Posts by doublelayer

Y'know how everyone hated it when tuition fees went up? Cutting them now could harm science, say UK Lords

Re: Bah!

"In this country, we call it maths, or more properly, mathematics. It's a broad field, encompassing multiple concepts, so it's a plural. What's next? Calling physics physic?"

Well, that leaves a lot of room for discussion. For example, "maths" makes sense because there are lots of different types of mathematical units, but there isn't really a problem with a singular noun describing a group of things that fall into one category, so that gives "math" a way in. For example, we refer to "the sciences", clearly plural, but many of those sciences are singular. Although there are lots of pretty different aspects of chemistry and biology, I don't think anyone says "chemistries" or "biologies". Similarly, the courses that teach students what happened in the past are typically referred to as "history", even though it is simple to realize that there are a lot of them and therefore "histories" has some logic. I also think the plural approach has some logic, as well.

In context, maybe "math" is more appropriate than you give it credit for. While the subject in general includes lots of types of maths (though as I'm writing this I am wondering whether we can say something like "Algebra is a math" to refer to one of the elements in the set of maths), the original point gave a specific algorithm for calculating the value of something. Not by any means necessarily correct, but a single algorithm nonetheless which did not involve multiple branches of mathematics. In that respect, you could argue that it only involved one part of maths, and therefore only one math.

US court nixes Google's $5.5m court payoff over Safari Workaround – no one affected saw cash

Re: Who gets the money?

I beg to differ. I could go into an argument about whether a cookie can be constituted as an invasion, but I don't have to. Why not? The workaround involved in this legal matter isn't an RFC2109 cookie. Instead, it's a piece of javascript which Google claimed wasn't there. If we want to litigate the "trespass" point made by the original poster, I could argue that, since the code was unknown to the user and executed on their device rather than Google's servers, it is in fact trespass on the phone's system. Once again, however, I don't have to. The case against Google was not about trespassing in the legal sense. They lost the case, and so the legal system would agree that what they were doing was wrong. So I'm afraid I do not think any of your points are accurate.

Re: Who gets the money?

I don't think the original post had the viewpoint that this was fine because no damages. I think the point they were trying to make is that it is hard to establish damages in a legal sense, a fact that did not seem to impress the poster. The trespassing and privacy rights are of course the important part for us users, but there isn't a clear way to say that they are worth a certain amount and therefore have those violations charged. That's why cases like these end up getting punitive damages rather than punitive damages and compensation for the value lost. I, like the original commentor and presumably you, would like to see the law fix that so we can get both.

They say piracy killed the Amiga. Know what else piracy is killing? Malware sales

Re: Copyright -- artificial monopoly

Original: "Producing anything of value generally requires resources - these usually boil down to time, energy and physical or mental exertion, plus whatever materials are required to produce the item/concept."

Response: "[P]hone camera) era producing copyrighted content, like pictures, is literally effortless task."

Rubbish. We have a convenient list of resources provided, so let's look at the resources needed to take a picture with a phone camera and how they appear on the list.

Phone: Must be purchased, "materials are required to produce the item/concept".

Battery: Must be charged, "energy".

Idea of thing to take picture of: Pictures have value only if they contain something of interest to somebody--the picture of my wall wouldn't have value to many, "mental exertion".

Taking a good photo: This requires getting a good angle, ensuring the expected things are in the frame, managing light, etc, "time [and] physical [and] mental exertion".

Storing the photo: Storage on the phone is in use, "materials are required to produce the item/concept".

Editing the photo: Not required, but many good photos are not sent out as raw files. Someone spends time and effort making it look nice or ensuring it honestly depicts whatever they want to have a picture of, "time [and] physical [and] mental exertion".

Sharing photo: Bandwidth to send the picture out, which the user pays for, "materials are required to produce the item/concept"

In conclusion, rubbish. Just because you can do something with little effort doesn't mean that other people who do it put the same low amount of effort in.

Hack-age delivery! Wardialing, wardriving... Now warshipping: Wi-Fi-spying gizmos may lurk in future parcels

Re: But when it reaches the mailroom...

Your mail people might either be more security conscious or more paranoid than the ones I've seen. At companies I've seen, many people ship electronics to the company. Some people need some components or general hardware, and get that ordered. Some others have weird package delivery problems at their home and have personal shipments routed to the company. In both cases, electronics are rather common and wouldn't be immediately reported.

Re: Hmm...

