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Germany is now a "constitutional democracy"?
"German police can now use spyware to monitor suspects" (2/26/2016)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

So here's an article on it. It doesn't seem to be regulation that's the issue, it seems to be the sheer expense of building out the infrastructure for your customers. https://arstechnica.com/inform...

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

Has there been a single case of that occurring? Or just reports of pilots seeing drones?

Yes. Many.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal....

PS: Can't they just shoot the drone or something?

IT has happened many times in the last few years. a quick google will find you multiple incidents. e.g. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal....
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

APK fears the truth that everyone finds out that he is a loser in real life and on the internet. He would also appreciate it if you didn't know that he has a very long history of being an asshole.

For those who lack imagination:

Tennessee is one example.
Michigan Republicans are trying something similar.
It's part of a push by the Koch brothers.
And their effort has been quite successful.

November 2000: APK begs forum admin to delete posts that got him banned, obvious sockpuppet pops in to offer him support. Priceless.

FYI, the center pic in your link should be of an LG Prada, not an iPhone. The Prada was the first smartphone to go without a keyboard or keypad, not the iPhone. As I keep telling people, just because the first time you saw a feature was on an Apple product, does not mean Apple invented it.

The pics on the left and right are also cherry-picked to make it look like the iPhone was the progenitor of the modern smartphone design. Here's what the pic looks like if you cherry-pick phones to make the comparison favorable to Samsung.

Samsung already had phones in their internal design pipeline prior to the iPhone's release which looked very iPhone-like. They just weren't allowed to present them in court because they missed a filing deadline. The judge in the case opted to prioritize a legal deadline over the truth, which makes sense if a lawyer is exhibiting a pattern of missing deadlines, but not when potentially a billion dollars is at stake. The truth is the industry was already transitioning towards touch and away from physical keyboards by the time the iPhone rolled out. The iPhone did not create this new paradigm, it just happened to make the biggest splash with it.

Samsung missed no deadlines in the similar case over the iPad's design. So they were able to successfully argue that the concept of a tablet existed long before the iPad, and that the Samsung Galaxy Tab's design actually borrowed from their digital picture frame which pre-dates the iPad (and the iPhone for that matter). And the jury ruled for Samsung in the tablet design patent case. They weren't jerks about it either - they didn't sue Apple for stealing their picture frame design for the iPad.

>unsupported by anything that resembles evidence

Evidence like it being widely reported in the press?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
http://fortune.com/2017/12/26/...
https://arstechnica.com/inform...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...

To be fair, if the woman hadnâ(TM)t been jaywalking on a dimly lit street at night in front of oncoming traffic, the accident also wouldnâ(TM)t have happened. There were two people making poor decisions, their paths crossed, and one of them died because of it. It sucks.

The sensors detected her just fine, the software just decide: 'Ehhh fuck it -- I am not stopping"

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

Time to provide documentation again of your long history of malicious behavior:

http://jeremyreimer.com/smam3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5132&view=next

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=818606

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=821190&start=40

http://www.thorschrock.com/2008/05/19/how-to-respond-when-people-threaten-to-sue-you-on-the-web/

I'm not an advertiser, webmaster, or a competitor. I'm just a Slashdot reader who is tired of seeing your spam comments.

Time to provide documentation again of your long history of malicious behavior:

http://jeremyreimer.com/smam3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5132&view=next

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=818606

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=821190&start=40

http://www.thorschrock.com/2008/05/19/how-to-respond-when-people-threaten-to-sue-you-on-the-web/

I'm not an advertiser, webmaster, or a competitor. I'm just a Slashdot reader who is tired of seeing your spam comments.

I think the problem is that governments keep selling to a single bidder for the entire job and end up getting fucked time and time again, but I suppose it's always a new set of idiots in office making the same mistake so there's a little bit of an excuse.

I think you are wrong about this and California shows why. CA law doesn't allow exclusive deals between municipalities and ISPs. So why do CA residents have so few choices? I believe the answer is that wired Internet service is a natural monopoly.

