hey google fans, care to try to defend google, here?
I'm not able to (easily) upgrade beyond 4.x on my phone and vpn is still broken. do you guys find this behavior (wontfix) acceptable?
I sure wish I could run my vpn again. funny that on my ancient nexus one (which is stuck on 2.2) runs the vpn software just fine. and I know that on a 5.x phone it also runs fine. why google ignores this show-stopper bug, I have no idea; but 'upgrade to a new phone' is never a good answer when its JUST a software fix that lazy-assed google refused to backport.
much more british than american. I hear indians (who speak something closer to british english) say that word; but I never hear US born folks saying that. I'm over 50 and the first time I heard that word was just a few years ago. its just not common here and its quite a dated old fashioned word.
I'd like to see a court go along with a company demanding their SEVERANCE back due to a worker (who was away from the job for months) not remembering something.
then again, this is the deep south and they have zero respect for workers down there. if a southern judge rules on this, the employees COULD be toast. its not legal, but that never stopped the south from being, well, the south, before.
oh, and any business that lets medical info about patients be hacked should be forced to go out of business and the ceo's and c-levels all should be put in jail.
if we did that, over night the security of such places would be 100% better. since there is no penalty to being incompetant, they continue to be as such.
only if there is personal pain for the c-levels would anything like this change.
lots of people like to hate on calif, but in this state, its a true 'right to work' state and that means no employer can deny you the ability to work in your field (even if it means working for the competition) and no employer can force you to be OUT OF WORK. this is pants-on-head levels of crazy, here, with this bank bullshit!
look mr. company man, you are telling us that you have low confidence in your CHOICE to fire us all and hire h1b's. its not our fault you went full retard on this one; and you cannot make it our problem once you let us go.
it should be interesting to see what happens. does the bank get slapped down or are they allowed to let this die quietly? I cannot see this non-contract standing once it gets public scrutiny. banks DO need customer confidence and if this goes truly public and is NOT spun so that it makes the employees sound bad, maybe a good example could be made.
there really needs to be a LOT more company bitch-slapping since the companies are so out of control right now. they get anything they want and the US government keeps giving them this, that and the other.
nah, problem solved by fresh install of dvd based win7, disable all bad updates (beyond a certain date) and disable update mechanism entirely.
that also means that win systems can't be directly on the net and even allowing them access to the net is not very smart anymore. whee! its like win95 and win98 days, where every windows box is, by definition, unsafe on a LAN or WAN.
we had a few years in the middle where it was good to enable updates and windows was starting to show some maturity in the computer market. not any more. MS has gone back to its truly evil ways and - funny enough - its starting to make apple look good in comparison! wow, just wow.
so many dogs get killed when cops come in on no-knock warrants and 'fear for their lives' and shoot the first thing that moves.
yes, its now even a meme about cops breaking your door down, sometimes the wrong place entirely and shooting pets.
I don't worry about terrorists. but if I see a cop, I stay the hell out of his way and his space. who knows if he's a reasonable person or a looney and its a chance I don't want to take.
too bad we glorify the police and fellate them. but they are NOT very good shots, overall, and yet we trust them with the power to kill.
you are not going to get people in the US (which is also known as 'jesus land' since more americans blindly and TOTALLY follow the christian bible than believe in evolution) to fight against their chosen religion. they are blinded by brainwashing (most religious people are since they get you while you are too young to think for yourself and reject the BS) and even though you have a quite valid point - they'll never see it.
all religions do more harm than good. but mankind so loves to think that he's immortal and religion 'promises' that mankind is somehow special in this universe (we're not, btw). you can't easily undo that kind of brainwashing.
sadly, we're stuck with this mental disease that is world-wide. something about mankind's mind that makes the need to think of yourself as special in this universe - that seems to be something that we cannot fix. it will be our downfall and probably end our world, quite literally.
we have had thousands of years to get better but we have not, as a whole. I don't think we can, to be honest. too many of us buy into the idea of a god creator and that he seems to favor one group of people over another (boggle!). until we fix this, we have no hope of moving up the evolutionary ladder. again, I don't think mankind can and I think what we see now is what mankind IS about and we just can't do any better than this.
pjr is a great programmer and seems like a great guy, too.
