Posts by doublelayer

Microsoft: Yo dawg, we heard you liked Windows password expiry policies. So we expired your expiry policy

Re: 20 years...

Thanks for the broad insult to everyone here. Let me enlighten you on a bit of user behavior.

Here's how passwords usually go when the security policy you mention is instated. Minimum 10 characters, at least one number, both cases, and a symbol. Password changes every month and the algorithm checks against old passwords so you can't duplicate and thoroughly checks against the last one so you can't just change it slightly.

New employee: Uses password anC9@mlzcQ)AX;1mbz

One month in: Changes password to fjZv83na.1/f8a

Two months in: Changes to E8zvhan3oz&

Three months in: Changes to Fnoazlh92*

Four months in: Changes to Thisisthe12thsystemI'vehadtochangethison!

Five months in: Changes to: Gottiredtyping2$

Six months in: Changes to Authenticate0^

Changing passwords can be useful, but forcing people to change them so frequently means that many will degrade the entropy of their password because why bother memorizing a long string of random characters when the information will be useless in a month? It will become obsolete faster for an attacker, but the attacker can gain access to systems and install back doors that do not need a password, so expiring credentials doesn't always help. Meanwhile, users use less random passwords that can be broken more easily, meaning you have a higher likelihood of getting an attacker. Also, the users are less happy.

Re: NIST

You can usually find a big book that nobody cares about in any workplace. A place I worked at a few years ago had a multi-volume set of instructions on administering Windows Server 2000, and as this was a software engineering area with few admins, nobody really knew why they were there. I have a feeling a convenient book code can be found when needed.

Re: Yeah, right.

Microsoft's mobile offering is assuredly dead, but Blackberry is too. Just because someone's making android phones and calling them Blackberry doesn't mean the system survives. The QNX-based OS is dead, the Blackberry company isn't making those devices fully, and they're just a different hardware type running android.

Internet industry freaks out over proposed unlimited price hikes on .org domain names

Re: Domain names are all pointless

"Ok sure maybe there are some security implications to my new system"

We need to talk about this. After this, I hope you have some extra time because I've got to learn the art of the understatement from you. But first, let's discuss the actual security implications of this. There are a lot of them. Whenever data is hidden from users, it becomes easy to make that data they never get to see contain the important part. It's hard to identify domains that are owned by the actual company apart from those registered by scammers with a bit of forethought. How will that change when domains are random sets of characters? Do I need to answer that?

Also, how useful will it be when I suggest you try out a new system by having to say "Well, I suppose if you do a search on [the site name] or you could always go to fa8enozvl3mz90vnae.airforce". Maybe a little harder for you to remember, no? And easier for you to get wrong, yes? And much easier for a scammer to register a bunch of things and SEO them into your search so you will get it wrong and won't be able to find out until it's much later than it should be, yes?

And even without the many security problems, and we've only scratched the tip of the iceberg on that, this system would require another layer of resolution services. Another set of servers. Another DNS query and some extra delay on actually connecting. An extra series of organizations running the thing with entirely unproven trustworthiness. Another layer of power that could make mistakes. Another layer that a user needs to administrate or stick with the OS default.

This idea is very bad. I know it doesn't compare to your understatement, but I'm working on it.

Microsoft's Edge on Apple's macOS? It's more likely than you think for new browser

Re: Don't want it

People can't design edge-only sites without having a lot of problems. They could do that with IE because IE had its own rendering engine that could be changed to produce different functionality than other browsers and the spec. Microsoft just took someone else's rendering engine. It can't really do that anymore. A site that works on edge will also work on any chromium browser, and because firefox/gecko supports most of the frameworks chromium does, it'll work well in that too. Of course, a bad designer can break this, but it's a lot easier to do a chrome-only site than it is to do an edge-only one.

FYI: Yeah, the cops can force your finger onto a suspect's iPhone to see if it unlocks, says judge

Re: Doesn't compute

I'm not downvoting, but I think this is not correct. Metadata describes some other piece of data, meaning that if you have a piece of data, any data that describes it would instead be metadata. If my data is a file, then the file size would count as metadata. If all my data is is the expression of a file's size, then its unit would be metadata. I think the definition of metadata specifically depends on the data involved.