We need to recognize that wired Internet is currently a natural monopoly and regulate it as such.

Technology may change its status as a natural monopoly, but the best placed companies (cellphone carriers) don't seem interested in doing anything about it (limited monthly bandwidth makes cellphone Internet impractical as a replacement for wired Internet).

The UK doesn't have this natural monopoly problem for Internet service, but the UK requires incumbents to allow competitors to user their last mile infrastructure. Remember when the USA had CLECs? Lobbying and obstruction by the ILECs killed that.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

"I'm sorry, what scare tactics did I refer to?"

I'm a little baffled by that question. I literally address this after making that statement. Go back and reread my last post if you are seriously wondering about this.

"I'm sorry, what scare tactics did I refer to? I have not referred to any well publicized and likely misleading sources used by the war on drugs - I have not referenced the usual claims of lowering IQ or as a gateway drug even though it is reported in a peer reviewed journal [nih.gov]. I specfically avoided such sources because I knew someone would attempt to discredit them."

So because you avoid those specific scare tactics you didn't use scare tactics at all? One thing does not follow the other there,

"And, please, a little more evidence than "snopes" here - one discredited mass media report is hardly adequate evidence."

That means you didn't read the link. There was something like a half dozen refuted cases in that link of the media or law enforcement claiming problems with laced weed and then later retracting their statements. Laced weed is a media manufactured problem, right up there with parents and teachers lecturing me as a child warning me of the dangers of "drug dealers handing out LSD to children" (What the hell kind of nonsense is that?). I am pointing to the complete lack of supporting data to refute the claim that laced weed is a real life danger here. If there is a real problem with this then there should be evidence of such,

"Trust me I know about people doing stupid things. I am a trauma surgeon and nearly half of my patients arrive with drug and or alcohol on their toxicology screen."

And this gets to the core of one of my main problems in this conversation. I'm getting anecdotal evidence from a person here who is regularly confabulating "drugs" and "marijuana". Marijuana is not alcohol and it is not all "drugs".

In regards to your links

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
This was nice and contributes to an informed conversation on the subject. While there is certainly still wide debate on the subject a number of other studies have found similar links to the problems detailed here. What I always wonder about the issues brought up in such studies, if marijuana is seeing such widespread use that 12% of Americans admit to having used it in the last year (from this link) why is there no health crisis in regards to the symptoms described here? People dying from liver disease and diabetes due to drinking is something that I run into in my own life and there is very clear data detailing the problem. With pot, not so much.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com...
Despite the headline all this article does is bring up that weed is more potent now and that there is no reliable source for metrics on CBD content in pot (which is what most medical users really care about). None of these things make pot bad.

http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/st...
This is more scare tactics. As I didn't want to meticulously read through the whole thing I did a text search for marijuana. There is no mention of the substance here. This link is completely irrelevant.

https://arstechnica.com/scienc...
Irrelevant. Ecstasy is not marijuana. It isn't even put together by a chemist. This is more of what I have been talking about in terms of scare tactics. "Other drugs are laced with crazy stuff which means marijuana could be laced which means it is laced!" seems to be the thought process with this.

https://www.journalacs.org/art...
This is just a craz

So I'm sure intelligence would prefer that Donald use a locked-down Android device. If ZTE want to restore trust in the US market, cosying up to the feds would be a start.

Wouldn't matter. Trump won't let anyone install security updates on his phones.

Trump is reportedly too lazy to have experts secure his iPhones
Trump's 'old, unsecured Android phone' poses major security threat, experts say
Trump’s cell phone use is security “nightmare” waiting to happen, lawmakers say

Trump is that boss that thinks security doesn't apply to him and blames the IT guys whenever he installed the next virus.

That actually is is a much bigger problem, and Google/Waymo and other researcher have concluded there is no safe way to implement a self driving car if humans have to supervise it and be able to take over in a split second (as per Tesla's fine print) when it does something wrong, such as try to kill you by driving into a concrete median:
Robot Cars Can’t Count on Us in an Emergency https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...