Depending on what it's doing, it might be able to impact your network. The main thing to consider is that it probably has a lot more time than you've given it credit for. After it gets delivered, it will sit in your mailbox until you get home or come outside to retrieve it. Even if your mail is delivered directly into your house, you have to actively go to the location to retrieve the mail. Depending on how it could be hidden, that might give it several minutes if you're at home at the time of delivery or several hours if it can sit happily in your mailbox and attack the network from there. As for automatic configuration, that's very dependent on what evil thing it wants to do. If it just wants to collect data and phone home, that doesn't take that long. If it wants to try default passwords or vulnerabilities on network devices, that's probably two minutes or so. If it wants to masquerade as a network device to catch a user or something of that nature, it will need a lot more time and, for that matter, a lot more battery power to get that done.

Re: Hmm...

Yes, the connection to 3G would possibly identify the source, depending on the availability of prepaid anonymous SIMs in the target country. However, that requires that the device be found. The idea of hiding it in the cardboard of the box would be a pretty interesting idea, with the battery being the main stumbling block.

Lyft pulls its e-bike fleet from San Francisco Bay Area after exploding batteries make them the hottest seat in town

Re: Looks like the technology hasn't been properly studied

There's a good argument for fluorine as well. After all, only a compound containing fluorine, O2F2, can be used to set water on fire, although cesium plus water equals explosion, so they can fight it out. Fluorine can also bond with noble gasses, though, which I think might give it the edge there. It is possible that francium would be the most reactive, but because it is so unstable and has a very short half life, we don't have any to test out. I'm going to suggest we eliminate it from discussion based on lack of fun explosion videos. By any metric, however, lithium doesn't come close.

Microsoft follows up those licensing hikes by snipping away costs for Azure Archive Storage

Re: Doesn't feel nice...

"To charge you to get your data out of the cloud is IMHO stark raving bonkers but there again, it really isn't your data any longer now is it????"

What do you expect? You put data on a server that is connected remotely, so if you're getting data off it, it is bandwidth you're using. That, like CPU time or disk space, is a limited resource, so there's a cost to using it. I think the stated price sounds too high, but it seems logical to me that data retrieval would cost money. If it did not, they'd be providing me unlimited bandwidth, which history has shown to always be more expensive for the provider than they planned. I'm very happy if they choose to do that, but I'm not surprised that they don't. Of course, they could wrap some amount of data transfer in the purchase of disk space, for example giving enough to perform a complete retrieval once, but then people would complain that they were being charged for transfer they weren't using if they left their data in for a longer period.

Re: First they trusted

"Non reliance on a third party for business critical systems isn't expensive. Skills are rare though,"

I'm sorry? That's very expensive. Oh, I know what you were going for--hardware on prem can be less expensive than the cloud. Maybe you were also going for license-free software too. But let's look at the typical third parties a business relies on and how expensive it would be to not rely on them.

Real estate: Most businesses rent their buildings. Many don't need a full building and share with other businesses. Some that need a building like the reduction in risk that comes from renting, or want to be able to move quickly. In order to run a business without renting, they need to purchase one or more buildings. This is very expensive, especially if the business is, like many businesses, located in an urban area.

Electricity: Most businesses get the power to run their building, their servers, and everything else from the grid. Of course they run local generation for backup purposes, but usually only enough to keep the absolutely critical systems running for a short time. If they wanted to have complete nonreliance, they'd effectively have to build their own electrical plant, requiring extra real estate costs not to mention the costs for the generation capacity. Even if they are allowed to use the standard electricity supplier so long as they can switch over, they'd probably need to buy a lot more generators and fuel in order that, when power from the grid fails, the situation is "everyone can keep working in the building" rather than "the public servers won't go down".

Communications: The company would have to be an ISP. That's the only way not to rely on anyone else. Well, actually, they'd still rely on the other ISPs and tier one communications companies, but not much can be done about that. I forgot, they probably run a phone line for customer support or at least sales, so they'll have to be a telco too.

Outsourcing: Many companies choose to have some roles, like cleaning, recruiting, or even HR, outsourced to another provider. They pay that provider, who provides the people who can do that task, manages them, and pays them. There are many additional companies who keep that all in house, but most of them are either very small, requiring little of those services, or very large.

That's without considering other tasks that the company might do and rely on, like sales which might be assisted by resellers or retailers, advertising which relies on external media, or hardware from servers to office chairs which probably is not all manufactured by the company.