On the point of surveillance, I don't think the argument should be "The stuff being collected isn't metadata; it's data", but instead "The stuff being collected is sensitive metadata about calls that should not be collected".

Re: You can pry my password from my cold, dead lips.

You use some type of data storage, right? This generally applies to any form. They can take it, and if they need biometrics to access it, they can now take those, too. The warrant in this case allowed them to access phones, but a different warrant could allow accessing computers, drives, or other devices.

Facebook: Not saying we've done anything wrong but... we're just putting $3bn profit aside for an FTC privacy fine

A good sign and a cynic

I'm glad to hear that there may actually be a penalty for their actions. It's been a long time in coming, and I think we can see that it is well-deserved. I'm afraid, however, that as much as they set aside, they don't actually intend to start paying fines any time soon. While this amount would be a large chunk for them, they can continue to operate just fine as it sits in a bank, including using their legal strength to try to get out of paying it or fixing any of their privacy disasters. Here's hoping the fine is charged and paid quickly.

Rising sea levels? How about the rising risk of someone using a nuke?

Re: Giving up nuclear weapons? Not likely

You are probably correct, but there are other examples. South Africa gave up their relatively small nuclear program and had all their weapons and manufacturing facilities dismantled with international oversight, and some countries have chosen to reduce their stockpiles, although not to zero. Not that this proves anything, but the history is interesting.

The peelable, foldable phone has become the great white whale of tech

Re: Fixing a problem that doesn't exist

It's certainly pointless for me, but some people want it. They want a device that they can carry in a pocket but has the screen size of a tablet. They have reasons, and though I don't share them or even understand what the reasons are, they exist for some people to want the device. If they want it and a company can build it, it seems useless to complain about its existence. Just join with me and don't buy it. Of course, this all hinges (pun originally not intended) on the companies' ability to actually make the thing so it has some semblance of a lifetime.

Re: Not surprising in the least

It will have less protection from stuff on the outside of the device, so it might get scratched, but it has an easier folding characteristic because the screen part doesn't need to fold completely flat but can instead curve. This means that it's less likely to simply crack in half, develop a crease, or interfere with the hinge opening properly. If they build the hinge properly such that the screen stays connected to it, it could also better withstand particulates getting into the screen from the hinge area. Of course, there are a number of ways to get this horribly wrong, and I would not be surprised to hear that they've found one of those. Still, outward-facing screen doesn't have to be a problem.

Re: Industry shudders: Do we have a big problem?

"At this stage of the game I want to be able to buy a really good phone for < £100"

The major problem facing the industry is that you can. Actually, prices might be slightly higher than that, but a phone that sells for £150 can have comparable specs to the flagships. Of course, you're going to play a guessing game about how long security updates will come, but you get that on the higher-priced ones too. There is very little difference between phones made by different companies at different times. They're just flat slabs of glass that look the same and run most of the same code.

I think one important element is that the computing-relevant specs of a phone are pretty unimportant. Of course, you can find a phone that is too slow to handle its tasks, but four cores vs eight cores or 4GB vs 6GB of RAM doesn't matter to most applications. Neither do the advances in cameras--while some people do actual serious photography with their phones and justifiably want the best camera for their needs, a lot of other people either don't use it at all or simply want the ability to quickly capture an image, so all they need in a camera is to end up with a recognizable image at the end. When smartphones were new, you could usually tell when you bought a new one that it had a lot more processing power than the old one. That is no longer the case.

Meanwhile, companies think that any change they make justifies a massive price increase. The mainstream manufacturers think that their new even more high-res screen should be worth a bundle. Palm think making a very small android phone that some people, myself included, would actually want justifies a 200% profit margin, which makes me lose interest immediately. Companies who used to make the cheap and introductory android devices think they can get a lot more money by making the software a bit nicer and multiplying the price by ten. I don't know why they think this, but I don't think it will end well for them.

