Posts by doublelayer

AI can't help without your data, says Gartner, so share, share, share!

Yargh

"Uber "knowing" from your calendar that you needed a lift from the airport"

I could just call my car, whatever service I use, from the airport, and wait five minutes. Alternatively, maybe they could add a feature of their app that lets me enter my flight number and queues a car to the airport based on landing. I could, you know, choose when to activate it and they wouldn't need to read my calendar to get it done.

"If you haven't changed your car insurance there should be easier and more effective ways of doing that. But that only happens if you share your data."

If insurance companies weren't basically evil, we would stick with one of them and they have that convenient one-question renew form. Other providers make it more difficult because we haven't used them before. Fix that first. No data required.

This will allow smartphones to be more trusted than other credentials, such as credit cards, passports, IDs or keys," Atwal concludes.

If that's the case, then the government that produces the passports and IDs is doing it wrong. The credit card companies are going to go to great extents to avoid fraud, too, so I doubt that. Finally, I have never seen people use keys as identification. Access, yes, but never identification.

"You've got to make your own PC - plug in a screen, keyboard and mouse," he said. "In terms of ecosystems it's evolved or developed enough."

Your AI is going to plug in my keyboard for me? That's brilliant! That'll save me a whole five seconds, that will!

Microsoft Office 365 and Azure Active Directory go TITSUP*

Re: FIVE NINES!!!!!

Here is some basic math that won't give you a perfectly accurate answer, but close enough.

If we assume that this lasted 3 hours, and that the system has been fine for this year, then we have (31+28+31+5)=95 days = 2280 hours of successful operation, not counting any of today. Therefore, we currently have (2280/2283)=99.869% uptime. We want it up to 99.999, meaning we need a total of (3/0.00001)=300000 hours of successful uptime. We already have 2280, so we need 297720 more hours, that's 34 years. That changes if the outage was not exactly 3 hours, but more so if we get to count last year's performance. I don't operate an office365 system, but another poster said this was the first outage in 28 months. We'll knock off 4 months for my calculation of this year. That still moves them up to a current performance of 99.985% and their additional no-downtime required down to 32 years.

So they don't really have a chance for five nines, but they definitely make three and four is almost guaranteed. I might not consider this for extremely critical things, especially if there's a risk for disconnection from the network on my end, but their infrastructure performance is not bad so far. Let's see how long it is until the next major outage. If it happens really soon or takes forever to fix, I'll consider dropping my semi-endorsement of the system. For now, I think they're fine.

An easy-breezy attitude to sharing personal data is the only thing keeping the app economy alive

Re: Devil's advocate

I get your point, but I don't really want the required data to be known by the advertisers. By extension, I am willing to accept that the ads will primarily be pointless to me. Since I haven't had many useful ads show up, that's not super new.

For example, I am willing to accept amazon's suggestions. I mostly ignore them, but I'm willing for that targeting to happen because:

a. The data is data I knowingly gave them. It's based on things I bought from them and nothing else. If I wanted, I could not buy some things from them to mess up the data, or even just buy them from a local establishment. I chose amazon, so they have the right in my mind to remember what I bought from them and suggest things to me. Equally, I have the right to ignore them, which I do most of the time. The same is true of your local grocer--they may remember what you like or what you've talked about, but if they tracked you to your holiday destination, watched you enjoy some fresh fruit, then used that knowledge to tell you about the fruit they had available, you'd find that creepy even if you did want to buy that fruit.

b. They don't track me around. Even if I'm signed in to my amazon account, they don't have sneaky little code pieces running all over the place to see what I'm doing outside their system (as far as I know). I'm relatively confident that, by signing out and clearing data, that anything sneaky they do is going to fail. I'm also trusting them not to be buying information on me that other companies stole.

c. The advertisements aren't intrusive; they're on amazon and nowhere else. If I go to a different page, they don't follow me (ads from other things will follow me from my amazon page, but that's because google/facebook ad networks tracked me there, not because of amazon).

d. To the best of my knowledge, they aren't packaging up that data and selling it to other people. I assume they aren't doing this because it seems to me that that might hurt their business (if I'm buying from someone else, I'm not buying from amazon).

I'm sure amazon does lots of evil things, and I limit their entrance as much as I can. However, none of those points apply to other sites. Google and facebook do significantly more creepy things to get my data, like attempting to track my browsing, buying information on me as I don't have an account for facebook, and copying information others who know me can provide. I have little control on what they do, any control I do have requires me to change things I do often (for example, not using google search), and I have no clue how much info they have, nor what info that is, nor what they are doing with it.

I hope this is helpful in understanding how I think about this.

My Tibetan digital detox lasted one morning, how about yours?

Re: Dabsy, I disagree about your choice of phone.

I will grant you that feature phones have their place, and for me that place is in the pocket of everyone who prefers them. However, those people who come to the conclusion that feature phones are the best because they don't like what other people do with their smartphones, so I shouldn't have my smartphone on me most of the time are the problem. A smartphone provides me with tools I may require that a feature phone doesn't; for example, I can find my way if I get lost using my GPS package on my smartphone, but a feature phone won't help. If I can ask directions, then I'm fine, but if I am out late and still need to go somewhere, the GPS app is, in my experience, the better way to get that done.

Incidentally, although I'm sure the arthritic would experience many accessibility benefits from a feature phone, the blind and visually impaired have almost entirely moved to smartphones, primarily the iPhone (as android's accessibility has been pretty terrible for a while). The smartphones allow them to do things that a feature phone does not make accessible. For example, dialing a call is simple on one but just try to find a good way to scroll down a contact list, as pretty much no feature phone will read the item you've focused on. The same applies to reading SMS messages, not to mention that many of them also find the other features helpful as well.

Spring is all about new beginnings, but it could already be lights out for Windows' Fluent Design

Re: Microsoft’s business models require stealing and reselling personal data

I can see from the downvotes that my dislike for the repetition of this is not shared by others. However, I would like to hear from one of those, if they can, why it is relevant here, as there isn't any privacy or security-related element in this post? I'm not trying to say the spirit of repeating this quote is wrong, but that it still seems irrelevant to the topic at hand. I also have seen it on about twenty other windows 10 posts, as well, and despite my minority-of-one status, I am willing to not see it on each proceeding post as well.

Re: Microsoft’s business models require stealing and reselling personal data

Cut that out. That quote isn't relevant here. It's a useful and revealing quote, which is why we all read it when they said it. Those who didn't see it have seen it in these posts on the comment threads. It's somewhat relevant to things that discuss microsoft's data slurp. It would be irritating then, too, because we have seen it already, but it's even more so here because their data slurp is not related to how and where they put stuff on the screen. No relevance at all. Also, you're making us dislike you. Please stop.