Let's also consider the original point. The desire is to avoid any other services. Most people can do that; machines were meant to run on prem and were designed with that in mind. However, imagine a situation where a lot of scalability is desired but the hardware for that is not always needed. You can get that on the cloud for relatively cheap. Obtaining that on prem is expensive because you have to keep a bunch of hardware frequently underutilized. What if you want geographic distribution, either for lower latency or increased redundancy in case of problems in one area. Cloud has that covered as well. Implementing that without external requirements means the company will have to purchase extra servers and physically bring them to various places. Because we're going for "Non reliance on a third party", it's not enough to rent space in a datacenter because what if the people running it didn't set up backup power right? So that's purchasing a building in another area, country, or continent just for keeping servers in.

I frequently prefer not to run services on the cloud, and I'll be the first to argue that there is too much emphasis on cloud over non-cloud. But it is expensive to have things that don't rely on a third party. Sometimes, the cloud is in fact worthwhile.

German privacy probe orders Google to stop listening in on voice recordings for 3 months

I enjoyed your joke, but let's analyze their statement for its real meaning.

"We don't associate audio clips with user accounts during the review process"

That doesn't stop them associating the clips with the accounts after the review process, or for that matter before. They could also associate the text with the accounts and not technically be lying there.

"and only perform reviews for around 0.2% of all clips."

Given how often there are false positives, a significant amount of those must be completely silent, or at least blank background noise with no speech. While I doubt it rises to 99.8%, it could be a healthy chunk. A program that eliminates these from the dataset would help get to the 0.2% level without improving at all on the privacy aspect. Similarly, they probably don't need to conduct reviews on things that get recognized properly. If we presume the chunks of the data in recognized languages saying standard things like "What time is it?" are left out, this gets us much closer to 99.8%. Once again, the 0.2% is probably the private stuff.

Re: You can do that by syllable. Still gonna run into false positives.

It doesn't matter whether words or syllables are used. That's exactly the point. It's pretty simple--the longer the wake word or phrase, the less likely the device is to think it's heard it. You could make it thirty seconds long, and you'll probably eliminate all false positives. Your method of two words that must be separated would help as well. But it doesn't really do much about the problem of data being recorded. It matters little whether they're recording mistakes or real audio, either way they've received something potentially private.

In addition, they're very likely to want something with a few false positives because these devices have a relatively difficult task identifying their wake word. There's a lot of background noise, and the manufacturers don't want the reputation as the one you have to wake up six times before it starts working. And the false positive rate doesn't really have to be an issue; I think most people who have one don't really care that it goes off incorrectly every once in a while. They would care very much that recordings of their home were being sent somewhere random, to be listened to by someone unknown, entirely without their permission. Making the wake word longer doesn't really solve the privacy issue.

Our hero returns home £500 richer thanks to senior dev's appalling security hygiene

Re: Ahhh passwords...

This can happen on Mac OS and Linux as well. I remember the occasion rather painfully when I had been working on an important recording (an audio project requiring a lot of editing and long-running operations) when I waited a bit too long and my machine locked. Only then did I realize that A) I had been writing notes on this project in Spanish, B) I was still set to the Spanish keyboard layout, C) my login window did not have a method to change the keyboard layout, and D) my password contained characters that were on the English keyboard but not the Spanish keyboard. Fun times, having to think about forcing a shutdown knowing that a lot of my work which I hadn't yet saved was going to be lost. It's fun when we first learn that saving should be done as often as possible and somewhat less fun when we forget to even though we've learned we should.

BOFH: Oh, go on, let's flush all that legacy tech down the toilet

Re: ShitSecurity

I think the HR and accounts people count as users, but still, the numbers don't line up exactly. Then again, it's never been really clear what this company does. I think we had one mention of manufacturing a year ago and some mention of trading, probably stocks but nobody really explained, about a decade ago. It's possible they have one product line that's sold to the general public which accounts for that database and the rest of their services are sold to business clients and are stored in another database, but at this point I'm just making stuff up to answer a theoretical question that I don't think was ever seriously considered in the first place.

Edit: Just after posting this, I realized the math mistake. They say the average transaction is seventy three quid, and they multiply that for every client, but not by multiple transactions. If they have customers who place multiple orders in a year, the average order could be 73 quid but the average money per year could be much higher. For example, they could be running a subscription service where people pay by the month, making the average annual intake from each customer about nine hundred pounds. Maybe some people pay by the day, too. Who knows.

And we're back live with the state of the smartphone market in 2019. Any hope? Yeah, nah

Re: Sales 101: When you can't sell by adding new features, take away existing ones.

Part of that is the companies deliberately choosing to do that, but I think this stems from the early days of phones, and for that matter computers. When they first came out, you could really tell when the phone was upgraded. Processing speed would be markedly better, and people would comment on the increased quality of screens in cameras. Now? I don't think so. Companies will have to realize the major changes that have happened to their market in order to plan their strategies, and the sooner they realize that the changes mean the old devices are still fine, the sooner they can try to really innovate to gain more sales.

