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How do you hide and freeze this? (App on Google Play). More info: http://www.zdnet.com/article/samsung-security-or-arrogance/.

I would agree.

It's not just "we want the top 5%," but "we want the top 5% that will take the median salary for the job title in our particular locale"

That brings up an important point, the whole idea of the "Dunning Kruger effect" that individuals with a low skill level not only are unaware that they have a low skill level compared to the average of individuals possessing that skill set, but lack the ability to distinguish the skill levels of that skill set in others as well.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/q...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

This is why in a company wide survey asking workers to rate their skill level relative to the rest of the company, something on the order of 35 to 42% of the company judged themselves to be in the top 5%, which, when when taken mathematically, is patently absurd.

My view on the matter, having a background in music before taking up computer science as a major, is that this reflects a common trapping of ego in terms of the amount of effort one puts forth in practicing their art. I had a college music instructor that hammered into our heads that "A good musician doesn't just practice a piece until he/she gets it right, they practice that piece until they can't get it wrong!" In the case of music it is rather easy for a non skilled "music listener" to tell a good player from a not so good player, to quote the lines from one of my favorite John Wayne movies: El Dorado:

Robert Mitchum played J,P., a drunken Sheriff who in one scene, walks into a saloon with newly deputized John Wayne and a gunman is hiding behind the piano with Joe, the piano player nervously playing hoping the whole situation blows over without him getting killed in the crossfire: (Reminds me so much of being the tech guy in many companies I might add.)

J.P.: Joe, you're playing a lot of sour notes on that piano.
Joe: I know I am.
J.P.: You don't look very happy.
Joe: I'm certainly not.
J.P.: Wouldn't you like to move away from that piano, Joe?
Joe: You're darn right I would.
J.P.: Well, then, move!

In the case of computer programming it is easy to fool one's self into thinking they have mastered something when they don't write code every day and constantly spend their time building the mind-set to solve problems with a programming language to where it is second nature to them. Someone mentioned the FizzBuzz game, Just for giggles , I tried it and was able to write a java object to do it in 2 minutes while sitting on the toilet and made it compile on the first try. If you have to spend a night figuring that out and getting it to compile and work right.. you have a bit more practice work to do before you are ready to play a perfect "Old Susanna" on the piano while a gunman is hiding behind the piano waiting to ambush John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, whilst not making any mistakes as it were..

Apparently the update left out a serious universal XSS vulnerability in IE11 unpatched. Source
Vulnerability Full Disclosure - 31 Jan 2015

Is it better than a wire coat hanger

http://www.zdnet.com/article/c...

There is malware in the Apple garden too, it is just that the reality distortion field prevents people from seeing it.

http://www.cnet.com/news/resea...
http://www.zdnet.com/article/d...

Granted, there has not been much of it, but according to the second link, they don't allow security software either (I stopped supporting Apple 3 years ago, so it could have changed though), so if something gets through the app store, or the browser, or however else, there is nothing out there to protect you.

At last check it is Microsoft who is fighting these sorts of things... even when significant penalties could be involved if they fail: http://www.zdnet.com/article/m...

Where is Google's backbone?

RIM announcing support for Android apps via a "player" shortly after product launch at BlackBerry World also added additional confusion and can be counted as a third management failure. If RIM had intended to provide Android/Dalvik VM support for the PlayBook in the first place, then why not provide those tools prior to launch?

Indeed, RIM had failed to foresee the problems of an "App Gap" on the PlayBook and were scrambling to provide tools and methods for leveraging the existing and very popular Android ecosystem.

The "app gap" is still there, and won't change as long as developers see blackberry as not being a player in the field. Remember - "developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers ..." has some truth behind it. If developers don't build it, people won't come.

Interesting point - Blackberry's app store contains about 130,000 apps, but 50,000 of them are quickie knock-offs from a single developer.

I think that the difference here is that the HoloLens won't be intended for outdoor use. It is way too conspicuous. People hated the relatively tiny Google Glass.

Instead, I think it will focus more on improving home and office life. From the videos I have seen, I can imagine a world where you can have additional virtual computer monitors to display information that you typically won't interact with. Such as logging information during coding. I would have IRC windows displayed on walls inside my house. When you get an email you could alter the colour of your desk by projecting slightly on top of it... etc...

