Slashdot Mirror

What makes you think Google, Facebook etc are so keen to sell your data while AT&T etc would never consider it, despite them knowing everything from your home address and daily movements to your TV watching habits and full browsing history?

Just like Google & Facebook, the major ISPs don't sell your data but do use it to run targeted ad networks of their own, taking full advantage of their far more extensive knowledge of you - and they're much harder to avoid. Examples of abuse abound, like Verizon being fined for their zombie supercookies, or AT&T charging an extra $29/month if you don't care to be targeted.

You can easily avoid Google or Facebook, but how do you avoid your only local broadband provider, or the telco you bought your phone from? It seems the GOP's answer is to avoid the internet completely.

"... the critical vulnerabilities for four exploits previously believed to be zerodays were patched in March, exactly one month before a group called Shadow Brokers published Friday's latest installment of weapons-grade attacks."

https://arstechnica.com/securi...

• Production Costs - perhaps nintendo was not making money on the mini-console. This sounds implausible, due to nintendos track record of always making money off of hardware. More plausible is that at a $60 price point they weren't making ENOUGH money on the mini-console to justify increasing production
• Production Capacity - nintendo stopped producing mini-nes' because they wanted to switch those production lines over to increasing switch production. we know that nintendo is trying to double switch production this year from this article : https://arstechnica.com/gaming...
• Marketing Strategy - the mini-nes was only intended to gin up exposure to the 'nintendo brand' so consumers would be aware and excited when the new switch platform came out, unfortunately the mini-nes was a huge success and getting in the way of the switch marketing strategy
• Licensing issue - the mini-nes had 30 games on it and not all where from nintendo. You would think nintendo would get a rock-solid licensing contract for the mini-console games, but maybe something went wrong with a licensee and they had to suddenly pull the product
• licensing costs - similar to production cost and "licensing issue" perhaps the costs of licensing those third party titles was higher than nintendo was comfortable with, but shipped the mini-nes anyways thinking it would not be a big release. Now that it is ridiculously popular, the licensing costs where perhaps not worth continuing production
• cannibalization of upcoming product - why would a consumer pay $5 a game to play these classics on the $300 nintendo switch when they could just buy the mini-nes for $60? Currently you can't play any of these classic games (legally) on the switch but it is expected that nintendo will release a virtual console for the switch enabling this functionality in the future. The timing of this announcement would line up with a possible virtual console announcement in E3, the trade show coming up in a few months

Full disclosure: I work in the video gaming industry

It also has Beam streaming built in, if you like to broadcast your play.

What limits has Microsoft placed on Beam to appease Hollywood studios who would complain that the user can stream, say, a movie playing in a browser? And can game publishers trigger these limits if they don't want their copyrighted games performed publicly without a license? Capcom, for one, has been known to require royalties for streaming Street Fighter matches (source).

It depends how well know your connection method is. Security by obscurity sometimes work. This is why I use tin can and piano string connectivity to get enhanced security and make my devices harder to connect to:

https://arstechnica.com/civis/...

Such is the nature of proprietary software. Users are at the mercy of whatever proprietors grant.

Other problems with this:

• You can't determine if Microsoft's list is complete and correct. They report whatever they want.
• Even if the list is complete and correct for now, you can't do much to change anything. Remember that a previous version released information even when "privacy settings" were set not to do that? That could still happen. Didn't the EFF warn Windows users about privacy problems with Windows 10? And aren't the default settings (which, in my experience, most users use) set to reveal a great deal? The user's software freedom is not respected.
• Even if the list is complete and correct for now, the software can change. Microsoft can issue an update that alters how the software behaves without updating the list.
• There could be other code that releases information Microsoft left out of the so-called "privacy settings".

Regardless of the PR, regardless of the labels on the settings, regardless of whether you're using the GUI to make changes or setting registry values, regardless of whether you're using one variant of proprietary software ("Basic" edition, "Home" edition, etc.) or another (perhaps an enterprise or "professional" edition) the relationship to power does not change how proprietary software works: With proprietary software users' privacy is never really under their control. Users who don't understand how computers work or why software freedom matters may read articles like theverge.com's article and come away thinking they're better off now. They won't realize proprietary software user are still facing the same problems as before with nothing of substance altered.

