards

Re: TCP/IP

As I read it, the protocol will not, in and of itself, require internet access. The IP connection could be to a LAN only, and the devices could then receive instructions from another device on the LAN. However, whether the manufacturers choose to let you do that is up to them. They could easily require a connection to the internet in order for the devices to pay any attention to commands and you couldn't do much about it. Still, if this gets implemented, there will probably be at least a few devices that don't require access online to be remote-controlable.

Re: they kinda missed a trick here?

Nothing stops them from doing that, but that's pretty much what they're already doing. There's no need for them to adopt a new standard if they want to keep doing that, and I'm sure many devices won't abandon single-backend policies on their products. Those companies who do adopt this, on the other hand, are probably banking on making money by selling more devices that can interoperate. They're probably also banking on customers not blocking the extra data flow that reports back to them as well, so it's not as if this new protocol fixes that problem at all. But at least it should be easier to control the devices using local machines and keep using things after they've been abandoned by their manufacturers.

Put the crypt into cryptocoin: Amid grave concerns, lawyers to literally dig into exchange exec who died owing $190m

Re: What's the point?

The problem with that plan is that, if the money was stolen by someone in connection with his death or he faked the death, all the evidence is in exactly the same place and time, namely the days around the theft and the death, whether fabricated or not. A description of a person might work if you have some idea where that person is and enough details to identify them later on. However, we do not have any good idea where he could be now, and he's had plenty of time to disguise himself. Even without having put a lot of effort into a disguise or obtaining plastic surgery, the generic description of a person as provided for most people would be of no help at all when our search area is the entire planet.

Logically, the best course of action in determining where the money is is to try to track that money. Whether it's him who has it or someone else, they can best be identified by tracking where the money is being spent.

If we know with certainty that it is, in fact, that man who stole the money and faked his death, we will still need to track any accounts that may hold information and those connected to the wallets to find him. If we know with certainty that he is dead and therefore someone else stole the money, our best chance of identifying that person is to check on his accounts for pertinent communications and monitor the accounts connected to the money. Either way, the course of action is the same.

What's the point?

This investigation can end one of two ways:

There's a body there, and it's him:

Meaning: The money was stolen by someone else, and we don't know who. Let's see if we can track any records of their activities to identify and find them.

There is someone else's body there, or they've found a way of faking a body being shipped around the world and buried:

Meaning: He almost certainly was the one to steal the money, and is somewhere else. As his identity is now believed dead, he's not using that identity anymore. Let's see if we can track any records of his activities to identify and find his new identity about which we have no details.

Either way, the answer will be to try to track the person who has access to the stolen funds. It doesn't really matter if we know that it is or isn't him, because whoever it is is going to be hiding somewhere and not announcing their true identity. Until the person is found, nobody can get their money back and no charges can be pressed.

Re: Having identified where the money went ...?

I would have assumed that he converted the money or some of it into a nontraceable cryptocurrency (zcash, for example) or something physical so he could live well without making any other withdrawals for a while. But given that it took these people several months to figure out that any money was missing, it's also possible that he has been withdrawing regularly and they haven't figured it out yet.

Wham, bam, thank you scram button: Now we have to go all MacGyver on the server room

Re: Helping out...

But you probably give that number to people or enter it on forms from time to time. If not, you might not need that number. My mental phone book is sadly pathetic. I can give you the phone number of friends I had in 2007 when I placed calls by manually dialing on a land line, but people I've met since then, including those I call or send messages to frequently, are only known by my contacts database. I have that backed up, but maybe I should try memorizing the numbers.

Lobes carry the load, says IDC: 'Hearables' sector accounts for half of all tech clobber sold

Earworn wearables

Come on. A smartwatch is more than a regular watch. It's a watch that does more stuff and dies really fast. It's distinct. The things being called earworn wearables or hearables now, on the other hand, are just earphones. You put them in your ears, connect them to something else, and they make sound based on what the thing you connected them does. It doesn't run apps or let you program it or have any function without a connected device. No special name needed.

I wonder what people would think of a real wearable based around an earphone. I have a feeling the lack of a screen would make it rather unpopular. The only thing that comes to mind is a set of earphones that have a voice assistant built into them rather than requiring a separate phone to do that. While it's not a thing I or probably anyone here would want, it sounds like a thing Amazon might experiment with for a while.

Google Chrome will check for leaked credentials every time you sign in anywhere

Re: what happens when Google's master key gets compromised?

