In Mint, I prefer to start Nautilus, then click on the "Open This Folder As Root" menu option, which asks me for my password, and automatically sudos (is that a verb?) me up a new root-powered instance of Nautilus. With a shiny red background to tell me I am running as root and I better be extra careful.
Not that I don't know the commands, but I've got a few Linux newbies under my wing and I've started to look for intuitive GUI ways to do things. Mint has delivered that pretty darned well in the last couple of versions.
But I do like you suggestion of an "open this FILE as root" option, which could simply be a shortcut to "sudo [insert normal open command]". I'd think such a thing would be pretty easy to do.
So when I go into my Ford dealer, I should see ads for Chevy and Toyota?
If Dell mentioned Apple anywhere on their page, with or without disparaging remarks, one of two things would happen:
1. Microsoft would ream them a new asshole and drop them from "Platinum Partner" to "Zinc-coated Shit Partner" in about.000000000001 picoseconds, and retroactively raise their Windows licensing fee from $25 to $400 per PC faster than you can say "Chapter 7".
2. Apple would unleash the Cupertino Legal Mobsters (all wearing dapper bright-colored suits and carrying fast-draw holsters with the legal papers in them). Like a plague of locusts, they would descend upon Dell and Dell would be consumed in shiny, bright-colored, user-friendly flames of Hell.
Wrap the whole thing in an "if (vendor='Dell')" statement and you get the picture.
Dell, as a rule, provides Windows or Ubuntu. They've chosen one Linux distro, built one basic image of it, and that's what you get if you choose "Linux".
Doesn't really matter, though. Since there's no real discount for getting Ubuntu, you're better off buying it with Windows (if you're an experienced user) then nuking it from orbit or setting it up for multiboot.
That way, you have a license to Windows if you should ever need it, for "free", and you choose your own operating system for daily use.
... and once it becomes practical on a scale that would support enough people to get out there, eventually some jackass would control it who will kill you if you don't do what he/she likes. Doesn't matter how large the space we can reach is, if you get there someone with more resources is going to want to control you.
IANAL, but I'd assume that you'd probably have an international warrant against you, so don't sail to port in any RIAA-friendly countries or countries that have extradition agreements with same. And, of course, your ISP is subject to the laws of the country in which THEY operate, so you might find your Internet connection cut off if you pick an ISP located in a RIAA-friendly country.
Plus, well, anything that can work that remotely is going to have some form of usage limits or ridiculously expensive metered usage, and probably isn't going to be terribly fast. "Massive bandwidth," if it's even available, isn't going to come cheap.
Not at all. If my software comes under attack, its job is to confuse the attacker as much as possible in any way possible, while identifying the nature of the attack and alerting me to it.
The whole point of a good layer of defense is to slow down your attacker as much as possible, and make it obvious that he's an attacker.
Actually, the ideal would probably be to make the inferred password really long and make it take a long time to guess, then make it a perfectly valid one - to a honeypot server.
True, but that's not "one additional call per 100" based on the cell phone you are using. If you're in a dead zone, it's likely that ANY phone would lose the call. That's what a dead zone is.
In your case, your dropped calls are explained by a dead zone. And they are in fact going to be in different places because cell companies don't always share towers. But you can predict them.
In the case of the iPhone 4, what Apple themselves are stating is that their new phone (paraphrased) "drops less than one call in a hundred MORE than our previous iPhone". And the iPhone 3GS doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation for maintaining good call connections. I've had 3GS-toting pals borrow my old Blackberry 8300 to make calls before, because I get good signal and they don't.
Don't get me wrong, the iPhone is drop-dead sexy and the UI is beautiful and it's all that. But it doesn't exactly have a reputation for being a stellar, umm, phone.
The iPhone 4's new groundbreaking antenna was supposed to fix all that, not make it (admittedly only a teeny bit) worse. But with a very large sample size of units in the wild, Apple isn't even trying to claim an improvement in dropped calls. They are trying to claim it's a minor problem because the problem isn't too much worse with the new phone than it already was with their own previous model. Where their previous models never really had a stellar reputation to start with.
Other than obvious cases like complete signal loss in known marginal areas, I have dropped maybe 5 calls in the 2 years I've owned my Blackberry for reasons I could not fully explain. An increase of "only one call in about 100 dropped" for me would be enough to return it.
Fortunately, in Apple's defense, they have obviously worked out a deal with AT&T where you can. And that's good news for their customers. They've also offered a solution that looks very likely to actually fix the problem. That's GREAT news.
