Considering the U.S. has elections every 2 years, if running ads a year before the election counts as attempting to influence the election, then every ad run at any time is attempting to influence the upcoming election.
Correct.
That's how politicians do it now. Obama was the first to really embrace it, he never really stopped campaigning after winning the first time. Trump is doing it now, continuing to do rallies and campaign stuff. Campaigning never stops these days, it's just a bit less intense the further from the next election you get.
I dunno, North Korea has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Trump presidency. We know they are good at hacking... Might be a joint effort with Russia.
Everything that happens at Twitter is part of a global conspiracy theory now. A bizarre mix of Jews, feminists, SJWs, Clintons and other Illuminati have taken over and started secretly waging a war against innocent trolls^W conservatives like poor Milo and totally-rational-definitely-reads-the-whole-article skeptics like Sargon.
Those poor martyrs will, sadly, never be forgotten.
Root users can manually download and install OTA updates. I do it all the time.
Having said that, my primary phone is unrooted and the bootloader locked. The only reasons I had to root have all become moot now - granular permission control and ad blocking. Both are available without root, and the extra security provided by a locked bootloader and fully encrypted phone is extremely valuable.
They measure the revenue from Google Play vs. the Apple Store. However, Apple requires all payments to go through Apple. The Amazon app on iOS can't process any payments, it takes you to the Amazon web site instead. Everything has to go through Apple, including all in-app purchases.
Google is far less restrictive. You can install entire alternative apps stores (and they are very popular in China and India). You can have your own payment systems, e.g. Amazon or Netflix directly. Netflix used to charge more on iOS to cover the Apple tax, I don't know if they still do.
Someone posted a tale of woe on Twitter the other day. They bought a "smart" lock, controlled via an app on their phone. The phone uses nearby wifi APs to determine location without powering up the GPS. The guy has a portable wifi AP for use when travelling...
Every time he sets up his mobile AP, anywhere in the world, is house unlocks all its doors.
An attacker could place a speaker against a window pane and tell the device inside to unlock the doors. They could call the answer phone and talk to it that way.
Malicious ads already produce high frequency sounds that spyware on phones can track, so presumably they could just emit speech at those frequencies instead.
I'm actually surprised it worked. I'd have expected one of the first things the device would do is filer out frequencies above and below human speech in order to remove as much background noise as possible. Anything ultrasonic should be discarded as it can only ever be noise, since no human can talk that high*.
One of the worst sources of plastic pollution is cosmetics and shower gels. Some companies put tiny plastic beads into them for texture/exfoliating. Some of the more responsible manufacturers have agreed to stop using them.
I just tried the Network Information API sample on Chrome for Android (https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/network-information/).
No permission request, it was enabled by default and there does not seem to be a way to disable it. It knew I was on cellular and that the downlink speed was 3.6Mb/sec (optimistic but basically correct).
Gab is not an open discussion forum. It actively bans left leaning accounts. It even blocks them from its Twitter feed. Like PewTube, it's building a right-wing echo chamber by censoring dissenting opinions.
This is all a matter of public record, you can verify it yourself and don't have to take my word for it.
These supposedly free-speech loving sites, set up specifically to be permissive, always seem to quickly end up banning anything they don't like on some flimsy excuse.
Since the presidency of the EU is not "big government", it's literally just a rotating position that gives countries an opportunity to propose an agenda. Estonia has pissed it's opportunity away by proposing something that seems to violate the human rights of EU citizens (the right to privacy in particular) and which has no hope of ever being adopted or even influencing the legislation.
Before you complain about the EU, note that it has some of the strongest privacy protections in the world. They have been used to stop government spying, they have been used to force massive multinational companies like Google to respect individual privacy. And those are actual, written and enforced law, not some random proposal that has zero chance of ever being enacted.
"We have already reported this vulnerability to the affected mobile vendors, and they have integrated patches in their latest updates, as well as fixes for newer device versions," Yue told Bleeping via email.
What are the "code audits" that they agreed to have for the next 20 years like? Seems like that could be a more effective deterrent than fining them 0.01% of last quarter's profit and giving all their victims a $1.75 gift card.
