Posts by doublelayer

Embrace and kill? AppGet dev claims Microsoft reeled him in with talk of help and a job – then released remarkably similar package manager

Re: All big guys have similar attitudes

That's bad, but it's often hard to combat. Unless a patent or copyright was violated, nothing blocks someone from looking at what you did and trying to copy it. We probably wouldn't want that anyway because the big companies would be able to accuse anything that is at all similar to something they did of having seen their thing, which they're already distressingly happy to do.

This situation strikes me as similar to recent complaints by developers of open source software that cloud providers have been running their software and making money from doing so without paying them. The issue is clear and it's undesirable, but it's also unsurprising because the license terms of much of that software state quite clearly that people are allowed to do this. If I had looked at AppGet's operation and created a competitor on my own, I would not have violated anything and the author probably wouldn't be very upset with me. If MS had done the same without talking to him, he would have been more annoyed but couldn't prove much. The issue seems like a recruitment and PR fiasco given their talks with him, but it doesn't change the justification of any other actions.

Rich Communication Services: Nobody uses it, nobody wants it, but analysts reckon it's on the verge of a breakthrough

Re: Nope

Um...not really. The centralized model argument is the only good one you've made. The security of the protocol itself has been verified repeatedly, and the data available to a potentially malicious Signal server is known. We have access to the code and we can take chunks of it, including their protocol, if it suits us.

The centralization argument is a good one--we shouldn't rely on Signal's servers because they could be compromised or removed. That's a valid concern. However, the comparison here has been between Signal and RCS. RCS is also centralized. Now I can hear the arguments already--Signal runs the only servers, whereas RCS is run by multiple mobile companies. The problem being that you need your mobile company's servers to send or receive RCS messages, and you also need your recipient's provider's servers to be operational. That's two single points of failure or interference. In addition, it restricts you to using one communication mechanism to send RCS messages--no sending one over WiFi unless your mobile provider supports it, and even if they do, it takes exactly the same path after leaving your local network. Neither are decentralized.

A decentralized communication system with end-to-end encryption would be nice. The one I've used before is encrypted email, which does offer that but has some usability problems. We can use a few other options or design a new one. RCS is not it.

In addition, RCS places a lot more requirements on hardware and mobile provider support. If I have any network connection, I can send an email with encrypted contents. If I have any verifiable mobile connection at setup time and any connection later, I can send a Signal message. If I have any mobile connection on any provider worldwide, I can send an insecure SMS message. If I have a specific set of phones running on one of two providers in the U.S., I can send an RCS message. That means that, if I go to a different country and get a local number, I can still send email, SMS, and Signal, but RCS is not an option no matter what I like--I just have to wait for someone there to implement it and hope they do so with the encryption enabled, because I can neither verify what their code looks like nor bypass them.

Oh, is that so. So what I'm hearing is they added end-to-end encryption. In a build that isn't the suggested one. On two carriers in America. Who have partnered with Google to get it. Twelve years after the initial protocol was started.

Given that we've had completely functional, auditable, few-restrictions end-to-end encryption on Signal for six years and completely functional, auditable, no-restrictions, decentralized end-to-end encryption on email for at least twenty, you'll forgive me if I find the introduction of the feature in a limited beta version of a protocol that's only available for a third of one country's mobile market on specific hardware only unimpressive.

Except RCS offers basically none of those benefits. Encryption: no. Centralization: yes. It's a little decentralized because you can go through your mobile company and skip others if your recipient is also on that provider, but it's still using a relatively small set of centralized servers, and given the number of times people have demonstrated successful attacks on those servers, it's likely not private.

You want decentralized, encrypted, text communication with support for rich content, images, etc? Good news. We have that. It's called email with PGP. You can use WiFi or cellular to do that. RCS is no more secure than SMS and likely less useful or secure than most centralized chat apps.

Twitter ticks off Trump with new 'Get the facts' alert on pair of fact-challenged tweets

Re: I would pay full ticket price...

The weird versions are trying to explain what it means. Many don't seem to realize the "Congress shall make no law" part; they think that there should be no limits whatsoever. For example, all the people who get very annoyed when someone tells them to leave a private place where they have been lecturing without permission. The explanations are attempting to state this in clearer language because those people either never read the text or don't understand what it means.

Re: I would pay full ticket price...

You have to summarize the points and include a clarification that many people seem not to realize. My suggestion is this:

The first amendment means the government can't make what you say illegal, but other places can decide what you can say on their platform.

That's for the 140 character limit. If I'm allowed to go to 280, I'd include the following clearer version:

The first amendment stops the government from denying you the freedom to say or write things, but the government can still restrict your actions while you say those things and private organizations can decide what you are allowed to say when you're on their platform.

