Regarding the Dash, they are/were devices from Sony running a licensed and tweaked version of the Chumby software, but communicating only with Sony servers.
Regarding the current status of Chumby, the company folded several years ago, though the servers were kept up for somewhat longer by investors in hopes of finding a market. Once that fell through, one of the Chumby employees purchased the bulk of what was left for what I suspect was a nominal amount, put up a server to provide basic clock capabilities while he got things straightened out, then left that basic service up and running and now has subscriptions available for people who want (many of) the previous capabilities of the devices. If you have an old Chumby you should be able to use it as a clock.
Regarding the Chumby itself, it was an Internet-connected tiny-board computer running something Linux based with a touchscreen running applets built in a stripped-down version of Flash. Without an Internet connection, they're not quite bricks but close (there is an offline/serverless setup you can do to run them from a USB stick). The appealing thing about them isn't and wasn't the hardware (basic ARM stuff from before the iPhone existed). The appeal of the Chumby even now is that (as others have noted) it's a clock with some computer features. The Chumby has streaming audio from multiple sources (predefined or manually-entered URLs), an FM tuner, hardware volume knob, snooze button, USB port for a stick with MP3s, etc. along with WiFi and the ability to connect to it via SSH.
These days you can get better software capabilities with a stand and an old Android phone plus a few apps, but even then you're probably going to spend quite a bit more time fiddling with that setup than you will by just plugging in a Chumby, entering a WiFi key, and maybe setting a schedule for switching to/from night mode. And you still won't have a snooze button.
Perhaps "inflection point" where the slope of a line changes direction rapidly would be more accurate, but tipping point is more widely comprehended in conversation. In any case, I'm not necessarily talking about a permanent change when we talk about massive time scales, I have no idea what the environment of the planet is going to look like after millions of years of evolution particularly by short-lived organisms. In fact, I'm also not talking about an inflection point in CO2 concentrations - I'm talking about inflection points in other things affected by CO2 (among other things).
Bill McKibben actually has an interesting take on it in Eaarth - it's not that the world will end or that humanity will die off, it's that the world will no longer have the conditions that humanity and many other plants and animals have evolved with, and we and the rest of the ecosystem may have problems adapting as fast as the changes are happening.
Your comment history is fascinating. You comment on few stories, but on the ones you do comment on you're *everywhere* with "there's no proof of climate change causes and we can't do anything about it anyway" and "gun grabbers" and straw man arguments.
I saw a few places where you seem to take an approach of "we can't fully fix this, so let's not even try to do anything" which seems to me like a rather defeatist attitude.
Anyway, regarding tipping points and whether they'd have happened in the past, it's entirely possible that they did happen and that over time things worked their way back down. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to mitigate the impacts of those, because the interim time period may REALLY SUCK in a "be glad the wars will kill you or your children before starvation" kind of way that lasts for thousands of years while natural selection selects for algae and plankton that thrive in the new conditions.
While I'm sure there's concern over linear rises (whatever the nature of the line), I think there's more concern over "tipping point" events and the impacts they may have - beyond just changing the slope of the line.
Some examples of possible/expected events are temperatures rising enough to free trapped methane (under permafrost, but also locked up in methane clathrates), ice-free summers in the Arctic ocean (dark water warms in the sun where ice reflects it) and influxes of cold fresh water from ice melt interfering with ocean currents that do a lot of distribution of heat around the world (thermohaline circulation). None of these are things that are going to happen overnight, but the impacts of them aren't all well understood and there's a lot of concern that we may be past the point of preventing them.
The MS folks may be interested in accepting bitcoin, but it's quite possible that their financial folks have no tolerance for the potential for issues - at least not until the current brouhaha is sorted out. After all, declining to accept bitcoin costs might cost them a very few customers but possibly not even that.
Also, as someone else noted the delays that are now more common in bitcoin payments are a bad match for software or license key downloads - it's almost like purchasing a software download by mailing a check. Heck, quoting one article on bitcoinschannel.com: "the 0.001 BTC fee â€" worth US$0.43 at the time of writing â€" is no longer sufficient to get guaranteed confirmations from the next few blocks on the Bitcoin network." I'll note that a processing fee of US$0.43 or higher is getting pretty close to the cost of postage for mailing a check - particularly if you have to go higher to get your transaction processed promptly.
I've mostly never bothered going beyond just stuffing things in folders, sometimes by date sometimes by subject.
