Posts by Barry Rueger

To catch a thief, go to Google with a geofence warrant – and it will give you all the details

It gets worse

My new BlueTooth equipped furnace air filter also demands access to location data before its app will work.

Which I guess would be useful if my furnace was stolen....

That's Huawei we roll: Firm claims it's slinging 100k of its pricey, China-exclusive Mate X foldable phones each month

Meanwhile in Vancouver

Huawei CEO Meng Wanzhou remains under house arrest. CBC Radio's ”Sanctioned" podcast has a new episode this week describing the pre-trial court room manoeuvring.

Flying taxis? That'll be AFTER you've launched light sabres and anti-gravity skateboards

Re: Flying taxis = wrong solution to right problem

MONORAIL!

Is it a make-up mirror? Is it a tiny frisbee? No, it's the bonkers Cyrcle Phone, with its TWO headphone jacks

Kids these days...

Two headphone jacks? Sony did that forty years ago with original cassette tape Walkman.

Shhh! It's us, Microsoft. Yes, it's 2020. We're here with a new build of Windows 10

Re: Too Slow

Haven't touched WINE since I discovered VirtualBox. I've got an elderly Vista instance that just moves happily from one machine to the next for the one accounting program that lives inside it.

Re: Too Slow

Sadly she uses a couple of Windows only applications and I have little faith in WINE's ability to handle them. Beyond that the process of moving everything from Windows to Linux is daunting given that machine is heavily used for several hours each day.

Too Slow

My wife's HP laptop just did what I take was a pretty major Windows 10 update. Can anyone explain why this should take hours, and why every update requires a complete reboot?

This machine has been an endless battle from Day One, and still has significant issues with BBC I-player, but only at home, and only some times of the day - with a fibre connection and a series of different routers and mesh systems.

Obviously some of the problems lay at the feet of HP, but when I reboot with a Linux USB the performance issues disappear so Windows has to take the lion's share of the blame.

And that's ignoring the overall user interface...

Huawei's P40 and P40 Pro handsets will not ship with Google Mobile Services, Richard Yu confirms

Excellent!

Huawei phones are very, very nice, and a lack of Google crap will just make them excellenter!

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

AKA Libertarians

Wikipedia describes the "Institute for Justice" as follows:

The Institute for Justice (IJ) is a non-profit libertarian public interest law firm in the United States.[3][4][5] It has litigated eight cases considered by the United States Supreme Court dealing with topics that included eminent domain, interstate commerce, public financing for elections, school vouchers, tax credits for private school tuition, civil asset forfeiture, and residency requirements for liquor license.

It's a Koch financed outfit that seems to exist largely to protest regulations that you or I might consider sensible safety precautions, but which they feel unnecessarily constrain corporate entities like "engineers", food cart operators, hairdressers, and taxi owners.

The point being that it's a pretty much entirely political outfit, and that some of the claims made in the story are questionable.

Or, put another way, they seem to believe that their libertarian ideals trump the rules and laws that elected representatives put in place.

Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold for $$$$ to private equity firm, price caps axed

We Told You So!

Back in the day, some twenty-five years ago, the Internet was a sparkly new thing, and the noun was still capitalised.

Probably the biggest debate on-line - aside from "copyright doesn't apply" - was whether commercial interests should be allowed on the 'net. The arguments were long, and they were passionate, but at the end of the day a society where everything was for sale won the game.

Now we have an Internet where we are bombarded with advertising, where every iota of our lives are monitored and processed to better select which ads we see, and where the the idea of a non-commercial Internet is seen as a quaint and old-fashioned idea.

One by one nearly every part of the Internet that was free of commercial exploitation has been bought and sold, or like the Usenet archives that Google snapped up, shut down when it seemed that there was no profit to be made.

If you're too young to remember those days you should consider yourself lucky. Those of who do will just despair for what the Facebooks and Googles have done to the beautiful Internet that we used to have.

American telcos get 90 days to wrap up deals with, er, dangerous Chinese supplier – that's Huawei the news goes

Meng Wanzhou

Don't forget that Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou is still under house arrest in Vancouver while fighting a rather sketchy US arrest warrant.

