Posts by doublelayer

Ahem, Amazon, Google, Microsoft... Selling face-snooping tech to the Feds is bad, mmm'kay?

Re: This is a nice goal

Perhaps an analogy would help. You are in a boat, which is leaking. The hull is weak, so new leaks are going to form soon. You could spend all your time patching every small leak you see. That is like going to each company and trying to stop them; it will help for a while, but it won't solve the problem. Bigger leaks will form, and you will sink. Instead, you should plug the leaks that are a major problem right now, but put as many people as you can on either strengthening the hull so the leaks stop or sailing the boat to a place where it is safer to be after your boat sinks. That would be like trying to pass legislation about the tech, either making it illegal to use or putting restrictions on it. You may have a lot of trouble actually getting that to happen, but a very low probability of something working is better than a guaranteed bad outcome after a delay that will probably not be very long.

Re: This is a nice goal

The point is not that they might as well give up and provide the systems, but that the course of action of contacting each company that plans to make the system available is not going to result in a successful privacy-respecting situation at the end. After delaying the thing for a few months, the system will come into existence anyway. You instead have to do something about the desire by those in power to have such a system running, either to convince them that it is not good (good luck) or to instate regulations in place that make the system better for privacy when they do eventually build it (again, good luck). Simply playing whack-a-mole with the businesses that are thinking of providing it won't work very well because eventually someone who doesn't care about the petitions will come along.

Oh snap: AWS has only gone and brought out its own Backup

Re: All your eggs in one basket

Backing up internally can be useful in a few situations, for example if you messed up your VM or database and need it restored to the way it was before you did that. Mostly, that's an insurance policy against user failure, analogous to internal backups taken off on-prem servers and stored locally. For the typical case of backups, that is restoring data after something has destroyed your current system, it is less useful. Normal cloud activity is supposed to be insulated from things like disk failures by the cloud provider, so, if you are restoring backups for a small scale hardware problem, your provider probably has a major problem and you shouldn't be using them. Meanwhile, if something happens that is large enough that it takes out a datacenter, your backups stored there will be just as gone as the services you ran there. Maybe this backup solution will allow you to download the backup data and store it on a system of your choice, but I doubt it.

RIP 2019-2019: The first plant to grow on the Moon? Yeah, it's dead already, Chinese admit

Re: Safe reserves and efficiency

Couldn't they have tested this before they tested it on the moon by taking their small biosphere to Antarctica and leaving it outside? They could start when there is a lot of sunlight and then cover the solar panels if present to simulate the nightfall. If the heater can't survive a fortnight in that, it won't on the moon either. The transit costs would be much less.

Goddamn the Pusher man: Nominet kicks out domain name hijack bid

I find this type of person to be really annoying, as they have found a bunch of domains that eventually someone will want and will only give them away in exchange for much more than most of them are worth. That said, they have the rights to those domains, and I don't. It's annoying because I want to buy them for less than the domain resellers want to get, but it is not as if they've done anything improper in obtaining them. If they disappear tomorrow, I'd be happy, but I would not do anything nor would I want anything done to them to take away the things they obtained in a completely legal way.

Re: How about some grace time after expiry?

That doesn't make it anyone else's fault. If the company put their asset under the control of someone and didn't check that that person was doing what they should be doing, it becomes their fault and their problem. You have no right to a domain name; your right to use the name starts when you buy it and ends when your agreed time of purchase ends. At that point, the name is available again. From the sound of it, the policy provides for a convenient length of time so a matter of minutes can't kill the domain. If they didn't notice that 1) the registrar is sending a bunch of important-looking messages to us about our domain and 2) the services that happen from our domain have stopped being used and if you go to the domain you get a DNS lookup failure, then they don't seem to be doing the proper tests I'd expect from the least technical of organizations.

Brit hacker hired by Liberian telco to nobble rival now behind bars

Re: highly skilled hacker

In constructing that malware, there was some work finding holes into the systems. Usually, the default passwords were helpful, but a lot of devices that were supposed to have things like web interfaces limited to local subnets or devices behind NATs and thus harder to find had security holes that nonetheless allowed access. UPNP was a major culprit here, though not in the least the only one.

What a cheep shot: Bird sorry after legal eagles fire DMCA takedown at scooter unlock blog

Legal question

"With the information out there that people can basically steal existing scooters for $30 and a bit of effort, it remains to be seen whether people will stop throwing them in lakes and trashing them in favor of a more illegal approach of repurposing them."

I feel little sympathy for this company as they don't seem to have much of a problem leaving them in people's way, but doesn't the "throwing them in lakes" method of using them also count as illegal, as you are destroying someone else's property? For someone who is considering only those alternatives, at least steal the thing; it's less wasteful.

Peak Apple: This time it's SERIOUS, Tim

Re: Recession ???

I want innovations. My phone is fine, and does the things I do with it perfectly well. For that reason, I do not need another, and the phones out there don't do anything new, so that doesn't tempt me either. If someone did come out with a phone that had new features, that might indeed tempt me into buying it. Some new features are useful. Phones with network connections were useful. Phones with touchscreens were useful. A phone with the capability to have a full sized keyboard with moving keys or a clever simulation thereof that still fits in my pocket would be useful. That's why they should innovate. It would cause people to drop their older devices and buy new ones much faster if the new phones did something useful that the old ones did not, rather than being a different size and having a camera with more pixels.

