Improved security with malware reporting and disabling outdated plug-ins by default
I've had a grudge on Google due to their plugin status quo, because I've been burned with firefox and now prefer to update plugins manually. Firefox build numbers change little, and plugins can last through a point-zero-point-one update with no problem. Point one changes break them more.
Chrome updates by full one versions every few months and gives me little choice because their extension model is a lot newer and lacking the community behind it we have in the moz extensions portal. Just the other day an extension was saying that it was disabled because its auto-updated version wanted upgraded [snooping?] privileges. I didn't bother; extension privileges changing randomly is the other problem that Firefox doesn't experience.
For example, IIRC extensions like Google adblock and Readability want my web HISTORY and 2 or 3 other seemingly unrelated things in order to complete the install. Granularity of the privilege ring API so that programmers can give us X service is quoted as the problem. Then I find another extension* that wants nothing and gives me the same results without spying. I'd like to see a link detailing all the privileges and whether history is really linked to hiding page elements.
I've disabled Chrome updates altogether after 8.0 on Windows XP, but extensions seem to continue to auto-update and get disabled pending my um, "relicensing" approval. Is there a way to manually manage extensions in Chrome other than just turning them on or off? Can I block privileges by doing some about:config-style hacks to test if the plugin really needs them?
*except for Chrome adblock which has no other substitutes that I know of
Google makes money data mining. You shouldn't trust them with nefarious anti-government translations; if they never delete one e-mail, they will definitely never lack the same logging for your translation activities.
I'm also starting to think that trusting my web searches to them all these years may not be such a good idea, even if their dashboard claims they've already deleted it.
That said, duckduckgo isn't as good for searching and lacks mapping and similar all-in-one google conveniences. Their translations are the best; one and a half order of magnitude better than the babelfish I used till last year. Google translate sentences stay on topic more than 90% of the time in long pages, rather than having completely obvious topic changes when a particular noun or verb has multiple pairs to translate to. That said, I would prefer a flaky translation because noise can anonymize you.
It's the first time I'm accepting that not all job board spammers are ESL chinese or russians living outside the USA; it makes sense that more than a handful write badly precisely to obscure the source behind foreign speech and overseas TLDs that globalization allows us to rent without setting a foot in far away lands. Example: "bit.ly"
you forgot another logical step. first, we do what you said, then just run it thru a case changer. all lowercase sounds good. all caps sounds better.
break up sentences like i'm doing, pretending that we're holding a typewritter-style car-return over-compensation. all this adds mental noise "proving" the fact that the writer is nothing more than yet another internet noob. why not double any question marks and exclamation points!!?? throw in unnecessary ellipsis at the end of sentences for suspense... if your mailer permits html colors, underlines and smileys, go crazy. men do not normally use consecutive smileys beyond triplets also, use a pinch of u's, ur's, and other web2.0 hip stuff its/it's/there/their misuse and some lolz, and wtfs for good sense the last two are things nobody uses in real-life documents that are traceable to you careful with that because your office emails might show a few samples where you do slip unintentionally, and then you're screwed.
Forgot to add this: back in 2007 MS had 90% OS share in China, which makes 'which Linux penetration do you have' just an exercise in futility.
How much market share might MS have lost to Red Linux / People's OS supposing the govt mandate did take effect after that techrepublic article was written 3 years ago?
An older article article stresses CCW Research's statement that 33% of new PC buyersuninstall that Linux derivative right off the bat, but the PC shop tends to do just prior to the sale that for them as a loyalty perk. More unsettling is that IE6 isn't the only IE... IE7 and IE8 numbers has to push the balance even further away from the People's OS --new pirated PC's don't easily get XP even in the USA, especially in the mobile form-factors. That counts for fewer Windows downupgrades to XP that would otherwise beef up IE6's numbers in China.
FB's 600 million people are only a small 10% of the world population, though:) More seriously, the problem is those FB Like and Share buttons that people hold onto for dear life probably won't be here in 10 years. Then what?
Remember unmaintained Geocities pages made 10 years ago sporting dozens of broken images and broken links (and then Geocities itself going under a few years ago along with legacy Tripod communities and tons of webrings.)