I recommend our local CBC outlet's excellent podcast Sanctioned: The Arrest of a Telecom Giant. Nine episodes to date, and more to come as the case progresses

Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

Woof to Enter

My side job is taking groups of dogs for trail hikes. I have learned two things.

If the door lock relies on a battery it will eventually go dead.

But if the household children are more than ten years old there will always be at least one door unlocked.

Without any apparent irony, Google marks Chrome's 'small' role in web ecosystem

Google is exploring shaming developers of slow loading websites

Like Gmail? That consistently consumed all available RAM, grinding my not too old laptop to a grinding halt, and eventually forcing me back to Thunderbird and the generic "Email" app that came with my phone?

Any developer that doesn't test on five-year-old hardware and a mediocre wifi hotspot should get out of the business.

Chrome OS: Yo dawg, I heard you like desktops so we put a workspace in your workspace

Linux for the win

The more that I read stories like this the more happy I am to stay with Linux where I control my workspace.

I cannot imagine returning to Microsoft, Google, or Apple. I much prefer not being locked down.

We're late and we're unreliable but we won't invalidate your warranty: We're engineers!

Re: I need an electrician

I'm Canadian, so 120v is "normal" and 240v is "will kill you." Even though I’ve since worked with both, and understand that world+dog uses the latter these stories still terrify me.

Nothing's certain except death and patches – so that 'final' Windows 10 19H2 build isn't really

Re: SNAFU

Yes, keep testing those builds, so the general population won't have to.

An excellent and subtle troll. We all know that all of the most egregious bugs enhancements will appear when the Great Unwashed get this dropped in their laps.

Ow-wei, says Huawei as Chinese giant admits US sanctions smacked it right in the phone biz

China has a thriving on-line ecosystem that honestly is a few steps ahead of the US in ubiquity and convenience - WeChat rules everything. Although you'll hear people complain about lack of Google services the Chinese ones are more than good enough.

Access to the Googleverse is only an issue outside of the Middle Kingdom.

Don't underestimate Huawei and other Chinese tech giants. It's entirely possible that they may create a new ecosystem that turns Google into the next Yahoo

Yahoo! Groups' closure and a tale of Oftel: Die-hard users 'informally' included telcos

Facebook? Twitter? Useless for these purposes.

I too remember E-Groups, as well as ListServ and MajorDomo. It truly saddens me that email lists have been all but replaced by Facebook pages, WhatsApp, and forums.

For every task there is a tool that will perform best, and for many things an email list or reflector is that thing. If you belong to a group of 500 like-minded individuals it's the only sensible route. There's no need for each member to maintain a list of members on their own system, and people are free to leave with no worry that the list emails will keep coming to them.

Email is the lowest common denominator - everyone has an email address, and can send and receive messages no matter how old or oddball their computing device might be. It's a shame that email has been devalued to the point where some people actually think that a Facebook group is a realistic alternative. Did I mention that an email list also doesn't filter messages based on some California kid's algorithm? And doesn't stick advertisements into the message? And can even allow attachments? That you can easily move from a group discussion to a private one?

I use forums for solving technical problems, and the fairly permanent nature of them works well for that. And I use Twitter for another set of tasks that are perfect for that medium. As good as those are for some jobs, there are still places where an email list is the easiest, most secure, and most flexible option.

Ultimately though what this demonstrates yet again is that we all need to take on the task of moving our work away from the Googles and Yahoos of the world and into our own hosted spaces. You simply can't trust that any of these corporations will maintain the services that you use, much less any archives that you may have created. Fortunately a lot of hosting providers have some kind of one-click install for email lists so a lot of the headaches are eliminated.

A funny thing happened on Huawei to the bank. We made even more money. Hahaha. Here till Friday

Meng Wanzhou

Don't forget that Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou is still under house arrest in Vancouver while fighting a rather sketchy US arrest warrant.

I recommend our local CBC outlet's excellent podcast Sanctioned: The Arrest of a Telecom Giant. Nine episodes to date, and more to come as the case progresses.

Hundreds charged in internet's biggest child-abuse swap-shop site bust: IP addy leak led cops to sys-op's home

Re: poor choice of words

Apparently Tetris is not enough, and some cops are developing PTSD as a result. The linked CBC story is but one such report.

