You're focusing on the trees and ignoring not just the forest, but the entire Amazon Basin.
How Wikipedia handles things is completely irrelevant to the situation. This legislation affects literally everybody, possibly even outside the EU depending on how far they try to wave their reproductive pseudopod.
It's a shockingly stupid piece of legislation that in one move can easily make it not worth the effort to run *any* service *at all*. ESPECIALLY if that might even vaguely involve interacting with the public, cause you'll risk liability for anything any user does.
It is overwhelmingly cost prohibitive, puts too much burden on the service providers, and destroys free speech. With legislation like that, you may as well not even bother having the internet at all.
The problem is scale. It's not just a couple machines doing this... It's thousands or 10s of thousands of machines that are usually spread across entire countries or multiple countries. And those machines don't even do sustained traffic anymore. Maybe 20% of them will do The Thing(tm), then they'll go quiet and another batch will start doing The Thing(tm).
IMO, around the mid-late 2000s when they first moved to intel and commoditized hardware, was peak Apple.
Sure, there were issues, but by and large the sum of their parts was excellent. Their prices had only a relatively tiny margin compared to identically speced other laptops (couple hundred at worst). They were also easily repairable. They supported the majority of important ports at the time, with the exception of their video dongles. Also, their peripherals were crap but you didn't necessarily have to use those. (Holy hell those hockey puck mice...)
All in all, they were actually making decent products, and were generally a heck of a lot more reliable than the Windows equivalent. I still remember being amazed that I could suspend and resume the machine as often as I wanted without it failing on me. I could work for a month without even a reboot unless I had to do a system-level update. At the time Windows XP wasn't even a distant second for reliability.
I am still using my MBP2011 because I was able to upgrade the HDD to a 1TB SSD and add 16GB RAM several years after the original purchase, so now the machine still works relatively great (although the way the fan is going, I think I need to take it apart and give it a good dusting...) The fixed battery still pisses me off, but I can't do anything about that.
But now we're at the point where their devices are completely unupgradable and unrepairable without great cost, and now I have to decide whether to allow Apple to continue f__king my wallet over sideways, or abandoning my investment in the platform and go to something else and get f__ked over in a completely different way.
We shouldn't allow Apple to get away with this shit. Just cause they *finally* introduce a repair program, doesn't negate all the hell people have had to go through. Those class action lawsuits should continue on. And the lawsuits need to stop being so stupidly toothless. If Apple doesn't get hit with a bill that's at least 5 billion, they will just treat these as the cost of doing business.
IMO Apple doesn't face enough class actions considering how breathtakingly shit their entire product lineup has become. It's very frustrating how their hardware used to be absolutely second to none, and justified their premium, but in the last decade or so they've turned into nothing but a train wreck running on momentum.
I'm so livid with the entire computer industry today. Your choices are: Buy Apple and pay extra for shit, gimmicky hardware, buy Microsoft and get ok hardware but an OS so offensively managed that your machine can stop working through no fault of your own, or buy Google and have a spy camera shoved up your ass. (Or get Linux and be prepared to put your sysadmin hat to perform an operation that every other OS has been able to handle easily for the past 2 decades)
There are literally NO good options today. It's really depressing.
The US originally led the space race cause they couldn't handle the idea of the commies beating them to anything. Ever since the cold war ended, there has been zero political interest to keep going, unless it involved distributing pork to politicians favorite companies.
The only way US will ever become serious about space again, is if there's a military reason to do so, and that won't happen until and unless some new existential threat his the US.
Unless someone has their machine connected directly to the internet (in which case you've got a whole lot of bigger problems), what's the likelyhood that this would actually be exploited?
Woooooooooooow, how you got modded informative is beyond me when you didn't give one single piece of concrete info in your entire post.
support - never had an android device go out of support before I replaced it
What does that even mean? You replace your phone yearly? Monthly?
The verifiable fact that the overwhelming majority of android manufacturers do not put out ANY updates at all. Once you buy their device, you're SOL unless there's a demonstrable hardware failure. Of the handful of major android manufacturers out there, a tiny few of those collectively agreed to provide 2 years of android updates, for *some* of their phones. Compare that to Apple that provides a solid *5* years worth of updates on their ENTIRE lineup.