It doesn't cover the other rights granted by the amendment, but it at least gets the point of "freedom of speech" through.

cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell: Microsoft leads aged command-line interpreter out into 'maintenance mode'

Re: Microsoft only have themselves to blame

"The verbosity, though, means you can actually usually take a correct guess at the command you're after, and its parameters, without having to Google what you're attempting to achieve."

I'm glad that works for you. It doesn't work for me. I usually have no clue what a command is called, and I am often very baffled about how I'm supposed to extract parts of the results. I have to wonder if part of the reason you know these things is not that it's so clear and standard, but that you've used it enough that most things you want to do frequently you've already seen--while you may not have memorized them, you can take guesses based on having seen them before.

The problem with PowerShell is that it's intended both as a CLI system and a programming language. Not a scripting language, but a programming one. Meaning lots of things like exceptions and type confusion which can be harmful. Consider how a user interacting with it as a CLI sees certain elements. An easy example is error messages. Let's compare some error messages printed by unix tools and PowerShell commands:

Listing a nonexistent directory:

me@machine:~$ ls /doesnotexist

ls: /doesnotexist: No such file or directory

PS C:\>ls c:\doesnotexist

ls : cannot find path 'C:\doesnotexist' because it does not exist.

At line:1 char:1

+ ls c:\doesnotexist

+

+ CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (C:\doesnotexist:String) [Get-ChildItem], ItemNotFoundException

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : PathNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetChildItemCommand

Copy a file onto itself:

me@machine:~$ cp file1 file1

cp: file1 and file1 are identical (not copied).

PS C:\>copy file1 file1

Copy : Cannot overwrite the item C:\file1 with itself.

At line:1 char:1

+ copy file1 file1

+

+ CategoryInfo: WriteError: (C:\file1:String) [Copy-Item], IOException

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : CopyError,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.CopyItemCommand

Yes, the information is there. The error messages are possibly a little better, in fact. But the rest of the data is useless and it gums up the output stream. It's all there because people are expected to run these commands in scripts and catch these things. Well, let's say I'm writing a script to copy things and I want to catch the copy-onto-itself bug for some reason. What do I catch? Look at that error printout from earlier. Is it WriteError? IOException? CopyError? Which of these can I even catch? What else might cause that but not be this particular error? Is there a CopyFileOntoItselfException?

None of that is obvious. An easy method to find out is to go online. What if I don't want to? Well, on a unixy OS, I can do "man cp" for a full log or just run cp with no arguments to get a summary. What about PowerShell? Maybe just "copy" will do the trick:

PS C:\>copy

cmdlet Copy-Item at command pipeline position 1

Supply values for the following parameters:

Nope, that's not it. Might they have made a man command for me? Yes, they have. While we're on the subject, I'm noting here that the only way I can find commands is by entering their unix versions and seeing if someone at PowerShell HQ has linked them to me. While get-help is not that hard to guess, I could see several other options such as get-documentation, describe-command, show-manual, and various other things.

Let's try "man copy". It pulls up a typical man page, except the basic one doesn't really say anything. It talks quite a bit about the command being able to copy and rename a file in one command because well, duh, but it spends only a couple terse lines talking about parameters and doesn't mention errors or exceptions. There are two other views, detailed and full, and maybe one of those contains that information. Detailed doesn't. Full doesn't. Finding out that neither does takes reading long man pages with very long examples sections.

So if I want to use it as a method of launching things, I end up having to see plenty of pointless details that only matter if I'm writing programs. If I'm writing programs, I have to hunt the internet for information about what a command can do. They should start with a good CLI and build the scripting onto that, but they didn't. It shows.

Re: Strings

No, I think there are two faults: one with the programmer and one with the vendor.

The vendor's comes first: they need to make a better method of figuring out what version of things is being run. They have lots of methods, but as pointed out they don't have a specific format.

But there's also the programmer. It's pretty clear that trying to extract version information or really anything from a copyright string is bound for failure. It's not meant to include all that information. The internal string that gets rendered could be any of these:

"Microsoft Windows Version 10.0.15926536, copyright 2001-2020 Microsoft Corp"

"Microsoft Windows Version 10.0.15926536, copyright 2001-{$current_year} Microsoft Corp"

"Microsoft Windows Version 10.0.{$patch_version}, copyright 2001-2020 Microsoft Corp"

"Microsoft Windows Version {$major_version}.{$minor_version}.{$patch_version}, copyright 2001-2020 Microsoft Corp"

"Microsoft Windows Version {$version_number_string}, copyright 2001-2020 Microsoft Corp"

Or even "{$product_name} Version {$product_version_string}, copyright {$copyright_start_year}-{$current_year} {$product_vendor}"

And that's just a few of many possibilities. Relying on that isn't a good idea. It's bound to break, and I'm surprised MS did anything at all on hearing it. I'm actually surprised they did hear about it--if I had written a script and it broke, I wouldn't anticipate any assistance from them and I would have found some other method to get around it.