That's because while I've tried various options in the past (including DigiKam when I was keeping a Linux box running all the time at home), what I'd really like is something that can do the equivalent of ID3 tagging within my picture files. I'd like to be able to set all this assorted metadata about subjects, locations, etc. and have it travel with the picture. Having it in an index file in the storage directory does me no good when I pull stuff over to a Windows box, or perhaps to a phone, or push it to Dropbox for simple sharing.
Having everything stored in a single database disconnected from the images is not what I want, and not what I want to invest my time in. SQLite may be a wonderful thing, but a SQLite database containing all my photo metadata does me jack bit of good if I'm not at a desktop system where all that crap is stored.
And cloud. No, I do not in fact wish to store all of my photos in some online nirvana where each can float around on its own little cloud of electrons meditating about the Buddha and hoping to be a single-pixel gif on the next turn of the wheel. I'm not opposed to online storage (particularly for backups) and I know that we're no longer in the age of watching JPGs slowly fill the screen as they download at 48.8 and render on a 386 - instead we're in the age of shitty underperforming peering connections as network carriers and content providers fight over who's going to pay how much for what so that I can get my picture and edit it using tools written in what - Javascript? Adobe Flash?
Give me something that saves structured metadata within the files themselves in a portable way (no supplemental files, no resource forks, no alternate data streams, nothing that requires concepts that would be difficult to relate to my dear dead grandmother even with broad analogies). If local apps want to load and cache compilations of that data for speed of access, that's fine and dandy as long as the file is the master.
I have an Insider build of Windows 10 on a Lumia that I'm not using as a daily driver, and it feels like it'll update overnight, then ask me in the morning how stable this build is. I don't know, I've probably had less than 15 minutes of "on" time on the phone since the last update! Further, 99% of the crashes I see on the phone are because the primary app I use (PocketCasts for podcasting) was released, updated once, and has a variety of significant bugs.
Windows Phone itself? Has been fine, I actually like it, but was a little too locked-down for my use and is of course lacking in apps.
I'm not directly involved with medical product design or certification, but while this looks fascinating I think they're going to have a difficult time with selling it, at least in the USA and I suspect in many other countries as well. That's because they're going to have a very hard time getting required certifications / FDA approval, and it'd be really hard to try to argue that this isn't a medical device.
I'll give a couple of related examples: DICOM viewing software, which has a wide variety of open source and free low-end versions of commercial software, most or all of which are careful to note that they are "Not For Clinical Use" because they haven't been through a certification process. You can get them an use them (for example for reviewing your own medical imaging data), but physician's offices that actually use them for clinical purposes are running significant risks not so much of being sued but of having insurance complications on the off chance that they do get sued (or if the company somehow found out about it).
The other example I'll offer is Cefaly, a device for treating migraines with low-level electrical stimulation. They were available for quite some time (including over the counter I believe) in Canada and Europe, but it took a couple of years before the FDA approved their marketing and sale in the USA (http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm388765.htm). The version approved for the US market was also simplified from the international version, having only a single level rather than the 3 modes found on international models. Cefaly was also reviewed through "the de novo premarket review pathway, a regulatory pathway for generally low- to moderate-risk medical devices that are not substantially equivalent to an already legally marketed device." That's not something that will be available for mobilECG which will likely get a variety of industry pushback noting that it's substantially similar to existing ECG and Holter devices.
So overall this looks like a great way to improve cardiac care in second- and third-world hospitals lacking access to or priced out of purchasing equipment, but I think their market is a lot smaller than their video implies.
The risk from this could actually turn out to be really high - perhaps not to any individual system, but to an office environment. TFA includes "100 meters" and "a $15 USB dongle and 15 lines of Python code" which I could believe.
The issue is that if this can be a broadcast attack, it doesn't need to be successful any more than hacking an ad network needs 100% infection rates - if I can drive up outside a multi-story office building with a cheap adapter at the end of a USB extension cable (and perhaps an appropriate dish) and broadcast "Win-R http://attacksite.site/<Enter>", how many of the PCs in window offices will load that site which loads various exploits based on detection of the browser? This is even better than spearphishing because I don't have to worry about getting through email filters, and if I manage it right I know what company/companies I targeted at what time along with my trojan access to one or more computers within those offices.
Remember, this is injection of events, not 2-way communication. There's no handshaking or anything else.
I'm going to be keeping track of this and probably pushing some customers to eliminate or at least replace some cordless equipment - that was an agenda item before, but this can make it a high-priority agenda item.