Mozilla rejects your reality and substitutes its own … browser for VR and AR goggles

Why do all the companies think we want VR everywhere?

It seems as if every company has some type of VR system in the works or deployed. Other than games, I can't see much of a reason for it. Sure, you could probably do an efficient workload with simulated workstations instead of a lot of real ones, but that's just a display technology, not really VR. I like reality--if the thing I need is there, then I can use it, and if the thing I need isn't there, then I need to go get it. Pretending that it's there only works if I can successfully pretend to use it, which basically only works for interfaces to things that are smaller than the interface we want to simulate. Most such interfaces just include a small screen where the controls are put and we deal with that pretty well or we buy the other version that has the standard controls as traditional. I'll be charitable and say that that is a good use case, despite my doubts. Other than those two, is there any other reason to spend time and money on making more VR stuff?

One solution to wreck privacy-hating websites: Flood them with bogus info using browser tools

Re: Mutant 59

>>so they might make a system to make those results that you see now and immediately realize won't be useful more enticing

>All good points and I'm inclined to agree, but that one remark made me think "Isn't that what they do already anyway?" After all, Google is the ultimate clickbait engine - it's up to me to get my site//page listed at the top their rankings by whatever means necessary because very few people search beyond the first page of results and mine had, therefore, be pretty damn eye-catching.

My point was more that, if you paid google every time you clicked on a result (in order to avoid paying them for lots of useless searches), they would make all the results that showed up look good. Right now, it is the responsibility of the person doing SEO to make their search relevant. Google messes up a lot, but usually you can scan through things that aren't relevant and find the one most likely to be useful. This applies even if you just look at the first ten results from the search; I can tell that the page from the Department of Agriculture that will let me eventually download the 2014 crop report for North Dakota is not what I need if I just want the statistics on economic performance of resource extraction industries with a focus on the oil market, even if the report contains the phrase "increasing wages in the oil sector" which convinced google that it was relevant.

In a world where google makes money on my clicks, they have an incentive to make that search result useful. It will start with the helpful cause of defeating SEO and actually having more relevant searches, but it will extend to making things look better than they are. They could have a system to look at my query and only have things that they know are connected in the previews. In my previous example, the phrases "Department of Agriculture" and "Crop Report" are going to alert me that I don't need to click. Google could identify that those phrases aren't very connected to my query, so they just don't put them in the preview. Now I just have a page that looks technical and comes from a government website with "increasing wages in the oil sector" in my preview, so it will look like what I want. Then I click on it and find out what it is, so I immediately leave the page. Google doesn't care; at that point, they got my click.

Re: Mutant 59

I'm also worried that making a lot of sites nonfree might deny access to some people. For example, children don't often get credit cards until they are quite old, but they are capable of reading and understanding news stories well before that. I found the free ad-supported news to be a good way to become knowledgeable when I was young, but asking my parents for permission for each article or site I visited, especially when some were junk, would have been annoying enough that I just wouldn't have read as much. Reading all that news and related information in my adolescence has, I hope, made me a more knowledgeable adult and I always recommend that interested children do so as well. Similarly with email, as I'm from a generation where we had that but we didn't have cell phones while we were young. Sometimes I need to send an email that says "No, but I'll be there tomorrow." Charging that one sentence at the same level as any other message, especially to a child or someone whose main mode of communication is email, is pretty ridiculous.

I'm also worried about the evolution of nonfree micropayments. If the system is to pay for each article consumed (I'm sticking with the newspaper example here), the paper might choose to have tiny articles that you get through very fast, or articles that don't explain anything "The CLOUD Act was [passed by congress], and [does all the stuff we said it would] and has been used as a solution for [this court case that caused it to be passed]. Here's the new component, but if you want any background, you'll just have to read those articles we just linked to. If you would like to see senatorial responses to the CLOUD act's passage, consider these articles: [Wyden (D OR) on CLOUD act], [Paul (R KY) on spending bill], [McConnell (R KY) on spending bill], [Schumer (D NY) on spending bill], ..."

Alternatively, if the price is subscription based, then the paper has no reason to have good articles most of the time, as long as they have a good enough article once in a while. Leaving the newspaper example, google might have an incentive to make sure that your searches aren't great, just so long as they can be better than bing and duckduckgo. If it takes you three times as many searches, then they get three times the money. If they changed the policy so that they only get paid when you find something and click on it, then they will have an incentive to make sure you find a lot of things that all look pretty good, so they might make a system to make those results that you see now and immediately realize won't be useful more enticing. Also, they would not want to show you any more preview than they need, so my recent search to confirm that "Wyden" was the correct spelling of the senator's name would not have put that up on top like it was.

At least with free things you have the option to determine what is good and stop using what is not. With everything being paid, not only is a lot of stuff harder to set up and manage but there are lots of ways it can go wrong. Those who charge less or nothing will be abnormal, and can use that to attract attention ("New York Times charges $0.02 per article; imagine how that builds up if you read it every day. Look at this! Russia Today is free. We could just read that.").

For some reason, you lot love 'em. So here are the many ThinkPads of 2018

Re: @Snorlax

Ah. So you're those people who use that. I'm actually quite happy to hear that, because I've hated those things forever. I never use them, but they like to send my cursor to random places when I'm typing quickly, and because I'm typing quickly, I don't notice instantly. I've even gone to the extent of removing it from the device's drivers, if I can without causing additional damage as sometimes it's connected to the normal mouse. I haven't found a person who says they like them, so I always considered it useless. At least there are some people for which that's a useful device. I find them more acceptable now.

Cloudflare touts privacy-friendly 1.1.1.1 public DNS service. Hmm, let's take a closer look at that

Re: Freenom's front page...

They're those people who keep pushing their free top-level domains so they can randomly revoke yours and sell it to an advertiser. Fortunately, I never set mine up because the system was broken at the time and I got to the point of refreshing the page to see if any of the controls would work. Then I went and bought another domain. So I'm not going to use their DNS.

Block blocked: Google to banish cryptominers from Chrome Web Store

Re: These people have made cryptocurrencies too annoying to use

Exactly. My point was that windows defender deciding that the monero binaries were malware was pointless because no cryptominer would use them. Ergo anyone with them would be using them for their intended purposes.

