The same thing I do with idiotic companies that want me to sign a ridiculous NDA with no time limit every time I step into their place. I simply ignore them until they break.
So I didn't have to send a massive link to someone to click on. Especially for messaging services where I'm trying to convey something and use links, but the link fills up more than the message itself, like the URL for this damn story.
The more they keep censoring, the more I don't care about them or their services. Google is not the first service to pull this crap and won't be the last, but it's amazing how Google doesn't learn from the past and realize the companies that went full censorship don't even exist anymore.
It's not just Facebook. Google has been doing this for quite a while. The first time you turn on your phone, it wants to sync your contacts to google. I found this very annoying. Your contacts will get synced so fast, before you have a chance to do anything, it's already there.
Then remember Google plus? The damn thing started suggesting for me contacts from reading my emails, contacts and phone history. It even picked out phone numbers that were not on my contacts list as suggested people I add from Google plus.
And it's not like Apple isn't doing the same thing. Open FaceTime. It just magically knows these phone numbers of users have FaceTime?
If lineageOS (Not lineageos fault) wasn't purposely being gimped by hardware manufactures, I would be using it more often.
This isn't just happening in the IT world, this is happening in every profession. I can tell you with industrial machine automation, there are no longer good operators nor maintenance people. Multimillion dollar machines grinding to a halt because no one knows how to fix it or operate it. It has gotten to the point where companies are buying equipment and the manufacturers of the equipment are now running and operating these machines, because the owners are completely incompetent, in management and hiring practices.
It's quite a sad state of affairs. It's also affecting the quality of people you can hire off the streets who require major retraining now. It's rare I find a company that even has a plant engineer. I have a plant engineer and people get shocked when they meet him.
Maintenance teams? Plant Engineers? Good competent operators that can also fix the machine? IT guys to deal with networking and communication issues? A lot of these things don't exist anymore and a lot of companies fail to realize how many of these positions actually blended in with each other before, which made things actually work.
Nowadays, they expect the minimum wage operator to do everything and require the knowledge of a PHD in multiple fields. Of course that never works, I see their production numbers, it's terrible.
"Google are not innocent in this either, their APIs intentionally hand over private info on a single click and hide what's going on. They intentionally downplay "full network access' as if its nothing. They intentionally pop up misleading "Cancel / Agree" dialogs as if to use a service you have to agree to the loss of privacy."
This attitude seems to be endemic throughout the whole industry now. Just bought some HP workstations that I'm going to throw linux on (Slick small devices with dual screen support), but just turning on the computer for Windows 10: Microsoft wants to collect data on you and you have to agree to it, and then HP wants to collect data on you and you have to agree to it. This anonymous usage data isn't just limited to their computers, it's on their damn printers too, which annoys the crap out of me. When did I agree that my printer is going to be a trojan horse into my corporate network? I no longer trust any devices anymore.
I had to create new firewall rules to block all traffic to the internet from these devices. Luckily, this is getting easier to do with new switches being able to block stuff by port and easy to create VLANS.
I'll stick to the Pi even if it is more expensive than some other boards with more features. Why? The community. I've already been burned by Android devices. All those ones that were basically flooding the market. They were cheap, pretty powerful devices. But why bother? When after a year, all the support is gone. Meanwhile, I still have the first of the first Pi's still running with little to no issues.
But it has become so much more than that now than just for students to toy around with. They're all over the place and being used for a lot of things, including even critical stuff lately. They've proven to be quite reliable and cheap to replace if necessary. Building redundant Raspberry Pi systems is a snap to do, since they're so cheap and with linux, easy to do. The size itself is a big plus. Hell, I've seen a guy build an entire machine out of a Raspberry Pi, no PLC. And quite a few big name industrial suppliers are now building Raspberry Pi modules.
Depends what you're using it for. People will upgrade them regardless, the price isn't an issue for many. It's just a matter if you really want to bother updating it if it runs fine for what it's doing?
I'm still using the original Raspberry PI for various things. It works fine. Mind you, this is in an industrial setting too. I've been using them as HMI screens, information screens and a lot of other little things.
They've been easy to manage and update. I haven't had any of them go out either, if they do, no problem as I just plug in a brand new beefier raspberry pi. The only thing I dislike about them is the power connector, but I've been able to resolve that with a soldering iron to make a better connector for industrial use. The USB power supply connector is not very good. However, I've been seeing some devices that offer protection over the GPIO for sale which peaked my interest as well. Phoenix Contact has also been making some nice little devices with the Raspberry Pi that mounts on a DIN rail, which also peaked my interest.
But for the most part, I've been quite happy with them and their resilience. I even have one outside that has survived over 100 degrees Fahrenheit ambient (37-38C for you metric people).