One of the significant notes is that it seems the Seagate 4TB drives are doing much better than some earlier versions, and that WD is no longer doing so well.
Another thing that gets brought up every time one of these is released is "Why are they still using Seagate drives if they're so bad?" and the answer is simple: it remains a balancing act between cost and reliability. Backblaze has the redundancy and processes in place to not worry about single-drive failures, so FOR THEIR USAGE the lower drive cost is more important. If you're on a smaller setup where you have everything on just a few drives with inadequate redundancy, a few dollars extra for better reliability is worth the cost.
When you really get down to it Backblaze is looking at cost per gigabyte per day, and if ($LESS_RELIABLE_DRIVE_COST + $DRIVE_REPLACEMENT_COST) is lower than ($MORE_RELIABLE_DRIVE_COST) then they're going with the cheaper option.
This is at least the third variation of this I've heard of - there's the Kickstarted solar roadways thing mentioned here, there's this one, and there was an earlier one that proposed larger drop-in units that were basically pre-fabricated road surface blocks with a clear (enough) top, internal electronics (including lighting) and connections out either off the road or possibly through adjacent units for power delivery.
The various arguments when those were initially proposed included that road surfaces and significant chunks of parking lots (the aisles, not the parking spaces themselves) are empty 90+% of the time (true), it's surfaces that are already not natural so there are no objections of "you're covering that beautiful field with solar panels," and by using pre-fabricated units you might be able to actually put in road surface at a comparable cost in labor.
I know my initial reaction at that time was that the concept wasn't terrible - it addressed real problems. The technology might not have been there, and still might not be there, but for some carefully chosen situations they might be a viable option. The biggest obstacle that I could see is that something like that would likely need some pretty tight tolerances in the installed environment, and "road bed" and tight tolerances don't always go together so well (see "alligator cracking").
Also, regarding the criticisms that it would cost far too much to cover all the roads in the USA, just how much electricity are you expecting to consume? I feel sure that on average houses with solar have less solar panel surface area than they have driveway area and a lot of them are (hoping to) produce more power than they need for their house. Covering all roads wouldn't be necessary, most likely even covering all suitable roads wouldn't be necessary.
And regarding France doing a large experiment with this, is it a 1000km stretch or is it multiple locations in differing road conditions, up to a total of 1000km of test plots?
The two sets of changes are a gradual drop in per-KwH from 11 cents to 2.6 cents along with an increase in the charge for connecting to the grid, going from $12.75/month to $38.51/month.
If either one of those wasn't changing or was changing less then it might be feasible to at least break even; I suspect that the combination is actually designed to ensure that it costs more to feed power to the grid than you can possibly get back financially unless you have a huge (and thus expensive) solar array.
The biggest question now for me would be whether that $38.51/month charge applies even if you're set up to never feed energy back to the grid - if so, then this was absolutely set up to screw anyone with solar. If you can have solar for your own use (e.g. to cover your own AC/heating during the day) and just use the grid as backup, then it may still be feasible - particularly if cost-effective energy storage options become available. Depending on how things were set up, those options might not even need to be very efficient - heating or cooling of thermal masses for overnight temperature control for example.
Or, if you have electricity that you'll have to pay to send to the grid then it's effectively free to use it on other things. How much do Bitcoin mining rigs cost? Or incandescent-lit signs that say "F*ck The PUC"?
Many (most?) antivirus packages check for program updates along with definition updates and will warn if there's an update available. Hardware driver updates on the other hand are the kind of thing that almost never get installed unless you know you have a problem and go looking for a solution.
And as far as going without antivirus, it's a question of which is more of a concern - the things that may target the antivirus, or the things that may target the other parts of the system (browsers, maybe Flash still, maybe old Java, maybe Office vulnerabilities, etc.).
Introducing any new software onto a system has the potential to add increased attack vectors. In the case of antivirus software exploits may be easier to get to the right place because the software by definition is looking at all the traffic coming in, but you could just as easily look for vulnerabilities in network card driver stacks for widely-used network and wireless cards.
At least with antivirus they're likely already getting updates regularly; the same can't be said for hardware drivers on a huge percentage of systems.
I use CallTrack to log my phone calls to a Google calendar, and I use SMS Backup+ to log my text messages (marked read and labeled with SMS) to GMail. Both of these make it much easier to go back and look at what I was doing/who I was talking to on any given day (e.g. using syntax like "label:sms after:2015/12/14 before:2015/12/17" in GMail).