It's a reaction to the hideous skeuomorphic crap we had for years, aka "maybe if I click on the cheese plant" UI design.
And then before that we had "OMG I've got 2MB of video RAM I must fill it with low quality textures and photoshopped rounded icons."
Similar thing with contrast. In the 70s and 80s we understood that too much contrast is bad, and so is too little. Then it went insanely high contrast as hardware improved, now insanely low because amateur graphic designers...
Flat can be okay when it's done well, but it's too easy to screw up. The old 80s style may look dated, but it's hard to get wrong.
Sounds like an incredibly effective way to destroy productivity. All requests, even for trivial things, have to go through one person, or at least through the IT department.
Maybe it's different at law firms, but as an engineer it would be impossible to do my job working that way.
It's actually in the company's interest to allow work computers to be used for private stuff.
My boss has my private email address. Once or twice I've answered questions while on holiday. Very often something I ready during lunch break for my own private amusement turned out to be very helpful for the job. All that would go away if they suddenly got strict about computer use, although I'd probably jump ship anyway in short order.
I thought the problem with Obamacare was too many Republicans worried that the will lose the next election because so many of their constituents will lose their healthcare or have costs rocket up.
If an organization is reliant on having complete control of its network for security then it's fucked anyway. Real security has layers. If your security can't survive one phishing email that uses some zero day exploit, or someone connecting an infected laptop to the wifi (e.g. when they get back from a trip), if you ban any equipment you can't totally control... You are both reducing productivity (which IT is supposed to enable) and failing to secure the company systems.
Anyway, in this case the guy was just using Yahoo Messenger to talk to his family, as well as clients. It's going to be quite hard to block his family but still allow clients to talk to him that way. And the specific issue was not that he was found out, it's that they captured a load of his private communications in the process. Firing him was fine, they just didn't need to invade his privacy further to do it.
That sounds like a horrible, Orwellian place to work.
Did you give employees laptops and phones for travel? Did they routinely turn them off to prevent you activating the camera/microphone and carry a second personal laptop?
It really sounds like an awful way to live. I wouldn't work at such a place, I'd only go somewhere that doesn't routinely spy on me and largely doesn't care as long as I get stuff done. Even if I didn't care about privacy, I'd assume it was a sign that there were other serious problems with the management style and working environment.
Barbulescu had previously told his employer in writing that he had only used the service for professional purposes.
So it's not even email, just Yahoo chat. The issue here is not that he lied about using the service for work only, he could still be fired for that, it's that in the EU an employer can't simply read everything on its network because the users of that network have some small expectation of privacy.
Don't misunderstand this. Network monitoring for detection of intrusion, scanning emails for viruses and spam, that sort of thing is still fine. Even reading employee emails when there is some good reason to is okay in the right circumstances. What isn't okay is the boss being able to read anything an employee writes in a random chat message to their family. Seeing that they are chatting to their family is fine, and the additional invasion of privacy isn't necessary to sanction them for it.
It's really quite a narrow ruling, but an important one. It reinforces the idea that privacy is a basic human right in the EU and that there must be good reason for violating it. Consider that just because the employer owns a laptop that it gives to you, that doesn't give it the right to remotely turn the web cam and microphone on whenever it likes, e.g. in your home, or even in the office where most people would be upset if you set up a CCTV camera on top of their monitor.
The guy seems to be suffering from delusions of grandeur. Google has the most popular web browser in the world, and doesn't give a shit about his new fork of Chromium. His market share is non-exisitant, he is no threat.
These are the same rules they have for everyone. Don't be a dick, provide a link to the EULA and how to uninstall your software, pretty much the bare minimum anyone could reasonably expect.
Slashdot Mirror
The fundamental difference between R and D is this:
Republicans want to change society by forcing people to behave a certain way.
Democrats want to change society through the tax system.
Considering the U.S. has elections every 2 years, if running ads a year before the election counts as attempting to influence the election, then every ad run at any time is attempting to influence the upcoming election.