This article just stinks. Blackberry? Those went out of style long ago. This is just some sort of fear mongering article trying to make the FBI sound like they're in the right about encryption. There are plenty of other phone manufacturers offering completely secure phones with recent hardware and software. And of course the guy just happens to conveniently admit to selling mostly to the cartel. Next he'll confess to selling to ISIS too and we'll have that "Ah ha, see! This is why we have to break encryption!" moment.
And to assume that the cartel in Mexico doesn't have the technical know how and skill to do this themselves, that they require an American company in the US to do this for them? Are we to assume the cartel is that dumb? Disabling the cameras, microphones, gps and installing encryption software on your phone is not difficult to do. The fact that they setup their own facilities to pack their product, we are to assume they can't start their own small facility to secure their phones for their own people?
Meanwhile, the cartels are setting up number stations all over the place and using encrypted communication for a while, without the need of some American company to do it for them. They've had the technical know how, the sophistication, the engineers for a long time. Something doesn't add up in this article.
We should arrest the developers of pgp and ssh too. Then force them to weaken all the encryption and watch the fireworks when the Chinese hack every computer in the US. Great times ahead!
Unfortunately, the US has a bunch of idiot business owners and managers who skirt regulators all the time, without considering the consequences of their actions. Some costing lives, some costing major litigation. This isn't saying these other countries don't either, but we should be better, considering the rising trend of this.
This is for places with no well established IT department. Seeing them move to cloud services is really no surprise. There is huge demand for this. And a lot of smaller businesses are going to be encouraged to use cloud services since it does reduce their costs dramatically, because well, no IT person.
Do they care about who keeps their 'identity'? Most likely not. They don't even know how these computers work or what they do. All they know is they need email.
And if this doesn't shock you, you should see how many companies are moving to third party accounting systems like SAP Ariba. I have very large customers on it and demanded I use it. It annoys the crap out of me and everyone else because their interface is a farce. Invoicing people through it is a pain in the ass, especially when I have to pay for it. I've had more work order stops because of it, since these companies no longer handle their own accounting, thus discrepancies or other issues do not get resolved for DAYS.
It's getting harder to get a phone that doesn't depend on Google services or their own ridiculous framework like Samsung and LG. Just look at the ridiculous process of trying to root your LG phone, it's absurd! They're making it incredibly difficult to unchain yourself.
You're not the only person dropping Google's services. I've already dropped them all and want nothing to do with Google. They've turned into a pervasive and invasive company and they don't even try to hide it anymore.
Few years back, I was excited about the Android touch screens and how neat that you could use them for HMI kiosk type displays. This was when everyone thought desktop Android was for some reason the future and all those all-in-one Android PC's were all over the place. Then a lot of manufacturers started dropping Android. It started getting difficult to get large (20+ inch) Android powered touch screens (I was using them as information screens all over my plant and interactive security camera feeds). Then support started dropping from these devices (Many of them stuck on Android kitkat). The prices skyrocketed from $300 to $1500. Developing for these old versions of Android became a hassle, since everything freaking changed how Android did things in a heartbeat, especially when you wanted to add more fancy things. Old development information just ended up getting google washed, so trying to find answers why X doesn't work for old versions just became difficult. There is nothing wrong with the hardware, it's still pretty nice, but trying to get a new version of android resorts to hoping someone made a custom firmware and maintains it.
I just ended up giving up on Android completely (Had no time to deal with the BS), went with Raspberry Pi's and can get nice inexpensive very large touch screens that work for them. Maintaining them is a snap compared to the junk Android is now. All the Android screens, nice as they were, especially the HP's slate, all into the dump. Meanwhile, my Raspberry Pi's still chugging along for 3 years plus, zero issues. When I want to add more fancy things, no problem! All the libraries work, have the latest updates, works great! Rather spend my money donating to the Raspberry Pi team and linux development. Upgrade? No problem, $30 and I got a more beefy Raspberry Pi! I'm pretty sure I can keep my personally made software going until I die with very little effort.
The vast majority of phones are now turning into what modern day printers are. All of them are crap. What's a good printer? There isn't one, they're all bad. You can either choose a bad one or a very bad one. Those are your choices. Oh, but I can buy that more expensive one, it will be better! No, it's bad too! Then of course they discontinue the product, change the design, but functionality, power and speed isn't any different than the model from 2 years ago.
By the way, I would pay good money for devices that are supported for at least 5 years, including printers.
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The same thing I do with idiotic companies that want me to sign a ridiculous NDA with no time limit every time I step into their place. I simply ignore them until they break.