Both of those are extremely useful if I'm going back later (e.g. during billing) to track down details of what I was doing.
I use it on a daily basis but only as a media device - it has decent battery life, and connected to WiFi I can use it to stream audio or play podcasts without drawing down my regular phone. Pocket Casts is twitchy on it, but still syncs so it's easy to hop between devices.
I don't use it as a daily driver because of some of the software restrictions that impact how I use the phone (restricted app access to SMS and call logs). Apps are a little lacking and many are well behind Android counterparts, but that's survivable.
For the most part the builds have been stable, though I've had a few hangs in one of the recent ones related to WiFi. In the early days T-Mobile's WiFi Calling on my home network would just lock the thing up hard - but it'd come back if it was disconnected from the wireless network either by changing the SSID briefly or by going for a walk around the neighborhood.
I use Xmarks (paid customer for it and LastPass, do they even have a free version?) but it definitely has its flaws and I don't get the impression that the company puts ANY resources into it beyond basic maintenance and support. I've had times where bookmarks simply disappeared (e.g. 80% of a folder of links to client sites), and there's no reasonable way to go back and track down when or why.
In my case I assume it was a sync issue between browsers on multiple systems, but since it was a folder of sites I only needed to access every few months it left me with a big window for when the loss occurred. I could have downloaded all of the bookmark sets to be able to search (or otherwise track changes) but that's a one-at-a-time process through a clunky web interface. Last time I looked there was no way to search through the old bookmark sets, nor is there any kind of automated changelog or indication of what changed - not even a count of number of bookmarks in each saved backup. Even having a count of the # of bookmarks would have helped, because I could have looked for spots where the total number declined since I'm bad about doing cleanup.
Overall I'd call Xmarks "just good enough to keep me from actually deciding to try to roll my own solution" which is really a pretty low bar since I have some idea of the development scope I'd be facing.
Reading through this, it seems like it's much more likely to be useful for targeted attacks against people who are known to be actively moving all their traffic over VPNs.
Basically if the attacker is able to host a service (via port forwarding) on the IP of the same VPN endpoint that the target is going out through, then when the target visits that service (via phishing email, malicious website linked images, etc.) the VPN service will allow the attacker to see the origin of the request.
For items where you can get the benefit of OEM pricing (e.g. for Windows) while customizing a system, it may make sense to purchase the bare-bones of what you'll want from someplace like Dell where you can customize, then add other items like graphics cards and SSDs on your own. If you don't care much about the motherboard details, power supply, case, etc. this may be the way to go.
On the other hand, you'll get an overall better system if you build from components - brand power supply, possibly a better case (though the manufacturers target easy/quick assembly and maintenance to keep labor costs down), etc. Take a look at the Logical Increments Guide at http://www.logicalincrements.com/ for reasonable recommendations at various price points.
If you know what you're looking for and can spread your purchasing over 2-3 weeks you can also get a lot of components at good discounts by watching sites like SlickDeals and possibly FatWallet for sales - SlickDeals has a lot of component sale announcements in the forums, not sure about other sites.
It's not that he hasn't done anything, it's that when he was convicted he was a minor which meant he got probation.
Assuming that the Finnish age of majority is 18, he'll be charged and prosecuted as an adult for any crimes he's engaged in at this point. That may make a difference or may not.
I've seen some commentary that indicated bug problems, so hopefully this is temporary.
The reason it should be temporary is that the upgrade process seems to take AT LEAST as long as the original upgrade install from Windows 7 did, and since the upgrade leaves behind a windows.old directory so you can roll it back I'm not sure how that interacts with an initial upgrade from Windows 7/8/8.1.
I have a test laptop set up with Win10 and triggered the upgrade/update through Windows Update. The entire process took longer than I expected - possibly almost as long as the original Win10 install. The system can be used during the initial stages (download and some file updates) but then it reboots and you're at the black screen with a big white progress circle for quite a while.
I was working on other things, but it feels to me like it probably took more than an hour to complete, though I think it was likely less than 2.
It might be worth considering the Gigabyte BRIX units - there's quite a range, but most of them support dual output (HDMI+VGA or HDMI+MiniDisplayPort). There's one that lists nVidia graphics and triple displays but that might not be worth it; you might also be able to drive dual HDMI with active splitting of the DisplayPort but again, that might not be worth it.
Processors are all over the map from Celeron up to i7.
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Regarding the Dash, they are/were devices from Sony running a licensed and tweaked version of the Chumby software, but communicating only with Sony servers.
