Scott (of the Antartic) died in 1912 and had nothing to do with the pictures. Shackleton's later expedition was using his hut and left the pictures there.
Ah yes, the "I'm too stupid to read the original words so I'll make up some straw man and attack that instead" gambit. Did I say the smart phone camera was always on? No I didn't. Is it still annoying and offensive? Absolutely. Try and comprehend.
I expect any smartphone user who pointed the camera of their device in people's faces in the way that glass does every second it is worn would experience the same reaction.
With this in mind, on iOS, there's no API to get at the SMS directly - you need to rely on OS flaws to do it. Even sending an SMS requires switching to the iMessages app - no app can send an SMS directly unless they implement SMS functionality within themselves (which means they can't use the cell network SMS facilities).
Conversely, Android does allow 3rd party apps to swap out core parts of the experience and it has lead to some highly innovative products. Apps like Viber integrate VOIP into the standard dialler. There are countless SMS apps which add stuff like emoticons & IM functionality (even Google Hangouts is one). There are numerous desktop replacements, many which provide a modern launcher to older devices, or augment the experience in interesting ways.
Yes there is malware lurking around on the fringes, but that's the price of freedom. Google has a responsibility to squash it whenever it rears its ugly head in the store and I assume they're pretty good at it. Consumers have a responsibility to read the permissions and favour apps which have no earthly reason to be asking permission to do things which could be harmful.
I don't see they can do much for 3rd party stores. It's not Google's job to police Amazon's appstore, or Opera's, or the gazillion stores in China. That's their job. There is nothing to stop some Chinese entrepreneur launching a curated store with trusted apps from trusted sources. Maybe it already exists and some fools still choose to ignore it for another site where everything is free. More fool them.
Many devices physically CANNOT do certain actions. My tablet cannot send or receive SMS messages or make voice calls. Some tablets have no GPS. Even a phone may not be able to send or receive SMS messages or receive calls or serve up a location because it is out of range or is in aircraft mode or the sim is removed or its out of credit. Apps have to cope with not getting the things they want already which is why I don't see the problem providing switches that allow users to disable them. I don't think it would lead to an arms race.
So I think apps would be foolish to go down that road. Once the cat was out of the bag that they were screwing their apps on purpose, they'd be downranked to oblivion. I think most likely that most apps wouldn't care on the general principle that the power of the default is a powerful thing.
That said, this is all orthogonal to this story. Android's security clearly needs improvement but when you have a bunch of people downloading their apps from a tainted source it wouldn't matter if it got finegrained controls or not.
Assuming the feds had the unencrypted wallet, I expect the first thing they would do is transfer all the funds out of the original wallet to their own to prevent that happening. Even if the person maintained a backup, the first thing that would happen when they synced is that all the coins would disappear out of it.
I think Android's upfront permissions model is weak but I don't think it has much bearing on this particular story. Anyone stupid enough to download apps from an untrusted source and click through the permissions the app wants is not going to be protected by having the option to remove some of those permissions. Because if they were that concerned about their security they wouldn't have allowed the app on their device in the first place.
That said I think it is vital that Android should allow me to withhold a permission, exchange the permission for a lesser one (e.g. fine grained location for a dummy location), or receive a prompt. I also think that Google should weight apps in the store by the risk they pose which could be a weighting based on the reputation of the seller, the app's rating and the permissions it asks for. Apps would be inclined to ask for less permissions or farm those permissions out into an optional and auxiliary app if they knew it improved their search rankings.
When was the last "Massive iOS Mobile Botnet Hijacking SMS Data" headline?
When was the last maximum security prisoner getting run over by a bus headline? Sometimes freedom has its own risks, which includes idiots making poor decisions over where to get their software from. Does that mean everyone should be locked up in a cage to prevent that from happening?
Android certainly has poor security options once an app installs, but I would say in this case that if someone is stupid enough to download an app from an untrusted source, click through when it asks for suspiciously broad permissions, that more fine grained controls is not going to help these people. They are idiots.
That said, Android has some shocking poor security behaviour that Google should fix. It should be possible to turn off certain permissions an app says it wants regardless of what the manifest says. It should be possible to control permissions related to making calls, sending or receiving SMS messages, camera, location or hitting the internet. Apps can't take for granted that these services exist or are even available in a device so I don't see much fallout from allowing the user to control the visibility of these services.
Download your apps from a reputable store and exercise some common sense. I wouldn't be surprised if this infection was because idiots were downloading warez from some dubious app store.
