Nevermind that in creating such a thing they've created a gigantic security hole in the hardware itself that an attacker could potentially use to make sure your computer is a permanent part of someones botnet!
You think that wasn't the whole point to begin with? A remotely activated sleeper that sits on everyone's Windows machine at boot, and can run any executable dropped on the filesystem, silently and at every boot? The.gov is probably wringing their hands at the possibilities. Seriously. They're already doing it on phones, why not on everyone's personal computers as well?
That, "SOME DAY" it might be more economical to install an identical system does not change the fact that it's still a silly splurge NOW.
If the system does NOT pay for itself over a reasonable period of time (and within the lifetime of the product warranty), you're splurging. Not spending wisely.
I pay close to $250/month for power (it just went up 47% in CT in the last 6 months for the same power usage). So if the 10kWh PowerWall costs me $3,500 (+inverter, grid tie-in, installation), then it pays for itself in ~18 months. That's a pretty easy sell from my perspective.
Adding $10k of solar panels to the system to go completely off the grid, just adds to that value, and to the resale price of my house if I choose to sell it within the next 10-20 years. As panel efficiencies improve, I can upgrade those panels, or add an additional PowerWall, and increase that independence.
Totally worth it, in my opinion.
Besides, many (most?) communities are now putting a quota on the number of solar installations, because of the pressure they put on the common utility/grid system (yes, they do -add- more pressure to the grid, contrary to common thought, especially at nighttime and when there is heavy, localized cloudcover), so if you wait, you may find yourself the only one on the block who can't add solar because it's prohibited. A PowerWall tied to the common utility can relieve some of that pressure, and increase the independence from a constant feed from the power company.
Never, EVER accept a Friend request from someone you haven't met, physically, in person. Seriously.
I treat Facebook and LinkedIn with the same policy, and I have dozens of Friend Requests pending for YEARS, which will never be accepted. If I haven't met the person and pressed palms with them, then they don't get connected to me using social platforms, period.
You would be wise to do the same. With all the dark profiles being built behind the scenes, it makes sense to keep things clean and tight.
...they've already tasted the power, and they want more.
It begins with your online accounts, back-door access to the data systems you know and "trust" (Yahoo, GMail, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), extending on to IoT monitoring (XBox Kinect sending your data to Microsoft nightly? Samsung TVs recording your room and sharing it with third parties?), license plate cameras everywhere, mailbox RFID monitoring, Stinger cells and much more.
Nay, the only thing that will stop Mass Surveillance at this point, is two words: Mass Extinction.
SIM-lock issue is no biggie, you can always simply buy the phone without telco as middleman.
...except in the United States of America.
You might be outside the US, but you literally cannot purchase a phone in the US without specifying which carrier you're going to bind that phone to, contractually. Not Samsung/HTC/LG/Motorola/Google, not Microsoft, not Nokia, not iPhone and not BlackBerry.
So you're luck to be outside the US. For the rest of us, we're stuck paying full price for phones off-contract, and still being held to carrier restrictions.
I use this on my Android device with AdAway with tremendous success. I also use Android Firewall with some custom rules to block annoying apps from trying to send my data through servers in China, Romania, etc.
Use these, and you'll have a nice, clean, tight setup. I also use Squid on my LAN, and my router is configured to send every packet through Squid (custom iptables rules on the router; a Buffalo Wireless running dd-wrt), and on the Squid side, I block about 12,000 separate ad URLs, domains and sites, so again, the experience for anyone on my segment, is nice and clean and fast.
The side benefit of Squid, is that I can see every single request, phone home, ping, malicious or otherwise, that my devices try to do, and I can permit, prohibit, redirect or block entirely based on schedule, as I wish.
You'd be surprised how chatty a standard iPhone and Android device are, without "training" on the Squid/AdAway side.
They were probably doing it anyway, and now want everyone to opt-in, so they can cover their arses before they got caught for tracking everyone without their consent.
There's one phone that just throws away the encryption keys, which are never stored anywhere than on two locations on the hard drive (in encrypted form), so only these two locations need to be wiped.
Unfortunately, not supported by AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile here in the US.
Sorry, 0.facebook.com is only supported by select mobile carriers and is not available from your mobile carrier. If you are contacting your mobile carrier, mention that your IP address 99.16.210.3 is not supported. Go to m.facebook.com (Standard data charges may apply) Report a Problem.