All I see is those senior citizens taking their first PC-netizen steps using FB training wheels today will be 10 years older and less able to learn how to really copy and paste or otherwise share anything. That 99.99% of the world or whatever it is, will be very enraged when they're eventually trapped in another endangered website. It will not be nice when their "kids" or we are asked to copy-paste their stuff thousands of items at a time, unless some company sneaks their own migration tool past the FB APIs.
Alternative GUIs are lame --they always break something down the road.
Chrome has issues when you've selected a higher DPI. Tabs overtake the min-max-close area so that you can't interact normally with the window, and it looks like a wont-fix. I had to go back to squinty 96dpi fonts on this laptop.
Derivatives like Chromium and Iron are also affected.
My above link sucks because it's mostly non-US charges against StreetView. This one is more relevant because of quotes like this one:
[Pennsilvania, USA] Judge Reynolds sided with Google and concluded that the Street View service doesn't meet the criteria for an unlawful intrusion. Case law precedents define an actionable intrusion as one that causes "mental suffering, shame, or humiliation to a person of ordinary sensibilities." Reynolds doesn't believe that sufficient evidence was provided to demonstrate that Street View can cause such damage.
sigh. What happens when John Doe tries to do his own private StreetView project all over the USA?
Nowhere in the states can you record in public without permission from anybody at all
I'll believe that when I see all the Google StreetView drivers and VIPs get jailtime:) The rest of your statement, I can't argue with. The laws here are just screwed up.
Even if the car is considered private property, unless the officer was sitting in the passenger seat, anyone can record anything they want anywhere if it is in public. That is the premise for most all security cameras and recordings anywhere ever.
Why is there such a big legal avoidance of audio when videos also do the same "tapping"? Why exactly don't they call it 'wiretapping' when the cops do it: any wrongful actions of yours will get "authenticated" via visual evidence. How? in the form of the videotape featuring you and your car as taken from the nearly-mandatory cameras rolling from the windshield in the cop's car.
OTOH, assuming you did nothing wrong, can you still sue them for illegal recording? Moreover, assuming the cop did nothing wrong, why can he so easily sue you? Could I have installed a camera in my car pointing at him and his car and done the same thing they get away with? Why is audio any different? Not trolling, just pointing out how unbalanced the justice system is.
Indeed. It is disheartening how even insignificant websites written in foreign languages have FB integration.
My PC-challenged mother has been using Facebook for most of her online pursuits. All those "Like" and "Share" buttons on Youtube, her foreign newsfeeds and random sites have made her believe that they're a normal part of the TCP protocol or something.
She wouldn't learn how to copy-paste a URL to a good-ol' webmail message until I told her that the selfish FB doesn't allow her to share individual content (we know FB is eager to e-mail spam your other friends to join, but not so eager about letting the sharing API e-mailing a single link or important update beyond the walled garden) to all her overseas friends still lacking a membership.
I'm still blown away since last night, when I found a site that creates a fake identity with
fake name
Occupation
address and geographically-correct USA phone #
credit card number*
weight and height
blood type (Asia's fascination with personality divination surprises me --ie: blood types are in Final Fantasy VII and Capcom's Street Fighter II characters). Does any Japan-bound/.-er know if job applications habitually need to know this?
UPS Tracking number (to mislead auction fraudsters who reverse electronic payments after you ship them the hard goods? dunno... seems to help scammers more than it would help legit people)
SSN (some legit businesses and their webforms won't go anywhere if you blank-social them, even if your local laws exempt you from providing one)
Mother's maiden name
Birthday
Website
Fake e-mail at example.com (apparently Dreamhost owns that domain and provides a free password that enables your fake identity to receive e-mails)
* I heard somewhere these CC# generators pass validation algorithms on forms, and are helping flag your scammer's billing company to the authorities by failing to be real when a the money transfer is charged. In reality, they'll probably just chase you for using fake data, which is illegal in most EULAs and probably all USA legislation
I know that, but not the India techs remoting into users PCs on a laptop deployment or poorly managed enterprise setting. I've had to make people download putty.exe because your solution requires access to "Add/remove Programs", which becomes 100% "useless" if the password isn't immediately available or the GPO or nearby IT nazi just says "no config changes here!"