China to test digital version of its currency at 2022 Winter Olympics

Re: Why the uproar ?

What's different here? Well, let's check out a few things. If I'm in an oppressive country and I want to do something about it, money is quite handy. Here's what can happen now:

My friend: I'd like to start printing a lot of information that I have found and distributing that.

Me: Sounds good.

Friend: But I'm afraid that they'll figure me out when they realize my bank account has been drained right when the publications start.

Me: I'll chip in, and I have other friends who are also interested. We'll all help.

Friend: Thank you.

Me: Hands cash to friend.

Other friends: Hand cash to friend.

Friend: Goes to office supply store, buys paper and ink cartridges with cash.

Government of oppressive country: Doesn't know who bought those supplies.

With digital-only transactions, they would know. And they'd know who sent cash to my friend in the first place, meaning that we couldn't support the attempt financially without also being on the radar.

So yes, it's worse because it's China, a dictatorship. It wouldn't be good here either. We don't have to worry about our governments imprisoning us for buying paper and printing a lot, but we do have reasonable concerns about who has access to information. Information about where you spend money gives a potential criminal plenty to use to steal your money or identity, track you physically, and the like. At the moment, if you are concerned about this, perhaps because you have already become a victim of identity theft, you can stop using credit cards for much and switch to cash. With digital-only currency, you don't have that option and you will rely on the integrity of that system. In addition, if that system works like cash, there's a possibility that people will be stealing it with stolen access credentials without recourse, as it has been done previously with cryptocurrencies and stolen keys. With physical cash, criminals can only steal the amount they find--if my wallet is stolen, the criminals don't get any cash I store elsewhere.

Frontier: Yes, yes, we've filed for bankruptcy protection, but that's not stopping us giving key staff $38m in bonuses

Re: Verizon sold wire line knowing this outcome

"This article should really blame Verizon and the like for abandoning the services where they cannot make large profit."

Really? So it goes like this:

Verizon: We have some businesses that won't make a bunch of money. We want a bunch of money. Also, we probably shouldn't just turn them off because that will disconnect all our customers. Any ideas?

Employee: Sell it. Someone will want it. They'll pay us money for it, and the customers get service from that place.

Verizon: Will anyone want it?

Employee: Sure. You could make money. Someone will want to try.

Verizon: Anyone want this infrastructure?

Frontier: Yes please.

How is that blameworthy for Verizon? They didn't want something, and they found someone who did want it. While they didn't think it would be profitable, it wasn't inherently harmful--just not worth very much. If Frontier bought Verizon's infrastructure then decided to take sheers to all the cables, would that be Verizon's fault too?

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

Re: AMD Dreams

But that's not an intrinsic limit either of the instruction set or of memory. Should we need to remove that limitation, it can be done. It would require some OS code changes, but they get updated all the time so we can manage that. Current processors can't connect to that much memory anyway so any limitations would be removed by the time they can. The next limit would be 16 exabytes, which would be much harder to work around, but I figure that one is a long time off.

Contact-tracing app may become a permanent fixture in major Chinese city

Re: @Wade Burchette - Define freedom!

So Jefferson was a hypocrite about slavery, being happy to make others do it while not wanting to do it himself. What else is new? I think the inherent injustice and hypocrisy of basically all of history has been realized before. The question that now concerns us is the present, and whether we like the person who said it, the point still may have validity to the present. Similarly, we should keep in mind the failings of people in the past so we don't repeat them. In this situation, for example, we would be keeping in mind that freedom for some didn't mean freedom for all, so we should be very careful to ensure that everyone gets the benefits we create or maintain now.

Home working is here to stay, says Lenovo boss, and will grow the total addressable PC market by up to 30%

Re: NUCs & Similar

Monitors, definitely. Minidesktops, I doubt it. I think laptops connected to monitors is the way they will go and probably the right one too. The reasons are many.

First, a laptop is likely more useful for the user. Work is most effective at a specific place with full-sized peripherals, but a laptop allows that person to move to a different place if they need to. If their previous office is unavailable or noisy, they can relocate to a different part of their house (assuming they have one available). This also makes it easy for them to bring their machine elsewhere for those occasional in-person events or meetings. Not to mention the benefits of the built-in UPS.

It also benefits the employer. By providing a laptop, they can push several potential costs back onto their employee. They don't have to buy the monitor if they're feeling miserly, nor do they have to spend IT support time on getting peripherals to connect. Laptops are more likely to use a generic power adapter which can be sourced quickly if damaged, which could be useful if the WFH trend leads to WFH from further distances.