Maybe you consider phones to be disposable commodity items, but I do not. If I buy a phone, I will continue to use that phone until it is no longer physically able to do what I need it to do, or my requirements change. Heck, I'm still using a Macbook Pro from 2011 because it still does what I need. (The fact that Apple's successive generations of macbooks have been worse and worse is also a contributing factor, but I digress...)
malware - never had any, ever, on android. Getting less on iOS would be tricky
So because YOU'VE never been infected, that means that malware doesn't exist? I've never have polio or malaria, but I sure as hell recognize that they exist.
The verifiable fact is that up until a few years ago, the google app store was a cesspool of malware. Non google app stores STILL are. Google realized they needed to do something, so they implemented controls similar to what Apple was already doing, and the malware situation improved considerably. Compare that to Apple that had implemented such controls early on, and as a result the incidents of malware on iOS was literally orders of magnitude less than Android.
Google has dramatically closed that gap, but the incidence of malware on the android platform is still higher than on iOS.
flashlight - hit the 'flashlight' button that's built into the OS and it turns on the camera light. No permission changes required
I thought it was obvious that I was being hyperbolic, specifically for the reason you described. I was referencing an earlier time when phones *didn't* come with built in flashlights, so people used apps that would max the brightness of your display to act as a pseudo-flashlight. Apparently you're too young to remember that, or too busy getting your hate on to care.
privacy - so you want privacy but you use Siri. Thanks, I needed the laugh.
Apparently you live in a very black and white world so you seem to have difficult understanding that privacy, like may other things in this world, operates on a gradiant. You share your bank account information with your spouse but not with a random person on the street. Similarly, there's a difference between asking Siri to play music vs allowing a third party application from slurping my entire contacts list and monitoring my location at all times. Apple makes their money on overpriced hardware. Google makes their money by siphoning as much personal info from you as they can. That single decision informs the entire philosophy behind their entire respective product portfolios.
There is no such thing as absolute privacy. You have to give up a certain measure of privacy just to step out your front door in the morning. The best you can do is look at what privacy features are offered and decide for yourself if the privacy cost is acceptable.
That's subjective, and I disagree. E.g. I can't actually use an Apple device because it refuses to let me run the software I want.
Oh good, we've finally gotten to the part of your post that is actually reasonable and not some ridiculous knee-jerk reaction. It is completely reasonable to a couple of overwhelming re
Really? And how many brain cells did you need to rub together to come up with that brilliant bit of prose? Not a heck of a lot, I'd wager.
Just because you are too stupid to understand that different people have different needs and requirements, doesn't make me an Apple fan. If you had even bothered looking at my post history, you would know that I am absolutely NOT an Apple fan. In fact, I am extremely critical of Apple, and my current iPhone may well be my last Apple device if they don't pull their heads out of their asses.
But nah, lets not let facts get in the way of your rabid frothing-at-the-mouth hatred. Maybe you should go back to talking about how you have sex with the mothers of other PUBG players and let us adults get back to our discussion.
Only if you don't set your default application correctly.
I've found that it gets routinely changed back after a round of Windows updates.
IMO this is malicious behaviour on the part of Microsoft, who are doing everything they possibly can to force people to use Edge without outright blocking Chrome and Firefox from launching.
The more Microsoft changes, the more they stay the same. And then they wonder why they are so untrusted.
Based on the description of the problem, the Echo gave multiple audible prompts. How did no one in the family even hear that and go WTF?
If a foreign voice barged into my conversation with someone, that would immediately catch my attention. So something seems off about this story to me. Either the family's situational awareness is worse than that meme of the guy repeatedly getting barreled over by a bull, or they turned the volume down on the Echo to the point of inaudibility, which defeats the entire point of having the thing in the first place, or there are shenanigans at play.
Considering how callously companies are using AI these days, seems to me that shenanigans are only slightly less likely than user ineptitude.
IE6 demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that if Microsoft manages to get even the slightest lead over everyone else, their innovation will grind to a screeching halt and anything they do do will be exclusively for their own benefit.
I mean, we knew this already thanks to countless other examples of their behaviour, but IE6 is probably one of those visible and glaring, directly impacting the entire computer industry and internet.
