I believe that's a feature of the T-Mobile network. I don't know how it works, but I like it!
Some people have apparently even mis-credited Apple for the feature. Unfortunately all these features ("Scam ID" and "Scam block" and "Name ID") require a post-paid plan to work - https://explore.t-mobile.com/c...
Their Prepaid service has a static monthly price tag but lacks Visual voicemail and the above features.
So, Oreo has created a lot of new work for component vendors and OEMs, and it's going to take them time to work through it.
This is sad. I'm a very reluctant smartphone user who was on an Android 4.4 once-flagship until its cracked screen died 6 weeks ago. I blocked version 5 offer to update even knowing that 6 would never be offered for it despite the original $550 price tag.
Still, I spent those couple years noticing that the hands of friends acquiring budget and not-so-budget phones still hungered for anything beyond versions 4 and 5 and just assumed 6 and 7 were for techies with lots of cash.
This summer I realized with some joy that the hydra-like fountains of version 4 were finally drying up to the appropriate heirs... which were nothing better than Android 5 anyway. So it's with a heavy hard that this post and your comment make me realize that versions 6 and 7 may become the new Android-4-like plague:-D
For those who are on iOS, this means that a 24 months down the road, regular folks with phones bought new TODAY will be wondering why the Android app store is outright failing to show X or Y app on their phone with no reason given to the user (a gripe for another day.)
The reality is that the app makers will have moved on to demand a higher OS floor, which is good for "security" but hard news for buyers from the wrong company at the wrong time.
So... back to your comment, I'm hoping two or three years down the road Google might freeze their OS a-la Windows XP so manufacturers can afford skinning without worries of release # fragmentation even within their own product lines.
What version of Android a phone is running is pretty far down on my list of things that are important to me in a phone.
I still see phones on shelves that have 4 on them, and plenty of cheap tablets on Amazon do. Now, imagine grandma wants to buy a present for your kid and sees this great deal, a $50 device... She is too concerned about too many other people on her holiday list to bother pulling out her flagship phone just for the one kid, and just dumps it from the bargain bin to her cart without Googling^W thinking twice.
Funny thing, you can s/grandma/ with most younger people, and the outcome is still the same... your kid gets a device that is 5+ years out of date, will never see fixes for Wifi "KRACK" (ugh!) exploits and will have space constraints that are ridiculous by average package sizes seen on today's App store ecosystems. Out of the box, my bargain phone came with half of 8GB full, and without many apps 6 months out has just 1 GB available.
So yeah, versions are an indicator of how old a device is, and it's useful if you learn the subtle color and icon schemes used by each of the versions so you can judge the OS based on a glance at a store. Of course, nothing beats careful research, but most people on a store floor do uninformed purchases if their flagship of choice (Samsung / iPhone) is unexpectedly out of the question (suddenly out-of-stock during your shopping deadline, or your credit card is declined or you realize the phone is too big or stupidly lacks essential features and 3.5mm jacks when it's in your hands)
Yep. It sucks. The bands I follow on there have tiny followings and can't afford to pay up like bigger companies. Some of them have trouble making their rent on a monthly basis, but Facebook still wants to extort money from them to show their posts to their followers.
That Facebook is "free" is the illusion here. The mantra "you are the product" we hear recited so often on/. requires SOMEONE to be on the non-product side of the table, right?
The band is the "buyer" in this case. Why shouldn't it pay for the privilege of having the product all nice and rounded up? It's not just pure ad companies being required to pay anymore, that is all.
Agreed. It's like we're in a backwards world. An Encyclopaedia is what laymen (mostly students before the concept of Wikipedia was pioneered) traditionally use to find basic information about something, covering an extremely large array of topics of interest. Due to limits with scope and priorities, for anything much more detailed, they are expected to invest in a different book dedicated to the branch of human knowledge or science that studies the topic.
The threads here exemplify one of the modern problems of the internet: Something scratches the itch of a few people, who spoil it so nobody else who isn't an expert can have nice things. Linux, FOSS and tech support comes to mind.
The end result is the appearance of YT videos and question-answer sites like StackExchange where the laymen / curious 90% of the world just end up posing the same types of questions over and over *because* reading what everyone else is writing requires too much inside knowledge to begin with... "Read The Manual / FAQ / Post history" is not as foolproof and practical as we make it up to be.
Seriously... I've never heard a reference to any software he developed before?
Just as importantly: Did Tim Cook's command of English REALLY come as a second language? As far as I know he's just not qualified to guide the world on either of the 2 points he's contrasting.
But he's in the rich and famous club... therefore millions of people and the governments listening to him will give him and others a free pass. The blind leading the blind
Practically half of us are already hacked NOW. When would something be implemented even if a standard were already agreed upon and mandated? I get the feeling this will be treated like Android security where if you don't invest in X flagship, which is optional and expensive, you're just not covered. 140 million is nearly half of all US citizens. I'm pretty sure we can't just reprint all our forms, reprogram all our websites, rework all our databases and change the mentality towards accepting the new name and (hardest of all) technical requirements of the new setup.
All in all, we need a solution (whatever it is) Yesterday, but even in 1, 3, 5, 10 or 15 years I can't see it really in place (there is failure inertia of British / Metric conversion proportions here). Reminds me a bit of the stupid job we've done when it comes to the spirit of the law for chip&pin Credit cards, being optional and all and totally backward compatible to the old insecure method when the card gets stolen to pay for something online without you there (which is the point).
NFC-enabled tokens. This is what Google uses internally
Although the politicians / CEO's are Google's target today, eventually a company will make a tier for the rest of us... including non-technical "normies" using cheap phones ($50 - $150)... In my experience, while tech people almost exclusively splurge on feature-rich flagship phones where NFC is a given, cheap phones are common for normies.
I did a lot of research to replace my dying phone last week. Cheap (and not so cheap) phones don't cover the 5Ghz Wifi band yet. Cheap phones don't have DLNA. They don't have mirroring / Wifi Direct, which I enjoyed a handful of times on our new, cheap smartTV. Cheap phones cover few video codecs so you're left with weird "not supported" errors when playing some files. Cheap phones don't have remote control features. More relevantly, cheap phones don't have NFC.