But if I spent money to upgrade my phone to the latest version that was supposed to help with dropped calls, then was told that I shouldn't complain because the new phone I spent money on only made the problem a "little bit worse", I think my reaction would be somewhat short of unfettered joy. And I think that reaction is a rational, reasonable one.
If disaster movies are at all accurate, your best chance of survival is to start predicting a global apocalypse.
Guys should dress somewhat shabbily, women should dress as provocatively as possible, preferably in high heels so you can run effectively from any disaster.
Be sure you have tons of impossible-to-verify-independently facts and observations, and report your findings to the most fossilized organization possible.
First, I agree, the Apple problem is different from the problem all other phones experience. Pesky laws of physics! Apple should have arranged to have those suspended before building an antenna susceptible to them!:)
The problem you are experiencing is that your signal is a "solid" five bars, and even the attenuation you are experiencing isn't enough to drop it to four. The Steve probably picked his location carefully so he was at a "low" five bars and holding the phone wrong could drop it to four.
I don't know if the Bold has it, but my Curve 8300 allows me to show signal strength in db loss rather than "bars". On the Curve, you hold the ALT key and tap the keys "N", "M", "L", and "L" in sequence. If the Bold has some equivalent, you might find it useful to see what sort of actual signal losses you incur by holding the phone various ways.
I can pretty much guarantee you it'll never be anywhere close to the iPhone 4's loss in a "death grip" situation, though. Exposed antenna conductor makes it possible to change the actual characteristics of the antenna. Anyone who knows signal at all will tell you that the effect of changing the antenna characteristics almost always has a more severe effect than simply blocking part of the signal.
Excellent idea, but if you institute a random delay you might actually make your system more secure (and you use less CPU doing it because you're not walking through the entire checking algorithm, thereby making yourself less susceptible to CPU overload DOS attacks).
A fixed-time-to-answer would quickly tell the time-based algorithm that it was not dealing with something that is susceptible to it, and the attacker would immediately move on to a dictionary attack or some other method.
If you institute a random delay, a time-checking algorithm would interpret that delay as meaning it got part of the answer correct, where in reality it might have gotten another part of the answer correct (or none of it). A few thousand random-delay hits would have the cracking algorithm thinking that it was simultaneously getting the same bits of the key right and wrong, but still convinced that it was dealing with a time-attack-sensitive system. The attacker might even interpret it as some form of rotating key and give up.
In other words, you are fooling the decryption algorithm down a blind alley of inquiry, and wasting its time. That's far more secure than telling it that you are not subject to time-based attacks right up front. You want to waste as much of your attacker's time and effort as you possibly can.
And, sure, the attacker is probably using multiple simultaneous attacks, but the more obviously impossible attacks you can convince them to try, the more likely it is they'll trip some form of DOS detection.
Actually, the ideal would be to tune the timing to infer to the attacker something utterly unlike the actual password, and if someone sends in the password you are inferring by your timing you are now aware that a time-based attack is underway, and you can stop trying to check passwords sent by that connection entirely - just keep replying "access denied" with the delay continuing to infer the same key. Puts a lot less load on your system, and keeps the attacker busy and armed with lots of incorrect information.
I suppose since there's no real industry standard for "bars", each company can make them up as they go.
Personally, I'd rather own a phone that estimated a little on the low side, but I suppose a phone that shows more bars would tend to lead purchasers to believe that it has a better radio/antenna combination.
So I can easily see why Apple (and most companies in the business to actually sell phones) might easily be driven to a certain amount of, shall we say, "puffery" in their signal-bar algorithms.
I should also note that the introduction of the case, which is Steve's solution to the problem, simply puts the iPhone 4 on an even footing with all other phones that have their antennas enclosed in non-conductive material.
You will still be able to interfere with the signal indirectly by blocking or garbling signal to the antenna. You just won't be able to screw up the antenna characteristics by touching it directly any more.
From a simple physics standpoint, yes, the Apple problem has the potential to be a lot worse than most other phones.
That's because the antenna conductor (metal) is physically accessible on the iPhone 4, meaning that attaching something conductive to it can actually change the physics of the antenna. With most other phones, the antenna is enclosed in a non-conductive material like plastic, so any signal loss is from blockage, reflection, or interference - you can't change the antenna characteristics directly. You can still screw up the signal, but generally to a far lower degree.
This is an anecdotal example, but illustrates why this (a) is a bigger problem, but (b) still isn't a problem for everyone.
