Slashdot Mirror

http://thenextweb.com/asia/201...

He is running a pre-installed Windows?

First thing I do is wipe any new computer clean. The OEMs can't be trusted anymore.

Except if you bought a Lenovo, it'll helpfully replaces OS components through Lenovo Service Engine entirely on its own. So a clean install won't save you. Nice eh?

It's not a social network.

http://thenextweb.com/socialme...

There are some that posit that Faraday is a thinly disguised front for Apple....

Funders: Undisclosed.

Bad choice if true. A better early pioneer in the fields of researching the philosophy of nature they would have picked, pardon the pun, had it been Apple, would be Isaac Newton. :)

And in repose to the original story, yes, Faraday apparently did borrow its name from an early electrical pioneer, but so did Tesla Motors. Nicki T, remember? The guy without whom you'd be surfing the internet by candle light? J/K, LOL. There'd be no internet. No computers, and you'd be writing snail mail letters also, yes, by candle light, even in 2015, likely, as unless your family had been VERY rich, you'd very likely NOT have electricity in your house. There'd probably be no radio, (Marconi was a thief, not an inventor,) no cell phones no smart phones, no radio telescopes, no X-Ray machines, no MRI's, no satellites or space program or anything that came from any of that. Oddly, I've never been able to find a single word of praise or thanks on Tesla Motor's website for the name, the inventions of the admittedly eccentric genius and the goodwill they've stolen, and are profiting mightily from.

Fuckers.

There are some that posit that Faraday is a thinly disguised front for Apple....

Funders: Undisclosed.

Except from TFA... "documents filed in California point to a parent company run by a Chinese billionaire who styles himself after Apple's late Steve Jobs."

There are some that posit that Faraday is a thinly disguised front for Apple....

Funders: Undisclosed.

Might well be. What car manufacturer sells cars as "experiences" ? No one, not even the likes of Rolls Royce or Jaguar do it. "Experience" selling comes from the software industry (Microsoft and pals). So yeah Apple might be
behind the veil of secrecy.

There are some that posit that Faraday is a thinly disguised front for Apple....

Funders: Undisclosed.

Hello, sure I can explain further. From your original comment I gather you read the Story: http://thenextweb.com/insider/... . Notice the first 2 words are "Live" and "Coding", combined together in the form of a Hyperlink. When clicked, said Hyperlink takes the reader directly to another document, in this particular case, Live Coding. Hope that helps.

Somebody doesn't call Steve Jobs a jackass?

This, and content blocking are going to crater intrusive overbearing advertising. Of course it will take decent ads along for the ride, but hey, the industry refused to even marginally police itself, and abused our goodwill terribly, so here goes...

If dropping infected USB sticks into a parking lot and seeing who picks them up and plugs them in works

| Yeah, I watch Mr. Robot, too...

Um, Mr Robot took it from ancient (in internet terms anyways) history:

Just one random story from 2011:

http://thenextweb.com/insider/...

Min

http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/...
Shorter with a promise of a follow up review
http://www.cnet.com/products/m...

I kind of want it. But I'm a little annoyed at myself with my android phone (s6) since the latest update (T-Mobile) once again locked the bootloader.

Windows 10: Here are the privacy issues you should know about

Sign into Windows with your Microsoft account and the operating system immediately syncs settings and data to the companyâ(TM)s servers. That includes your browser history, favorites and the websites you currently have open as well as saved app, website and mobile hotspot passwords and Wi-Fi network names and passwords.

You think this crap is reasonable?

Forgot the link:

http://thenextweb.com/microsof...

The level of data collection and sharing enabled by default in Windows 10 is truly scary, as I mentioned in a comment yesterday (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7759605&cid=50205063). But that blog post is snarky and awful. There is a decent article about it, which belongs in the summary, ironically one she linked herself: http://thenextweb.com/microsof...

There may be a valid point or two in that blog, but the Google drool all over it makes it truly terrible.

"I have enormous faith in Google and Googlers doing the right thing with respect to protecting the data I share with them"

Umm yeah...

"Users with Home versions of Win10 will be required to accept automatic updates, including drivers.