You may have uninstalled the app, but did you also freeze the in-ROM Facebook SNS service? Not likely, and it will bridge (eg: phone home) to other apps that integrate with and talk to Facebook.
Get Titanium Backup and freeze SNS, or use Root App Delete (for rooted Android phones) and get rid of that bugger. It eats data, leaks your location every 60s, and does all sorts of things you don't need or want it doing.
"Have you ever plugged your phone into a strange USB port because you really needed a charge and thought: "Gee who could be stealing my data?". We all have needs and sometimes you just need to charge your phone. "Any port in a storm." as the saying goes. Well now you can be a bit safer. "USB Condoms" prevent accidental data exchange when your device is plugged in to another device with a USB cable. USB Condoms achieve this by cutting off the data pins in the USB cable and allowing only the power pins to connect through.Thus, these "USB Condoms" prevent attacks like "juice jacking".
Despite Apple and other corporate plans to move everything and everyone to "The Cloud", the masses are doing quite the opposite, moving everything away from the cloud and hosted resources.
There's already a growing exodus to use personally-controlled storage, cloud and other environments, or heavily encrypted storage platforms to hold their data, making apps that expect "iCloud(tm)" and other in-the-clear, branded solutions from being all but useless.
So as long as these "replacement" versions work primarily, and with full functionality without feature-reduction 100% locally and by default, then they'll be fine. If they require the iCloud/cloud to function, they're going to suffer from diminished adoption.
The same is happening with digital currency v. analog/paper currency, resulting from increased eroding confidence in the system (eg: Target failures, identity theft, and hundreds of other examples in the news, nearly weekly).
If these features aren't being demanded by users (and there's plenty of evidence they're not), then why the big push to store everything you have and own, off-premises?
On my side, every single packet across the wireless side of the router, goes through a local Squid instance. Not only can I inspect the logs, but I have Squid filtering out tens of thousands of sites, domains, ad spamming pages and other things, so if there were any abuses coming, I could just block those too, or turn on other block index files and filter off even more.
Now THAT is impressive. Here in the Northeast US, where we have AT&T for phone and DSL, each GB over your cap, costs $15.00. It used to be $10.00, but they jumped it 50% without warning a few months ago.
Does the "kill switch" remotely disable the mobile/cellular capabilities of the phone? Or does it completely disable the device, thus bricking it?
These are smartphones, and they're used by many people for more than just a phone. I'd even argue that the function used the least on these devices, is the actual phone itself.
I rarely see someone having an actual voice conversation on a phone these, days, but people spend hours and hours doing everything else with them.
So if there's a civil uprising, martial law, and the.gov decides to shunt an entire city (Boston Bombers anyone? Greece? Turkey last year?, we've seen this many times already), then they also render these devices inert for much more than just communications devices.
- My ex-wife can no longer monitor her blood sugar (Type 1 diabetic, 100% digitally monitored via iPhone) - Digital locks on your home no longer are able to be unlocked (keyless entry with NFS, etc.) - Credit card information, details, photos, videos, other data is now unavailable
The chilling effect of this alone, should cause hundreds of thousands of people to step up and march on their congressperson's front door.
The potential abuses of this are so far reaching, far superseding the cost of replacing a phone handset that happens to get stolen.
I'd rather see the funding go into a user-driven device locating capability, with remote wipe/reporting on the other end instead of a remote kill switch controlled by corporations and the.gov.
Most of us who attend meetings, use computers. We don't sit back and watch movies or videos. We do actual work.
See all that horizontal scrolling while just viewing webpages? Magnify that tenfold for apps that don't support horizontal scrolling (eg: PowerPoint, Office apps, many editors, mail, etc.)
This is utterly useless in any sort of business settings, if it can't even handle the lowest-common-denominator laptop screen resolution.
I own a Gigabyte GB-BXi7-4770R BRIX Pro, so I do love and respect their products, it's just that THIS ONE is a poorly-executed implementation, of what could have been an amazing product.
It's got a ways to go before it's useful to the masses, beyond bachelor party photos-on-the-wall and starting gamers.
Slashdot Mirror
...and breached 60 million accounts!
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08...
Nevermind that in creating such a thing they've created a gigantic security hole in the hardware itself that an attacker could potentially use to make sure your computer is a permanent part of someones botnet!