Regarding the current status of Chumby, the company folded several years ago, though the servers were kept up for somewhat longer by investors in hopes of finding a market. Once that fell through, one of the Chumby employees purchased the bulk of what was left for what I suspect was a nominal amount, put up a server to provide basic clock capabilities while he got things straightened out, then left that basic service up and running and now has subscriptions available for people who want (many of) the previous capabilities of the devices. If you have an old Chumby you should be able to use it as a clock.
Regarding the Chumby itself, it was an Internet-connected tiny-board computer running something Linux based with a touchscreen running applets built in a stripped-down version of Flash. Without an Internet connection, they're not quite bricks but close (there is an offline/serverless setup you can do to run them from a USB stick). The appealing thing about them isn't and wasn't the hardware (basic ARM stuff from before the iPhone existed). The appeal of the Chumby even now is that (as others have noted) it's a clock with some computer features. The Chumby has streaming audio from multiple sources (predefined or manually-entered URLs), an FM tuner, hardware volume knob, snooze button, USB port for a stick with MP3s, etc. along with WiFi and the ability to connect to it via SSH.
These days you can get better software capabilities with a stand and an old Android phone plus a few apps, but even then you're probably going to spend quite a bit more time fiddling with that setup than you will by just plugging in a Chumby, entering a WiFi key, and maybe setting a schedule for switching to/from night mode. And you still won't have a snooze button.
Perhaps "inflection point" where the slope of a line changes direction rapidly would be more accurate, but tipping point is more widely comprehended in conversation. In any case, I'm not necessarily talking about a permanent change when we talk about massive time scales, I have no idea what the environment of the planet is going to look like after millions of years of evolution particularly by short-lived organisms. In fact, I'm also not talking about an inflection point in CO2 concentrations - I'm talking about inflection points in other things affected by CO2 (among other things).
Bill McKibben actually has an interesting take on it in Eaarth - it's not that the world will end or that humanity will die off, it's that the world will no longer have the conditions that humanity and many other plants and animals have evolved with, and we and the rest of the ecosystem may have problems adapting as fast as the changes are happening.
Your comment history is fascinating. You comment on few stories, but on the ones you do comment on you're *everywhere* with "there's no proof of climate change causes and we can't do anything about it anyway" and "gun grabbers" and straw man arguments.
I saw a few places where you seem to take an approach of "we can't fully fix this, so let's not even try to do anything" which seems to me like a rather defeatist attitude.
Anyway, regarding tipping points and whether they'd have happened in the past, it's entirely possible that they did happen and that over time things worked their way back down. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to mitigate the impacts of those, because the interim time period may REALLY SUCK in a "be glad the wars will kill you or your children before starvation" kind of way that lasts for thousands of years while natural selection selects for algae and plankton that thrive in the new conditions.
While I'm sure there's concern over linear rises (whatever the nature of the line), I think there's more concern over "tipping point" events and the impacts they may have - beyond just changing the slope of the line.
Some examples of possible/expected events are temperatures rising enough to free trapped methane (under permafrost, but also locked up in methane clathrates), ice-free summers in the Arctic ocean (dark water warms in the sun where ice reflects it) and influxes of cold fresh water from ice melt interfering with ocean currents that do a lot of distribution of heat around the world (thermohaline circulation). None of these are things that are going to happen overnight, but the impacts of them aren't all well understood and there's a lot of concern that we may be past the point of preventing them.
The MS folks may be interested in accepting bitcoin, but it's quite possible that their financial folks have no tolerance for the potential for issues - at least not until the current brouhaha is sorted out. After all, declining to accept bitcoin costs might cost them a very few customers but possibly not even that.
Also, as someone else noted the delays that are now more common in bitcoin payments are a bad match for software or license key downloads - it's almost like purchasing a software download by mailing a check. Heck, quoting one article on bitcoinschannel.com: "the 0.001 BTC fee â€" worth US$0.43 at the time of writing â€" is no longer sufficient to get guaranteed confirmations from the next few blocks on the Bitcoin network." I'll note that a processing fee of US$0.43 or higher is getting pretty close to the cost of postage for mailing a check - particularly if you have to go higher to get your transaction processed promptly.
I've mostly never bothered going beyond just stuffing things in folders, sometimes by date sometimes by subject.