Re: So where is the new market ?

It's not our job to find a new market for apple. If there is or isn't a perfect new market for Apple to enter, it does not change the fact that they have focused too much on their iPhone line and neglected other products and other opportunities. The brilliance of Apple at one point was that they could find a place that seemed like it didn't need a ton of innovation and they could innovate anyway. Whether the result was pleasing to everyone was not the point; whether you like or dislike iPhones, smartphones, or mobile phones, you can't deny that Apple's creation of the iPhone caused a lot of innovation in the market, both from them and their competitors. However, let's look at where Apple is and where they could go.

Where they are:

They have a few lines of products. Most are somewhat stagnant.

Desktops:

iMac: This is still a normal machine, and suits those who need a lot of computing power (from a standard home user to their pro model with xeons) and wants that attached to a big screen. They have innovated here with higher resolution screens and the pro model with high specs.

Mac Mini: They have updated it with more modern components, but the concept is still the same and the cost has gone up. The components are more expensive, but it isn't the low-cost Apple box it once was.

Mac Pro: The internals are from 2013. I honestly don't know why they're still making them.

Macbook Pro: Their innovation was dropping all the ports for USB C and taking the function keys off for a little strip of touchscreen. I haven't heard anyone all that excited about that.

Macbook air: They dropped the ports off this one too and took the price up a bit. The screen is now higher resolution. I don't think taking a screen they already used and putting it in the air case counts as innovation.

Macbook Retina: The thin, light, and underpowered one. It has been exactly the same since introduction.

iPod Touch: They still sell these with a chip (underclocked) from a phone they stopped selling a long time ago. I don't know why they're making this either.

iPad: Now available in five sizes. Those sizes are small (not updated with modern specs), normal, normal with the capability to use a pencil, large but still smaller than a laptop, and very large but still smaller than a laptop. However, the last major change was the pencil, which doesn't seem to be a major seller.

Apple TV: Maybe the software is changing. I don't own one. It doesn't seem the hardware is, though.

Apple Watch: Wait a minute. How many different versions of this have they made? Four? Well, I don't really know what the innovations are there but I certainly haven't heard about them.

These are all their real products other than the iPhone. Most of them are either outdated or just odd. In other cases, the computers have the modern processors in them but otherwise are the same as the old ones. Taking away the old ports isn't innovation.

Where they can go:

They already are looking at TVs. They could probably do quite a lot. I think that, if Apple built a TV, they could at least get it working with fewer remote control devices, which seem to have multiplied in the past decade. They could also get a streaming service running should they be so inclined. Both of those leave room for Apple to innovate if they wanted.

Apple has a home speaker thing. I didn't mention it above because it's ludicrously expensive and doesn't do very much. However, they could expand into the home automation market much more than they have already. Plenty of home devices could be designed differently.

There are many other markets for them, too. They could become more technical and start building services for developers, for example trying their hand at the cloud services market. They could embrace their artistic users, fix the high-end image, video, and audio programs they've been breaking and make machines for designers of many types (for example, a large screen with their pencil and touch capability but also running a full mac OS and creative software rather than the mobile versions that pretend utility. They could expand their music technology and start producing hardware for those who write music. They could try a watch with fewer capabilities and longer battery life, starting a real competition for the fitness tracker market. They could make a bluetooth headset that 1. doesn't have the various problems seen with bluetooth and 2. doesn't consist of two tiny units that each cost $80 and each fit easily through a street grate.

Diversification without consideration is useless. In fact, it's harmful. But this is Apple. Their business has been finding things that need a new design, and making that new design. Continuing to make the same style of computer with weirder software and an increasing number of flat touchscreens without doing anything else will eventually leave them stuck if they don't find something else to complement them.

Re: RE: Monopolies restrict innovation and invite abuse

"The decline of Microsoft suggests there might be something in that [theory that monopolies are more innovative]. After all, going back 15 years, they had a de facto monopoly on desktops."

Wholeheartedly disagree. Fifteen years ago, Windows ran on most desktops, but Apple still made a bunch of them, and desktop Linux was a thing that existed though it fell down a lot. You also had various small OS projects that had some users. Nowadays, Windows still runs on a lot of desktops, though it's gone down some. And the others are ... Mac OS, Linux, and random things with small user counts. Microsoft had some concerning things going on, but they had not obtained a position of true monopoly, and they have lost some of that market share over the years.

Consider how it would have been if Apple had a monopoly, a true one, at that time. Would they have, for example, switched from PowerPC to Intel processors? Probably not. They did that because the processors were slower per watt than intel ones, making computers power hungry. That meant that people who wanted laptops would not want the Apple-made ones, and Apple had an opportunity to fix that. Eventually, Apple might have made the switch when a new challenger had been making a few inroads, but they would have no reason if their machines were accepted due to a lack of choice.

If a company has a monopoly, it must fear that a challenger will arrive at some point and take their business, and to avoid that it must either innovate or place roadblocks in front of competition. Even if we assume that it always does the former, it has less reason to innovate than does a company that has an active competitor. Its products don't have to be the best for the various customer groups, they only have to be the ones that are available and generally better than the options that can be found easily.

