Slashdot Mirror


User: pipedwho

pipedwho's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
677
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 677

  1. Re:Star Trek Communicators on Sci-fi Predictions, True and False (Video 1) · · Score: 1

    There's a point that everyone, yes even you, seems to miss about ST communicators as a precursor to cellphones:

    Only officers had them.

    The world where everyone carries their own communicator, all the time, was not foreseen in TOS.

    Maybe it was, and then they bypassed that phase of society by edict.

    "Hey Redshirt! Get off that communicator and help us deal with this ugly alien, or it's going to end badly for you!"

    "Oh crap, we just lost another Redshirt! Enough of this shit, from now on only officers get to bring communicators down to the planet surface."

  2. Re:iOS NFC Only Being Used for Apple Pay on Apple Locks iPhone 6/6+ NFC To Apple Pay Only · · Score: 1

    Security of the transport is not what is at issue. The security of the entire stack needs to be evaluated for a weak link further down the chain before security could be claimed to be a non-issue.

    You are right though that the API probably isn't completely ready and/or Apple want to release their apps first. Probably not a bad idea while they iron out any problems before all and sundry spew forth apps. It is much easier to deprecate an API element to fix a major security or other problem when your own implementation is all you have to worry about breaking.

  3. Re:NFC isn't used for just payment on Apple Locks iPhone 6/6+ NFC To Apple Pay Only · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The speed of NFC is a few hundred kbps and is not designed for bulk data transfer. The NFC is most likely used to setup a much faster Bluetooth or Wifi transfer in a way that guarantees that the transfer has been initiated by a device in close proximity.

    With longer range protocols (Wifi/Bluetooth/etc), you need other ways to pair the devices to make sure you're transferring your naked photos to the right endpoint.

    With NFC, what you see is what you get, but the NFC layer is only used for connection setup.

  4. Re:Too Late for Aus on Apple Locks iPhone 6/6+ NFC To Apple Pay Only · · Score: 2

    In Aus, the NFC terminals (Paypass/Tap&Go/etc) all use the same protocol, in the same way that all the Visa/Mastercard/Bankcard magstripes were written in a common industry format. American Express/Diners were outliers and originally required their own terminals, which is why they always had to fight an uphill battle to be accepted by smaller merchants. These days, the EFTPOS machines and banks have facilities for multiple card types, and the EMV standards encompass implementations for both NFC and Chip&PIN.

    The NFC in smart phones use the same RF protocols that are in place for other wireless payment cards (and can easily be updated to provide slight protocol changes if necessary). The hard part is that Apple needs to partner with the big payment providers to allow their generated 'one-time' payments to be correctly cleared in the same way any given issued credit card is cleard. Currently Visa/Mastercard/etc do this for their branded cards and are the biggest players in this sector, which is why Apple needs to work with them to avoid having to set up any of its own infrastructure (beyond it's internal payment gateway and integration with backends at Mastercard/Visa/etc).

    There is no reason once deals are struck between Apple and Visa/Mastercard in Australia, that any merchant here would require a change to their installed Paypass/Tap&Go systems. There may be some technical integration problems between Apple and Visa/Mastercard that need to be sorted out first, but that work has most likely already been done (or mostly done), otherwise Apple wouldn't have announced it with such fanfare.

    Like everything, for some reason these deals take longer to happen in Aus when the technical and business solutions may have already played out elsewhere in the world. Take iTunes for instance; we had to wait much longer than the US, because it took longer to get the distribution agreements worked out thanks to our local incumbents with pre-existing contracts being reluctant to renegotiate and move with the times.

  5. Noisy? on Architecture That Changes Shape In Response To Heat · · Score: 1

    And I thought the constant hum of air conditioning units was annoying. I'd hope this wouldn't be as annoying as waiting for a leaky gutter to finally plop out the next drop of water.

  6. Re:Everything old is new again on To Really Cut Emissions, We Need Electric Buses, Not Just Electric Cars · · Score: 1

    Volume of manufacture (or lack thereof) is the primary reason for the huge 2:1 cost differential between the electric and diesel busses. That differential would come down dramatically once trolleybus volumes increased to rival that of diesel busses.

  7. Re:checks the date on Report: Microsoft To Buy Minecraft Studio For $2bn+ · · Score: 1

    I know Unix!