I think that Google realised how much of a backlash they were causing by creating a head mounted device that can record other people, since they pulled the Explorer program. The everyday public despises it (as you say, Glasshole). It has been banned in many places, you can't use it driving in many areas (illegal, one person was pulled over citing that it is a monitor). I don't think that is something that will change either, at least not until wearing headsets like this at home becomes mainstream.

So facts don't matter if they don't match your flag waving? FACT Windows gets 10 years of support, FACT Google abandons their devices less than 2 years after release. Like it or lump it THOSE ARE THE FACTS.

But since your only criteria seems to be which website the info comes from? Here is the same report on ZDNet, you're welcome.

I am also a one time Sony customer, I quit buying Sony when they put viruses on CDs. Citation: http://www.zdnet.com/article/s...!

I have tried bifocals (traditional and progressives) and they pretty much suck.
Sadly my favorite glasses, SuperFocus, have gone out of business and it seems like they're not coming back.

So, I am looking forward to seeing what the Adlens people can do; this will probably be my next pair of glasses. Blog post with an Adlens review
Link to an overview of what Adlens does: https://www.adlens.com/our-technology/

With any luck I'll never use fixed lenses again; adjustables are just that nice.
My current SuperFocus glasses were kind of expensive ($700+), but I would buy them again in a heartbeat... they are just that awesome. It is hard to describe how nice it is to see all 3 of my computer monitors in sharp focus at the same time without having to maneuver my head to position the progressive's sweet spot. Or to watch television, or look at my ipad, or drive, all in sharp focus with a really easy adjustment to the glasses' slider.

Is that with FOSS, decent developers can fix bugs and keep moving on a deadline. We found an oversight in Apache Storm's HDFS integration that affected us, but not most users. So I patched it and sent it along. Had it been an Oracle product, not an Apache product, it would never have happened on a timeline acceptable to our schedule.

Security bugs? I like to throw this one out there at people who think big companies cannot unleash epic stupid on their paying customers that makes even most 0.0.1 projects on GitHub look production-ready.

You are saying that NK has a lack of powerful computer skills.. do you actually have a factual basis for that? They send many students outside for training and education, and there are reports that they do indeed have a cyber war unit. They used to kidnap Japanese people for information, surely they could get their hands on some Pcs running linux.
  http://www.zdnet.com/article/n...

links:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/a...

Guess you haven't noticed that Visual Studio 2015 Community is free for OSS development -OR- small business (< $1 M gross revenue AND < 250 computers).

Read all about it here or here.

Here's MORE in that regard (dozens of times, millions of users infected by ads):

http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...
http://www.securityweek.com/lo...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/m...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023...
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...
http://www.securityweek.com/ea...
http://www.itworld.com/securit...
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...
http://www.zdnet.com/ad-exec-o...
http://search.slashdot.org/sto...

APK

P.S.=>

"And they dont hurt that much..." - by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16, 2014 @08:00PM (#48613667)

Oh, really? See above, & "tell us another one"... apk

You mean like promoting internal products in their search results?

http://www.zdnet.com/article/y...

Or forcing a company to use their location services over a competitor (Android has 80% of the worldwide market)?

http://www.androidpolice.com/2...

Or not allowing a company to manufacturer non Google approved Android devices if they manufacturer Android approved devices?

http://marketingland.com/googl...

"Great" clearly means different things to different people.

To malware authors, JRE is clearly great, because it is a frequent (successfully attacked) target. Maybe it's also great if you trust Oracle, which I don't.

Oracle's JRE patching record is not great, but worse than that you daren't set it to automatically update itself because Oracle has previously distributed malware bundled with JRE security updates ( http://www.zdnet.com/article/a... ).

That started seventeen minutes ago: http://hardware.slashdot.org/c...

Get with the times already.

You can't say "Get with the times" in a comment where Slashdot was scooped by ZDNet five days ago. That ship sailed.

According to an article at ZDNet, the office Google is closing has 50 engineers, and they've been offered positions in offices outside of Russia. Adobe already closed offices in Russia earlier this year, for likely the same reason.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/g...

It is time to stop painting the open source fantasy as reality. Open source is great in theory but in practice it simply has not delivered outside of a few corner cases.

Actually the opposite is demonstrably true: http://www.zdnet.com/article/c...
Coverity finds open source software quality better than proprietary code
"In 2013, code quality of open-source projects using the Scan service surpassed that of proprietary projects at all code base sizes, which further highlights the open source community’s strong commitment to development testing."