These people have made cryptocurrencies too annoying to use

I wasn't very interested in cryptocurrencies in the first place, but I downloaded the monero system to see how well it worked. It turns out that windows defender blocks the executables as malware, because cryptominers might use them, I guess. That would be rather ridiculous, because that requires you to download the full blockchain before you can start, and that takes 42gb of storage and network. I have no clue what they have in there to make it take that much. My main point of this digression, though, was to say that using the basic monero tools to mine wouldn't work very well for the malware people. My main point outside the digression is to say that monero, at least, has reached the point where it is too annoying for me to want to use it.

It works a bit better on linux systems, which I checked after the initial windows test on the laptop I had with me, but it still requires a ton of storage and network, which means it will take hours to initiate. Sure it's secure, but annoying enough that the idealotheorists who like to predict economies operating on cryptocurrencies should try to come up with a better solution.

Intel outside: Apple 'prepping' non-Chipzilla Macs by 2020 (stop us if you're having deja vu)

Don't assume that ARM is secure

I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that ARM is and will always be secure. For one thing, many ARM cores have speculative execution that was insecure, and it hasn't necessarily been fixed. Yes, intel is worse for now, as meltdown is their thing, but ARM isn't perfect now from the security perspective. There's no guarantee that ARM will be more secure than intel in the longterm. In fact, there isn't even a reason to assume that is likely. The next CPU architecture flaw may hit any processor type.

I'm concerned

I would not particularly care about switching, but I'm concerned that apple will take the opportunity to perform more locking. Right now, I can boot to something else, such as a linux disk for fixing things or a portable OSX disk for a different system. If apple likes the extra-secure IOS model where I'm not allowed to do very much, then I wouldn't want to buy one. This wouldn't be integral to arm, but this would be a convenient time from apple's perspective to do so.

They're already starting to make moves that concern me, such as their work on making sideloading painful or just their terrible performance with the latest update, where security problems were happening one a week and I still have a computer that repeatedly fails for weeks before working well for another four days. Locking me out any more will almost certainly lose me as a customer.

Air gapping PCs won't stop data sharing thanks to sneaky speakers

Re: Some Smartarse Title I'll Think of After It's Too late To Change This One

That doesn't really make a case for this article. The computers you mention might be vulnerable to the attack, but the ability for that to work is somewhat questionable, given that said machines would be in a noisy manufacturing area, where interference would be severe. That also presumes that there is another networked machine in close proximity to receive and transmit the data.

However, the more important point is that you don't need this exotic exploit to steal the data from these machines. You need physical access to get the malware onto the machines. Unless they have a really nice tiny code file that you can type in quickly without attracting attention, you need a disk to put the malware on the machine. Anyone with access and a disk could just copy the sensitive data onto that disk and walk off with it. If you want malware that is capable of staying for a while and sending new data, you are already putting things at risk, but certain types of radio emission would be superior. If those XP laptops have WiFi or bluetooth chips (I know, turned off, doesn't matter), malware using those will be easier to write and more resilient in the longterm. Still, if you have physical access, but just right now and you won't have it again, it might be better to try to access the storage of these valuable documents outside the manufacturing facility. I assume these files are stored on design machines that are newer or at least have a backup. If not, the company is asking for disaster. If so, I might be better served going after that.

Re: When would an airgapped machine have speakers

But in that case, wouldn't they come through a speaker, rather than headphones? If you're not looking at the screen, you probably aren't tethered to the machine by a wire, either. Some desktops have a basic built-in speaker, which is powered so not a vector, and that would be fine for the alert chimes. If it didn't, most IT offices I've seen have a collection of cheap speakers that are also usually powered, which are attached to computers that don't have a built-in speaker but need audio output. That also requires you to care about the chimes, which can be useful every once in a while, but not all the time.

When would an airgapped machine have speakers

OK. I don't see many airgapped machines, even when you'd want one. When I do see one, it's never in a convenient open place where you would be able to have lots of other machines around to act as bugs. But most importantly, it doesn't have any useful purpose for which you would need audio input or output. If you do have any, it's using any internal speaker the machine has, which, as the article states, is actively powered. The reason for this: the machine doesn't have any audio to play. You can't put music on it because it's airgapped. So how about we just put in the CD that our perspective user was going to listen to, but instead of an audio CD we just put in a blank one and burn some data onto that. It'll be a lot faster. If you have an airgapped machine and you're listening to music with it, you're not using it correctly. If you have another reason for audio, please enlighten me.

Apple, if you want to win in education, look at what sucks about iPads

Re: Just nonsense from teachers that are too dumb to do anything...

>Anyone telling that Apple products are not easy to use and it is hard to save files in apps must be seriously out of [their] mind!

Er... no. I'll be the first to admit that I have an iPhone and I prefer IOS to things like android, but it is not simple to save files on IOS devices. You have no disk. Some apps will use iCloud only. Some of those apps will fail if you're offline, because the file is only in iCloud. Other apps will save internally and allow uploads to iCloud. Other apps were built when there was no such thing as iCloud drive, so any file they saved got synced, but not downloaded. Thus, they usually link with dropbox or google drive. Sometimes you get apps that require you to use an http server on the iThing or sync the file using iTunes file sharing. It gets worse when you try to move a file between programs. Writing an essay in whatever word processor you like is fine, but just try to move it from the word processor you like to the one I like. At best, you end up shuffling the file around through iCloud drive so that I can get to the open in... button. Other times, you end up with emails or more annoying mechanisms. It's not impossible. It's not infeasible. It's not even difficult most of the time. But it definitely can be annoying.

Why you shouldn't trust a stranger's VPN: Plenty leak your IP addresses

Your own VPN doesn't work for a lot

Creating your own VPN won't block various things. It works for preventing MITM attacks by way of sneaky networks outside trusted access methods, which is why I have mine. This clearly doesn't refer to VPNs that let you access devices on one walled-off network, as only VPNs set up specifically to that network will work for that. Therefore, for anonymity, you don't have great options as far as VPNs go. Your own VPN will protect you from where you are all the way to the endpoint, which is also yours. Ergo anyone who was going to identify you from your original traffic will now identify you from your endpoint. If they're monitoring you, they will still be able to identify somewhere where your data is going, so any by-person tracking system will still work (except for location info, but that's not the major problem). You could try to get around that by making a new system that just serves as an endpoint, making that difficult to identify as yours. Still, records of activity and/or records with the company hosting or providing service to said system should identify that quite clearly.

Machine learning library TensorFlow can count to potato... I mean, 1.7

Re: Performance is variable,

As I understand it, you can't play with snap, because IBM will only let it run on high-end (I.E. more expensive than you or anyone else can afford) servers made by their hardware partner, the totally-open-and-not-unreasonable computer corporation. Oh sorry, that's actually spelled IBM. So while it might actually run faster than anything else, you can't verify said measurements until you have already committed to using IBM stuff, at which point I'm sure they get the benefits of having designed for their hardware. If it's really important to them, I'm sure they will find a way to show you how bad TensorFlow could be if you deliberately brea...is in practice when compared to the code cranked out by the aforementioned interested-in-machine-learning-not-all-of-your-research-budget computer corporation. In other words, keep playing with TensorFlow and the other machine learning systems that we have now; those will be the important ones later.

