Posts by doublelayer

Surprise! Plans for a Brexit version of the EU's Galileo have been delayed

Re: Good

I believe the original proposal was for a global system, and it would probably make sense. If anyone's going to be using it, the British military would probably be one of those. so they'd want access wherever there are large military bases, including the U.K. itself, the Indian Ocean (Diego Garcia), and if small bases are added in, the western and southern Atlantic as well. They would probably also want coverage in places they might be expecting to have to fight, such as south and west Asia. That will require much more than one regional setup, and while you could provide coverage in all those areas without a full global system, it would still cost almost as much.

Re: Good

That's technically true, but it's worth keeping in mind two points:

The U.S. doesn't get to decide who they break. Their options are that everyone can use it, only the U.S. military and people they've given the keys to can use it, or nobody can use it. If they decide to mess up the civilian tech, they will mess up plenty of things, including things in the U.S. that rely on it. They can't give the keys to domestic users easily because typical hardware doesn't support them and those keys would inevitably get leaked. That makes it somewhat implausible that they'd choose to do so.

A lot of hardware capable of using GPS can also be used for reception of signals from one or more of the other systems. All of those systems also provide time signals. Therefore, one could ensure that the hardware running these time-sensitive systems supports multiple satellites, and if the U.S. ever goes crazy and destroys theirs, just fall back to Russia's, China's, or the EU's.

Unless we get into a situation where a country decides to invest in massive jamming operations (in which case a dedicated system won't help) or where the U.S., Russia, China, and the EU are all allied against whatever country we're in (in which case I'm leaving immediately), we'll continue to have a usable time signal.

Re: Good

Japan's QZSS is not a global navigation system. It serves eastern Asia and the northern Pacific only. India's serves south Asia and the northern Indian Ocean. Japan is planning to extend their system in the future, but they haven't done so yet.

The only currently-existing global satellite navigation systems are those run by the U.S., Russia, China, and the EU. It's not impossible for some other country to set up their own, but it is expensive. This will undoubtedly lead to many questions about whether it is helpful and worth the price.

Raspberry Pi goes 2GB for the price of 1GB in honour of mini-computer's eighth birthday

Re: Better options

Let's compare your thing with the pi, and see what else we have to buy to make them somewhat equivalent. We're assuming here that what you want to do with it is to use it as a desktop--if you want to have it integrated into another project, the pi's GPIOs, CSI and DSI interfaces, etc. will make it the better option. But desktop only:

Your thing has an internal drive. The pi doesn't. Add a 64 GB SD card to our shopping list.

Your thing has a power supply provided. The pi doesn't. You probably already have a supply, but they did just make the switch to USB-C so you might not. Add one of those to our shopping list.

Your thing has two USB ports. The pi has four. Add a hub to your shopping list. Yes, since you accused the pi of needing one, I'm going to add this. You can do just fine with four ports, but two is harder.

You want to use two video outputs? Fine. Both can do it. The pi needs a relatively uncommon micro-HDMI connector, so let's add two cables connecting that to regular HDMI. And to your list we'll add a VGA to something modern adapter and we'll assume you already have a normal HDMI cable.

And ... that's it. They are now equivalent. There may be small differences in processing speed, but it's hard to know without having benchmark numbers for both, and I haven't found a place that benchmarked both of them.

So let's add up the prices. The pi with 4 GB of memory is £44. An SD card is about £8. The HDMI cables can be found for £2 each. The foundation's supply costs £8, but you could find a cheaper one. Total price:: £64. If you want a nice plastic box, we can make that £70. If you want a nice metal box, £76.

Your thing costs £110. A USB hub is £5 or so. The VGA-to-display port adapter I found costs £6. Total price: £121.

So that's why.

Drones must be constantly connected to the internet to give Feds real-time location data – new US govt proposal

Re: LTE Data Plans

"You can buy a 10MB data plan for only $5/month which should be more than enough for GPS data polled every five seconds."

Let's assume that the data is neatly compartmentalized and compressed so that it can fit into a single 512-byte UDP packet, and that there will be a 128-byte response packet to indicate that the data has been received. If you think the protocol would end up being this light, you are quite the optimist, but let's go with it.