You think that wasn't the whole point to begin with? A remotely activated sleeper that sits on everyone's Windows machine at boot, and can run any executable dropped on the filesystem, silently and at every boot? The .gov is probably wringing their hands at the possibilities. Seriously. They're already doing it on phones, why not on everyone's personal computers as well?
That, "SOME DAY" it might be more economical to install an identical system does not change the fact that it's still a silly splurge NOW.
If the system does NOT pay for itself over a reasonable period of time (and within the lifetime of the product warranty), you're splurging. Not spending wisely.
I pay close to $250/month for power (it just went up 47% in CT in the last 6 months for the same power usage). So if the 10kWh PowerWall costs me $3,500 (+inverter, grid tie-in, installation), then it pays for itself in ~18 months. That's a pretty easy sell from my perspective.
Adding $10k of solar panels to the system to go completely off the grid, just adds to that value, and to the resale price of my house if I choose to sell it within the next 10-20 years. As panel efficiencies improve, I can upgrade those panels, or add an additional PowerWall, and increase that independence.
Totally worth it, in my opinion.
Besides, many (most?) communities are now putting a quota on the number of solar installations, because of the pressure they put on the common utility/grid system (yes, they do -add- more pressure to the grid, contrary to common thought, especially at nighttime and when there is heavy, localized cloudcover), so if you wait, you may find yourself the only one on the block who can't add solar because it's prohibited. A PowerWall tied to the common utility can relieve some of that pressure, and increase the independence from a constant feed from the power company.
Never, EVER accept a Friend request from someone you haven't met, physically, in person. Seriously.
I treat Facebook and LinkedIn with the same policy, and I have dozens of Friend Requests pending for YEARS, which will never be accepted. If I haven't met the person and pressed palms with them, then they don't get connected to me using social platforms, period.
You would be wise to do the same. With all the dark profiles being built behind the scenes, it makes sense to keep things clean and tight.
From Black Mirror, a great series on Netflix and also in-full on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
...they've already tasted the power, and they want more.
It begins with your online accounts, back-door access to the data systems you know and "trust" (Yahoo, GMail, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), extending on to IoT monitoring (XBox Kinect sending your data to Microsoft nightly? Samsung TVs recording your room and sharing it with third parties?), license plate cameras everywhere, mailbox RFID monitoring, Stinger cells and much more.
Nay, the only thing that will stop Mass Surveillance at this point, is two words: Mass Extinction.
THIS!
Then why does newspaper columnist Marian vos Savant have a recorded IQ of 228?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Ahem. Laws don't "expire", but that's why I suppose you chose to post that comment under AC, instead of a proper username.
You might be outside the US, but you literally cannot purchase a phone in the US without specifying which carrier you're going to bind that phone to, contractually. Not Samsung/HTC/LG/Motorola/Google, not Microsoft, not Nokia, not iPhone and not BlackBerry.
So you're luck to be outside the US. For the rest of us, we're stuck paying full price for phones off-contract, and still being held to carrier restrictions.
...and even if he doesn't sign it, it becomes law anyway, as long as Congress is in session.
I use this on my Android device with AdAway with tremendous success. I also use Android Firewall with some custom rules to block annoying apps from trying to send my data through servers in China, Romania, etc.
Here's my AdAway custom lists:
http://adaway.org/hosts.txt
http://hosts-file.net/ad_serve...
http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/...
http://someonewhocares.org/hos...
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho...
Use these, and you'll have a nice, clean, tight setup. I also use Squid on my LAN, and my router is configured to send every packet through Squid (custom iptables rules on the router; a Buffalo Wireless running dd-wrt), and on the Squid side, I block about 12,000 separate ad URLs, domains and sites, so again, the experience for anyone on my segment, is nice and clean and fast.
The side benefit of Squid, is that I can see every single request, phone home, ping, malicious or otherwise, that my devices try to do, and I can permit, prohibit, redirect or block entirely based on schedule, as I wish.
You'd be surprised how chatty a standard iPhone and Android device are, without "training" on the Squid/AdAway side.
Can I set my own key? Set and maintain my own hash? No?
Not interested.
We want true, user-controlled security, not vendor provided.
We've learned our lessons already. The trust is gone.
(posting from my uber-low ID)
They were probably doing it anyway, and now want everyone to opt-in, so they can cover their arses before they got caught for tracking everyone without their consent.
So you screwed around with peoples accounts, huh? Aren't you proud of yourself.