Be careful of your data. Other people have reported having to get their Switch repaired and their savegames getting wiped.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming...

Slashdot owns SourceForge now. Since we took over in 2016 we've been improving. https://arstechnica.com/inform... No more bundled adware, all projects are scanned for malware, https downloads & hosting, & more. Big redesign coming soon too

Can't help but notice this reply was posted at exactly 2017-04-01 0:00.

Slashdot owns SourceForge now. Since we took over in 2016 we've been improving. https://arstechnica.com/inform... No more bundled adware, all projects are scanned for malware, https downloads & hosting, & more. Big redesign coming soon too

Why is this vote as informative, it is wrong. From Ars

He [the judge] went on to acknowledge the Georgia situation is "an unusual case because most official codes are not annotated and most annotated codes are not official." Despite the fact the OCGA is official law, the judge said its annotations are entitled to copyright. The Georgia General Assembly has made clear "that the OCGA contains both law and commentary," Story wrote, and the two are distinguishable.

In an article posted by the Verge today, the members of Congress who voted to Shred the ISP Privacy Rules are listed, by name, along with information of how much they received in donations from the telecom industry and employees of those corporations.

Remember... Congress didn't need to do this. Newly-promoted FCC chairman Ajit Pai was going to gut the FCC rule behind Internet privacy all by himself. But with this move, the members of Congress named in this list took the extra step under the authority of the Congressional Review Act to expressly cause the privacy rules to "have no force or effect" and prohibit the FCC from issuing similar regulations in the future .

They might say that this move was just a legal technicality... that the real power for privacy should properly rest with the FTC. Bullshit. The resolution they passed eliminates the FCC's privacy rules without any immediate action to return jurisdiction to the FTC, which is prohibited from regulating common carriers such as ISPs and phone companies.

All that's left to happen is for Trump to sign it, and then, that's that. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

In an article posted by the Verge today, the members of Congress who voted to Shred the ISP Privacy Rules are listed, by name, along with information of how much they received in donations from the telecom industry and employees of those corporations.

Remember... Congress didn't need to do this. Newly-promoted FCC chairman Ajit Pai was going to gut the FCC rule behind Internet privacy all by himself. But with this move, the members of Congress named in this list took the extra step under the authority of the Congressional Review Act to expressly cause the privacy rules to "have no force or effect" and prohibit the FCC from issuing similar regulations in the future .

They might say that this move was just a legal technicality... that the real power for privacy should properly rest with the FTC. Bullshit. The resolution they passed eliminates the FCC's privacy rules without any immediate action to return jurisdiction to the FTC, which is prohibited from regulating common carriers such as ISPs and phone companies.

All that's left to happen is for Trump to sign it, and then, that's that. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

9. Game mode: It "ensures" your computer is always maximizing its resources for an optimal gaming experience.
Ensures how? throttling my background tabs? How will it affect streaming?

ArsTechnica has a brief review of Creator's Edition. Concerning Game Mode:

Game Mode is intended to boost gaming performance by a few percent. The idea is straightforward enough: when a game is using Game Mode, Windows plays around with thread affinities to dedicate processor cores to games, shuffling background tasks to other cores...

Game Mode is available for both regular Win32 games, and for UWP games sold through the Windows Store. In the case of the latter, Microsoft intends to offer an API so that games can automatically enable the mode. For the former, the user will have to opt in explicitly.

How much difference does it make in practice? Frankly, I'm not seeing any real difference in the games I've used—to the extent that I'm not even sure Game Mode is functioning.

So, kinda meh. A lot surely depends on the game, and what else you got going on in your system, but I wouldn't expect a night-to-day difference.

Umm... the "explicit user opt-in" was what was just KILLED by Congress.

From ArsTechnica:

The rules issued by the FCC last year would have required home Internet and mobile broadband providers to get consumers' opt-in consent before selling or sharing Web browsing history, app usage history, and other private information with advertisers and other companies. But lawmakers used their authority under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to pass a joint resolution ensuring that the rules "shall have no force or effect" and that the FCC cannot issue similar regulations in the future.