My dying flagship supports all of the above, but replacing those same features is still requiring the same prices as 30 months ago. Worse, features have been nerfed (battery removal, forced sim card resizing replacement and sometimes loss of headphone jack). Since I am on an older phone now, I'm a little worried for whims of companies bringing about new breach-inspired requirements towards new hardware that I'll be prompted to consider for work-related authentication.
But I'll be damned if I'm going to wire my home up to spy on me and send all the data back to Amazon, Google or WHOEVER.
I don't give a shit HOW useful it is. It's simply TOO intrusive for my liking.
And if I ever move into a place with this crap pre-installed, I'll have an electrician out first to disconnect it all.
Something in your comment triggered my realization that 10 years down the road, that cable box we all have will be accompanied by a no-choice spying box given by our ISP... and we'll *like* it;) "Simply too intrusive for my liking" applies to many things that are already a reality where we cannot "vote with our wallets" today.
For instance, if you're posting this from a mobile device. the US governments' claws are already in them. We cannot just assume Windows 10 is the only bad guy --Snowden's revelations precede the outrage over the release of that system by quite a while, so just think what else was it that made the data mining practical.
But I digress! Everyone and their mother is releasing a voice assistant (Samsung, Google, Windows 10's Cortana, Siri, Alexa, LG) and some of those are achieving a hardware presence. Nothing will forever keep the ISPs from realizing they too can join the bandwagon, putting one more camera and microphone into our houses to taste a piece of the revenue pie. Microsoft's XBox / Kinect camera, Google's defunct Glass and Samsung's always-on SmartTV background audio recording didn't kickstart any pro-privacy legislation, and all remained legal. Thus, they'll keep being remade by other companies.
Nothing will hold back today's media-laced ISPs in the US from eventually expanding their semi-forced phone/internet/television "triple play" plans into customized hardware. Charter's recent merger with Time Warner forced some new hardware along with channel lineup changes, deprecation of perfectly-working televisions and price increases down my throat... and it is stupid that they would not just let me use existing hardware and conditions that I see with other neighbors who had assistance just 6 months earlier. I had a take-it-or-leave-it situation in my hands and was forced to accept terms because my situation was meant to be an escape to Verizon's own oppression phasing out DSL and forcing their own hardware, prices and changes.
IIRC regular folks originally did word-of-mouth marketing for Whatsapp as an SMS-replacer in the third world. Like other proprietary TCP IP services, it can do much more, but I hate the confusion of insituating that web streams and messengers ARE texts and phonecalls. One crucial factor in the confusion is the growing association of accounts with address books and phone numbers (though the system doesn't use phone lines and is a veiled trick to gain marketing data in the guise of simplicity)
Web companies intentionally muddling the waters to sell something as a functional equivalent of a familiar classic tech often contribute to very confused users. Web giants don't usually have to deal with phone or email tech support. The result is that when something goes wrong, *we* are the ones stuck figuring out how to help friends find missing messages... or explaining in non-technical terms why a [direct] call to someone via their OS's address book did get charged as pricey long distance call by their ISP instead of connecting through the intended TCP Whatsapp or Facebok "call"
"Internet-based messaging services" offered by Facebook, Wechat, Whatsapp and other services should legally be prevented from being called "texting". Before shooting me down, consider why technical users today never call Slack messages (or IRC, or ICQ, or AOL chats) "texts." Android 6+ now allow awareness and blocking of attempts by Facebook and the like to provide one-stop-shop communication, but the accumulated damage to the popular understanding of telco communications vs. proprietary smartphone offerings is already extensive, and likely irreversible.
Nobody is looking for "exciting" in the breakfix sense, per se. But product teams and devs are looking for cool features for their users. This will help them with checklists full of buzzwords, but it's in detriment of the stability of the product. The rest of this post may or may not reflect what's happening at your company, but it's reflected on a larger scale of failures seen all over the place prioritizing "cool/exciting/BROKEN" over "stable/boring." Then, forcing it on your users by stopping support for old releases or outright ignoring problems if they stay embedded in your latest release. Brings to mind Firefox, GNOME 3, KDE4, systemd, Android (GUI, fragmentation lack of security / patching), Windows 8+ with Metro and telemetry. It even extends to hardware --boring cathode TVs don't sell as profitably as 16:9, then 3D, then smarttv then 4K. Now it's impossible to find the boring tv even if it's all you need, because it's killed the option from the market. On smartphones this happens with features from just 2-3 years ago, such as removable batteries, wired headphones and reasonably-sized 4-inch screens outside of iPhones and ancient imports from 3rd world countries.
Agile isn't helping --no doubt too many here see too much gets stuck in the backlog for months or years for something that is annoying, dangerous, unexpected... etc. They are working on new shiny features, and thus need new libraries, dependencies, build systems, programming languages and finally releases with shiny stuff (and for web companies, new *BROWSER* versions.) They use Agile to stay busy creating new features to look like they're staying in touch with today's "features" and tracking-platform-do-jour. It's hard to do that and stay "boring" because you're introducing new code --therefore, you're introducing newer bugs. The problem is how far this deprioritizes pressing matters. Eventually you'll find that management and devs will close the boring dev tickets as wont'fix.
Worse yet, they WON'T close them for years and lean towards announcing workarounds on-demand outside of the official dev ticket. By "announce," this mean as silently as possible, because the devs and managers hate "looking bad" with an all-hands announcement that their product is broken with no fix planned. Initiated users that have learned of the fix the hard way via the original troubleshooting with tech support people are too lazy/shortsighted to share it openly with everyone at their level (especially the poor, clueless weekend staff rotation guys that'll endup paging tech support). Hundreds of man hours repeating this secret fix to every new employee that comes across the bug are wasted, for the users and for tech support. Due to churn, techs will eventually hire a new staff member while the bug goes un-updated. In the grand scheme of things, that new person will also unaware of the secret fix, adding complexity to the situation. No blame for them, but it's annoying that the new staffer eventually finds the bug, but not the "boring" information that a developer was supposed to have kept in the ticket.
If something is clickable, make it look clickable.
Wait till you realize that the great Hyperlink Underline and standard visited / non-visited colors from the nineties are looong gone.
"Progress" has meant the opposite of discovering (who creates new paradigms these days?). Discovering is hard, but destroying is easy.
