... for free. Even without monthly subscription. Ok, maybe some small amount to keep the number if there's no activity for a while but terminating calls is usually a lucrative business.
" You can click a button on a mobile phone and instantaneously have GPS guide drivers right to you.", wow what a great enabler! What can you do with it, some kind of postal service? It's not doing well as it is... Sure, Uber would have some success if the regulated competition needs to spend on licenses, insurances, minimum wages and such but it's not because it's more efficient but because it's circumventing the law (that we probably have way too many laws and regulations and circumventing them might be sometimes beneficial it's another story).
Otherwise some things never took off - yes you could have some products delivered to your door by the producer directly but even grocery delivery from big chains never were a success. Obviously you won't be making heart surgery or even smartphones in the "gig economy" and what other things you can make or offer are pretty well covered as they'll ever be, from plumbers to prostitution. That you'll have in some years some services as pervasive as Uber or heck YouTube and you'll be wondering how was the life before sure. But to have other special expectations about "gigs" is like people were saying when the hard drives went up 200% in prices in 2011-2012: I'll just save it in the cloud. Riiiight.
"Anything" is not suitable for a calculator app. I mean seriously (and this is sanitized just for the sake of argument example, imagine something you can't actually follow easily in your head):
Collecting passwords in a browser form field is fairly common, and not wrong.
This is not "a browser"... or at least SHOULD NOT be, it is an app that would in principle exist in the very same form (at least from what I can see in the demos) even if the web was never invented. However it is/it does come with its own browser (like many other things nowadays!) - heck it's bigger than my first HARD DRIVE!
Oh, sorry, it was you... Well in this case not only it isn't funny but it's somewhere from pathetic to dangerous. We can make fun of RMS but it's the world that's sick.
Yea, especially the high end Tab Ses from Samsung were a total ergonomic disaster. It was a whole ordeal to just to pick the tablet from a flat surface, even with both hands - usually it involved dragging it to the edge of the table (and good luck trying to get it off the floor; to make it worse the glass from the back would scratch even if you looked at it wrong).
Other than that generally Samsung dropped the ball for the last quite a few years, at least for the high end tablets. SOCs that were 1.5 generations behind for very premium prices, all kinds of nasty software bugs (that were leading to battery not lasting overnight if you left wifi on and stuff like that) updates all but non-existent (even for big security issues) and so on.
Maybe they want to come back in the game; this tables somehow seems to be in the right direction. No more glass back (I wish really bad things to happen to everybody who ever thought it's a good idea to have both sides and very often the edges of a portable device made of glass, like a fragile screen is not enough), a decent 16:10 aspect ratio (I don't know why they insist on 4:3 for premium tablets while for good monitors or laptops it's almost impossible to find one that's 4:3 anymore). A probably (hopefully) decent amoled display (by the way Apple left everybody in the dust with the super-bright + 120Hz iPad Pro display, too bad that was 4:3 too, it would be ironic if it was produced by Samsung while Samsung had something decent but not great for their best tablets) and now it seems a lower starting price for these S5es. Who knows, maybe they have something going here.
I am stunned of how wrong they get it. Sometimes they can't even agree with the current data, like "we forecast a maximum of 22C for today, current temperature 23.5". I'm always thinking of the first part from "Two Man in a Boat" when they get it (once again) spectacularly wrong.
Your garbage is someone's else treasure. There are alarms, countdown timers, app notifications (including chat clients), music/audiobook players, step counters and many more. If you want to use your phone as a mobile phone from 20 years ago combined with a desktop computer from 20 years ago fine, but not everybody wants that. And the solution for you is simple: just don't install any apps. The solution "let's kill everything in 20 minutes" even if the user installed let's say vlc and is playing something because you just want to do calls and texts with a phone seems to be extremely poor on many levels.
I think you kind of shot yourself in the foot at every step. The Nokia we're talking about here (the one making Android phones) has nothing to do with the one sold to Microsoft (making Windows Phones and earlier feature phones). This Nokia's commitment is to "clean Android" and all their phones worth considering have Android One, I haven't seen anything else. If you look at https://www.android.com/one/ they are by far the manufacturer with the largest number of models, 7 (while most are missing or have one or two lost phones there).
If you want to check out some crazy "everything for consumers" go and try pay online the motorway toll for Austria. You need to do it 18 days in advance. Because the customer has rights, needs two weeks to think, plus three days for the (snail) mail to reach them (yes, they are thinking you pay the motorway online and then after two weeks send a letter saying you don't agree to it anymore). And because you could change your mind in two weeks you are not allowed to pay online the toll for today. Or tomorrow. You need to actually stop somewhere (not a drive-through toll boot, you usually need to park, go inside a gas station or something) and buy it. Sure, you can buy it from your phone or computer too - but it'll be valid only from 30 or 31st of January, no matter if you want to drive now. It's all for your benefit, you need to be protected, what if you change your mind?
