Slashdot Mirror

So it has come to this.

Well if your clients are customers who use your service because it wont be snopped I would say you are screwed!

American cloud companies are now suffering. I put this link as a story, and I am surprised the slashdot editors didn't accept this.

60% of all European companies are canceling their cloud contracts or are revising them due to security concerns!

Canada's health ministry is quotes in that article's comments on already cancelling as there is no confidentiality thanks to the NSA's prism program.

So my hunch is it is not his overeaction, but all his customers leaving for European or Canadian encrypted email cloud providers instead.

While what you say has some truth, the part you leave out is that the attacks against Android were not against the linux kernel used by Android, but the Android specific parts. So, while while your numbers may be accurate as they quote Trendmicro, they misrepresent the reality. Just as a vulnerability in Firefox is not a linux vulnerability, even though Firefox ships with most linux distributions, likewise, a vulnerability found in the Google specific Android pieces does not make it a linux kernel vulnerability. If those pieces were tied directly into the kernel by the kernel developers, that would be different. But just like if I raise my Jeep and it becomes unstable when cornering, that doesn't mean it is a problem with all Jeeps, Google, modifying specific pieces of "linux" does not mean that the vulnerability is a problem with linux.

You mean like this one?

Gotta love their timing on this, given that Tor was just compromised using JavaScript malware.

Sure about that? This was just in the news yesterday.

All machines may suffer from malware. However with the Unix style of permissions, OS X and Linux are unlikely to suffer from true viruses. Trojans are far more likely. As for kernel attacks, you've never heard of the Blue Screen of Death? What world do you live in?

Not true.

Windows has the most secure kernel options available rivaling even OpenBSD and sitll has issues. Look up buffer overflows, priveldge escalation, heap spraying, and other techniques?

Just because you are a limited user does not mean something can't write something in a ram address of a root app or service and then execute? There are loopholes and ways with timing known as branching or breaching as SSL can be over run too.

Windows style permissions are VMS and more advanced than Unix believe it or not regardless of what the slashdotters say. An admin user for example does not even have full admin access but rather has a token to give to the true admin to run something just as an example enforced with UAC.

What is changing though is many malware writers are targetting Linux and MACOSX. They are easy targets because they refuse to run anti virus software with a smile and refuse to believe they are infected when they truly are.

Windows may have 100x as many users but Windows is getting so much secure and the users keep them up to date with AV software that is easier to pick on the 1% in greater numbers.

It is a good thing Linux or MacOSX never get malware. It is not like flashback or anything has ever hit such users.

You sir are a fool and a prime target to hit if I were a bank trojan writer. Windows users keep their systems updated and run AV software but you on the otherhand are a prime picking.

This myth needs to end before someone losses all their money from the next Mac or Linux banking trojan.

Anything like the spamhaus ddos problems a short while ago? http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/spamhaus-ddos-grows-to-internet-threatening-size/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/can-a-ddos-break-the-internet-sure-just-not-all-of-it/

Anything like the spamhaus ddos problems a short while ago? http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/spamhaus-ddos-grows-to-internet-threatening-size/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/can-a-ddos-break-the-internet-sure-just-not-all-of-it/

Still less than 50% of all web visitors have a browser that is capable of reading HTML 5 because of IE.

Therefore it needs to be ignored if you do not want to drive IE users away to competitors. At this point IE 8 is tied to Windows 7 and it wont go away until 2019 when the corps finally leave. They are locked at that version for their apps.

Vista and XP users will still carry on long after support ends and will demand your site works with their older versions of IE at 8 and 9. IE 6 is still very popular too and you can't ignore them if you develop business websites.

As Adi Shamir (the S in RSA) has been trying to point out, cryptography is a method for transferring data between two trusted hosts. So the F-16 zooming above Washington can get some radar data from the airbase in Virginia and no one listening in can decrypt it. At the point where some luser picks up a USB drive off the parking lot floor and plugs it into a computer inside the airbase, all the encryption in the world matters not one whit.