Hands off our phones, says Google: Radar-gesture-sensing Pixel 4 just $999 with a 3-year lifespan – great value!

Re: Just buy a recent Xiaomi phone

Upvote for the Huawei suggestion. It's been a very long time since I liked a phone this much.

Transcribe what?

There are two noteworthy apps shipping with Pixel 4: the Recorder app, which can transcribe recorded audio – reporters rejoice –

Has Google backtracked, or does Android still block the recording of your own phone calls? Idiots.

Ye olde Blue Screen of Death is back – this time, a bad Symantec update is to blame

Re: Paging ...

Nah. Central Point was the real deal.

Not a death spiral, I'm trapped in a closed loop of customer experience

Capital One

New credit card. Attempt to setup on-line access by clicking through from the email telling me to set up on-line access.

They have a form asking for:

Last Name*

Birth date

Phone number

Postal code.

Didn't work.

Twenty minutes with a phone drone with English as a fourth or fifth language eventually determined that the problem was that when applying on-line I had entered my cel phone number into the box marked "home phone." AKA landline.

Which, like many, I don't have.

After asking me for information (like my phone number!) to confirm my identity they assured me that my record now showed my mobile number.

And that I should try logging in again after 24 to 72 hours!

* At one point I checked out the FAQ in case I had missed something obvious.. It instructed me to:

Enter your full name as shown on your card in the box labelled " Last Name."

You rang? Windows 10 gets ever cosier with Android, unleashes Calls on Insiders

All Well and Good But...

I'm much, much more interested in knowing what this update will break.

Honestly there are probably a thousand significant issues that MS could be addressing instead of faffing around with crap like this.

Android dev complains of 'Orwellian' treatment as account banned after 6 years on Play store

Hardly news

If you're a writer you often want to record interviews, including those done by phone.

New phone last year, which upgraded to Oreo, and all apps that recorded phone calls stopped working. Google in its wisdom had disabled that function in Android and if you or your company needed it you were SOL.

This is why I have moved everything possible away from Google. Even when (infrequently) they do something well it's likely that next week they'll just shut you down with no warning and no avenue for appeal.

The OS is 'no longer' important to Microsoft, and yet new Surface kit has 3 Windows flavours

Microsoft. + Android

Dear God. I can't imagine how that could be anything but a disaster showcasing the worst elements of both OSs.

Hey, it's Google's birthday! Remember when they were the good guys?

Seduced, betrayed, and Sold to the Highest Bidder

I too recall moving from Yahoo! to AltaVista, to Google, and being honestly astonished how the latter always seemed to find exactly the page that I needed. Yes, it was that good.

As years went by I added any number of Google products to my on-line life, and was generally very happy.

Then, maybe ten years ago, they started killing off great tools and services with no particular sense of caring that this would actually hurt people. Products like Gmail started getting interface "updates" that actually made them less useful and more annoying. Android seemed to become more annoying with every version, burying users under a torrent of notifications while locking out things that are actually pretty much essential for some people. At the same time Google demands repeatedly that I do things by yelling "OK Google" at my phone pr computer.

And, irony of ironies, Google Search has become nearly useless, with sponsored ads, shopping sites, and entirely irrelevant things taking over the first page of results.

The one Google product that might still be top of the list is Maps, but they've made the maps so low contrast that they're often un-readable. There's actually a plug-in that specifically adds contrast so you can see streets and names.

This is the year that I've actually moved most of my life out of Google, partly because of the data collection and sale of my information, and partly because so many of their products just don't deliver what is promised. NextCloud, Thunderbird, and my web host's email service cover most things, and arguably do it better than Google.

At this point the only products that I actually choose to use, and am generally happy with, are nice stable Open Source ones like Mint Linux and LibreOffice. I'm tired of battling some corporate code geek's idea of what would be the next Kewl Thing to foist on users. I don't want novelty, I want to get my work done.

It's sad, but I'm happy to just avoid Google at all costs.

It's beginning to look a lot like October, everywhere you go. Take a look at the Windows 10, primed for release again

Please, no!

Really there's only one question when a Windows update is released : what will it break on my wife's laptop?