Or maybe... just maybe... us techies arn't one-issue-voters. Maybe we bought Apple because we looked at all the options and variables, compared them to our needs, and decided that an Apple device was the best choice for what we needed.
The unescapable fact is that, despite being a bunch of obnoxious, money-grubbing control-freaks who seem to have completely lost their marbles in recent years, their devices are still vastly superior to Android in many critical aspects:
-They actually support their devices, on average of about 5 years. Android? You're *lucky* if you get two. Most give you the finger as soon as they have your money. -Overwhelmingly lower incidents of malware. While not perfect, they've done a significantly better job of keeping malware out than Google has. -I don't have to put my sysadmin hat on just to use a freaking phone. The idea that I need to worry about resource management, for example, is offensive to me. It's a f__king *phone*. -Overwhelmingly better privacy features than Android. Again, not perfect, but lightyears ahead of Androids, "This flashlight app requires access to your entire contact list and you can't do anything about if you didn't notice that permission during install."
For me personally: Siri. I use this a lot. I use it for making music selections, sending text messages, making phone calls, etc. The last time I used the Google equivalent, it was effectively useless, and from what people have told me recently, it hasn't gotten any better. Maybe they saved all the good stuff for their home device products? Don't know, don't care.
There are some aspects, in fact a lot, of aspects to iOS and the way Apple carries themselves that frustrate me. But when taken in aggregate, Apple is still the superior device to use than anything the Android ecosystem has to offer.
Google has made great strides in improve Android. They've improved privacy, introduced deep sleep features, and most recently, Project Treble. But I'm the kind of person who does not rely on a company's future promises, so I am waiting to see if all these new features actually live up to expectations before I even consider jumping ship.
I am in awe of just how stupid the ZTE leadership is. It's like they're having a "Hey Blackberry! Hold my beer!" moment.
Up until recently, I was basically ambivalent about ZTE. Based on the recent news I'm seeing, I now won't touch them with a 10 foot pole even if their devices were readily available.
I'm currently an iphone user but I've been paying a lot of attention to Android's releases because Apple's recent behaviours have been making me consider jumping ship.
But there are certain features on my iphone that I consider invaluable, the most notable one being Siri.
For example, I can ask siri to give me a weather report while I'm getting ready in the morning, and it will give me a useful summary. Or when I'm travelling on my bike, I can tap my headphones and ask for the time, or tell it "play all" and it will play my music. I can dictate text messages, tell it to initiate a call, etc. In short, it's invaluable for when I need to use my phone without being able to look at it.
And for inexplicable reasons android phone reviews *never* touch on this topic, focusing too much on on specs and aesthetics and too little on what you can actually DO with the thing.
The last time I used the Google Assistant, it was nothing more than a voice interface to google search. Has this changed? I've talked to a few people about it, but no one seems to use it in the capacities mentioned above. Can anyone provide any insight on this?
Unfortunately, Canonical concedes that it simply doesn't have the resources to review all code submitted to the Snap Store. Instead, it puts the onus on the user to do their due diligence by investigating the developer before deciding to trust them.
I'm sorry, but that just won't cut it. Google proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that if an app store isn't carefully curated, bad actors WILL in infest it as much as they can get away with.
If Canonical is worried about their reputation after this incident, they need to understand that this incident will be nothing compared to when they discover that there are hundreds of sketchy applications filled with genuine malware.
By comparison, Apple (ignoring their control-freakery for the moment) understands that developers cannot be blindly trusted. The result is that their platform hasn't seen remotely the issues that Android has.
Canonical needs to learn this lesson as well before their snap store goes to shit before it's even started.
Slashdot Mirror
What about a "just f__king work without giving me grief" mode?
https://sadtrombone.com/
And those who do learn from history are doomed to watch everyone else repeat it.
You're focusing on the trees and ignoring not just the forest, but the entire Amazon Basin.
How Wikipedia handles things is completely irrelevant to the situation. This legislation affects literally everybody, possibly even outside the EU depending on how far they try to wave their reproductive pseudopod.