Dot-org price-cap scrap latest: Now ICANN accused of snubbing registrars with 'sham' public comment process

Re: Trade Union Dispute

Nobody's arguing the registrars are perfect. I'm sure we can all point out times they've been annoying. However, in this dispute between companies, we, the public, are coming off the worse for it. It is we who purchase domains, we who shouldn't have to pay more when the costs haven't changed, and we who will have to deal with the price increases. That there are large and imperfect entities on our side doesn't mean the argument is irrelevant.

That's great, but it won't work. The board members aren't diabolically evil people who conspired to get in; they got in then decided to be evil about things. If you get rid of them, you could easily replace them with a different set of people who have the exact same attitude. If we can get some method for external validation of decisions and external control to prevent abuses, we shouldn't have to bother wasting time preventing the current board from rejoining, because even if they did, they couldn't do this kind of thing again.

Watch as 10 cops with guns and military camo storm suspected Capital One hacker's house…

Re: I'm confused.

The theory is that she had knowledge of security vulnerabilities, or more likely, common misconfigurations, from her time which she then used. It doesn't seem likely that she had any special access to Amazon's systems, just the required knowledge to break in, which in this case was obtained from a job at Amazon but could also be obtained from elsewhere.

As for a $10K computer, that is pretty ridiculous, but it can be done. If you max out the specs on the iMac Pro, (18 core Xeon, 256 GB memory, 4 TB SSD, and a 16GB graphics card), you can get the price all the way up to $14500. If you're thinking laptop, you can max out the specs on the System76 Serval WS to $7747, which is somewhat shy of the $10K mark but a) people exaggerate and b) you can increase the value of any computer by buying even more expensive memory* and putting it in. Neither of these maxed out machines are really of use to many people, but if you want to buy them, you can. Someone who decides to steal a bunch of credit card data for no good reason then announce their identity online might not do the mental math on whether such a purchase is truly necessary.

*It is easy to increase the price of any computer by adding memory to it. In both cases above, the maximum memory increase was responsible for large chunks of the high prices. Apple's was more expensive as their desktop chips support much faster memory and they're willing to sell you 256GB whereas system76 will only go as high as 64GB, but each involved a significant amount of expenditure to get there. If you wanted to go out and buy the same type of memory and install the upgrade yourself, you might be able to get even more, and thus a higher bill. Similarly, there is no sane limit to how much an SSD goes for--there is always a bigger one or a faster one for 1.5X the price.

Summer vacations put an end to rampant desktop crimewave

Re: The delayed emails

Does this explain why, when I was studying at university, emails would work just fine when sent from nearly everyone but backdated emails from the administration would appear about three weeks after they were supposed to arrive cheerfully displaying a faked early date but not fooling anyone because the headers would have the real one? Curiously enough, this often happened to campus IT's emails as well. If that wasn't a thing you fixed after I left, I think I have another client in need of your services.

He's coming home, he's coming... Hutchins' coming home: British Wannacry killer held in US on malware dev rap set free by judge

In legal terms in American (and others') immigration systems, everyone who comes to the country and isn't a citizen is an immigrant. When they leave again, they're no longer an immigrant. I think they started doing that after science fiction made the term "alien" applied to a person sound really strange. Current American anti-immigration policy has been enforced strongly against, well, almost everybody, but definitely if a criminal record is involved. Since he wasn't planning to move to the country, only visit for a while, he wouldn't have the required paperwork and could be held up unnecessarily because the program that has a big list of names doesn't include much complexity in its algorithms. So the judge just wanted to send a message that this is under control, and there is no need for more chaos than they already have. We'll see if that goes anywhere.

Re: Hear, hear! @werdsmith

As for why the prosecution occurred in the U.S., I believe the reasoning was that some of the banks affected were American ones, and at least some victims were American. From that basis, the FBI felt the crime was at least partially under their jurisdiction. From a legal standpoint, the crime could also be investigated and tried in other countries where victims, either banks or users, were located. It's not all that illogical--cybercrime makes it harder to decide where trial should occur, but if victims are in a country, it is within most agreements on international prosecution that the crime can be tried there.

I don't mean by saying this that I support the actions of the FBI in this case. Although I do think they had the right and even the responsibility to investigate the malware, I would have chosen not to pursue the investigation of this small component in the malware given the circumstances, and I don't think his treatment was particularly justified. My statements above are just intended to explain the rationale for the location of investigations and trials.