IKEA CFL bulbs aren't a good point of comparison. They're certainly cheap but they definitely need some warmup time. Depending on where you use them this isn't necessarily bad - I have 3 in the kid's room where its handy that they take a minute to brighten up. But I wouldn't want them somewhere like a hall or toilet.
But CFLs that light up faster are easy to find and normally say as much on the packet. Also, they last a very long time (longer than incandescent) and use less energy. So they're cheaper to run and cheaper over the lifetime of the bulb. Most of the objections to them are highly irrational though the GP's post is so paranoia infused I wonder if it's a parody or the person is in need of medication.
I've had less luck with LED bulbs. Some brands are far less reliable than they claim and I first decked my house out with a brand called EcoPal and I'd say 30% of them have failed in 5 years which is not acceptable when they claim to last 30. I've used other brands which are more reliable. I guess the scope for reliability is very wide because no two LED bulbs designs seem to be the same - it's still a very nascent market.
Personally I'd be more amenable to the console that shares the least, or at least has switches that control its behaviour. I would be more impressed by a console which strikes a good balance between privacy and the ability to share and allows users to adjust it further one way or the other as they see fit. And if someone doesn't want to Tweet, Like, live cast or whatever then there should be a simple checkbox in the settings which removes all that shit from the UI.
I doubt Google cares that some app is too buggy to function without a particular permission. Their general approach is to let the cream float to the top.
Most apps already have to cope with features that are missing. e.g. an app might want to read SMS or make calls, but neither facility is available on most tablets. Or they might ask for GPS coords and again they simply can't have it. If they can't cope with the variety out there already then I don't see much difference if the user has an explicit switch to disable that functionality.
That said, the current situation is completely unacceptable. The upfront permissions are getting worse and worse for some apps and often for completely esoteric reasons. Twitter recently updated their app to ask my location. Fortunately there is a switch in their app to turn this off, but really I shouldn't have to count on their charity - I should be able to turn that setting off whether they want me to or not.
The easy way to avoid the presumption of taint is comply with whatever regulatory rules exist to prevent money laundering. That is why those rules exist in the first place and why governments will come down hard on sites which attempt to side step those rules.
Its very simple to understand. If I stole someone's wallet then there is a transaction chain linking my money to the crime. So if I exchange those 500 bitcoins for another 500 bitcoins less some fee, now there is no chain linking me to the crime. It's money laundering.
Casascius exchanged Bitcoins for other Bitcoins, plus a small fee for the cool novelty token. He didn't exchange BTC for USD, or vice-versa, or anything even remotely similar to that. He made frickin' change (albeit more literally than normal).
No, he laundered money. He is acting as a break in the chain where potentially laundered money stops at his door and new, clean money is issued to the customer for a fee. It would be akin to me buying your dye pack stained dollars and giving you clean dollars for a commission and not bothering to keep records or conform to any regulation.
It's probably why various governments are shutting down exchanges. What good is a bitcoin if you can't change it for real money? The answer is not much for legit users, although it might become an underground currency for criminals the same way the Liberty Reserve became. There would still have to be something akin to the Liberty Reserve or Silk Road to put people looking to buy Bitcoin or cash out in contact with local dealers though.
And you think people with lack of bandwidth are happy about downloading 10GB+ games instead? Besides not every game is twitch sensitive and a 1-2Mbps link is perfectly adequate for most games. Sony and Microsoft are well known to be releasing cloud based game streaming services soon. SteamOS doesn't make a lick of sense unless it is ultimately intended as a platform for cloud gaming too.
I think the idea is blazingly obvious - release a relatively thin client (which happens to be Linux but like XBMC could be anything) and stream games through the cloud. That is what is going on here.
I expect that in the future when you buy a game on steam that there will be a "play instantly" option. Maybe you can even rent games this way, or subscribe to the service. But by decoupling where the game runs from where it is played, it doesn't matter what architecture or OS the user has. Cloud gaming in other words. Probably something little more complex than a chromecast or raspberry pi would be capable of serving as a streaming client and I imagine that Microsoft, Sony, Valve, Google, Apple all have their eyes set on something of that nature.
I expect Linux is largely an irrelevance here since most of the games are going to be streaming from somewhere else. Of course Valve might encourage game devs to port their game to Linux to benefit from cheaper hosting fees if they release a cloud based platform and that might trickle down to native versions of those same apps.
It should pretty obvious that SteamOS is not intended for desktop use. It might be possible to install a desktop, but this is primarily meant for use under a TV or similar set up. I even doubt that people are expected to even install games onto the OS itself. I expect the ultimate intention is Valve will launch a cloud service so that SteamOS is just a minimal frontend for games running somewhere else.