Such a shame --I have CSS overrides to bring back underlines because throwing away good information is stupid. Scrolling with super tiny low-contrast scrollbars [I hate you, Google Chrome!] to hover your mouse over low-contrast skinny fonts to find a link that is only slightly colored, when the status bar popup appears intermittently? All of this information hiding results in users that are much harder to teach, because everything is intentionally obfuscated and nothing comes with a formal manual.
it's almost like browser organizations out there are piling up the hatred against navigation because they want you sticking around aimlessly within a single page.
No. Menus do not just "look" like "menus" --they have to be explained over the phone or any medium where words trump logos. People don't even know what a 'browser' looks like so when you get a user phonecall you're left guessing where to start.
See how Whatsapp is handling this officially in their WhatsApp FAQ - Finding the Menu button
20th century called. They want their computer back.
Get real. Not everyone is on the desktop world. Every MB counts. Your $400 retail computer comes with 1 Terabyte now, but most home users out there only replace their 10 year old machines when death is imminent, and they have more humble 300-500GB setups.
Laptops and SSD drives bring another dimension to the situation. SSDs are laughably small even on desktop PCs. The "new" professional grade HP laptop that work assigned me a year ago was a downgrade from the regular HD in the 6-year old it was replacing where I had at least 300GB.
The formatted SSD 100GB started out losing 30GB from my files transfered from the old PC (I had a couple virtual machines and respective linux ISOs because shells and SSH on Windows is deficient, even with Cygwin)
Another 20GB was occupied by Windows 7 and I ended with about 10GB free, which was a bit of a worry preceding the Windows 10 download / upgrade process. Every megabyte counts, especially when you now automatically have programs doubling in size.
USB is becoming a big mess of different versions, far too many versions. USB is starting to lose its usefulness. USB 3.2? Most of my devices don't even use USB 3.0 yet. The USB spec is starting to look like changes are being made for the purpose of making changes, but to no real end.
The situation is similar with Unicode "versions":) and I didn't know they were a thing tilll windows 8 or so... codepages and UTF encodings were already painful enough! "Legacy" devices that for one reason or another don't have the latest browser or OS (and sometimes even having them) are already annoyingly finicky when you send out Unicode emoji. iPhone users are annoyingly up-to-date compared to crappy carrier-locked Android users like me, and often trigger a few square glyph placeholders on emoji texts. If you use your phone or Windows 7 PC to browse Twitter and Instagram posts that are emoji-heavy, you'll notice the effect.
Back to the topic of the USB problems, even having current "standards" is a pain. Courtesy outlets (cable boxes, older gaming consoles, monitors) tend to be unpowered and even cables often lag behind on today's 5-inch phone world. As you go beyond 3-feet cables, 2 amp support required by hungry screens seems to have its work cut out with.2 Amps that is all the rage with PC USB ports and travel adapters.
So you're implying that this is all about sentimentality? People feel about MS Paint the way a person might feel about their grandmother?
Tech people suck at empathy --your post is an example against letting us tech people make important decisions. In other sciences, there isn't a marked absence of checks and balances, certification, regulations / fines / jailtime, design oversight bodies... and the world is a bit more stable because of that. Let's imagine how doctors in similar decisions would be allowed to act in the absence of the Hippocratic oath, when all their Slashdot versions say seemingly translates to "not my problem," "that's an easy DIY task/patient, heal yourself" and "just get a new one"
Of course, power users don't care that for every one of us that can google an alternative, there are dozens of regular Joes that will each contribute to wastes of time as we try to level the playing field.
Is it so hard to see that this is less about sentimentality and more about familiarity and NETWORK effects? Ignoring sentimental reasons here, when grandma dies, you'd need a "hire" a new noodles person or find / keep using a subpar one. When grandma is killed off on purpose because, well, feeding her must be HUGELY affecting MS's bottom line, more evidence comes out that nothing is off-limits.
Going back to network effects here, imagine if the internet decided to shut down mail apps and POP3 / IMAP overnight. All the knowledgeable suckers switching to outlook Webmail would have to jump through some hoops, but the damage comes from knowing that email will never be the same again --you'll have to ask each person you reach if they do see the program (which for some/.-impaired is a difficult enough waste of 10 minutes) and force them through setting up the webmail account (or signing up to the MS store in this case) when all I want is a quick way for them to send my helpdesk a screenshot with some cropping and markings that can't be conveyed well over a phonecall.
Imaging that Facebook decides to disable N % of their accounts because they're unprofitable (below x percent of logged hours per year), under the guides of being presumed inactive or dead: just like with the webmail example above --killing an existing assumption be disabling random nodes in your "network" leads to confusing talks about why something isn't where expected and how to fix it.
You very likely can block the call through your provider. I know Verizon allows you to block up to five numbers completely free. And it is a true block for calls. If they call you they get a message basically saying that you've been blocked.
Correct. I too have received the somewhat ambiguous "The subscriber is not accepting calls from this number." The way it's phrased, you'd not suspect "THIS" means "YOUR" rather than "theirs" until you have ugly situations and see the hints that this acquaintance is no longer interested in you. Subtle ambiguity at its best! Something similar happens with blocking texts. I have an inkling that my own smartphone is doing just that when user the stock app to "reject" a new SMS spammer's number. I feel that these notices are a disservice, because granting too much information about a *block* leaves you at a disadvantage security-wise than just silently rejecting a blockee. I mean, it's perfectly reasonable for infosec folks to burn us regularly with their practice of coding sites to say "bad password" when a more helpful "there's no account registered under that email address (pssst, you *typo'd* it to go along with your perfectly-entered password)" would have been good. Somehow the contexts always hurt us consumers with bad decisions that cause unwanted side-effects.
I've gone on Android's Quiet mode by mistake and missed calls, resulting in queries about hearing a telco notification that I was in some special state (and even triggering some kind of option to SMS me immediately). I'd rather the telco silently provide the wait-for-10-rings-and-voicemail that my being unavailable would have resulted in.
But I'm venting. At least we have the comfort that the GP's desire to block voicemail is already a reality. The blocking messages completely remove your option to appeal the block and/or leave an urgent voicemail when regular calls are impaired by the process. I'm sure many-a-teenager have estranged their parents thanks to such means without ever having to even ditch their old contact number.
