Yes, we all heard that insanity. "Please cripple functionality of your PC in the name of security".
The answer is still no, just as it was in the beginning of computing and just as it will be tens of years from now. Now go back under the rock you crawled from.
I didn't make any of these broad claims. I wanted to specifically address the claim that this particular criticism of Chinese policy is hypocritical from European point of view. Nothing else.
I fully agree that Chinese may have a system in place that is socially stable enough to make a successful state. Historians in the far future rather than people today will judge that. We simply do not know which system is better, and we know for a fact that democracy in the way it's practised across the West has serious problems with social stability after barely a hundred years behind it. Introducing similar democracy in formerly dictatorial states has shown to produce catastrophic consequences as well.
I would however make a point that Chinese model has the same problem that it always had - too much emphasis on the certain clique of people, making top leadership inbred, all while strangling criticism that would remind said leadership of their own flaws. This is what keeps Western democracy competitive in the long run in spite of its massive laundry list of flaws, and we already know how that ended up for China. They went from country that almost conquered the world to a country with no naval power almost overnight because of failure at top leadership level.
I strongly suspect that one of the point behind this is to move business and create jobs in China instead of allowing foreign dominant services to take hold. In which case, this is very much successful.
That wasn't my question, nor am I interested in an off-topic debate.
Re:What's the difference between China and EU?
on
China Cuts Off Some VPNs
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Help me understand your point of view. We run liberal democracies here in EU. We do block some things based on cultural expectations, and in some cases, because certain foreign power that shall not be named forces us to do so typically through government corruption on high level as shown in leaks by certain man who now resides in Russia.
But on the principle, we still consider freedom of speech to be of paramount importance, and unblocked internet access to be an important cornerstone of this principle. As you point out we do make some deviations from the principle, but these deviations tend to be based on rather awful historic facts and are very much targeted.
Chinese model is about denying large portions of free speech, such as political non-threatening free speech of political dissidents to improve social cohesion of their society. How is it hypocritical to criticize this aspect of Chinese society from European point of view? We very clearly differ here, and there is no hypocrisy at play. Our blocking is targeted, specific and based on history. It specifically makes a point to avoid suppressing political dissent when at all possible. Chinese is pre-emptive, overly broad and its main intent is suppression of political and social dissent.
I fail to see hypocrisy. Please point out the mistake in my logic and explain how exactly this critique is hypocritical.
Right. International business will be kept out of China because it's required to conform to local laws regarding internet access.
In other news, international business will be kept out of EU because of customer protection legislation and out of US because of danger posed by gun culture and gun laws.
Said no one with a clue, ever. On any of those points. Internationally ran businesses judge their presence in the target country based on profits and risks. Thing mentioned above are categorised as "risks", and as long as profits are greater than risks, which they will be in China for foreseeable future, risks will be mitigated through things like usage of local services that aren't blocked in China, providing the necessary support to users in EU and so on.
Yes. Because these tests are pure FUD generation. These "tests" are designed specifically to give high marks to AV kit that has its heuristics engine to produce as many false positives as possible and low marks to AV kit that has a reasonable heuristics engine that looks for realistic threats and doesn't spam user with "this is a potential threat, upgrade for 9.99 now to fix" advertisements.
Reminder - home users aren't threatened by latest custom tailored malware. They are threatened by well known mass-produced threats like bitlocker. And MSE catches those just fine.
That is why you use MSE. It's about the only AV that isn't attempting to spread fear uncertainty and doubt in the mind of the user about the state of his machine to sell him various subscription packages and upgrades. It just does what it does quietly and unobtrusively.
And let's face it, a lot of home users do not know enough to be safe even from basic threats like viruses through email attachments and drive-by-downloads. That is what MSE helps with.
I never caught a virus since floppy days (except for one case where I was reinstalling XP from vanilla disk on open university network and forgot to unplug the machine before installing firewall - it got owned in seconds). I've observed MSE heuristics, which is the part that most of the crappy "tests" typically slam MSE for - catch things like encrypted executables and crack engines just fine.