No, drivers can be delicensed too. It only needs to be able to *get* a license, voice-assisted by whatever "disabled" person is on the driver's seat --think disabled men, or backseat children whose parent driver just had a heart attack at 70mph. Good plan, unless lawmakers actively kill this automation effort in its infancy on grounds of "automated terror attacks that leave no video-trackable humans to chase... like we caught that Times Square guy in 2010" or something.
IBM's recently lauded "Watson technology" will be miniaturized and eventually the car will be like the Star Trek enterprise's "computer" listening and responding to its Picard. To pass a license test, it has to understand the driver w/in milliseconds. That's to hear, parse, evaluate for command flaws (like asking to brake while stationary), compare to its realtime input and then act.
True, but sadly people are happy enough with the current, reachable IPv4 internet that they won't care unless somehow there's youtube and facebook killer that is v6 only out there. But you can't be #1 if you start out in a broken-off shard of the internet --I mean, your site's not even counted in official top-site stats, unless it's ipv4
There's a problem: your average tech can't even suspect Apple to be a "well known" IPv6 router maker... see? IPv6 marketting was dead on arrival even for those who *deserve* to boast their early mastery.
I never heard of RouterBoard or Fritz!Box 7390 at the local giant computer store, or Staples, Circuit City, Best Buy, Sears, or even RadioShack. I also paid $150 for a router with no physical* sign that it was fully compliant out of the box. *That* is still the problem: even *they* don't care that they *care*
* Only the GUI once you pay and get the device home...webwise? only on the forum, or officially a few shy hints and firmware changelog one-liners.
but not using said alternative firmware. Let's face the upgrade side: we're talking about days when people routinely root their cellphones and have at least one alternative browser they click on without having an ounce of IT blood in their family.
On using the alt firmware... I'm under the impression that the main OSS router firmwares force you to use a CLI before you can 'install' what 99% of the world considers a mandatory port 80 GUI.
If that's still the truth, then it's pretty bad form. The only reason Joe User configures consumer routers is all the sticky color-coded labels / shrinkwrap saying "USE THIS CD IN WINDOWS TO RUN THE EASY-CLICK WIZARD GUI FIRST!" Alternative firmware doesn't get to use that trump card. That alone is the reason only 1 in 50 wifis in densely packed buildings in this large US metropolis is still in a factory state as opposed to 2 in 14 back in 2005.
The bitter part is that those 49,500 employees at Apple don't *manufacture* the iPods and iPads. Foxconn announced a huge move of 200k jobs away from the Hong Kong area, and you can well guess how many people will chase after the new physical location --big overnight loss there.
I wonder if we might count 3rd parties of these huge product lines as fulltime employees of Apple? Not to the PHB's but the point is still non-trivial.
if you read the EULA's when you activate your device i do believe there are some age restrictions in there too.
EULA's are on smartphones too these days? Ouch. That's sad. All my dumb phones up through May 2010 didn't.
I can't remember seeing an activation EULA on a work blackberry either, though the setup was pretty long and I might just have forgotten. EULAs never mention the built-in cameras snitches your GPS and serial numbers via EXIF headers, but companies still don't get sued. The more reason to hold a tight grip on the last generation of trusted hardware (to us users). Displays don't need a EULA, but wait till HDCP is everywhere:)
This is the most common form of malware I've had to clean up. Back when Windows didn't have 'home versions' and lacked group policy they only got away with rewriting your dlls to spy on you and create popups.
I have stopped seeing the popups altogether --now it's just 'Windows Antivirus 2010 has detected legitProgram.exe / legitTechTool.exe / yourCLI contains a virus and must close it. To remove it, click below [and pay USD$80]' It is annoying that turning back the clock fails most of the time, or the person infected waits long enough that any clean copy of the OS is long discarded by newer infected System Restore snapshots.