Germany has a problem with the entire point of Amazon's daft Dash buttons – and bans them

Re: A 'proper' use for the buttons

The "we built a light switch" use case for those is indeed really unnecessary. However, it does sound like you could implement many things with these if you were so inclined. It would depend on things like how long the button lasts on its batteries, how good its WiFi access range is, and what happens to it if I put it outside where things get cold and damp, but there are indeed some use cases I can think of for a network-connected button. That said, there are not that many of those use cases, because most of the time that I'm inside, I could do those things more easily with the computers and/or phones that are usually close to me most of the time. The main utility of the button that I can see is allowing someone to activate it from outside my house (for example when I'm not at home). Even then, it's not a real problem. It's not quite hammering nothing because I say there's a nail, but I should maybe find a screwdriver rather than using the hammer to get it in.

Re: Just dumping the stuff in a cart wouldn't be a terrible option.

I would suggest you put a different control that people can use to indicate what they're missing, and then the person who buys that can ensure they get the right thing and the best amount of that. Therefore, if five people notice that the toner is out on the printer you only end up buying one replacement purchase, rather than five times as much. You could have your own programmed buttons for that or you could just put a link on the intranet for each different thing you could run out of. For example, it could work where each printer has a URL on it that indicates it has run out of toner, and sends that notification to the proper place. When the supplies purchaser checks this, they can verify which things need toner, whether there is any in closets that should be used, and then what really needs to be purchased.

Re: A simple idea

"Bear in mind that in a lot of fields [...], people HAVE to purchase, but really, REALLY don't want to have anything to do with the vendor. Amazon Dash buttons offer a straightforward way of avoiding this contact for regular purchases."

That could be done equally easily through normal Amazon use, no physical buttons required. I use Amazon and other online shopping systems, but I don't need a button that has the issues I mentioned previously to interact with those systems.

"You buy the button, and the cost is refunded on your first purchase. It's right there in the article."

I know; I read the article. I was expressing incredulity about that concept. I previously thought that Amazon would give these away with the knowledge that people would buy things more often if they had them. I was surprised to hear that customers were willing to pay money for the button itself, perhaps because I wouldn't want one at all. If they're willing to do that, it's entirely logical for Amazon to sell them. I just find the facts described in the article to be surprising.

A simple idea

Instead of trying to sell people on physical buttons, which are* crazy, give far too little information, and prone to all sorts of hardware problems like running out of power, becoming disconnected from their connection, or being pressed thirty times by the young child your child brought over to play, why doesn't Amazon implement software reorder buttons. If you want to reorder something in the Amazon app, you have to go to the menu, go through your previous orders, find the relevant order, and reorder the item therein that you want. The web is even slower. They could probably create a convenient page that lets users set up one-click reorder buttons, which would be free for them and really convenient to customers. It should take Amazon devs all of a week or two to implement that**.

*Wait. People are buying these? As in paying money for them? Not being given them for free if they ask? Even despite all the problems I mentioned, and the 98% of other problems I didn't mention? Either I'm going insane, or they already got there.

**Given that they already have the order system in place for the physical buttons, they could probably tie some UI elements to that and implement these software buttons in one day if they thought of it.

CES flicks the off switch on massager award… and causes a buzz

Sales site categorization

I've been trying to sell some secondhand network equipment for a friend's charity which does not need it anymore, but I have had difficulty when I posted it under electronics, my reasoning being that it wasn't a computer in and of itself, and that it wasn't exactly accurate to classify it as computer parts. So I waited for a while in the hopes that someone would see it in electronics, but no luck. Then I looked at the things being sold in the computers category. There are a number of computers, but there are various other things. I suppose I can accept that people sell printers and monitors there, after all they are devices that you use with and only with computers, although I still reductively think they should really be somewhere else. I'm not going to fight that battle though because I first have to fight the people selling as computers (these are all real things posted in the past week) printer paper, cameras, bare electric cable, and empty enclosures that once had computer components in them but now do not. Some attempts to categorize just don't work. Whether this is the fault of the options for categories or the people who choose which one to use is an exercise for the reader. In the meantime, does anyone need some switches? Nobody bought them when I reposted them as computers.

Who cracked El Chapo's encrypted chats and brought down the Mexican drug kingpin? Er, his IT manager

Re: Where he went wrong

Some possibilities:

1. El Chapo didn't want to figure out how to generate keys.

2. Admin wanted to have bargaining chips.

3. Admin wanted to turn El Chapo into police.

4. Admin didn't want to get into a situation where El Chapo has generated new keys and lost them, cannot access anything, and is getting mad. When El Chapo gets mad, people tend to die.

5. Admin didn't want someone else to be able to steal keys, because there could be many informants. If you do want to participate in a criminal enterprise and not undermine it, you can only trust yourself and the leader, so it's best to make sure anything important is done by one of you.

6. The admin did in fact do this, and reversed it in order to turn over the data.

7. The admin wanted to have some indication to the cartel that he was providing useful services, and thus that he should not be shot.

Dozens of .gov HTTPS certs expire, webpages offline, FBI on ice, IT security slows... Yup, it's day 20 of Trump's govt shutdown

Re: Comparison

"Not being super clued up with the way my American cousins implement their particular flavour of democracy, I wanted to float an interpretation to see if I "get it"..."