"argue that these messages should not qualify as calls and, therefore, should be exempt from consumer protection laws that ban similar types of telephone marketing"
Correct, they should be classified as harassment. And since it's done over the telephone and likely come from out of state, the FBI has jurisdiction.
Isn't it vexing how lawmakers and marketers claim exemption from "consumer" protection laws AND prevent us from claiming exemption from being classed as "consumer" in the first place? It used to be that to consume something, you had to "hear" about it by passive means and willingly seek it out. Marketers turned that into "cram it down his throat by any means necessary and ask questions later... we can't be sued, so at worst, he won't buy the product! #win-win"
Funny, but I have the opposite problem: I get lots of calls that ring, but when I answer there is nobody there. I assume these are mostly poorly programmed predictive dialers
These too are on purpose. There are numbers from unique area codes that consistently, if not always, result in dead air when you do pick up. Once / twice would be considered a programming bug or a bad product. ALWAYS? nope.
Not many businesses would keep a botched product for first-contact, considering calls are more noticeable than junk mail and spam. After all, with a call you ALWAYS know when the mark is "live" as soon as they pick up. It's similar to sending email you expect to bounce because you're not sure of a spelling, just to see if an address is inactive or not.
My money here is on "surveillance", the sort you might get from debt collection agencies or cheap scouters finding potential marks for future spammers. You say "hello?" and hang up a second later? Too late! "They" know the number works now. They now also know if you're male, female, young or old. For scouters, this is the equivalent of saying they have one more mark in a list of "100,000 VERIFIED email addresses for YOU to spam at the low, low price of X dollars per thousand"?
Debt collectors also don't care you say X fake name has nothing to do with you or your family at your house number. They swear they'll remove you from the list, only to call again a day later and promise the same, sometimes by the same phone rep. They poll to see what times you're picking up the phone, and they sometimes mention details of who they're targeting. They use fake caller ID numbers that start with a local area code + 3 digits that match your own phone's to incite familiarity AND evade code blocks. The last 4 digits are never repeated, defeating the purpose of your using cheap landline blocking hardware or cheap non-programmable smartphone call-rejection features.
I wish I had a homebased PBX system without the hassle of actually having to buy servers to do VOIP. That way, I could program responses and direct all unknown numbers to a honeypot like I've seen Google Voice users do.
Stories like this one have been pushing me to back up our thousands of photos before mother gets hit with some cryptoware and we lose it all (one of our neighbors lost it all when her kids got Cryptowalled).
I'm finally doing something about it, and was just sitting next to the PC watching Youtube to figure out what to do after installing the new 2TB internal drive. I have been scratching my head thinking of something that won't require Cygwin / rsync and will interact with Windows 7 backup files in case I need to use Linux. Since I did pay for my Ultimate upgrade, I'm planning to use it exclusively if push comes to shove, so I'm this close to just sticking the disk in and forgetting about Linux compat. I might just buy a separate disk and do SystemRescueCD images later, if needed be, but my experience says that leads to needless duplication, and I haven't found filesystem agnostic deduplication in OSS.
I'm always horribly unique whenever I check. Doesn't matter what browser I use.
Pro tip: Even in 2010 UA strings in Firefox had become specific beyond the call of duty with build date, rendering engine verision, OS version, and other useless stuff that browser-quirk-sniffing techniques can discard without really breaking your rendering. Erm, I recognize that UA sniffing is stupid with modern pages, but the strings are a vestigial tracking item. My getting a UA-changer extension with pre-populated defaults for iPhone 3, iPads or plain Firefox 3.5 back then brought the uniqueness from 1 in several (20?) million to one in a hundred thousand or maybe fifty thousand IIRC
Of course, none of that helps much until you do disable flash and install noscript, and turn off cookies... and delete all browser-request languages and keep just 'en' instead of 'en-US'. An even bigger secret than the UA is that Flash and Javascript tracking your resolution and FONT-LIST makes for a unique fingerprint. No two home users that have installed software will end with the same combination of useless fonts. That's courtesy of installing office, photoshop, games and random OEM shovelware.
Nice that it includes some non-ASCII chars (extended Latin-1). But not IPA, which makes it hard for linguists. There are plenty of variable width fonts that cover IPA etc., but fewer fixed width fonts.
That said, I'm pretty sure it's a small minority of users who need this...perhaps one (me). (I used it when writing up computational linguistics in XeLaTeX.) So I'm not complaining!
A digression first: With all the nasty data collection on today's downloaded freeware, I find it to be an awesome breath of fresh air when slashdot brings us truly no-strings attached free stuff.
Its "(useful) Stupid (Unix|Emacs|xxxxxx)" series was short-lived, but it was cool. And I just can't believe it was all the way back in 2008 - http://ask.slashdot.org/story/...
*To the point, now,* this about a free fixed-width font for my IDE, specially after I've been looking for something like the Coffee font in my LG phone, but without its annoying filled-in o glyphs.
I grok IPA and though I'd never considered its need to be supported before, since my attention has been caught but Windows 7 and Kitkat's issues with more common symbols, it's a shame to hear I wouldn't be able to make use of the IPA that Wikipedia takes so seriously when I'm looking at foreign terms. The cool thing is, routing back to you and I, that on http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/ it says there are 22 contributors with 1530+ glyphs. Unfortunately Unicode apparently supports way more than 65K total chars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode has some 150k number listed on the recent versions)
You probably guess what I'm asking for here... it's a lot easier to contribute "solving" even a single glyph per slashdotter to make this font what you and I need, than doing other open source bug fixes so common here. "If you don't like it, the source is there, go FIX it" is annoying, but here the nature of the problem is O(n)-difficulty menial work, rather than having some years-unresolved bug that requires x language and y libraries, then finding a rootcause, issuing a clean fix, then testing it, and then getting it approved for upstream.
So it'd be nice if appearing here would get even 1% of slashdotters doing something nice with those holes left in the font. We still have to learn font-glyphing, whatever that entails, but it's probably less menial than any coding fixes we might contribute to the world. Why aren't there more crowd-sourcing tasks of this type here on slashdot?
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that's a feature of the T-Mobile network. I don't know how it works, but I like it!
Some people have apparently even mis-credited Apple for the feature.