That's because while I've tried various options in the past (including DigiKam when I was keeping a Linux box running all the time at home), what I'd really like is something that can do the equivalent of ID3 tagging within my picture files. I'd like to be able to set all this assorted metadata about subjects, locations, etc. and have it travel with the picture. Having it in an index file in the storage directory does me no good when I pull stuff over to a Windows box, or perhaps to a phone, or push it to Dropbox for simple sharing.
Having everything stored in a single database disconnected from the images is not what I want, and not what I want to invest my time in. SQLite may be a wonderful thing, but a SQLite database containing all my photo metadata does me jack bit of good if I'm not at a desktop system where all that crap is stored.
And cloud. No, I do not in fact wish to store all of my photos in some online nirvana where each can float around on its own little cloud of electrons meditating about the Buddha and hoping to be a single-pixel gif on the next turn of the wheel. I'm not opposed to online storage (particularly for backups) and I know that we're no longer in the age of watching JPGs slowly fill the screen as they download at 48.8 and render on a 386 - instead we're in the age of shitty underperforming peering connections as network carriers and content providers fight over who's going to pay how much for what so that I can get my picture and edit it using tools written in what - Javascript? Adobe Flash?
Give me something that saves structured metadata within the files themselves in a portable way (no supplemental files, no resource forks, no alternate data streams, nothing that requires concepts that would be difficult to relate to my dear dead grandmother even with broad analogies). If local apps want to load and cache compilations of that data for speed of access, that's fine and dandy as long as the file is the master.
And while you're at it, get off my damn lawn.
I have an Insider build of Windows 10 on a Lumia that I'm not using as a daily driver, and it feels like it'll update overnight, then ask me in the morning how stable this build is. I don't know, I've probably had less than 15 minutes of "on" time on the phone since the last update! Further, 99% of the crashes I see on the phone are because the primary app I use (PocketCasts for podcasting) was released, updated once, and has a variety of significant bugs.
Windows Phone itself? Has been fine, I actually like it, but was a little too locked-down for my use and is of course lacking in apps.
I'm not directly involved with medical product design or certification, but while this looks fascinating I think they're going to have a difficult time with selling it, at least in the USA and I suspect in many other countries as well. That's because they're going to have a very hard time getting required certifications / FDA approval, and it'd be really hard to try to argue that this isn't a medical device.
I'll give a couple of related examples: DICOM viewing software, which has a wide variety of open source and free low-end versions of commercial software, most or all of which are careful to note that they are "Not For Clinical Use" because they haven't been through a certification process. You can get them an use them (for example for reviewing your own medical imaging data), but physician's offices that actually use them for clinical purposes are running significant risks not so much of being sued but of having insurance complications on the off chance that they do get sued (or if the company somehow found out about it).
The other example I'll offer is Cefaly, a device for treating migraines with low-level electrical stimulation. They were available for quite some time (including over the counter I believe) in Canada and Europe, but it took a couple of years before the FDA approved their marketing and sale in the USA (http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm388765.htm). The version approved for the US market was also simplified from the international version, having only a single level rather than the 3 modes found on international models. Cefaly was also reviewed through "the de novo premarket review pathway, a regulatory pathway for generally low- to moderate-risk medical devices that are not substantially equivalent to an already legally marketed device." That's not something that will be available for mobilECG which will likely get a variety of industry pushback noting that it's substantially similar to existing ECG and Holter devices.
So overall this looks like a great way to improve cardiac care in second- and third-world hospitals lacking access to or priced out of purchasing equipment, but I think their market is a lot smaller than their video implies.
The risk from this could actually turn out to be really high - perhaps not to any individual system, but to an office environment. TFA includes "100 meters" and "a $15 USB dongle and 15 lines of Python code" which I could believe.
The issue is that if this can be a broadcast attack, it doesn't need to be successful any more than hacking an ad network needs 100% infection rates - if I can drive up outside a multi-story office building with a cheap adapter at the end of a USB extension cable (and perhaps an appropriate dish) and broadcast "Win-R http://attacksite.site/<Enter>", how many of the PCs in window offices will load that site which loads various exploits based on detection of the browser? This is even better than spearphishing because I don't have to worry about getting through email filters, and if I manage it right I know what company/companies I targeted at what time along with my trojan access to one or more computers within those offices.
Remember, this is injection of events, not 2-way communication. There's no handshaking or anything else.
I'm going to be keeping track of this and probably pushing some customers to eliminate or at least replace some cordless equipment - that was an agenda item before, but this can make it a high-priority agenda item.