The U.K. and U.S. do things very differently, so it's hard to make a parallel. Yours doesn't really apply.

"Is this essentially the same to us Brits voting some nutter into power (some party that is close to the far left / far right), and then when the nutter Government tries to pass the budget which has us spending £20bn on a wall the MP's don't let the budget pass? However spunking £20bn on a wall was in the party manifesto in which they campaigned on."

Not now. That happens too, but at this point, it's two different groups disagreeing. The most analogous thing in British politics is when two parties that are in coalition disagree or one party has a major split. However, even this is less antagonistic because the coalition implies that the parties did agree at some point on their policy, but have separated. In this case in the U.S., one side campaigned on the policy while the other side campaigned on not allowing the policy to proceed, both receiving enough votes from somewhere to get them a position of power. In this case, this happened across multiple elections because terms overlap, but it would also be possible under the American system to have something like this happen in one election. Each side feels it has a mandate to the voters that voted for them to provide for or block the policy. The people who are in charge can't pass the policies that they want because they lack the votes. However, in the U.K. this would usually lead to a vote of no confidence and another election. The U.S. does not allow that. The executive and legislature are independent, and neither can remove the other. So they continue to have a disagreement until someone changes their mind or they just ignore the topic and do other things. Or in this case, they choose not to do anything at all.

Wanted – have you seen this MAC address: f8:e0:79:af:57:eb? German cops appeal for logs in bomb probe

Re: Home users...check logs...

Separation is good, but why do you need your guest network to be open? I run two networks as well, but I just give the password to the guest network to any guests and don't change it so they can come back. I don't need to carry the traffic of anyone who comes along, either to have free bandwidth or, now that tracking is a thing, get accused of something done by a stranger.

This is the final straw, evil Microsoft. Making private GitHub repos free? You've gone too far

Re: Free! For up to three collaborators!

"If you think taking physical media to people's houses is an acceptable form of backup, you've been very, very lucky to date."

The implication being that this is not reliable? Media in multiple locations prevents things from being damaged should there be a situation where the site and everything in it is damaged in some way such as fire or flood. You could be more protective of the data by having multiple disks to deal with mechanical failure, too. If you're doing it properly, why is this not a viable way to backup data in that way?

"I don't run my own generator, because even though my job requires electricity, it's much cheaper to pay someone else for the electricity they generate in bulk."

But I'm sure you or someone in your institution runs a system for backup power if the systems that get power are important enough. You could theoretically hire someone to have a bunch of generators and bring one to you, but having one there and knowing how to work it provides a lot of benefits.

"Similarly, I could find someone to "mind" a disk for me, but how is that really better than putting it in a remote data center that has a full-time staff that will look after it."

In many ways, it is not. For every option, you hae to look at the benefits but also the costs. For the datacenter, they include:

Benefits:

1. Someone is there to manage it, so it's unlikely to go offline.

2. They have good physical security, so it is unlikely that someone would break in and steal your data by taking the drive.

3. They manage a lot of data, so it is unlikely to be corrupted or lost by accident.

4. The datacenter is probably a long distance from where you are, meaning that you have more geographic stability.

Costs:

1. You may have to pay for its storage, depending on who is storing the data. If you're just putting your drives in someone else's house, you probably don't have to do that.

2. If some disaster does happen and the data doesn't come back online, you don't know where that data is, whereas you could locate and retrieve a backup you made yourself.

3. Various people you don't know may have access to the data because they run the system that stores it.

4. You don't know everything about the system, so it is possible that someone could break in using a vulnerability and steal it.

5. If something happens to the datacenter, you don't know if that system had backups anywhere. Depending on how their system works, your data may still have a single location even if it's spread across multiple physical devices in that location.

When you decide how you're going to store your data, you have to consider both sides of this coin. If you don't, you end up jumping to conclusions about what is better without having the required information to support the assertion. Both are viable options, and which to use depends on how the above points apply and how important each is in the particular situation.

Re: Not impressed

That message has been there for long before Microsoft gained control. I know this as I had a system that was locked down, needed to use github sometimes, and only had Internet Explorer on it. That message appeared every time. Complain about the message all you like, but know that Microsoft isn't responsible for it.

Great, you've moved your website or app to HTTPS. How do you test it? Here's a tool to make local TLS certs painless

Re: But why is it so complicated?

HTTPS can be circumvented by some MITM systems, but not by others. A company proxy likely has that built into it, but that's because the company can control which devices are connected to it and configure them to trust the proxy and to allow http traffic to be left unencrypted until the proxy. A MITM system on a standard network can't necessarily do that to you, because the browser will inform you that the traffic is now in insecure HTTP, that is if it doesn't complain more vociferously which some will do. So HTTPS is still useful against many attacks.