I'll spend extra on a dependable product. Apple computers have shown to not be dependable

Perhaps not in your experience. For other people, including me, the opposite has shown to be true.

But you know what? Everyone has their own version of the plural of anecdote being data, so we will all work from our own individual experiences and be justified in doing so. But I wouldn't be so certain about identifying macro trends in your personal experience here.

I'll spend extra on a dependable product. Apple computers have shown to not be dependable

Perhaps not in your experience. For other people, including me, the opposite has shown to be true.

But you know what? Everyone has their own version of the plural of anecdote being data, so we will all work from our own individual experiences and be justified in doing so. But I wouldn't be so certain about identifying macro trends in your personal experience here.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/b...

- DETEKT

What is Detekt and how does it work?

"Detekt is a free tool that scans your computer for traces of known surveillance spyware used by governments to target and monitor human rights defenders and journalists around the world. By alerting them to the fact that they are being spied on, they will have the opportunity to take precautions.

It was developed by security researchers and has been used to assist in Citizen Lab's investigations into government use of spyware against human rights defenders, journalists and activists as well as by security trainers to educate on the nature of targeted surveillance.

Amnesty International is partnering with Privacy International, Digitale Gesellschaft and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to release Detekt to the public for the first time."

###

Official Sites:

https://resistsurveillance.org...
https://github.com/botherder/d...
https://github.com/botherder/d...
https://github.com/botherder/d...

- version 1.1 download (Nov 20, 2014) .exe & sig
https://github.com/botherder/d...

###

- Detekt Author's GPG key:

The distributed binary is signed with my personal PGP key, the public key is available at

https://nex.sx/nex.asc

###

- More info/News stories:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news...
http://www.amnestyusa.org/news...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://threatpost.com/detekt-...
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
http://www.zdnet.com/amnestys-...

###

- Author's Twitter Page:

https://twitter.com/botherder

Perhaps when none of the major browsers use it as the default search engine, people will start to get the idea out of their stupid heads that forcing a search engine to remove results is not the same thing as taking something off the internet. In short, Google != "The Internet".

Then perhaps we won't see more idiotic decisions like this one.

yeah, when amazon gas partial outages like last year... it makes plenty of headlines http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-we... http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

How many times has it been pronounced dead ?

Never.

What to say but wrong ?
http://www.yourdonreport.com/i...

Really if you haven't been around do a little searching for yourself. I have been hearing that COBOL is dead since the 80s.

But as a development language it is most certainly dead. COBOL is only used in very old legacy applications invariably centered around finance and big iron.

I guess you didn't know COBOL has been enjoying a resurgence ? It has a very nice niche for cloud applications, you know those CLIENT/SERVER type apps.

http://www.microfocus.com/asse...
http://www.zdnet.com/cobol-sti...

Hell the COBOL 2014 standard is now out.

The FCC is under pressure from EVERYBODY to reclassify ISPs as Title II Common Carriers. And the reason is simple: it is what should have been done in the very beginning.

FWIW, up until about 10 years ago they were classified under Title II. It was only a ridiculously stupid decision within the FCC that declassified them in the first place. [PDF] A decision so stupid that a little ISP, called Brand X, litigated it all the way to the supreme court and lost because guys like Clarence Thomas are ideologues with no grasp of reality.

Sounds like you need this if you want to blow $200 for a real desktop like system. Sure some emedded uses would call for an atom.

For building robots and doing simple things an ARM is fine and most importantly cheap! Folks still use XP machines with 512 megs of ram and cpus not much faster to this day. Postgresql, php, image recognition, and other clients tools ran fine on a pentium III. He'll Debian demoed a 1000 users with apache on a 75 mhz pentium back in the day!

These are not made to run VMware and virtual ized oses and video editing and compiling code. That's what a workstation like my i7 is for.

There are two down sides worth noting. That's one of them; have they got USB figured out yet? Just one port is bad enough but if they bugger the polyfuses again... But the real problem is the RAM. 512MB is cramped. 256MB is unacceptable.

The USB hasn't been an issue in a long time. RAM isn't too much of an issue either. If you want a general purpose computer then this is not it. It's not for multitasking or anything fancy at all, but there are plenty of other products on the market to cater to your needs.