BUT - the code is proprietary (boot loader) and don't say that BL's don't ever get corrupted or have to be reloaded; I've seen it happen more than a few times. if the chip gets corrupted and needs reloading I'm not going to WANT to buy a new chip from paul every time.
for one-offs its great. but the cost for the chips gets expensive when you add in his price points.
again, he's a great programmer and his stuff is top-notch, but it comes with a cost and its not very affordable if you have to build more than a few units with his chips.
basically you are saying that you'd have to treat the cell phone as simple a transport, only, and never a data entry or even data display device. it should not even be part of any encryption system other than normal cell or wifi. assume its weak and just consider it like UDP (lol). do all your data entry, display and encryption outside of the phone and the phone simply gives you a wifi AP.
if you think about it, that's a huge waste. such power and display, being ignored and using it just to convert cell rf to wifi rf. in fact, there are boxes that do that cheaper and better. you could get a $30 battery 'travel router' and have cell rf via usb and wifi also over another usb port. that gets you raw ip.
then, you need your trusted phone, but it can't be any kind of 'normal' phone. and this does not know or care about cell and only speaks ip/wifi. you can have a trustable touchscreen system that does that and it does not have to have any blackbox magic in it.
it still means you need 2 boxes. but really, since one box (the cell part) will never be 'ours' or trustable, might as well make it its own separate box, create an IP boundary and talk just IP.
if a phone can be repurposed so that no black magic is left in it and all code is known and trustable, then we could go back to using 'phones' as user interfaces. but really, if you need to trust it, you can't use phones as phones and UI devices anymore.
apps can change behavior if you deny privs and even worse, fail silently and not tell you why.
best is to allow all privs and feed the apps JUNK FAKE DATA. everyone's happy. well, everyone that matters, anyway.
anything less is not good enough. no special cases for apps; let each app gets its 'data'; but let ME decide what 'data' means.
if apps don't like getting fed dummy data then maybe they will stop asking for the world. its a training thing; we have to train our app developers to STOP demanding the world just for a flashlight app!
xprivacy feeds dummy data. I have not been able to install it yet, though, as it needs a bunch of things that are not always easy. but this feature is what is needed in order to put the control back in the owner's hands.
permit/deny is the wrong approach. sorry, but its a stupid way of solving what is a broken architecture. apps writers are rogue (most of them) and we have to start treating them as hostile sources. sounds harsh but that's how it is right now.
any western government (not the US) who is trying to 'shake down' google or FB gets my 100% blessing in anything they do to reduce the force, power and evilness of both of those companies.
anything that causes either of those companies PAIN is a good thing in my, uhm, 'book'.
corporations are evil and the biggest ones have the most evilness to them. anything that knocks down the evil corps even a little is a Good Thing(tm).
I spend a lot of time removing crap from webpages. sadly, this breaks things due to wildcarding a bit too much.
but I love having control over what the page renders to. in fact, it was the main idea behind the separation of content and format. the wizziwhig (lol) idiots broke the web when they refused to understand the CONCEPT of a tagged language that gets rendered to the USER'S liking, not the PUBLISHER's.
google designed a faulty os, their update model is broken, their fragmentation is a nightmare and the fact that they broke vpn's for ALL of 4.4 is NOT a carrier issue, my friend!
I love to blame carriers, too; but vpn api being broken for a year and NOT BEING FIXED is a carrier issue to you? how in the world is that their fault when google, themselves, abandoned 4.4 for key bugfixes?
I'm supposed to jump on 5.0 and not expect MAJOR bugs to be fixed in just a few versions back; a still-current version for most people??
google owns this one. sorry if that goes against your narrative but vpns being broken in a whole version and never being fixed is a huge slap in the face.
I also valued the sd card and swappable battery. it was hard for me to convert over to an lg g2 (at a friend's request). the sd card this is not hard to deal with; a $10 OTG adapter gives you usbstick access or even micro-sd. it sticks out (dongle) but its not horrible.
battery wise, my phone can take new batteries but its a huge issue to open the phone and dig out so many things. the batt is not soldered it, but its pretty deep inside. still, a batt change would be needed every 2 years or so and when that time comes, I'll do the $15 batt replacement. in the short term, sigh, there's always those usb batteries that are very common now.
lg g2 bootloader is unlocked. its not a current phone but its buyable for $120 or so, refurb or clean-used, and that's not a bad deal for what was once a flagship and still is quite competitive.