Elon got it wrong, self driving is a separate problem and you can't get there incrementally by increasing the level of autonomy (think wanting to go to the moon - going farther and farther by car will never get you there):
People who paid Tesla $3,000 for full self-driving might be out of luck https://arstechnica.com/cars/2...

These were apparently Nigerian spammers. The spammers and scammers are left alone to bring _any_ outside currency into a desperate local economy. A reasonable survey of bribery, reported at https://arstechnica.com/tech-p..., shows bribery as nearly 40% of the national and state budgets, and the police as being the most often bribed. I'm afraid to say that the people prosecuted most likely failed to pay the needed bribes, perhaps due to bankruptcy, and thus were some of the very few scammers ever prosecuted in Nigeria.

And yet the CDC did exactly that research. https://www.nap.edu/read/18319...

Guess what? Guns help prevent crime more than they cause it. And we're not talking about indirect deterrence here where knowing a populace is armed keeps potential criminals scared. We're only talking about direct defensive uses of firearms.

If you can't be arsed to read the whole thing, Guns and Ammo summarized it here http://www.gunsandammo.com/pol...

Funny, because for over 20 years, the CDC was prohibited from studying gun violence. Yes, the NRA has bought legislation that prevents any money the CDC gets from going into gun violence research.

So obviously the CDC did not conduct the research, because they're not allowed to. They're allowed to contract it out for no money, which basically means really self-interested researchers (i.e., industry) gets to write an opinion piece about it.

Your article is dated to 2013, and the CDC has not conducted any gun violence research since 1996 (Dickey Amendment).

And all my article states is the AMA is lobbying for its appeal since 2016, because one really cannot make any sort of judgements without proper research. Of course, the NRA opposes this, almost as if they're worried about the real truth, that it might be the next cigarettes, or leaded gasoline, or climate change, or something. Or it might be because their whole set of mottoes end up being lies...

Are you REALLY gonna sit here and argue that Hollywood and the LA music industry isn't as hard left as one can humanly get....really? Because if you truly believe that I have a bridge you might be intersted in buying, dirt cheap!

For the rest of us that have functioning brain cells we all know that endless copyright is being pushed by The House Of Mouse and Disney has been SJW central for the better part of 40 years. Feel free to look up Disney's donations to political parties, you'll see they certainly aren't friends of the right, neither is most of Hollywood which is who will benefit from this legislation.

I can appreciate your concern, since the recent history with Skype and some other acquisitions left a bit of a bad taste, but this article from ArsTechnica suggests that Microsoft might have been the best option:

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

The Microsoft of today is not the same Microsoft as in the days of Ballmer and Gates. While Microsoft certainly has as big focus on the corporate world, its open source portfolio is bigger by the day. In many ways pigs are flying.

Are you not aware that Microsoft is still currently "licensing" software patents on devices distributed with the Linux kernel?

Yes... It goes like this... You build a new device and start distributing it with the Linux kernel installed.
Microsoft approaches you and says your device violates 200+ Microsoft software patents because it runs Linux.
You now have to pay Microsoft money for a software patent license for every device you distribute because you are building and distributing devices that include the Linux kernel which they say violates their software patents.

It's a very sleazy extortion scheme designed to stifle Linux and open source in the marketplace.

I can appreciate your concern, since the recent history with Skype and some other acquisitions left a bit of a bad taste, but this article from ArsTechnica suggests that Microsoft might have been the best option:

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

The Microsoft of today is not the same Microsoft as in the days of Ballmer and Gates. While Microsoft certainly has as big focus on the corporate world, its open source portfolio is bigger by the day. In many ways pigs are flying.

Given that Ethereum has had a centralized hard-fork and bitcoin has had a mining pool over 50% control, your faith in those coins seems very misplaced...

https://www.coindesk.com/ether...

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

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

If Samsung won't come to the party, make sure your next phone supports Project Treble (should be any phone that shipped with Oreo, plus the original Pixels). That finally decouples the OS from the SoC drivers, and means any Treble phone can (theoretically) be upgraded with Google's own OS releases.