Unfortunately all these features ("Scam ID" and "Scam block" and "Name ID") require a post-paid plan to work - https://explore.t-mobile.com/c...
Their Prepaid service has a static monthly price tag but lacks Visual voicemail and the above features.
So, Oreo has created a lot of new work for component vendors and OEMs, and it's going to take them time to work through it.
This is sad. I'm a very reluctant smartphone user who was on an Android 4.4 once-flagship until its cracked screen died 6 weeks ago. I blocked version 5 offer to update even knowing that 6 would never be offered for it despite the original $550 price tag.
Still, I spent those couple years noticing that the hands of friends acquiring budget and not-so-budget phones still hungered for anything beyond versions 4 and 5 and just assumed 6 and 7 were for techies with lots of cash.
This summer I realized with some joy that the hydra-like fountains of version 4 were finally drying up to the appropriate heirs... which were nothing better than Android 5 anyway. So it's with a heavy hard that this post and your comment make me realize that versions 6 and 7 may become the new Android-4-like plague :-D
For those who are on iOS, this means that a 24 months down the road, regular folks with phones bought new TODAY will be wondering why the Android app store is outright failing to show X or Y app on their phone with no reason given to the user (a gripe for another day.)
The reality is that the app makers will have moved on to demand a higher OS floor, which is good for "security" but hard news for buyers from the wrong company at the wrong time.
So... back to your comment, I'm hoping two or three years down the road Google might freeze their OS a-la Windows XP so manufacturers can afford skinning without worries of release # fragmentation even within their own product lines.
What version of Android a phone is running is pretty far down on my list of things that are important to me in a phone.
I still see phones on shelves that have 4 on them, and plenty of cheap tablets on Amazon do. Now, imagine grandma wants to buy a present for your kid and sees this great deal, a $50 device... She is too concerned about too many other people on her holiday list to bother pulling out her flagship phone just for the one kid, and just dumps it from the bargain bin to her cart without Googling^W thinking twice.
Funny thing, you can s/grandma/ with most younger people, and the outcome is still the same... your kid gets a device that is 5+ years out of date, will never see fixes for Wifi "KRACK" (ugh!) exploits and will have space constraints that are ridiculous by average package sizes seen on today's App store ecosystems. Out of the box, my bargain phone came with half of 8GB full, and without many apps 6 months out has just 1 GB available.
So yeah, versions are an indicator of how old a device is, and it's useful if you learn the subtle color and icon schemes used by each of the versions so you can judge the OS based on a glance at a store. Of course, nothing beats careful research, but most people on a store floor do uninformed purchases if their flagship of choice (Samsung / iPhone) is unexpectedly out of the question (suddenly out-of-stock during your shopping deadline, or your credit card is declined or you realize the phone is too big or stupidly lacks essential features and 3.5mm jacks when it's in your hands)
Sorry, CERN. We thought nobody would notice... Alright then. Computer: END PROGRAM!
***CARRIER LOST***
Yep. It sucks. The bands I follow on there have tiny followings and can't afford to pay up like bigger companies. Some of them have trouble making their rent on a monthly basis, but Facebook still wants to extort money from them to show their posts to their followers.
That Facebook is "free" is the illusion here. The mantra "you are the product" we hear recited so often on /. requires SOMEONE to be on the non-product side of the table, right?
The band is the "buyer" in this case. Why shouldn't it pay for the privilege of having the product all nice and rounded up? It's not just pure ad companies being required to pay anymore, that is all.
Agreed. It's like we're in a backwards world.
An Encyclopaedia is what laymen (mostly students before the concept of Wikipedia was pioneered) traditionally use to find basic information about something, covering an extremely large array of topics of interest. Due to limits with scope and priorities, for anything much more detailed, they are expected to invest in a different book dedicated to the branch of human knowledge or science that studies the topic.
The threads here exemplify one of the modern problems of the internet: Something scratches the itch of a few people, who spoil it so nobody else who isn't an expert can have nice things. Linux, FOSS and tech support comes to mind.
The end result is the appearance of YT videos and question-answer sites like StackExchange where the laymen / curious 90% of the world just end up posing the same types of questions over and over *because* reading what everyone else is writing requires too much inside knowledge to begin with... "Read The Manual / FAQ / Post history" is not as foolproof and practical as we make it up to be.
Just as importantly: Did Tim Cook's command of English REALLY come as a second language?
As far as I know he's just not qualified to guide the world on either of the 2 points he's contrasting.
But he's in the rich and famous club... therefore millions of people and the governments listening to him will give him and others a free pass. The blind leading the blind
Practically half of us are already hacked NOW.
When would something be implemented even if a standard were already agreed upon and mandated? I get the feeling this will be treated like Android security where if you don't invest in X flagship, which is optional and expensive, you're just not covered. 140 million is nearly half of all US citizens. I'm pretty sure we can't just reprint all our forms, reprogram all our websites, rework all our databases and change the mentality towards accepting the new name and (hardest of all) technical requirements of the new setup.
All in all, we need a solution (whatever it is) Yesterday, but even in 1, 3, 5, 10 or 15 years I can't see it really in place (there is failure inertia of British / Metric conversion proportions here). Reminds me a bit of the stupid job we've done when it comes to the spirit of the law for chip&pin Credit cards, being optional and all and totally backward compatible to the old insecure method when the card gets stolen to pay for something online without you there (which is the point).
NFC-enabled tokens. This is what Google uses internally
Although the politicians / CEO's are Google's target today, eventually a company will make a tier for the rest of us... including non-technical "normies" using cheap phones ($50 - $150)...
In my experience, while tech people almost exclusively splurge on feature-rich flagship phones where NFC is a given, cheap phones are common for normies.
I did a lot of research to replace my dying phone last week. Cheap (and not so cheap) phones don't cover the 5Ghz Wifi band yet. Cheap phones don't have DLNA. They don't have mirroring / Wifi Direct, which I enjoyed a handful of times on our new, cheap smartTV. Cheap phones cover few video codecs so you're left with weird "not supported" errors when playing some files. Cheap phones don't have remote control features. More relevantly, cheap phones don't have NFC.