I wen with vzn, as well, due to their coverage. sucks, though, that there are different physical phone models for each carrier. even the case you buy for the phone has to match the vzn version or the att vesion. absurd!
phones really are stupid. I blame the kids who basically don't know the history of how computers COULD be and SHOULD be, and ignored all this shared wisdom we had over the past decades (in computer theory and useability) and basically started from zero and made all those same mistakes again that could have been avoided if they only hired some folks who have been working in software for more than a year after college;(
thru and thru, android shows that it was not well thought out and is one kludge over another.
is android linux? not really. take a linux admin who has lots of experience and give him an adb shell into a phone. have him poke around. are there syslog files? man pages? can you even friggin run ifconfig -a? no. nothing of the sort. its not like any linux I've been on. whatever I tried other than df, pwd, ls (and such) didn't work. its not really linux as we know it. it COULD HAVE BEEN but the children in control decided against it for some reason.
really absurd. shame what this could have been but wasn't.
a friend convinced me to try a 'new' android phone (older used one but a few gens back so its now affordable). my one and only android, the N1, is stuck at 2.2 or something equally ancient and I'm tired of that being such a POS.
refurb phone came with 4.4. I rooted it (lg g2) and installed twrp recovery (not easy at all, for some reason) and then a custom rom based on 4.4, supposedly with lots of fixes.
I then find out that vpn is broken (by design) in ALL 4.4 codebases. everyone complains about this, if you search on it. google broke an api or something and nothing works anymore for vpn.
I bought a 2nd phone of the same type as a spare. that one came with 5.0 installed. tried the custom rom for that version and vpn works; but the led indicator won't work (at all) for newmail or unaswered calls.
so, I get to pick which version I run; broken vpn but all else (mostly) working or broken led but vpn does work.
sigh. this was supposed a good phone, too. its been out long enough so it should be stable but its not. god know what else is broken but I have not found it yet.
stock os is not any better and has bloat which needed to be removed, anyway.
when I searched for the vpn issue, it seems that google has left this open for more than a year, unfixed! their reply: essentially saying 'go to 5.x and abandon 4.x'.
great. just great. I can do that but many others can't, and the led indicator is broken on 5.x, with no fix in sight that I can find.
android is a fucking mess. a total steaming pile of shit. the reason people put up with this is because there are not many other choices. few want any part of MS anymore, many (like me) don't love apple; and so there's nothing really left anymore but android;(
a year and no vpn fixes. 4.3 worked (from what I've read). 4.4.* broke it. there is nothing newer than that in the 4.x train (is there?). 5.x is a mess, as well.
this does not even address the security issue (SF). if I want a fix for this, I'm essentially on my own. I have not seen any fixes for this phone yet and since its 'old' now, I doubt I will.
thanks google. you are THE 'short attention span' poster child of the century. you have the talent to be a good vendor but you seem to not care! how sad. strong ability but you lack focus and you give up on things PEOPLE ACTUALLY USE and just move onto the next shiny thing.
sigh. android will continue to be a mess and a nexus does not guarantee anything about patches or support. google just has no reason to care about you. they don't get paid by you, they are not working for you and whatever they throw over the wall, the fanboys will think its great no matter what.
Slashdot Mirror
google closed the bug and marked it as 'wont fix'.
I'd like you to answer why you think that's ok.
scuze me?
the problem is not at the app level. its in the o/s. and I'm already rooted, so that's not the issue, either.
sigh. not sure why I bother replying to ac's...
but I'm on android 4.x and 4.x is marked 'wont fix' by google and their vpn (ipsec, I think; not sure which component is broken) just will not work.
https://code.google.com/p/andr...
hey google fans, care to try to defend google, here?
I'm not able to (easily) upgrade beyond 4.x on my phone and vpn is still broken. do you guys find this behavior (wontfix) acceptable?