My BlackBerry is set up to report signal in "db loss" rather than bars. As I understand it, 113db of signal is available from your average cell tower, but in order to hold a conversation I really need to have more than 15db (in other words, -100db is about my low limit for a comprehensible call)
I can attenuate my signal by about 5db by holding my phone wrong. In other words, if I'm in an area where my phone reads -95db, I can pretty much garble the crap out of a call by holding the phone wrong. At -105db, I don't try to get my hands near the phone (the call's going to suck anyway, but I can maintain a conversation as long as I use Bluetooth and keep my hands away).
Being in a rural area, -100db is not terribly unusual for me, and I do drop or garble calls occasionally by holding the phone wrong. Such is life in the quieter spaces of the world. I have a signal repeater in my house with a rooftop antenna, and I can maintain about -95db throughout the house, -80db in the kitchen where the repeater is located.
On the other hand, the iPhone 4 is supposed to experience a signal drop of about 27db. Honestly, I'm not often in areas where I could tolerate a 27db signal loss. To me, -85db (28db available) would be considered a "good" signal in most places. In other words, to me the "death grip" would be fatal almost anywhere I'm likely to use a phone.
On the other other hand, when I travel down to larger and more populated areas, I start to see numbers better than -70db (I even saw -45db the other day, which was astonishing to a hick like myself but is probably normal for city folk). At -70db, I'd have 43db left. Even if I lost 27db, I'd have 16db remaining, which is enough for a decent (if not perfect) call. I might or might not notice the loss. At -60db I wouldn't even know I was losing signal, nor would I care.
So, yes, the iPhone 4 problem is potentially far more serious than it is with all other phones, simply because the iPhone 4 is the only phone with an exposed-metal antenna that you can attenuate directly rather than just interfere with.
But it's honestly only a problem for you if you frequent areas where there isn't a lot of extra signal available. If you have a strong enough signal that a loss of 27db still leaves you with plenty of signal to maintain a call, then you'll never see a problem.
That's key, and I don't see any way that they could have honestly believed that only 0.5% of their users were having trouble.
Let's be blunt here. The Steve knows the problem is bigger than 0.5%. The Steve is not stupid. He's a pretty smart guy.
But since only 0.5% of customers have gone to the trouble of saying they had a problem, he can freely use the accurate statistic that 0.5% of users reported problems and be absolutely, 100% correct. He is not misrepresenting the problem, he's quoting actual numbers of people who bothered to call in the problem.
My wife and I have both had problems, but neither contacted Apple Care.
And your inaction, even though you knew AppleCare wouldn't help you, provided The Steve with the number he was looking for. It justified delay on his part, marginalized the problem, and makes their issuance of cases look magnanimous rather than conciliatory.
Don't fail to vote then complain when a member of the party you don't like gets voted in.
If you have a problem, you should call AppleCare and log a complaint. If you and everyone else who could Death Grip their phones into submission had done so, The Steve couldn't brush it aside as an insignificant subset of his customer base, he'd know he had a really serious problem on his hands.
Suffering in silence is very nice and courteous and all that, but you are the customer here and if you have a problem it's your job to let the manufacturer know that you do, so they can make it right (even in cases when you know they won't).
I'm not Apple fan, and I've never owned (and haven't the slightest interest in) an iPhone, but I have to agree.
The amount of signal degradation is much higher than most other phones, but the circumstances under which it happens are relatively rare and many would never run into it at all (and a case fixes it, so a free case sounds like a winner).
Of course, if you ponied up for the entire Apple Experience including the shiny-shiny case, an external wrapping around all that sexiness might not be to your liking, but if a full refund is available you can always go for that.
I'd say the most worrying is the necessity for an adjustment to the algorithm to more accurately reflect the signal levels so people know when their calls might drop during a death grip incident. That was the one thing that made me stop for a second. Why did they feel the need to inflate the bar readings in the first place? So the iPhone 4 could gain a reputation for having better signal in more places? That sounds a little squirrely to me.
But I like the BlackBerry feature (ALT-NMLL) that shows me signal loss to the nearest -db, rather than estimating it with a 1-to-5 system. I'm also frequently in areas where signal is marginal, so the extra level of detail is extremely useful to me.
Translation: Wait until September, we're redesigning the phone casing to put some clear shiny coating on the antenna, but we need to sell through the current stock first.
Of course, if this is true, who knows if the iPhone 4.1 will do better than the 4? As it stands, the 4 seems to have good signal unless you attenuate it by grounding a couple of antennae together.
So if you can put up with a protective case and you want your Shiny, then at least The Steve is ponying up the cases for free.
The fun part was that, since they couldn't source enough cases from Apple, they'd be using third party cases. Meritline should expect a bulk order for the "$1 Apple iPhone 4 Slipcase" very, very soon.