It's a massive change to the model we use to conceptualize the threat -- instead of Alice and Bob trying to communicate with each other and keep Charles from decrypting, we have Alice and Bob trying (a) to protect their machines from Charles compromising it and (b) trying to limit the data done if he does compromise it. This isn't your father's security any more.

What is also means is that we are going to need a lot fewer secrets that are really worth keeping or else spend much more time partitioning our virtual worlds. As BEAST/CRIME show, if you treat your Facebook login cookie as a secret, then you need to access it from a partitioned browser where a malicious page cannot make requests using it.

Looks like the NSA is up to their old dirty tricks: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/researchers-say-tor-targeted-malware-phoned-home-to-nsa/ ... And yes, I second the motion to stop using Windows -- its full of zero day bugs like this. Not a day goes by where you don't hear about a new zero day attack focused on Windows, and its been that way for decades.

Because no other operating systems or applications have zero day bugs....

Users can not secure themselves against invasive hacking by the US Government.

The best that can be done is probably a VM that's been stripped down to essentials and does nothing but TOR but even that isn't going to keep the NSA out if they want in.

Looks like the NSA is up to their old dirty tricks: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/researchers-say-tor-targeted-malware-phoned-home-to-nsa/ ... And yes, I second the motion to stop using Windows -- its full of zero day bugs like this. Not a day goes by where you don't hear about a new zero day attack focused on Windows, and its been that way for decades.

They have precisely zero security value. Please see, for a brief introduction:

http://phys.org/news/2011-11-stanford-outsmart-captcha-codes.html
http://cintruder.sourceforge.net/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/05/google-recaptcha-brought-to-its-knees/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2008/04/gone-in-60-seconds-spambot-cracks-livehotmail-captcha/
http://www.troyhunt.com/2012/01/breaking-captcha-with-automated-humans.html

among others.

Nobody who actually understands the nature of the threat would even CONSIDER using captchas at this point.

Now...every now and then some poor naive fool stands up and says "But but but...they're working for us." No. They are not. You are simply not worthy of attack...yet. If you ever become a target, because someone has a grudge against you, or because you have an important resource, or merely because someone is bored, then if they are are at least minimally competent attackers, they will go right through your alleged "captcha" defenses without the slightest problem.

They have precisely zero security value. Please see, for a brief introduction:

http://phys.org/news/2011-11-stanford-outsmart-captcha-codes.html
http://cintruder.sourceforge.net/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/05/google-recaptcha-brought-to-its-knees/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2008/04/gone-in-60-seconds-spambot-cracks-livehotmail-captcha/
http://www.troyhunt.com/2012/01/breaking-captcha-with-automated-humans.html

among others.

Nobody who actually understands the nature of the threat would even CONSIDER using captchas at this point.

Now...every now and then some poor naive fool stands up and says "But but but...they're working for us." No. They are not. You are simply not worthy of attack...yet. If you ever become a target, because someone has a grudge against you, or because you have an important resource, or merely because someone is bored, then if they are are at least minimally competent attackers, they will go right through your alleged "captcha" defenses without the slightest problem.

- Great Firewall of the UK, China, Iran and Russia
- Undersea cables cut in the Mediterranean knocking entire continents off the network
- Copyright collection agencies deciding what is allowed on the internet and what isn't with no public input or control whatsoever (HADOPI, GEMA, the list goes on for quite a while)
- Several nations' network speeds are so slow as to make the internet unusable for doing anything more than reading text
- Several nations don't have internet connectivity whatsoever (largely island nations, Southeast Asia and Africa)
- ICANN's support of non-English URIs and country-specific TLDs
- US laws like COPPA, CFAA, and the planned CISPA/SOPA, and a USTR hostile to internet freedom
- And this one has been important since the dawn of the internet: ICANN and IANA have always been based in the US and controlled by its government
- The top three biggest TLDs in the entire world (.com, .net, .org) are all administered in the US, and this has been used to establish jurisdiction over servers physically located in foreign countries. (See Megaupload, Rojadirecta, TVShack, and the Pirate Bay) -- frequently at the behest of private industry without due process of law

In addition to security there is also the ease of maintenance that you gain by eliminating windows. But security alone should be enough to force the decision by insurance companies offering 'hacker insurance': Time may go by and the name may change, but it is still the old NT kernel underneath.