Republicans argue that the Federal Trade Commission should regulate ISPs' privacy practices instead of the FCC. But the resolution passed today eliminates the FCC's privacy rules without any immediate action to return jurisdiction to the FTC, which is prohibited from regulating common carriers such as ISPs and phone companies.

If Trump signs the resolution to eliminate privacy rules, ISPs won't have to seek customer approval before sharing their browsing histories and other private information with advertisers.

Not sure what can be done about it except to use the Internet as little as possible.

What can be done along with running your own secure mail servers, it to set up and run your own DNSSEC service.
Set Up a DNS Name Server
Domain Name System Security Extensions

For the last few years, my home network has had a small subnet that can only reach the Internet via the Tor Network. As a Comcast subscriber with no other options in ISP's, I'm seriously considering putting all the family devices into this subnet and setting up private VPN access into it for the mobile devices while on the road.

Nothing new here... ISPs used to be able to do this, until an Obama-era regulation blocked it in October, 2016. This just returns us to the prior status. See here

If the issue existed in the layered lithium battery and the tight tolerances of the case-battery fitment, they're probably planning a thinner (lower capacity) battery that is less likely to pinch and detonate. There's no reason it can't be just as safe as any other phone battery.

And thanks to the battery-sucking SoC in those units, it will then have abysmal battery-life.

Nearly Twice the battery capacity (in mAh) as the iPhone 7 plus, yet it actually has LESS battery life! 803 mins for the iPhone 7 plus, vs. 712 mins for the GN7. That's an HOUR AND A HALF difference!

That's just sad. Now just think how bad it will be if they decide to downgrade the battery capacity...

Who downmodded me?? This is well known.
https://arstechnica.com/securi...
http://www.itworld.com/article...

The point of these certs is to verify that a secure connection to the site in question..

Yes that's the only job of certs. But they do not even manage to do it reliably! It is not too difficult to buy a rogue domain or code signing certificate from a legitimate CA (by getting temporary access to their DNS system, phone or fax line); and even easier for a rogue CA to falsely pretend that's what happened, if it knowingly issued a certificate that it should not, and got caught.

In related newsnews, Symantec was caught red-handed issuing 30.000 certificates in violation of its policy or sound practices, including for google.com and gmail.com domains.

Thus certs are to network security what boarding checks are to airplane security: annoying and expensive security theater, and better than nothing.

HTTPS depends on trusting 3 things.

a) The site
b) The CA
c) The DNS

If any 1 of these things isn't trustworthy, none of them are.
Phishing site - never trustworthy.

CA - Symantec is an example, but there are lots of untrustworthy CAs https://arstechnica.com/securi...

DNS - hijacking DNS is a real thing. How much do you trust your network provider NOT to intercept all DNS and redirect them elsewhere?

... here:

https://arstechnica.com/inform...

Especulates that:

  ***The custom version developed under the joint venture is essentially a custom image of Windows 10 at its core, with a set of policy settings hard-coded for government users. It's not clear if additional code is being added to the image.***

So, they changed some Registry Keys and Group Policies, and you do not have to play wack-a-mole every time an update comes...

Also, please remember that:

*** The Chinese government, like the US government, has been permitted source code review for security purposes in a secured lab at Microsoft's China Information Technology Security Certification Center in Beijing since 2003.***

So, most likely, the chinese already reviewed the telemerty and deemed it non threathening (or negotiated with microsoft to get a copy of it ;-) ).

But5 at this point, all is especulation, only time will tell...

Are you fucking kiding me. i know you know how to google. but here are just a few.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-event...

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/...\

https://arstechnica.com/securi...

I remember when people on slashdot knew how not to be fucking morons and look for information if they wanted to learn something. people like you make me sick.

Personally I switched to VeraCrypt once these issues were disclosed even though it appears they weren't as serious as initially thought. the fact that VeraCrypt has been patched against issues found in the TC audit and against the Google disclosed issues makes it seem like a better choice at this point. I stuck with TC 7.1a for quite a while until I found a reason to switch since with security it is good to stick with a known quantity until something else has a good track record or a serious flaw is discovered in the original. For me it was the 2 google issues, for someone else it may have been the minor issues from the audit or the combination of the google issues and the audit but that is something that needs to be decided on individually until there is a very clear reason to switch.