Re: I have to say I'm with Lenovo on this

I don't think that's necessarily the case. Not allowing WFH when it is feasible is certainly annoying, but forcing it can be equally if not more so. And there are times when it isn't a good idea, such as when frequent collaboration is required, where physical proximity helps quite a bit. I would actually not be surprised to hear that the least human of bosses try to push WFH when they realize that it doesn't really lead to the decrease in productivity they previously predicted. It allows them to push the costs they had to pay back on the workers, primarily real estate. When they get to pocket some of that cost saving, lots will consider it.

Re: All this talk....

I think you just pointed out that many offices have people who produce useful things. Lots of work is done without manually building things and yet is useful. Design, programming, architecture, research, writing, and many other things can be done from a typical office environment. If you're just considering the location, much of small-scale engineering counts too--initial prototype creation and small-scale repair often occurs in offices that have big tables with equipment on, but they're still basically offices. Sure, lots of people there will be doing nothing, but you can find a way to be unproductive anywhere you go.

Home working leads to more laptops

They seem quite confident about home working leading to increased sales of machines. Ignoring for the moment how home working will catch on, I'm not certain about the other chunk of that. Sure, some companies will have to change out computers for home workers, because they did desktops and would have to switch to laptops. But if a worker already has a laptop from their employer, they don't need to replace it. Also, I'm guessing most businesses that will be switching to home work have already done so, meaning the first round of obligatory laptop purchases probably started two months ago and is ongoing. That implies that this quarter's sales may be somewhat high, but that it probably won't be a longterm trend because a lot of other companies won't be buying new machines or replacements until the ones they're using more actively are much older.

Maybe Lenovo was hoping for more personal purchases because children have been doing online schooling while their parents use existing machines, but those purchases have also likely been made and online schooling is not going to continue as long as home working. I think their optimism may be premature and they'd better make quite a bit of progress in this quarter if they hope to hit that growth target.

Re: Market +30% = wages -30%

All of that is going to have to balance itself against the profound distrust our employers have for us. I think the main reason that hasn't become much of a thing so far is that a lot of employers are afraid we won't be as productive or as conscientious when not in their office. Let's see whether this period at home is enough to kill that idea or if they are eager to get us back there. Either way, it will be a disappointing option for several. I would prefer the office, but I also prefer that people have the choice if feasible.

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

Re: Yes, Daily, or even hourly!

I think I know why companies stopped writing manuals. At some point, they must have realized that, with their manuals online, I could download them before a purchase to do research on what their product could do and how complicated the process was. No, they want me to figure out those things only after the purchase, which led to the new idea of refusing to publish the manuals and only including a paper copy with their product. But then, people started scanning those and uploading them, so what more could they do? They just had to stop making the manuals. I'll still figure out how the feature works, won't I? Surely I'll keep buying things without any idea what they do or how.

Escape is sadly rarely an option.

ESC, however, is surprisingly often an effective option. I think that's why it's over in the corner of the keyboard, to make it easier to press by someone looking over the user's shoulder.

Re: ID10T error

Helping the user understand what went wrong and how to have it not go wrong next time is very useful. However, even if the tech was busy and just wanted to do a quick solution, let me show you how the workaround would have gone.

Tech: "Right. Now instead of using this email, I want to try loading the program the normal way."

User: "But I'm supposed to use the new version. It's coming out now."

Tech: "Let's just try it."

User: Opens old program.

Old program: Works.

User: "This one works, but it's the old version. I'm supposed to use the new one."

Tech: "No, use that one. The other one isn't ready yet."

User: "The email says it's ready. They sent it to me because it's ready."

Tech: "No, they want you to use this one. They're just showing you what it will be like."

User: "I don't think that's right. You don't write this program; you're tech support. Trust me on this one. I use this program all the time."

Tech: "Trust me. The program you can open normally is the right one."

User: "Maybe you should discuss that with my boss, but he's not here. I'll get his boss."

Tech: "No, I don't need to talk to"

Tech: "Wait. Come back. No, really, it's just a minor"

Door: Closes behind user.

Minutes: Pass slowly.

Customers in line: Look angrily at tech.

Door: Opens. User comes back.

User: "This is the manager of my boss. She will tell you about the program update."

Manager: "What's the problem?"

Tech: "There will be a program update but the user thinks it was released now. They're trying to run a screenshot."

Conversation: Forks here. If manager is clueless you can end up in a loop. We will proceed on the fork where the manager knows what a screenshot is.

Manager: "I see. Can I see the message, please?"

User: Shows message to manager.

Manager: "Ah. You see here where the update is said to be coming out soon, but not yet?"

User: Yes.

Manager: "And this attachment is a picture ..."

Manager: Continues to explain situation to user.

Manager: Now annoyed at tech for not doing this themselves.

Isn't it a lot easier just to solve the situation well with a useful explanation that will probably prevent it in the future as well? Workarounds only work if the user understands why they're doing the workaround. They can cut out several contingent explanations, but if you provide no reason for your alternate suggestion, people will think you're just winging it and you don't really know what you're doing.