It's a shockingly stupid piece of legislation that in one move can easily make it not worth the effort to run *any* service *at all*. ESPECIALLY if that might even vaguely involve interacting with the public, cause you'll risk liability for anything any user does.
It is overwhelmingly cost prohibitive, puts too much burden on the service providers, and destroys free speech. With legislation like that, you may as well not even bother having the internet at all.
The problem is scale. It's not just a couple machines doing this... It's thousands or 10s of thousands of machines that are usually spread across entire countries or multiple countries. And those machines don't even do sustained traffic anymore. Maybe 20% of them will do The Thing(tm), then they'll go quiet and another batch will start doing The Thing(tm).
That's why DDOS' ard so hard to mitigate against.
How is this new? Arnold Schwarzenegger figured that out decades ago. 1987, specifically.
IMO, around the mid-late 2000s when they first moved to intel and commoditized hardware, was peak Apple.
Sure, there were issues, but by and large the sum of their parts was excellent. Their prices had only a relatively tiny margin compared to identically speced other laptops (couple hundred at worst). They were also easily repairable. They supported the majority of important ports at the time, with the exception of their video dongles. Also, their peripherals were crap but you didn't necessarily have to use those. (Holy hell those hockey puck mice...)
All in all, they were actually making decent products, and were generally a heck of a lot more reliable than the Windows equivalent. I still remember being amazed that I could suspend and resume the machine as often as I wanted without it failing on me. I could work for a month without even a reboot unless I had to do a system-level update. At the time Windows XP wasn't even a distant second for reliability.
I am still using my MBP2011 because I was able to upgrade the HDD to a 1TB SSD and add 16GB RAM several years after the original purchase, so now the machine still works relatively great (although the way the fan is going, I think I need to take it apart and give it a good dusting...) The fixed battery still pisses me off, but I can't do anything about that.
But now we're at the point where their devices are completely unupgradable and unrepairable without great cost, and now I have to decide whether to allow Apple to continue f__king my wallet over sideways, or abandoning my investment in the platform and go to something else and get f__ked over in a completely different way.
We shouldn't allow Apple to get away with this shit. Just cause they *finally* introduce a repair program, doesn't negate all the hell people have had to go through. Those class action lawsuits should continue on. And the lawsuits need to stop being so stupidly toothless. If Apple doesn't get hit with a bill that's at least 5 billion, they will just treat these as the cost of doing business.
IMO Apple doesn't face enough class actions considering how breathtakingly shit their entire product lineup has become. It's very frustrating how their hardware used to be absolutely second to none, and justified their premium, but in the last decade or so they've turned into nothing but a train wreck running on momentum.
I'm so livid with the entire computer industry today. Your choices are: Buy Apple and pay extra for shit, gimmicky hardware, buy Microsoft and get ok hardware but an OS so offensively managed that your machine can stop working through no fault of your own, or buy Google and have a spy camera shoved up your ass. (Or get Linux and be prepared to put your sysadmin hat to perform an operation that every other OS has been able to handle easily for the past 2 decades)
There are literally NO good options today. It's really depressing.
I'd love to see how it works against a political opponent, where only opinions and fist-shaking matter, and facts are actively discouraged.
The US originally led the space race cause they couldn't handle the idea of the commies beating them to anything. Ever since the cold war ended, there has been zero political interest to keep going, unless it involved distributing pork to politicians favorite companies.
The only way US will ever become serious about space again, is if there's a military reason to do so, and that won't happen until and unless some new existential threat his the US.
They couldn't even agree on a standard for headphones with built in microphones.
You really think they will share a common standard for something as complex as device remote access?
I certainly won't be holding my breath.
For the life of me, I can't figure out the root motivation for holocaust denialism.
They can't handle the idea that human beings are capable of being barbaric?
Is it a hatred of Jews so seething that they can't accept that genocide is anything other than a good thing?
I hate how Slashdot doesn't let you mod in the same article you post. This is the singularly most informative post in the entire thread. Thank you!
Unless someone has their machine connected directly to the internet (in which case you've got a whole lot of bigger problems), what's the likelyhood that this would actually be exploited?
And you're a troll.
Woooooooooooow, how you got modded informative is beyond me when you didn't give one single piece of concrete info in your entire post.
support - never had an android device go out of support before I replaced it
What does that even mean? You replace your phone yearly? Monthly?