The Vista series is as vulnerable as XP. That includes Vista 7 and Vista 8. Every few months you have vulnerabilities that affect the whole zoo. On top of that you have a thriving ecosystem of malware flame and Conficker. New malware arrives and joins the old which never really goes away. It is the whole system that is weak, not just the pieces. Not even new, unready systems like Haiku-OS have that. The only way to leave it behind is to leave Windows behind.

No, the only real change since more than 10 years ago has been how M$ has been gaming the vulnerability reports and CERT. Even the shills and astroturfers defending M$ are nothing new.

Considering that they've been approving 100% of all warrants? Yeah, pretty sure there's a problem. Reminds me of the kangeroo courts...I mean human rights councils here in Canada. Which had a 100% conviction rate.

[Citation needed]. I regularly see stories about nasty bugs in the Java plugin for web-browsers that allow drive-by downloads and code execution vulnerabilities. I've never heard of Java having to be pulled from a data-center. I'm not saying it isn't true, I'm just saying I'd like to see more info, because it's the first I've heard of this.

FYI - in the last year the Java JRE was pulled from all major platforms for at least a while. Quickest story I could find on-line is this one. It was reported on Slashdot back when it happened, and it wasn't simply the browser-plugins, but full JRE. Data centers would have been the most affected; they didn't necessarily pull it but they were under a lot of pressure due to the impact of the JRE vulnerabilities.

The issues in play affected all versions of the JRE going back quite a while, up to and including the latest version at the time. In the last couple months there's been enough patches released to restore JRE functionality, but you have to be using the latest versions. Even then, Java's security perception has been shattered as a result.

Also as a note, there were several rounds of major security issues for the JRE in the last year. They thought they got one fixed and another popped up.

Now, it might be nice if Apple allowed people to have the capabilities provided by a jailbreak if they want them. That's not the same as having a jailbreak.

How would you do that without giving people the chance to completely hose their machines like PCs?

Jailbreaking is to get out of the "jail" that iOS puts on applications, so it's basically giving root to iOS users.

If you give people the ability to, they will do it because someone will tell them to do it. There is no way around dancing pigs. Hell when jailbreaking was a popular activity, there was a Rickrolling worm that spread amongst jailbroken iPhones. And another one that stole banking information.

Why? Because people jailbroke as "something neat" and then followed some instructions that said to install OpenSSH in order to do something that required jailbreaking (pirated apps? unique apps? who knows or cares).

Point being, give people the ability to, and they'll do it without regards for security.

It's just like the "Allow non-market apps" checkbox on Android - I'm fairly certain most people have it checked without regard for WHY it's there in the first place. Perhaps they saw some free app on Amazon? Or bought something from Humble Bundle? If you follow how to install those apps, they say to check it.

ERMAGERD LESS CPU CORES SUCKS!!! I RUN 4 CPU INTENSIVE TASKS AT ONCE, ONE WITH EACH OF MY INDEX FINGERS, AND ONE WITH EACH OF MY NIPPLES.
I LIKE TO KEEP 1BAJILLION MOVIES ON MY PHONE IN HIGHER RESOLUTION THAN THE SCREEN! I NEED A 1TB SD CARD.
I CAN TELL BETWEEN 1080p AND 720p AT NORMAL VIEWING DISTANCES ON A 4.7" SCREEN!
I NEVER EVEN USE MY PHONE, I JUST DROOL AT THE SPEC SHEET!

Yep, that pretty much summarises all the complaints I've seen.

If you look at the benchmarks, it does better than or equal to a Galaxy S4 on everything except GeekBench, where it still ties for memory speed. So I wouldn't call the CPU/GPU 'mid-range', like everybody seems to be saying.