Correct.
That's how politicians do it now. Obama was the first to really embrace it, he never really stopped campaigning after winning the first time. Trump is doing it now, continuing to do rallies and campaign stuff. Campaigning never stops these days, it's just a bit less intense the further from the next election you get.
I dunno, North Korea has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Trump presidency. We know they are good at hacking... Might be a joint effort with Russia.
Everything that happens at Twitter is part of a global conspiracy theory now. A bizarre mix of Jews, feminists, SJWs, Clintons and other Illuminati have taken over and started secretly waging a war against innocent trolls^W conservatives like poor Milo and totally-rational-definitely-reads-the-whole-article skeptics like Sargon.
Those poor martyrs will, sadly, never be forgotten.
Root users can manually download and install OTA updates. I do it all the time.
Having said that, my primary phone is unrooted and the bootloader locked. The only reasons I had to root have all become moot now - granular permission control and ad blocking. Both are available without root, and the extra security provided by a locked bootloader and fully encrypted phone is extremely valuable.
The methodology in that article is flawed.
They measure the revenue from Google Play vs. the Apple Store. However, Apple requires all payments to go through Apple. The Amazon app on iOS can't process any payments, it takes you to the Amazon web site instead. Everything has to go through Apple, including all in-app purchases.
Google is far less restrictive. You can install entire alternative apps stores (and they are very popular in China and India). You can have your own payment systems, e.g. Amazon or Netflix directly. Netflix used to charge more on iOS to cover the Apple tax, I don't know if they still do.
Someone posted a tale of woe on Twitter the other day. They bought a "smart" lock, controlled via an app on their phone. The phone uses nearby wifi APs to determine location without powering up the GPS. The guy has a portable wifi AP for use when travelling...
Every time he sets up his mobile AP, anywhere in the world, is house unlocks all its doors.
An attacker could place a speaker against a window pane and tell the device inside to unlock the doors. They could call the answer phone and talk to it that way.
Malicious ads already produce high frequency sounds that spyware on phones can track, so presumably they could just emit speech at those frequencies instead.
I'm actually surprised it worked. I'd have expected one of the first things the device would do is filer out frequencies above and below human speech in order to remove as much background noise as possible. Anything ultrasonic should be discarded as it can only ever be noise, since no human can talk that high*.
* Except after getting kicked in the balls.
One of the worst sources of plastic pollution is cosmetics and shower gels. Some companies put tiny plastic beads into them for texture/exfoliating. Some of the more responsible manufacturers have agreed to stop using them.
I just tried the Network Information API sample on Chrome for Android (https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/network-information/).
No permission request, it was enabled by default and there does not seem to be a way to disable it. It knew I was on cellular and that the downlink speed was 3.6Mb/sec (optimistic but basically correct).
As the AC said, HOLY FUCK.
Gab is not an open discussion forum. It actively bans left leaning accounts. It even blocks them from its Twitter feed. Like PewTube, it's building a right-wing echo chamber by censoring dissenting opinions.
This is all a matter of public record, you can verify it yourself and don't have to take my word for it.
These supposedly free-speech loving sites, set up specifically to be permissive, always seem to quickly end up banning anything they don't like on some flimsy excuse.
Since the presidency of the EU is not "big government", it's literally just a rotating position that gives countries an opportunity to propose an agenda. Estonia has pissed it's opportunity away by proposing something that seems to violate the human rights of EU citizens (the right to privacy in particular) and which has no hope of ever being adopted or even influencing the legislation.
Before you complain about the EU, note that it has some of the strongest privacy protections in the world. They have been used to stop government spying, they have been used to force massive multinational companies like Google to respect individual privacy. And those are actual, written and enforced law, not some random proposal that has zero chance of ever being enacted.
From TFA:
"We have already reported this vulnerability to the affected mobile vendors, and they have integrated patches in their latest updates, as well as fixes for newer device versions," Yue told Bleeping via email.
Who? Which devices?