One of the significant notes is that it seems the Seagate 4TB drives are doing much better than some earlier versions, and that WD is no longer doing so well.
Another thing that gets brought up every time one of these is released is "Why are they still using Seagate drives if they're so bad?" and the answer is simple: it remains a balancing act between cost and reliability. Backblaze has the redundancy and processes in place to not worry about single-drive failures, so FOR THEIR USAGE the lower drive cost is more important. If you're on a smaller setup where you have everything on just a few drives with inadequate redundancy, a few dollars extra for better reliability is worth the cost.
When you really get down to it Backblaze is looking at cost per gigabyte per day, and if ($LESS_RELIABLE_DRIVE_COST + $DRIVE_REPLACEMENT_COST) is lower than ($MORE_RELIABLE_DRIVE_COST) then they're going with the cheaper option.
So how does the site look on Opera Mini?
This is at least the third variation of this I've heard of - there's the Kickstarted solar roadways thing mentioned here, there's this one, and there was an earlier one that proposed larger drop-in units that were basically pre-fabricated road surface blocks with a clear (enough) top, internal electronics (including lighting) and connections out either off the road or possibly through adjacent units for power delivery.
The various arguments when those were initially proposed included that road surfaces and significant chunks of parking lots (the aisles, not the parking spaces themselves) are empty 90+% of the time (true), it's surfaces that are already not natural so there are no objections of "you're covering that beautiful field with solar panels," and by using pre-fabricated units you might be able to actually put in road surface at a comparable cost in labor.
I know my initial reaction at that time was that the concept wasn't terrible - it addressed real problems. The technology might not have been there, and still might not be there, but for some carefully chosen situations they might be a viable option. The biggest obstacle that I could see is that something like that would likely need some pretty tight tolerances in the installed environment, and "road bed" and tight tolerances don't always go together so well (see "alligator cracking").
Also, regarding the criticisms that it would cost far too much to cover all the roads in the USA, just how much electricity are you expecting to consume? I feel sure that on average houses with solar have less solar panel surface area than they have driveway area and a lot of them are (hoping to) produce more power than they need for their house. Covering all roads wouldn't be necessary, most likely even covering all suitable roads wouldn't be necessary.
And regarding France doing a large experiment with this, is it a 1000km stretch or is it multiple locations in differing road conditions, up to a total of 1000km of test plots?
The two sets of changes are a gradual drop in per-KwH from 11 cents to 2.6 cents along with an increase in the charge for connecting to the grid, going from $12.75/month to $38.51/month.
If either one of those wasn't changing or was changing less then it might be feasible to at least break even; I suspect that the combination is actually designed to ensure that it costs more to feed power to the grid than you can possibly get back financially unless you have a huge (and thus expensive) solar array.
The biggest question now for me would be whether that $38.51/month charge applies even if you're set up to never feed energy back to the grid - if so, then this was absolutely set up to screw anyone with solar. If you can have solar for your own use (e.g. to cover your own AC/heating during the day) and just use the grid as backup, then it may still be feasible - particularly if cost-effective energy storage options become available. Depending on how things were set up, those options might not even need to be very efficient - heating or cooling of thermal masses for overnight temperature control for example.
Or, if you have electricity that you'll have to pay to send to the grid then it's effectively free to use it on other things. How much do Bitcoin mining rigs cost? Or incandescent-lit signs that say "F*ck The PUC"?
Many (most?) antivirus packages check for program updates along with definition updates and will warn if there's an update available. Hardware driver updates on the other hand are the kind of thing that almost never get installed unless you know you have a problem and go looking for a solution.
And as far as going without antivirus, it's a question of which is more of a concern - the things that may target the antivirus, or the things that may target the other parts of the system (browsers, maybe Flash still, maybe old Java, maybe Office vulnerabilities, etc.).
Introducing any new software onto a system has the potential to add increased attack vectors. In the case of antivirus software exploits may be easier to get to the right place because the software by definition is looking at all the traffic coming in, but you could just as easily look for vulnerabilities in network card driver stacks for widely-used network and wireless cards.
At least with antivirus they're likely already getting updates regularly; the same can't be said for hardware drivers on a huge percentage of systems.
I use CallTrack to log my phone calls to a Google calendar, and I use SMS Backup+ to log my text messages (marked read and labeled with SMS) to GMail. Both of these make it much easier to go back and look at what I was doing/who I was talking to on any given day (e.g. using syntax like "label:sms after:2015/12/14 before:2015/12/17" in GMail).