SUSE bakes a Raspberry Pi-powered GNU/Linux Enterprise Server

Re: Since the BBC Acorn days...

No, don't get one of those. Compare the specs of the beagle bone boards to the raspberry pi. You have a board with a one-core processor and 512mb of ram in the beagle bone. The raspberry pi has that, too. It's called the raspberry pi zero and it costs $5. If you want the same processor but with WiFi, the 0w does that. The only thing the beagle bone has that the raspberry pi doesn't is built-in flash on the board. However, that is a limited size that you can't replace, so unless you want to manage having an OS and data on multiple storage devices, just use a raspberry pi with a larger storage card, which can hold an OS and all the packages you put on it.

The raspberry pi has its problems--the one that I would like to see changed (although it would be nearly impossible) is power consumption such that you could run one from a battery for a significant length of time. Other than that, it's a really good piece of tech. Given that the competitors also can't run forever on battery, either, raspberry pi doesn't even have that as a comparison point.

Happy as Larry: Why Oracle won the Google Java Android case

I disagree

An API is a list of commands. All of them had to be implemented in the first place, and so the design of the API could be considered secondary to the design of the original implementation, as otherwise it's useless. There are so many things that could be considered API-ish enough, but copyrighting them is ridiculous.

For example, imagine that SQL was a copyrighted language. Instead of having a lot of possible database systems, which you could choose with the knowledge that your core app will keep working because basically all of your SQL statements are identical from one to another, you'd have one or two products. The open source one might have tried to get the rights to use SQL, but the company would have said no way, so things would work differently on that one. What's the big deal, you say? The big deal is that people start working on those products that are free so they don't have to pay to learn. I started to program with languages that required no commercial components. My first server was a linux one, because I could try and fail with it as many times as I needed without having to worry that microsoft would make my license not work because of something I messed up. Admittedly, I'm still using linux servers, so that might be a point in favor of the alternative. However, going back to the SQL example, people who you were hiring to deal with databases would have two options. Either use the open source one they know, which might be brilliant or might be inefficient, or learn the other one with no guarantee that they will ever use it again. SQL fixed that--I have a website with MySQL running on the databases. I needed to write a client-side program in C to deal with the same type of data. I migrated the relevant database to SQLite so the program had its copy of it. If MySQL breaks, I remove it and put a different one in. I'll have to change a few parts where I use modules only designed for MySQL, but the statements are the same. That is what API agreement can do.

Back to programming languages. Python is a language that has an implementation. It's fine, and people use it often. There is another implementation, pypy, which is more efficient and is also used often on different systems. They adhere to the same standards, so I don't have to rewrite my code if I intend to run it on other devices. I don't even have to recompile to byte code. Would that have happened if python was run by a company that decided to copyright __name__=='__main__'? No, it wouldn't. Python would be dying. It isn't now. Guess how they managed that.

Take the dashboard too literally and your brains might end up all over it

seductive and ... elegant?

The article says: "At their best, dashboards are seductive, elegant and informative. At their worst they are seductive, elegant and horribly misleading."

I beg to differ. At their worst, dashboards are hideously inelegant. They have about a hundred links to things I don't need. Either they're just all out there, usually on the top or left, or the dashboard people put them into one tiny button so that if you ever need them, you have to scroll gigantic menus. Then you have data that isn't related to what I'm doing, so the page is big and mostly pointless. Then, you have the things where something I have to deal with is on the dashboard, and the page that lets me interact with that thing is also accessed from the dashboard, but the two aren't connected. For example, a dashboard for tasks that I had for a while that would show you a nice clean table of the tasks with their statuses and summaries. And if you wanted to look at the detail or change them, you couldn't click on anything to open it up. No, you had to enter the task number in the search box, being careful to change the search type to "task number" from the default of generic search (which would not find a task by its number), which would always pull up a search results page even when you entered the whole number. Then you could click on the one result on the results page to see the task. And you would see the form with (not joking) eighty five different text entry or selection boxes for different elements of the task, at least sixty of which were empty because no one needs them. That is what a dashboard is at its worst.

US Congress quietly slips cloud-spying powers into page 2,201 of spending mega-bill

Re: provided they get a US judge to approve a subpoena

Yes, technically. There is a token requirement for foreign government permission. However, if any data is held on any U.S. company (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter), the U.S. government can have it with a court order. By the way, evidence shows that they can get rubber stamp orders from courts like the FISC if they want them. As for foreign governments helping out the course of privacy if you are lucky enough to store your data on a system that really has no American company involvement, most countries won't care so much about it. In fact, you are most likely to be safe if you store your private data in a country that respects your privacy because it doesn't give its citizens any. I bet anyone storing their data on Chinese-based servers is safe. From that specific thing. And significantly more at risk for a lot of other things but let's not think about that.

I doubt that countries within the U.S. bubble will object like they should. Not only do they probably want the data on their own citizens, but the last thing they will want to do is to annoy the U.S. They dislike Trump, and I don't trust his administration to do anything good with the data, but we shouldn't forget that the Obama administration wasn't any more supportive to citizen privacy, having wholeheartedly supported the NSA slurp throughout. Whether you trusted them more, as I did, doesn't change the fact that politicians have a long history of not caring about your privacy.

Anyone know a cure for cynicism?

Holy sweat! Wearables have THREE attack surfaces

Wearables and

This applies to anything and everything that has

a. A network connection and

b. an app

That's a lot of things. Wearables and industrial equipment, yes, but also those voice assistants, some "smart" headphones, consumer-purchasable NAS boxes (you would hope to avoid the cloud with them, but actually no), IoT things like those networked light bulbs (at least the comparatively smarter ones that have a local bluetooth connection so you can turn them on even if your network went down, as opposed to the network-only ones which are just terrible), smart TVs or TV-connected sticks or boxes that have a phone-remote-control app, and even some internet-connected ovens. It's been proven that the developers at this point couldn't care less about security, and the general population don't care to understand, except for those who care enough to become terrified and ludditish. So do you have any suggestions about what we can do to get the problem rectified? Because I've tried all I can.