What are the "code audits" that they agreed to have for the next 20 years like? Seems like that could be a more effective deterrent than fining them 0.01% of last quarter's profit and giving all their victims a $1.75 gift card.
Forget notifications, the damn summary is TL;DR
It's a reaction to the hideous skeuomorphic crap we had for years, aka "maybe if I click on the cheese plant" UI design.
And then before that we had "OMG I've got 2MB of video RAM I must fill it with low quality textures and photoshopped rounded icons."
Similar thing with contrast. In the 70s and 80s we understood that too much contrast is bad, and so is too little. Then it went insanely high contrast as hardware improved, now insanely low because amateur graphic designers...
Flat can be okay when it's done well, but it's too easy to screw up. The old 80s style may look dated, but it's hard to get wrong.
Sounds like an incredibly effective way to destroy productivity. All requests, even for trivial things, have to go through one person, or at least through the IT department.
Maybe it's different at law firms, but as an engineer it would be impossible to do my job working that way.
It's actually in the company's interest to allow work computers to be used for private stuff.
My boss has my private email address. Once or twice I've answered questions while on holiday. Very often something I ready during lunch break for my own private amusement turned out to be very helpful for the job. All that would go away if they suddenly got strict about computer use, although I'd probably jump ship anyway in short order.
A little trust goes a long way.
I thought the problem with Obamacare was too many Republicans worried that the will lose the next election because so many of their constituents will lose their healthcare or have costs rocket up.
If an organization is reliant on having complete control of its network for security then it's fucked anyway. Real security has layers. If your security can't survive one phishing email that uses some zero day exploit, or someone connecting an infected laptop to the wifi (e.g. when they get back from a trip), if you ban any equipment you can't totally control... You are both reducing productivity (which IT is supposed to enable) and failing to secure the company systems.
Anyway, in this case the guy was just using Yahoo Messenger to talk to his family, as well as clients. It's going to be quite hard to block his family but still allow clients to talk to him that way. And the specific issue was not that he was found out, it's that they captured a load of his private communications in the process. Firing him was fine, they just didn't need to invade his privacy further to do it.
That sounds like a horrible, Orwellian place to work.
Did you give employees laptops and phones for travel? Did they routinely turn them off to prevent you activating the camera/microphone and carry a second personal laptop?
It really sounds like an awful way to live. I wouldn't work at such a place, I'd only go somewhere that doesn't routinely spy on me and largely doesn't care as long as I get stuff done. Even if I didn't care about privacy, I'd assume it was a sign that there were other serious problems with the management style and working environment.
From TFA:
The company had presented him with printouts of his private messages to his brother and fiancée on Yahoo Messenger as evidence of his breach of a company ban on such personal use.
Barbulescu had previously told his employer in writing that he had only used the service for professional purposes.
So it's not even email, just Yahoo chat. The issue here is not that he lied about using the service for work only, he could still be fired for that, it's that in the EU an employer can't simply read everything on its network because the users of that network have some small expectation of privacy.
Don't misunderstand this. Network monitoring for detection of intrusion, scanning emails for viruses and spam, that sort of thing is still fine. Even reading employee emails when there is some good reason to is okay in the right circumstances. What isn't okay is the boss being able to read anything an employee writes in a random chat message to their family. Seeing that they are chatting to their family is fine, and the additional invasion of privacy isn't necessary to sanction them for it.
It's really quite a narrow ruling, but an important one. It reinforces the idea that privacy is a basic human right in the EU and that there must be good reason for violating it. Consider that just because the employer owns a laptop that it gives to you, that doesn't give it the right to remotely turn the web cam and microphone on whenever it likes, e.g. in your home, or even in the office where most people would be upset if you set up a CCTV camera on top of their monitor.
+4 insightful for just quoting the fucking summary... *sigh*
The guy seems to be suffering from delusions of grandeur. Google has the most popular web browser in the world, and doesn't give a shit about his new fork of Chromium. His market share is non-exisitant, he is no threat.
These are the same rules they have for everyone. Don't be a dick, provide a link to the EULA and how to uninstall your software, pretty much the bare minimum anyone could reasonably expect.