Re: Yes, Daily, or even hourly!

In all fairness, they did read that screen and they did what it said. Apple didn't say anything about why the app didn't work and told them to go talk to you. They did that. There's little the user could do at that stage; either you would have to update your app, Apple would have to reverse their 64-bit only decision, or they would have to downgrade their OS. The latter option isn't really an option because that's a lot to ask, plus the error message didn't tell them to do so.

To test its security mid-pandemic, GitLab tried phishing its own work-from-home staff. 1 in 5 fell for it

Very much this. It's really important for us and basically everyone else to realize that, while a lot of phishing emails that have come in and will continue to come in are terrible and obvious, there can and will be more sophisticated ones. It takes longer to get the logos into the right place, make the login page work the same, get text checked for spelling, grammar, and naturalness, and do the work behind other links in the message that a user might check for authentication, but that work can be done. I've seen several not bad attempts. None of us is immune to a message crafted well enough.

The problems are email and people. Email can be modified to do some things. No impersonation is a good start. Wouldn't help in this case--they didn't impersonate, they used a valid misleading domain. Showing link contents before going somewhere would be nice. Probably wouldn't help in this case. Subsetting HTML so it's harder to do visual tricks would probably annoy a lot of people, but some of those people are the people who send multimegabyte messages overloaded with logos, so I'm fine with it. Probably wouldn't help in most cases because if everyone can't do it, and scammers can't do it, then they still look the same.

In the end, someone has to decide whether to click the link or not. The email system can try to point out potential problems, but automatic means can't block everything malicious. While email needs some updates, it can't and won't fix stupid user syndrome.

Re: Not bad? Users? Policy?

I disagree--HR is HR, and whether it's tech or something else, they're going to have knowledge of HR matters and probably not much else; HR doesn't really need to know anything about the product as long as they can understand when people are doing something wrong. What I don't know is who these people were who received the messages. If only fifty went out, it could be basically any subset, as wikipedia estimates they have about 1200 employees.

If it's fifty people in HR, sales, and finance, it's regrettable but not that surprising to me. If it's fifty developers, we have a major problem.

Mind your language: Microsoft set to swing the axe on 27 languages in iOS Outlook

Re: Words will be said

Well, 2% of India's massive phone market can be quite a few devices. Not quite 55 million, but still a large chunk. Several countries whose languages are supported aren't that big. I don't see Danish (population of Denmark 5.81 million), Czech (population of Czechia 10.7 million), or Greek (population of Greece plus population of Cyprus 12.04 million) being removed from the supported lists, even though by most potential arguments those make more sense. Not all of those people use Outlook on IOS either, and in all four of those countries, a large section of the population is likely to speak another language, primarily German or English, which would remain supported.

Speakers of the removed languages may also speak English, Hindi, Spanish, or Russian but not necessarily. Certain other languages, such as Tagalog, are not associated with multilingualism with a supported language; while English and Spanish are spoken in the Philippines, the lingua franca in many areas is Tagalog, with people being bilingual in that and their native tongue.

I doubt that. If they did the translations for Windows usage, they would have all the data needed to keep up translations for IOS too. It doesn't take much effort. If they're dropping it here, they're likely dropping it everywhere where Outlook is run. Even if they split up the decision, I can't see them leaving IOS untranslated but all other platforms functional.

Re: Apple is going to write off all ...

It sounds like the interface will no longer be translated into those languages, but you can still type in them. Similar to how I can type any language I want even while my mail client continues to use its previous localization. While I can well sort of, no actually it doesn't make sense. I was going to give them some leeway on a few languages that aren't spoken by very many people who almost all speak another language anyway, but they've got some very large languages on that list. They were able to afford that before, they can continue to.

For the price tag, this iPad Pro keyboard better damn well be Magic: It isn't... but it's not completely useless either

Re: Because ... it’ll just work : Nope

I don't think that was agreement. What I heard there was that yes, Apple devices last quite a while, but so do other machines, so there's not much difference, so the higher prices aren't justified on that alone. The point of disagreement is that you claim that Apple devices will likely last longer, whereas the reply claims they will both last quite a long time, and probably a similarly long time.

Not that I necessarily agree, as there are many Apple devices that seem to get support for longer over some of the most well-known competitors, but I too have seen very functional devices from all sorts of manufacturers that continue to function for long after they were purchased. If hardware is treated well, including good management or at least replacement of its software from time to time, they usually keep working for longer than the average user expects. I do give Apple some credit for some of their devices, the easiest example being IOS devices getting several OS updates whereas Android is just getting to having some likelihood of security updates, but in other cases Apple has proven themselves to not be so interested in device longevity, including their battery fiasco and making everything less repairable as the years go on.