The verifiable fact that the overwhelming majority of android manufacturers do not put out ANY updates at all. Once you buy their device, you're SOL unless there's a demonstrable hardware failure. Of the handful of major android manufacturers out there, a tiny few of those collectively agreed to provide 2 years of android updates, for *some* of their phones. Compare that to Apple that provides a solid *5* years worth of updates on their ENTIRE lineup.
Maybe you consider phones to be disposable commodity items, but I do not. If I buy a phone, I will continue to use that phone until it is no longer physically able to do what I need it to do, or my requirements change. Heck, I'm still using a Macbook Pro from 2011 because it still does what I need. (The fact that Apple's successive generations of macbooks have been worse and worse is also a contributing factor, but I digress...)
malware - never had any, ever, on android. Getting less on iOS would be tricky
So because YOU'VE never been infected, that means that malware doesn't exist? I've never have polio or malaria, but I sure as hell recognize that they exist.
The verifiable fact is that up until a few years ago, the google app store was a cesspool of malware. Non google app stores STILL are. Google realized they needed to do something, so they implemented controls similar to what Apple was already doing, and the malware situation improved considerably. Compare that to Apple that had implemented such controls early on, and as a result the incidents of malware on iOS was literally orders of magnitude less than Android.
Google has dramatically closed that gap, but the incidence of malware on the android platform is still higher than on iOS.
flashlight - hit the 'flashlight' button that's built into the OS and it turns on the camera light. No permission changes required
I thought it was obvious that I was being hyperbolic, specifically for the reason you described. I was referencing an earlier time when phones *didn't* come with built in flashlights, so people used apps that would max the brightness of your display to act as a pseudo-flashlight. Apparently you're too young to remember that, or too busy getting your hate on to care.
privacy - so you want privacy but you use Siri. Thanks, I needed the laugh.
Apparently you live in a very black and white world so you seem to have difficult understanding that privacy, like may other things in this world, operates on a gradiant. You share your bank account information with your spouse but not with a random person on the street. Similarly, there's a difference between asking Siri to play music vs allowing a third party application from slurping my entire contacts list and monitoring my location at all times. Apple makes their money on overpriced hardware. Google makes their money by siphoning as much personal info from you as they can. That single decision informs the entire philosophy behind their entire respective product portfolios.
There is no such thing as absolute privacy. You have to give up a certain measure of privacy just to step out your front door in the morning. The best you can do is look at what privacy features are offered and decide for yourself if the privacy cost is acceptable.
That's subjective, and I disagree. E.g. I can't actually use an Apple device because it refuses to let me run the software I want.
Oh good, we've finally gotten to the part of your post that is actually reasonable and not some ridiculous knee-jerk reaction. It is completely reasonable to a couple of overwhelming re
Really? And how many brain cells did you need to rub together to come up with that brilliant bit of prose? Not a heck of a lot, I'd wager.
Just because you are too stupid to understand that different people have different needs and requirements, doesn't make me an Apple fan. If you had even bothered looking at my post history, you would know that I am absolutely NOT an Apple fan. In fact, I am extremely critical of Apple, and my current iPhone may well be my last Apple device if they don't pull their heads out of their asses.
But nah, lets not let facts get in the way of your rabid frothing-at-the-mouth hatred. Maybe you should go back to talking about how you have sex with the mothers of other PUBG players and let us adults get back to our discussion.
Only if you don't set your default application correctly.
I've found that it gets routinely changed back after a round of Windows updates.
IMO this is malicious behaviour on the part of Microsoft, who are doing everything they possibly can to force people to use Edge without outright blocking Chrome and Firefox from launching.
The more Microsoft changes, the more they stay the same. And then they wonder why they are so untrusted.
Based on the description of the problem, the Echo gave multiple audible prompts. How did no one in the family even hear that and go WTF?
If a foreign voice barged into my conversation with someone, that would immediately catch my attention. So something seems off about this story to me. Either the family's situational awareness is worse than that meme of the guy repeatedly getting barreled over by a bull, or they turned the volume down on the Echo to the point of inaudibility, which defeats the entire point of having the thing in the first place, or there are shenanigans at play.