  8. Re:Legacy Support on Apple Announces Smartwatch, Bigger iPhones, Mobile Payments · · Score: 1

    VMWare Fusion runs OSX fine without any cleverness. Just tell Fusion you're installing OSX and when the installer asks, just enter your Apple ID and password. I haven't tried with really ancient versions of OSX, but it definitely works for OSX 10.7 and up (and OSX 10.5 Server and up). You don't even need the installation media as it downloads the OS from the net during installation.

  9. Mod parent up on Is "Scorpion" Really a Genius? · · Score: 1

    Mods, this is both +5 Insightful and Informative.

  10. Re:The man who saved Onagawa on TEPCO: Nearly All Nuclear Fuel Melted At Fukushima No. 3 Reactor · · Score: 1

    Mod parent up. Very informative.

  11. Re:Service in exchange for a free modem? on The Hidden Cost of Your New Xfinity Router · · Score: 1

    The GP post is more an indictment on the mob^w justice system that all too often seems to presume guilt before evidence beyond a reasonable doubt is required.

    It also goes both ways. You may need to login to these systems to identify yourself, but when doing so you'd sure hope your transport stream was completely protected from the owner of the router. Otherwise, you may find someone kicking down your door when you arrive back home.

  12. Re:Cat blog on Google Will Give a Search Edge To Websites That Use Encryption · · Score: 1

    This is not just about protecting login credentials. The idea is that if your cat blog is ranked highly, many people will click on it. For sites like that, a DNS or other redirection hack allows me to impersonate your site with some drive by or otherwise downloadable malware.

    TLS is about trusting the site your connecting with to actually be the site you think it is. So if your cat blog had a valid TLS certificate, then the impersonating site would need to obtain a fake certificate to avoid the client displaying an invalid certificate warning.

    It also stops middleware proxies from listening to or interfering with/re-writing the data stream before it gets to you (ie. detailed browse history collection, advertising and/or spyware insertion, etc).

  13. Re:Worse Than U Think on 35% of American Adults Have Debt 'In Collections' · · Score: 1

    When considering 'worth', you forgot to factor in the value of a constant income stream. In economic terms, a person is cash-flow positive if their income exceeds their outgoings. Even though someone may have an instantaneous snapshot of wealth that is equal to or less than zero, they may still be cash-flow positive or neutral.

    Business valuations are related to total potential revenue which may be far less than the outgoings for a start-up company. However, that company may still be valued at millions or billions of dollars if the earnings potential is non-zero, even though they are hugely negative on their balance sheet. Think Amazon back in the early days when it first started.

    This is the same for a person. If that person dies, they may have zero direct assets at the time (or may even owe more money than they have assets), but you'll quickly realise they were 'worth' a lot more than zero as all the debts and other things that were being paid for suddenly cease to covered. At that point, cash-flow takes a huge negative hit and debt is accumulating in a way that it can no longer be repaid. That debt may be in the form of dependants that now must be paid for by someone else (or by the State), unsecured loans that must now be written off by the creditors, and other general outgoings that will stop.

    Say I somehow take out an unsecured loan for a million dollars from a bank. I am now worth $1,000,000 to that bank. If I die straight away, they are out the million. As long as I'm alive and working, I can keep repaying the loan, and at 5%pa over 10 years I'll end up repaying the loan, plus an extra couple of hundred grand in interest. So if you ask the bank what I'm worth, they'll tell you I'm worth a lot more than zero, even if I took the money to Vegas and blew it all in the high-rollers lounge.

  14. Re: Flash panic on OKCupid Experiments on Users Too · · Score: 1

    I have to agree that buying something useful that you otherwise would not necessarily have bought in the first place is not a bad thing for either yourself or the economy as a whole.

  15. Re:Flash panic on OKCupid Experiments on Users Too · · Score: 1

    It encourages you to sign up for a loyalty card in the first place, otherwise you pay 'full price'. Once you have the loyalty card you start thinking about going to one of the shops that you are 'loyal' to rather than the corner shop down the street. (This may not be individually true for everyone, but on average that is how it works.)

    This sort of 'discounting' is kind of like in industries without loyalty programs where there is an RRP and a much lower 'street price'. The shops don't actually expect people to pay the RRP (with the exception of someone that is either uninformed or desperate to buy a more difficult to source item immediately). But it does allow them a lot of 'discounting' and haggle margin to make the customers feel good about what they're paying.