What a hang up: US big box biz Best Buy kicks Huawei to the curb

Chinese government

I thought the company that was owned directly by the Chinese government was ZTE, while huawei is just a company that the Chinese government can bully, interfere with, or destroy at a whim. Either I'm wrong, or perhaps we should have started with ZTE phones, right? I see those for sale at a number of places in the U.S.--I even found a nice budget phone from them that, while it didn't get any updates (it's android, who was expecting any) didn't have any bloatware and was quite snappy for the $40.

Programming languages can be hard to grasp for non-English speakers. Step forward, Bato: A Ruby port for Filipinos

Re: What a stupid idea.

While I have also stated my opinion that this won't be very good for them, I don't think your reasons are valid. You seem to assume here that children in a large group of communities are just not capable of programming. I contend that this is simply wrong. Many of them will not enjoy programming, and others will want to be good at it but just won't get there. And then there are the very many people who may be brilliant at it but haven't been introduced. I think this could be improved by teaching them some keywords in English, sticking with ruby for the structural benefits in Tagalog, and making sure that they have people to teach them. I think that's the most important part. Even if good tagalog translations of each error message exist, they won't always understand them without help. Just ask any beginning programmer what an "expression" is, any second-year programmer what an "l-value" is, etc. and you'll get confusion, and we're talking about English speakers here.

I wish all of these perspective programmers the best of luck learning to code. While I'm concerned that the way they are learning might not be the best, it's better than nothing. I don't doubt that some of them will make very skilled programmers in their time.

I don't think this is best

I want this to work, but I doubt it will. It's like all those people who came to me wanting to get into computer science and proudly announced that they could write in scratch. That began several years ago, and I had the two positions of not knowing what it was and later telling them that we don't use that. The result being that, while they understood the topics involved, they couldn't write in a language that was actually used. Worse yet, many of them considered their skills as extremely prodigious because they knew more scratch than did the standard user they could find on the internet. The fact that all users they found on the internet were being taught programming in secondary school came as an unpleasant surprise to many of them. I don't know if scratch is more used now or not, but I can say with confidence that you still can't get a job writing in it. Therefore, I always recommend that people start teaching in a subset of a real language. Python is considered easy to learn, so that's an option. I find that new coders may find the strongly and explicitly typed C-style languages more definite, as long as their teacher can help them understand the compiler messages.

As for other languages, I realize that I have a benefit in that I am a first-language English speaker. However, I'm concerned that, if we intend for people who speak other languages to be able to get jobs in programming, their experience in non-English languages and therefore their inexperience in traditional ones will prove to be a problem for them. I would perhaps suggest that teaching these people a few of the English words involved would be more helpful, even if you stick with ruby in order to help with the syntax.

US mulls drafting gray-haired hackers during times of crisis

An alternative:

Drafting is not going to solve your problem. When you draft soldiers, you need to train them in fighting. However, forgive me but as difficult, risky, important, and painful as fighting is, it won't take you forever to train. Those in command need more training, but there already exists infrastructure for mass-training privates. Meanwhile, technical staff will need training, if not in the way they operate, at least in the systems they will be using and a good way to integrate their work processes with those of others, with whom they haven't worked.

Therefore, I suggest an alternative. It consists of three main steps:

1. Realize how important whatever technical thing you want to do is, and how much it is worth to you to have a prepared staff to deal with it.

2. Pay sufficiently knowledgeable staff high rates to get them to work with you. If this is more than you are used to paying soldiers, consider that:

a. Security people are doing something more complicated than following officers' orders and firing weapons, even if it looks nicer;

b. The risk due to missing security personnel on a system is greater than the risk of soldiers leaving an area of the battlefield open (if this is not the case, reevaluate and return to step 1);

c. The amount of damage a mistaken action by a security employee can cause is greater than that a soldier can cause (I'm referring to military readiness and large-scale war footing. I understand that an individual soldier could kill a lot of people by mistake).

3. Respect your technical employees. Realize that they have alternatives, and that if you put them through something painful or if you don't respect their experience, you will wind up with a lot of semi-technical staff, while the ones you want are cheerfully working for industry. For example, don't immediately discount warnings, as their job is to protect you. Also consider that given part C above, there are probably sufficient advantages to not putting them through some of the worse military pains. Imagine how it would have been if those navy ships in the Pacific (that crashed into other ships due to overworked crew who were not allowed to sleep) had been running military communications and control networks instead of ships.

Gartner's top tip to data crunchers on the eve of GDPR? Don't be creepy

A suggestion

I wonder how people would like a site that contains copies of companies' privacy policies and terms of service documents with interpretations for the average user. I have considered setting it up, with document 1 being the windows 10 legal agreement *shudder*. It's problematic because, among other problems, the companies might not permit me to duplicate their text, and they could try to find a legal way to claim that I'm lying about the interpretations (by the way, said interpretations wouldn't be mine, they'd be summaries created by a panel of technically-aware and legally knowledgeable people). Let me know what you think, as I'll have to check in with my legally knowledgeable friends and get their opinions too. Oh, and find a way to keep it running if it is getting used.

US cops go all Minority Report: Google told to cough up info on anyone near a crime scene

Re: Increasingly less serious crimes?

On the specific crimes, it hurts me to say it, but the arson is worst. Sexual battery is terrible, and should never happen, but the worst that can happen is a very terrible thing for the victim. Arson can result in multiple deaths, depending on how many people were present and what happens to the fire after the structure in question has gone up. Victims are likely to be those who cannot easily escape fire, including the elderly, children, and the disabled. Even if no one has been killed, the owner of the structure (assuming it is a residence) has had their life derailed as well. Neither should occur, but in the sense of the possible damage, arson is very terrible.

In the scope of the article, they raise a good point even if you quibble how they do so. Even if you disagree entirely with the gradation of the crimes, you would probably understand that the general public that has not been connected to the crime will probably sort the crimes in the order of death > fire > assault. If you extrapolate, you could understand how this could extend down to thefts, vandalism, etc. We're not saying that it will happen, but the possibility is clear.

Possibilities

I understand why some people might be willing to accept this for murder, etc. However, consider the precedent. We may disagree how trustworthy American law enforcement is, but imagine law enforcement in dictatorships. If there is a legal way to extract this data, they will use it against much more than murderers. If we create a big-brother-capable system here, even if we protect ourselves, we may doom others to having it used on them. That is our responsibility.

Also, the article mentions the google predictive keyboard as one of the apps in use here. Why does that ask for location data? Get that away from me right now. FYI, google, that's evil.