I did find one removal tool distributed as.com.exe and.scr(eensaver), but never checked that the non-screensaver ones are just a file rename. Never had a chance to try out on with the exe-catching malware... Between exe-knocking and the design failure that puts group policy APIs in XP *Home* edition, malware pretty much forbids any tool --safe mode sometimes gets pwned or corrupted past any home of recovery.
The Windows-based Basilisk II emulator of 68000 processors could run any MacOS up to OS 8.1 IIRC. At some point after iPods started being sold, I noticed an abrupt trend for install OS's to be Bios-keyed so that you couldn't even troubleshoot a laptop with a desktop CD (lots less lenient than Dell and Compaq locking out only computers bearing competitor's logos while working accross all form-factors).
Things never got back to the old ways after OS 9 came out. Another problem is that MacOS 10.n completely disappears off the shelves and corporations that trained all their users on that n version the morning MacOS 10.n+1 is released.
Now that I think about it, XP would never have survived 10 years that way --they were still selling it legally at large physical stores in 2009, and even in 2008 corps could still bulk order new PC's imaged with it in spite of MS' having long released a newer OS hungry for attention. The converse is how few stand-alone copies of OS 9.x you see. The grip apple on planned obsolecense these days is scary, and changed so suddenly it's still making heads spin:)
And I was an apple fan a decade ago... when they still made only computers.
Gig after Gig of space is the norm after having been a measly dozen or two MBs in Windows 3.1. So WHY do they just remove useful files like calendar.exe (users of Windows 2000 and XP (and maybe 98) who try doublecliking the date get an error if they're not admins, so can't see a calendar), qbasic, vb runtime dlls for old shareware we all hoard somewhere, the cd player from Win2k, the more feature-complete sound recorder prior to Vista, the telnet.exe file and others. All of those files are so tiny that removing them is just an antiservice for the sake of streamlining support. It's not like their siblings in complexity (solitaire, paint and calc.exe) ever get much from version to version, though Windows 7 DID change them a lot after 15 years of neglect
Our source pictures WERE jpegs weighing 2.5MB for 7MP camera. Uploading to "back'em up" results in resizing and resolution loss: facebook (their retrievable backups at least) is storing them as supposedly no more than 200k*. Most pics retrieved in the 28MB zip were 80k or so... barely acceptable for blowing up and editing, and if it's the first time some of you think about this, then think especially about those ~600 million FBers who don't expect their precious memories to have degraded quality.
There is another issue which FB warns about: if you click around in the resulting site-backup-like file structure you'll find that all the data you were hiding from certain groups is there in the clear, including your full birthdate, association information and so on. This is NOT something you would want someone to steal via social engineering, all nicely pre-packaged to be sold to higher-level scammers.
* The recently changed photo upload dialog compresses photos prior to departure to finish quicker, so FB can no longer "steal" a full size version and shortchange you... FB used to upload your megapixel shots fully in the past, but isn't giving us access to them.
Also, PC's have a hard time leaving our hands for more than 100 bucks... My used PC prices compete with cheapo NEW $300 ones, while ~$550 is as low as macs go, and unbelievably less user-upgradable at that, so people I know bought more $1300 macbooks than $550 mac minis. Yup, reality distortion fields are strong.
Suppose Joe Q User got a high n < 50 emails from Spammer King per day. A few cents a day in 'damage recovery' won't be worth suing for when courts/lawyers charge in the thousands, and he's not the one paying for bayesian algorithm research and footing the power / maintenance bills for monthly SPAM filtering appliances.
WebMail providers and ISPs are the only parties that could USE your so-dubbed 'BS metric' to litigate any useful net values in the high Millions of dollars for millions of filtered emails to their millions of worldwide users. I would support their initiative... but they just aren't interested. It's the same apathy that Microsoft showsby caring only once or twice in ~20 years to sue malware creators who case real damages in IT time, ransomware actually paid, and data loss caused from poorly planned fixes and emergency restores.
How much less could a Webmail provider care compared to giants like MS, when spam is so hard to track that they're gladly footing the bulk-filtering bills mentioned and still giving millions of us "free" webmail?