People want 1080p on a 4.7" screen - are they crazy? I really don't understand where that sentiment comes from. It's just more pixels for the GPU to push around, and it means your games will run worse.

So, they have 'just' 2 cores and a 720p screen, this gives better battery life without making the phone massive. I can totally live with that. I really like what they've done here. They've looked at the system as a whole, and instead of loading it with pointless shit like Samsung, or going with massive bezels on something that's meant to fit in your pocket like HTC, they've made almost the entire front of the phone a screen, make it fit in your hand nicely, given it great battery life, and great performance. And it's customisable and made in the USA. It even has 802.11ac.

What else do you want? And be reasonable, this is today's tech we're talking about.

HA! I was right; http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/08/you-get-the-dongle-you-pay-for-in-googles-chromecast/#p3

Linux the kernel is the core of both Android the operating system and GNU/Linux the operating system. If one gets pedantic, then technically Microsoft Office for Android satisfies the argument that it's supported on an OS running Linux the kernel, but when most people use "Linux", they're not referring to the kernel, but the operating system with all of its GNU and POSIX stuff.

Actually he's won using that definition too. The Linux kernel has virtualization code from Microsoft already.

As noted by MrNemesis, the Ars Technica piece was, as so much journalism unfortunately is these days, written to push a specific "us vs them" mentality; this ultimately resulted in the author compromising their integrity to try and hammer a dubious point home in a concrete manner. A look at the Wikipedia article about the CSIRO patent notes the author had a follow-up article with more dubious attempts to validate their point; he quotes an unrelated and apparently uninformed politican saying Australia invented WiFi - it did not - as evidence of CSIRO claiming it did, and making the unusual assertation that because CSIRO itself wasn't directly involved in the creation of the WiFi standard its patent claim is invalid, even though a company that was licensing CSIRO's patent actively used it as part of their participation in the creation of the WiFi standard. The Register also covers the interesting points.

I'm an Australian and I think CSIRO is an awesome organisation that's earned considerable respect, and I'm not overly fond of the US media's attempts to smear it in order to improve their bottom line (in Ars' case, ad impressions from indignant people on both sides of the fence).

It's easy to jump on a bandwagon, but you should figure out where it came from and where it's going before you do.

Yes, I like the section in this article which talks about how old and common the tech in the CSIRO patent is;

"All of the elements of the "unique combination" CSIRO proffered in court as a breakthrough weren't merely old by tech standards, they were decades old. "Multicarrier modulation," used in WiFi as OFDM, was described as early as the 1950s. Papers had been published on interleaving in the 1960s. Forward error correction, Intel's lawyer told the Texas jury, "was used when NASA sent the Mariner mission to Mars in 1968." Harris Semiconductor had actual working products incorporating these techniques by the 1980s and the company was selling its modems to the US military. The lead defense attorney for Intel, Robert Van Nest, even showed one of those Harris modems to the Texas jury during the 2009 case.

"This Harris modem wasn't patented," Van Nest explained. "Of course not. Nobody thought this was a real invention, because interleaving, modulation, and coding had been around for 30 years by the time Harris came up with this." The issue was making great wireless products, Van Nest explained. "The problem wasn't putting these radio technologies together. Everybody had that... The problem was, how do you take something like the Harris modem and turn it into a chip that I can hold in my hand? That's a problem that the CSIRO patent doesn't even address."

Now trademark trouble over the name SkyDrive.

But on the other hand, for a British Judge to rule that any use of the word Sky with preceding or trailing letters in any combination somehow violates a someone else's brand name is a bit of a stretch. It seem more based on the fact it was an American company they could pick on easily. I'm pretty sure the SkyTrain brand name is still held by someone, even if they are no longer in business.

There were plans afoot to integrate skydrive more tightly with Windows 8.x anyway so it may become a moot point,

It's all about the money. The SF airport officials want their cut of the fares and are bullying the rideshare cabs to get it. This is what they said in April :-

The airport has demanded that six different ridesharing companies quit their SFO operations until further notice.