The test you link basically measures heuristics engine for latest custom tailored threats. To catch those, you will need to tweak your heuristics engine to produce a huge amount of false positives. This is what commercial AV really likes to do because it makes their AV software look super-important when in reality, it's massive amount of false alarms that user should have never seen for the cost of potentially catching that new custom tailored virus only seen targeted at very specific machines that is never an actual significant threat to home user. MSE does the exact opposite - its heuristics engine only reacts to something that actually looks like a real threat or a generator of real threats and tries to minimize false positives. This is because MS doesn't look to actively market or sell MSE upgrades, and as a result, it's a piece of software aimed at actually satisfying the needs of a home user rather than maximum monetization of home user through fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Now I'm having a bit of a problem with MSE and browser download interaction (for some reason MSE doesn't finish the automatic scan of downloaded item and browser cannot save the item on the first attempt - will work on retry), but MSE is still a top notch unintrusive piece of AV that catches threats that normal home user should watch for.
It probably won't catch government-made or other custom-tailored malware - but as a home user that's not what you're looking out of anyway.
I guess you never heard about ghostery, adblock, noscript et al?
Essentially all flash exploits come from very specific kinds of flash elements, and those are blocked by aforementioned software. For me, it's the primary reason to run adblocker. Safety.
That is because its Unity. Unity doesn't run well on anything.
And I do mean anything. No hardware in the world runs Unity well. Not because hardware is bad, but because Unity is a buggy piece of shit that won't run well even on SLI 980s.
As for "playing games released on the same year", I'm yet to find a game that won't work with my 560Ti. Though many of these releases I had to bump quality down to medium to get solid frame rate.
Paid shills? Please. I don't rate this particular flash mob anywhere near that high. Paid shills are typically decent at their job and a whole lot less obvious.
This is more of a PR effort aimed at fan base that got the shills that had their morale crushed by catastrophic failure of 8 bounce back with "well 10 is going to be awesome, and by the way, 8 is awesome too".
We have no evidence because any evidence would have to come from Microsoft, which apparently hasn't decided yet. I have outlined my specific reasoning in the last paragraph of the post.
You know, it's funny when a windows shill accidentally stumbles upon the problem that his masters probably told him ten times over not to ever mention, because that is one point where the battle is objectively unwinnable for pro-windows arguments.
The problem that windows 8 and now apparently 10 aren't designed for desktop but for lowest common denominator of all windows devces, which means touch optimization throwing desktop usability out of the windows (pun intended). At the same time, 7 was in fact designed for desktop, as was XP. As a result, both have a vastly superior (and vastly more popular) UI scheme that works for most users, whereas 8's does not. The fact that even hardcore pro-8 shills now advertise software like Classic Shell, which removes some of the failings of Microsoft but doesn't address the myriad of others which remain hard coded in the OS says everything that needs to be said about Microsoft's design focus for 8. When even your supporters readily concede that your UI is so terrible, it needs to be fixed by third party just to be even considered functional on desktop, you know that the battle is lost.
We're seen how well that worked in 8. While post-10 announcement PR campaign and AC shills are all over articles like this one, reality remains. 8 is an abject failure that eclipsed even pearls like Vista and Millenium Edition. There is nothing we've seen so far to suggest that 10 will actually prioritise desktop usability over compatibility with lowest common denominator. In fact, we've seen ample evidence that "lowest common denominator" is now going even further down, from large screen tablets to now phones.
This while actual PC monitors are getting cheaper and cheaper while getting bigger and bigger. While mice continue to improve in accuracy and comfort of use. The conflict is evident, and Microsoft has clearly chosen a side. 8's sales are a very good showing of why they chose the wrong side, and pig-headed armies of followers are likely one of the biggest problems that MS has today. Because said pig headed armies keep telling Microsoft that as long as they keep on forcing the round peg that is tablet, and phone based touch interface into square hole that is desktop, they will eventually succeed.
Didn't take long for the first 8 shill AC to lock in and start the strafing run.
Makes me wonder if these are bots who just have a couple of dosen templates they fire off ASAP when handler indicates that someone is once again pointing out the obvious failure of 8 on desktop.
I read the original article this is sourced from. And then I read the small print at the bottom of the article that most people missed.
The article is actually spot on if you read the small print. But it looks like it's wrong if you just read the main article.