My dying flagship supports all of the above, but replacing those same features is still requiring the same prices as 30 months ago. Worse, features have been nerfed (battery removal, forced sim card resizing replacement and sometimes loss of headphone jack). Since I am on an older phone now, I'm a little worried for whims of companies bringing about new breach-inspired requirements towards new hardware that I'll be prompted to consider for work-related authentication.
I like my tech gadgets and everything.
But I'll be damned if I'm going to wire my home up to spy on me and send all the data back to Amazon, Google or WHOEVER.
I don't give a shit HOW useful it is. It's simply TOO intrusive for my liking.
And if I ever move into a place with this crap pre-installed, I'll have an electrician out first to disconnect it all.
Something in your comment triggered my realization that ;)
10 years down the road, that cable box we all have will be accompanied by a no-choice spying box given by our ISP... and we'll *like* it
"Simply too intrusive for my liking" applies to many things that are already a reality where we cannot "vote with our wallets" today.
For instance, if you're posting this from a mobile device. the US governments' claws are already in them. We cannot just assume Windows 10 is the only bad guy --Snowden's revelations precede the outrage over the release of that system by quite a while, so just think what else was it that made the data mining practical.
But I digress! Everyone and their mother is releasing a voice assistant (Samsung, Google, Windows 10's Cortana, Siri, Alexa, LG) and some of those are achieving a hardware presence. Nothing will forever keep the ISPs from realizing they too can join the bandwagon, putting one more camera and microphone into our houses to taste a piece of the revenue pie. Microsoft's XBox / Kinect camera, Google's defunct Glass and Samsung's always-on SmartTV background audio recording didn't kickstart any pro-privacy legislation, and all remained legal. Thus, they'll keep being remade by other companies.
Nothing will hold back today's media-laced ISPs in the US from eventually expanding their semi-forced phone/internet/television "triple play" plans into customized hardware. Charter's recent merger with Time Warner forced some new hardware along with channel lineup changes, deprecation of perfectly-working televisions and price increases down my throat... and it is stupid that they would not just let me use existing hardware and conditions that I see with other neighbors who had assistance just 6 months earlier. I had a take-it-or-leave-it situation in my hands and was forced to accept terms because my situation was meant to be an escape to Verizon's own oppression phasing out DSL and forcing their own hardware, prices and changes.
IIRC regular folks originally did word-of-mouth marketing for Whatsapp as an SMS-replacer in the third world. Like other proprietary TCP IP services, it can do much more, but I hate the confusion of insituating that web streams and messengers ARE texts and phonecalls. One crucial factor in the confusion is the growing association of accounts with address books and phone numbers (though the system doesn't use phone lines and is a veiled trick to gain marketing data in the guise of simplicity)
Web companies intentionally muddling the waters to sell something as a functional equivalent of a familiar classic tech often contribute to very confused users. Web giants don't usually have to deal with phone or email tech support.
The result is that when something goes wrong, *we* are the ones stuck figuring out how to help friends find missing messages... or explaining in non-technical terms why a [direct] call to someone via their OS's address book did get charged as pricey long distance call by their ISP instead of connecting through the intended TCP Whatsapp or Facebok "call"
These "texts" are not SMS
"Internet-based messaging services" offered by Facebook, Wechat, Whatsapp and other services should legally be prevented from being called "texting". Before shooting me down, consider why technical users today never call Slack messages (or IRC, or ICQ, or AOL chats) "texts." Android 6+ now allow awareness and blocking of attempts by Facebook and the like to provide one-stop-shop communication, but the accumulated damage to the popular understanding of telco communications vs. proprietary smartphone offerings is already extensive, and likely irreversible.
Nobody is looking for "exciting" in the breakfix sense, per se. But product teams and devs are looking for cool features for their users. This will help them with checklists full of buzzwords, but it's in detriment of the stability of the product. The rest of this post may or may not reflect what's happening at your company, but it's reflected on a larger scale of failures seen all over the place prioritizing "cool/exciting/BROKEN" over "stable/boring." Then, forcing it on your users by stopping support for old releases or outright ignoring problems if they stay embedded in your latest release. Brings to mind Firefox, GNOME 3, KDE4, systemd, Android (GUI, fragmentation lack of security / patching), Windows 8+ with Metro and telemetry. It even extends to hardware --boring cathode TVs don't sell as profitably as 16:9, then 3D, then smarttv then 4K. Now it's impossible to find the boring tv even if it's all you need, because it's killed the option from the market. On smartphones this happens with features from just 2-3 years ago, such as removable batteries, wired headphones and reasonably-sized 4-inch screens outside of iPhones and ancient imports from 3rd world countries.
Agile isn't helping --no doubt too many here see too much gets stuck in the backlog for months or years for something that is annoying, dangerous, unexpected... etc. They are working on new shiny features, and thus need new libraries, dependencies, build systems, programming languages and finally releases with shiny stuff (and for web companies, new *BROWSER* versions.) They use Agile to stay busy creating new features to look like they're staying in touch with today's "features" and tracking-platform-do-jour. It's hard to do that and stay "boring" because you're introducing new code --therefore, you're introducing newer bugs. The problem is how far this deprioritizes pressing matters. Eventually you'll find that management and devs will close the boring dev tickets as wont'fix.
Worse yet, they WON'T close them for years and lean towards announcing workarounds on-demand outside of the official dev ticket. By "announce," this mean as silently as possible, because the devs and managers hate "looking bad" with an all-hands announcement that their product is broken with no fix planned. Initiated users that have learned of the fix the hard way via the original troubleshooting with tech support people are too lazy/shortsighted to share it openly with everyone at their level (especially the poor, clueless weekend staff rotation guys that'll endup paging tech support). Hundreds of man hours repeating this secret fix to every new employee that comes across the bug are wasted, for the users and for tech support. Due to churn, techs will eventually hire a new staff member while the bug goes un-updated. In the grand scheme of things, that new person will also unaware of the secret fix, adding complexity to the situation. No blame for them, but it's annoying that the new staffer eventually finds the bug, but not the "boring" information that a developer was supposed to have kept in the ticket.
If something is clickable, make it look clickable.
Wait till you realize that the great Hyperlink Underline and standard visited / non-visited colors from the nineties are looong gone.
"Progress" has meant the opposite of discovering (who creates new paradigms these days?). Discovering is hard, but destroying is easy.