And here's a biggy. If you don't want Microsoft installing updates automatically -- if you're a user who has chosen to take control of this process up to now -- you probably will hate Win10.
In some environments, this is unacceptable from a support and security standpoint, and reports are already coming in regarding driver related issues."

The cesspool that is the average Windows Home machine can only be improved by automatic updates. Just heard from someone a couple of days ago that they disabled Windows Update completely because it made their computer slow.

Many users -- especially on somewhat under-powered systems -- may find Win10 to be a painfully slow experience compared with Win7, irrespective of MS' claims.

Weasel worded nonsense - most factual reports suggest the opposite.

First things first. It's obvious from my email today that this icon and MS pitch alone are confusing many users. They've never seen anything like this appear before and many think it's a virus or that their system has been otherwise compromised.

Ah I wish the average user was that suspicious about actual threats. That corner on the average Windows machine is taken up by about twenty background apps.

The privacy issues in Windows 10 are quite fucking terrifying, and matter far more than one more icon hidden in a corner.

The issue for me is that I use Windows because I have to, Android / iPhone / GMail / Siri / Google Now etc. are a choice. And if I am not wrong, these are all opt in, you get notices when you first start up your phone / iDevice. Also a quick read suggest Microsoft's data collection goes far beyond anything I have seen even from Google.

"Windows 10 generates a unique advertising ID for each user on each device. "

"We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to protect our customers or enforce the terms governing the use of the services."

tl;dr Windows 10 privacy issues are scary, but that blog post is garbage, try here: http://thenextweb.com/microsof...

The level of data collection and sharing enabled by default in Windows 10 is truly scary, as I mentioned in a comment yesterday (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7759605&cid=50205063). But that blog post is snarky and awful. There is a decent article about it, which belongs in the summary, ironically one she linked herself: http://thenextweb.com/microsof...

There may be a valid point or two in that blog, but the Google drool all over it makes it truly terrible.

"I have enormous faith in Google and Googlers doing the right thing with respect to protecting the data I share with them"

Umm yeah...

"Users with Home versions of Win10 will be required to accept automatic updates, including drivers.

And here's a biggy. If you don't want Microsoft installing updates automatically -- if you're a user who has chosen to take control of this process up to now -- you probably will hate Win10.
In some environments, this is unacceptable from a support and security standpoint, and reports are already coming in regarding driver related issues."

The cesspool that is the average Windows Home machine can only be improved by automatic updates. Just heard from someone a couple of days ago that they disabled Windows Update completely because it made their computer slow.

Many users -- especially on somewhat under-powered systems -- may find Win10 to be a painfully slow experience compared with Win7, irrespective of MS' claims.

Weasel worded nonsense - most factual reports suggest the opposite.

First things first. It's obvious from my email today that this icon and MS pitch alone are confusing many users. They've never seen anything like this appear before and many think it's a virus or that their system has been otherwise compromised.

Ah I wish the average user was that suspicious about actual threats. That corner on the average Windows machine is taken up by about twenty background apps.

The privacy issues in Windows 10 are quite fucking terrifying, and matter far more than one more icon hidden in a corner.

The issue for me is that I use Windows because I have to, Android / iPhone / GMail / Siri / Google Now etc. are a choice. And if I am not wrong, these are all opt in, you get notices when you first start up your phone / iDevice. Also a quick read suggest Microsoft's data collection goes far beyond anything I have seen even from Google.

"Windows 10 generates a unique advertising ID for each user on each device. "

"We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to protect our customers or enforce the terms governing the use of the services."

tl;dr Windows 10 privacy issues are scary, but that blog post is garbage, try here: http://thenextweb.com/microsof...

From this article;

You can deactivate that by hopping into settings, but I’d argue that it should be opt-in rather than on by default. Many users won’t get round to turning it off, even though they would probably want to.

I would argue that most of the people who have an issue with the default sync option are the ones that would know how to turn it off and would do it. Conversely, most of the people that would benefit from the sync, that being most of the users of Windows 10, would not know it exists and/or how to turn it on.

Microsoft had to choose whether to cater to the average user or the security conscious user that does not trust Microsoft. Microsoft chose the former.

A link in the article linked lists the problematical parts of the Microsoft privacy policy and user agreement:
http://thenextweb.com/microsof...