(512 bytes + 128 bytes)/ 5 seconds * 1 minute / 60 seconds = 7680 bytes / minute of flight time

10 megabytes * 1024 kilobytes / 1 megabyte * 1024 bytes / 1 kilobyte = 10485760 bytes per month

10485760 bytes / 1 month / (7680 bytes / 1 minute) = 1365.333 minutes of flight time (maximum) per month

In other words, a maximum flight time per month of about twenty two hours. Sure, the very casual hobbyist might not be up for longer than that. If someone's using their drone for aerial photography, data collection, or simply really likes the hobby, they won't be happy with that limitation. And this limit only applies if no data is sent, at all, other than the GPS check-in. And it relies on the provider using binary megabytes rather than decimal ones. And still costs $60 per year per drone.

In addition, this fails to solve any of the other problems noted in the article, such as requiring decommissioning or costly retrofitting of all the drones in existence today and the problems making this requirement work where cellular coverage is less than perfect.

Vivo's APEX 2020 concept smartphone grabs life by the gimbals to shoot stable snaps

whether it holds up to the typical 24-month phone lifespan

I think you'll find that phones are typically expected to live much longer than that. I'm not just talking about we tech people who expect everything to last for decades and get grumpy when it doesn't. Check with your friends and family and see how old their devices are. I'm guessing you'll find quite a few ones older than three years. Sure, some have new devices, but this is usually because the one they had before it really got too old or, more likely, got broken. When smartphones were newer, the new device would well outstrip the two-year-old device, making people want to buy the newer one to use its new features. Now that this is no longer the case, fewer people have the desire to buy each new product, and while some still do, the average consumer doesn't.

Microsoft's Windows OEM, Surface sales looking a bit peaky as coronavirus takes toll on China supply chain

Overeagerness to predict things

"Antonio Wang, associate vice president at IDC China, said there would be "a positive side" as Chinese consumers become aware of the importance of access to internet information as a result of the outbreak."

That's a rather strange prediction. I'm assuming that it's referring to the widespread and severe censorship of many topics around the virus and its handling, and the prediction is that people will be annoyed with this and ... I actually don't know what they're predicted to do. If the prediction is that people will protest against censorship, don't count on it; Chinese citizens are well aware of the censorship, don't like it, and are aware that open revolt doesn't end well. If it's people taking other measures to evade the censorship, that might happen, but doesn't seem relevant to the prediction quoted above. I really don't know where that prediction came from, but I'm expecting that whatever it is predicting won't happen.

Wi-Fi of more than a billion PCs, phones, gadgets can be snooped on. But you're using HTTPS, SSH, VPNs... right?

Re: A lot of WiFi traffic may be local....

Well, most web traffic is HTTPS now, and most machine-to-machine protocols in heavy use are encrypted as well with SSH having replaced many more classic ones. But you're correct, a lot of traffic isn't encrypted on a LAN. For that reason, we're usually somewhat protective of who we let onto our LANs. An exploit that lets an unauthenticated user read our traffic is much worse than one that lets others on our LAN read our traffic.

Re: Unpopular opinion

As has been pointed out, that's not really at issue here. But also, it's not correct either. Of the various methods of getting attacked, MITMing is lower on the list of concerns, but it doesn't require nation-state level effort, and it doesn't have nation-state limited value. An attacker can set up a WiFi MITM device for relatively cheap. If it works for them, they can hope to grab some passwords, access tokens, or credit card numbers from you. True, at this point we've likely encrypted nearly everything that is that sensitive, but we've done this because at one point we didn't and we realized what a disaster it could be for people to pluck them out of our unencrypted network traffic. Not to mention that there are other things you can do with a functioning MITM system; I've only discussed the possibilities involved in reading network traffic, but sending some unexpected traffic to the user also offers some interesting possibilities, albeit at a higher risk to the attacker.

Your phone wakes up. Its assistant starts reading out your text messages. To everyone around. You panic. How? Ultrasonic waves

Mitigation options

"The best way to defend yourself from these attacks is to turn off voice commands, or only allow assistants to work when a handheld is unlocked."

Another good way that still allows use of voice commands is to disable the vocal trigger to start the assistant. The user can still use commands, but only by pressing a button on the phone to do so. If they have a complex unlocking system and allow a few commands to run without unlocking, this allows them to do that as well. It does prevent using the device when the device isn't near you, but when comparing it to disabling the feature entirely, it will have less effect on a user who uses the commands.

As attacks go, it's interesting but not the most frightening. It requires a lot of attacker investment and physical proximity. If they do it and I am there, I will likely hear my phone as it reads my new messages aloud and so I'll interrupt it and possibly look for a cause. If they're banking on my not being there so I don't notice the information being read out, they could have someone run in and grab my phone, which would be faster and require less investment on their part.