"911" would be a logical choice if she knew she was in imminent danger. She was contacting Mom to come pick her up, probably because she thought she had scared him off with her initial kick and scream. She was, unfortunately, wrong. But I don't know her true motivations, of course. I wasn't there, I'm not 12, and I'm not female. She got the word out that she needed help. She did something. Maybe not the optimal thing, but she's a 12-year old in a potentially dangerous situation that she may or may not be fully aware of.
Assuming she wanted to use "911", VoIP on the iPod Touch cannot do location, so at best it would have been a central dispatch office that covers the entire US. So, assuming Cesmat was within earshot, he'd know she was trying to talk to someone before she could get a location out. If she even got the call connected, it's very likely the call would have ended before she could scream an address with city and state to the dispatcher.
On the other hand, her Facebook friend already knew where she was, and she knew the friend was there and had a way to contact her mother.
Overall, though, agreed - she at least did something that got help on the way and became part of the evidence chain that helped nail the bastard for what he did. Tragically, it didn't prevent the rape, but I'm not sure anything she could possibly have done would have. If she had attempted to escape or tried to communicate in a more obvious way, Cesmat might have killed her, and no one would have known she needed help and it might never have been linked to him.
It seems that she had the opportunity to get away after the initial assault, but she wasted her time trying to get help on Facebook.
Of course, she had no way of knowing he was coming back. So it's quite possible she was just asking for Mom to come pick her up, as the article stated. Plus, he wasn't gone long. Even if she had tried to escape, it might not have been successful.
While hardly ideal (since the rape actually did occur), at least she was resourceful enough to let someone know she might have been (and as it turned out was) in trouble and needed help. The mother was enroute
Also, where was the mother?
Out of the house. No further information is available. But since she and Cesmat had been dating and he was still living there, it was probably not unusual for him to be left alone with her. Dating someone with a criminal record isn't exactly a sign of brilliance, but on the other hand he had no prior record of anything violent.
Please, please, please read TFA. Especially before you accuse a girl of being stupid because she was raped and had no way of calling for help. It really makes you look stupid when you make up facts to support a viewpoint that accuses the victim of stupidity.
First, she made the communication BEFORE being assaulted.
- Cesmat had confiscated her cell phone earlier in the evening. She had no telephone. Hence no ability to make calls.
- Cesmat had briefly left her room after attempting to remove her pants and her fighting him off. She had no way of knowing she was ABOUT to be raped (get the timeline right), so she used her only communications media to get a friend to have her mom come home and get her away from Cesmat ASAP. Little did she know he was about to re-enter the room and rape her.
- After the rape, Cesmat left. She then blocked the room off and escaped through the window, found a payphone, and called her mother (who was enroute already).
Could leaving the room immediately have prevented the rape? Maybe. Or maybe he was just outside the room at the time and her attempt at escape could have turned this deadly.
Given the fact that Cesmat took away her cell phone earlier in the evening, as mentioned in TFA, if there had been a landline he probably would have made sure that didn't worth either.
His excuse to her was that "he didn't want her texting all night". Obviously, his real intention was to make sure she had no way of calling for help. Thank goodness he didn't know her iPod had Internet access. She at least had a way to ask for help.
He confiscated her cell phone earlier in the evening, and was probably unaware that her iPod gave her any ability to communicate. He wanted her isolated.
Later, he walked into her room, naked, and attempted to remove her pants. She screamed. He left the room briefly. She sent a message on Facebook asking a friend to contact her mother and ask Mom to come and take her home. I don't know what was going through her head at the time, leaving might have been a better option, but she's 12 years old and asking for help was probably not a terribly bad option.
He walked back into the room very shortly thereafter and raped her, after which she escaped the house, got to a payphone, and called her mother who was already enroute.
Maybe she could have handled it better, such as leaving immediately, but if she only had enough time to fire off an IM over Facebook to a friend, it's unlikely in the extreme that she could have escaped or secured the room in the time she had available, and any attempt to do so might have made the situation worse. She might have thought he wouldn't come back in since he left after a scream.
As it is, she used her only communications media to make sure people knew she was in trouble and who was a threat to her, which would have been very useful if this whole thing had turned even more tragic and Cesmat had actually killed her. She called for help using the only method she knew would reach someone she knew.
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In Mint, I prefer to start Nautilus, then click on the "Open This Folder As Root" menu option, which asks me for my password, and automatically sudos (is that a verb?) me up a new root-powered instance of Nautilus. With a shiny red background to tell me I am running as root and I better be extra careful.