“It’s not fair for the cab companies that go through the permitting process to compete with these unregistered vehicles,” said airport spokesman Doug Yakel. “Not only are we talking about the limited space at the airport, but also the safety of our passengers.”

A trip to the airport can result in a $50 fare for cabs, but drivers must pay nominal fees each time they enter and exit the hub as part of the permitting process overseen by the CPUC. SFO wants all ridesharing companies to be certified by the CPUC before operating at the airport.

So, when banning the ridesharing cabs (who don't pay their 'nominal fees') didn't work, they started arresting the cab drivers.

After the cease and desist order was issued, airport officials and police began “admonishing” rideshare drivers who dropped off or picked up passengers at the airport.

Starting July 10, airport officials began slapping rideshare operators with citizen arrests for trespassing when they were discovered at the airport. “This is not the type of arrest where somebody gets put in jail,” Doug Yakel told Ars. “It's a misdemeanor and it's for trespassing.” Yakel went on to say that the curbside airport police observe and “have the right to question drivers,” if they see anything that appears to indicate ridesharing. Tells include anything from the giant pink mustache that Lyft drivers slap on their car grill to seeing the rider and driver exchange money before the rider leaves. “There could be a variety of different things that [airport police] would be looking for to see if there's a rideshare transaction,” Yakel explained.

At that point, airport police contact an airport official, who writes the rideshare driver a citation for a court date. Yakel said that officials are writing citations under California Penal Code section 602.4, which states that people offering “goods, merchandise, property, or services of any kind whatsoever” on airport property, without the airport's permission, are guilty of a misdemeanor. Yakel told Ars that he didn't know how high the fine for such a misdemeanor might be.

I find it telling that Liotta (the author from TFA) is not mentioned in any IEEE RFCs, except in RFC 5345 to say that he makes claims with no real-world measurements. But that's just appealing to authority.

The most troubling part of his proposal, I think, is the elimination of Postel's Law. The Telco-oriented people have been telling the Internet community people all along that what we need is an intelligent network that provides QoS guarantees. The Internet community rejected that, with the result being an Internet that grows in speed and adapts to countless unforeseen applications. Liotta uses the human autonomic nervous system as metaphor, but the fatal flaw is that the human autonomic system has only one brain. The Internet doesn't work with a single controlling entity.

Likewise, his illustration of the Youtube clip is not entirely accurate. Companies like Google and Netflix are making colocation deals with a bunch of the Internet Service Providers, so that most videos don't have to travel through the backbone, Time Warner Cable aside.

There are problems with the current Internet and projects to redo the basis of networking, but Liotta's proposals remind me of those fantasy "cities of the future" fiction that I used to read when I was a kid.

primates tend to be in bands and they all protect each other. Mogamy happen because it takes a long time to rise the offspring, and it needs the support of both the female and male, and Love was one of the reward mechanism.
See Helen Fisher's talk
http://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_studies_the_brain_in_love.html

Why do you assume all primates are the same socially?

They're not

On the other side of it you can not tell me that VW didn't know that they had a security issue

which means they'll have a hard time in the courts if (or when) a VW gets hacked by someone doing a drive-by with a bluetooth device that can get access via a hack of the entertainment console.

Ars had a nice writeup of a hacker who had control of a car, they could turn the brakes on and make the steering wheel turn (via the commands that control the automatic parking feature).

Is the US involvement in the MSWind backdoor confirmed? I thought it had be "plausibly denied". (I may doubt their denial, but that's not proof.)

It has been confirmed that Microsoft gives access to zero days to the NSA, so yes.

Speaking of I/O, there's the problem of the actual HDMI/Displayport connection. Many 4k TVs only have a 30 Hz refresh rate at full resolution. Basically, the bandwidth of existing cables isn't enough to handle a 4k movie at a higher refresh rate. They're going to have to come up with a whole to cable standard just to deal with the increased resolution.

"What's most surprising about this story to me is that any patients would sign such a contract."