So I didn't have to send a massive link to someone to click on. Especially for messaging services where I'm trying to convey something and use links, but the link fills up more than the message itself, like the URL for this damn story.
Was?! It still is!
The more they keep censoring, the more I don't care about them or their services. Google is not the first service to pull this crap and won't be the last, but it's amazing how Google doesn't learn from the past and realize the companies that went full censorship don't even exist anymore.
It's not just Facebook. Google has been doing this for quite a while. The first time you turn on your phone, it wants to sync your contacts to google. I found this very annoying. Your contacts will get synced so fast, before you have a chance to do anything, it's already there.
Then remember Google plus? The damn thing started suggesting for me contacts from reading my emails, contacts and phone history. It even picked out phone numbers that were not on my contacts list as suggested people I add from Google plus.
And it's not like Apple isn't doing the same thing. Open FaceTime. It just magically knows these phone numbers of users have FaceTime?
If lineageOS (Not lineageos fault) wasn't purposely being gimped by hardware manufactures, I would be using it more often.
This isn't just happening in the IT world, this is happening in every profession. I can tell you with industrial machine automation, there are no longer good operators nor maintenance people. Multimillion dollar machines grinding to a halt because no one knows how to fix it or operate it. It has gotten to the point where companies are buying equipment and the manufacturers of the equipment are now running and operating these machines, because the owners are completely incompetent, in management and hiring practices.
It's quite a sad state of affairs. It's also affecting the quality of people you can hire off the streets who require major retraining now. It's rare I find a company that even has a plant engineer. I have a plant engineer and people get shocked when they meet him.
Maintenance teams? Plant Engineers? Good competent operators that can also fix the machine? IT guys to deal with networking and communication issues? A lot of these things don't exist anymore and a lot of companies fail to realize how many of these positions actually blended in with each other before, which made things actually work.
Nowadays, they expect the minimum wage operator to do everything and require the knowledge of a PHD in multiple fields. Of course that never works, I see their production numbers, it's terrible.
In defense of stack-overflow, I found it quite useful and helpful on occasion where the man pages were not.
"Google are not innocent in this either, their APIs intentionally hand over private info on a single click and hide what's going on. They intentionally downplay "full network access' as if its nothing. They intentionally pop up misleading "Cancel / Agree" dialogs as if to use a service you have to agree to the loss of privacy."
This attitude seems to be endemic throughout the whole industry now. Just bought some HP workstations that I'm going to throw linux on (Slick small devices with dual screen support), but just turning on the computer for Windows 10: Microsoft wants to collect data on you and you have to agree to it, and then HP wants to collect data on you and you have to agree to it. This anonymous usage data isn't just limited to their computers, it's on their damn printers too, which annoys the crap out of me. When did I agree that my printer is going to be a trojan horse into my corporate network? I no longer trust any devices anymore.
I had to create new firewall rules to block all traffic to the internet from these devices. Luckily, this is getting easier to do with new switches being able to block stuff by port and easy to create VLANS.
All this is doing is pushing for better crypto and security.
Just like the cloud.
I'll stick to the Pi even if it is more expensive than some other boards with more features. Why? The community. I've already been burned by Android devices. All those ones that were basically flooding the market. They were cheap, pretty powerful devices. But why bother? When after a year, all the support is gone. Meanwhile, I still have the first of the first Pi's still running with little to no issues.
But it has become so much more than that now than just for students to toy around with. They're all over the place and being used for a lot of things, including even critical stuff lately. They've proven to be quite reliable and cheap to replace if necessary. Building redundant Raspberry Pi systems is a snap to do, since they're so cheap and with linux, easy to do. The size itself is a big plus. Hell, I've seen a guy build an entire machine out of a Raspberry Pi, no PLC. And quite a few big name industrial suppliers are now building Raspberry Pi modules.
Depends what you're using it for. People will upgrade them regardless, the price isn't an issue for many. It's just a matter if you really want to bother updating it if it runs fine for what it's doing?
I'm still using the original Raspberry PI for various things. It works fine. Mind you, this is in an industrial setting too. I've been using them as HMI screens, information screens and a lot of other little things.
They've been easy to manage and update. I haven't had any of them go out either, if they do, no problem as I just plug in a brand new beefier raspberry pi. The only thing I dislike about them is the power connector, but I've been able to resolve that with a soldering iron to make a better connector for industrial use. The USB power supply connector is not very good. However, I've been seeing some devices that offer protection over the GPIO for sale which peaked my interest as well. Phoenix Contact has also been making some nice little devices with the Raspberry Pi that mounts on a DIN rail, which also peaked my interest.