...not to mention, doing so is a Felony. No wonder they posted as AC.
There's one phone that just throws away the encryption keys, which are never stored anywhere than on two locations on the hard drive (in encrypted form), so
only these two locations need to be wiped.
Yay for BlackBerry!
Unfortunately, not supported by AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile here in the US.
You may have uninstalled the app, but did you also freeze the in-ROM Facebook SNS service? Not likely, and it will bridge (eg: phone home) to other apps that integrate with and talk to Facebook.
Get Titanium Backup and freeze SNS, or use Root App Delete (for rooted Android phones) and get rid of that bugger. It eats data, leaks your location every 60s, and does all sorts of things you don't need or want it doing.
And what if that outlet, with the "TSA-approved Cable(tm)" is doing more than just powering on your device?
This is why USB Condoms exist (no, this is not a joke)
http://int3.cc/collections/fro...
Despite Apple and other corporate plans to move everything and everyone to "The Cloud", the masses are doing quite the opposite, moving everything away from the cloud and hosted resources.
There's already a growing exodus to use personally-controlled storage, cloud and other environments, or heavily encrypted storage platforms to hold their data, making apps that expect "iCloud(tm)" and other in-the-clear, branded solutions from being all but useless.
So as long as these "replacement" versions work primarily, and with full functionality without feature-reduction 100% locally and by default, then they'll be fine. If they require the iCloud/cloud to function, they're going to suffer from diminished adoption.
The same is happening with digital currency v. analog/paper currency, resulting from increased eroding confidence in the system (eg: Target failures, identity theft, and hundreds of other examples in the news, nearly weekly).
If these features aren't being demanded by users (and there's plenty of evidence they're not), then why the big push to store everything you have and own, off-premises?
On my side, every single packet across the wireless side of the router, goes through a local Squid instance. Not only can I inspect the logs, but I have Squid filtering out tens of thousands of sites, domains, ad spamming pages and other things, so if there were any abuses coming, I could just block those too, or turn on other block index files and filter off even more.
Easey peasey.
Now THAT is impressive. Here in the Northeast US, where we have AT&T for phone and DSL, each GB over your cap, costs $15.00. It used to be $10.00, but they jumped it 50% without warning a few months ago.
Here's the real Occum's Razor here:
Does the "kill switch" remotely disable the mobile/cellular capabilities of the phone? Or does it completely disable the device, thus bricking it?
These are smartphones, and they're used by many people for more than just a phone. I'd even argue that the function used the least on these devices, is the actual phone itself.
I rarely see someone having an actual voice conversation on a phone these, days, but people spend hours and hours doing everything else with them.
So if there's a civil uprising, martial law, and the .gov decides to shunt an entire city (Boston Bombers anyone? Greece? Turkey last year?, we've seen this many times already), then they also render these devices inert for much more than just communications devices.
- My ex-wife can no longer monitor her blood sugar (Type 1 diabetic, 100% digitally monitored via iPhone)
- Digital locks on your home no longer are able to be unlocked (keyless entry with NFS, etc.)
- Credit card information, details, photos, videos, other data is now unavailable
The chilling effect of this alone, should cause hundreds of thousands of people to step up and march on their congressperson's front door.
The potential abuses of this are so far reaching, far superseding the cost of replacing a phone handset that happens to get stolen.
I'd rather see the funding go into a user-driven device locating capability, with remote wipe/reporting on the other end instead of a remote kill switch controlled by corporations and the .gov.
Very scary stuff happening here. Verrrrry scary.
Question: How is this any different from typing in a pirated key to a licensed copy of software you have installed in 'demo' mode today?
Answer: It isn't. You're not licensed to use the service, and enabling it on your machine, is a violation of the terms of that license.
Ahm... no.
Most of us who attend meetings, use computers. We don't sit back and watch movies or videos. We do actual work.
See all that horizontal scrolling while just viewing webpages? Magnify that tenfold for apps that don't support horizontal scrolling (eg: PowerPoint, Office apps, many editors, mail, etc.)
This is utterly useless in any sort of business settings, if it can't even handle the lowest-common-denominator laptop screen resolution.
I own a Gigabyte GB-BXi7-4770R BRIX Pro, so I do love and respect their products, it's just that THIS ONE is a poorly-executed implementation, of what could have been an amazing product.
It's got a ways to go before it's useful to the masses, beyond bachelor party photos-on-the-wall and starting gamers.