Read the Ars Technica piece by the writer who tried to say "no" to such a contract. In short: he gets booted out the door. Now imagine you're in pain and maybe scared about a possible medical emergency (as the patient in the lawsuit here was). Situations like that is why oversight of a time-critical service like this is needed.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/all-your-reviews-are-belong-to-us-medical-justice-vs-patient-free-speech/

Even if they offered a cheaper iPhone, they still wouldn't be able to install pirated software on it.

Seriously http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/ios-apps-hijack-twitter-accounts-post-false-confessions-of-piracy/ this is my favourite post of a Developer attacking its customer by hijacking Twitter accounts, and posting false “confessions” of piracy.

They simply do not want the iPhone, and piracy is not the reason. Although not being in control of your hardware will definitely have an effect in every market.

Well then. Now we see the textbook publisher's response to SCOTUS upholding the first-sale doctrine. If a Thai student can import to the U.S. cheaper copies of the same book by the same publisher, that's all well and good. The textbook makers will just stop making paper textbooks.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/03/the-cost-difference-in-mailing-netflx-vs-gamefly-all-of-gameflys-profits/

The reason GameFly pays more is because their mailers weigh more. Netflix keeps the mailer at 1 ounce and pays 44 cents each. GameFly's mailer is 2 ounces and they pay the two ounce price. The big giant clue in the linked article is that the USPS is considering changing the price of the 2 ounce mailer to the price of a 1 ounce mailer.

So the real story is that GameFly wants a discount with zero actual justification.

The packaging for GameFly costs more. Work it into your business model or reduce the packaging weight.

I don't do business with GameFly but if I did, I'd cancel. They actually have the nerve to pretend Netflix is getting some kind of special treatment while they are the ones seeking it.

There is nothing unfair about what the USPS is doing. The rest of us have to pay by the ounce for our mail.

Just read the article you linked. While interesting, it does kinda support Gamefly's case. A 2-ounce mailer cost $1.05, whereas a 1-ounce mailer cost $0.44. In other words Gamefly pays ~238% of what Netflix pays, 38% above any differences in weight. Further, at these weights, the majority of the cost of delivery is a flat cost, rather than an increase in fuel consumption due to weight. The cost of fuel to transport 1 ounce of additional weight is certainly less than a penny; the vehicle, occupant, and other cargo make up the vast majority of the weight (and the occupant's time is no small factor on the cost). Just basing numbers on the weight of the packages alone, charging ~$0.10 extra for the additional ounce will more than make up for the added costs.

There are other factors you haven't considered. Perhaps larger, thicker, or heavier packages tend to jamb in the automatic processing machines more often, requiring more manual intervention and slowing everything down. And even if that doesn't apply to gamefly's specific case, it may apply to packages greater than 1 ounce in general. And if that's the case, it would justify the post office making a special exception for gamefly since they wouldn't actually be costing more.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/03/the-cost-difference-in-mailing-netflx-vs-gamefly-all-of-gameflys-profits/

The reason GameFly pays more is because their mailers weigh more. Netflix keeps the mailer at 1 ounce and pays 44 cents each. GameFly's mailer is 2 ounces and they pay the two ounce price. The big giant clue in the linked article is that the USPS is considering changing the price of the 2 ounce mailer to the price of a 1 ounce mailer.

So the real story is that GameFly wants a discount with zero actual justification.

The packaging for GameFly costs more. Work it into your business model or reduce the packaging weight.

I don't do business with GameFly but if I did, I'd cancel. They actually have the nerve to pretend Netflix is getting some kind of special treatment while they are the ones seeking it.

There is nothing unfair about what the USPS is doing. The rest of us have to pay by the ounce for our mail.