Re: Lol arcane knowledge of memory management

Memory management still needs to be known by most software devs. However, I think that will also decrease in the coming years without much harm. I know quite a bit about it; I taught it for some time. Let's consider other things I taught in the same course. One of them was caching locality. Interesting thing, that. However, when they implemented a system that was supposed to provide increased speed through keeping data close together for optimized caching, it actually ran slower. This had worked a few years before, but it is different now because processors became better at caching things, and the better solution became the one with the least overhead. You could view this as a problem, but the result was that less effort had to be spent on getting the full benefits of the cache. Some people still have to know about the architecture of the cache, either to really intensify performance or to build a better cache, but your standard dev could spend time on the functionality of the software without making things less organized and more fragile to get better performance.

Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

You can't get any modern OS to run on 128MB of memory and 2GB of hard drive space. Not even a modern CLI-only Linux will exist happily in that*. Yes, things have bloated, and Windows is one of those things, but everything has gotten bigger and uses more resources. Therefore, the 32GB/2GB spec is not sufficient for the use case of a workstation.

*CLI-only Linux on 128MB ram and 2GB disk: You can run embedded Linux images on this, but that's not the same. You can probably shove a trimmed-down image into those specs, but it will run terribly. Your issue will most likely be memory. Disk space is less of a concern because CLI packages are so small, but it probably wouldn't be that long before that was an issue too.

Re: 32GB HP and Linux GUI

"...a GUI Linux is still going to use up a bit of memory."

"Yes, but XFCE uses only 100 MB, and LXDE uses about 85 MB."

At the risk of starting a which window manager debate, neither of those is really used that much. You could do a lot of things to get a distribution to exist happily in a gigabyte or two, but most users will want a reasonably modern window manager that they already like. You could also have a Linux installation on one of these that is predominantly CLI*, but that wouldn't appeal to many users even though it would have no problem with the memory limits. In order for that to work, you would need to run not only the desktop system, and a relatively new one at that, but also a browser and libreoffice simultaneously. That doesn't need a lot of resources, but it can still use up enough memory to make the atoms slow.

*a CLI Linux on an atom: I did this with an old atom tablet that someone wanted to throw away. It has a whole gigabyte of memory in it, which put a lot of limits on what I could comfortably do with it. I assembled a Debian distribution for it that stays in CLI unless I manually launch a GUI, in which case it will use Mate. That works for some use cases, though it mostly sits in a cabinet so who can say if the effort was worth it.

Re: keep the users away from the system disk / partition

I can't say I agree there. For servers or systems where the profile could be loaded on multiple devices, that is required. When using a single device in a standalone configuration, however, you will only have the one disk in there in the vast majority of situations. So the data will need to be on that one unless you want to try having a removable media device such as an SD card permanently installed to store that data. I don't recommend that. You could create a new partition that stores user data, but that's just asking for a situation where the user has used all 96 GB of their space and would like to use some of the 16 GB free space on the 32 GB OS partition, but can't. The alternative is valid as well (it doesn't have to be as a result of system bloat; maybe they do want to install extra OS functionality that uses a lot of disk, such as large databases such as those in some foreign language packs. Manually resizing partitions is a pain that may not be needed when the disk is fulfilling a single purpose.

Re: So much for competing with Google..

I just want Microsoft to shrink the windows 10 install image so it fits on a DVD again. It's 4.69GB now. I cannot see that that is needed. I don't think you can fully set up a windows 10 machine without an internet connection anyway so they might as well produce a slightly slimmer build and download the rest of the components after the install. I have about thirty blank DVDs that I don't need but finding USB drives of sufficient size that I don't mind completely erasing takes a few minutes.

Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities @Dave

The atom is indeed quite a nice processor, just as the quad or octacore ARM chips are. That is to say, when those chips are running something that can run in parallel, they can perform miracles of performance. When they run things on only one core, the performance is fine, but not particularly notable.

However, atoms tend to be paired with two things that put major restrictions on their utility. Number one is the tiny amount of RAM typically put on the SOC. Most atoms that actually get used have 2GB, and some have 1GB (and people have built tablets with the 1GB RAM SOCs in them; those people are evil). When you take a processor that is somewhat slow and also make it page to use modern GUI applications running on a GUI OS, it can be painfully slow to respond. The second thing is windows. Windows will run fine on more capable hardware, but it is not lightweight enough for the atom. If that is the only thing that runs, it will probably work fine, but users of windows intend to run multiple applications because this looks like their laptop or desktop. When they see how slow the thing is, they try to use web applications instead on the theory that the heavy lifting can happen in the cloud. This, of course, means that they're now trying to run chrome on an atom processor and the 1GB of memory left after windows used some, and that's a recipe for disaster. Lighter browsers will run, but not with many tabs or script-heavy sites.

Running Linux on one of these is better in some cases, but a GUI Linux is still going to use up a bit of memory. These things usually only have a bit of memory, so that can still be very limiting. In general, a Linux user is probably more likely to know that the thing can only run two programs at once and stick to that, meaning that a Linux user will probably be more satisfied with it than would a windows user, but the windows user could similarly run only two (or one depending on size) program and use the thing. For most use cases, neither option is particularly useful.

She will lock you out, livin' la Vidar loca: Enterprising crims breed ransomware, file thief into hybrid nasty

Information

"The idea is that the victim will be so concerned with cleaning up the Gandcrab malware infection that they won't notice the malware was also lifting their passwords, payment card numbers, and unique system configuration information."