AT&T tracked its own sales bods using GPS, secretly charged them $135 a month to do so, lawsuit claims

Re: Telekom

Their salespeople are often happy to talk to you if you're a possible customer, but the conversation often goes like this:

Me: I'm considering your internet service for my house.

Them: Great.

Me: Can I get a static IP?

Them: We don't normally include that unless you want a business plan. I can transfer you to that team if you like.

Me: I've already got an IPV6 block. Can you route that traffic to me?

Them: What?

Me: Never mind. Do you have any statistics about latency?

Them: No.

Me: I'm not asking for a guarantee or SLA. I'm just looking for a basic estimate.

Them: Sorry. I don't know what that means and I don't think we have that.

Me: Can I bring my own network equipment?

Them: Sure. Just plug anything into the router.

Me: I already have my own router. Do I need to go through yours?

Them: Er ... not sure.

Me: Well, I would like to sign up now. [Previous research has shown me that few of these questions are answered online either]

Them: Great. Would you also like home phone service? It's not much more per month...

This applies to any provider. After a couple of these, you just give up on asking others.

Re: Telekom

I've definitely found that with corporate versus personal sales. At a very basic level, the amount of information and control about the product or service is significantly higher when it's a company buying it. With corporate internet service, I get information about the type of line, the expected bandwidth, the expected latency, firewall rules and how I can turn them all off, IP addresses and what I need to do to get statics, full manual for the supplied or suggested modem if I use it, freedom not to use their equipment. With the exact same company, home service looks like "Up to 100 MB/s" [I'm not sure if "MB" as opposed to "Mb" 's a typo or a deliberate lie). I've had a home ISP who had unremovable firewall rules on outbound traffic, and they were one of the best. I think it happens with nearly every other product as well. Oligopoly power is fun, isn't it?

Hey Siri, are you still recording people's conversations despite promising not to do so nine months ago?

That wouldn't surprise me. Unfortunately, it's not just Apple doing this. Amazon and Google were both caught keeping databases of this stuff and they're almost certainly still doing it. Microsoft probably doesn't have a database because who uses Cortana, but it's probably worth checking anyway. Only Apple, to my knowledge, has any level of disclosure about capturing and sending out the data with an opt out switch that, well I don't know whether it does anything, but it's there. People are going to have to learn that data is stored and analyzed and monetized and published and leaked and they should probably care. So far, they don't seem to have figured that out.

FCC boss pleads with Congress: Please stop me from auctioning off this spectrum for billions of dollars

Re: No real danger

You're absolutely right. No, I don't want that. Unfortunately, they've already started to do that. It is, for example, the FCC's responsibility to identify the companies selling location information from mobile providers, which is illegal. It is their responsibility to investigate those places and fine them, and it is their responsibility to collect those fines. They have instead chosen to ... do nothing. If they are already placing themselves above that law, I don't see a reason they'd balk at placing themselves above another law.

Re: So it's actually more of the same

I'm not that knowledgeable about this band, but I've just done some searching about who currently uses it. Sure, there are emergency services on the list. It seems mostly to be extra capacity needed in urban areas, but not their main bands. However, I note one other user, American UHF channels 14-20. Maybe it's me being paranoid, but I'm wondering about that television company that has been so linked to this director before. I wonder how many stations they have using those channels and how expensive it would be to move them. That will probably require more research, but it might explain some of the vehemence.

With millions upon millions out of work in the US, here come the scammers claiming victims' unemployment money using stolen info

Re: Scammers are an infamia

I have had plans where, while you didn't pay for calls directly, you had a time limit after which you would have to start paying. Incoming calls would not count against that limit until you had been on them for at least a minute, but then the clock would start to count down. I think you can still get such a plan here, but I haven't had one like that in a decade. I think it's mostly still available for those who prefer lower bills, because mine is higher than it has a right to be.

Re: Scammers are an infamia

While I tend not to actively interact with their call by pressing a number to talk with one of their agents, I frequently leave the call connected and wait for their automatic system to hang up. Depending on how complex their setup is, it may have a limit to number of concurrent calls (or better yet, they may pay by the minute). Since incoming calls are free on my plan, I am happy to let them keep talking. Back when they had an Eliza program handling the first stages and would call me once a week to test it out, I used to have it play against a simple program I wrote to read out random sentences whenever the bot stopped talking. Sadly, they seem to have stopped and now the only calls I get ask me to press one and hang up after two or three repeats of their recording.

Dutch spies helped Britain's GCHQ break Argentine crypto during Falklands War

It's a classic trust balancing act. When we are worried about someone else, we value intelligence actions against them, and politicians who disrupt it are doing harm. When we aren't afraid of someone else, we become alert that the intelligence actions are being aimed at us and people we like, so we now want politicians to disrupt them. There is a perfect solution to this: only have politicians who are trustworthy and understand the point--if the actions are warranted, they don't say anything, whereas if the actions are harmful or unjust, the whistle is blown thoroughly. As with every other perfect solution to anything, this one too is completely impossible. Instead, we have politicians doing their best to ensure that we are afraid of someone in order to support intelligence requests which don't actually serve to benefit those politicians. Meanwhile, intelligence collection systems blatantly lie about obvious things even though they have a robust political bulwark, meaning that nobody trusts them. Why they go to such efforts is anyone's guess.