Just read the article you linked. While interesting, it does kinda support Gamefly's case. A 2-ounce mailer cost $1.05, whereas a 1-ounce mailer cost $0.44. In other words Gamefly pays ~238% of what Netflix pays, 38% above any differences in weight. Further, at these weights, the majority of the cost of delivery is a flat cost, rather than an increase in fuel consumption due to weight. The cost of fuel to transport 1 ounce of additional weight is certainly less than a penny; the vehicle, occupant, and other cargo make up the vast majority of the weight (and the occupant's time is no small factor on the cost). Just basing numbers on the weight of the packages alone, charging ~$0.10 extra for the additional ounce will more than make up for the added costs.

Eric Holder is a horrible authoritarian shitsack. I remember hearing the news that Obama picked Holder as AG not long after he was first elected, it was the first and strongest sign that Obama's campaign promises were 100% bullshit.

And here I was thinking that Obama's selection of Joe Biden as his running mate was a strong sign that he didn't intend to do any real "hope" and "change."

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/03/the-cost-difference-in-mailing-netflx-vs-gamefly-all-of-gameflys-profits/

The reason GameFly pays more is because their mailers weigh more. Netflix keeps the mailer at 1 ounce and pays 44 cents each. GameFly's mailer is 2 ounces and they pay the two ounce price. The big giant clue in the linked article is that the USPS is considering changing the price of the 2 ounce mailer to the price of a 1 ounce mailer.

So the real story is that GameFly wants a discount with zero actual justification.

The packaging for GameFly costs more. Work it into your business model or reduce the packaging weight.

I don't do business with GameFly but if I did, I'd cancel. They actually have the nerve to pretend Netflix is getting some kind of special treatment while they are the ones seeking it.

There is nothing unfair about what the USPS is doing. The rest of us have to pay by the ounce for our mail.

Windows NT 3.51 was the most stable operating system I have ever used.

I guess you never used Novell NetWare v3.12 then. Now that was stable !

It's pretty tricky, really. You have to simulate at least 4 satellites' signals, compensating for their orbital movement at the position where you want to tell your target it's located.

But its just numbers and time. That's all the GPS receiver knows about. It knows nothing actual orbits or movements. Just precise time and epheremis numbers.
The signals would be trivial to generate with a computer.

GPS jammers are even easier. I was approaching a tractor trailer in Utah one moment, and the next the GPS was in a "Recalculating" frenzy and I was jumping from Montana to Iowa and points in between. After I was half a mile away from the rig everything was back to normal. Apparently some long-haul truckers don't like to be tracked. The thing was, the GPS didn't say it lost signal, it indicated I was suddenly in specific locations hundreds of miles away.

From what I read at Ars Technica, the Verge article is inaccurate; evidently Wired & other reviewers didn't run into the same problems. The discussion at Ars Tech was quite interesting if you're like me and tempted to get one:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/07/the-chromecast-has-a-netflix-promotion-and-its-gone/?comments=1&start=0

I've been looking into WD TV lately, and it's one of the options I'm seriously considering getting for my mother, as we switched from cable to watching online & downloading years ago. She has a Roku, but the interface is fairly exasperating and it's only able to show the pre-defined sources it came with; AFAIK it can't discover (or be sent) videos across our network, and trying to manually set it up to access a system with that interface just might result in me throwing it out a window in frustration.

You are absolutely right!.

You mean the one that they basically decided to start over from scratch a few months ago? http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/05/report-blizzard-to-overhaul-project-titan-launch-it-in-2016-at-the-earliest/

I'm sure as most people have alluded to Titan was probably built around a subscription based game. Blizzard is re-working it on a F2P model. By the time Titan is released I would all subscription games will have converted to some form of F2P.

You mean the one that they basically decided to start over from scratch a few months ago? http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/05/report-blizzard-to-overhaul-project-titan-launch-it-in-2016-at-the-earliest/

It takes up most of the storage on the device.

I bet you don't back up very frequently, and Time Machine determines that the record of files modified kept by FSEvents is stale. That would force it to do a deep scan, i.e., it traverses the whole directory hierarchy to figure out what has changed, much like rsync does.

If you back up every couple of days the whole backup including prep time should take under a couple of minutes. That's particularly true if you keep the default functionality of Time Machine (that is, backing up every hour).