Because it's not aimed at people who want a desktop. It's aimed at people who have a device sitting under their TV and want a simple navigable interface to play games or do other activities of a similar nature (e.g. streaming content).
Thing is these, things were not "unsolicited". The person ordered one thing (a game called Tearaway) and through an obvious database mistake received something of higher value (a PS Vita Tearaway bundle). It's not like the consoles just turned up out of the blue. I expect the retailer is well within their rights to demand the item to be returned even if they are responsible for paying the postage to have them returned.
Slashdot Mirror
Scott (of the Antartic) died in 1912 and had nothing to do with the pictures. Shackleton's later expedition was using his hut and left the pictures there.
Ah yes, the "I'm too stupid to read the original words so I'll make up some straw man and attack that instead" gambit. Did I say the smart phone camera was always on? No I didn't. Is it still annoying and offensive? Absolutely. Try and comprehend.
I expect any smartphone user who pointed the camera of their device in people's faces in the way that glass does every second it is worn would experience the same reaction.
With this in mind, on iOS, there's no API to get at the SMS directly - you need to rely on OS flaws to do it. Even sending an SMS requires switching to the iMessages app - no app can send an SMS directly unless they implement SMS functionality within themselves (which means they can't use the cell network SMS facilities).
Conversely, Android does allow 3rd party apps to swap out core parts of the experience and it has lead to some highly innovative products. Apps like Viber integrate VOIP into the standard dialler. There are countless SMS apps which add stuff like emoticons & IM functionality (even Google Hangouts is one). There are numerous desktop replacements, many which provide a modern launcher to older devices, or augment the experience in interesting ways.
Yes there is malware lurking around on the fringes, but that's the price of freedom. Google has a responsibility to squash it whenever it rears its ugly head in the store and I assume they're pretty good at it. Consumers have a responsibility to read the permissions and favour apps which have no earthly reason to be asking permission to do things which could be harmful.
I don't see they can do much for 3rd party stores. It's not Google's job to police Amazon's appstore, or Opera's, or the gazillion stores in China. That's their job. There is nothing to stop some Chinese entrepreneur launching a curated store with trusted apps from trusted sources. Maybe it already exists and some fools still choose to ignore it for another site where everything is free. More fool them.
So I think apps would be foolish to go down that road. Once the cat was out of the bag that they were screwing their apps on purpose, they'd be downranked to oblivion. I think most likely that most apps wouldn't care on the general principle that the power of the default is a powerful thing.
That said, this is all orthogonal to this story. Android's security clearly needs improvement but when you have a bunch of people downloading their apps from a tainted source it wouldn't matter if it got finegrained controls or not.
Assuming the feds had the unencrypted wallet, I expect the first thing they would do is transfer all the funds out of the original wallet to their own to prevent that happening. Even if the person maintained a backup, the first thing that would happen when they synced is that all the coins would disappear out of it.
That said I think it is vital that Android should allow me to withhold a permission, exchange the permission for a lesser one (e.g. fine grained location for a dummy location), or receive a prompt. I also think that Google should weight apps in the store by the risk they pose which could be a weighting based on the reputation of the seller, the app's rating and the permissions it asks for. Apps would be inclined to ask for less permissions or farm those permissions out into an optional and auxiliary app if they knew it improved their search rankings.
When was the last "Massive iOS Mobile Botnet Hijacking SMS Data" headline?
When was the last maximum security prisoner getting run over by a bus headline? Sometimes freedom has its own risks, which includes idiots making poor decisions over where to get their software from. Does that mean everyone should be locked up in a cage to prevent that from happening?
That said, Android has some shocking poor security behaviour that Google should fix. It should be possible to turn off certain permissions an app says it wants regardless of what the manifest says. It should be possible to control permissions related to making calls, sending or receiving SMS messages, camera, location or hitting the internet. Apps can't take for granted that these services exist or are even available in a device so I don't see much fallout from allowing the user to control the visibility of these services.
Download your apps from a reputable store and exercise some common sense. I wouldn't be surprised if this infection was because idiots were downloading warez from some dubious app store.
Alibaba is filled with tablets retailing for this sort of price. I assume Datawind just made a bulk purchase and is selling them for a small margin.
But CFLs that light up faster are easy to find and normally say as much on the packet. Also, they last a very long time (longer than incandescent) and use less energy. So they're cheaper to run and cheaper over the lifetime of the bulb. Most of the objections to them are highly irrational though the GP's post is so paranoia infused I wonder if it's a parody or the person is in need of medication.