Not that I don't know the commands, but I've got a few Linux newbies under my wing and I've started to look for intuitive GUI ways to do things. Mint has delivered that pretty darned well in the last couple of versions.
But I do like you suggestion of an "open this FILE as root" option, which could simply be a shortcut to "sudo [insert normal open command]". I'd think such a thing would be pretty easy to do.
So when I go into my Ford dealer, I should see ads for Chevy and Toyota?
If Dell mentioned Apple anywhere on their page, with or without disparaging remarks, one of two things would happen:
1. Microsoft would ream them a new asshole and drop them from "Platinum Partner" to "Zinc-coated Shit Partner" in about .000000000001 picoseconds, and retroactively raise their Windows licensing fee from $25 to $400 per PC faster than you can say "Chapter 7".
2. Apple would unleash the Cupertino Legal Mobsters (all wearing dapper bright-colored suits and carrying fast-draw holsters with the legal papers in them). Like a plague of locusts, they would descend upon Dell and Dell would be consumed in shiny, bright-colored, user-friendly flames of Hell.
Actually, probably both.
Wrap the whole thing in an "if (vendor='Dell')" statement and you get the picture.
Dell, as a rule, provides Windows or Ubuntu. They've chosen one Linux distro, built one basic image of it, and that's what you get if you choose "Linux".
Doesn't really matter, though. Since there's no real discount for getting Ubuntu, you're better off buying it with Windows (if you're an experienced user) then nuking it from orbit or setting it up for multiboot.
That way, you have a license to Windows if you should ever need it, for "free", and you choose your own operating system for daily use.
"It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it. Whoa-oh-oh-OH-oh."
[[ cut to Mike in front of a web browser, screen not visible ]]
[click]
"Oh, God!"
[click]
"Oh, God!"
[click]
"Oh, God!"
[click]
"Oh, God!"
[click]
"Oh, God!"
[[ commercial break ]]
[[repeat]
How many burning libraries of Congress is that?
... and once it becomes practical on a scale that would support enough people to get out there, eventually some jackass would control it who will kill you if you don't do what he/she likes. Doesn't matter how large the space we can reach is, if you get there someone with more resources is going to want to control you.
And how many leaves it should cost.
IANAL, but I'd assume that you'd probably have an international warrant against you, so don't sail to port in any RIAA-friendly countries or countries that have extradition agreements with same. And, of course, your ISP is subject to the laws of the country in which THEY operate, so you might find your Internet connection cut off if you pick an ISP located in a RIAA-friendly country.
Plus, well, anything that can work that remotely is going to have some form of usage limits or ridiculously expensive metered usage, and probably isn't going to be terribly fast. "Massive bandwidth," if it's even available, isn't going to come cheap.
Spiteful?
Not at all. If my software comes under attack, its job is to confuse the attacker as much as possible in any way possible, while identifying the nature of the attack and alerting me to it.
The whole point of a good layer of defense is to slow down your attacker as much as possible, and make it obvious that he's an attacker.
Actually, the ideal would probably be to make the inferred password really long and make it take a long time to guess, then make it a perfectly valid one - to a honeypot server.
True, but that's not "one additional call per 100" based on the cell phone you are using. If you're in a dead zone, it's likely that ANY phone would lose the call. That's what a dead zone is.
In your case, your dropped calls are explained by a dead zone. And they are in fact going to be in different places because cell companies don't always share towers. But you can predict them.
In the case of the iPhone 4, what Apple themselves are stating is that their new phone (paraphrased) "drops less than one call in a hundred MORE than our previous iPhone". And the iPhone 3GS doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation for maintaining good call connections. I've had 3GS-toting pals borrow my old Blackberry 8300 to make calls before, because I get good signal and they don't.
Don't get me wrong, the iPhone is drop-dead sexy and the UI is beautiful and it's all that. But it doesn't exactly have a reputation for being a stellar, umm, phone.
The iPhone 4's new groundbreaking antenna was supposed to fix all that, not make it (admittedly only a teeny bit) worse. But with a very large sample size of units in the wild, Apple isn't even trying to claim an improvement in dropped calls. They are trying to claim it's a minor problem because the problem isn't too much worse with the new phone than it already was with their own previous model. Where their previous models never really had a stellar reputation to start with.
Other than obvious cases like complete signal loss in known marginal areas, I have dropped maybe 5 calls in the 2 years I've owned my Blackberry for reasons I could not fully explain. An increase of "only one call in about 100 dropped" for me would be enough to return it.