Such a shame --I have CSS overrides to bring back underlines because throwing away good information is stupid. Scrolling with super tiny low-contrast scrollbars [I hate you, Google Chrome!] to hover your mouse over low-contrast skinny fonts to find a link that is only slightly colored, when the status bar popup appears intermittently? All of this information hiding results in users that are much harder to teach, because everything is intentionally obfuscated and nothing comes with a formal manual.
it's almost like browser organizations out there are piling up the hatred against navigation because they want you sticking around aimlessly within a single page.
WhatsApp FAQ - Finding the Menu button -
https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/an...
No.
Menus do not just "look" like "menus" --they have to be explained over the phone or any medium where words trump logos. People don't even know what a 'browser' looks like so when you get a user phonecall you're left guessing where to start.
See how Whatsapp is handling this officially in their
WhatsApp FAQ - Finding the Menu button
Get real. Not everyone is on the desktop world. Every MB counts. Your $400 retail computer comes with 1 Terabyte now, but most home users out there only replace their 10 year old machines when death is imminent, and they have more humble 300-500GB setups.
Laptops and SSD drives bring another dimension to the situation. SSDs are laughably small even on desktop PCs. The "new" professional grade HP laptop that work assigned me a year ago was a downgrade from the regular HD in the 6-year old it was replacing where I had at least 300GB.
The formatted SSD 100GB started out losing 30GB from my files transfered from the old PC (I had a couple virtual machines and respective linux ISOs because shells and SSH on Windows is deficient, even with Cygwin)
Another 20GB was occupied by Windows 7 and I ended with about 10GB free, which was a bit of a worry preceding the Windows 10 download / upgrade process.
Every megabyte counts, especially when you now automatically have programs doubling in size.
USB is becoming a big mess of different versions, far too many versions. USB is starting to lose its usefulness. USB 3.2? Most of my devices don't even use USB 3.0 yet. The USB spec is starting to look like changes are being made for the purpose of making changes, but to no real end.
The situation is similar with Unicode "versions" :) and I didn't know they were a thing tilll windows 8 or so... codepages and UTF encodings were already painful enough!
"Legacy" devices that for one reason or another don't have the latest browser or OS (and sometimes even having them) are already annoyingly finicky when you send out Unicode emoji.
iPhone users are annoyingly up-to-date compared to crappy carrier-locked Android users like me, and often trigger a few square glyph placeholders on emoji texts. If you use your phone or Windows 7 PC to browse Twitter and Instagram posts that are emoji-heavy, you'll notice the effect.
Back to the topic of the USB problems, even having current "standards" is a pain. Courtesy outlets (cable boxes, older gaming consoles, monitors) tend to be unpowered and even cables often lag behind on today's 5-inch phone world. As you go beyond 3-feet cables, 2 amp support required by hungry screens seems to have its work cut out with .2 Amps that is all the rage with PC USB ports and travel adapters.
So you're implying that this is all about sentimentality? People feel about MS Paint the way a person might feel about their grandmother?
Tech people suck at empathy --your post is an example against letting us tech people make important decisions. In other sciences, there isn't a marked absence of checks and balances, certification, regulations / fines / jailtime, design oversight bodies... and the world is a bit more stable because of that. Let's imagine how doctors in similar decisions would be allowed to act in the absence of the Hippocratic oath, when all their Slashdot versions say seemingly translates to "not my problem," "that's an easy DIY task/patient, heal yourself" and "just get a new one"
Of course, power users don't care that for every one of us that can google an alternative, there are dozens of regular Joes that will each contribute to wastes of time as we try to level the playing field.
Is it so hard to see that this is less about sentimentality and more about familiarity and NETWORK effects? Ignoring sentimental reasons here, when grandma dies, you'd need a "hire" a new noodles person or find / keep using a subpar one. When grandma is killed off on purpose because, well, feeding her must be HUGELY affecting MS's bottom line, more evidence comes out that nothing is off-limits.
Going back to network effects here, imagine if the internet decided to shut down mail apps and POP3 / IMAP overnight. All the knowledgeable suckers switching to outlook Webmail would have to jump through some hoops, but the damage comes from knowing that email will never be the same again --you'll have to ask each person you reach if they do see the program (which for some /.-impaired is a difficult enough waste of 10 minutes) and force them through setting up the webmail account (or signing up to the MS store in this case) when all I want is a quick way for them to send my helpdesk a screenshot with some cropping and markings that can't be conveyed well over a phonecall.
Imaging that Facebook decides to disable N % of their accounts because they're unprofitable (below x percent of logged hours per year), under the guides of being presumed inactive or dead: just like with the webmail example above --killing an existing assumption be disabling random nodes in your "network" leads to confusing talks about why something isn't where expected and how to fix it.
Like the comic https://www.xkcd.com/713/ said, ISS can now get geoip'd, yieldeing ads to "meet local girls in LOW EARTH ORBIT." ;)
Progress is sad
You very likely can block the call through your provider. I know Verizon allows you to block up to five numbers completely free. And it is a true block for calls. If they call you they get a message basically saying that you've been blocked.
Correct. I too have received the somewhat ambiguous "The subscriber is not accepting calls from this number." The way it's phrased, you'd not suspect "THIS" means "YOUR" rather than "theirs" until you have ugly situations and see the hints that this acquaintance is no longer interested in you. Subtle ambiguity at its best!
Something similar happens with blocking texts. I have an inkling that my own smartphone is doing just that when user the stock app to "reject" a new SMS spammer's number. I feel that these notices are a disservice, because granting too much information about a *block* leaves you at a disadvantage security-wise than just silently rejecting a blockee. I mean, it's perfectly reasonable for infosec folks to burn us regularly with their practice of coding sites to say "bad password" when a more helpful "there's no account registered under that email address (pssst, you *typo'd* it to go along with your perfectly-entered password)" would have been good.
Somehow the contexts always hurt us consumers with bad decisions that cause unwanted side-effects.
I've gone on Android's Quiet mode by mistake and missed calls, resulting in queries about hearing a telco notification that I was in some special state (and even triggering some kind of option to SMS me immediately). I'd rather the telco silently provide the wait-for-10-rings-and-voicemail that my being unavailable would have resulted in.