Which is why you can also get this Beta 2 release on third party phones like the Essential Phone, Nokia 7 Plus, OnePlus 6, Oppo R15 Pro, Sony Xperia XZ2, Vivo X21 & X21UD, and Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, as well as Google's own Pixel series.

Failing all that, LineageOS will work well with your Samsung.

Autonomous cars were one year ago, I'm not sure what point you are making - your article says theirs a driver in the seat. From your link:

The taxi service is not totally "self-driving." Waymo notes that "as part of this early trial, there will be a test driver in each vehicle monitoring the rides at all times."

There isn't yet an autonomous car (as in, self-driving in conditions humans normally drive in). It will be big news when they are available.

(Sorry, Japan. You can be second.)

If Japan can figure this out, they'll be first. Although I'm guessing that they can't do it either,

Autonomous cars were one year ago, though I admit it can be hard to remember with quacks like Uber and Tesla constantly making headlines. (Sorry, Japan. You can be second.)

Autonomous cars were one year ago, though I admit it can be hard to remember with quacks like Uber and Tesla constantly making headlines. (Sorry, Japan. You can be second.)

Tesla will either crash and burn, or be completely out of the woods, in 3 months. Call it 6 months just for some wiggle room: by the end of the year, Tesla will be either gone or a rock solid investment.

There is an excellent graph of Tesla's free cash flow that supports this.

I say this since I have never seen any proof that this and this has ever elimiated as a possiblity. Sourceforge killed itself three years ago and this is a opportunity to come back if they step in and make the needed changes to their infrastructure and policies.

You posted this twice so I'll respond twice: We actually don't bundle spyware with our installers. In fact that's the first practice we eliminated when we acquired SourceForge in 2016, along with instituting malware scans for every project, https downloads and project web hosting, a redesigned experience, and much more. https://arstechnica.com/inform...

We actually don't bundle spyware with our installers. In fact that's the first practice we eliminated when we acquired SourceForge in 2016, along with instituting malware scans for every project, https downloads and project web hosting, a redesigned experience, and much more. https://arstechnica.com/inform...

In short, no it doesn't work anything like that.

Have a read of this, more specifically the sections titled "four party model" and "What happens when you buy something".

They’ve already invented an oven.

Verizon was fined for violating network nuetrality in 2012 when they blocked people from tethering, again in 2016 for supercookies, and they were throttling video just last year. This is a non-exhaustive list.

Each of these violations happened under different rules, which they thought they could get away with (and mostly did) because the former rules were so lax. Your claim that no "ISP has yet done anything differently" is ridiculous - what they have done is dropped any plans that they had for maintaining network neutrality, because those plans are now unnecessary. Now they go back to what they were doing before, only this time with no consequences.

it doesn't create an additional attack surface

Unfortunately, yes it does.

An update on Ars Technica has details: https://arstechnica.com/gadget...

In short: A string of words in a voice conversation was interpreted to be "send a voice message", which it did. Probably the best fix: Make sure the Echo's voice responses through the several steps needed to accomplish this cannot be muted and are played at a volume level louder than the ambient noise in the room.

This makes the whole thing the equivalent of a butt dial to voicemail circa 1997. Sit on your non-flip phone and either speed dial someone or re-dial a previous number. The call goes to VM and if you're talking the whole time someone gets a 30-minute "file" of someone talking and not knowing they are being recorded.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2...

So the NSA knew a lot about them and their deep links to the FSB.

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

we'd just have to speculate.

I agree. So what we know of Trump being completely useless at most things, I'm speculating that he has a store bought iPhone and is using it for Twitter. It's quite possible that this phone has already been compromised but he's too stupid to realise the risk involved. Remember he's the same guy that while shouting about Hillary's email security was running his own extremely insecure server

Just like it would be a PR nightmare to slow down an older phone without asking? Just like it would be a PR nightmare to put a keyboard prone to failure in one of the most expensive laptops available? Yeah, you're right that would be a big mistake. People might create class action lawsuits.