Slashdot Mirror
Improved security with malware reporting and disabling outdated plug-ins by default
I've had a grudge on Google due to their plugin status quo, because I've been burned with firefox and now prefer to update plugins manually. Firefox build numbers change little, and plugins can last through a point-zero-point-one update with no problem. Point one changes break them more.
Chrome updates by full one versions every few months and gives me little choice because their extension model is a lot newer and lacking the community behind it we have in the moz extensions portal. Just the other day an extension was saying that it was disabled because its auto-updated version wanted upgraded [snooping?] privileges. I didn't bother; extension privileges changing randomly is the other problem that Firefox doesn't experience.
For example, IIRC extensions like Google adblock and Readability want my web HISTORY and 2 or 3 other seemingly unrelated things in order to complete the install. Granularity of the privilege ring API so that programmers can give us X service is quoted as the problem. Then I find another extension* that wants nothing and gives me the same results without spying. I'd like to see a link detailing all the privileges and whether history is really linked to hiding page elements.
I've disabled Chrome updates altogether after 8.0 on Windows XP, but extensions seem to continue to auto-update and get disabled pending my um, "relicensing" approval. Is there a way to manually manage extensions in Chrome other than just turning them on or off? Can I block privileges by doing some about:config-style hacks to test if the plugin really needs them?
*except for Chrome adblock which has no other substitutes that I know of
Google makes money data mining. You shouldn't trust them with nefarious anti-government translations; if they never delete one e-mail, they will definitely never lack the same logging for your translation activities.
I'm also starting to think that trusting my web searches to them all these years may not be such a good idea, even if their dashboard claims they've already deleted it.
That said, duckduckgo isn't as good for searching and lacks mapping and similar all-in-one google conveniences. Their translations are the best; one and a half order of magnitude better than the babelfish I used till last year. Google translate sentences stay on topic more than 90% of the time in long pages, rather than having completely obvious topic changes when a particular noun or verb has multiple pairs to translate to. That said, I would prefer a flaky translation because noise can anonymize you.
It's the first time I'm accepting that not all job board spammers are ESL chinese or russians living outside the USA; it makes sense that more than a handful write badly precisely to obscure the source behind foreign speech and overseas TLDs that globalization allows us to rent without setting a foot in far away lands. Example: "bit .ly"
thanks.
you forgot another logical step.
first, we do what you said,
then just run it thru a case changer.
all lowercase sounds good.
all caps sounds better.
break up sentences like i'm doing, pretending that ...
we're holding a typewritter-style car-return over-compensation.
all this adds mental noise
"proving" the fact that the writer
is nothing more than yet another internet noob.
why not double any question marks and exclamation points!!??
throw in unnecessary ellipsis at the end of sentences for suspense
if your mailer permits html colors,
underlines and smileys, go crazy.
men do not normally use consecutive smileys beyond triplets
also, use a pinch of u's, ur's, and other web2.0 hip stuff
its/it's/there/their misuse and some lolz, and wtfs for good sense
the last two are things nobody uses in
real-life documents that are traceable to you
careful with that because your office emails might show a few samples
where you do slip unintentionally, and then you're screwed.
Man, I'd probably make a good spammer. Ugh.
Forgot to add this: back in 2007 MS had 90% OS share in China, which makes 'which Linux penetration do you have' just an exercise in futility.
How much market share might MS have lost to Red Linux / People's OS supposing the govt mandate did take effect after that techrepublic article was written 3 years ago?
Even factoring in the People's OS, evidence shows that they have no OS chokehold over their supposedly oppressed citizens: By Microsoft's shamefaced anti-IE6 campaign figures, the Chinese are the kings of the IE6 holdout with 35% --a full 10% lead over the South Korean runner-ups. Other analysts placed China at 45% last November, when 15% was the world's average.
An older article article stresses CCW Research's statement that 33% of new PC buyers uninstall that Linux derivative right off the bat, but the PC shop tends to do just prior to the sale that for them as a loyalty perk. More unsettling is that IE6 isn't the only IE... IE7 and IE8 numbers has to push the balance even further away from the People's OS --new pirated PC's don't easily get XP even in the USA, especially in the mobile form-factors. That counts for fewer Windows downupgrades to XP that would otherwise beef up IE6's numbers in China.