Samsung’s DeX dock clicks the second time around

Requires a good desktop experience

This requires me to be able to run whatever software I need. I appreciate that standard business users can run google apps or office365 on it, but if I need anything more than that, this won't work well. Also, you could do exactly the same thing with any of the numerous small PC solutions--the kangaroo PC (I haven't ever used one of these, but if the description is accurate, it's a desktop that is portable and has enough battery life that you can move it about without having to boot it when you've arrived), the intel compute stick, any windows tablet with an atom processor if you can handle that, or even a raspberry pi. I realize that with a phone, you already have the device and you don't have to sync any data to it, but if your users are going to be using cloud applications, that doesn't matter so much. For me to be interested, I'll need it to have a full desktop OS. I'd prefer linux, while I'm sure others would prefer windows for those many business applications that are the main argument for windows-over-linux commenters. I'll also need it to be smaller and more convenient than a laptop, because those are self-contained with the maximum that I have to carry being the power adapter.

I would prefer not to see samsung trying to invent new solutions to the how-to-sync-video-to-a-screen system, as that's an invitation to break something. I don't want to purchase a new screen every four years because samsung has dropped support for this model, not to mention the infinite IoT vulnerabilities that any WiFi solution will undoubtedly have. If they have to do something that doesn't involve the old-fashioned HDMI, then could they at least make it a dongle that I can attach to whatever screen I've already got please?

Trump blocks use of Venezuelan Petro cryptocoins in the US

Dear Mr. Trump

You're wasting your time on that. Nobody wants those coins, because anyone who is smart enough to figure out how to get and store them realizes that they don't exist. Even the people who think bitcoin will last don't think these will. We can only speculate as to what Sr. Dictator was thinking when he got that set up, other than further burdening his country's electrical grid with a blockchain insurance system. Nice try though. Maybe the other restrictions will have some effect on Venezuela.

It's Pi day: Care to stuff a brand new Raspberry one in your wallet?

Re: Pi vs Mac Mini

I think the comparison operates on the structure that apples and oranges are similar enough that you can compare them in a broad sense, but doing so on specifics is focusing on the wrong thing. Therefore:

"This yellow apple is not as crunchy as that red one, so I like it less." is fine.

"This orange from California is sweeter than that one from Florida, so I like it more." is fine.

"I tried the apples at the supermarket, but they seem old so I ate oranges." is fine.

"This apple had a thinner skin than that orange, so I like it more." is missing the point because oranges have rinds and apples don't (well functionally they don't). Meanwhile, using a general comparison such as "Oranges have thick rinds and apples don't, so I prefer apples." is fine.

Thus, comparisons like "Raspberry pi boards are cheaper and easier to modify than mac minis", "The cost of the raspberry pi is commensurate with its components, but the mac mini is hideously overpriced", and "The raspberry pi has a GPIO interface, but the mac mini does not" are all completely valid comparisons. Statements like "Both of the machines have 1.4ghz processors, but the mac mini is more expensive" are missing the point because the processors are different and so the comparison can't be used to correctly differentiate between the two.

Re: Pi vs Mac Mini

What?

>1.4Ghz quad core Raspberry Pi - £35

>1.4Ghz dual core Mac Mini - £479

>Whilst the Mac Mini does come with a 500MB hard drive, you can pick one of those up for under £25

The raspberry pi has a 1.4 GHZ arm processor. The mac mini has a 1.4 GHZ intel one. The mac's is faster. A lot faster. Also, the hard drive is 500 gb, not mb. Big difference there.

You're comparing apples to oranges. Although I agree with you that the oranges in question are old and unappetizing, after all the mac mini has a processor from 2014 in it, that doesn't make your comparison correct or even usable.

One in three Android Wear owners also uses ... an iPhone

I don't understand wearable tech companies

I can see a few, very few, cases for wearable tech, but I can't see why so many companies are going as crazy for it. It's not like a smartphone, where everyone basically needs one, and the shipments show it. I, like many people, don't want a device that is essentially my phone only smaller and harder to use strapped to me all the time. Although I am looking for a watch that does the vibrating alarm thing just to avoid annoying my roommates with my early alarm, and people who are interested in fitness might see this as an efficient way to collect that information, I don't see why the companies think that everyone else will want one too.

Google to 'forget me' man: Have you forgotten what you said earlier?

Not understanding the mechanics

I get the theory of this RTBF concept, but I don't understand exactly how google would implement the deletion. If this man was named "Somebody", would google be required to remove the results only when the search term was "Somebody", or contains "Somebody", or has some level of similarity? For example, could I find this by putting in a deliberate mistake "Some Body Criminal History"? If yes, then maybe that is too weak for the underlying theory. If not, how can you possibly limit this such that it is still possible to find these articles at all?

There's more to blockchain than dodgy cryptocurrencies

Re: Of course there is, until

I wholeheartedly agree. My problems with the system, however, are not just limited to explanations. I don't think current blockchain solutions have good answers to my complaints, in that private key management, fraud, or availability/resilience are left up to the original authors of the code (bad) and individual users (worse). I respect those who will keep their private key nicely managed and stored; that's my approach and it leaves a lot of opportunity for fixing things and self-management, but if it's required then my parents won't know how, and they'll just leave it on the blockchain registry company system that they found with their google search. History shows that to not be a good idea.

Of course there is, until

Of course blockchains are going to be used for a lot of transaction-type data. That will make certain types of systems easier. However, if you think that there will be an explosion in blockchains that takes out the currently-existing structure of financial tech, think again. For one thing, it will take at the very least a system for keeping private keys that is private and understandable to the below-average citizen. That has been a problem that allows cryptocurrencies to be stolen, and the blockchain still relies on that structure. Until you have a good answer (and that answer must be short because nontechnical people aren't going to wait) to the questions "How can the blockchain system better solve the problem of fraud than my credit card company who I can call to deny payment?", "Who is responsible if my data, money, or whatever I put into the blockchain is lost or stolen", and "How can I use this system everywhere with virtually the same level of convenience, even if I'm disconnected from the network for some time or my wallet/blockchain-enabled-storage-device-thingy has broken down.", you won't see the systems switching over.

Privacy folk raise alarm over schools snooping on kids' online habits

Details of one case

I have various opinions about this, but I think I should provide some details on the background I have before I explain them. I went to ordinary schools whose computer policy was basically "there are two rooms with computers in them and otherwise you don't need them", so the issues were pretty basic. However, I have a much younger sibling (who has recently entered university) who went to a school that issues each student a computer. These computers are extremely controlled. They have spyware over pretty much everything. I was interested, and my sibling wanted the info, so I took a copy of the disk from an external boot. This school, at least, knows what it's doing when it comes to systems admin. There are many programs that I don't understand, but I was able to identify:

1. The program that monitors all web traffic, obviously for blocking purposes, but also it seems to have a large cache folder containing files whose content I could not discern.