It's Terpin time: Bloke who was SIM jacked twice by Bitcoin thieves gets green light to sue telco for millions

Re: Weakest link security

If it's stored in your head, you stand a good chance of forgetting it. If that means you lose your money, you probably decide not to store it only in your head. If there's a method of resetting a forgotten password, that method can then be attacked. The same provisos hold for all the typical methods of storing sensitive information--the better they are at making sure other people can't get in, the more complex or difficult they are to use. Eventually, you reach a point where what you're really doing is making it hard for yourself to get in without doing much to an attacker. This is why 2FA is so important--if for any reason one method becomes compromised, the attackers still can't get in for the time being. The story here is about the failure of 2FA to have two factors that work well enough. That can of course be argued, but "memorize a long password and why not the private key while you're at it" isn't going to solve anything.

Apple tries to have VirnetX VPN patent ruling overturned again, US Supremes say no... again

Re: What??!!

I will have to read the patent, because if it's just NAT circumvention, that isn't original enough. The IETF was working on that quite a while ago and has continued past that RFC several times. Nor would pier-to-pier video communication be a valid patent as that's been done for a while as well. If it's been upheld this many times, it must be about something more specific than that.

Xiaomi in the UK: Multi-eyed Mi Note 10 hits Blighty festooned with cameras and hefty battery life

Almost certainly, as they make money off the advertising and preinstalled apps to help deal with the low purchase prices they often charge. Xiaomi devices are more likely to be supported by Lineage OS and other alternatives though, which has been a major point in Xiaomi's favor when I consider what device to buy.

Huawei claims its Google Play replacement is in 'top 3' app stores after Trump turns off tap to the Chocolate Factory

"Outside the Great Firewall, you don't need an app store, given that you only have to log in, or sometimes even simply go to, one of those sites through a mobile browser when you haven't got the app installed, and you get bombarded nagged to death forced suggested that their spyware feature-laden app can be downloaded straight from the site at the click of just One Button."

Almost always, this is a link to the Play store entry with a bunch of pop-ups around it. It doesn't help if the user is trying to download the app without Google Play. Of course, if the user wants to find an APK, there are a few sites willing to offer it. As long as you find the one that hasn't added some malware, that will work fine. Unless the app concerned also needs Google Play Services, in which case you will have to find clean versions of those.

This is why it will be difficult for their international business. We can do all of that, but the general user won't (or, if they're in your family, they'll ask you to). This means that the general public who buys a Huawei device without Google's insertions will end up in this situation, and they may mention this to others considering making that purchase. Only time will tell if enough notice for this to be problematic for Huawei.

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

Re: Forget the 'Osborne Effect':focus on the "Upton Effect".

These complaints are rather tenuous. The USB-C thing was a design flaw, and they should have caught it. It was not very impressive when they didn't. But it was a nondestructive design flaw that could be worked around, and they fixed it.

They have a reason for not making the OS a 64-bit one, namely they still make older pis, including the zero, which have 32-bit processors and they want it to be easy for the new customer who is probably a schoolchild to flash an OS to the pi without worrying about versions. You can dislike this reason, but it's logical from their viewpoint and they've been consistent about it. A 64-bit OS is possible from others, just not from them for the time being.

That said, it is absolutely not the case that the pi is "in its infancy". It's been around for over eight years, and we're on our sixth model (and that's not counting any of the non-B models). Even in human lifetimes, that's childhood not infancy, and as computer product lines go, that's between young adulthood and middle age. The fact that the pi is not in its infancy is one of the major reasons it is such a good product; one of the main problems with competitor products is the lack of the type of support the pi community has. Therefore, it's not fair to defend problems that are problems by claiming the product or the designers to be new at this. They're not.

Re: Power to the Pi-ple

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

Re: Power to the Pi-ple

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Acedemic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Paranoia mode on

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

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

Paranoia mode on

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

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

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

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

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

Re: poison pill time?

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

Re: The bloody obvious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: I've said it before...

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

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

Judgement

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

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

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

Re: El Reg shitty photography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Haven't we all?

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

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

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

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

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

Re: LOL

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

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

Re: Powered what?

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

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

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

Re: I have an Essential Phone

"The add on bus is unique."

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

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

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

Re: Court

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

Re: Minimum wage?

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

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

Re: Innovation?

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

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

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

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

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

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it

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

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

Re: Inevitable

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

Re: Inevitable

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Not a desktop replacement for Win 10 then

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

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

Re: Dual screen?

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

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

Re: I never understood why ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: I never understood why ...

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

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

Re: Reduce, re-used, recycle

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

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

Re: Annoying tho

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

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

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

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

"1. LEO latency sucks for FP shooters"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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