She would happily disable all updates on the thus far reasonable assumption that a security breach will cause less damage than whatever Microsoft delivers.J

Open-source companies gather to gripe: Cloud giants sell our code as a service – and we get the square root of nothing

Darned capitalism!

Capitalism and altruism do not play well together. (Or perhaps unregulated Capitalism.) It was inevitable that Open Source would become commercialized regardless of the creator's intent.

Having watched the Internet as it was destroyed by commercial interests it's hardly surprising that the software underlying it would also be exploited.

Scotiabank slammed for 'muppet-grade security' after internal source code and credentials spill onto open internet

Surprised? Hardly.

It's only been a year since Scotia Bank finally relented and made passwords case sensitive and allowed special characters.

Lately though they forced mobile customers to "upgrade" to a new improved app that lacks several heavily used features, and which is inarguably harder to use for everyday tasks.

For instance, instead of tapping a button to confirm an action you now need to drag a slider across the screen.

How much pass could LastPass pass if LastPass passed last pass? Login-leaking security hole fixed

My thought exactly. Can you say "single point of failure?"

Just what we all needed, lactose-free 'beer' from northern hipsters – it's the Vegan Sorbet Sour

In the same way that various fruit and flower based "teas" are NOT tea.

Lord yes!! Although after a couple of weeks touring China I'm now thinking that pretty much nothing sold in Canada qualifies as "tea."

Still, Yorkshire Gold will do in a pinch.

Are you who you say you are, sir? You are? That's all fine then

Re: Love 'em!

It's a teansgender age. When I call the cable company I identify myself as my wife Susan. I dare them to challenge me.

Re: Scripted

My mother was listed as a co-signer on all of the bank accounts when my father died. "For business reasons."

Somehow she and the bank managed to move everything into her name only before officially registering the death with them.

This happened within a couple of hours of death, which suggests that the bank liked him as little as we did.

Lights, camera, camera, camera, action: iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip biz in new iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip shocker

Peak tech

Seriously, we have really plateaued in terms of technical innovation. Nothing here represents much of an advance over what's already on the market.

OK, let's try that again: Vulture rakes a talon on Samsung's fresh attempt at the Galaxy Fold 5G

Less is more

I'm actually at the point where I want less media technology in my pocket, not more. I like discrete tools for specific tasks, not a balled up mess of half-baked apps struggling to function under this month's iteration of Google 's "we've decided you don't need, or can't be trusted with" restrictions on Android devices.

As much as I like the idea of a computer in my pocket, Android is far from offering what I need. Screen size is the least of my problems.

Re: It's a stupid idea

I've found the failure always seems to give little advance warning, is very rapid once it starts, and quickly becomes catastrophic.

And given that most manufacturers don't even provide software updates after 18 or 24 months I'm assuming that spare parts availability, repairs, and warranty will all be even less.

If my $35 toaster is dead after a year I'll write it off as planned obsolescence, but a phone priced at two grand?

Huawei new smartphone won't be Mate-y with Google apps as trade sanctions kick in

Re: This is more of a problem for Google than for Huawei

The only app that requires significant investment is for mapping

Nope, just translation. Although even people in China moan about not having Google maps, Baidu seems to have decent maps available in Mandarin, and I believe WeChat also offers maps.

I would not for a moment bet against Huawei in this battle. Their hardware is top-notch, and China really understands the whole mobile services thing.

Aside from that, doesn't Amazon still have an app store?

Hey, it's 2019. Quit making battery-draining webpages – say makers of webpage-displaying battery-powered kit

Good Old Days

I remember getting my first high-speed DSL connection, and marvelling at Web pages that jumped onto the screen immediately instead of taking five or ten seconds.

Fifteen years later, with a cable connection many times faster, I find that things are slower than they were using a 56k dial-up.

Something is very broken.

Gov flings £10m to help businesses get Brexit-ready with, um... information packs

Please explain

I've been asking, and have yet to get a clear answer, but what exactly are the specific, measurable benefits that Brexit will deliver?

If you ignore vague nationalism and unspecified "pie in the sky" promises, there doesn't seem to be anything that doesn't feel like a pending disaster.