I've had less luck with LED bulbs. Some brands are far less reliable than they claim and I first decked my house out with a brand called EcoPal and I'd say 30% of them have failed in 5 years which is not acceptable when they claim to last 30. I've used other brands which are more reliable. I guess the scope for reliability is very wide because no two LED bulbs designs seem to be the same - it's still a very nascent market.
Personally I'd be more amenable to the console that shares the least, or at least has switches that control its behaviour. I would be more impressed by a console which strikes a good balance between privacy and the ability to share and allows users to adjust it further one way or the other as they see fit. And if someone doesn't want to Tweet, Like, live cast or whatever then there should be a simple checkbox in the settings which removes all that shit from the UI.
Most apps already have to cope with features that are missing. e.g. an app might want to read SMS or make calls, but neither facility is available on most tablets. Or they might ask for GPS coords and again they simply can't have it. If they can't cope with the variety out there already then I don't see much difference if the user has an explicit switch to disable that functionality.
That said, the current situation is completely unacceptable. The upfront permissions are getting worse and worse for some apps and often for completely esoteric reasons. Twitter recently updated their app to ask my location. Fortunately there is a switch in their app to turn this off, but really I shouldn't have to count on their charity - I should be able to turn that setting off whether they want me to or not.
The easy way to avoid the presumption of taint is comply with whatever regulatory rules exist to prevent money laundering. That is why those rules exist in the first place and why governments will come down hard on sites which attempt to side step those rules.
How so?
Its very simple to understand. If I stole someone's wallet then there is a transaction chain linking my money to the crime. So if I exchange those 500 bitcoins for another 500 bitcoins less some fee, now there is no chain linking me to the crime. It's money laundering.
Casascius exchanged Bitcoins for other Bitcoins, plus a small fee for the cool novelty token. He didn't exchange BTC for USD, or vice-versa, or anything even remotely similar to that. He made frickin' change (albeit more literally than normal).
No, he laundered money. He is acting as a break in the chain where potentially laundered money stops at his door and new, clean money is issued to the customer for a fee. It would be akin to me buying your dye pack stained dollars and giving you clean dollars for a commission and not bothering to keep records or conform to any regulation.
It's probably why various governments are shutting down exchanges. What good is a bitcoin if you can't change it for real money? The answer is not much for legit users, although it might become an underground currency for criminals the same way the Liberty Reserve became. There would still have to be something akin to the Liberty Reserve or Silk Road to put people looking to buy Bitcoin or cash out in contact with local dealers though.
And you think people with lack of bandwidth are happy about downloading 10GB+ games instead? Besides not every game is twitch sensitive and a 1-2Mbps link is perfectly adequate for most games. Sony and Microsoft are well known to be releasing cloud based game streaming services soon. SteamOS doesn't make a lick of sense unless it is ultimately intended as a platform for cloud gaming too.
Anyone with an ounce of sense would see this is the direction this is all pointing.
I expect that in the future when you buy a game on steam that there will be a "play instantly" option. Maybe you can even rent games this way, or subscribe to the service. But by decoupling where the game runs from where it is played, it doesn't matter what architecture or OS the user has. Cloud gaming in other words. Probably something little more complex than a chromecast or raspberry pi would be capable of serving as a streaming client and I imagine that Microsoft, Sony, Valve, Google, Apple all have their eyes set on something of that nature.
I expect Linux is largely an irrelevance here since most of the games are going to be streaming from somewhere else. Of course Valve might encourage game devs to port their game to Linux to benefit from cheaper hosting fees if they release a cloud based platform and that might trickle down to native versions of those same apps.
It should pretty obvious that SteamOS is not intended for desktop use. It might be possible to install a desktop, but this is primarily meant for use under a TV or similar set up. I even doubt that people are expected to even install games onto the OS itself. I expect the ultimate intention is Valve will launch a cloud service so that SteamOS is just a minimal frontend for games running somewhere else.
Because it's not aimed at people who want a desktop. It's aimed at people who have a device sitting under their TV and want a simple navigable interface to play games or do other activities of a similar nature (e.g. streaming content).
Thing is these, things were not "unsolicited". The person ordered one thing (a game called Tearaway) and through an obvious database mistake received something of higher value (a PS Vita Tearaway bundle). It's not like the consoles just turned up out of the blue. I expect the retailer is well within their rights to demand the item to be returned even if they are responsible for paying the postage to have them returned.