Fortunately, in Apple's defense, they have obviously worked out a deal with AT&T where you can. And that's good news for their customers. They've also offered a solution that looks very likely to actually fix the problem. That's GREAT news.
But if I spent money to upgrade my phone to the latest version that was supposed to help with dropped calls, then was told that I shouldn't complain because the new phone I spent money on only made the problem a "little bit worse", I think my reaction would be somewhat short of unfettered joy. And I think that reaction is a rational, reasonable one.
If disaster movies are at all accurate, your best chance of survival is to start predicting a global apocalypse.
Guys should dress somewhat shabbily, women should dress as provocatively as possible, preferably in high heels so you can run effectively from any disaster.
Be sure you have tons of impossible-to-verify-independently facts and observations, and report your findings to the most fossilized organization possible.
First, I agree, the Apple problem is different from the problem all other phones experience. Pesky laws of physics! Apple should have arranged to have those suspended before building an antenna susceptible to them! :)
The problem you are experiencing is that your signal is a "solid" five bars, and even the attenuation you are experiencing isn't enough to drop it to four. The Steve probably picked his location carefully so he was at a "low" five bars and holding the phone wrong could drop it to four.
I don't know if the Bold has it, but my Curve 8300 allows me to show signal strength in db loss rather than "bars". On the Curve, you hold the ALT key and tap the keys "N", "M", "L", and "L" in sequence. If the Bold has some equivalent, you might find it useful to see what sort of actual signal losses you incur by holding the phone various ways.
I can pretty much guarantee you it'll never be anywhere close to the iPhone 4's loss in a "death grip" situation, though. Exposed antenna conductor makes it possible to change the actual characteristics of the antenna. Anyone who knows signal at all will tell you that the effect of changing the antenna characteristics almost always has a more severe effect than simply blocking part of the signal.
Excellent idea, but if you institute a random delay you might actually make your system more secure (and you use less CPU doing it because you're not walking through the entire checking algorithm, thereby making yourself less susceptible to CPU overload DOS attacks).
A fixed-time-to-answer would quickly tell the time-based algorithm that it was not dealing with something that is susceptible to it, and the attacker would immediately move on to a dictionary attack or some other method.
If you institute a random delay, a time-checking algorithm would interpret that delay as meaning it got part of the answer correct, where in reality it might have gotten another part of the answer correct (or none of it). A few thousand random-delay hits would have the cracking algorithm thinking that it was simultaneously getting the same bits of the key right and wrong, but still convinced that it was dealing with a time-attack-sensitive system. The attacker might even interpret it as some form of rotating key and give up.
In other words, you are fooling the decryption algorithm down a blind alley of inquiry, and wasting its time. That's far more secure than telling it that you are not subject to time-based attacks right up front. You want to waste as much of your attacker's time and effort as you possibly can.
And, sure, the attacker is probably using multiple simultaneous attacks, but the more obviously impossible attacks you can convince them to try, the more likely it is they'll trip some form of DOS detection.
Actually, the ideal would be to tune the timing to infer to the attacker something utterly unlike the actual password, and if someone sends in the password you are inferring by your timing you are now aware that a time-based attack is underway, and you can stop trying to check passwords sent by that connection entirely - just keep replying "access denied" with the delay continuing to infer the same key. Puts a lot less load on your system, and keeps the attacker busy and armed with lots of incorrect information.
I suppose since there's no real industry standard for "bars", each company can make them up as they go.
Personally, I'd rather own a phone that estimated a little on the low side, but I suppose a phone that shows more bars would tend to lead purchasers to believe that it has a better radio/antenna combination.
So I can easily see why Apple (and most companies in the business to actually sell phones) might easily be driven to a certain amount of, shall we say, "puffery" in their signal-bar algorithms.
So sorry, Mr. Troll, I should have chosen the term "current production run". My apologies.
I should also note that the introduction of the case, which is Steve's solution to the problem, simply puts the iPhone 4 on an even footing with all other phones that have their antennas enclosed in non-conductive material.
You will still be able to interfere with the signal indirectly by blocking or garbling signal to the antenna. You just won't be able to screw up the antenna characteristics by touching it directly any more.
From a simple physics standpoint, yes, the Apple problem has the potential to be a lot worse than most other phones.
That's because the antenna conductor (metal) is physically accessible on the iPhone 4, meaning that attaching something conductive to it can actually change the physics of the antenna. With most other phones, the antenna is enclosed in a non-conductive material like plastic, so any signal loss is from blockage, reflection, or interference - you can't change the antenna characteristics directly. You can still screw up the signal, but generally to a far lower degree.
This is an anecdotal example, but illustrates why this (a) is a bigger problem, but (b) still isn't a problem for everyone.