Wait a minute, we're supposed to haggle! ISPs want folk to bargain over broadband

Re: Penalising loyal customers - helps competition?

An ideal market would be one where the consumer has all the necessary information upfront so they can make a like for like comparison.

This! In Canada at least it can be impossible to figure out what exactly you'll be charged for wireless or Internet services using the provider web sites.

Prices are either entirely hidden or require you to assemble features a la carte, excluding the one critical tool that is entirely absent from the options. Only once you've spent an hour on the phone do you know the real price.

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

Re: Indeed

The fact that nobody moved to stop a thief is a sad indication of the morals of our society today.

No, in the US of A it's an indication that that there's an even chance that doing so would get you shot.

Canadian ISP Telus launches novel solution to deal with excess email: Crash your servers and wipe it all

Re: This has all happened before, this will all happen again

If there is one thing all Canadians unite in, it's the mild dislike of Bell, Telus, and Shaw ;o)

Ahem. From my experience, Rogers is still the worst of the bunch.

One person's harmless japery can be another's night of LaserJet Lego

Phones too

Many years ago I worked with a Production Manager called "God," in reference to his infallibility and legendary ability to to solve any crisis. He was big, and black, with James Earl Jones voice.

The office had just bought a handful of pizza box Macs, each of which came with a microphone. The following Monday we found that the error "beep" on the machines was replaced by a recording saying "This is God! You made a mistake, and I know about it."

Better though was the story of the then new digital phone systems which would let clever boys change the office ring tones to anything they wanted. It started with crickets...

Bit of a time-saver: LibreOffice emits 6.3 with new features, loading and UI boosts

The thing that drives me mad is the default that text copied and pasted from a Web page carries over the formatting, which has never, ever matched anything I would use in a document.

Has there ever been a practical use case for inserting HTML formatted text into a (professional) text document?

Silly money: Before you chuck your chequebook away, triple-check that super-handy digital coin

But! Integration!

I can hardly wait for the day when every one of the dozen sites that I have to subscribe to just to watch movies or TV also insist that they be paid with their own bespoke e-currency. Wanna bet that Apple is first in line?

British ISPs throw in the towel, give up sending out toothless copyright infringement warnings

Re: Entertainment is a problem

I fail to see why I, having paid for a film on DVD, should be subject to an unskippable FBI warning

Especially since I don't live in the US of A.

Re: Follow the money

Don't you think people should be paid for their work occasionally?

No question. So why is it so damned hard to actually buy or rent so much content? It's astonishing how much of our media history has entirely disappeared since streaming took over.

Aside from the ridiculous assumption that I would pay monthly subscriptions to a dozen or more streaming services just because they've carved up the catalogue into as many pieces.

I would happily pay $50 a month for one iTunes like service that would draw on everyone's catalogues instead of wasting time on wild goose chases for well known films that should be easily accessible.

So, as others have said, make it easy to give my money to you, for things I actually want to watch. Otherwise just accept that the Pirate Bay is thriving for a reason.

Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who

Once it had achieved it's goal (essentially nationalist publicity), the politicians pretty much had no choice but to cancel it,

That's pretty debatable. I think it was Robert Heinlein -hardly a spendaholic liberal - who first wrote about the plethora of technological advances that came from, or were spun off by, the US space program.

Arguably much of the tech industry wouldn't exist as we know it without the space race, and equally arguably when it was abandoned a significant amount of incredibly important research and development died with it.

The problem, as always, is that so many people don't understand or appreciate the phenomenal leap that technology took in the 1960s. In many ways it went from zero to 100 mph in a handful of years. Nothing in subsequent decades has matched that pace, with the possible exception of the commercialization of the Internet.

The biggest barrier to truly visionary action comes from two groups : those who can't see utility beyond the next quarterly result, and those who are unable or unwilling to believe that an ongoing investment today is worthwhile because it might deliver significant returns years or decades from now.

As annoying a Musk or Branson might be, they at least have that vision, as do the Chinese, Indians, and a half a dozen other countries. While the US (and possibly Russia) debate endlessly whether it's worthwhile to fund space resesrch, the new kids on the block will be in orbit, or on the Moon, or on Mars, and will reap the benefits of their own technological revolutions.