The approach they claim to use wouldn't work most of the time. While it works fine if the passwords were originally in plain text, it doesn't work if the hashes were salted at all or used a hashing algorithm other than the one Google's decided upon. Chrome wouldn't know the salt or algorithm to use, meaning the sent data wouldn't be matchable to whatever is in the database. Google has a lot of employees intelligent enough to understand this. Logically, they considered it. My guess is that they made the system work and now are being a little evasive in explaining exactly how it works.

Re: Is this *another* attempt to smother me in Gmail shit ?

I wholeheartedly agree. However, I don't know of a reliable external email system that hasn't recently gained the desire to have your mobile number for verification (verification, I say. Not advertising or data selling. Stop questioning us, you puny end-user). My main email is through my own mailserver, but I need an external email which runs the accounts for the domain name and mailserver, so if there's a good one out there that isn't likely to start demanding extra details, I'd like to identify it.

How much cheese does one person need to grate? Mac Pro pricing unveiled

Re: Use

That may be, but the original question was whether they have any point. They may not be the best machine out for video editing, but it's conceivable that someone could use it for that. In addition, a lot of video editors are attached to Apple equipment and software. I'm not saying they need to be, but if they are, this could be the machine they're looking for. It's certainly overkill for anything I do, but that's because I can offload tasks that need a lot of CPU or GPU power, as I rarely need to have so much power right at my fingertips.

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Re: But on the other hand...

I'd agree with you if they had tried to hide what their item was made of, but nobody did that. The ingredients are always in the name, usually as the first word. The reason words like burger and milk are used is that they describe what the food item will be like. Almond milk is designed to be similar to dairy milk but be made of almonds. There is absolutely no ambiguity that almonds are involved and that, therefore, this is not dairy milk.

Meanwhile, using this term better indicates to a perspective customer what type of product they're dealing with. It'd be like if you prevented anybody other than Apple from using the word "book" in the name of a laptop, anyone but HP using the word laptop, or anyone but IBM using the word computer. Everyone could still sell laptops, but you wouldn't necessarily know whether a device was actually a laptop because that useful descriptive term wasn't allowed.

Re: AKA Libertarians

I really don't care what I'm called. My title is software engineer because that's what my employer decided to call us, though I doubt they had any reason for choosing that over something else. I'm a programmer. I'm also a developer. The word engineer is hard to define. At one point, it only meant people who dealt a lot with engines, in which case nearly no modern engineers would count. However, in its current usage, an engineer is someone who designs and builds something from a relatively low level. I think I qualify under that unofficial definition.

Re: Rename the terms?

I don't think it's "electrical" they have a problem with. I think that, based on their current stance, my title of "software engineer" would also be covered. It's patently ridiculous, but for some reason they're interested enough to fight the issue.

Re: AKA Libertarians

Since you aren't mentioning the topics in the article, only attempting to attack the case based on the source of a lawyer, I can only assume your comment "regulations that you or I might consider sensible safety precautions, but which they feel unnecessarily constrain corporate entities like "engineers" is meant to apply to this case.

In which case, you'll need to do a better job. These safety precautions... what are they? Having passed a test and paid for a license saying you're competent to engage in civil engineering? I'm fully in favor when the person you're making do that is a civil engineer. But there's a big difference between "civil engineer" and "electrical engineer". For that matter, my job title at the moment is "software engineer". Should I have to pass that test and pay for that license as well?

And while we're talking, your attack of this case based on a group who litigates other cases is not a very good argument. I'm sure that, if I reviewed all their cases, I could easily find one I disagreed with strongly. That doesn't make them automatically wrong here. For the same reasons, someone who has always argued cases to my liking isn't guaranteed to keep doing so. When you deal with a legal group of the scale of this one, you are bound to have cases you agree with and ones you disagree with. Having not looked into their previous cases, let's presume that I agree with you and disagree with the majority of their cases. That still doesn't make them wrong here. If you wish to prove this case has no merit or is actively wrong, you'll need to start talking about the case.

It may be out of sync with the US govt, but Huawei is rolling out its Harmony OS to more devices in 2020

Re: Makes sense.

It's probably helpful from a continuity perspective as well. Rather than design new platforms based on Linux or Android every time they start making a new smart television, they can stick with this and reuse some code. That is if they remember they've got that code, which has not been a hallmark of other IoT manufacturers.

That said, I wonder how much code can profitably be shared between a smartwatch and a television. While the kernel could be copied, the smartwatch has the problems of limited processing and very limited battery life, while the television is connected directly to the mains and has an excuse for a much more powerful processor. That doesn't mean they can't use exactly the same kernel for both, but one designed for a television might put heavy pressure on a watch's battery and one designed to preserve the resources of a watch might not be as snappy as users of a television would like.