Passwords and card numbers I get. I can also see taking a bunch of user files in the hope that some of them will prove lucrative to you. But what kind of system config information do they take, and why? It can't be to break in, because they already got access. It couldn't be to break in again, because if the user properly cleans up from the infection, most config information will be changed by the full wipe and reinstall. If they don't properly recover, the infection will remain. However, I don't know what intrinsic benefit might exist in configuration data that would make that worth stealing.

You were told to clean up our systems, not delete 8,000 crucial files

Re: xfer

When I create temporary files, I put dates in the file names that are my estimation for the latest date where I'll need this. My rule to myself which I've been pretty good at following is that if I find one of these, and I don't know what it is, and the date in the name is more than a week ago, that file gets deleted without my putting any effort into figuring out what it is. So far, that has never been a problem.

You can blame laziness as much as greed for Apple's New Year shock

Re: Never mind China

The utility of icloud's approach for the non-technical user is the ease with which the thing sets up and works. It does the "sane and useful defaults" thing. For readers here, the sane defaults thing is usually not what we want because we want settings set to exactly our preferences. A person without that skill or who cares less about that may appreciate that apple has built it so it will work from the get go.

Recently, a family member wanted to view some pictures that they had taken on their phone, so they called me up to ask how to get them on their computer. They were happy with the answer that, because this was an apple computer and icloud was enabled, that they were already there and they just had to launch the photo application to view them. For me, this is actually a downside because I don't need my photos auto-uploaded. For them, it let them do something that would have been more difficult. That is one benefit of apple's approach. It's not for everyone, but it provides real benefits for some.

Stormy times ahead for IBM-owned Weather Channel app: LA sues over location data slurp

Re: "To the contrary, the app misleadingly suggests . . ."

And the lawyer in question did it right this time, by stating things truthfully. The app did not lie, I.E. it did not say "We don't send your location data to the highest bidder, the second highest bidder, and on down the list." Instead, it said something along the lines of "Your location is required to retrieve weather information from your area". That falls under lying by omission, perhaps, but it is more correct to say what that was, which was an attempt to mislead without outright lying. I don't know whether the privacy statement had lies or just buried the truth in a bunch of hereunders. However, the last thing we need is for a word that doesn't imply in the strict dictionary definition to be the cause of a failed case to protect users' rights.

Grab a bucket and spade: Sandbox open for Insiders again with fresh Windows 10 build

Maybe fix the account craziness

I recently had to help a person who set up a win10 laptop to sign in with a microsoft account, but then entered the wrong email address. The system let that work, for some reason, but kept asking for an email verification which couldn't happen because that address was not one the user had. Meanwhile, the system for switching the email address would not accept the real one because, according to whatever backend was put on it, that address was not available. I presume by this they meant that someone had already set up a microsoft account with it. The fact that that someone and this someone were the same person did not seem to matter. In the end, we ended up having to create the email account with the typo in it just to get the computer to shut up. So maybe someone could look into making that sign in method functional rather than trying to build what seems like the fifth sign in system for win10.

Apple blew my mind – literally, says woman: MagSafe plug sparked face-torching blaze, lawsuit claims

Re: Weird, it's otherwise never the *connector*

I concur on the many faults of the cable. I especially agree about those tabs to wrap the cable; that was clearly a bad idea. However, I like the magsafe connection because I heavily use my laptops, meaning that their batteries are going to reach that point where they do not last all day anymore. At that point, I'll need to plug them in in a place with people walking about. When they aren't looking where they're going and knock my cable, I'd rather have it fall out than stay stable. If it stays in place, either my laptop is to be thrown to the floor, which is not very nice, or the person will fall over the cable on their face, which is worse. For this reason, the magnetic connectors are useful to me. I've only seen them used on macs and Microsoft surfaces, though.

Crystal ball gazers declare that Windows 10 has finally overtaken Windows 7

Re: Android

Hence why I used the word "could". In order to get that capacity, you still need the relevant access using those tools. My example here would be routers running openWRT. On those, you don't get all the same Linux compatibility that you might want, but you do get root functionality, ability to run virtually any code that you can compile and run in the resource limits and with the tools installed, and theoretically the ability to construct the tools you are missing, which some people choose to do with openWRT. On a rooted android device, you may have obtained root capabilities but you still can't get around the major changes android has made to the unix-like user tools. One major example of this is that android uses user accounts very differently to virtually every other Linux system out there, which is virtually guaranteed to get in the way with many complex tools.

On the other side of this coin, if I created a machine that used the full Debian distribution, with the Linux kernel, GNU tools, and all the other functionality that clearly makes a Linux system, and then sealed it in a virtualization system so you couldn't use any of it, I have changed how it works. All the Debian code is there, but it doesn't give the user the functionality of Debian. It only gave the creator of the system those capabilities. For the user, it is what the thing can do, rather than what code went into it, that makes the system what it is. When "Linux system" has come to mean a certain level of usability, compatibility, and modifiability, it is a disservice to use that term when those aspects are not present, even if the words are literally true. For me, my microwave is not a Linux system; it is a microwave. Until I am allowed to rewrite its code or at least log in, the Linux kernel it runs does nothing for me, and the thing is called what the thing does, which is a microwave.