I sure wish I could run my vpn again. funny that on my ancient nexus one (which is stuck on 2.2) runs the vpn software just fine. and I know that on a 5.x phone it also runs fine. why google ignores this show-stopper bug, I have no idea; but 'upgrade to a new phone' is never a good answer when its JUST a software fix that lazy-assed google refused to backport.
much more british than american. I hear indians (who speak something closer to british english) say that word; but I never hear US born folks saying that. I'm over 50 and the first time I heard that word was just a few years ago. its just not common here and its quite a dated old fashioned word.
"I'm just a victim of circumstance!"
yeah yeah, curlie rules.
I'd like to see a court go along with a company demanding their SEVERANCE back due to a worker (who was away from the job for months) not remembering something.
then again, this is the deep south and they have zero respect for workers down there. if a southern judge rules on this, the employees COULD be toast. its not legal, but that never stopped the south from being, well, the south, before.
that's all I have to say.
oh, and any business that lets medical info about patients be hacked should be forced to go out of business and the ceo's and c-levels all should be put in jail.
if we did that, over night the security of such places would be 100% better. since there is no penalty to being incompetant, they continue to be as such.
only if there is personal pain for the c-levels would anything like this change.
(ring, ring)
"hello?"
"we need you to come in and fix our system."
"busy now; just reinstall windows."
"really?"
(click)
lots of people like to hate on calif, but in this state, its a true 'right to work' state and that means no employer can deny you the ability to work in your field (even if it means working for the competition) and no employer can force you to be OUT OF WORK. this is pants-on-head levels of crazy, here, with this bank bullshit!
look mr. company man, you are telling us that you have low confidence in your CHOICE to fire us all and hire h1b's. its not our fault you went full retard on this one; and you cannot make it our problem once you let us go.
it should be interesting to see what happens. does the bank get slapped down or are they allowed to let this die quietly? I cannot see this non-contract standing once it gets public scrutiny. banks DO need customer confidence and if this goes truly public and is NOT spun so that it makes the employees sound bad, maybe a good example could be made.
there really needs to be a LOT more company bitch-slapping since the companies are so out of control right now. they get anything they want and the US government keeps giving them this, that and the other.
clear her system, disable updates and have a good backup plan so you can always restore from read-only media (yeah, dvd) anytime you want.
seriously. disable updates and have a good backup/restore strat and test it to be sure you can do a restore.
nah, problem solved by fresh install of dvd based win7, disable all bad updates (beyond a certain date) and disable update mechanism entirely.
that also means that win systems can't be directly on the net and even allowing them access to the net is not very smart anymore.
whee! its like win95 and win98 days, where every windows box is, by definition, unsafe on a LAN or WAN.
we had a few years in the middle where it was good to enable updates and windows was starting to show some maturity in the computer market. not any more. MS has gone back to its truly evil ways and - funny enough - its starting to make apple look good in comparison! wow, just wow.
does that apply to cops, too?
so many dogs get killed when cops come in on no-knock warrants and 'fear for their lives' and shoot the first thing that moves.
yes, its now even a meme about cops breaking your door down, sometimes the wrong place entirely and shooting pets.
I don't worry about terrorists. but if I see a cop, I stay the hell out of his way and his space. who knows if he's a reasonable person or a looney and its a chance I don't want to take.
too bad we glorify the police and fellate them. but they are NOT very good shots, overall, and yet we trust them with the power to kill.
what was it like in the dealership? were they 'hungry' or acting like nothing happened?
I wonder if people can go to VW and get 'deals' (even on non TDI cars) given the current publicity vw is having to deal with.
you are not going to get people in the US (which is also known as 'jesus land' since more americans blindly and TOTALLY follow the christian bible than believe in evolution) to fight against their chosen religion. they are blinded by brainwashing (most religious people are since they get you while you are too young to think for yourself and reject the BS) and even though you have a quite valid point - they'll never see it.
all religions do more harm than good. but mankind so loves to think that he's immortal and religion 'promises' that mankind is somehow special in this universe (we're not, btw). you can't easily undo that kind of brainwashing.
sadly, we're stuck with this mental disease that is world-wide. something about mankind's mind that makes the need to think of yourself as special in this universe - that seems to be something that we cannot fix. it will be our downfall and probably end our world, quite literally.
we have had thousands of years to get better but we have not, as a whole. I don't think we can, to be honest. too many of us buy into the idea of a god creator and that he seems to favor one group of people over another (boggle!). until we fix this, we have no hope of moving up the evolutionary ladder. again, I don't think mankind can and I think what we see now is what mankind IS about and we just can't do any better than this.
which exit?
pjr is a great programmer and seems like a great guy, too.