"The Privacy Statement and Services Agreements combined come to 45 pages. Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, Horacio Gutierrez wrote that they are'“straightforward terms and polices that people can clearly understand'.”

Personally I have been lobbying my city council to put in a park/greenspace shaped like this.

Adblocking is coming to the iPhone with iOS 9

The next version of Safari will let users block ads on iPhones and iPads.

With the roll-out of iOS 9, Apple is giving app developers an easy way to create mobile ad blockers for Safari on iPhones and iPads. The new "Content Blocking" feature allows developers to pass a JSON file with a set of rules for images, popups, cookies, resources and other elements in Safari.

Sources like The Next Web point out that such a feature would allow ad blocking and privacy apps "to exist on iOS for the first time since launch".

On the other hand the Marketing Land warns that this move "could chip away at Google's and other ad networks' mobile ad revenue from iOS devices", NiemanLab calls it "a blow for mobile advertising" and Cult of Mac asks if that is a good thing and proposes as an answer:

Is that a good thing? Well, maybe for the average user, for a period of time. But when you block ads on the web, you prevent content providers from earning any revenue from them. If we all did that, our favorite sites would have to find other sources of revenue, or stop supplying content altogether.

I have no idea why, in a technical and privacy oriented forum as ours, the focus of the accepted submission was not on the fact that this is an "Adblocker app enabler" move instead of a "Google killer move".

20 Years of write once and test everywhere! And now thanks to Android there are over 18000 distict Andoid platforms to test on too!! http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2...

What you call 'fragmentation' I call 'variety'. And since Android app crash rates are actually lower than iOS ones (ie a platform with much lower 'fragmentation') then it clearly isn't the problem that you think it is...

20 Years of write once and test everywhere! And now thanks to Android there are over 18000 distict Andoid platforms to test on too!! http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2...

I for one salute out software testing overlords :|

Here's an ultra-condensed, slightly re-ordered version of the Q&A:

Q: Isn't this just an interstitial?
A: No. We donâ(TM)t like interstitials either. They sit between you and the content and require another click and new pageload before you can proceed to the article.

Q: How can I skip the Canvas ad and read the article?
A: As soon as the page loads you can move your cursor to the article and it will slide back over the Canvas ad. Pro tip: hit the âcâ(TM) key on your keyboard and the article will move in or out right away. Try it now to see how it works!

I'm sorry, how is this functionally different from an interstitial? And no, Boris, you may not answer "because it uses canvases," because HTML5 and Javascript can trigger reloads on their own.

My current default browsing environment is the following:
- Firefox with NoScript, Classic Theme Restorer, and Status-4-Evar
- Pale Moon with NoScript (I'm heavily considering abandoning Firefox entirely, aside from obligatory browser compatibility testing)
- In ultra-extenuating circumstances, elinks (this is what I have to use for my local newspaper's website when I have to perform the 1 odd search every 3 months for a police blotter story. Their website forces a navigation forward saying that the browser is broken, and elinks handles it in the most graceful fashion when I click the "Back" button. The Boston Globe is far less annoying for odd searches, and if a newspaper truly wants to paywall their content, they can go with the Rupert Murdoch method and refrain from sending the full article text in the base HTML.)

I had the page for the Q&A open, and I went to NoScript and clicked "Temporarily allow all this page"; what a mistake that was. It proceeded to chug, and take almost 25 seconds to load an abomination of 78 scripts among 21 external domains (20 if I count "tnwcdn.com" as internal), and it took 4 different stages of "Temporarily allow all this page" to allow everything. It's a veritable cross-site scripting nightmare, and the end result is a full-page ad (sometimes video or with semi-transparent animated layers) covering 92% to 99% of the page, with the far right edge consisting of the article dangling annoyingly in a sine-wave oscillation on the right half. It was so disgusting, I had to click "Revoke Temporary Permissions" to restore some visual sanity, and make me not want to "kill -9" Firefox out of spite.

I'm going to be brutally honest: this is the kind of website design that led me to browse the web the way I do now: Flash disabled unless I specifically enable it, and NoScript set with its ultra-agressive rules. I don't even need AdBlock, because NoScript takes care of the most annoying elements powered by the reckless abuse of Javascript in modern website design. If there's a regular banner ad that isn't Javascript, I'll see it, and if it's really good, there's a faint chance I might click it. If there's a page whose core content can't be rendered without any of these ultra-annoying elements, I leave, never come back, and tell all my friends how disgusting the page is (as I will do for The Next Web; there are plenty of other tech blogs that don't stoop this low).