Broken your new Surface Go 2 already? Looks like it's a bit more repairable this time

Re: I suspect not

I agree that sentence is unclear. I looked at the source. The cameras seem to come out just fine. See approximately 51% through the video to see it. Not that that part is particularly important, but the sentence break should have been after the "along with the cameras" chunk. Probably the clearest phrasing would be "The Micro SDXC socket and cameras can be removed easily, but the other components cannot."

If you're appy and you know it: The Huawei P40 Pro conclusively proves that top-notch specs aren't everything

Re: reviewer uses Google extensively

Unless they changed their mind yesterday, the bootloader is locked and I haven't seen anyone successfully break it. So if you get this, you have to accept the Huawei flavor of non-Googled AOSP. That's why I'm not that excited about this--I dislike Google too, but I don't see much benefit in running equally unwanted Huawei code.

Re: If you are desperate for Mountain Views spyware

I'm glad that works for you. I've used it as well, although not that often. My experience has been less reliable. Some apps work perfectly. Some are tagged as GSF-dependent but also seem to work fine, but I'm just waiting for a problem. Many others that have been tried work only to request their permissions, then keel over. For me, that's almost always fine. I rarely need an app urgently, and I can usually find an alternative. Also, I know what is happening. I don't think the general public is in a similar situation. If their experience of using a client such as this, assuming someone installs it for them, is that half the apps they want* crash immediately, they won't be that impressed. That would restrict the market for Huawei devices outside of China to two small subsets of the population: 1) Technical people who probably don't want Google anyway and know how to get around it and 2) people who just don't use many apps.

*The estimate of half is quite rough, but I think it's actually higher. Many in the public are big users of social media apps or games, and I think both are likely to make heavy use of Google's APIs. I haven't done a test because I use neither category.

Re: Flashy

Oh, it looked like that to me too. I prefer my phones ungoogled, which I mostly get via Lineage OS. So having a manufacturer that doesn't include the Google layer...it sounded like quite the helpful approach. I wouldn't have to wait for a device to become supported. I wouldn't have to build the image myself. I wouldn't get the choices I get with Lineage OS. Uh-oh.

There's the rub. I want Google off my phone because I like the certainty that I'm not being tracked by software I don't have control over. Huawei has removed the Google-specific layer. They have instead added their own layer, and I can't trust it, and I can't remove it. All I have now is two choices for whose untrusted and unverifiable software is preloaded. I will have to go to similar lengths to get rid of it, but unlike certain phones that ship with Google's apps preinstalled (Xiaomi's devices, for example), I have little hope that Huawei will ever let me reflash it. Why should I consider this a benefit? Code that I didn't want and can't trust, but would be generally useful if I had to use it has been removed and replaced with code I still don't want and can't trust but is by most reviews less useful.

You can't have it both ways: Anti-coronavirus masks may thwart our creepy face-recog cameras, London cops admit

Re: A solution occurs to me

Yes, for the record if anyone is unsure, my preceding comment was intended as humor. But if some piece of equipment has to be destroyed by idiots, I have a preference as to which type they go after.

A solution occurs to me

Hey you conspiracy theory people--sorry, I mean truth-knowers, you've made a mistake. 5G isn't causing the COVID outbreak. No, really. Look at the deployment maps. The masts you're burning are almost all 4G ones, and we've had 4G for quite a while, so that can't be doing it. You know what's new, having been set up right before this started happening and in London, where the U.K. has the most cases? That's right, a bunch of facial recognition cameras. Well, that's what they say they are. All you need is a few devices out there spreading contagion for it to spread from there. These are evil disease-causing equipment. Just look at the facts. You were burning the wrong things. Hint hint.

Note: Obviously, this is untrue. The facts don't support that at all. It'd be ridiculous to think of this. Even these people are intelligent enough to realize this fallacious argument. [Truth-knowers, don't trust the person who put this footnote in my comment.]

Better late than never... Google Chrome to kill off 'tiny' number of mobile web ads that gobble battery, CPU power

Re: How about no execution whatsoever?

No autoplaying videos, but if they want to embed a clip into the ad so I can choose to view it after reading their text, that's fine. I won't be doing it, but it's fine if they choose to. HTML5 has support for it already, so I have no problem killing their JS rights.

Re: Bugger AdBlock, it's Internet advertising that's theft.