2. The program that allows any staff member at the school to retrieve the contents of the students' screens at any point, as video. Obviously this was designed to prevent students from not paying attention to class, but there seems to be no control preventing doing this when, say, the student is not in class, in a different class, at home, etc. This program was known to the students, who had seen the teachers use it. There was no indication to the students that this process was occurring, nor was there any mechanism for students to see by whom or when their computer had been accessed.

3. The program allowing streaming video from webcams. This I cannot understand. Theoretically, teachers can already see their students just fine, right?

4. The program logging keystrokes. Actually there were at least two of them, but they were nicely hidden binaries so I don't know what they do or where they send the data. I'm pretty sure they were keyloggers because the accompanying .plist files (these are macbooks) had strings like "keylog" in them.

None of this was turned off when the computer was taken home. A simple packet analysis shows tons of phones home and lots of encrypted data traffic.

Now, my opinions. I think this should be very worrying to students and parents alike. I've seen many parents saying that student activity should be monitored. I'm not fighting against that, but I think that any monitoring should be understood. If your children are in primary school, you may have a reason not to give them all the info, mostly so you can avoid confusing them, but if you don't trust your children when they are in adolescence enough to tell them what monitoring is affecting them, there's probably a bigger problem. In the specific case of this school, they seem to be collecting a scary amount of information. I can see running web monitors and even the screen capture thing for educational purposes, but I don't know, and doubt extremely, that this school has put responsible limits on data access. If you don't at all trust the students, at least distrust the staff a bit too. I definitely see webcam-watching and keylogging as extremely dangerous. The former has so many risks I don't even have to list them, and I can't even think of a good reason for needing it. Keylogging would mostly allow the school to collect passwords. That seems like it should be against some law or other, but it's probably not. Even if they think they have the right to them, I think penalties should be extremely severe the first time one of them has their data leaked.

The most valuable lesson a student might learn from this is that you can't trust people. Any people. That will probably prove to be a valuable lesson for real life, but it runs a bit counter to schools' and parents' roles as guides. And if the students actually try to learn enough technical skill to fight back, they will likely run into the removal-protection components of the software and get in a lot of trouble. The message of this: don't try to learn how computers work, you don't need to know. Fomenting pessimism and distrust is not a recipe for success, so I believe something should be done to fix this.

A quick addendum: after learning about the software on this computer, which I hope helped my sibling learn new skills in how to disassemble and understand systems, we talked with their parents, who were, fortunately for them, trustworthy and supportive. With their parents' encouragement, we installed a webcam cover and blocked certain ports used by the software to send back traffic on their home network. I don't imagine we prevented much, but we at least did our best.

BlackBerry unveils bold new strategy: Suing the c**p out of Facebook

Re: Blackberry should sue every tech company ever

Thank you for the clarification. I agree that I haven't looked at the greater content. Therefore, my descriptions may have lacked necessary details. However, my protest remains. First, I claim that the description you have provided from the patent body is unoriginal, and is essentially identical to my meaning--the description of the generation is basically saying "we use a random number generator to generate a key using a seed", I.E. not at all new. Therefore, it mostly hinges on whether anyone else had checked two values for complexity before. This is a basic cryptographic concept. Even if nobody had thought of that, you can hardly claim invention of a cryptographic challenge. The high-level code you provided all fits into my facetious function "weLikeThisKey", but would require about three lines of code assuming I write it nicely:

bool weLikeThisKey(key k, key q) {

keyComplexity ck=complexityOf(k);

keyComplexity cq=complexityOf(q);

return ck.isAppreciablyBetterThan(cq);

}

Perhaps blackberry could patent the content of their complexity checker (I'm giving them a lot of the benefit of the doubt here), but not the process of using a complexity checker. If that were the case, it would functionally limit any comparison of values with some function, as that function could provide a benefit for a cryptographic key.

In addition, a patent's content is supposed to be summarized in its abstract. You have not yet told me why all of my quick descriptions of patent contents are incorrect. If any of them are correct, then blackberry has patented something that already existed. At the very least, blackberry entirely failed to explain the new concept in their abstracts. I believe that perhaps that is because there is no new concept in most of these patents. My point, therefore, remains unchanged.

Blackberry should sue every tech company ever

Clearly, I'm missing something. I don't think any of these are new, or were new fifteen years ago. Please tell me what I'm missing with these interpretations:

Number: 7,372,961

Description: Method of public key generation. Described as "a potential bias in the generation or a private key is avoided by selecting the key and comparing it against the system parameters. If a predetermined condition is attained it is accepted. If not it is rejected and a new key is generated."

Meaning:

do {

key=make_key();

while (!WeLikeThisKey(key));

Number: 8,279,173

Description: User interface for selecting a photo tag. "There is disclosed a user interface for selecting a photo tag. In an embodiment, the user interface embodies a method of selecting a photo tag for a tagged photo, comprising: providing a tag entry field for entering a photo tag; in dependence upon a string entered by a user, displaying in a matching tag list any tags from one or more selected tag sources matching the entered string."

Meaning: A search box with a list of results. And tags, of course.

Old alternative: Google image search.

Number: 8,209,634

Description: Previewing a new event on a small screen device. "Individual applications are each represented by an application icon on a screen of a graphical user interface for the device. When a new event occurs, particularly when the new event relates to a specific one of a plurality of similar applications, the invention provides a convenient way to denote which application relates to the event. In response to a new event of a one of the applications, the application's icon is visually modified to notify of the new event."

Meaning: Visually indicating something, as long as it's a small screen.

Old alternative: The flag icon on a mail program meaning you have unread mail. If this doesn't count as small screen, the same thing on a laptop.

Number: 8,301,713

Description: Handheld electronic device and associated method providing time data in a messaging environment. "An improved handheld electronic device and an associated method are provided in which time data regarding certain aspects of a messaging conversation on a handheld electronic device are made available to a user. Such time data is provided, for instance, in situations where an interruption has occurred during a messaging conversation."

Meaning: Knowing what time a message was sent.

Old alternative: Any SMS system ever that allowed the phone to store the messages for any length of time. Alternatively, e-mail (we find that e-mail clients were brazenly violating patents by displaying the received date and time of e-mail messages. The culprits were so evil as to do this even before the filing of the patents by the plaintiff. We sentence all involved to having to clear out their inboxes and then their spam folders.).

Number: 8,429,236

Description: Transmission of status updates responsive to status of recipient application. "During one mode of operation, a mobile communications device transmits status messages using a conservative message transmission mode. This allows the mobile communications device to transmit a greater number of status updates for future processing by the recipient application while conserving resources."