But I'm venting. At least we have the comfort that the GP's desire to block voicemail is already a reality. The blocking messages completely remove your option to appeal the block and/or leave an urgent voicemail when regular calls are impaired by the process. I'm sure many-a-teenager have estranged their parents thanks to such means without ever having to even ditch their old contact number.
"argue that these messages should not qualify as calls and, therefore, should be exempt from consumer protection laws that ban similar types of telephone marketing"
Correct, they should be classified as harassment. And since it's done over the telephone and likely come from out of state, the FBI has jurisdiction.
Isn't it vexing how lawmakers and marketers claim exemption from "consumer" protection laws AND prevent us from claiming exemption from being classed as "consumer" in the first place?
It used to be that to consume something, you had to "hear" about it by passive means and willingly seek it out. Marketers turned that into "cram it down his throat by any means necessary and ask questions later... we can't be sued, so at worst, he won't buy the product! #win-win"
These too are on purpose. There are numbers from unique area codes that consistently, if not always, result in dead air when you do pick up. Once / twice would be considered a programming bug or a bad product. ALWAYS? nope.
Not many businesses would keep a botched product for first-contact, considering calls are more noticeable than junk mail and spam. After all, with a call you ALWAYS know when the mark is "live" as soon as they pick up. It's similar to sending email you expect to bounce because you're not sure of a spelling, just to see if an address is inactive or not.
My money here is on "surveillance", the sort you might get from debt collection agencies or cheap scouters finding potential marks for future spammers. You say "hello?" and hang up a second later?
Too late! "They" know the number works now. They now also know if you're male, female, young or old. For scouters, this is the equivalent of saying they have one more mark in a list of "100,000 VERIFIED email addresses for YOU to spam at the low, low price of X dollars per thousand"?
Debt collectors also don't care you say X fake name has nothing to do with you or your family at your house number. They swear they'll remove you from the list, only to call again a day later and promise the same, sometimes by the same phone rep. They poll to see what times you're picking up the phone, and they sometimes mention details of who they're targeting. They use fake caller ID numbers that start with a local area code + 3 digits that match your own phone's to incite familiarity AND evade code blocks. The last 4 digits are never repeated, defeating the purpose of your using cheap landline blocking hardware or cheap non-programmable smartphone call-rejection features.
I wish I had a homebased PBX system without the hassle of actually having to buy servers to do VOIP. That way, I could program responses and direct all unknown numbers to a honeypot like I've seen Google Voice users do.
Stories like this one have been pushing me to back up our thousands of photos before mother gets hit with some cryptoware and we lose it all (one of our neighbors lost it all when her kids got Cryptowalled).
I'm finally doing something about it, and was just sitting next to the PC watching Youtube to figure out what to do after installing the new 2TB internal drive. I have been scratching my head thinking of something that won't require Cygwin / rsync and will interact with Windows 7 backup files in case I need to use Linux. Since I did pay for my Ultimate upgrade, I'm planning to use it exclusively if push comes to shove, so I'm this close to just sticking the disk in and forgetting about Linux compat. I might just buy a separate disk and do SystemRescueCD images later, if needed be, but my experience says that leads to needless duplication, and I haven't found filesystem agnostic deduplication in OSS.
Thanks
I'm always horribly unique whenever I check. Doesn't matter what browser I use.
Pro tip: Even in 2010 UA strings in Firefox had become specific beyond the call of duty with build date, rendering engine verision, OS version, and other useless stuff that browser-quirk-sniffing techniques can discard without really breaking your rendering. Erm, I recognize that UA sniffing is stupid with modern pages, but the strings are a vestigial tracking item.
My getting a UA-changer extension with pre-populated defaults for iPhone 3, iPads or plain Firefox 3.5 back then brought the uniqueness from 1 in several (20?) million to one in a hundred thousand or maybe fifty thousand IIRC
Of course, none of that helps much until you do disable flash and install noscript, and turn off cookies... and delete all browser-request languages and keep just 'en' instead of 'en-US'.
An even bigger secret than the UA is that Flash and Javascript tracking your resolution and FONT-LIST makes for a unique fingerprint. No two home users that have installed software will end with the same combination of useless fonts. That's courtesy of installing office, photoshop, games and random OEM shovelware.
Nice that it includes some non-ASCII chars (extended Latin-1). But not IPA, which makes it hard for linguists. There are plenty of variable width fonts that cover IPA etc., but fewer fixed width fonts.
That said, I'm pretty sure it's a small minority of users who need this...perhaps one (me). (I used it when writing up computational linguistics in XeLaTeX.) So I'm not complaining!
A digression first:
With all the nasty data collection on today's downloaded freeware, I find it to be an awesome breath of fresh air when slashdot brings us truly no-strings attached free stuff.
Its "(useful) Stupid (Unix|Emacs|xxxxxx)" series was short-lived, but it was cool. And I just can't believe it was all the way back in 2008 - http://ask.slashdot.org/story/...
*To the point, now,* this about a free fixed-width font for my IDE, specially after I've been looking for something like the Coffee font in my LG phone, but without its annoying filled-in o glyphs.
I grok IPA and though I'd never considered its need to be supported before, since my attention has been caught but Windows 7 and Kitkat's issues with more common symbols, it's a shame to hear I wouldn't be able to make use of the IPA that Wikipedia takes so seriously when I'm looking at foreign terms. The cool thing is, routing back to you and I, that on http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/ it says there are 22 contributors with 1530+ glyphs. Unfortunately Unicode apparently supports way more than 65K total chars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode has some 150k number listed on the recent versions)
You probably guess what I'm asking for here... it's a lot easier to contribute "solving" even a single glyph per slashdotter to make this font what you and I need, than doing other open source bug fixes so common here. "If you don't like it, the source is there, go FIX it" is annoying, but here the nature of the problem is O(n)-difficulty menial work, rather than having some years-unresolved bug that requires x language and y libraries, then finding a rootcause, issuing a clean fix, then testing it, and then getting it approved for upstream.
So it'd be nice if appearing here would get even 1% of slashdotters doing something nice with those holes left in the font. We still have to learn font-glyphing, whatever that entails, but it's probably less menial than any coding fixes we might contribute to the world. Why aren't there more crowd-sourcing tasks of this type here on slashdot?