The main article states the following: "We announced that a free upgrade for Windows 10 will be made available to customers running Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1 who upgrade in the first year after launch.*
This is more than a one-time upgrade: once a Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device – at no additional charge."
Note the asterisk.
Now here is what it says in small print under the article:
"*Hardware and software requirements apply. No additional charge. Feature availability may vary by device. Some editions excluded. More details at http://www.windows.com./"
This basically let's them downgrade the "free version" into shitty "limited edition" and then ask for sub money for "full edition".
The issue here is that Microsoft pulls a lot of money from windows tax. I seriously doubt that they are willing to lose this money. Either we're looking for an upgrade as a desperate means to push windows app store upon people (which doesn't exist in 7, which majority of PCs are on) or this is a classic "try before you buy" scheme which downgrades the OS after a year "trial". Either way, we just don't know. Original article's claim of "no charge" promise is pretty much gutted by the "feature availability" caveat. We'll have to wait and see what they do.
"*Hardware and software requirements apply. No additional charge. Feature availability may vary by device. Some editions excluded. More details at http://www.windows.com./"
There is no information on windows.com at this time, but this small print lets them basically downgrade OS into shitty "free" version after a year, with additional subscription fee to restore full functionality. I would not be making bold claims like yours just yet - we don't know their business model yet
I would remind a lot of people here that windows division brings in a lot of revenue for Microsoft in form of infamous "windows tax" and I seriously doubt they're willing to just lose this revenue stream after investing as much as they did into it to keep it.
The problem here is the mix of application incompatibility (they cannot provide other software you use) and actual difficulty of making an OS as usable as XP/7.
Admittedly they could compete with 8 on interface, but let's face it - those who use 8 either need some specific features in 8 or just don't know how to upgrade to 7.
Not the way it works. Several studies have been done that appear to indicate that the impact is actually on gut microbiome which changes the way metabolism works resulting in fattening.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, we all heard that insanity. "Please cripple functionality of your PC in the name of security".
The answer is still no, just as it was in the beginning of computing and just as it will be tens of years from now. Now go back under the rock you crawled from.
APK has fanboys now?
Oh fuck me...
I didn't make any of these broad claims. I wanted to specifically address the claim that this particular criticism of Chinese policy is hypocritical from European point of view. Nothing else.
I fully agree that Chinese may have a system in place that is socially stable enough to make a successful state. Historians in the far future rather than people today will judge that. We simply do not know which system is better, and we know for a fact that democracy in the way it's practised across the West has serious problems with social stability after barely a hundred years behind it. Introducing similar democracy in formerly dictatorial states has shown to produce catastrophic consequences as well.
I would however make a point that Chinese model has the same problem that it always had - too much emphasis on the certain clique of people, making top leadership inbred, all while strangling criticism that would remind said leadership of their own flaws. This is what keeps Western democracy competitive in the long run in spite of its massive laundry list of flaws, and we already know how that ended up for China. They went from country that almost conquered the world to a country with no naval power almost overnight because of failure at top leadership level.
That's the one. Name is similar enough for me to mix the two.
It's a great example of malware targeted at average users rather than tailored zero day exploit. And it's easily caught by MSE.
Certainly. Which is a risk. Which needs to be mitigated, just like the other example I provide, exposure to support and warranty claims made in EU.
I strongly suspect that one of the point behind this is to move business and create jobs in China instead of allowing foreign dominant services to take hold. In which case, this is very much successful.
That common malware that used encryption to encrypt your entire hard drive and then ask you for a few hundred EUR/USD to decrypt. Messed up the names.
That wasn't my question, nor am I interested in an off-topic debate.
Help me understand your point of view. We run liberal democracies here in EU. We do block some things based on cultural expectations, and in some cases, because certain foreign power that shall not be named forces us to do so typically through government corruption on high level as shown in leaks by certain man who now resides in Russia.
But on the principle, we still consider freedom of speech to be of paramount importance, and unblocked internet access to be an important cornerstone of this principle. As you point out we do make some deviations from the principle, but these deviations tend to be based on rather awful historic facts and are very much targeted.