FB's 600 million people are only a small 10% of the world population, though :)
More seriously, the problem is those FB Like and Share buttons that people hold onto for dear life probably won't be here in 10 years. Then what?
Remember unmaintained Geocities pages made 10 years ago sporting dozens of broken images and broken links (and then Geocities itself going under a few years ago along with legacy Tripod communities and tons of webrings.)
All I see is those senior citizens taking their first PC-netizen steps using FB training wheels today will be 10 years older and less able to learn how to really copy and paste or otherwise share anything. That 99.99% of the world or whatever it is, will be very enraged when they're eventually trapped in another endangered website. It will not be nice when their "kids" or we are asked to copy-paste their stuff thousands of items at a time, unless some company sneaks their own migration tool past the FB APIs.
Alternative GUIs are lame --they always break something down the road.
Chrome has issues when you've selected a higher DPI. Tabs overtake the min-max-close area so that you can't interact normally with the window, and it looks like a wont-fix. I had to go back to squinty 96dpi fonts on this laptop.
Derivatives like Chromium and Iron are also affected.
My above link sucks because it's mostly non-US charges against StreetView. This one is more relevant because of quotes like this one:
[Pennsilvania, USA] Judge Reynolds sided with Google and concluded that the Street View service doesn't meet the criteria for an unlawful intrusion. Case law precedents define an actionable intrusion as one that causes "mental suffering, shame, or humiliation to a person of ordinary sensibilities." Reynolds doesn't believe that sufficient evidence was provided to demonstrate that Street View can cause such damage.
sigh. What happens when John Doe tries to do his own private StreetView project all over the USA?
Nowhere in the states can you record in public without permission from anybody at all
I'll believe that when I see all the Google StreetView drivers and VIPs get jailtime :)
The rest of your statement, I can't argue with. The laws here are just screwed up.
Even if the car is considered private property, unless the officer was sitting in the passenger seat, anyone can record anything they want anywhere if it is in public. That is the premise for most all security cameras and recordings anywhere ever.
Why is there such a big legal avoidance of audio when videos also do the same "tapping"? Why exactly don't they call it 'wiretapping' when the cops do it: any wrongful actions of yours will get "authenticated" via visual evidence. How? in the form of the videotape featuring you and your car as taken from the nearly-mandatory cameras rolling from the windshield in the cop's car.
Now, assuming you did do something wrong, can your lawyer really do the 'fruit of the poisoned tree' defense to throw that perfectly irrefutable evidence out just because you were unaware that a camera pointed at you was there?
OTOH, assuming you did nothing wrong, can you still sue them for illegal recording? Moreover, assuming the cop did nothing wrong, why can he so easily sue you? Could I have installed a camera in my car pointing at him and his car and done the same thing they get away with? Why is audio any different? Not trolling, just pointing out how unbalanced the justice system is.
Indeed. It is disheartening how even insignificant websites written in foreign languages have FB integration.
My PC-challenged mother has been using Facebook for most of her online pursuits. All those "Like" and "Share" buttons on Youtube, her foreign newsfeeds and random sites have made her believe that they're a normal part of the TCP protocol or something.
She wouldn't learn how to copy-paste a URL to a good-ol' webmail message until I told her that the selfish FB doesn't allow her to share individual content (we know FB is eager to e-mail spam your other friends to join, but not so eager about letting the sharing API e-mailing a single link or important update beyond the walled garden) to all her overseas friends still lacking a membership.
I'm still blown away since last night, when I found a site that creates a fake identity with
* I heard somewhere these CC# generators pass validation algorithms on forms, and are helping flag your scammer's billing company to the authorities by failing to be real when a the money transfer is charged. In reality, they'll probably just chase you for using fake data, which is illegal in most EULAs and probably all USA legislation
I know that, but not the India techs remoting into users PCs on a laptop deployment or poorly managed enterprise setting. I've had to make people download putty.exe because your solution requires access to "Add/remove Programs", which becomes 100% "useless" if the password isn't immediately available or the GPO or nearby IT nazi just says "no config changes here!"
