The chance of a virus is "less likely" to the point of nonexistence - because there are no viruses. IF you have a Mac virus, then let's see the damn thing. Its been ten years that Windows people have been talking about the "no one cares to write one"/any second now you'll see millions" meme. SHOW me, if it's possible. Put it on the table.
A trojan is not a virus, and there aren't any viruses out there in the wild. Viruses are so hard to make that greyhatters save them up all year to trot their latest at Defcon... and it's news when it happens.
Mac has Time Machine if all else fails and a friend says "yes! please install ant-virus software on this Mac, it's FREE!" when they borrow your Mac for a session. You are far more likely to be installing a trojan when you try to install "antivirus" apps on a Mac than not. That's because viruses don't exist, and there aren't any established apps for checking for them. If such an app does exist, it has one of the lowest CPU usage figures of any app on any platform, anyway. (Checking for: ZERO: viruses: DONE.)
TROJAN. Trojans are installed by users who are faked out by a web page that demands they install a program using an admin-enabled account. There is no protecting an operating system from a person who installs strange programs on demand.
It is not a virus. Viruses infect Windows machines on bootup, through flaws in the OS, opening mail, spreadsheets, or scratching yourself, and probably on exposure to sunlight or eating Splenda. There are MILLIONS of viruses in Windows. And trojans. They exist because Windows had its bloodstream exposed in '95 when Gates and company welded the OS file system to the IE browser, making Windows a target of opportunity for decades.
There has not been a single virus on the Mac in the wild, ever. And it's not for lack of trying: the first black hat to release such a thing gets mad props forever, not to mention the thanks of the various Slavic mafias.
You can't guard against ignorance, laziness, and lack of experience. Those things enable trojans to be installed, and always will be.
Macs still Just Work. That's because it's Unix with a fancy hat on.
If Google is not ruled by Japanese law, why is every country on earth subject to American law on copyright?
Not only that, but America claims that Americans everywhere on the planet are subject to American law no matter where they are.
Julian Assange and Megaupload would be really surprised to hear about the concept that Japanese laws don't apply to America.
America also maintains that our laws apply to anyone in the world who does business here, even to the limited extent of renting server space on our soil.
Why, that means that America is Really Special and other people's laws don't apply here, and our law applies everywhere. Good to get that out there, fully stated. (Isn't that an empire?)
Trademarks are not copyrights. Copyrights do not need defense, and you cannot lose them. Sorry if you already know that, but others are hugely confused about this.
Let me put this in: America is screwed up because our economy was based on slavery. We treated the slaves and ex-slaves like animals, and made a huge section of our population into a permanent underclass, locked into ghettos without real jobs, schools or housing. No matter how much we've changed, when Americans talk about how they need guns, they mean they are afraid of the part of town with the descendants of ex-slaves in it.
And we're afraid of the white poor as well... but a major part of that poverty was caused by wage competition with people of color who were paid nothing, and then almost nothing for over three hundred years. As they are now competing with overseas workers being paid ten cents an hour. We've systemic poverty that leads to violent stupidity and overpopulation in some parts of the country, and the well-off are terrified of those people, hence the constant references to homogeneous cultures being better off.
Of course Europe is not homogeneous - but it didn't have millions of blacks in slavery and near-slavery for over 300 years.
The fear of the poor is absolute and fueled by endless loops of violence shown by local news every night. Americans are convinced they are living in a crime-ridden hell, and the problem is those non-homogeneous folks.
OJ Simpson tried it. He's in prison for life. Doesn't matter whether you are trying to recover your own property.
Now if there were DRUGS in the house, they'd send in armored Starship Troopers and shoot the family dog as a friendly way of saying hello. Well, in the English-speaking countries, anyway.
Why does everyone believe that technology can't be programmed to lie? Speed cameras can be manipulated. As another poster pointed out, they can blink the lights red during a green or yellow to take a still shot of you "blowing" a red light. As with voting machines, why does everyone think that tech intrinsically always tells the truth when it is so tempting for those controlling the software to make it lie? When they have overwhelming motivation to lie?
I read with interest the stories about prosecutors and cops trying to force people to hand over passwords to their confiscated machines.
Many here and elsewhere believe that those accused should just hand over the password. That the cops will open the folders and find nothing, and then they are free to go.
The question is really: what is to stop the IT team searching your now helpless, decrypted box from simply copying in a few kiddy porn files into the hard drive? Instant guilt.