Azure consultant to sue Google for linking his cached pics to cloned site, breach of copyright

Re: Not sure, but...

I hear the same sort of thing. Suing Google doesn't make a ton of sense unless he tried to go through the normal takedown and Google acted maliciously to block that. But from this article and his accusations, I get several incompatible stories and I'm not sure which one is really the case.

He isn't being crazy about his copyright--he's trying to prevent Google from making copies, which is illegal, by the by, and using them to lower traffic levels to his site, which would lower the ad payout to him and presumably increase the one to him. I don't know the details, and there is a possibility that the summary as stated in the article is not representative of the real situation, but if it is, it seems relatively clear that theft of that nature is malicious.

We all within our graves shall sleep

A hundred years to come;

But ere that century so deep

Will pass, crimes may be done,

And though I wish naught but the best,

To children then, I must confess,

As I live now, I wish my due,

As would I wish to those of you,

A hundred years to come.

Modified with apologies to William Goldsmith Brown

If at first you don't succeed, Fold? Nope. Samsung redesigns bendy screen for fresh launch in September

Re: Another solution...

I can think of a use case: people like watching video but don't want a tablet in a bag. For me it'd be worthless, as I don't want a bigger screen or a bigger device. For you, it sounds like it won't be useful either. But I don't have a problem if someone else decides they want the product and choose to buy it. Why not?

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

Re: "being stupid enough to believe you can get away with it"

In that case, I'll fix the question for you.

And why beholdest thou the NSA that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the GCHQ that is in thine own eye?

All countries want to do this, and many have. I don't like that the U.S. and U.K. do it. That is an extreme understatement. And that is why I also have a problem with other countries doing the same thing. China has that kind of surveillance system at a massive level--it's almost the model for what repressive states and surveillance organizations want to be. China has forbidden most foreign communication systems, and has promoted national systems that lack encryption. They are as evil, if not more so, than the western democracies. Not that I think the western surveillance units are any good, but they haven't succeeded completely yet. Let's realize the real enemy, which lives nearly everywhere, and quit making this issue a point of pointless national comparison.

Equifax to world+dog: If we give you this $700m, can you pleeeeease stop suing us about that mega-hack thing?

Re: Passing the loss to the shareholders is fine

There are a number of ways to force employees into investing in company stock. One easy method is to ensure that any stock they have is on a vesting schedule that makes it hard to sell. For example, while they can't force employee retirement contributions to be in company stock, they can offer a matching plan that is in company stock. This would be seen as a major benefit--it's essentially free money--but if the stock becomes zeroed, that benefit is retroactively erased. And if they really wanted to prevent this from happening, there are lots of ways to try to make sure employees get hurt in the scenario. Some of those might be later shown as illegal, but not before regulators get nervous that a company might have a way around it.

Re: Settlement is BS

Whether elected or appointed, they're politicians. And yes, it's a bit weird to effectively elect someone who can choose not to prosecute something. However, someone has to choose, and as stated above, there are benefits to having that choice. The alternative is that someone still has that power, but they're not elected. That is the same from the possible conflict of interest perspective, but in that case it'd be harder to get rid of them if they did something citizens didn't like but wasn't technically illegal. Completely fair government is hard.

Checkmate, Qualcomm: Apple in billion-dollar bid to gobble Intel’s 5G modem blueprints, staff – new claim

I imagine the current team is in limbo at Intel right now. Going to work for Apple is a pretty good guarantee that they'll continue to have a job. They can quit, but there are not a ton of other modem manufacturers to go to. If someone only bought the IP, I imagine Intel would probably transfer a few of them to other divisions, and the rest of the team would be seen as unnecessary. So I think most of the team will probably be happy enough--they still have jobs in modem design if they want them.

UK cops blasted over 'disproportionate' slurp of years of data from crime victims' phones

Re: Police in impossible position

Nope. If there is a situation where there is data, and the police need it because they have a reasonable suspicion that it can help solve a crime, they can get it. It's called a warrant and we've spent a lot of time working out how to protect privacy and solve crimes at the same time. If I accuse you of having stolen my stuff and having it in your house, but I'm lying because I'm actually storing stolen things in my house, the police can still get a warrant to search my house. If they have reason to believe I'm telling the truth about you also being a thief, they can get a warrant to search your house.

Re: Police in impossible position

And it isn't wrong if they say there could be useful evidence and ask for it. What is wrong is saying "We will have to take all the data on your phone without any limits and give it to anyone we feel like and unless you agree we just won't be helping you at all because that's not our jobs". I think most real victims would accept having the relevant information sent to the police quickly. If there isn't information on their phones, that doesn't mean the crime didn't happen, and if they value the privacy of unrelated information, that doesn't mean the crime didn't happen.