    Once the first few chain stores started doing this, the others followed suit. So now you have a sad state of affairs where the 'chain cartel' has a huge advantage when it comes to repeat customers. Your local corner store loses business and has to jack up their prices to pay the rent, causing even less customers to shop there. Less competition from small players. Big chain stores can get away with this because they always have one or two items that the other big chain stores don't and thus you end up signing up.

    As a loyalty card holder, the retailers have far more detailed (marketable/mineable) information about you than they otherwise would have. Now they can run the numbers to see where its safe to jack up the price without losing customers.

    With competition reduced, once a company has significant control over a market (either geographically or in a category segment), up go the prices to the maximum the market can afford.

    So you may think you're getting a discount, but the discount is simply from an artificially inflated starting price. Or in some industries funded by the fact that you are now buying more than you otherwise needed to. It is all a numbers game. The big retail giants have increased profits year over year, so at no point have they been forced to release some of that profit back to either the suppliers by paying more, or to the consumers in the form of honest price reductions.

  16. Re:Flash panic on OKCupid Experiments on Users Too · · Score: 2

    The problem with most 'commercial experimentation' is that it isn't about getting better value for the consumer, but about how to to best convince the consumer to pay more for something, or buy something, that they otherwise would not have.

    Loyalty cards are a way for a business to encourage a customer to return whether or not it is really in their best interest. Phone contracts, transaction 'fees' and 'licensing' are other ways to get people coming back for more of a beating. If you make the fine print and pricing structure too complicated to understand, while offering all sorts of shiny bling in the big print, marketers have found that they can significantly increase sales. Auto bank account debits are great in that the consumer starts to forget that they are continually paying for something, and may take a few extra months (and therefore payments) to cancel a service that they are no longer using - especially when you make it difficult to do.

    Factory rebates are another example of sneaky marketing. They make it hard to claim the rebate, in some cases always 'losing' your first application, or finding something incorrect or incomplete in their overly complicated request form. In the end they pay out less than 1 in 5 rebates because most people give up trying to claim that $100. However, when buying the product the consumer factored in the rebate and probably avoided a more suitable competitor with a better more 'expensive' product.

    All these techniques would have been arrived at by experimenting on consumers. It is simply about a business trying to get as close to the threshold of pain as possible to maximise profit. Too far and they go backwards - which is why they experiment on a small sample of their market before any large scale roll out.

  17. Re:Switchin back to a Keyboard on Lots Of People Really Want Slideout-Keyboard Phones: Where Are They? · · Score: 2

    Only twice as fast with "touch typing" vs a touch screen phone?

    I'm easily at least 10 to 20x faster with touch typing on a bluetooth external keyboard than on the touch screen of my phone.

    Anything smaller than about 2/3 size keys are too small for proper touch typing.

    That being said, I only ever use the touch keyboard on the phone for short responses and scenarios where being able to type a few words at all is better than nothing. A friend has one of those fold-out bluetooth keyboard cases for his Samsung mega phone and loves it. After folding open, the keys are just big enough for real touch typing - he flies with that thing. His phone + keyboard case is about the same size as an old Palm Pilot.

    Touch screen phone keyboards are a major compromise, but do provide a keyboard that takes up no space at all and is still quite useable when you're on the go. Especially when pocket space in the hipster skinny jeans is at a premium.

  18. Re:Advantages? on Comcast Carrying 1Tbit/s of IPv6 Internet Traffic · · Score: 1

    How so?

    A firewall can be set to block all incoming connections with a few inbound exceptions that the user requires (eg. port 22 on a particular box, and port 80 on another one).

    The advantages are that the firewall no longer has to keep track of all NAT connections with the associated timeout issues, and that there will never be a network address collision issue when you connect via VPN from a remote network with the same subnet range. It also removes issues related to split-horizon DNS.

    For certain corporate requirements and address aliasing, IPv6 can still be NATed where necessary.

    But, for your bog standard user that just wants to 'feel safe' behind their firewall, there is really no difference in setup or maintenance complexity between NAT and a router with a default firewall setting of 'block all inbound connections'. UPNP/etc even works the same way to automatically open up a gaping hole whenever requested by a user application.

  19. Re:Innovation patents are not true "patents" on A Brief History of Patenting the Wheel: What Goes Around Comes Around · · Score: 3, Informative

    The system is not so silly when you look at how it works in practice, http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/...