On the other hand I find a lot of the projects for the RPi appear to be more CPU constrained. But given it's 256MB of RAM it has had absolutely no problem performing as a media centre, or a mame arcade, or the many far simpler and less resource intensive applications I've seen them used in I would definitely NOT call it "unacceptable".

Remember in it's price category it is more comparable to a high end Arduino than a computer, and it's finding a lot of applications in systems where it doesn't even need a GUI.

Though some ideas are just simply retarded.

"but a Mac with Adblock tends to be a bit harder to get infested than a Windows machine"

That's the original claim I'm responding to. Quit putting words in my mouth that I did not say.

The words I said are pretty goddamned simple to understand - Macs are as vulnerable as Windows machines. And if you think the Pwn-to-Own contest isn't worthwhile enough, then bear in mind that roughly half of all Apple computers cannot receive security updates due to how their security practices are implemented, which means there are TONS of vulnerable OSX machines out there as patches are provided only to the newest OS X and the one immediately preceding it, and the older machines may not run the newest versions, which means they're stuck.

Or how about direct talk from the guy that PWNED Apple computers in the 2008 and 2009 Pwn-to-Own - http://www.zdnet.com/blog/appl...

What do you know? An Apple watch that can't keep time. What's next, an Apple phone that can't make calls? Oh, wait.

That's right, Linux is monolithic, but on the other hand--and this is a crucial difference--Linus is hugely concerned about preventing breakage. Of all the large packages I use, the kernel is the one that gives me the least worry when it comes to upgrade time.

L. Poettering, on the other hand, seems to relish in breaking things. He sure isn't big on commiserating with people whose systems his code has broken.

OK, well then let's do what Linus says is best. What's that? He has “[no] particularly strong opinions on systemd itself”? Systemd it is then!

Wrong conclusion. If Linus doesn't care, them no particular choice is a winner in his mind. Said another way, "Can't we all just get along?"

Here.

Well, at least a non-malformed link.

That's right, Linux is monolithic, but on the other hand--and this is a crucial difference--Linus is hugely concerned about preventing breakage. Of all the large packages I use, the kernel is the one that gives me the least worry when it comes to upgrade time.

L. Poettering, on the other hand, seems to relish in breaking things. He sure isn't big on commiserating with people whose systems his code has broken.

OK, well then let's do what Linus says is best. What's that? He has “[no] particularly strong opinions on systemd itself”? Systemd it is then!

Debian already stated that they would not go with systemd,

I think you might want to check again. Ironically, for all the claims that SystemD is for a better desktop experience, Ubuntu was the last one to enable SystemD. Not sure what to think about that. I think the reality is that SystemD makes life easier for distro builders, not for users, and that is why it has won.

I'll be watching this one close, wondering if Redhat will have to come out with a fancy option to support systemd with an option for init.

I'm really interested in seeing that too.

and potentially adds important network security.

And potentially adds new important network vulnerabilities.

http://www.zdnet.com/apple-pay...

Dahamma,

I appreciate the very thoughtful response.. I understand (and agree) conceptually that the user is buying a counterfeit good(s); but in practical terms, in real terms the users isn't. They are buying a computer, or board, etc.; if they checked to see if it was legit (the chips within) it would appear to be legit (yes perhaps the definition of counterfeit).

You are implying that this only happens to people with "bad/cheap" brands.. ZD is reporting, "The chip is extremely common on a wide variety of devices and there is no way of knowing at this time which devices have cloned chips -- and the tainted supply chain could hit anyone."

I'm clearly saying that FTDI's wanton destruction of private and government property is terroristic in nature and that it will effect major users, home users, etc. Unlike many "debates" on the Internet, we will soon know which of us is right (or wrong) or in which ways we are right and wrong.. as I suspect the reporting on this will only continue to increase. We also also see if FTDI un-does their "silent" upgrade.

I'm also saying there isn't any valid legal reason for them to have taken this course of action; if they are taking action it should be with the makers of the devices; their upgrade could have been informational (for example). "Your computer contains counterfeit parts... Please contact us..." It's also not like this was a needed upgrade that by happenstance caused this problem.. it was deliberate, willful and served no urgent nor addressed any exigent circumstances.

Samsung is cool with that since they haven't challenged Microsoft.

Yes they have.

"Bad Microsoft Android patents may lie behind Samsung lawsuit"
http://www.zdnet.com/bad-micro...

And, from the very little I know about RAID 5 ... if you only have 3 drives in it, you're not really getting a whole lot of added security, are you?