Wouldn't solve his problem. TimeMachine takes considerable time to prep and start a backup before it starts actually doing any work, I'd guess its likely doing the same sort of thing that Rsync, gathering a list of changes.

No, it doesn't. It only takes a considerable amount of time to prep if you haven't backed up in many days. If you have backed up recently the prep time is quite short. And if you use the default configuration (in which it backs up every hour) the prep time is almost nil.

If you read John Siracusa's excellent OS X Leopard review you will find that Time Machine avoids traversing the whole hierarchy because it taps into FSEvents which keeps a record of the files that have been modified since the last backup.

Wouldn't solve his problem. TimeMachine takes considerable time to prep and start a backup before it starts actually doing any work, I'd guess its likely doing the same sort of thing that Rsync, gathering a list of changes.

No, it doesn't. It only takes a considerable amount of time to prep if you haven't backed up in many days. If you have backed up recently the prep time is quite short. And if you use the default configuration (in which it backs up every hour) the prep time is almost nil.

If you read John Siracusa's excellent OS X Leopard review you will find that Time Machine avoids traversing the whole hierarchy because it taps into FSEvents which keeps a record of the files that have been modified since the last backup.

AFAIK, Time Machine is a GUI frontend for rsync. Watch Activity Monitor.app when it fires up. That will tell you. I don't use Time Machine, personally, I know how to use rsync.

No, Time Machine is NOT a frontend for rsync. Yes, you can achieve something that resembles Time Machine by using the --link-dest option.

I use rsync --link-dest regularly through a script called tym ("Time rsYnc Machine") to backup stuff on systems at work for which I don't have admin privileges to configure Time Machine (oh, I haven't done it in a few weeks, I should do it asap!). So I know it has some drawbacks compared to TM, the main two being:

• - It always traverses the whole directory hierarchy looking for changes. Time Machine doesn't always do that.
• - It always creates a hard link for every file being backed up that has not changed. Hard links are very inexpensive, but still it takes a considerable amount of time if you need to create over a million hard links *every* time you back up.

If you read John Siracusa's excellent OS X Leopard review you will find that Time Machine avoids traversing the whole hierarchy because it taps into FSEvents which keeps a record of the files that have been modified since the last backup. TM will only do a full, "deep" traversing if it decides that the record is stale (not sure how it does that) and only then the backup takes an inordinate amount of time.

In Siracusa's review you will also find that Time Machine creates hard links to directories for which none of the content has changed since the last backup (as odd as that may sound) thus avoiding the creation of the possibly hundreds of thousands of hard links for all the files inside them.

AFAIK, Time Machine is a GUI frontend for rsync. Watch Activity Monitor.app when it fires up. That will tell you. I don't use Time Machine, personally, I know how to use rsync.

No, Time Machine is NOT a frontend for rsync. Yes, you can achieve something that resembles Time Machine by using the --link-dest option.

I use rsync --link-dest regularly through a script called tym ("Time rsYnc Machine") to backup stuff on systems at work for which I don't have admin privileges to configure Time Machine (oh, I haven't done it in a few weeks, I should do it asap!). So I know it has some drawbacks compared to TM, the main two being:

• - It always traverses the whole directory hierarchy looking for changes. Time Machine doesn't always do that.
• - It always creates a hard link for every file being backed up that has not changed. Hard links are very inexpensive, but still it takes a considerable amount of time if you need to create over a million hard links *every* time you back up.

If you read John Siracusa's excellent OS X Leopard review you will find that Time Machine avoids traversing the whole hierarchy because it taps into FSEvents which keeps a record of the files that have been modified since the last backup. TM will only do a full, "deep" traversing if it decides that the record is stale (not sure how it does that) and only then the backup takes an inordinate amount of time.

In Siracusa's review you will also find that Time Machine creates hard links to directories for which none of the content has changed since the last backup (as odd as that may sound) thus avoiding the creation of the possibly hundreds of thousands of hard links for all the files inside them.