    The greater flexibility does not restrict innovation, and that should be the key test of it's usefulness.

    This is because an "innovation patent" is not examined until it is challenged, at which point, the ones that don't meet patentability requirements will only be rejected at that point and not before. The duration of an Innovation Patent is also much shorter than a standard patent.

  20. Re:This is scary on Consciousness On-Off Switch Discovered Deep In Brain · · Score: 1

    Right, but anesthesia or a wrench is not exactly the "kill switch" that this seems to be .

    More precisely, both are more likely to be actual 'kill switches' than this new method. In both general anaesthesia and the old wrench to the back of the head, there is a non-trivial likelihood that both will end in the recipients death. This new technique is theoretically attempting to target the required part of the brain with far more accuracy and less collateral damage than existing methods of rendering a person unconscious.

    I perceive it more like a virtual machine suspend.

  21. Re:Useless on Radar Changing the Face of Cycling · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not that the driver thinks it's a motorbike and gives extra consideration. It's that with multiple co-linear lights, a driver is far better able to judge how far away the cyclist is. As another poster noted, if a driver thinks you're a motorbike, they'll also assume you are travelling at or faster than the traffic flow.

    On a bicycle, a single point source of super bright light will let a driver know that you're somewhere in that direction - while partially blinding them if you angle it up like I see done far too often.

    Whereas, a wider (multi-element) lamp that isn't overly bright will let the driver's eye far better estimate and track how far away you are - while not blinding them to the other surrounds.

  22. Re:Well, sort of. on Can the NSA Really Track You Through Power Lines? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There's also the off-peak hot water signals that are modulated on the line (at around 1kHz) in some places. Those signals are generated at the local substation. Their purpose is to activate various hot-water systems to load balance the area's power use. Where the final goal is to minimise the peak usage during 'peak' periods of use.

    It is conceivable that if an 'interview' is made when that type of noise appears on the line, and that an accurate time reference is available, it may be possible to use this to narrow down the search region.

    Still not going to pin-point a location, but could definitely narrow it down far better than just using the 60Hz line frequency. Which is far too narrow band to provide any useful information beyond what country you're in.

  23. Re:Dislike function is positive reinforcement on Data Mining Shows How Down-Voting Leads To Vicious Circle of Negative Feedback · · Score: 1

    The prediction of operant conditioning predicts that positive reinforcement will increase behavior and negative reinforcement will reduce behavior. The report is not contesting operant conditioning it is only determining what sort of reinforcement the like and dislike function provide; reporting that the like function of these sites actually has little or no reinforcement and that the dislike function has a positive reinforcement toward unwanted behavior. This shows that it would be appropriate to say that there could be some debate on the meaning of like and dislike functions and what some appropriate alternatives may be.

        - Corbett Dehring

    In addition to this, I'd suggest that trolling can be likened to bullying in the sense that the negative response of the victimised party (or group) encourages continued trolling behaviour. And negative in this context is really about the negative feelings of the reader being communicated through the use of the like/dislike up/down vote.

    Without that communication or feedback, the trolling/teasing/bullying behaviour has no reinforcement path, and the troll/bully moves on to greener pastures.

  24. What about devices with no RTC? on Do Embedded Systems Need a Time To Die? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If a device does not have a way to keep track of time (eg. in built real time clock, with backup battery that will last for the duration of the device's 'lifetime'), then it becomes vulnerable to permanent denial of service when something spoofs a fake future date and time. What happens when a hundred thousand devices go offline because someone spoofed an NTP response?

    You may as well force every device to have a kill switch and remotely shut it down when it's too old. At least that'll probably require some kind of public key signature from an authenticated service (in the same way you'd authenticate a remote firmware update).

    What I'm trying to say is this is one of those 'management ideas' that sounds great in the philosophical sense, but fails in technical merit.

  25. Re:Autoimmune disorder... on Canadian Teen Arrested For Calling In 30+ Swattings, Bomb Threats · · Score: 5, Informative

    1. Pay phono
    2. Voip over someone else's wifi
    3. Someone else's phone while they're too drunk to notice an outgoing call
    4. Hacked remote computer, then install and use Voip service
    5. Stolen cell phone
    6. Break into someone's house and use their land line phone
    7. Burn phone
    8. etc.