Behold, the insides of Samsung's Galaxy Fold: The phone that tears down all on its own

Re: Two screens with an infinitesimally-precise and tiny mating junction

That has some advantages, but runs into the problem that the gap has to be really small to not be noticed when held close to the user's face. When this happens at greater distances, it's more doable, but for a phone, you'd hear a lot of complaining about the phone with a line down its screen. I think that pretty much any way you build this, it's going to have some major problems at first. Admittedly, they might have done a little more to avoid the problems they have.

Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz: Car hire biz demands $32m+ for 'defective' cyber-revamp

Re: Any blame on Hertz for not actually being in charge?

To be fair, the typical definition of IT would include a lot of things related to the website, such as where it is being run, where the database is, and what the spec would be, but the writing of the code that runs the site would probably not be a specifically IT thing. It mostly depends whether programmers and administrators are both lumped into IT or not. In most places I have seen, these groups are in different departments and simply connect. On that basis, it's not the IT department's fault if the programmers, in this case outsourced, fail to write the code properly.

Fed up with 72-hour, six-day working weeks, IT workers emit cries for help via GitHub repo

Re: Who is Complaining?

If you read the article, it's kind of a lot of people in China who are being forced into this and a bunch of other people who did argue about this and are having their comments blocked or erased. They're getting a bit of support from some engineers at github, but not very much. The information was all there.

I am happy to work longer shifts than is the norm, and perhaps six-day weeks. I won't mind doing it, as long as:

1. It lasts for a short amount of time before things go back to normal (two weeks would be acceptable, a month under exceptional conditions, see point 4)

2. There is some direct benefit to me, I.E. being paid extra, additional vacation time, or receiving some other benefit, not the chance that this will be looked well upon and someone will demonstrate their gratitude later

3. There is some planning so I know when this is going to happen. Not that it has to be scheduled a year in advance, but don't come to me on Monday and just announce it

4. There is a real purpose. If something needs fixing or building quickly, that's fine. If two projects need to proceed and I really have to work on both of them, that's fine. If I'm doing my normal job but they want me to work extra hours for no good reason, that's not fine.

Google rolls out Android Easter Egg for Europe – a Microsoft antitrust-style browser, search engine choice box

Re: And why...

I'm not supporting Apple's decision to do this, but it is not the same as what Google is doing and is not as clear-cut a competition issue. Consider this:

Apple doesn't let anyone else build things running IOS. Google does let other people make android devices. Google does not allow the manufacturers to change defaults if they are running the Google build of Android (they can change the UI, but could not make another search engine the default or decide not to include Google's apps). Manufacturers also can't make some devices with AOSP or other non-Google Android builds if they also want to have some devices with Google apps. So Apple restricts only the customers of their own products, whereas Google restricts the many phone manufacturers that have at least some Android products. If Apple had a massive market share, this would be a factor, but they do not have enough to be considered a risk to customers or competitors, while Android does. That's the major difference between the cases as the law is concerned.

You may say that Apple is still worse, as the consumer has less choice. However, that is a bit simplistic. Apple doesn't let the people who buy those devices make some decisions, while Google tries to eliminate the choice for all users of Android regardless of manufacturer. For example, the reason we can't get Lineage OS shipped on a device is because Google has prevented it. Decide on your own whether this difference is relevant to you, but at least you know why Google is being targeted and Apple is not, for now.

I'm a big fan of LineageOS, but it cannot be recommended to very many people because it's not supported on many devices. Yes, it's more than most other alternative mobile OS images, but it's not that long a list. Frequently, the people who ask me for ideas already have hardware they want to use, and it's rarely already on the list.

Even if it is already supported, the process is not easy enough for a nontechnical user. If a nontechnical user wants to try desktop Linux, they can get a disk from someone and boot it (usually happens automatically if it's an optical disk). From there, they just follow the instructions like they would on any other computer. To install Lineage, they will need to know how to root a phone, what a bootloader is, how to install and use ADB on the command line, and possibly other issues depending on the specific device. That is enough complexity to put a large part of the public off. I'm willing to install it for some, but I can't do so for everyone.

Take your pick: 0/1/* ... but beware – your click could tank an entire edition of a century-old newspaper

Re: The most dreaded word in IT...

"I have to give honorable mentions to "Uh-oh", "Ooh-kay", and the less brief but still terrifying "Hey [insert your name or nickname here], what do you do when it says..."