They have the ability to change file dates and such - it's just software - and they probably have toys from Microsoft and others that give them such abilities.
And who else HAS kiddy porn casually strewn around but the kiddy porn IT team at a prosecutor's office?
The question to ask is, again, now that we've given them prosecutorial nukes to destroy people, why on earth would you trust them? They can pick off people at will. Political dissidents, harassment complainants, people at border crossings - all they need is your password and a few minutes with a USB flash drive, and you are public enemy number one.
The "damges only" part of the law is long gone. It's something like a quarter million dollars in damages per song. What once was a civil law matter - provable damages - is now a federal crime, a felony.
GPS tracking and logging, recording what you say, where you've been, what you post and what you read - the total police state. People mod me flamebait when I point out that we're living, eventually and soon, in a giant prison, a fishbowl, where the powerful get to see what we're up to, but we never see them or what they do.
Now we have the concrete illustration. "Fishbowl". They are fucking laughing at us.
What utter nonsense. The US government has been hiring "private" companies to do what they themselves are forbidden to do. Among other things, especially for spying on Americans.
Mirrors or plasmas can defeat low power single lasers, if the target knows it's coming. Or the target can keep changing orbit, if the attacker is far enough away to make dodging work. Come to think of it, this can be overcome by focusing hundreds or thousands of optical (green, blue, UV) lasers on one target. Uh oh. Cheap and low power can do the job. X-ray lasers would be best - no shield can stop them, unless you're in an asteroid with a few hundred feet of rock protecting you.
Kinetic weapons moving at miles per second rule here. Return of the cannonball! Imagine buckshot of a pound per shot, fired from electromagnetic guns, moving at hundreds of miles per second, impacting the hulls... shredded wheat.
I doubt that humans would man most weapons. Drone ships would be simpler. smaller, faster, cheaper, and more expendable. Flying EM guns and nuclear powered x-ray cannons, with radar dampening shrouds would prowl the dark, quietly.
Drones don't need big rockets. They can spend years sneaking up on you with ion drives. Decades. Impossible to detect until they open fire.
Ships of the line? For humans, maybe. Command and control can't really be based on a single planet. Speed of light delays... but that can be overcome, can't it...
Some sort of manned assault frigate would be essential if your goal was less than outright annihilation. Send in the commandos, hit the right targets - that takes people and yes, ships of the line.
Americans tend to image every space war as a reenactment of World War II - be honest with yourselves. It won't be like that. It'd be smaller, more deadly, cheaper, easier to do - if a space-based industrial economy were to do it. Earth would be a not-good place to build and maintain space... anything. Space-based economies, in rotating habitats, have it all over plantary military forces - they are on top of the hill already, and they have access to all the power and material they need.
Communications is key to any military mission. Radio is easily detected and can be jammed. I'd say quantum entanglement is the answer here - sort of a QE telegraph. Use enormous, ordered arrays of bits, entangled with corresponding arrays at Command or other ships, and Morse code is reborn. No EM emissions, no jamming possible, no detection possible. If you want sneaky, the ghost of QE comm is just what you need.
Other weapons: throw big rocks at them. Force majeure, the undefendable attack.
No, I don't remember that because it wasn't true. Within a day of the allegation, it was known that IBM Selectrics had proportional font balls at the time of the memo. AND the military had them. AND the same font was used in other Bush docs that weren't in contention. AND the font is from the Sixties, so yes it is possible that it was used. The "fact" is that it was not a forgery. Fonts didn't begin with Macs. And that it is unutterably sad that reality doesn't have a chance in American anymore, not against a Republican cause.
Goodness me - are you saying that the anti-science material is a Republican operation? That's quite the admission. Thanks for that. Not that everyone didn't already know that it was.
Ah, the Dan Rather Discreditation Offense. Works if the judges are on your side. Ignore all other facts and evidence, zero in on the "alleged" nature of one piece you can hammer on endlessly, and "disprove" all other facts thereby.
Of course there is a massive series of oil and coal industry funded fake science attacks on real climate science. This was uncovered years ago. It's also obvious on the face of it.
You sell the iPad in before the end of its life cycle, and recoup half the money you spent. iPads retain value for years. The total cost of ownership remains low, lower than for Windows laptops or netbooks. So you are really paying about $200 bucks for a year's use of a $500 iPad, about $300 for two years. About a hundred a year, if you think about it. Most Apple computer products are like that. Sell them every two years or less, and you're saving money over buying and keeping a PC, and you get the fastest and best hardware on an ongoing basis. Any longer, and you have battery or 3.5 jack issues, and even then people will still buy them if they know how to do it themselves.