Re: Android

I accept that, but only somewhat. Linux is more than the kernel. The name may have applied only to the kernel at some point, but it has grown to be a term used to refer to a type of system using that kernel and certain types of tools above that. Android has some GNU code in there too, but it isn't GNU/Linux in the conventional sense, nor is it Linux in the conventional sense. Similarly, BSD may refer to a kernel, a license, a set of kernels that use the same paradigm, and an operating system distribution built on one or more. When comparing it to an operating system, I, at least, will assume the "operating system distribution" definition to be in use.

Specifically with GNU, having a system that would be accepted as Linux by many does not necessarily require the GNU implementations of the tools. For example, an embedded Linux using the busybox versions of the basic tools and without other GNU components could still fall into my definition of a Linux-style system if it allowed access and user control. Meanwhile, a system that puts all the code of a standard Linux system with GNU tools in, but then blocked its ability to be used in the standard manner (for example blocking login ability and the ability to install new code) would no longer count for me as a Linux *system*, instead being a thing using the Linux kernel.

Re: Android

Android uses the Linux kernel. So do a bunch of embedded devices and some systems for internal virtualization components. None of those mean that Linux runs the world, for the major reason that an actual Linux system consists of more than a kernel. It's a great kernel, but with a completely closed layer above, the benefits to users just aren't there. Android uses the kernel but prevents real use as a Linux-capable machine by denying root access and being structured such that gaining root access through odd means doesn't allow compatibility with most Linux functionality. I can run some things, sure, but things that expect the standard environment of users or anything complex will run into roadblocks set up by the android developers in an effort to keep android unified and not easily changed by the end user.

If I want to run software that will run on Linux, I need a desktop install, a server running it, or a designed-for-linux embedded device like a raspberry pi or an openWRT-compatible router (some limitations remain). It will not run on my android phone any more than it will on my Linux-powered microwave. In that sense, Linux on the desktop, where there is effort put into letting users control everything, keeping things globally functional, and creating a nonproprietary system, is very far from running the world. It has dominance in servers, but not much else. Claiming victory because android borrowed some code is missing the point.

It's a lot of work, being popular: Apple, Tim Cook and the gilets jaunes

Re: India is a race to the bottom

When you have so many buyers, you don't need a lot of margin for that to be a big thing. When you have such a large market with customers who will show their devices to others, you have a chance to become a brand that is popular across that market. This is how certain areas get a surprising distribution of a specific brand, and the phone manufacturers would not mind at all being that brand across India or some areas therein.

Do not adjust your set: Hats off to Apple, you struggle to shift iPhones 'cos you're oddly ethical

Re: it's not just about you

"Why did you arbitrarily exclude rooting and installing a 7.1.2 custom ROM? You are of El Reg's readership."

I'll include another reason. I can't install these things unless I've already gotten one of the android-makers' flagships. For these custom ROMs, the list of supported devices is rather short. All the expensive devices are there, but the nice thing that android has that apple doesn't is the availability of devices that have internals commensurate with their price. None of these get the ROMs created for them, and I do not intend to try to compile it myself. So my android devices rarely support anything other than the thing they came with. The devices that do get this are the flagships that are overpriced and underpowered. So my choices are too expensive but well supported (apple), too expensive with some rooting required and later no support because they'll use rooting as an excuse to say no (flagships), or sensibly priced but no software or support.

Another relevant problem is that these ROMs don't always offer all their functionality. They are buggy and require more user maintenance. I am capable of doing that, but I'd rather not do it for my friends and family or the devices I manage for my employer because a lot of stuff can break. This isn't like Linux on the desktop, where when something breaks it is easy to figure out what it is and slap in a fix, because things on custom android versions change a lot and a lot of things that break frequently are device-specific.

Is Google purposefully breaking Microsoft, Apple browsers on its websites? Some insiders are confident it is

Re: support Mozilla

I would not be surprised to hear that google has deliberately broken various things. Recently, I noticed a difference between recaptcha (made by Google) systems on different sites. I use one site that makes me use it a lot, and the system always works then. Then, I wanted to set up a protonmail account, which also requires a captcha to prevent spammers from using it. Imagine this: the recaptcha system suddenly got confused. My computer or network was sending out automated queries or something. I should please try again after several minutes (it took four hours for this message to go away). And the next time, where keyboard input on the box didn't work because javascript error or something that was definitely just a one-time thing and not anyone's fault at all, and the next time, when my computer or network was back to sending automated queries. Back to another site, and it works well again. Either protonmail just happens to write very terrible code that also manages to infect Google's backend, or Google's captcha system would rather not support an alternative to gmail.

Ofcom asks networks, ISPs: Hey, wouldn't it be nice if you let customers know the best deal once their contract's up?

Re: What is this out of contract thingie?

I'd like to do that. Unfortunately, I have been and can give you the results. I have no results. I'm not looking at U.K. contracts, but I assume they're much the same.

For each provider I check, they have several different plans, all of which seem very similar. I'm a very simple customer; I already have my hardware and I don't need very much data. Each plan has the following variables:

Minutes/texts provided

Data cap

Data speed

Data at high speed cap

Roaming costs

Price difference for different number of lines

Very few of this matters to me. Ideally, I'd like a plan where I have a specific price for each type a thing and just live with it, although I'm fine with caps. Whenever a plan as simple as this exists, prices are much higher than all the other plans where details are less clear. Or sometimes, they will have more complexity to make up for it, such as some plans where there is also a cost for the sim itself (I don't know why). I have found no resource that allows for easy comparisons, and I have had enough conversations with the people at the mobile providers to know that I dislike having conversations with the people at the mobile providers.