None of that was a problem till Vista appeared.
It only has to be better than the average driver
No, drivers can be delicensed too. It only needs to be able to *get* a license, voice-assisted by whatever "disabled" person is on the driver's seat --think disabled men, or backseat children whose parent driver just had a heart attack at 70mph. Good plan, unless lawmakers actively kill this automation effort in its infancy on grounds of "automated terror attacks that leave no video-trackable humans to chase... like we caught that Times Square guy in 2010" or something.
IBM's recently lauded "Watson technology" will be miniaturized and eventually the car will be like the Star Trek enterprise's "computer" listening and responding to its Picard. To pass a license test, it has to understand the driver w/in milliseconds. That's to hear, parse, evaluate for command flaws (like asking to brake while stationary), compare to its realtime input and then act.
True, but sadly people are happy enough with the current, reachable IPv4 internet that they won't care unless somehow there's youtube and facebook killer that is v6 only out there. But you can't be #1 if you start out in a broken-off shard of the internet --I mean, your site's not even counted in official top-site stats, unless it's ipv4
There's a problem: your average tech can't even suspect Apple to be a "well known" IPv6 router maker ... see? IPv6 marketting was dead on arrival even for those who *deserve* to boast their early mastery.
I never heard of RouterBoard or Fritz!Box 7390 at the local giant computer store, or Staples, Circuit City, Best Buy, Sears, or even RadioShack. I also paid $150 for a router with no physical* sign that it was fully compliant out of the box. *That* is still the problem: even *they* don't care that they *care*
* Only the GUI once you pay and get the device home...webwise? only on the forum, or officially a few shy hints and firmware changelog one-liners.
but not using said alternative firmware. Let's face the upgrade side: we're talking about days when people routinely root their cellphones and have at least one alternative browser they click on without having an ounce of IT blood in their family.
On using the alt firmware... I'm under the impression that the main OSS router firmwares force you to use a CLI before you can 'install' what 99% of the world considers a mandatory port 80 GUI.
If that's still the truth, then it's pretty bad form. The only reason Joe User configures consumer routers is all the sticky color-coded labels / shrinkwrap saying "USE THIS CD IN WINDOWS TO RUN THE EASY-CLICK WIZARD GUI FIRST!" Alternative firmware doesn't get to use that trump card. That alone is the reason only 1 in 50 wifis in densely packed buildings in this large US metropolis is still in a factory state as opposed to 2 in 14 back in 2005.
The bitter part is that those 49,500 employees at Apple don't *manufacture* the iPods and iPads. Foxconn announced a huge move of 200k jobs away from the Hong Kong area, and you can well guess how many people will chase after the new physical location --big overnight loss there.
I wonder if we might count 3rd parties of these huge product lines as fulltime employees of Apple? Not to the PHB's but the point is still non-trivial.
if you read the EULA's when you activate your device i do believe there are some age restrictions in there too.
EULA's are on smartphones too these days? Ouch. That's sad. All my dumb phones up through May 2010 didn't.
I can't remember seeing an activation EULA on a work blackberry either, though the setup was pretty long and I might just have forgotten. EULAs never mention the built-in cameras snitches your GPS and serial numbers via EXIF headers, but companies still don't get sued. The more reason to hold a tight grip on the last generation of trusted hardware (to us users). Displays don't need a EULA, but wait till HDCP is everywhere :)
This is the most common form of malware I've had to clean up. Back when Windows didn't have 'home versions' and lacked group policy they only got away with rewriting your dlls to spy on you and create popups.
I have stopped seeing the popups altogether --now it's just 'Windows Antivirus 2010 has detected legitProgram.exe / legitTechTool.exe / yourCLI contains a virus and must close it. To remove it, click below [and pay USD$80]' It is annoying that turning back the clock fails most of the time, or the person infected waits long enough that any clean copy of the OS is long discarded by newer infected System Restore snapshots.