That point is relevant, and I imagine you'll find many who won't accept it, but the analogy still applies. In the case of a collect call from a telemarketing system, they are undoubtedly paying for the line capacity, the phone, the person talking, and for any call where the other party doesn't accept the charges. That fact doesn't make the theoretical practice any less odious. In occasions where the data usage is very extreme, I think there's reasonable grounds for complaint. Not that it would do anything, but nonetheless reasonable.

Recently

"We have recently discovered that a fraction of a percent of ads consume a disproportionate share of device resources, such as battery and network data, without the user knowing about it," (Marshall Vale)

This is great news. It isn't that Google just doesn't care and will allow anything through as long as they stand to get some money out of it. They just have a six to eight-year latency period on realizing really obvious things. And here was I thinking that they were ignoring these things on purpose. Fantastic, really. If this pattern holds, we might see the following headlines in the future:

2020: Google recently discovered that Android updates are important, and they need to do something to ensure people get them where they punish noncompliant manufacturers.

2021: Google recently found out that malware embedded in ads is concerning.

2022: Google has become aware following a bit of research that Android users would like extra security in their mobile operating system.

2023: Google recently discovered that, if you have a motto that tells you not to be evil, and you cancel that motto, it sounds really bad.

2024: Google realized not long ago that people seem to care a bit about their privacy.

2025: It has come to Google's attention that people are worried about their copying of certain information without compensating the people they copied it off, and maybe someone should come up with a method that uses neither the crazy suggestions of the original publishers or of Google.

2026: Google has come to the conclusion that becoming the market leader in product obsolescence might not be the nicest thing to do to their customers.

Xiaomi Mi 9 owners furious after dodgy Vodafone software patch bricked their mobes

Re: I'm curious

The updates released by carriers are just placed on the carrier's servers, with the phone locked in some way to only get updates from those servers. You can contact those servers however you want, though. If you have a carrier-locked device that you didn't connect to their network, it still gets updates*.

*It actually doesn't get any updates, but that's because the carrier never releases any. If they ever did release one, your phone could download it and install whatever bugs it contains with no difficulty.

Re: Worse than that

That's great. But that's because Xiaomi has decided to be nice. The point being that neither Google nor the carrier (I'm assuming this was not associated with a carrier) care at all about providing you updates. Any credit there is for maintaining the phone this far goes to Xiaomi. There is such credit to go out, but not because this is a very long time. Just because most of the competition is lamentably bad at it.

Stop tracking me, Google: Austrian citizen files GDPR legal complaint over Android Advertising ID

Corruption is a good consideration, but you don't fix corruption at high government levels with detailed data collection on the average citizen. In fact, that gives you extra methods to maintain corruption, because people might only get privacy if they have sufficient connections, and they now have a massive database which can be sold to lots of people with cash to spend.

You attribute totalitarianism to revolution, and you're often correct. However, it doesn't always work that way. There have been many countries where someone came to power in an election that was somewhat democratic (sometimes with a lot of voter intimidation, but not always), but then turned the country into a totalitarian nightmare. The European example that is most well-known is Italy. Examples can be found elsewhere though, from early 1900s Japan to modern-day Venezuela. The dictators who eventually became beyond democratic removal were able to do that by leveraging powers of previous governments. That's one reason we want lots of limits on governments, but it's not enough to relocate those powers to a business or military area, because then you've just moved the problem around. Tracking citizens would be very useful to a dictatorship, as you've pointed out and as countries like China prove every day.

In my opinion, what leads to totalitarianism is access to power. If a revolution creates a power vacuum, then it is now easier to take over, so people will try. If you destroy a country, there will be a lot of displeasure, meaning that power is easier to get with popular support, so people will try. And if you make the government or anything else all-powerful, then you have increased the potential rewards of controlling that thing, so people will try.

Re: In all honesty

"I would rather no one knew what i was browsing or buying and i definitely do NOT want targed ads. Infact i do not want ANY Adds."

I don't like ads either. You and I are perfectly within our rights to try to avoid ads. However, it's quite a hard argument to make that advertising itself violates our rights. If we get everybody to agree, we can try, but I am not going to put much effort into an anti-advertising push. I will put that energy into anti-tracking policy, though, because that causes a lot more harm to everybody and is already legally dubious. The result may be that there are still ads, but they are tailored only to the current environment or to small amounts of data you've knowingly decided to let the advertisers use. Should we get that, I would view it as a profound victory.

Re: In all honesty

I agree, and I think my previous restrictions implement that. Namely, the retailer can record the shopping history of people and associate it with the account, but they cannot release that information and they cannot further track. It would be nice for them to offer accountless purchases, but even if they choose not to, a person can get anonymous shopping by setting up multiple accounts. Well, they can get untracked shopping; buying online is almost intrinsically attached to some identifiers because you have to pay and cash doesn't work and you have to get delivery of anything physical.