Re: "But I never experimented on a live system again"

Is it that suspect? The output from the formatter was very unclear, simply asking for a drive number. It did not explain its purpose. If that was normal, it is entirely possible that the expected utility wasn't clear either. Maybe it would have asked for a drive on multi-drive systems before going to the interface with which Adrian was familiar, which he had not seen because previous systems either had one drive or had a utility that figured it out. It seems like a bad process for displaying information to the user, but given that, I can understand getting it wrong.

Whose cloud is it anyway? Apple sinks $30m a month into rival Amazon's AWS – report

Re: Hmm...

With last year's revenue coming to $265.6 billion, it comes to about 01:09:16 of the revenue each month. Then again, this shows more about Apple's scale than it does for the cost of AWS or other cloud services. For the real numbers, we should track down statistics on how much they pay for Google Cloud and how much they paid up front and pay on an ongoing basis for their many datacenters, as they do have quite a bit running in house.

Now here's a Galaxy far, far away: Samsung stalls Fold rollout after fold-able screens break in hands of reviewers

Re: Need better testing

They may tell you everything, but many of them don't really understand the thing you gave them. So as long as you choose ones with a less technical mindset, all they'll be able to say to someone after they've broken the device is "So it's like a phone, but not, but big and like two phones but only one sometimes but also two, and breaky and you can move it around and watch the lights". I think that, if you know enough to identify the children being used, you might know that much already about the product.

Double trouble for Lyft after share price drop sparks class action lawsuits claiming hype

Re: Has someone external run the numbers

That is true about calculating exact market share, but it also means that each company can't really know the right numbers either. Each company may have a great deal of data about their own numbers, but they don't know the specifics for the opposition. That's why there are places that do third-party estimation of this type of thing for investors. I haven't seen if any of those have investigated this, but I would not be surprised to hear that they've been asked. If there is a report about this either already or shortly to be released, its contents will dramatically affect the prospects for this case.

Has someone external run the numbers

Is there some place where an analyst has figured out what the real market share is? Just as Lyft could be making up the data in order to sell more stock, Uber could be making some up to tank Lyft's stock price too. Uber have a history of being somewhat less than ethical, and Lyft have a better but not exemplary record, so some verifiable data from an unbiased source might be helpful here.

Who's using Mueller Report Day to bury bad news? If you guessed Facebook, you're right: Millions more passwords stored in plaintext

Ah, but you see, they were sneaky with their adverbs. You would think that they meant them in the sense of internally abused or internally improperly accessed, but they meant internally accessed but only in a proper way (you probably don't want to know what Facebook considers proper ways to access data) and not abused internally. Should they want some abuse done with the data, they can get an external entity to do it. Adverbs are tricky.

Idiot admits destroying scores of college PCs using USB Killer gizmo, filming himself doing it

Re: Don't Blame the Victim, But

"While they're at it, they might also do something about the more subtle attacks from USB sticks that allow malware infections."

And that would be? IF the USB does something at the hardware level like trying to fry the board, there are hardware solutions to that problem (although they aren't perfect and don't result in "completely impregnable"). If it does something at the software level, the OS has to respond to any threats. The problem is that the software-based USB threats aren't by their nature detectable as unusual. They represent themselves as various types of USB device, including input, storage, and network. But you can't eliminate any of those capabilities because people use legitimate versions of all of the above. You also can't prevent multiple devices from being connected to one port (which wouldn't even work to protect against most exploits but has been suggested before) because people use USB hubs and some devices have good reasons for showing themselves as multiple classes of device.

Facebook: Yeah, we hoovered up 1.5 million email address books without permission. But it was an accident!

Re: It's time...

It should apply, but the GDPR enforcement people don't seem to actually be doing anything. One fine against Google for not all that much, and a few minor actions against minor companies. Haven't they had long enough to start investigating these places? How long do they need to do this?