Re: "warehouse to be backdoored prior to shipment to final destination"
Tailored Access Operations (TAO)
"Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant" (5/15/2014)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
GCHQ, NSA, CIA have different ideas on what they want and why.

In some nations the NSA might be working with a national telco over decades. So it is safe for the NSA to use a that nations gov staff as they more loyal to the NSA than their own nation over generations.
In other nations the telco network might still be staffed with people who are totally loyal to their own nation. So that big dump of data back to a domestic staging server network might be detected. Code litter from another nations malware is left to fool any contractors or other gov investigators.
Other methods are needed.
The CIA might have a trusted local person sneak into a building under the cover of been new staff, a friend or more than a new friend to a long term staff member. Physical access gets past any network security and trusted devices can be altered on site and data collected by a person later on site. No internet link needed but physical device access is needed to alter code and then collect the result. No code litter is found.
Or just send a command to a US brand's hardware and collect it all with the internet.
Different methods for different nations and if staff are still loyal to their own nation.

How about publicly funded research simply end up in the public domain?

Because in the US, Congress and the courts have a habit of allowing rights holders to take works out of the public domain and place them back under copyright.

The public domain doesn't exist in the US, only an uncertainty as to whether or not you can use a work without being sued for copyright violation.

As such, any law that puts something into the public domain is a pointless gesture in the US. At least until the law is fixed, so that putting something into the public domain is a permanent act that cannot be revoked.

Could be ex and former staff selling mi/gov grade product to their cult, faith, embassy, other parts of the US gov, the private sector.
Once the devices got handed out to NATO nations, the different EU nation police forces all their ex and former staff can sell the US product to the private sector.
The US is now been flooded with its own products as once very secret tech finds its way into every embassy and the private sector.
Other nations front companies, US dual citizens helping their real nations.
The UK had the same issues. Some ore gov, mil other are just random efforts by different groups.
What the UK did can often show what could be in the USA.
Fake Mobile Phone Towers Operating In The UK (09 June 2015)
http://news.sky.com/story/fake...
UK Cops Using Fake Mobile Phone Tower to Intercept Calls, Shut Off Phones (10.31.11)
https://www.wired.com/2011/10/...
Fake mobile phone towers discovered in London: Stingrays come to the UK (6/11/2015)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

The other US side would be to track US police, city workers to ensure they did not have a task force on any emerging private sector products or services.
Once a map of every phone in a wide city area was tracked, tracking undercover officials would be easy given a lack of digital counter surveillance training.
New "staff" or users reporting back into a government building every few days or weeks for a set time would be very easy to map.
Another aspect would be to counter any journalist trying undercover work. Their origin and return to their place of work would be detected if they ever had two working phones with them. Their undercover story phone and their journalist phone.
Other tracking could counter bloggers and web 2.0 attempts by citizen journalism to enter political parties or party political fund raising.
They might make an error with two phones in use. One they used for undercover work in the past, one they use for their blog.
Lack of cash could see device reuse and very easy tracking.
Also the meeting of any gov worker, federal official, contractor, mil, political staff with any journalist would be tracked by the mil, gov, party, contractor. A vast database of journalist. A political and private sector version of the NSA's FIRSTFRUIT.
The Most Intriguing Spy Stories From 166 Internal NSA Reports (May 17 2016)
https://theintercept.com/2016/...
“.. over 5,000 insecurity-related records” ranging from “espionage damage assessments” to “liaison exchanges.”
Someone is not tracking the fake networks for some reason. Political over, mil, police or gov use? Gov workers detect the fake cell products and nothing is done?

In an effort to placate the studios, Microsoft introduced "PlayReady 3.0" with the Windows 10 Anniversary update. PlayReady 3.0 is a hardware-based DRM (digital rights management) system that requires dedicated decoding hardware, either on the CPU or on the graphics card, preventing the video stream from being captured in software or via an external capture device.