But for the most part, I've been quite happy with them and their resilience. I even have one outside that has survived over 100 degrees Fahrenheit ambient (37-38C for you metric people).
Which browser is still relevant?
This article just stinks. Blackberry? Those went out of style long ago. This is just some sort of fear mongering article trying to make the FBI sound like they're in the right about encryption. There are plenty of other phone manufacturers offering completely secure phones with recent hardware and software. And of course the guy just happens to conveniently admit to selling mostly to the cartel. Next he'll confess to selling to ISIS too and we'll have that "Ah ha, see! This is why we have to break encryption!" moment.
And to assume that the cartel in Mexico doesn't have the technical know how and skill to do this themselves, that they require an American company in the US to do this for them? Are we to assume the cartel is that dumb? Disabling the cameras, microphones, gps and installing encryption software on your phone is not difficult to do. The fact that they setup their own facilities to pack their product, we are to assume they can't start their own small facility to secure their phones for their own people?
Meanwhile, the cartels are setting up number stations all over the place and using encrypted communication for a while, without the need of some American company to do it for them. They've had the technical know how, the sophistication, the engineers for a long time. Something doesn't add up in this article.
Moral of the story? Be careful what you say around people, even sarcasm can be used against you.
We should arrest the developers of pgp and ssh too. Then force them to weaken all the encryption and watch the fireworks when the Chinese hack every computer in the US. Great times ahead!
Unfortunately, the US has a bunch of idiot business owners and managers who skirt regulators all the time, without considering the consequences of their actions. Some costing lives, some costing major litigation. This isn't saying these other countries don't either, but we should be better, considering the rising trend of this.
This is for places with no well established IT department. Seeing them move to cloud services is really no surprise. There is huge demand for this. And a lot of smaller businesses are going to be encouraged to use cloud services since it does reduce their costs dramatically, because well, no IT person.
Do they care about who keeps their 'identity'? Most likely not. They don't even know how these computers work or what they do. All they know is they need email.
And if this doesn't shock you, you should see how many companies are moving to third party accounting systems like SAP Ariba. I have very large customers on it and demanded I use it. It annoys the crap out of me and everyone else because their interface is a farce. Invoicing people through it is a pain in the ass, especially when I have to pay for it. I've had more work order stops because of it, since these companies no longer handle their own accounting, thus discrepancies or other issues do not get resolved for DAYS.
It's getting harder to get a phone that doesn't depend on Google services or their own ridiculous framework like Samsung and LG. Just look at the ridiculous process of trying to root your LG phone, it's absurd! They're making it incredibly difficult to unchain yourself.
You're not the only person dropping Google's services. I've already dropped them all and want nothing to do with Google. They've turned into a pervasive and invasive company and they don't even try to hide it anymore.
Too late.
Few years back, I was excited about the Android touch screens and how neat that you could use them for HMI kiosk type displays. This was when everyone thought desktop Android was for some reason the future and all those all-in-one Android PC's were all over the place. Then a lot of manufacturers started dropping Android. It started getting difficult to get large (20+ inch) Android powered touch screens (I was using them as information screens all over my plant and interactive security camera feeds). Then support started dropping from these devices (Many of them stuck on Android kitkat). The prices skyrocketed from $300 to $1500. Developing for these old versions of Android became a hassle, since everything freaking changed how Android did things in a heartbeat, especially when you wanted to add more fancy things. Old development information just ended up getting google washed, so trying to find answers why X doesn't work for old versions just became difficult. There is nothing wrong with the hardware, it's still pretty nice, but trying to get a new version of android resorts to hoping someone made a custom firmware and maintains it.
I just ended up giving up on Android completely (Had no time to deal with the BS), went with Raspberry Pi's and can get nice inexpensive very large touch screens that work for them. Maintaining them is a snap compared to the junk Android is now. All the Android screens, nice as they were, especially the HP's slate, all into the dump. Meanwhile, my Raspberry Pi's still chugging along for 3 years plus, zero issues. When I want to add more fancy things, no problem! All the libraries work, have the latest updates, works great! Rather spend my money donating to the Raspberry Pi team and linux development. Upgrade? No problem, $30 and I got a more beefy Raspberry Pi! I'm pretty sure I can keep my personally made software going until I die with very little effort.
The vast majority of phones are now turning into what modern day printers are. All of them are crap. What's a good printer? There isn't one, they're all bad. You can either choose a bad one or a very bad one. Those are your choices. Oh, but I can buy that more expensive one, it will be better! No, it's bad too! Then of course they discontinue the product, change the design, but functionality, power and speed isn't any different than the model from 2 years ago.
By the way, I would pay good money for devices that are supported for at least 5 years, including printers.