We are getting bogged down in details. Now it's the poor students that only have a wide-screen laptop and not enough vertical resolution (note that this can be even a brand new Macbook Air STARTING from $999, with a resolution that was pathetic for a good phone from 3 generations ago). What I'm trying to say is that while they might be lacking enough vertical resolution or a certain type of video output or by now probably many are missing the capability to read CD/DVDs and some don't have any place to plug even a normal USB stick... is not because because the hardware is too expensive or too exotic or dangerous or banned or whatever. It is just because they didn't feel the need to have whatever we say they're missing.
NO. Guess what, they don't have because they don't need and don't want. Either a computer or protective gloves or a carpet with a unicorn. But not because you're so poor that you can't afford it, not in the USA. Having a place to stay, paying the bills, yea, that can be tricky. A computer you can get for free (sometimes directly from the trash) or for very, very cheap.
OnePlus handsets are well supported, cheap and well made.
In which universe?! They START FROM $499 for the OLD model and everything except the SOC/RAM is sub-par (even for the times when it was launched) for what they claim to be (flagship): mediocre display (at least they don't put it upside-down by design lately), no microSD expansion capabilities, NO CAMERA STABILIZATION, no water protection except some dubious claims on twitter like "it will be fine for normal usage", no wireless charging. YES, it does have a headphone jack but even the wired earbuds aren't included and are something like $20.
And that is of course that is if you order from China and deal with all the hassle, from a company that was caught spying on the customers (via the phones) and where the credit cards used for purchase were not only "leaked" but also charged for random things (otherwise you wouldn't even hear about it as they were denying it even as all people who entered CC numbers in their site were charged).
What the heck! We have an important update, we recommend you update as soon as possible. BAM! All extensions except two gone, it has some blueish theme and many things look... strange. Screw you Mozilla.
8 reasons why smartphones are privacy nightmare [techradar.com]
Seriously? "Malicious apps", "Wi-Fi tracking", "Lack of antivirus software", "Lack of security patches" (sweeping statement).
Give me a break. Please go and find a better boogeyman than totally crazy complains like "lower adoption rates of antivirus software on a smartphone compared to full-fledged PCs".
Just to be clear, the ONLY part that is new is "won't count towards Google Drive storage quotas".
Nothing changes, you could (since probably before Whatsapp was really popular) store the un-encrypted backups on GDrive and it's off by default and you are warned that they aren't encrypted. Local backups aren't encrypted too by the way, unless you have some kind of device encryption.
The end-to-end encryption is only on-the-fly. You start saving shit you need to trust the place you save it to. It's just like ssh, there is encryption for the connection and there is even an ephemeral symmetrical key agreed upon on the spot but you need to take care what to do with the stuff once you start logging or redirecting to files, etc.
Most people don't care anyway. Many of the services aren't end-to-end encrypted (Email, SMS, Yahoo Messanger - rest in peace-, Google Talk or whatever they call it nowadays, Facebook Messenger unless you're using secret conversation or something and so on).
Sure, they could encrypt the backups but the user would have to manage (think store safely) the keys. Do you really expect most users to be able to get the key they set/saved years ago when the old phone breaks (or is lost) and they need to restore the backup to a new phone? Especially if is a key with enough entropy (think a complicated passphrase) that they aren't supposed to be using anywhere else?
You XP machine hasn't been getting automatic updates for 9 years now.
That is absolute bullshit. In 2009 they were still making new machines (completely new models) with/for XP like the legendary 9.5 hours EEE Pc 1000HE (yes, the battery is still pretty strong). XP got updates until 2014 and this can be trivially (one registry key) extended to 2019 (yes, they are still pushing updates for XP). Even without the registry "hack" Microsot still patched all XPs with the mega-emergency KB4012598 - that was last year, yes 2017.
To me, the most interesting development in phones has been the incredibly value in the sub-$300 price, as evidenced by Motorola's various phones, Huawei, Honor, OnePlus, etc.
Honor IS the cheapo brand of Huawei. Together with Xiaomi plus a lot of other small(er) players they DO deliver a lot of value and usable devices even under $200 (sometimes on special sales even into double digits).
However with Oneplus (as mentioned in TFA) the situation is totally different: they START at $500++ and that is if you order from China. And NO, you can't do better by shipping at Amazon or similar, you'll only get even more expensive devices and "international version no warranty" bla bla.
I seems like if you had some window of time and access to a physical key, you could probably clone it... after all it holds everything needed to generate a OTP.
Cloning is easy only for things that were designed to be read easily, from mag-stripes to normal flash memory (for example) that is specifically designed to give you the data you're asking for. Otherwise in real world it is really, really, really hard to clone things. If you don't believe me go and clone a kidney, heck even a tooth; your body has all the needed information isn't it?
Even the SIM cards from 20+ years ago are pretty resistant to attempts to extract the keys from them, and even if there are a few vulnerabilities and the designs were in infancy. Still even for those it's a pretty complicated affair to get the keys out. Now it's a different story, any such devices are much more tamper-proof. Unless there's a backdoor (which is really a vulnerability of any such system) I think even three letter agencies will have a very hard time to get into those. Especially that there won't be any push to get them cracked, it requires too much effort as opposed to just getting the data from the provider (from what I understand these are for 2FA not to hold arbitrary encryption keys).