REF: https://arstechnica.com/gadget...

Unfortunately, it seem as if these 6-core and 4-core Ryzen 5 CPUs are only going to be eight-core Ryzen 7 CPUs with cores disabled in both compute-complexes.

The R5 1600X and 1600 are going to have one core disabled per compute-complex (CCX): 3+3. This was expected.
However, surprisingly, AMD has told Anandtech and Ars Technica that the R5 1500X and likely also the R5 1400 are going to have two cores disabled per CCX: giving it a 2+2 config.

When clock and IPC have been taken into account, Ryzen's biggest performance bottleneck compared to Intel has been shown to be when threads on different CCX'es are accessing the same memory. Each CCX has its own L3 cache and there is an interconnect between the CCX'es L3 caches which while being slower than a single shared L3 cache is somewhat faster than going to main memory ... but the L3 caches are only victim caches to each core's L2 cache - and therefore not necessarily caching the entire working set.

This means that the 1500X and 1400 are going to be slower on many workloads than on a hypothetical Zen CPU with one single four-core CCX.

It is believed that this bottleneck is the reason behind relatively low Ryzen 1800X/1700X/1700 scores in many games - compared to Intel (even when clock speed and IPC have been taken into account).
(Curious enough, this is also a known issue among programmers for the XBox One and PS4 - both having AMD CPUs with a similar setup, but apparently it didn't really occur to game programmers that AMD would have a go at retaking the desktop?)

I don't see any mention of Elon Musk and Tesla in this discussion. Musk is bringing a new level of automation to his car factories. The interior of the new Model 3 will be designed for full robotic assembly. For example, typical wiring harnesses that appear in other cars will be avoided as they are not suitable for robotic manipulation. Instead, wiring connections are likely to be more pluggable by robots. Their new cars feature full glass roofs. I suspect this is because it will leave the top of the car open for robots to work until close to the end of assembly. Most cars weld their roofs on during frame assembly (which is typically robotic for most car manufacturers). This limits access to the interior during final assembly.

Musk has talked about the machine that makes the machine as the most important engineering challenge to be solved in manufacturing. He says the final version of his factories will look like an "alien dreadnought". Humans will be involved only in maintaining the robots, and not in the actual assembly process, since they slow the entire process down to "human speed". I'm not sure how many people are aware of the level of innovation that is occurring right now in America at Tesla's factories. There is no company in the world that is doing what Tesla is doing in automobile manufacturing.

There were rumours about Hyperion:
https://arstechnica.com/the-mu...

I'm not too familiar with Elric, but I agree that Culture would be nice :)

...You're so, so, so very late to the party. Google is only allowed to operate in China if it plays by the rules. There's quite a lot of history behind this. Outside of China, Google's moral compass is largely guided by its founders, including Sergey Brin, who grew up in the USSR and has been an outspoken opponent of censorship. Even Julian Assange feels strongly that Google's political objectives align closely with those of the Obama administration, a point backed up in Brin's Wikipedia article, where he's quoted as being concerned, on a geopolitical level, that more countries are following in China's footsteps and want to construct national firewalls.

While there are certainly very reasonable grounds for feeling insecure about the amount of control that large media companies can exert over the availability and visibility of facts and opinions, the example of Google seems to be a particularly benign one, at least for the time being.

That all said, the American outlook of total opposition to censorship is rather abnormal; most functioning democracies have found it either needful or expedient to ban hate speech, including holocaust denial. From the perspective of those other countries, one might say Google is following in the footsteps of other companies that have taken it upon themselves to compensate for deficiencies in American political philosophy, albeit in a greatly diminished capacity. As Twitter has also recently discovered, hate speech contributes negatively to discourse communities.

Paper and copper network was from:
https://arstechnica.com/inform... (8/15/2014)
The FCC has changed the definition of broadband ( Jan 29, 2015)
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1...
IMSI catchers from
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0... (FEB. 11, 2016)

I often ask myself, would the web be like it is today if Firefox had remained a viable, popular web browser?

Firefox has surpassed IE.