BUT - the code is proprietary (boot loader) and don't say that BL's don't ever get corrupted or have to be reloaded; I've seen it happen more than a few times. if the chip gets corrupted and needs reloading I'm not going to WANT to buy a new chip from paul every time.
for one-offs its great. but the cost for the chips gets expensive when you add in his price points.
again, he's a great programmer and his stuff is top-notch, but it comes with a cost and its not very affordable if you have to build more than a few units with his chips.
basically you are saying that you'd have to treat the cell phone as simple a transport, only, and never a data entry or even data display device. it should not even be part of any encryption system other than normal cell or wifi. assume its weak and just consider it like UDP (lol). do all your data entry, display and encryption outside of the phone and the phone simply gives you a wifi AP.
if you think about it, that's a huge waste. such power and display, being ignored and using it just to convert cell rf to wifi rf. in fact, there are boxes that do that cheaper and better. you could get a $30 battery 'travel router' and have cell rf via usb and wifi also over another usb port. that gets you raw ip.
then, you need your trusted phone, but it can't be any kind of 'normal' phone. and this does not know or care about cell and only speaks ip/wifi. you can have a trustable touchscreen system that does that and it does not have to have any blackbox magic in it.
it still means you need 2 boxes. but really, since one box (the cell part) will never be 'ours' or trustable, might as well make it its own separate box, create an IP boundary and talk just IP.
if a phone can be repurposed so that no black magic is left in it and all code is known and trustable, then we could go back to using 'phones' as user interfaces. but really, if you need to trust it, you can't use phones as phones and UI devices anymore.
shame. really it is. but this is what we have.
that does not go far enough.
apps can change behavior if you deny privs and even worse, fail silently and not tell you why.
best is to allow all privs and feed the apps JUNK FAKE DATA. everyone's happy. well, everyone that matters, anyway.
anything less is not good enough. no special cases for apps; let each app gets its 'data'; but let ME decide what 'data' means.
if apps don't like getting fed dummy data then maybe they will stop asking for the world. its a training thing; we have to train our app developers to STOP demanding the world just for a flashlight app!
xprivacy feeds dummy data. I have not been able to install it yet, though, as it needs a bunch of things that are not always easy. but this feature is what is needed in order to put the control back in the owner's hands.
permit/deny is the wrong approach. sorry, but its a stupid way of solving what is a broken architecture. apps writers are rogue (most of them) and we have to start treating them as hostile sources. sounds harsh but that's how it is right now.
china wing-wang-wong no name brand
you should upgrade to, at least, a wun hung lo unit; the wing-wang-wong just doesn't measure up.
any western government (not the US) who is trying to 'shake down' google or FB gets my 100% blessing in anything they do to reduce the force, power and evilness of both of those companies.
anything that causes either of those companies PAIN is a good thing in my, uhm, 'book'.
corporations are evil and the biggest ones have the most evilness to them. anything that knocks down the evil corps even a little is a Good Thing(tm).
I spend a lot of time removing crap from webpages.
sadly, this breaks things due to wildcarding a bit too much.
but I love having control over what the page renders to. in fact, it was the main idea behind the separation of content and format. the wizziwhig (lol) idiots broke the web when they refused to understand the CONCEPT of a tagged language that gets rendered to the USER'S liking, not the PUBLISHER's.
damn.
google designed a faulty os, their update model is broken, their fragmentation is a nightmare and the fact that they broke vpn's for ALL of 4.4 is NOT a carrier issue, my friend!
I love to blame carriers, too; but vpn api being broken for a year and NOT BEING FIXED is a carrier issue to you? how in the world is that their fault when google, themselves, abandoned 4.4 for key bugfixes?