Meaning: Data compression before you send data on a network.

Old alternative: Data compression on a modem from the 90s.

Number: 8,677,250

Description: System and method for switching between an instant messaging conversation and a game in progress. "Enabling a game application on the electronic device to utilize a contact list for an instant messaging application, during a game in progress with a particular contact in the contact list, preparing game messages to be sent to the particular contact by including game progress data, communicating at least one game message during the game in progress with the particular contact using an instant messaging system used by the instant messaging application; displaying at least one instant message in an instant messaging conversation user interface; and displaying a game in progress user interface associated with the game play, after detecting a selection in the instant messaging conversation user interface to switch to the game in progress."

Meaning: So ... basically any multiplayer game ever?

Old alternative: Any game with built-in chat, or, given that this patent also mentions "System and method for switching", any multiplayer game ever + any instant messaging system ever + alt tab.

Number: 9,349,120

Description: System and method for silencing notifications for a message thread. " A user can select to silence a message thread. Once a message thread has been silenced, the user will no longer receive notifications of new messages added to the thread."

Meaning: Mute button

Old alternative: Close the IM program handling that thread, or focus on a different thread, or press mute button on messages. Also, they don't mention the unmute button. Give me a minute--I'm just off to patent the unmute button and sue every messaging company ever. And that includes blackberry! The world of messaging shall be mine!

Suspicious cert-sellers give badware a good name for just a few thousand bucks

and I'm sure people have this filter turned on

I find myself wondering whether there are many people with this filter enabled. I somehow doubt that malware authors who haven't bothered with this are seeing it as a big problem. I, for one, disabled it on my personal windows machine the time, and I'm assuming for Microsoft's sake that it was a bug, that they tried to flag firefox as unsafe. And I checked the hash; my copy was not invalid. I have to imagine that a lot of users just click through any warnings they get. Otherwise, how is the entire malware community making it through on certs sold every few days?

Less than half of paying ransomware targets get their files back

Re: They deserve it.

No, they most definitely do not. I can somewhat understand what I think you're saying when the victims are companies. They should have the knowledge and capability to do back ups, and when the data is lost the victims are more their customers as the company can often account for the loss. But when the victims are people, average citizens, you can't blame them for not having done proper backups. We would all prefer that they did, but for those who are technically unaware, especially those who are elderly or children, expecting that they will be able to do complete backups without help is wishful thinking, and saying that "they deserve it" for not having done so is close to victim blaming. Sometimes, they can get hit with ransomware without even having done anything suspicious. Even for most companies, it is probably the company that will be taking the loss. I think we all have a tendency to sympathize less with companies than we do with individuals, but someone loses either way. Now for companies that don't bother with security and leak our information out and respond with a from-the-heart "who cares", they deserve it.

Re: I actually am surprised

Not really. Honor among low-end malware artists is pretty much absent. Not to mention that it can be easier to assemble ransomware without bothering to write that annoying decrypt-and-put-things-back-to-normal stage. Honor among high-end malware artists is even lower.

For all we know, aliens could be as careless with space junk as us

Collecting the reasons this could fail

Here are some plausible reasons for this approach not to work.

Let's say we have planet X, with intelligent life on it. Let's list some ways they might not show up on this scan.

1. People on planet X haven't gotten things to space yet.

2. People on planet X got things to space, and they cleaned up so now you can't see a giant cloud of junk.

3. Planet X is small, so satellites that orbit about are less useful for communications than ground-based radio equipment. The same for navigation satellites. Much less stuff to be in orbit and thus visible.

4. Planet X has a nearby moon or moons, and equipment lasts longer when they go and put it there. Depending on the location of the moon, this might work much better than on earth. At least their space stations won't be crashing back down if they were safe on the lunar surface.

5. People on planet X have focused on travel rather than tech without travel. They live on a few planets and it is easier to communicate between planets X, Y, and Z with devices placed in orbital paths of the star instead of around a planet in particular. Good luck determining whether those are communication satellites or tiny asteroids.

6. People on planet X have technology that doesn't produce opaque junk belts. Not that I'm suggesting transparent or gaseous tech (although that'd be cool), but how about tech that contains light-transmission tech so that they don't have a lot of satellite junk blocking energy from their planet (maybe they have the opposite climate change problem).

7. Access to space on planet X is limited by some control system. Satellites that are of use can go up, but they have to be brought back at some point. Even if they aren't, people can't deliberately send perfectly useful cars up just because they feel like wasting them.

8. Satellites on Planet X that are useful are expensive. In order to avoid breaking them, junk in orbit is brought down automatically if telemetry remains, or shocked out of orbit using ground-based devices to affect their paths. Failing that, ground-based or satellite-based lasers would make a nice light show if they did it at night.

9. Planet X has an extreme orbital path. Satellites must be brought down to avoid damaging them (E.G. by bringing them too close to the sun without atmospheric protection).

Come on, add yours.

Too many bricks in the wall? Lego slashes inventory

What we need

We just need somewhere to produce a gigantic bucket of standard lego parts. Nothing unusual--just your ordinary smallish bricks that you lose a lot of and there is no problem with that. This allows kids to do what I did when I was younger and play with their siblings in trying to make things. True, most of mine were basically box-shaped, with anything theoretically interesting on the side of the box or inside it on platforms, but we don't have to put imagination limits on it. I always thought my brother was much better at it than I was, but I now know he just produced the designs from the box while I produced the box.

Microsoft builds Uncle Sam custom versions of 365 and Azure Stack

Re: And this is better why?

>>> I'll do my best not to argue for Linux here. I already know why they aren't using it.

>Lack of easy integration, doesn't run most business software directly, high vulnerability counts to evaluate, lower performance on the same hardware, and poor enterprise management and security features in comparison out of the box would spring to mind for starters.

That's why I said "I already know why they aren't using it.". Thanks for the summary, anyway. Some of those points are quite logical. Others are less so, but I'm going to stick with my not-arguing-about-Linux stance here.

However, your point of cloud being superior because cost is lower...I don't agree. Not only do we have to conclude that that is an appealing argument to the government, who don't appear to care a ton about cost given their history in computing purchases (and everything else), but we also have to conclude that buying equipment, hiring admins, and properly securing everything is more expensive than buying Microsoft-set-up equipment, paying Microsoft's admins, hiring the smaller set of admins to manage the systems because you still need that, and still securing the systems. I know that you get some economies of scale here, but you lose a little of it via Microsoft's dedicated data center. However, my main point is that, while it might be cheaper from a cash standpoint, it might be more expensive from a security and management standpoint. I'm not sure if you can even calculate that in correctly, but I'm quite sure they're not trying.