Don't worry, Elon Musk will save us.

There are some other perspectives in this. It looks like a snowball that picked up the edge from bumping into the rings.

Donald Trump, the president of the United States of America, does not know what the powers and limitations are for the office of president.

Well the new boss is just like the old boss....the one who said that he "can't" pardon Snowden.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

You appear to be under the impression that Android is free software, and therefore, the royalty for putting Android on a device is zero. AOSP is free software, but Google Play Store and Google Play Services are not. Furthermore, makers of Android devices with a microSD slot that supports SDXC have to pay an exFAT patent royalty to Microsoft.

Some Android devices use ext4 (over six years ago) as the internal file system thereby avoiding the exFAT royalty.

As for removable SD cards, they normally come preformatted with FAT or exFAT which Android can read and write to which in turn avoids the exFAT royalty. Actually, the PS3 and PS4 also do this as well otherwise if they could format external devices with exFAT or NTFS they would have to pay Microsoft a royalty.

I was saving that mod point just in case you showed up, nutbar boy. => HAND.

If you want the best "pure Google" Android phone and prompt software and security updates and you're willing to pay flagship smartphone prices, you can get a Google Pixel. But what do you do if you want those things but don't want to pay out the nose?

The answer to that question might just be "get a Nokia 6." The company's throwback feature phone probably got more press coverage, but the Android-based Nokia 3, 5, and 6 all look really promising. The phones' manufacturer, HMD, is promising a "pure, secure, and up-to-date" lineup that gets prompt monthly security updates and quick updates to new Android versions. And we came away impressed by the Nokia 6's build quality and specs, given that it costs about a third of what a Pixel will run you.

Nokia and HMD will still need to prove that they can actually follow through on their big talk about software updates and support, but for now, HMD is at least saying the right things.

from: Ars Favorite phones from 2017's MWC

a government having a braindrain and becoming incapable of properly overseeing related aspects like elections, security systems or nuceal launch codes can become a huge liability.

I'm more worried about officials of the government — which is already a monopoly, by its very definition and function — turning those things into private cash-cows and sources of other undue influence, than I am about a corporation doing same.

The latter has already happened — numerous times in different countries, including the US. The former — not so much. And, even if/when it does happen, that standing army you mentioned will still be there to take over the miscreants.

Supposedly, NSA created a special Blackberry for President Obama — but they would not make one even for the Secretary of State. Today, aghast at the choice made the country's voters — the "little people", who "don't know any better" — the security apparatus are leaking embarrassing details about Trump's team. What hope do you and I have of prevailing against such organizations, if the POTUS is struggling against their sabotage?

With the braindrain you fear and lament, maybe, you and I and, indeed, anyone in the world will be able to buy a smartphone as secure as the President's. Secure not only against the US government's unwarranted searches, but against those of the really oppressive regimes. And the government's spies will be able to use the same off-the-shelf tech for their purposes...

Unless you're "on the inside", you have no way of determining what the sales figures actually are.

You mean except for the publicly available financial statements and copious public data about sales?

Yeah we have plenty of information about how many smartphones are selling and who is selling them. It's not some closely guarded secret.

> One Billion Hours of YouTube Are Watched Every Day. And some of them don't involve cats.

Those are all videos of some korean rapper horsing around.
https://arstechnica.com/busine...

captcha: famous

are dumber than back in the '70s when by now we're supposed to be in well into a major ice age.

No, what's dumber is perpetuating a right-wing myth.

Here's a recent article that seems relevant. It's talking about suicide rather than homicide, but the point is the same. People who try to kill themselves with drugs or knives only have a 5% chance of dying. People who use guns have a 90% chance. Guns really are different. They're amazingly effective tools for killing. That's what they're designed for. Now add the fact that you can carry one with you everywhere you go, and it only takes a moment to pull it out and start shooting. The time from when you think, "I want to kill this guy," to when he's lying on the floor with a fatal injury might only be seconds. There's nothing else like them.

Like the drone hit , that turned out to be a plastic bag . https://arstechnica.com/inform...