Surprising absolutely no one at all, Samsung's folding-screen phones knackered within days

Re: Extremely poor

That's ridiculous. Not only do Apple design a lot of the components, but they write all the software that runs on top of those. You can like, dislike, or feel a burning repulsion towards IOS, but if you're going to argue about which phone manufacturers copy a lot of stuff, you might not want to look at the android manufacturers that get all the chips from Qualcomm and all the OS from Google. They just design a case to put them in and write a launcher and a few apps nobody uses. I don't think it's fair to say they just copied someone else's work either; they chose the components they wanted and built a device out of them. It's how electronics work--this isn't art here, where using someone else's work shows that you lack imagination.

Re: Pretty well Inevitable for an Alpha Version

I think any portable product design should include one more step immediately after the first manufacturing run is complete:

Hello engineers. Thank you for working on this product. Here are the first units for you to use. You have to use them for the next two weeks. Be rough on them. Report any failures.

If the engineers are being too careful still, we'll have to scale it up again.

Hello engineers. Sorry we arrived unannounced at your house. We just brought along these gifts for your children. When they tell you their gift is broken, please report what happened.

This will find things never imagined by the people who built the testing machines.

Microsoft debuts Bosque – a new programming language with no loops, inspired by TypeScript

Re: can someone explain...

You make a list containing n elements, run a lambda over it where you ignore the thing in the list but ask for input and run the process on it. It's reasonably simple, but not at all revolutionary.

Re: What's Wrong With a Loop?

It was also possible that their thought process went like "If they think this is good style, they might use a bunch of gotos in the next project, which could be much larger". Depending on whether you were going to be there for a while, they either thought "They will really hate it once this catches up to them and they have to recode something big in the future" or the more pragmatic "We will really hate it if we see this on something bigger". They could then decide that you could get experience writing in a clearer style with this relatively small project to get you used to a better way.

iOS 13 leaks suggest Apple is finally about to unleash the iPad as a computer for grownups

Re: File transfer

Unfortunately, you'll need a third-party app to do this. There are a number of them though I cannot make a recommendation for a modern one. You install that and a client on a computer you're transferring to, and this allows files to be sent between the two. Definitely not the best solution, but it's available. Other apps do the same thing to file-sharing-enable apps that didn't do it right themselves. I should say for the record that I have never had an iPad and don't recommend it for computer tasks. This is just a thing that can be done and might help in some cases.

Re: file system access

Let's go car analogies. By your definition, if I drive, I am a professional user. All driving means to me is that I can make the car go where I want. I cannot decide how the car does this by governing the methods the engine processes its fuel. I can't make the car fit through gaps that are too small, or go above its maximum speed, drive off-road if the car isn't designed for it, or fly. All I can do is decide where the car is pointing and whether it is moving or not with some control over speed. That's analogous to a user of an IOS device. They do not have control over the system level, analogous to the stuff you can make a car do by disassembling and rebuilding parts. They can't make it do things it wasn't designed to do unless someone has already written the app (by user, we're already saying that they don't have the knowledge or desire to write the app themselves). But they can tell the device what to do and have it respond. And if they want extra functionality, they can either write an app themselves or have someone else do so.

A user of a computer uses it. That is all that is required. They do not have to have control over the computer, administrate it, or use it for some computery thing that we whitelist as making you a user. They just have to have a computer that they are putting to some use. Your strange definition of user doesn't work, and it seems to exist only to yell about IOS.

I'm not defending the devices, and I'll admit right here that the solutions below are most definitely not optimal, but here is how you can do those things if you already have iPads present:

"- File system access to backup and restore user created content."

You could use various options. You can take full backups to a desktop over a cable so they go much faster and/or use a made-for-IOS storage device which can take files. Most applications can export to a companion application for this.

"- File system access to allow simple transfer of files between devices."

This depends on what you want to get the file from or send it too. Flash drives aren't exactly going to happen, but you can get a file off one on a computer and send it over using internet services, airdrop (macs only), various apps over bluetooth, etc. You can also write files to apps that support file sharing using the USB cable.

"- User control over installed app versions"

You can disable automatic updates and sync the old app version before you update something you're concerned about. Should the new version not work, you can delete it from the iPad and send the old version back from iTunes.

"Using iCloud to back up thousands of 50 MB camera RAW files isn't realistic and having a single backup in one location is never a good choice."