Re: Stop using that phone

Yes and no. Fine, I'll insert them into your sentence. I would [yes] like to be treated fairly but [no] not by requiring seeing my accuser's phone. If they think they need that, they can ask for it. If they think there is data on the phone that reveals a false accusation, they can get an order requiring it. If I am in fact guilty, they should be going after me rather than my victim. Similarly, they should consider me innocent unless proven guilty in this situation, as well. False accusation is a problem, but there isn't an easy solution. Finding a way to pressure victims in violation of their rights doesn't really stop the issue of false accusations. It may seem that way, but what it really does is destroy the rights to privacy and convince victims that law enforcement isn't going to help them. Both of those things are bad things.

Re: Stop using that phone

That's well and good. However, that doesn't seem to be the reason for demanding this data, as there were plenty of cases mentioned in the article where they already had the evidence they needed. It also doesn't seem an appropriate reason for demanding all data on a phone. So you've described a real problem that I think is quite important, but I don't think it is relevant to this situation.

Google pays out $13m to make Wi-Spy scandal go away: Bung goes to peeps and privacy orgs

Re: $3 million divided amongst 22 plaintiffs?

That's $136K per plaintiff, or $15150 per year. Not bad to have, but nothing compared to what the lawyers get.

Re: Not enough

Yes, they are. However, I have to agree with the original point. Around that time, in the late 2000s, I thought of Google as an ally. They had a pretty good search engine. They had just released their mobile OS and their browser as open source. They stood with us against stupid suggestions that would result in damage to the internet. When compared to other companies, I wasn't that afraid that they could abuse the data they got, and part of this is that I thought I knew what data they had. Knowing what they were truly doing helped me to decide to avoid some of their worse privacy invasions, and even some nontechnical people seem to have figured out that this is a problem. If they hid this for longer, I would still have figured it out, but probably a couple of years of handing them data later.

It's 2019 and you can still pwn an iPhone with a website: Apple patches up iOS, Mac bugs in July security hole dump

Re: Who’s worse?

That's a false equivalence. For the bank example, an attacker picks a single target and would try to optimize lack of security with other factors. A malware attack is almost always targeted at everyone they can. If you want to pursue the bank analogy, it's like saying "In one town, you have 5% of the banks. In the other town, you have 95% of the banks. All banks in each town keep their money in the same place, but with different security. Which big vault are you going to break into?". In order to choose the 5%, you either have to know a good way into their vault that you don't have for the 95%, or you have to be really confident that they have more money. If you're opportunistic and just choosing one, you'll probably try for the one that has the more money, which is likely to be the one used by 95% of the banks.

Too hot to handle? Raspberry Pi 4 fans left wondering if kit should come with a heatsink

Re: So .....

Not the point. The point is better stated as "The CPU in this one gets hot a lot faster and thus has to underclock itself a lot more frequently than the CPU in the last one". Surely you would agree that this is a factor to be considered when buying the device, yes?

Re: Corrupt SD cards

In my experience, the SD corruption issue was terrible with the first models, although I think that was mostly software. Every time the device was shut down improperly, there'd be problems and usually the easiest thing was rewriting the card. Then 2013 or so rolled around and that stopped happening. I wondered about that so I subjected a victim pi to a cycle of power cuts at random intervals, including during writes and boot, but it survived all of them. I'd suggest you retrieve your pis, update the OS, and try again.

Re: "heat-spreading technology"

Even at 90 degrees, the specific heat of the top of the chip isn't high enough to cause a burn without waiting a while with your finger on it. It would feel uncomfortable, but you'd be fine. The board, probably not. If you're looking for a recipe for the thing to get damaged, running the chip at a temperature above spec for a long time or putting it through loops of heating up a lot, throttling until the temp goes back down past another limit, and letting it sail back up would both be good options.

Silly money: Before you chuck your chequebook away, triple-check that super-handy digital coin

Re: Why different currency units?

One theoretical benefit is that it isn't controlled by the local government. If it was done right, for example, people living in countries who have destroyed their own monetary systems would be able. to use it to escape that situation. Consider Venezuela, for example. The government has turned the local currency, the Bolivar, into worthless paper. Many of the people still trapped in Venezuela would prefer to use the U.S. dollar, and some do, but it's harder to do that because there aren't enough of them in the country, pushing the exchange rate even lower. Also, the government is still saying that the Bolivar has value (they say one is worth about $0.005, while the real value is $0.000062)*. The government is also annoyed at the United States and really doesn't want to be seen as having destroyed the currency, so they have forbidden the use of dollars. If there was a cryptocurrency capable of stepping in here, the people could use that to store value and transfer it. They wouldn't need to import paper to do it, and it would be harder to track. Of course, current attempts are completely worthless for this, as they don't hold value and can't be transferred without losing a lot of value and requiring quite a bit of local processing power to accomplish.