I couldn't find any historical reference as to why 4:3 was originally chosen for televisions (the details behind the NTSC format are brilliant, but that's a separate topic)
I actually have the answer to that, amazing myself. Movies were filmed in 4:3 since the early 1900's; when TVs were introduced, they copied the ratio. Filmmakers started filming in wider screen ratios in the 40's and 50's in direct response to the popularity of at-home TV watching, as they were trying to bring more value to the moviegoing experience. They also introduced 3D and Smellovision for the same reason.
TVs, when they finally went digital (a whole other disheartening subject) copied the widescreen aspect just as their NTSC predecessors had copied 4:3 movies. Monitor manufacturers followed suit, and 1920 X 1080 is now a new standard. Quad rez (4K across, 2K down) will be next.
I'm glad they are finally moving on to new resolutions as the tech progresses.
Yes, because it isn't circuit damage that freezes the phone - the phone works fine - it is the fact that the phone reports that it will not function without the available GPS feed, period. That's not just a random crash - they anticipate someone trying to disable the software or hardware, and told the phone to lock up if it didn't find an available GPS feed. So, wrapping up, yes I hate a problem with the fact that the phone will not work if you disable tracking with software OR hardware. That would be the entire point. The tracking is not entirely for your benefit.
I would not have a problem, as I stated so long ago, if the hardware could be disabled with a simple circuit breaker - a button in hardware that you can push to kill the power feed to the GPS so you could opt-out. A software button is useless - it tells you what you want to hear. A command from a the phone company, and it goes on stealth mode. How else do you think the cops are tracking people with the GPS on phones? Bad guys of course "shut off the GPS". It's turned back on without their knowledge. As I assume they turn it back on in "wake up, tell me where you are, and go to sleep" mode on any damned phone they'd like.
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The chance of a virus is "less likely" to the point of nonexistence - because there are no viruses. IF you have a Mac virus, then let's see the damn thing. Its been ten years that Windows people have been talking about the "no one cares to write one"/any second now you'll see millions" meme. SHOW me, if it's possible. Put it on the table.
A trojan is not a virus, and there aren't any viruses out there in the wild. Viruses are so hard to make that greyhatters save them up all year to trot their latest at Defcon... and it's news when it happens.
Mac has Time Machine if all else fails and a friend says "yes! please install ant-virus software on this Mac, it's FREE!" when they borrow your Mac for a session. You are far more likely to be installing a trojan when you try to install "antivirus" apps on a Mac than not. That's because viruses don't exist, and there aren't any established apps for checking for them. If such an app does exist, it has one of the lowest CPU usage figures of any app on any platform, anyway. (Checking for: ZERO: viruses: DONE.)
Show me the viruses.
We might as well give up on natural gas, then. It'll never work.
(Why is it that things that our great-grandparents built are impossible for us to even contemplate matching?)
"Can we please end the madness where people claim that since an OS is a variant of unix it can't get a virus?"
Name one in the wild. To the point, name one Mac virus in the wild.
You can't.
Been ten years since OS X came out. I think the point has been made. No viruses. Windows: millions.
It's not a virus. It's a trojan. Ain't no Mac viruses. But, good one!
TROJAN. Trojans are installed by users who are faked out by a web page that demands they install a program using an admin-enabled account. There is no protecting an operating system from a person who installs strange programs on demand.
It is not a virus. Viruses infect Windows machines on bootup, through flaws in the OS, opening mail, spreadsheets, or scratching yourself, and probably on exposure to sunlight or eating Splenda. There are MILLIONS of viruses in Windows. And trojans. They exist because Windows had its bloodstream exposed in '95 when Gates and company welded the OS file system to the IE browser, making Windows a target of opportunity for decades.
There has not been a single virus on the Mac in the wild, ever. And it's not for lack of trying: the first black hat to release such a thing gets mad props forever, not to mention the thanks of the various Slavic mafias.
You can't guard against ignorance, laziness, and lack of experience. Those things enable trojans to be installed, and always will be.
Macs still Just Work. That's because it's Unix with a fancy hat on.
You can't disable stupid.
If Google is not ruled by Japanese law, why is every country on earth subject to American law on copyright?
Not only that, but America claims that Americans everywhere on the planet are subject to American law no matter where they are.
Julian Assange and Megaupload would be really surprised to hear about the concept that Japanese laws don't apply to America.