Forget your deepest, darkest secrets, smart speakers will soon listen for sniffles and farts too

Re: It sounds like you're writing a letter...

Google has translate. Now they know what you're doing and how well you speak whatever foreign language you use. Victory while using the app is impossible.

The bandwidth and storage costs are not difficult at all. Audio can be compressed a lot. There are some codecs that are optimized for voice and can retain a great deal of the data needed for voice in tiny files. That's until they get better at speech recognition, into which they have been pouring millions. Then you're storing text. They already are doing something like this. If you use google's captcha and use the audio version, they make you transcribe a few words from some recording. Since you're usually blocked from whatever the thing is, it's probably better not to think about where that recording came from or what they're using your response to do.

ZipRecruiter has been flying low: User email addresses exposed to unauthorised accounts

October? That's a while

So they became aware of this back in October, and sent notification in December? If they were able to find and fix the bug in ninety minutes, which seems entirely plausible and not at all some random low number that someone made up, surely they could have identified the people whose data was read in two hours and sent them and the relevant oversight offices notification in three. What were they doing in these intervening months? By the way, isn't there some new regulation around that says notification should be sent in 72 hours or less? The protection of data or something like that? No, I must be imagining things.

Poor people should get slower internet speeds, American ISPs tell FCC

Re: Here's the thing...

I somewhat agree with your points, but I think broadband should be defined higher than you do, because dialup doesn't work anymore. If we took your connection down to dialup levels, browsing wouldn't work anymore. Some sites still use small files and have done with it, but with the image, script, and other media-heavy sites out there, a dialup connection would take forever to load it. It is not feasible to use those services without the scripts and images, at least most of the time. So I think we should find a reasonable lower bound on the speed needed to do standard browsing, and then define broadband as some level significantly higher than that. Otherwise, I think your ideas are good.

Re: What does "broadband" get you these days?

Broadband gets you a lot of things. It gets you el reg, and sites like it that don't exactly have tiny text-only article files, and most other news sites, which go straight out past medium sized files into the tons-of-images articles that would load in minutes over a non-broadband connection. It gets you the ability to stream video, which may just be entertainment, but may also be something like online educational materials. It gets you the ability to videochat with your friends or coworkers. It gets you the ability to download a linux update in minutes, or a windows update in an hour, rather than hours and a week, respectively. It gets you the ability to check job boards, go online to reserve a flight, or yes spend some time enjoying the content that the internet provides.

We've seen slower everything. None of us need things to go faster, as we'd all survive even if using a computer from 1990 with its modem access. We choose to use faster things, not because they are truly necessary, but because they are more functional and useful. And if we use those things, then the slow internet becomes obsolete and gets dropped. Like it or not, the 1200 baud modem of yore doesn't work. Even if we were able to connect it to the modern internet, you wouldn't be able to use it for anything. Even an SSH session uses more data now. The modem is obsolete. Dial up is obsolete. They should be replaced.

Re: It stinketh

Take a look at any ISP website and the large amount of space it devotes to its gigabit fiber system. That's always fun to read, right before you click the "is this available for me" button and get told no. I begin to think that they just have one fiber line connecting their headquarters to their off-site datacenter but can say that anyway because they technically have the services; just not in your area.

The eulogising of The Mother Of All Demos at 50 is Silicon Valley going goo-goo for gurus again

Double hyperlinks

No thanks. The benefit with a unidirectional hyperlink is that I don't have to control or know the person who controls the other end of that link, and I can link to things that are relevant to whatever I'm saying without having to worry about whether what I'm saying is relevant to them. Worse still, I could see this as the cause of an annoying amount of spam by people wanting to link to my page so I'll link back to them, which I'd have to run through because somewhere there would be one with useful content. Essentially, double-ended links would try to turn us all into a search engine, and I'd rather not do that.

Windows 10 can carry on slurping even when you're sure you yelled STOP!

Re: Bah!

I somehow doubt that would work. You would need to be able to fake a signal from a real windows device, which I presume has some encryption on it so it's hard to mess up, and you would also need to know the contents well enough to make misleading contents that don't get automatically rejected. If they found you doing it, they'd just autodelete anything from your network connection and carry on. If you have a way, I'm interested to hear how you'd get around these things.

Ticketmaster tells customer it's not at fault for site's Magecart malware pwnage

Re: Java f'in script !

I may be describing a badly written system, and I'll gladly stipulate that you can write a bad system in any language or paradigm you like. However, I still think this is an adequate argument against some, but only some, javascript use. The reason I say this is how many extremely terrible client-side form handlers there are. If they all worked really well, that would be nice, but it doesn't happen that way. Javascript is a tool like any other. You can do things with it that are not doable with other tools. You can also use it to turn a page that does not really need client-side interaction and turn it into a nightmare. It can also cause plenty of security problems, which doesn't help either. On balance, it's a tool that is misused a lot for whatever reason, making it unpleasant to many.