My BlackBerry is set up to report signal in "db loss" rather than bars. As I understand it, 113db of signal is available from your average cell tower, but in order to hold a conversation I really need to have more than 15db (in other words, -100db is about my low limit for a comprehensible call)
I can attenuate my signal by about 5db by holding my phone wrong. In other words, if I'm in an area where my phone reads -95db, I can pretty much garble the crap out of a call by holding the phone wrong. At -105db, I don't try to get my hands near the phone (the call's going to suck anyway, but I can maintain a conversation as long as I use Bluetooth and keep my hands away).
Being in a rural area, -100db is not terribly unusual for me, and I do drop or garble calls occasionally by holding the phone wrong. Such is life in the quieter spaces of the world. I have a signal repeater in my house with a rooftop antenna, and I can maintain about -95db throughout the house, -80db in the kitchen where the repeater is located.
On the other hand, the iPhone 4 is supposed to experience a signal drop of about 27db. Honestly, I'm not often in areas where I could tolerate a 27db signal loss. To me, -85db (28db available) would be considered a "good" signal in most places. In other words, to me the "death grip" would be fatal almost anywhere I'm likely to use a phone.
On the other other hand, when I travel down to larger and more populated areas, I start to see numbers better than -70db (I even saw -45db the other day, which was astonishing to a hick like myself but is probably normal for city folk). At -70db, I'd have 43db left. Even if I lost 27db, I'd have 16db remaining, which is enough for a decent (if not perfect) call. I might or might not notice the loss. At -60db I wouldn't even know I was losing signal, nor would I care.
So, yes, the iPhone 4 problem is potentially far more serious than it is with all other phones, simply because the iPhone 4 is the only phone with an exposed-metal antenna that you can attenuate directly rather than just interfere with.
But it's honestly only a problem for you if you frequent areas where there isn't a lot of extra signal available. If you have a strong enough signal that a loss of 27db still leaves you with plenty of signal to maintain a call, then you'll never see a problem.
That's key, and I don't see any way that they could have honestly believed that only 0.5% of their users were having trouble.
Let's be blunt here. The Steve knows the problem is bigger than 0.5%. The Steve is not stupid. He's a pretty smart guy.
But since only 0.5% of customers have gone to the trouble of saying they had a problem, he can freely use the accurate statistic that 0.5% of users reported problems and be absolutely, 100% correct. He is not misrepresenting the problem, he's quoting actual numbers of people who bothered to call in the problem.
My wife and I have both had problems, but neither contacted Apple Care.
And your inaction, even though you knew AppleCare wouldn't help you, provided The Steve with the number he was looking for. It justified delay on his part, marginalized the problem, and makes their issuance of cases look magnanimous rather than conciliatory.
Don't fail to vote then complain when a member of the party you don't like gets voted in.
If you have a problem, you should call AppleCare and log a complaint. If you and everyone else who could Death Grip their phones into submission had done so, The Steve couldn't brush it aside as an insignificant subset of his customer base, he'd know he had a really serious problem on his hands.
Suffering in silence is very nice and courteous and all that, but you are the customer here and if you have a problem it's your job to let the manufacturer know that you do, so they can make it right (even in cases when you know they won't).
I'm not Apple fan, and I've never owned (and haven't the slightest interest in) an iPhone, but I have to agree.
The amount of signal degradation is much higher than most other phones, but the circumstances under which it happens are relatively rare and many would never run into it at all (and a case fixes it, so a free case sounds like a winner).
Of course, if you ponied up for the entire Apple Experience including the shiny-shiny case, an external wrapping around all that sexiness might not be to your liking, but if a full refund is available you can always go for that.
I'd say the most worrying is the necessity for an adjustment to the algorithm to more accurately reflect the signal levels so people know when their calls might drop during a death grip incident. That was the one thing that made me stop for a second. Why did they feel the need to inflate the bar readings in the first place? So the iPhone 4 could gain a reputation for having better signal in more places? That sounds a little squirrely to me.
But I like the BlackBerry feature (ALT-NMLL) that shows me signal loss to the nearest -db, rather than estimating it with a 1-to-5 system. I'm also frequently in areas where signal is marginal, so the extra level of detail is extremely useful to me.
Translation: Wait until September, we're redesigning the phone casing to put some clear shiny coating on the antenna, but we need to sell through the current stock first.
Of course, if this is true, who knows if the iPhone 4.1 will do better than the 4? As it stands, the 4 seems to have good signal unless you attenuate it by grounding a couple of antennae together.