*The exchange rates for the Bolivar are stated in U.S. dollars because that is the primary external currency in use in unofficial transactions.

Re: Paradigm shift

Cryptocurrency as a concept is interesting. There are a number of real benefits we could get from a properly implemented cryptocurrency. Some immunity to government action (E.G. Venezuela's overprinting), a fast method of exchanging money at a distance, etc. The operative word there being "could". Current attempts at cryptocurrency have not only failed to meet those goals, they have been built without proper consideration of those goals. They have been built in such a way that transactions are extremely expensive, so that exponential increases in hardware are required to maintain the same transaction rate, either with a completely open blockchain so people can deanonymize payments at their leisure or a computationally intensive anonymity system. Their developers haven't been all that interested in having their cryptocurrencies be used as currencies, but instead have been selling them to speculators, meaning nobody sane can actually hold the currency with the expectation of the value being sort of similar when they come back.

Cryptocurrency will definitely become a massive cultural and technological change that will affect the way we all do business, except for that small probability that it keeps going like it has so far. In that case, it will be somewhat random--some people will be extremely enthusiastic, others will be intensely opposed, and almost everyone else won't care because they won't be using it.

Re: I like proper cash

Cash is great as a backup, but there are many advantages to using a different payment method. Of course, there are many disadvantages too. I'll list some of each.

Card payment advantages:

1. I can carry a lot more value, because I just put it on the one card.

2. Payments can be faster, as I don't have to find the required notes or wait for change to be dispensed.

3. If I am robbed, the card can be canceled, and charges can be reversed.

4. I can have multiple cards with me for different expenses (corporate/personal, for example). I don't have to keep receipts or a log of where I spent money, because the card provider has that and can show me.

5. I can use the same payment method everywhere. Yes, a few small places don't take all cards, but nearly everywhere takes the major ones. Cash doesn't work online.

Card payment disadvantages:

1. You have to deal with another company, with another password and another random number between 17 and 84 minutes before you get off hold.

2. Someone else has purchase data on you. Depending on what they do with it, this can be worrying.

3. It does theoretically make it easier to spend more. I can't say I've really experienced that, but I see the theory and it has value.

4. The card providers can break and then things start breaking. Fortunately, the people who are trying to get payments from you tend not to blame you for this.

These tradeoffs have settled in favor of card payments for me, at least most of the time.

The Empire Strikes Back: Trump discovers $10bn JEDI cloud deal may go to nemesis Jeff Bezos, demands probe

Re: Arachnids in the US

Completely separate conversation, but I'm curious what four empires you're thinking about when you say that three of them were located in the land that is now Iran? As I understand it, the four great empires of antiquity typically refer to Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus valley, and early Chinese civilization. Only one of those was anywhere near modern-day Iran, and even that was a bit west of there. Of course, Persia has been an important empire for quite a while, so I don't mean to understate the history of the area, but I wonder what your list is.

Re: Here is a first

I see the point in wanting multiple providers, if only to prevent the lock in issue. That's a necessary thing to consider. However, I also think we should consider the complex security landscape you would get with multiple providers that have to interlock. A single company's cloud system is complex enough and leaves ample room to misconfigure or for the provider to have bugs, but at least they are responsible for securing the whole thing and have written software designed to do just that. Not that it is guaranteed to work, but it's been tested inside the company for a while. If we created a system composed of several providers' systems put together, an attacker could break into any of them and then start attacking the newer mechanisms that connect the system. While the contract would doubtless include provisions for ensuring security of those mechanisms, there would be less existing code for doing that and the code created by the group of providers wouldn't be as well tested or as thoroughly written. This would make it easier for a security problem to arise, and to make things more irritating, each company would say that it wasn't their fault that the breech occurred because the scanning software that should have detected it was the responsibility of someone else.

I don't mean to discount the issue of lock in or the problems establishing a backup system in the event of an attack or malfunction. I think that's a very important consideration too. It's a situation where there isn't a clear right answer. I think it is useful to consider both arguments before deciding which model to do.

Chrome on, baby, don't fear The Reaper: Plugin sends CPU-hogging browser processes to hell where they belong

Re: Is this Chromium or Chrome?