I did find one removal tool distributed as .com .exe and .scr(eensaver), but never checked that the non-screensaver ones are just a file rename. Never had a chance to try out on with the exe-catching malware... Between exe-knocking and the design failure that puts group policy APIs in XP *Home* edition, malware pretty much forbids any tool --safe mode sometimes gets pwned or corrupted past any home of recovery.
The Windows-based Basilisk II emulator of 68000 processors could run any MacOS up to OS 8.1 IIRC. At some point after iPods started being sold, I noticed an abrupt trend for install OS's to be Bios-keyed so that you couldn't even troubleshoot a laptop with a desktop CD (lots less lenient than Dell and Compaq locking out only computers bearing competitor's logos while working accross all form-factors).
Things never got back to the old ways after OS 9 came out. Another problem is that MacOS 10.n completely disappears off the shelves and corporations that trained all their users on that n version the morning MacOS 10.n+1 is released.
Now that I think about it, XP would never have survived 10 years that way --they were still selling it legally at large physical stores in 2009, and even in 2008 corps could still bulk order new PC's imaged with it in spite of MS' having long released a newer OS hungry for attention. The converse is how few stand-alone copies of OS 9.x you see. The grip apple on planned obsolecense these days is scary, and changed so suddenly it's still making heads spin :)
And I was an apple fan a decade ago... when they still made only computers.
Gig after Gig of space is the norm after having been a measly dozen or two MBs in Windows 3.1. So WHY do they just remove useful files like calendar.exe (users of Windows 2000 and XP (and maybe 98) who try doublecliking the date get an error if they're not admins, so can't see a calendar), qbasic, vb runtime dlls for old shareware we all hoard somewhere, the cd player from Win2k, the more feature-complete sound recorder prior to Vista, the telnet.exe file and others. All of those files are so tiny that removing them is just an antiservice for the sake of streamlining support. It's not like their siblings in complexity (solitaire, paint and calc.exe) ever get much from version to version, though Windows 7 DID change them a lot after 15 years of neglect
Our source pictures WERE jpegs weighing 2.5MB for 7MP camera. Uploading to "back'em up" results in resizing and resolution loss: facebook (their retrievable backups at least) is storing them as supposedly no more than 200k*. Most pics retrieved in the 28MB zip were 80k or so... barely acceptable for blowing up and editing, and if it's the first time some of you think about this, then think especially about those ~600 million FBers who don't expect their precious memories to have degraded quality.
There is another issue which FB warns about: if you click around in the resulting site-backup-like file structure you'll find that all the data you were hiding from certain groups is there in the clear, including your full birthdate, association information and so on. This is NOT something you would want someone to steal via social engineering, all nicely pre-packaged to be sold to higher-level scammers.
* The recently changed photo upload dialog compresses photos prior to departure to finish quicker, so FB can no longer "steal" a full size version and shortchange you... FB used to upload your megapixel shots fully in the past, but isn't giving us access to them.
Also, PC's have a hard time leaving our hands for more than 100 bucks... My used PC prices compete with cheapo NEW $300 ones, while ~$550 is as low as macs go, and unbelievably less user-upgradable at that, so people I know bought more $1300 macbooks than $550 mac minis. Yup, reality distortion fields are strong.
Suppose Joe Q User got a high n < 50 emails from Spammer King per day. A few cents a day in 'damage recovery' won't be worth suing for when courts/lawyers charge in the thousands, and he's not the one paying for bayesian algorithm research and footing the power / maintenance bills for monthly SPAM filtering appliances.
WebMail providers and ISPs are the only parties that could USE your so-dubbed 'BS metric' to litigate any useful net values in the high Millions of dollars for millions of filtered emails to their millions of worldwide users. I would support their initiative... but they just aren't interested. It's the same apathy that Microsoft shows by caring only once or twice in ~20 years to sue malware creators who case real damages in IT time, ransomware actually paid, and data loss caused from poorly planned fixes and emergency restores.
How much less could a Webmail provider care compared to giants like MS, when spam is so hard to track that they're gladly footing the bulk-filtering bills mentioned and still giving millions of us "free" webmail?