Sonic transmission of data does not make infection possible. If it were possible, systems would crash all the time from random noise picked up by microphones.
It shames people to not even understand why the capitalist society works best with mass manufactured items, and that limited run items will always have significant compromises. Make more of an item, and it gets cheaper AND more reliable through necessity of efficiency.
Actually, that's consumerism you're referring to, the preferred mode of capitalism these days. And it only produces results for "reliability" in very narrow terms. The commodities in question usually have to be replaced outright more often because repairs of specific components are next-to-impossible. Repair intervention goes down a bit, but the "repair" has been redefined as a process of replacement. The upshot is that consumerism cultivates a disincentive to combine reliability with overall durability (which includes repair-ability)-- ta da! A throw-away culture results that ends up breaking-down the very planet we live on.
Speaking of game consoles, planned obsolescence figures greatly into this manufacturing miasma as well; Processor architectures are switched between iterations of each product line to induce their customers to buy more new software titles.
It seems to be Windows, if you follow the links. I think the details are almost unimportant though; Desktops need an integrated hypervisor to be reliably secure. This greatly reduces the attack surface, though none are as good as Qubes OS at this point.
User should look out for... Windows. That's what this thing runs on according to a description of this malware's predecessor/sister (linked in article)./. stories suck when they don't mention the host OS.
Um, I think its you who are mistaken by lumping Android (choice of OS and app sources) in with iOS (Apple-only source).
FairPhone are making sure the hardware will work with FOSS versions of Android and they are going as far as to test with other OS's like Firefox; the phone is designed to have the users' choice of OS installed onto it. That is a huge difference from the typical Android vendor.
In the EU look to Fairphone for a device without the slave labor, rampant pollution and closed systems. They are delivering this month(!) and on a scale of >32,000 units for their first run (original goal was 25k). Price is 325 euros.
Hopefully after an initial success, they will want to make one for the US market. Even so, I'd consider using one of the EU models in the US as a small tablet.
TFA could conceivably be titled, "How to turn up the Noise on reality-based social circles".
'Having trouble marketing in Facebook and Twitter audiences? Here's how to insinuate your ads into their conversations while keeping their protests down to a minimum...'
Most people don't buy into climate conspiracy theory. IMHO, this new method is more likely to be employed by paid Public Relations types to blunt pressure calling for social and ecological responsibility. If they can target unhinged conspiracies as "bubbles", they can preferentially target informed progressives (or any online community) to serve the interests of big business.
I wouldn't trust the advertising business to be even-handed with acquired psychological tools.
From my perspective, then that's just too bad for the telcos. They received 200 billion dollars and were partially deregulated during the 90's under the guise that we'd all get fiber optic our homes. Guess what. The telcos broke that promise and the government has absolutely nothing. The telcos did however, take our money. They are simply going to have to pony up the cash to upgrade to fiber like they promised unless they can bribe congress and the FCC enough to let themselves walk away.
And these days the telco/ISPs are filthy rich, too, with huge profit margins even through the depression. What a coincidence!
...with Point B normally being within a few miles of Point A (the caller). If Point C is also local, the call's success would not be dependant on any distant infrastructure. That's how POTS works.
With VOIP and cellular, its anyone's guess whether points A & C have to be routed through a point 50+ miles away.
What's funny (disheartening and predictable, actually) about this story is that it essentially describes the rubber-stamping of a process that is already mostly completed. Its corporatists doing their usual thing...
Until fiber optic cable cable to the home is as common as copper it won't be a suitable replacement for POTS.
I think it would have to be fiber that can route packets locally and is otherwise not dependant on corporate offices or server farms located dozens or hundreds of miles away. It should be able to operate for a week or more with only local inputs.
Mesh networking has been an interesting idea tossed around and tinkered-with for years. If anything spurs it to takeoff it will probably involve the dismantling of POTS.
Funny. I'd say the exact opposite about POTS long distance. Cell phones almost completely removed the notion of long distance being different from local calls.
The pricing structure is likely an outcome of the communications structure. It only serves to illustrate how unregulated commercial services can become centralized, and local communities overly-dependant on distant infrastructure.
POTS still has you chained to a 100 year old business model where calling outside a small local area will cost you extra money. 10+ cents per minute to go 30 miles is absolutely ridiculous considering that I can do the same with a cell phone it won't likely impact my bill.
I've heard similar fulminations from people who are 'chained' to local taxes just so their neighbors' kids can go to school. IMHO, its possible to take billing priorities such as yours too far.
It would also defeat the main purpose of Tor, which is to access the Web anoynmously.
If you want to build a separate anonymous network on the top the Internet, why would you use Tor and not technology that has been developed with that purpose in mind such as I2P, Freenet or Gnunet?
Because the people involved are hurriedly grasping at concepts that they hadn't thought worthwhile just a year ago. Naturally, they gravitate toward brands that have cache and repurpose them as meaningless buzzwords in an effort to stay relevant.