So if you can put up with a protective case and you want your Shiny, then at least The Steve is ponying up the cases for free.
The fun part was that, since they couldn't source enough cases from Apple, they'd be using third party cases. Meritline should expect a bulk order for the "$1 Apple iPhone 4 Slipcase" very, very soon.
"911" would be a logical choice if she knew she was in imminent danger. She was contacting Mom to come pick her up, probably because she thought she had scared him off with her initial kick and scream. She was, unfortunately, wrong. But I don't know her true motivations, of course. I wasn't there, I'm not 12, and I'm not female. She got the word out that she needed help. She did something. Maybe not the optimal thing, but she's a 12-year old in a potentially dangerous situation that she may or may not be fully aware of.
Assuming she wanted to use "911", VoIP on the iPod Touch cannot do location, so at best it would have been a central dispatch office that covers the entire US. So, assuming Cesmat was within earshot, he'd know she was trying to talk to someone before she could get a location out. If she even got the call connected, it's very likely the call would have ended before she could scream an address with city and state to the dispatcher.
On the other hand, her Facebook friend already knew where she was, and she knew the friend was there and had a way to contact her mother.
Overall, though, agreed - she at least did something that got help on the way and became part of the evidence chain that helped nail the bastard for what he did. Tragically, it didn't prevent the rape, but I'm not sure anything she could possibly have done would have. If she had attempted to escape or tried to communicate in a more obvious way, Cesmat might have killed her, and no one would have known she needed help and it might never have been linked to him.
It seems that she had the opportunity to get away after the initial assault, but she wasted her time trying to get help on Facebook.
Of course, she had no way of knowing he was coming back. So it's quite possible she was just asking for Mom to come pick her up, as the article stated. Plus, he wasn't gone long. Even if she had tried to escape, it might not have been successful.
While hardly ideal (since the rape actually did occur), at least she was resourceful enough to let someone know she might have been (and as it turned out was) in trouble and needed help. The mother was enroute
Also, where was the mother?
Out of the house. No further information is available. But since she and Cesmat had been dating and he was still living there, it was probably not unusual for him to be left alone with her. Dating someone with a criminal record isn't exactly a sign of brilliance, but on the other hand he had no prior record of anything violent.
Please, please, please read TFA. Especially before you accuse a girl of being stupid because she was raped and had no way of calling for help. It really makes you look stupid when you make up facts to support a viewpoint that accuses the victim of stupidity.
First, she made the communication BEFORE being assaulted.
- Cesmat had confiscated her cell phone earlier in the evening. She had no telephone. Hence no ability to make calls.
- Cesmat had briefly left her room after attempting to remove her pants and her fighting him off. She had no way of knowing she was ABOUT to be raped (get the timeline right), so she used her only communications media to get a friend to have her mom come home and get her away from Cesmat ASAP. Little did she know he was about to re-enter the room and rape her.
- After the rape, Cesmat left. She then blocked the room off and escaped through the window, found a payphone, and called her mother (who was enroute already).
Could leaving the room immediately have prevented the rape? Maybe. Or maybe he was just outside the room at the time and her attempt at escape could have turned this deadly.
Given the fact that Cesmat took away her cell phone earlier in the evening, as mentioned in TFA, if there had been a landline he probably would have made sure that didn't worth either.
His excuse to her was that "he didn't want her texting all night". Obviously, his real intention was to make sure she had no way of calling for help. Thank goodness he didn't know her iPod had Internet access. She at least had a way to ask for help.
The article has a pretty clear timeline.
He confiscated her cell phone earlier in the evening, and was probably unaware that her iPod gave her any ability to communicate. He wanted her isolated.
Later, he walked into her room, naked, and attempted to remove her pants. She screamed. He left the room briefly. She sent a message on Facebook asking a friend to contact her mother and ask Mom to come and take her home. I don't know what was going through her head at the time, leaving might have been a better option, but she's 12 years old and asking for help was probably not a terribly bad option.
He walked back into the room very shortly thereafter and raped her, after which she escaped the house, got to a payphone, and called her mother who was already enroute.
Maybe she could have handled it better, such as leaving immediately, but if she only had enough time to fire off an IM over Facebook to a friend, it's unlikely in the extreme that she could have escaped or secured the room in the time she had available, and any attempt to do so might have made the situation worse. She might have thought he wouldn't come back in since he left after a scream.
As it is, she used her only communications media to make sure people knew she was in trouble and who was a threat to her, which would have been very useful if this whole thing had turned even more tragic and Cesmat had actually killed her. She called for help using the only method she knew would reach someone she knew.