Chinese model is about denying large portions of free speech, such as political non-threatening free speech of political dissidents to improve social cohesion of their society. How is it hypocritical to criticize this aspect of Chinese society from European point of view? We very clearly differ here, and there is no hypocrisy at play. Our blocking is targeted, specific and based on history. It specifically makes a point to avoid suppressing political dissent when at all possible. Chinese is pre-emptive, overly broad and its main intent is suppression of political and social dissent.
I fail to see hypocrisy. Please point out the mistake in my logic and explain how exactly this critique is hypocritical.
Right. International business will be kept out of China because it's required to conform to local laws regarding internet access.
In other news, international business will be kept out of EU because of customer protection legislation and out of US because of danger posed by gun culture and gun laws.
Said no one with a clue, ever. On any of those points. Internationally ran businesses judge their presence in the target country based on profits and risks. Thing mentioned above are categorised as "risks", and as long as profits are greater than risks, which they will be in China for foreseeable future, risks will be mitigated through things like usage of local services that aren't blocked in China, providing the necessary support to users in EU and so on.
Yes. Because these tests are pure FUD generation. These "tests" are designed specifically to give high marks to AV kit that has its heuristics engine to produce as many false positives as possible and low marks to AV kit that has a reasonable heuristics engine that looks for realistic threats and doesn't spam user with "this is a potential threat, upgrade for 9.99 now to fix" advertisements.
Reminder - home users aren't threatened by latest custom tailored malware. They are threatened by well known mass-produced threats like bitlocker. And MSE catches those just fine.
That is why you use MSE. It's about the only AV that isn't attempting to spread fear uncertainty and doubt in the mind of the user about the state of his machine to sell him various subscription packages and upgrades. It just does what it does quietly and unobtrusively.
And let's face it, a lot of home users do not know enough to be safe even from basic threats like viruses through email attachments and drive-by-downloads. That is what MSE helps with.
I never caught a virus since floppy days (except for one case where I was reinstalling XP from vanilla disk on open university network and forgot to unplug the machine before installing firewall - it got owned in seconds). I've observed MSE heuristics, which is the part that most of the crappy "tests" typically slam MSE for - catch things like encrypted executables and crack engines just fine.
The test you link basically measures heuristics engine for latest custom tailored threats. To catch those, you will need to tweak your heuristics engine to produce a huge amount of false positives. This is what commercial AV really likes to do because it makes their AV software look super-important when in reality, it's massive amount of false alarms that user should have never seen for the cost of potentially catching that new custom tailored virus only seen targeted at very specific machines that is never an actual significant threat to home user.
MSE does the exact opposite - its heuristics engine only reacts to something that actually looks like a real threat or a generator of real threats and tries to minimize false positives. This is because MS doesn't look to actively market or sell MSE upgrades, and as a result, it's a piece of software aimed at actually satisfying the needs of a home user rather than maximum monetization of home user through fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Now I'm having a bit of a problem with MSE and browser download interaction (for some reason MSE doesn't finish the automatic scan of downloaded item and browser cannot save the item on the first attempt - will work on retry), but MSE is still a top notch unintrusive piece of AV that catches threats that normal home user should watch for.
It probably won't catch government-made or other custom-tailored malware - but as a home user that's not what you're looking out of anyway.
I guess you never heard about ghostery, adblock, noscript et al?
Essentially all flash exploits come from very specific kinds of flash elements, and those are blocked by aforementioned software. For me, it's the primary reason to run adblocker. Safety.
That is because its Unity. Unity doesn't run well on anything.
And I do mean anything. No hardware in the world runs Unity well. Not because hardware is bad, but because Unity is a buggy piece of shit that won't run well even on SLI 980s.
As for "playing games released on the same year", I'm yet to find a game that won't work with my 560Ti. Though many of these releases I had to bump quality down to medium to get solid frame rate.
Paid shills? Please. I don't rate this particular flash mob anywhere near that high. Paid shills are typically decent at their job and a whole lot less obvious.
This is more of a PR effort aimed at fan base that got the shills that had their morale crushed by catastrophic failure of 8 bounce back with "well 10 is going to be awesome, and by the way, 8 is awesome too".
Key words: "seems to indicate".
It may seem to indicate anything. I have outlined the financial incentives in the last paragraph.
We have no evidence because any evidence would have to come from Microsoft, which apparently hasn't decided yet. I have outlined my specific reasoning in the last paragraph of the post.