I don't know, nvidia is hit with giant class action lawsuits all the time and everyone still buys every new $800 nvidia gpu as soon as it hits the store shelf. But I was happy to replace my $2,000 dead gpu gaming laptop with the $100 netbook Nvidia offered. Thanks class action lawsuit!
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
https://www.consumeraffairs.co...

What alternatives exist for Windows users? Genuine question, because I'm searching for a new browser.

Firefox has been out for me for a long time. Some of its most popular forks, such as Pale Moon and Waterfox, go a long time without updates, which is a security risk.

Brave (Chromium) isn't as virtuous as it trumpets itself to be. It replaces ads with its own ads. Since the article is old, I went to Brave's site and read through their FAQs; they use a lot of weasel wording to give the appearance that they no longer do this, without actually saying so.

I was thinking about Opera, but I saw somewhere in the comments that it's now owned by China.

Correction: I misread an LA Times story and got two tunnels confused. As a result, I described this as a 2.7-mile tunnel in West Los Angeles, when in fact that's a different tunnel that has been proposed but hasn't been constructed yet. This tunnel, in contrast, is located around SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne. Musk hasn't revealed its exact length, but the company submitted a proposal for a 2-mile tunnel at the site last year. We regret the error.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2...

This is not where I saw it originally but was the easiest to find today with the correction.

Shit penis bags, forgot to include the link:
https://arstechnica.com/gadget...

Yep. Sounds just as dumb as this.

The human is in charge. They are responsible, they are the ones the law applies to. If a human driver works for a company and the company knowingly lets particularly unsafe drivers (i.e. inadequately trained or drivers with inhibited judgement) continue driving, the company is liable for their actions. In this case the driver was a computer, and the company knew the driver was the equivalent of inadequately trained -- it couldn't even manage 13 miles between interventions.

But this car had a human driver. You've conveniently ignored that point, yet declared that the human is in charge (as this one was), and is responsible, and is the one that the law applies to. Ergo, The driver human, not the CEO human, is more proximate to the cause.

A car manufacturer has nothing to do with how a regular car is driven, and therefore it is not their responsibility if someone mows pedestrians down.

Really? A car manufacturer has nothing to do with how its cruise control operates? A cruise control that, for example, fails to detect that the vehicle in front has slowed or that a pedestrian has entered the road? No relationship at all?

This defence is not working for VW regarding the emissions fraud. Let us hope it does not work for Uber either.

The situation there is the U.S. government has documents showing the the CEO personally and specifically approved of deceiving federal regulators as to the existence of the device. He is charged with "conspiracy to defraud the US government and customers, wire fraud, and conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act," not violating the Clean Air Act himself.

You have presented nothing comparable for the Uber CEO. "It couldn't even manage 13 miles between interventions," paired with a safety driver, was deemed within the duty of care of the California and Arizona governments prior to the accident. You have not even shown that anyone at Uber knew that the safety driver was inadequately trained or had inhibited judgement... you've simply thrown out the fact that they were present.

So again, try harder.

Cool! A flying car that will fly into people and other vehicles over because Uber’s software will think it’s an object to ignore.

Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.

The thing they have in common? The people involved wouldn't know science if it bit them on the ass. Instead they grind axes.

I know this was tagged as "funny", but it's disturbingly close to the truth. At a recent Flat Earth Convention (yes, really) the folks seemed to genuinely believe they were doing legitimate science to "prove" that the earth isn't round. They regard folks who do actual peer-reviewed science as part of some "conspiracy by the elite" and therefore not to be trusted.

That particular spot was well lit.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2...

Ars has a great write up on it and an actual shuttle engineer added some information in the comments. The most obvious issue is that there was no way to prevent what happened to Columbia from happening to Atlantis (which was in the VAB at the time) and losing 2 shuttles. Link: https://arstechnica.com/scienc...

As opposed to every subsequent shuttle flight where they made a point to have a second shuttle on standby?