This is where you'll want a full device backup, which gets taken via the cable onto a computer. The files making the backup can be copied to other media as well for redundancy.

Obviously, these aren't the nicest ways to accomplish these things, but as it sounds like you've already got an iPad, hopefully some of these will be useful for the specific problems.

Re: file system access

Thank you for that, but I'm afraid you may have missed my point. My point was not, as your reply implies "Android can't run a useful shell". It was, rather, "If Apple opened up filesystem and terminal access on an iPad it would be about as useful as, and therefore get as much use from IT and the general public as, the default android shell". Your comment supports my belief that nobody finds that mockery of a shell useful, and instead goes with one of your suggestions when they want one on an android device.

Re: file system access

I'd like those things, but a) Apple is not going to do them, ever, and b) very few users in companies care about these things.

They aren't planning to have you write code or administrate things on them. That isn't what they're for, and they wouldn't do a very good job. You'd get a micro Mac OS that's hard to build things for, leaving you with a thing that's kind of like using the shell directly on an android device*. Just use a laptop for that.

They're trying to sell this to the people who write documents, read messages, update spreadsheets with the data they got from the messages, read a website, and finish writing a document. Their improvements are aimed at people like that, who very frequently have multiple documents open to scroll through them but don't really understand what the filesystem is. I don't think the changes mentioned in the article will be sufficient, but it's good to know what they're going for.

*Using the shell on an android device: Not using a sort of Linux VM, nor a remote shell with the android device being a terminal, but the system shell to which we all have access. Does anyone use that? That's why we wouldn't use one on the iPad either. It'd be a pain. All it would do is let us write a few scripts that give us more control, then stay away from it for the future.

A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears

Re: Builders...

"the US is the most confusing, with half a dozen shapes of plugs available for use in the home"

Sorry? The U.S. has the one type of socket, with two parallel slots and a lower round earth slot. In very old installations, you might find the old type of socket, which is the same but without the earth slot. I believe those aren't allowed anymore. There may be other standards, but I don't think you find them in American homes. That's the only style of plug I've seen for that region, with the only variable being whether the device to plug in has an earth pin or opted not to include one.

Re: AS400's

At one point, I had a problem like this, where I had the capability to provide UPS power to some equipment* but no way to determine if it went down from the setup. My method was to add a small network device to the mains but not UPS supply, which would be contacted by a sentinel program running on one of the protected machines. If that device went down, the machines would sync to the disks, I'd get a warning, and some more important machines would run automatic shutdowns. If there are people there, I suggest a power fail buzzer with a similar setup.

*Not much equipment and a small environment. There was no room and no budget for a proper UPS solution that can be monitored by the equipment; everything had to be built out of things found in the closet.

Hey criminals, need a getaway vehicle? There's an app for that... Car share tool halts ops amid crime wave, arrests

"Share Now said no other cities should be affected by this."

Why not, exactly? From their home page, they're operating in nine other cities in the U.S. and Canada, so what is stopping people from doing exactly the same thing there? Or did they mean the quote in the title in the sense of "We would really prefer if this didn't affect other cities"?

Ozzy app maker cancels hump day: We've tripled profits! scream slackers

Re: Wouldn't fly around here

I once worked at a place that managed to be semilarge and still have a startup environment, actually a rather pleasant one. I think they mostly managed it by having smaller offices in many places, so there were only about 200 people where I worked. The nice thing about their scheduling system was that they really didn't care when you did the work as long as you were there for or called into any meetings and worked for the specified amount of time. You could do some long days and take most or all of a day off. You also didn't have many meetings, and most of them were small and could be organized to give you the flexibility to take time off.

Europe's home PC buyers reach for their collective smartphone, sigh: We don't need a new desktop. This is a computer, right?

Re: The old ones don't get obsolete

I don't care about optical drives on laptops, and nor do many people who have asked me to find them a laptop. The media is simply too old and too small to be used very much. I have a USB drive in my disk that I can connect if I need it. Otherwise, it's extra weight I do not need to carry with me. As for keyboards, there are certainly a lot of terrible ones around around this time, but there were some truly terrible ones before too. I've seen many keyboards on the more expensive laptops that are fine, but sometimes a keyboard is a thing that will be compromised with a laptop.