I'm also getting really tired of the overuse of slide animations in HTML5/Javascript website design. If I were to make a listicle of the worst HTML5/Javascript abominations, The Next Web's design decisions here would be number 1.

I'm also insulted by TNW's proselytization about ads, because they've been so deep in the marketing tank due to their financial position (they have to get funding to keep their website running, and they're hopelessly stuck in the web ad arms race), their undying love for annoying touch-centric webpage design (their "about" page ( http://thenextweb.com/about/ ) has a static non-scrolling background in the top 20%; that's one of the oldest asinine elements of ultra-touch-hipsterish web design that has been plaguing websites since 2011; Vox i

You wouldn't say Apple has as strong or a stronger hold on the music and mobile phone markets?

No. I wouldn't. The market share numbers are in some cases nearly an order of magnitude different. Suggesting Apple has a comparable hold on their markets has no basis whatsoever in reality.

Google's search market share: roughly 90%

Apple's global smartphone market share: roughly 10% to 20% (it varies based on iPhone launch dates)

Apple's music market share: roughly 30% for retail sales and 10% for streaming

I wish I could find more recent numbers for music sales, since I suspect the iTunes share of the overall music sales market is much lower now, what with streaming services knocking the legs out from digital downloads. It's also worth pointing out that, as one of the earlier links shows, Android makes up roughly 75-80% of the global smartphone market, so if you want to suggest that Apple has a monopolistic hold over the phone market, what does that say about Google, given that their share is roughly 4x greater?

http://thenextweb.com/google/2...
wages are $12-$14 in US, $4 in China, rest is offset by cheaper shipping.
http://www.informationweek.com...?
Says something about $5 difference, and gives a good breakout of hardware costs.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Says $4.

So I was off, but not by much, it appears that China just isn't cheap anymore. In the US they are more likely to use machines to assemble where possible, in China, they historically considered people less expensive, but that may have changed over the years.

I would sometimes invoke that theme just to stare and wonder for a bit...never saw anyone use it.

http://thenextweb.com/microsof...

Next up: broadcast content will be recognized and skipped. Look at this article for instance: basically you are watching a broadcast channel, suddenly a Coca Cola ad pops up. You might see a slight millisecond of the original ad, but before you know it the ad is offering you a free Coke if you go to the supermarket in *your street* and give the code "1H5D" to the clerk.

Or, you might simply get that ad that offers you the mortgage on the new home you were looking at for the last ten days. You searched it online, 'it' knows, and the ad gets targeted to you.

Many people here react like: I will disconnect my TV. But will you ? It may be broadcast or local streaming content now, but in 10 years time when broadcast and settopbox are dead, it will be internet TV all the way. Tailored to your choice, of course, but the ads will too. This is not future, it already happens. Don't think they make this technology only to sell boxes. They want you.

The only way to change the way this works is to act now, and support lobby-campaigns against this behavior. You may want to act now.

"Then in the back, nestled in a corner are the Arduinos, Maker Kits and littleBits DIY items of fun. They’re next to the wires, transistors and soldering guns.
The items that could have made RadioShack the darling of the Maker movement are shoved in the back and ignored. A layer of dust settles on the boxes."

http://thenextweb.com/opinion/...

Instead of asking an open-ended "why" for something that is known, just look it up and then you can discuss it intelligently.

If it's known, why can't you answer it?

If you do know, and you're asking "why" anyways, it sounds like FUD where you know the actual details don't support your position, but you want to raise the possibility that they might.

No. The idea is that I know you are wrong. And I can prove it. But you'll still argue that your opinion trumps reality, so I wanted you to look for yourself. Maybe you'd find: http://thenextweb.com/insider/...

That was the first result on my search. There are thousands more. All indicating that Uber has "has received final approval from the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission to [operate in NYC]"

Reality proves you wrong. Private cars are legal, regulated, and Uber is one. Legally. At least in NYC. One of their complaints is that there are thousands of separate commissions all regulating the services separately. Some state, most local. And no easy or unifying operating mechanism.