Considering how callously companies are using AI these days, seems to me that shenanigans are only slightly less likely than user ineptitude.
Yeah... :\
I believe my first words after I originally saw that article were, "Oh FFS, not again..."
IE6 demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that if Microsoft manages to get even the slightest lead over everyone else, their innovation will grind to a screeching halt and anything they do do will be exclusively for their own benefit.
I mean, we knew this already thanks to countless other examples of their behaviour, but IE6 is probably one of those visible and glaring, directly impacting the entire computer industry and internet.
Or maybe... just maybe... us techies arn't one-issue-voters. Maybe we bought Apple because we looked at all the options and variables, compared them to our needs, and decided that an Apple device was the best choice for what we needed.
The unescapable fact is that, despite being a bunch of obnoxious, money-grubbing control-freaks who seem to have completely lost their marbles in recent years, their devices are still vastly superior to Android in many critical aspects:
-They actually support their devices, on average of about 5 years. Android? You're *lucky* if you get two. Most give you the finger as soon as they have your money.
-Overwhelmingly lower incidents of malware. While not perfect, they've done a significantly better job of keeping malware out than Google has.
-I don't have to put my sysadmin hat on just to use a freaking phone. The idea that I need to worry about resource management, for example, is offensive to me. It's a f__king *phone*.
-Overwhelmingly better privacy features than Android. Again, not perfect, but lightyears ahead of Androids, "This flashlight app requires access to your entire contact list and you can't do anything about if you didn't notice that permission during install."
For me personally: Siri. I use this a lot. I use it for making music selections, sending text messages, making phone calls, etc. The last time I used the Google equivalent, it was effectively useless, and from what people have told me recently, it hasn't gotten any better. Maybe they saved all the good stuff for their home device products? Don't know, don't care.
There are some aspects, in fact a lot, of aspects to iOS and the way Apple carries themselves that frustrate me. But when taken in aggregate, Apple is still the superior device to use than anything the Android ecosystem has to offer.
Google has made great strides in improve Android. They've improved privacy, introduced deep sleep features, and most recently, Project Treble. But I'm the kind of person who does not rely on a company's future promises, so I am waiting to see if all these new features actually live up to expectations before I even consider jumping ship.
I am in awe of just how stupid the ZTE leadership is. It's like they're having a "Hey Blackberry! Hold my beer!" moment.
Up until recently, I was basically ambivalent about ZTE. Based on the recent news I'm seeing, I now won't touch them with a 10 foot pole even if their devices were readily available.
I'm currently an iphone user but I've been paying a lot of attention to Android's releases because Apple's recent behaviours have been making me consider jumping ship.
But there are certain features on my iphone that I consider invaluable, the most notable one being Siri.
For example, I can ask siri to give me a weather report while I'm getting ready in the morning, and it will give me a useful summary. Or when I'm travelling on my bike, I can tap my headphones and ask for the time, or tell it "play all" and it will play my music. I can dictate text messages, tell it to initiate a call, etc. In short, it's invaluable for when I need to use my phone without being able to look at it.
And for inexplicable reasons android phone reviews *never* touch on this topic, focusing too much on on specs and aesthetics and too little on what you can actually DO with the thing.
The last time I used the Google Assistant, it was nothing more than a voice interface to google search. Has this changed? I've talked to a few people about it, but no one seems to use it in the capacities mentioned above. Can anyone provide any insight on this?
Unfortunately, Canonical concedes that it simply doesn't have the resources to review all code submitted to the Snap Store. Instead, it puts the onus on the user to do their due diligence by investigating the developer before deciding to trust them.
I'm sorry, but that just won't cut it. Google proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that if an app store isn't carefully curated, bad actors WILL in infest it as much as they can get away with.
If Canonical is worried about their reputation after this incident, they need to understand that this incident will be nothing compared to when they discover that there are hundreds of sketchy applications filled with genuine malware.
By comparison, Apple (ignoring their control-freakery for the moment) understands that developers cannot be blindly trusted. The result is that their platform hasn't seen remotely the issues that Android has.
Canonical needs to learn this lesson as well before their snap store goes to shit before it's even started.