Both of those are extremely useful if I'm going back later (e.g. during billing) to track down details of what I was doing.
I use it on a daily basis but only as a media device - it has decent battery life, and connected to WiFi I can use it to stream audio or play podcasts without drawing down my regular phone. Pocket Casts is twitchy on it, but still syncs so it's easy to hop between devices.
I don't use it as a daily driver because of some of the software restrictions that impact how I use the phone (restricted app access to SMS and call logs). Apps are a little lacking and many are well behind Android counterparts, but that's survivable.
For the most part the builds have been stable, though I've had a few hangs in one of the recent ones related to WiFi. In the early days T-Mobile's WiFi Calling on my home network would just lock the thing up hard - but it'd come back if it was disconnected from the wireless network either by changing the SSID briefly or by going for a walk around the neighborhood.
Good god man, do you yell at people about horseless carriages as well?
I use Xmarks (paid customer for it and LastPass, do they even have a free version?) but it definitely has its flaws and I don't get the impression that the company puts ANY resources into it beyond basic maintenance and support. I've had times where bookmarks simply disappeared (e.g. 80% of a folder of links to client sites), and there's no reasonable way to go back and track down when or why.
In my case I assume it was a sync issue between browsers on multiple systems, but since it was a folder of sites I only needed to access every few months it left me with a big window for when the loss occurred. I could have downloaded all of the bookmark sets to be able to search (or otherwise track changes) but that's a one-at-a-time process through a clunky web interface. Last time I looked there was no way to search through the old bookmark sets, nor is there any kind of automated changelog or indication of what changed - not even a count of number of bookmarks in each saved backup. Even having a count of the # of bookmarks would have helped, because I could have looked for spots where the total number declined since I'm bad about doing cleanup.
Overall I'd call Xmarks "just good enough to keep me from actually deciding to try to roll my own solution" which is really a pretty low bar since I have some idea of the development scope I'd be facing.
Reading through this, it seems like it's much more likely to be useful for targeted attacks against people who are known to be actively moving all their traffic over VPNs.
Basically if the attacker is able to host a service (via port forwarding) on the IP of the same VPN endpoint that the target is going out through, then when the target visits that service (via phishing email, malicious website linked images, etc.) the VPN service will allow the attacker to see the origin of the request.
For items where you can get the benefit of OEM pricing (e.g. for Windows) while customizing a system, it may make sense to purchase the bare-bones of what you'll want from someplace like Dell where you can customize, then add other items like graphics cards and SSDs on your own. If you don't care much about the motherboard details, power supply, case, etc. this may be the way to go.
On the other hand, you'll get an overall better system if you build from components - brand power supply, possibly a better case (though the manufacturers target easy/quick assembly and maintenance to keep labor costs down), etc. Take a look at the Logical Increments Guide at http://www.logicalincrements.com/ for reasonable recommendations at various price points.
If you know what you're looking for and can spread your purchasing over 2-3 weeks you can also get a lot of components at good discounts by watching sites like SlickDeals and possibly FatWallet for sales - SlickDeals has a lot of component sale announcements in the forums, not sure about other sites.
It's not that he hasn't done anything, it's that when he was convicted he was a minor which meant he got probation.
Assuming that the Finnish age of majority is 18, he'll be charged and prosecuted as an adult for any crimes he's engaged in at this point. That may make a difference or may not.
I've seen some commentary that indicated bug problems, so hopefully this is temporary.
The reason it should be temporary is that the upgrade process seems to take AT LEAST as long as the original upgrade install from Windows 7 did, and since the upgrade leaves behind a windows.old directory so you can roll it back I'm not sure how that interacts with an initial upgrade from Windows 7/8/8.1.
I have a test laptop set up with Win10 and triggered the upgrade/update through Windows Update. The entire process took longer than I expected - possibly almost as long as the original Win10 install. The system can be used during the initial stages (download and some file updates) but then it reboots and you're at the black screen with a big white progress circle for quite a while.
I was working on other things, but it feels to me like it probably took more than an hour to complete, though I think it was likely less than 2.
It might be worth considering the Gigabyte BRIX units - there's quite a range, but most of them support dual output (HDMI+VGA or HDMI+MiniDisplayPort). There's one that lists nVidia graphics and triple displays but that might not be worth it; you might also be able to drive dual HDMI with active splitting of the DisplayPort but again, that might not be worth it.
Processors are all over the map from Celeron up to i7.