Uber is not a "private car service" in NY. There. That has been answered. If you want to go into the details, research it, and discuss it from a position of claiming to understand it.

Uber is licensed to operate as a private car service in NYC. The "why" before was as much "why do you think they aren't?" But you won't look. You are so sure you are right, that you refuse to look or listen. Why?

A raft of excuses ("battery's dead") and security problems come to mind; how would you implement such a system?

Not to worry, I have a phone charger with all the right attachments back in my cruiser. "Phone charging", quote on quote, is part of the many services we provide.

Believe it or not, I even have this handheld $20,000 gizmo that can back up the content of your phone in less than two minutes, whatever brand of phone you use. It also helps that SSD memory, by design, doesn't try to overwrite its memory spaces of deleted pictures with newly taken pictures, unless it's absolutely necessary. It's a way to make the SSD memory more reliable.

So if you're phone is not completely full, I may even find pictures that you deleted more than two years ago. Are you sure you don't want to tell me what illegal activity is on that phone, before I discover it myself. I'd go a lot easier on you if you told me now, instead of just wasting my time. After all, we both know I'm going to find out what you're hiding on that phone eventually, and then you'll be in hell of trouble.

Location: Uber needs to know where you are so you can get picked up. Surprise!

Contacts: For splitting fares with friends, inviting friends to use Uber

Phone: To call your Uber driver or for them to call you

Camera/Microphone: Uber has a function that lets you take a photo of your credit card for scanning

Wi-Fi Connection: Checks if you have internet and attempts to use the WiFi name to help determine your location

Device ID and Call Information: Allows access to your phone number and a unique ID for your device

Identity: Allows Android users to sign in and pay with one tap (using the Google Sign-In and Google Wallet services)

Photos/Media/Files: Uber says this is to “save data and cache mapping vectors.”

http://thenextweb.com/apps/201...

Here's the list of permissions you didn't explain and makes for interesting reading.

- Identity:
Add and remove accounts.
- Photos/Media/Files:
Access to protected storage.
Modify or delete files.
- Other:
Receive data from Internet.
Use accounts on the device.
Read Google service configuration.
Modify system settings.
Full network access.
I've bolded the last three because there's no reason for them. Why does it need full network access and access to Google service configuration. "Receive data from the Internet" is sufficient to download data, full network access means they're uploading quite a bit, combine this with all the other information you're getting and it's extremely suspect.

Given that Uber has been found to be less than trustworthy before, why do you think they aren't abusing your trust (and personal data)?

Contacts: For splitting fares with friends, inviting friends to use Uber

Phone: To call your Uber driver or for them to call you

Camera/Microphone: Uber has a function that lets you take a photo of your credit card for scanning

Wi-Fi Connection: Checks if you have internet and attempts to use the WiFi name to help determine your location

Device ID and Call Information: Allows access to your phone number and a unique ID for your device

Identity: Allows Android users to sign in and pay with one tap (using the Google Sign-In and Google Wallet services)

Photos/Media/Files: Uber says this is to “save data and cache mapping vectors.”

http://thenextweb.com/apps/201...

Didn't Blackberry give back door access to their phones to the governments of India, China and pretty much anyone else who asked?

Some simple fact checking would show this is false, yet it continues to persevere through the grossly uninformed.

Actually , it's true. India

The company has provided a solution that allows the government special access to Blackberry’s communication services, including BlackBerry Messenger and BlackBerry Internet Service email. As a result, the Indian government can now monitor the exchange of emails and email attachments on BlackBerry devices, as well as whether messages on Blackberry Messenger have been marked ‘delivered’ or ‘read.’

Saudi Arabia

Research in Motion has reportedly averted a ban on its BlackBerry communications services in Saudi Arabia in exchange for security concessions to the government.

Waterloo-based RIM has agreed to hand over user codes that would let Saudi authorities monitor its BlackBerry Messenger, a source close to the talks told Reuters News Agency on Tuesday.

The source said RIM would share with Saudi Arabia the unique pin number and code for each BlackBerry registered there. That will allow authorities to read encrypted text sent via Messenger, an instant messaging service that’s distinct from email sent on the BlackBerry that is so popular with its prized corporate and political customers.