It's the new edge that uses chromium. Old edge used its own renderer. The only thing using WebKit was Edge for IOS, which nobody ever really used anyway. So this could probably run in edge as well.

Google nuked tech support ads to kill off scammers. OK. It also blew away legit repair shops. Not OK at all

Re: Sorry, but I'm willing to accept that damage

I understand that point. And I feel a lot of sympathy toward those companies who are being prevented from advertising. I have no sympathy for Google in this matter and think they should be repairing the mess they made. However, I also am happy that at least some action is being taken against tech support scammers. Previously, Google has struck me as a remarkably lax enforcer of standards on their platform, resulting in untold numbers of net users being served malicious content. To me, this issue is rather worrying, and so I'm afraid I cannot be as sympathetic to real tech support companies as I'd like to be. I'm completely on their side when Google fails to check them properly and rejects an appeal to continue legitimate advertising, and I think Google is at fault for that aspect. However, I do not much care that tech support places that wish to advertise on Google have to go through extra verification, and I'm willing to accept that if it results in a decrease in tech support scams.

Sorry, but I'm willing to accept that damage

I get that it's not much fun for the companies who used to advertise on Google and are now blocked, but I have seen far too many malicious tech support ads that I'll accept most anything to have them thrown away. Of course, I'm blocking ads already, but these ads prey upon people who typically don't have ads blocked. I'm also afraid that I would find an advertisement on Google to dissuade me from going to a repair place. While advertising is a fact of life and necessary under some circumstances, it has become so pervasive and underhanded that I often feel very negatively towards those people who advertise.

Turning it off and on again IN SPAAACE! ISS animal-tracker kit needs oldest trick in the book

Re: They managed all that in 5 grams ?

Many phones, mostly the expensive ones, have barometers in them. They are used to track things like whether the user has climbed stairs. Otherwise, I don't think they're used all that much. At one point, a company manufactured temperature and humidity sensors and wrote the code to allow Android to use them, but a cursory check of this phone database shows that only nine Samsung phones included them, and those were from a while ago. I guess they weren't very popular.

Ex-Which? bod's £3bn Safari sueball has second shot at Google over UK data laws

Re: But the judges were right ?

That depends what money we're talking about. In settlements or fines as a result of a trial, it goes to the plaintiffs in court. Usually, that means 85% lawyers, 5% the person who brought the trial, and 10% sort of tried to be distributed to people but it doesn't really happen. The other option is 80% lawyers and 20% random charities the lawyers (and sometimes the lawyers for the other side) pick, and nothing to the users, even the one who brought the trial. If it's a fine from the government, the money is put into the general big bank account for the whole government, but not necessarily added to anyone's budget until the next budget is passed. After that, it just becomes more general purpose money as far as the government is concerned. Sometimes, the government uses the occasion of a big settlement to announce they will be spending some of that money on a program to do something sort of related to the settlement, but it doesn't mean they'll be using all the money for that purpose. As long as the money is removed from the company, the people removing it figure they've done what they intended to in as much as penalizing the company.

It was totally Samsung's fault that crims stole your personal info from a Samsung site, says Samsung-blaming Sprint

Which one is it

The article leaves a few options open. I'm sure this is because Sprint and Samsung are not all that happy to give out information and have contradicted one another, but here are a few things this could be:

1. Samsung has Sprint credentials (why?), and they left them unsecured. Criminals obtained them and started logging into Samsung's site.

2. Sprint left Sprint credentials unsecured, and criminals stole them and started to use them to log into Samsung's site because you can evidently use them on both (why?).

3. Sprint credentials were found by criminals from somewhere, and they started using them to log into Samsung's site (where were they found, or do the companies not know)?

Neither company seems to have bothered trying to explain exactly where the credentials came from. Logically, Sprint should be the only people with them, but who adheres to logic?

Facebook's Libra is a terrorist's best friend, thunders US Treasury: Crypto-coins dubbed 'national security risk'

Re: "if America does not lead innovation in the digital currency and payments area"

I'd like to petition the prescriptivist society to change the definition. My full petition is as follows:

Yes, your pedantry is correct, but I think we should fix that. The second world, as previously defined, ceased to exist three decades ago, as the block referred to by that name was directed by the Soviet Union. The existence of nominally communist nations does not mean there's a "second world", and that term no longer gets used. Meanwhile, many countries have been assigned to "first world" status despite not being NATO members and not necessarily having had an adversarial relationship with the "second world", including Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Therefore, we, calling ourselves the descriptivists, would suggest that we revoke the previously-established definitions of first, second, and third worlds and reassign them to mean what everyone else has been using them for for a while.