RAID5 requires a minimum of three drives. If one drive fails, the other two drives can continue function in degraded mode. The entire RAID would be lost if you have more than one hard drive failure. You could designate one or more extra hard drive as spares to automatically replace a failed hard drive. For extra security, each hard drive need to be on a separate controlller (which is what I have in my FreeNAS box). I typically have a hard drive crash every five years, which is why I replace my hard drives every five years. They keep getting bigger and cheaper all the time.

RAID6 may not be the answer for the enterprise.

Any application that requires Windows XP Mode, SUA, or more than 16 GB of RAM will work only on Windows 7 Pro and Ultimate according to this table.

So... some video editing programs won't be able to access more thatn 16 GB RAM on home? Some business applications may work better on the XP virtual machine (XP Mode) than in the native 7? SUA won't be coming with Windows anymore as it has been deprecated, so perhaps that should count. However, could you not run Cygwin instead?

So does any application that is accessed remotely through Remote Desktop.

That seems rather convoluted way of stating that you cannot access the computer through Remote Desktop and would have to install vnc or something to do it...

Show me a single app that will work on one of these versions but not the others.

Any application that requires Windows XP Mode, SUA, or more than 16 GB of RAM will work only on Windows 7 Pro and Ultimate according to this table. So does any application that is accessed remotely through Remote Desktop.

Well Cardwell also complained about this back in 2012 as well. http://www.zdnet.com/t-mobile-... So it seems that t-Mobile UK is the culprit here and should be thoroughly smacked upside the head. The article I linked indicated that they do this for "contractual" and "Fair-use" reasons. It's stupid so I'd find another carrier.

For some reason the SMTP server isn't supporting STARTTLS which is dumb, stupid and down right naive

The SMTP server supports XXXXXXXX just fine. It's just that mysteriously whenever you send the XXXXXXXX command through this particular ISP, it replaces the XXXXXXXX command with X characters before the server receives the packet.

This is a standard feature of Cisco gear (I had a PIX back in the early '00s that had this on by default), though I've never had a good explanation as to why. I definitely have no explanation as to why it would be turned on, on carrier grade gear.

I suspect that the carrier involved might be T-Mobile. And in that article, T-Mobile UK openly admits that some customer contracts forbid VPNs (what hyperbole?)

For the record, Yahoo, running FreeBSD, was compromised via Shellshock.

No, not really:

Earlier today, we reported that we isolated a handful of servers that were detected to have been impacted by a security flaw. After investigating the situation fully, it turns out that the servers were in fact not affected by Shellshock.

Also, are you sure that Yahoo is running FreeBSD on every server? I can't find anything more recent than this piece from 2011, but it would appear that 75% of Yahoo’s Web sites and services run on Linux".

RT.

How will this impact Microsofts Android Tax? I mean doesn't Microsoft have patented intellectual property rights to Android?

M-Cam casts doubts on Microsoft's Android patent portfolio

You shouldn't have conflated certain developers with anonymous trolls. These people specifically hang about Open Source forums to disrupt them. There's one sick fuck whose been doing it for the best part of a decade. I assume it's an individual, but how to explain someone posting on average one msg every five minutes over a twenty four hour period, mustn't sleep, eat or work ? And it isn't just Open Source forums. Some time back the Richard Dawkins forum had to be suspended as it had been infested and taken over by some particularly pathological people with their own agenda. Lastly, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols had this to say on the matter:

"But what I find particularly appalling is the fact that he regularly defends this, and advertises this as an efficient way to run a community. (But it is not just Linus, it's a certain group of people around him who use the exact same style, some of which semi-publicly even phantasize [sic] about the best ways to, ... well, kill me)." Lennart Poetterings

'At this point, I think Poettering has gone off the rails.

I know most of Linux's top developers. None of them are fantasizing about killing anyone or encouraging such hateful attitudes" Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

I don't think it's so much "we rewarded him" as we gave him leverage. Advertisers and marketers paid handsomely for the personal browsing data and truckloads of eyeballs Zuckerberg delivered:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-where-does-the-money-come-from/8654

You've probably got a bunch of crapware running in the background or aren't taking into consideration that the committed amount of RAM also included paged virtual memory. Here are a few links that show the memory usage:

XP, Vista and 7 baselines
Usage with 512MB RAM
7 SP1 Compared to 8