Russia, China

On November, 2007, in order to sell its devices inside Russia, RIM provided its encryption keys to Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) which, in turn, provided access to the Federal Security Service (FSB). The official Russian law which mandates this supervision is Order 6 from 16.01.2008 "About the statement of Requirements for telecommunication networks for operational and search activities."

In January, 2008, RIM China announced that BlackBerry sales through China Mobile were on track although 2007 was the expected start date. The delay was due to the fact that "RIM needed to satisfy Beijing that its handsets posed no security threat to China’s communication networks, according to sector analysts." There’s only one way to satisfy the Chinese government regarding "security threats" and that’s to comply with Chinese law regarding supervision and monitoring.

You can find more if you look.

Self-taught programmers are motivated by curiosity; webmonkeys are motivated by "oh shiny" - which is why they concentrate so much on "oh shiny". And when they get stuck because they're way out of their depth, who do you think they call ... (hint - not another web monkey).

Of course, we never recognize paradigm shifts until they're almost over. People still think of "The Internet" as what you see in a web browser, even though that's less and less true every day.

In fact, it's worth noting that 76.83 percent of Facebook's total monthly user base now accesses the service from a mobile device. With both daily numbers available now, we can calculate the percentage of Facebook's total daily user base that accesses the service from a mobile device: 73.44 percent.

People are moving away from browsers without even noticing it. Wikipedia? "There's an app for that." Banking? "There's an app for that." News? "There's an app for that." Slashdot? "There's an app for that." Bus schedules? "There's an app for that." Mobile (phone, tablet, notebooks) is where it's at, and more and more, even on notebooks and smart TVs, "there's an app for that."

It'll be worse with the IoT (Internet of Things), since those devices won't use a browser to communicate with each other, or with the user. So all those web monkeys are going to become redundant within the next few years.

So, what are they going to do? Take another boot camp to learn XCode? Java? C/C++ (yes, back-end services use c and c++).

>> The main value G+ gave to google was a way to unify all of their services so that they could track you across all of them.
>
> No, the main value of G+ was that Google was losing social networking to Facebook big time ...

That's orthogonal to the original the point about what G+ was designed for.
You are actually confused about what G+ is. It isn't social networking, it is unification.

They've finally given up on the frontal-assault approach to unification, they are now using the back-door instead.

It doesn't have that going for it anymore.

The UI's interesting as an experiment, but ultimately really creepy.

I'm pretty sure Aldous Huxley has a few things to say about an electronic gizmo that serves as an entry way to cheap consumer goods.

Riiiiight

From that page, "Google says that the video site reaches almost one out of every two people on the Internet."

"one of every two" -- so, every other household uses YouTube. When it hits 51%, that would mean the average household uses YouTube.

Comcast's "20 or 25" as an "average" figure is...unlikely.

Some perspective

Android and iOS accounted for 96.4 percent of all smartphone shipments in Q2 2014, leaving even less for the competition as the Google-Apple duopoly hit a new high. Android grew its share to 84.7 market share, while iOS fell to 11.7 percent, Windows Phone slipped to 2.5 percent, and BlackBerry tanked to 0.5 percent.

Even Windows Phone is selling 5x as many phones as Blackberry, and people are questioning the long-term viability of WinPhone.

And "Blackberry Shares Lead TSX". Come off it - if you read the article, it had nothing to do with phones:

The tech sector led advancers with BlackBerry Ltd. ahead 14 cents to $10.61 (Canadian) as the company said that it has created a new business unit that will combine some of its most innovative technology, including QNX embedded software, Certicom cryptography applications and its patent portfolio.

The story on blackberry buying the German security firm is more of the same - moving away from phone manufacturing and into software and services. And it's market cap? 5.6 billion, a far cry from the peak of 83 billion.

If blackberry believed phones were its future, it wouldn't be making the moves it is. If investors believed blackberry's phones had any sort of future, they wouldn't be rewarding the company with a higher stock evaluation for moving away from phones as a core business. The sales numbers have spoken. That can't be faked or argued. We're into a smartphone duopoly - android and iOS - and android is winning.

I think .5 is the US market share, not global

You think wrong.

http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2...