The old ones don't get obsolete

This is a wonderful time in desktop hardware, where virtually any machine you find that was built in the past ten years will work for a lot of use cases. I do some volunteer admin for a charity nearby, and they frequently come to me asking me to reinstall or update their desktops. Before when I'd did this, I had to deal with machines that would not have much life left--not because they were physically broken, but just because they no longer provided enough power. I haven't done that in a long while. Every machine is capable of handling Windows 10, office, and a web browser. That's pretty much all the people do with them. So they haven't bought any new desktops for at least three years and many of the ones in service are much older than that. The same is true of laptops to an extent--the processors, memory, disks, and graphics continue to be reasonable for quite a while. Laptops are getting better in the realm of size, weight, and screen resolution though. Still, people can use their old machines for longer and in the case of desktops, there seems to be little likelihood that this will change soon.

Google readies Pixel for the masses, but are the masses ready for Pixel?

Re: So they deny the problems, just like other manufacturers?

First, this is not an article directly comparing Pixels with iPhones. Pulling a Steve Jobs and using "Phones aren't perfect" is not really responding to the argument. The question is whether the bugs mentioned in the article, which are somewhat severe and form quite a long list, are enough to make the pixels less useful or desirable than other phones, both iPhones and other companies' phones, especially when taking the price into account. For me, that is a clear no as I do not care about the camera, and it sounds like that's the only part where the Pixel is better than other android devices.

Second, iPhones did bend, but haven't in a while (that was the iPhone 6), blow up (when they bent, also not in a while barring some "I squashed it and that ended badly" stories that would apply to a lot of phones), and the holding it wrong was a very long time ago. iPhones have many problems you could discuss. Use a newer one, and be honest about the quality when making comparisons. These historical bugs are still good only for jokes.

Re: I can't say that I'm trusting of Google hardware

You might have mobile data turned off if you don't have a very high limit. You might not use it for much but keep the small amount for an emergency need. Higher data allowances may be expensive from the mobile provider especially if you don't use it enough to justify the increase. To avoid background activity that may be difficult to stop from immediately using up all your data, you might turn off mobile data.

As for bluetooth, if you don't have any bluetooth devices, you might turn it off in case it does any background scans. By turning it off, you save battery. You could also have an incorrect reason for turning it off that has no real benefit. Even if that's the case, there is no good reason for the phone to enable it for you. If I've selected "off", no matter why I decided to do that, I meant "off".

As long as there's fibre somewhere along the line, High Court judge reckons it's fine to flog it as 'fibre' broadband

Re: Utterly Shameful decision.

Let's take it another way. We'll start with a question about the situation, and because I like them, we'll continue on to another analogy.

Does fiber differ from copper? Fiber in this case being FTTH? The answer is yes. It doesn't have to, as you've said, but it does. Fiber connections from most places are both faster and lower-latency than copper lines. Without the real specifications which they will not give you, this may be the only method for users to ensure higher speeds. Yes, it is possible that the fiber connection will be terrible too, but if you have it, you know that you have higher-spec equipment and the infrastructure that serves that connection was updated recently. You don't get that guaranteed with copper. With this environment of restrictions, you can only get a small amount of information.

Now the analogy. I have a wonderful intel processor to sell you. It fits into this motherboard, runs at a certain clock speed and has a good benchmark rating, and it runs at a specific power rating. I did not lie about any of this. Well, actually, I did lie about one thing. It's not an intel chip. It's a MIPS chip. If you're writing code for it, it will function just as I said it would. However, if you bought it to run X86 machine code on it, well that won't work so well.

I hear you protesting already. "The ISA is one of those features you have to match when it's a processor." I'd argue that this is analogous to the internet providers not telling you important details, but let's just accept this. So it's no longer a MIPS chip. It runs the X86-64 architecture with all the same extensions. Are we done? No, we're not. It still isn't an Intel chip. The specs may be the same, but there are still differences. Intel warranties their chips for some period of time. We at definitelymakeintelchips.com have a warranty on our chips for the same length of time. Another matched parameter. However, ours are built as cheaply as we can to pass that time, and because we employ the people who came up with planned obsolescence, our architecture that implements X86-64, which does not affect you at all because all your instructions run at the speed we told you, happens to have security vulnerabilities that Intel doesn't have. They weren't known to be there; we didn't refrain from telling you. We just hired the cheapest team we could find and the vulns will come out when your warranty is over.