I have outlined reasons for my interpretation below the quotes you provided, specifically in the last paragraph of the post.
You know, it's funny when a windows shill accidentally stumbles upon the problem that his masters probably told him ten times over not to ever mention, because that is one point where the battle is objectively unwinnable for pro-windows arguments.
The problem that windows 8 and now apparently 10 aren't designed for desktop but for lowest common denominator of all windows devces, which means touch optimization throwing desktop usability out of the windows (pun intended). At the same time, 7 was in fact designed for desktop, as was XP. As a result, both have a vastly superior (and vastly more popular) UI scheme that works for most users, whereas 8's does not. The fact that even hardcore pro-8 shills now advertise software like Classic Shell, which removes some of the failings of Microsoft but doesn't address the myriad of others which remain hard coded in the OS says everything that needs to be said about Microsoft's design focus for 8. When even your supporters readily concede that your UI is so terrible, it needs to be fixed by third party just to be even considered functional on desktop, you know that the battle is lost.
We're seen how well that worked in 8. While post-10 announcement PR campaign and AC shills are all over articles like this one, reality remains. 8 is an abject failure that eclipsed even pearls like Vista and Millenium Edition. There is nothing we've seen so far to suggest that 10 will actually prioritise desktop usability over compatibility with lowest common denominator. In fact, we've seen ample evidence that "lowest common denominator" is now going even further down, from large screen tablets to now phones.
This while actual PC monitors are getting cheaper and cheaper while getting bigger and bigger. While mice continue to improve in accuracy and comfort of use. The conflict is evident, and Microsoft has clearly chosen a side. 8's sales are a very good showing of why they chose the wrong side, and pig-headed armies of followers are likely one of the biggest problems that MS has today. Because said pig headed armies keep telling Microsoft that as long as they keep on forcing the round peg that is tablet, and phone based touch interface into square hole that is desktop, they will eventually succeed.
Didn't take long for the first 8 shill AC to lock in and start the strafing run.
Makes me wonder if these are bots who just have a couple of dosen templates they fire off ASAP when handler indicates that someone is once again pointing out the obvious failure of 8 on desktop.
I read the original article this is sourced from. And then I read the small print at the bottom of the article that most people missed.
The article is actually spot on if you read the small print. But it looks like it's wrong if you just read the main article.
The main article states the following:
"We announced that a free upgrade for Windows 10 will be made available to customers running Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1 who upgrade in the first year after launch.*
This is more than a one-time upgrade: once a Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device – at no additional charge."
Note the asterisk.
Now here is what it says in small print under the article:
"*Hardware and software requirements apply. No additional charge. Feature availability may vary by device. Some editions excluded. More details at http://www.windows.com./"
This basically let's them downgrade the "free version" into shitty "limited edition" and then ask for sub money for "full edition".
The issue here is that Microsoft pulls a lot of money from windows tax. I seriously doubt that they are willing to lose this money. Either we're looking for an upgrade as a desperate means to push windows app store upon people (which doesn't exist in 7, which majority of PCs are on) or this is a classic "try before you buy" scheme which downgrades the OS after a year "trial". Either way, we just don't know. Original article's claim of "no charge" promise is pretty much gutted by the "feature availability" caveat. We'll have to wait and see what they do.
Most people missed the small print:
"*Hardware and software requirements apply. No additional charge. Feature availability may vary by device. Some editions excluded. More details at http://www.windows.com./"
There is no information on windows.com at this time, but this small print lets them basically downgrade OS into shitty "free" version after a year, with additional subscription fee to restore full functionality. I would not be making bold claims like yours just yet - we don't know their business model yet
I would remind a lot of people here that windows division brings in a lot of revenue for Microsoft in form of infamous "windows tax" and I seriously doubt they're willing to just lose this revenue stream after investing as much as they did into it to keep it.
The problem here is the mix of application incompatibility (they cannot provide other software you use) and actual difficulty of making an OS as usable as XP/7.
Admittedly they could compete with 8 on interface, but let's face it - those who use 8 either need some specific features in 8 or just don't know how to upgrade to 7.
Not the way it works. Several studies have been done that appear to indicate that the impact is actually on gut microbiome which changes the way metabolism works resulting in fattening.