America also maintains that our laws apply to anyone in the world who does business here, even to the limited extent of renting server space on our soil.
Why, that means that America is Really Special and other people's laws don't apply here, and our law applies everywhere. Good to get that out there, fully stated. (Isn't that an empire?)
Trademarks are not copyrights. Copyrights do not need defense, and you cannot lose them. Sorry if you already know that, but others are hugely confused about this.
He's trying to say you don't have black people.
Let me put this in: America is screwed up because our economy was based on slavery. We treated the slaves and ex-slaves like animals, and made a huge section of our population into a permanent underclass, locked into ghettos without real jobs, schools or housing. No matter how much we've changed, when Americans talk about how they need guns, they mean they are afraid of the part of town with the descendants of ex-slaves in it.
And we're afraid of the white poor as well... but a major part of that poverty was caused by wage competition with people of color who were paid nothing, and then almost nothing for over three hundred years. As they are now competing with overseas workers being paid ten cents an hour. We've systemic poverty that leads to violent stupidity and overpopulation in some parts of the country, and the well-off are terrified of those people, hence the constant references to homogeneous cultures being better off.
Of course Europe is not homogeneous - but it didn't have millions of blacks in slavery and near-slavery for over 300 years.
The fear of the poor is absolute and fueled by endless loops of violence shown by local news every night. Americans are convinced they are living in a crime-ridden hell, and the problem is those non-homogeneous folks.
Well, if we burglarize your house, we know where to find your gun. Thanks!
OJ Simpson tried it. He's in prison for life. Doesn't matter whether you are trying to recover your own property.
Now if there were DRUGS in the house, they'd send in armored Starship Troopers and shoot the family dog as a friendly way of saying hello. Well, in the English-speaking countries, anyway.
Why does everyone believe that technology can't be programmed to lie? Speed cameras can be manipulated. As another poster pointed out, they can blink the lights red during a green or yellow to take a still shot of you "blowing" a red light. As with voting machines, why does everyone think that tech intrinsically always tells the truth when it is so tempting for those controlling the software to make it lie? When they have overwhelming motivation to lie?
It's an old idea - run the rails up a mountainside, and launch the craft from the end. It save a first stage.
I assume none of you tech types are actually going to die in Oil War III?
I read with interest the stories about prosecutors and cops trying to force people to hand over passwords to their confiscated machines.
Many here and elsewhere believe that those accused should just hand over the password. That the cops will open the folders and find nothing, and then they are free to go.
The question is really: what is to stop the IT team searching your now helpless, decrypted box from simply copying in a few kiddy porn files into the hard drive? Instant guilt.
They have the ability to change file dates and such - it's just software - and they probably have toys from Microsoft and others that give them such abilities.
And who else HAS kiddy porn casually strewn around but the kiddy porn IT team at a prosecutor's office?
The question to ask is, again, now that we've given them prosecutorial nukes to destroy people, why on earth would you trust them? They can pick off people at will. Political dissidents, harassment complainants, people at border crossings - all they need is your password and a few minutes with a USB flash drive, and you are public enemy number one.
The "damges only" part of the law is long gone. It's something like a quarter million dollars in damages per song. What once was a civil law matter - provable damages - is now a federal crime, a felony.
GPS tracking and logging, recording what you say, where you've been, what you post and what you read - the total police state. People mod me flamebait when I point out that we're living, eventually and soon, in a giant prison, a fishbowl, where the powerful get to see what we're up to, but we never see them or what they do.
Now we have the concrete illustration. "Fishbowl". They are fucking laughing at us.
What utter nonsense. The US government has been hiring "private" companies to do what they themselves are forbidden to do. Among other things, especially for spying on Americans.
EMP cannons. Or simple EMP emitters.
Mirrors or plasmas can defeat low power single lasers, if the target knows it's coming. Or the target can keep changing orbit, if the attacker is far enough away to make dodging work. Come to think of it, this can be overcome by focusing hundreds or thousands of optical (green, blue, UV) lasers on one target. Uh oh. Cheap and low power can do the job. X-ray lasers would be best - no shield can stop them, unless you're in an asteroid with a few hundred feet of rock protecting you.
Kinetic weapons moving at miles per second rule here. Return of the cannonball! Imagine buckshot of a pound per shot, fired from electromagnetic guns, moving at hundreds of miles per second, impacting the hulls... shredded wheat.