Finally, a point of honesty. Even if our chips are just as good in every way as Intel chips, it's not fair to sell them as Intel. Of course, in this example, Intel could sue us for trademark infringement, but the same applies to other terms with definite meanings. "Intel" means "designed and manufactured under the direction of Intel or someone they gave the name to", "titanium" means "the element titanium", and "fiber" means "fiberoptic cable". If the ad says "Our fiber home internet connection", they're clearly implying that the connection that is connected to your home is a fiberoptic cable. If it's not, they're being misleading.

Re: Utterly Shameful decision.

It's quite pointless to use fiber as a marketing term, because it doesn't guarantee faster speeds or lower latency. Still, they use it to imply that their network is better, and they do this in a misleading way. Consider a parallel. Titanium is a great metal for many reasons, and things are made of it at times to get the benefits of the element. If customers come to view titanium as an advantage in things constructed of metal, they might decide to buy things made of it and advertised as being constructed of titanium. Would it be acceptable for a company to take its existing not built with titanium things, glue a piece of titanium one centimeter square to it, and advertise it as built of titanium? Maybe the consumer does not need titanium, but they decided that they wanted it. They will buy the metal item with the assumption that the metal in it is titanium. If they rely on this for some reason, they will be disappointed. The term has a specific meaning. If they were being honest, the network providers would drop the specific technology being used from the adverts and simply give statistics for bandwidth *and* latency. Anyone who cares about specifically getting fiber to deliver that could identify that element, but it would not be used as a piece of marketing nonsense.

It is but 'LTE with new shoes': Industry bod points a judgy finger at the US and Korea's 5G fakery

Re: What about the ugly hype linking 5G and IPv6?

They're not going to kill WiFi any time soon. That's not really feasible, since 5G systems won't provide as much bandwidth or certainty, and since there are so many WiFi devices out there. And it's so easy to have an internal network with or without NAT, that's not going to happen either. I fully expect that NAT will continue to be used even as IPV6 eventually gets rolled out.

Re: "Although given the NBT was DAT and Minidiscs"

And this could be a problem for the mobile companies, too. Or less a problem for them than another reason for us to dislike them. I currently have trouble figuring out which providers a given device will support. Of course, if it's a GSM device, it will work on any GSM network, easy enough. But this only guarantees me voice, text, and some semblance of data that doesn't really work. If I want to use 4G or even 3G, I have to match up LTE bands (4G) or at least frequency bands (3G) with the ones the provider is going to use. And there are very few devices that actually include most or all of them, instead choosing some seemingly random selection to accommodate some provider they have in mind. If the 5G people are going to carve up the spectrum again, I predict another set of bands that will never be the same across providers or devices.

Firefox arrives for Snapdragon Windows and Slack sidles up to Office 365

Re: stats

Can we make that a quadratic equation with integer coefficients that are limited to some value? Only the one my quick python expression gave me was

30.172645780509356x^2-380.2337095297456x+847.7979639890812

Silk Road 2 + Dread Pirate Roberts 2 + 1 Liverpudlian = over 5 years in prison

Re: Slight concern

A logical concern, but it doesn't seem to work. We describe in great technical detail how malware was detected. One would assume that the malware writers would find new ways that definitely aren't the ones that failed, and that users would make sure those methods couldn't work. And yet, the most successful malware in the sense of getting itself on a bunch of victims' machines is not all that complex. It uses vulnerabilities that have been known for a while, and it isn't always very well-written at all. There are a lot of people bent on doing evil without the intelligence needed to avoid the mistakes of the past.

While Google agonizes over military AI, IBM is happy to pick up the slack, even for the Chinese military

Re: Objectively speaking

You are correct. The two are not at all the same thing. They're just two different bad things. Science does not have some get out of consequences free card. Nobody should have a get out of consequences free card.