I get a choice between Comcast (who works decently enough, as much as I detest their policies) at 50Mbps, or AT&T U-verse at 3Mbps (that's all they could get the modem to train up at). One is more bandwidth than I actually need, but the other isn't enough to handle my telecommuting needs.

Comcast is literally the only ISP available to me with greater than 3Mbps of bandwidth. Given that even the FCC thinks maybe broadband starts at 10Mbps, and that I work in tech and legitimately need decent transfer speeds to do my job, I'm stuck.

Google's basically giving them away for free or extremely subsidized and then tries to make money from them by snooping on the kids' email, while Apple actually tries to make a profit from them.

http://thenextweb.com/google/2...

From http://www.edweek.org/ew/artic...

The plaintiffs allege that Google has employed such practices since around 2010, when it began using a new technology, known as Content Onebox, that allows the company to intercept and scan emails before they reach their intended recipients, rather than after messages are delivered to users’ inboxes, regardless of whether ads are turned off.
Mr. Fread and Mr. Carrillo say that neither they nor any other users of Google Apps for Education consented to such practices. They are seeking financial damages amounting to $100 per day of each day of violation for every individual who sent or received an email message using Google Apps for Education during a two-year period beginning in May 2011.
While the allegations by the plaintiffs are explosive, it’s the sworn declarations of Google representatives in response to their claims that have truly raised the eyebrows of observers and privacy experts.
Contrary to the company’s earlier public statements, Google representatives acknowledged in a September motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ request for class certification that the company’s consumer-privacy policy applies to Apps for Education users. Thus, Google argues, it has students’ (and other Apps for Education users’) consent to scan and process their emails.
In November, Kyle C. Wong, a lawyer representing Google, also argued in a formal declaration submitted to the court in opposition to the plaintiffs’ motion for class certification that the company’s data-mining practices are widely known, and that the plaintiffs’ complaints that the scanning and processing of their emails was done secretly are thus invalid. Mr. Wong cited extensive media coverage about Google’s data mining of Gmail consumer users’ messages, as well as the disclosures made by numerous universities to their students about how Google Apps for Education functions.

Google hyper-vacillates between creating new garbage that nobody wants, and retiring old garbage that people need.

http://thenextweb.com/google/2...

What has this company got to do with Google? This smells like a fake set of blogs misusing Google's name, hoping to get this into the echo chamber.

From TFA:
Google acquired VirusTotal back in September 2012, promising VirusTotal will continue to operate independently.
http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/05/26/google-releases-virustotal-uploader-os-x-hopes-malware-submissions-will-beef-mac-security/

I was under the impression that this was part of the way they intended to compete with android. free os for small arm devices with bing as the default search and an app store.

http://thenextweb.com/microsof...

Is it http://thenextweb.com/creativity/2014/05/15/adobe-creative-cloud-worldwide/?

1) If your ISP advertises X Mbps, and the ISP makes a deal with Netflix to put in a separate exclusive pipe that provides enough total bandwidth to keep up with demand, and you still get X Mbps to everything else, then I don't know that I have a problem with it.

You subscribe and pay to both your ISP and Netflix. You've therefore already paid your ISP to carry your bits from Netflix.
Your ISP makes a deal with Netflix, and they get money from Netflix.
Netflix raises its prices to pay your ISP.
You pay more to Netflix.

Netflix raises its price by £1 in the UK, €1 in Europe and $1 in the US

Your ISP is getting more money from you indirectly through Netflix.

Y'all should got when the gettin' was good. http://thenextweb.com/microsof... I tried to find the relevant Slashdot article to really drive the point home but to no avail.

I am not a EE, but a 10 MW generator is not physically that large. I have seen giant flywheels that store a lot of energy and are spun up by a smaller motor on the other end running continuously (TUM / IPP fusion reactor energy storage near Munich). You could imagine putting something like that in to avoid fouling the power grid with 30 second 10 MW spikes.

I think the problem is letting a human connect these things. Maybe if you automate all the connections, similar to the Tesla battery swap stations? That and lifetime of the electrodes.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/...

Google at last count provides 90% of Mozilla's revenue - http://thenextweb.com/insider/...

Boycott Firefox AND Chrome! Long live Lynx!

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Care to cite?