Without large institutional and government support, Tor would buckle under the load of general-purpose internetworking. You need a P2P version of it essentially, which would be I2P, so that the lions' share of participants contribute bandwidth back to the network while creating much better defence against traffic analysis.
Tor has also been foolhardy in ignoring advances in computer hardware, and kept on using 1024bit keys until it was way too late. Now the NSA has many years worth of weakly-encrypted traffic stored where they can go fishin' for people they don't like (albeit, with a great amount of effort for the time being).
As to the subject of TFA, check out my post from Sunday.;)
"I assert that elementary OS is not a Linux distribution.
"Or at least that we don't aim to be. No, we'd rather be a software platform. A unified computer operating system. That means having a commitment to a particular toolkit (GTK+) and supporting a preferred programming language (Vala). It means deciding how our apps will behave. It means taking control and shaping the out-of-the-box experience as much as we possibly can by creating our own apps..."
Over time it will have to diverge from Ubuntu and the others out of necessity, given the design goals and above philosophy. In the more distant future there may remain enough residual compatibility to satisfy a Linux tinkerer, but a typical PC user would not jump through the required hoops or tolerate the lack of integration that would surely result.
I thought it was a good speech, but this 'todo' part towards making mass surveillance "expensive" stood out for me. So I used it as a list of criteria to evaluate my favorite privacy tools, I2P and Qubes OS.
Schneier's guidance does seem like a mixed bag to me, especially in this day and age; He mostly wants the privacy tech of the 1990s, only "more". I also got the same impression once watching Jake Applebaum speak at a gathering. There is this tendency to appreciate all the neat little qualities that targetted crypto does within various applications and platforms, and when asked about online privacy they regurgitate them all in a fashion that ensures no normal person would take heed. Extra demerits for implying that large IT industry projects need to be unleashed to address the privacy problem.
Its not hard to surmise from my other posts that I advocate a more blanket approach that is PC focused, so that ordinary people on their own can make the largest improvement in their online privacy using the fewest number of tools. The upshot is that those tools have to be more radical than usual in their design.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, I thought that was the whole point of MS putting Skype on the NSA PRISM program.
Sonic transmission of data does not make infection possible. If it were possible, systems would crash all the time from random noise picked up by microphones.
These 2 factors combine to kill modern drives, IMHO. The increased density makes the drive work harder to combat vibration.
HD bays and mounts ought to come with more carefully engineered dampening.
It shames people to not even understand why the capitalist society works best with mass manufactured items, and that limited run items will always have significant compromises. Make more of an item, and it gets cheaper AND more reliable through necessity of efficiency.
Actually, that's consumerism you're referring to, the preferred mode of capitalism these days. And it only produces results for "reliability" in very narrow terms. The commodities in question usually have to be replaced outright more often because repairs of specific components are next-to-impossible. Repair intervention goes down a bit, but the "repair" has been redefined as a process of replacement. The upshot is that consumerism cultivates a disincentive to combine reliability with overall durability (which includes repair-ability)-- ta da! A throw-away culture results that ends up breaking-down the very planet we live on.
Speaking of game consoles, planned obsolescence figures greatly into this manufacturing miasma as well; Processor architectures are switched between iterations of each product line to induce their customers to buy more new software titles.
Or you can use this ...which I am typing in at this moment.
It seems to be Windows, if you follow the links. I think the details are almost unimportant though; Desktops need an integrated hypervisor to be reliably secure. This greatly reduces the attack surface, though none are as good as Qubes OS at this point.
User should look out for... Windows. That's what this thing runs on according to a description of this malware's predecessor/sister (linked in article). /. stories suck when they don't mention the host OS.
Um, I think its you who are mistaken by lumping Android (choice of OS and app sources) in with iOS (Apple-only source).
FairPhone are making sure the hardware will work with FOSS versions of Android and they are going as far as to test with other OS's like Firefox; the phone is designed to have the users' choice of OS installed onto it. That is a huge difference from the typical Android vendor.
You could open an "incognito" or Private browser window for the search, then your cookies would not be visible and your history would not be applied.
In the EU look to Fairphone for a device without the slave labor, rampant pollution and closed systems. They are delivering this month(!) and on a scale of >32,000 units for their first run (original goal was 25k). Price is 325 euros.
Hopefully after an initial success, they will want to make one for the US market. Even so, I'd consider using one of the EU models in the US as a small tablet.
TFA could conceivably be titled, "How to turn up the Noise on reality-based social circles".
'Having trouble marketing in Facebook and Twitter audiences? Here's how to insinuate your ads into their conversations while keeping their protests down to a minimum...'
Most people don't buy into climate conspiracy theory. IMHO, this new method is more likely to be employed by paid Public Relations types to blunt pressure calling for social and ecological responsibility. If they can target unhinged conspiracies as "bubbles", they can preferentially target informed progressives (or any online community) to serve the interests of big business.
I wouldn't trust the advertising business to be even-handed with acquired psychological tools.
...make Finance look more like a death grip than a profession.