Translation: Alexander Peter Kowalski (aka "APK" and "AlecStaar") has been getting banned from forums for spamming the same piece of shitware for nearly 20 years, trying to bullshit people regarding to his level of technical expertise, and then viciously attacking those who call him out on these things.

He also harassed people by email for a while until he made the unpleasant discovery that forging the return address didn't protect him nearly as well as he thought it would.

He started a major crapflooding campaign here on Slashdot a few years ago, trying to run several prominent long-time members off the site, as part of which he kept replying to himself, and then to his own replies, and then to those replies, and so on, and so on, until he'd posted so many levels deep that he (apparently) fucked up the database, nuking those accounts' posting histories in the process. It's very largely thanks to him that we now have all the posting limits with timers and such.

He tries to goad people into doing things that he later tries to claim (minus all the relevant context, naturally) started as attacks on him. This worked with Jeremy Reimer and some other people, but did not work with those who were smart enough to see through him including a number of Slashdotters who did a little digging and discovered his colourful history on Ars Technica and some other sites. One of them even discovered where he'd posted his home address and phone number on several sites asking people to send him money for his crapware, and sent him a little present in the mail all the way from Norway to let him know just how well using multiple ISP accounts and hiding behind proxies was working for him after he'd in essence doxxed himself.

He's been caught out numerous times sockpuppeteering (and doing a pretty shitty and obvious job of it), which is why he's so quick to accuse anyone who disagrees with him or downmods him of being a sockpuppet of everyone else who ever has.

He has (or had at one time) a /. account, but it got modded down so many times for spamming that it was posting at -1 by default within a few weeks of its creation. This is why he makes such a big deal about "signing" his AC posts, BTW, because at least that way he starts at 0.

Oh, and it really does appear, as nearly as I've been able to tell, that he lives in his mother's basement.

But don't just take the word of some random AC for any of this. Do a little research and you'll find out what I (and many others) have for yourself.

HAND.

The trouble comes when these small "rural providers" get bought up by giant conglomerates. These "holding companies" can cheat the system, claiming the benefits of small when they've actually got deep deep pockets that could pay for compliance, but instead ear-mark that money to lobbyists and the "regulation hurts business" crusade.

The original exemption for ISPs with 100,000 or fewer subscribers was applied to the aggregated total of subscribers "across all affiliates," so that small ISPs owned by big holding companies wouldn't be exempt.

The new regulations change that. I think it's bad enough screaming vicious hate toward a known enemy like Comcast, but it's gotta be worse for people relying on some small service-provider that enjoys small-business exemptions but without any folksy small-business courtesy and service we're supposed to associate with small business, 'cause the small businessman sold out to an offer he don't refuse years ago, and now that "small business" is just one of a thousand pages in some nameless guy's portfolio whose only interest is income and territory.

Right now the lead article on Ars Technica is a highly positive review of the current state of VASIMR rocket engine technology: https://arstechnica.com/scienc...

But the author seems to be a frustrated SJW who couldn't resist a totally irrelevant slam at current US immigration policy, even though nobody has ever accused VASIMR developer Franklin Chang-Díaz of having sneaked across the border on foot.

While someone needs to put a stick in Intel's ass, I don't believe for a minute that this will remain a cheaper alternative, if AMD starts getting some traction.

Oh, and I didn't see anything about power usage. AMD has always sucked in that regard.

From the Ars Technica article:

IPC is interesting in that it gives a sense of how cores are designed, but workloads aren't constrained by IPC or clock speed per se; they're constrained by thermal and power constraints. And AMD compares very favorably there, too: the Intel chip is a 140W part, so can use about 50 percent more power than the AMD.

Hmmm, interesting. Thanks!

While someone needs to put a stick in Intel's ass, I don't believe for a minute that this will remain a cheaper alternative, if AMD starts getting some traction.

Oh, and I didn't see anything about power usage. AMD has always sucked in that regard.

From the Ars Technica article:

IPC is interesting in that it gives a sense of how cores are designed, but workloads aren't constrained by IPC or clock speed per se; they're constrained by thermal and power constraints. And AMD compares very favorably there, too: the Intel chip is a 140W part, so can use about 50 percent more power than the AMD.