I doubt that humans would man most weapons. Drone ships would be simpler. smaller, faster, cheaper, and more expendable. Flying EM guns and nuclear powered x-ray cannons, with radar dampening shrouds would prowl the dark, quietly.
Drones don't need big rockets. They can spend years sneaking up on you with ion drives. Decades. Impossible to detect until they open fire.
Ships of the line? For humans, maybe. Command and control can't really be based on a single planet. Speed of light delays... but that can be overcome, can't it...
Some sort of manned assault frigate would be essential if your goal was less than outright annihilation. Send in the commandos, hit the right targets - that takes people and yes, ships of the line.
Americans tend to image every space war as a reenactment of World War II - be honest with yourselves. It won't be like that. It'd be smaller, more deadly, cheaper, easier to do - if a space-based industrial economy were to do it. Earth would be a not-good place to build and maintain space... anything. Space-based economies, in rotating habitats, have it all over plantary military forces - they are on top of the hill already, and they have access to all the power and material they need.
Communications is key to any military mission. Radio is easily detected and can be jammed. I'd say quantum entanglement is the answer here - sort of a QE telegraph. Use enormous, ordered arrays of bits, entangled with corresponding arrays at Command or other ships, and Morse code is reborn. No EM emissions, no jamming possible, no detection possible. If you want sneaky, the ghost of QE comm is just what you need.
Other weapons: throw big rocks at them. Force majeure, the undefendable attack.
No, I don't remember that because it wasn't true. Within a day of the allegation, it was known that IBM Selectrics had proportional font balls at the time of the memo. AND the military had them. AND the same font was used in other Bush docs that weren't in contention. AND the font is from the Sixties, so yes it is possible that it was used. The "fact" is that it was not a forgery. Fonts didn't begin with Macs. And that it is unutterably sad that reality doesn't have a chance in American anymore, not against a Republican cause.
Goodness me - are you saying that the anti-science material is a Republican operation? That's quite the admission. Thanks for that. Not that everyone didn't already know that it was.
Ah, the Dan Rather Discreditation Offense. Works if the judges are on your side. Ignore all other facts and evidence, zero in on the "alleged" nature of one piece you can hammer on endlessly, and "disprove" all other facts thereby.
Of course there is a massive series of oil and coal industry funded fake science attacks on real climate science. This was uncovered years ago. It's also obvious on the face of it.
You sell the iPad in before the end of its life cycle, and recoup half the money you spent. iPads retain value for years. The total cost of ownership remains low, lower than for Windows laptops or netbooks. So you are really paying about $200 bucks for a year's use of a $500 iPad, about $300 for two years. About a hundred a year, if you think about it. Most Apple computer products are like that. Sell them every two years or less, and you're saving money over buying and keeping a PC, and you get the fastest and best hardware on an ongoing basis. Any longer, and you have battery or 3.5 jack issues, and even then people will still buy them if they know how to do it themselves.
I actually have the answer to that, amazing myself. Movies were filmed in 4:3 since the early 1900's; when TVs were introduced, they copied the ratio. Filmmakers started filming in wider screen ratios in the 40's and 50's in direct response to the popularity of at-home TV watching, as they were trying to bring more value to the moviegoing experience. They also introduced 3D and Smellovision for the same reason.
TVs, when they finally went digital (a whole other disheartening subject) copied the widescreen aspect just as their NTSC predecessors had copied 4:3 movies. Monitor manufacturers followed suit, and 1920 X 1080 is now a new standard. Quad rez (4K across, 2K down) will be next.
I'm glad they are finally moving on to new resolutions as the tech progresses.
Yes, because it isn't circuit damage that freezes the phone - the phone works fine - it is the fact that the phone reports that it will not function without the available GPS feed, period. That's not just a random crash - they anticipate someone trying to disable the software or hardware, and told the phone to lock up if it didn't find an available GPS feed. So, wrapping up, yes I hate a problem with the fact that the phone will not work if you disable tracking with software OR hardware. That would be the entire point. The tracking is not entirely for your benefit.
I would not have a problem, as I stated so long ago, if the hardware could be disabled with a simple circuit breaker - a button in hardware that you can push to kill the power feed to the GPS so you could opt-out. A software button is useless - it tells you what you want to hear. A command from a the phone company, and it goes on stealth mode. How else do you think the cops are tracking people with the GPS on phones? Bad guys of course "shut off the GPS". It's turned back on without their knowledge. As I assume they turn it back on in "wake up, tell me where you are, and go to sleep" mode on any damned phone they'd like.