It's got some slight new UI twists. Other than that, in this benighted post-Snowden era, not one whit of apparent concern for security and privacy.
In looking for a new name, they should have called it MeeToo.
See http://www.fairphone.com/
From my perspective, then that's just too bad for the telcos. They received 200 billion dollars and were partially deregulated during the 90's under the guise that we'd all get fiber optic our homes. Guess what. The telcos broke that promise and the government has absolutely nothing. The telcos did however, take our money. They are simply going to have to pony up the cash to upgrade to fiber like they promised unless they can bribe congress and the FCC enough to let themselves walk away.
And these days the telco/ISPs are filthy rich, too, with huge profit margins even through the depression. What a coincidence!
...with Point B normally being within a few miles of Point A (the caller). If Point C is also local, the call's success would not be dependant on any distant infrastructure. That's how POTS works.
With VOIP and cellular, its anyone's guess whether points A & C have to be routed through a point 50+ miles away.
As others here have pointed out, even "excellent" cell phone towers require people to talk like they're using walkie-talkies.
I got rid of land lines long ago, but I haven't had a real quality conversation on the phone since. The full-duplex aural feedback just isn't there.
What's funny (disheartening and predictable, actually) about this story is that it essentially describes the rubber-stamping of a process that is already mostly completed. Its corporatists doing their usual thing...
Until fiber optic cable cable to the home is as common as copper it won't be a suitable replacement for POTS.
I think it would have to be fiber that can route packets locally and is otherwise not dependant on corporate offices or server farms located dozens or hundreds of miles away. It should be able to operate for a week or more with only local inputs.
Mesh networking has been an interesting idea tossed around and tinkered-with for years. If anything spurs it to takeoff it will probably involve the dismantling of POTS.
Funny. I'd say the exact opposite about POTS long distance. Cell phones almost completely removed the notion of long distance being different from local calls.
The pricing structure is likely an outcome of the communications structure. It only serves to illustrate how unregulated commercial services can become centralized, and local communities overly-dependant on distant infrastructure.
POTS still has you chained to a 100 year old business model where calling outside a small local area will cost you extra money. 10+ cents per minute to go 30 miles is absolutely ridiculous considering that I can do the same with a cell phone it won't likely impact my bill.
I've heard similar fulminations from people who are 'chained' to local taxes just so their neighbors' kids can go to school. IMHO, its possible to take billing priorities such as yours too far.
It would also defeat the main purpose of Tor, which is to access the Web anoynmously.
If you want to build a separate anonymous network on the top the Internet, why would you use Tor and not technology that has been developed with that purpose in mind such as I2P, Freenet or Gnunet?
Because the people involved are hurriedly grasping at concepts that they hadn't thought worthwhile just a year ago. Naturally, they gravitate toward brands that have cache and repurpose them as meaningless buzzwords in an effort to stay relevant.
Without large institutional and government support, Tor would buckle under the load of general-purpose internetworking. You need a P2P version of it essentially, which would be I2P, so that the lions' share of participants contribute bandwidth back to the network while creating much better defence against traffic analysis.
Tor has also been foolhardy in ignoring advances in computer hardware, and kept on using 1024bit keys until it was way too late. Now the NSA has many years worth of weakly-encrypted traffic stored where they can go fishin' for people they don't like (albeit, with a great amount of effort for the time being).
As to the subject of TFA, check out my post from Sunday. ;)
"I assert that elementary OS is not a Linux distribution.
"Or at least that we don't aim to be. No, we'd rather be a software platform. A unified computer operating system. That means having a commitment to a particular toolkit (GTK+) and supporting a preferred programming language (Vala). It means deciding how our apps will behave. It means taking control and shaping the out-of-the-box experience as much as we possibly can by creating our own apps..."
http://elementaryos.org/journal/distros-platforms-and-where-we-fit
Over time it will have to diverge from Ubuntu and the others out of necessity, given the design goals and above philosophy. In the more distant future there may remain enough residual compatibility to satisfy a Linux tinkerer, but a typical PC user would not jump through the required hoops or tolerate the lack of integration that would surely result.
There was a story at The Guardian some months ago about internal government documents that had labeled mainstream environmentalists as extremists.
I thought it was a good speech, but this 'todo' part towards making mass surveillance "expensive" stood out for me. So I used it as a list of criteria to evaluate my favorite privacy tools, I2P and Qubes OS.
Schneier's guidance does seem like a mixed bag to me, especially in this day and age; He mostly wants the privacy tech of the 1990s, only "more". I also got the same impression once watching Jake Applebaum speak at a gathering. There is this tendency to appreciate all the neat little qualities that targetted crypto does within various applications and platforms, and when asked about online privacy they regurgitate them all in a fashion that ensures no normal person would take heed. Extra demerits for implying that large IT industry projects need to be unleashed to address the privacy problem.
Its not hard to surmise from my other posts that I advocate a more blanket approach that is PC focused, so that ordinary people on their own can make the largest improvement in their online privacy using the fewest number of tools. The upshot is that those tools have to be more radical than usual in their design.