I'm supposed to jump on 5.0 and not expect MAJOR bugs to be fixed in just a few versions back; a still-current version for most people??
google owns this one. sorry if that goes against your narrative but vpns being broken in a whole version and never being fixed is a huge slap in the face.
I also valued the sd card and swappable battery. it was hard for me to convert over to an lg g2 (at a friend's request). the sd card this is not hard to deal with; a $10 OTG adapter gives you usbstick access or even micro-sd. it sticks out (dongle) but its not horrible.
battery wise, my phone can take new batteries but its a huge issue to open the phone and dig out so many things. the batt is not soldered it, but its pretty deep inside. still, a batt change would be needed every 2 years or so and when that time comes, I'll do the $15 batt replacement. in the short term, sigh, there's always those usb batteries that are very common now.
lg g2 bootloader is unlocked. its not a current phone but its buyable for $120 or so, refurb or clean-used, and that's not a bad deal for what was once a flagship and still is quite competitive.
I wen with vzn, as well, due to their coverage. sucks, though, that there are different physical phone models for each carrier. even the case you buy for the phone has to match the vzn version or the att vesion. absurd!
phones really are stupid. I blame the kids who basically don't know the history of how computers COULD be and SHOULD be, and ignored all this shared wisdom we had over the past decades (in computer theory and useability) and basically started from zero and made all those same mistakes again that could have been avoided if they only hired some folks who have been working in software for more than a year after college ;(
thru and thru, android shows that it was not well thought out and is one kludge over another.
is android linux? not really. take a linux admin who has lots of experience and give him an adb shell into a phone. have him poke around. are there syslog files? man pages? can you even friggin run ifconfig -a? no. nothing of the sort. its not like any linux I've been on. whatever I tried other than df, pwd, ls (and such) didn't work. its not really linux as we know it. it COULD HAVE BEEN but the children in control decided against it for some reason.
really absurd. shame what this could have been but wasn't.
I continue to hate on google.
a friend convinced me to try a 'new' android phone (older used one but a few gens back so its now affordable). my one and only android, the N1, is stuck at 2.2 or something equally ancient and I'm tired of that being such a POS.
refurb phone came with 4.4. I rooted it (lg g2) and installed twrp recovery (not easy at all, for some reason) and then a custom rom based on 4.4, supposedly with lots of fixes.
I then find out that vpn is broken (by design) in ALL 4.4 codebases. everyone complains about this, if you search on it. google broke an api or something and nothing works anymore for vpn.
I bought a 2nd phone of the same type as a spare. that one came with 5.0 installed. tried the custom rom for that version and vpn works; but the led indicator won't work (at all) for newmail or unaswered calls.
so, I get to pick which version I run; broken vpn but all else (mostly) working or broken led but vpn does work.
sigh. this was supposed a good phone, too. its been out long enough so it should be stable but its not. god know what else is broken but I have not found it yet.
stock os is not any better and has bloat which needed to be removed, anyway.
when I searched for the vpn issue, it seems that google has left this open for more than a year, unfixed! their reply: essentially saying 'go to 5.x and abandon 4.x'.
great. just great. I can do that but many others can't, and the led indicator is broken on 5.x, with no fix in sight that I can find.
android is a fucking mess. a total steaming pile of shit. the reason people put up with this is because there are not many other choices. few want any part of MS anymore, many (like me) don't love apple; and so there's nothing really left anymore but android ;(
a year and no vpn fixes. 4.3 worked (from what I've read). 4.4.* broke it. there is nothing newer than that in the 4.x train (is there?). 5.x is a mess, as well.
this does not even address the security issue (SF). if I want a fix for this, I'm essentially on my own. I have not seen any fixes for this phone yet and since its 'old' now, I doubt I will.
thanks google. you are THE 'short attention span' poster child of the century. you have the talent to be a good vendor but you seem to not care! how sad. strong ability but you lack focus and you give up on things PEOPLE ACTUALLY USE and just move onto the next shiny thing.
sigh. android will continue to be a mess and a nexus does not guarantee anything about patches or support. google just has no reason to care about you. they don't get paid by you, they are not working for you and whatever they throw over the wall, the fanboys will think its great no matter what.
fwiw, that trick did not work for me. I have cookies turned off and lots of blockers active. nice try though.