Slashdot Mirror
... for free. Even without monthly subscription. Ok, maybe some small amount to keep the number if there's no activity for a while but terminating calls is usually a lucrative business.
... similar technologies would save it anyway!
" You can click a button on a mobile phone and instantaneously have GPS guide drivers right to you.", wow what a great enabler! What can you do with it, some kind of postal service? It's not doing well as it is... Sure, Uber would have some success if the regulated competition needs to spend on licenses, insurances, minimum wages and such but it's not because it's more efficient but because it's circumventing the law (that we probably have way too many laws and regulations and circumventing them might be sometimes beneficial it's another story).
Otherwise some things never took off - yes you could have some products delivered to your door by the producer directly but even grocery delivery from big chains never were a success. Obviously you won't be making heart surgery or even smartphones in the "gig economy" and what other things you can make or offer are pretty well covered as they'll ever be, from plumbers to prostitution. That you'll have in some years some services as pervasive as Uber or heck YouTube and you'll be wondering how was the life before sure. But to have other special expectations about "gigs" is like people were saying when the hard drives went up 200% in prices in 2011-2012: I'll just save it in the cloud. Riiiight.
"Anything" is not suitable for a calculator app. I mean seriously (and this is sanitized just for the sake of argument example, imagine something you can't actually follow easily in your head):
Or again maybe not:
>>>>> 10*(1-0.9)
0.9999999999999998
This is not "a browser" ... or at least SHOULD NOT be, it is an app that would in principle exist in the very same form (at least from what I can see in the demos) even if the web was never invented. However it is/it does come with its own browser (like many other things nowadays!) - heck it's bigger than my first HARD DRIVE!
"The user interface is designed using HTML/JavaScript and rendered using integrated Chromium (Google's open-source project) based browser"
'nuf said. Surely there are more wrong things wrong with that...
Oh, sorry, it was you... Well in this case not only it isn't funny but it's somewhere from pathetic to dangerous. We can make fun of RMS but it's the world that's sick.
Yea, especially the high end Tab Ses from Samsung were a total ergonomic disaster. It was a whole ordeal to just to pick the tablet from a flat surface, even with both hands - usually it involved dragging it to the edge of the table (and good luck trying to get it off the floor; to make it worse the glass from the back would scratch even if you looked at it wrong).
Other than that generally Samsung dropped the ball for the last quite a few years, at least for the high end tablets. SOCs that were 1.5 generations behind for very premium prices, all kinds of nasty software bugs (that were leading to battery not lasting overnight if you left wifi on and stuff like that) updates all but non-existent (even for big security issues) and so on.
Maybe they want to come back in the game; this tables somehow seems to be in the right direction. No more glass back (I wish really bad things to happen to everybody who ever thought it's a good idea to have both sides and very often the edges of a portable device made of glass, like a fragile screen is not enough), a decent 16:10 aspect ratio (I don't know why they insist on 4:3 for premium tablets while for good monitors or laptops it's almost impossible to find one that's 4:3 anymore). A probably (hopefully) decent amoled display (by the way Apple left everybody in the dust with the super-bright + 120Hz iPad Pro display, too bad that was 4:3 too, it would be ironic if it was produced by Samsung while Samsung had something decent but not great for their best tablets) and now it seems a lower starting price for these S5es. Who knows, maybe they have something going here.
I am stunned of how wrong they get it. Sometimes they can't even agree with the current data, like "we forecast a maximum of 22C for today, current temperature 23.5". I'm always thinking of the first part from "Two Man in a Boat" when they get it (once again) spectacularly wrong.
And that was almost 14 years ago:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Your garbage is someone's else treasure. There are alarms, countdown timers, app notifications (including chat clients), music/audiobook players, step counters and many more. If you want to use your phone as a mobile phone from 20 years ago combined with a desktop computer from 20 years ago fine, but not everybody wants that. And the solution for you is simple: just don't install any apps. The solution "let's kill everything in 20 minutes" even if the user installed let's say vlc and is playing something because you just want to do calls and texts with a phone seems to be extremely poor on many levels.
Maybe it's time to give up dial-up?
I think you kind of shot yourself in the foot at every step. The Nokia we're talking about here (the one making Android phones) has nothing to do with the one sold to Microsoft (making Windows Phones and earlier feature phones). This Nokia's commitment is to "clean Android" and all their phones worth considering have Android One, I haven't seen anything else. If you look at https://www.android.com/one/ they are by far the manufacturer with the largest number of models, 7 (while most are missing or have one or two lost phones there).
If you want to check out some crazy "everything for consumers" go and try pay online the motorway toll for Austria. You need to do it 18 days in advance. Because the customer has rights, needs two weeks to think, plus three days for the (snail) mail to reach them (yes, they are thinking you pay the motorway online and then after two weeks send a letter saying you don't agree to it anymore). And because you could change your mind in two weeks you are not allowed to pay online the toll for today. Or tomorrow. You need to actually stop somewhere (not a drive-through toll boot, you usually need to park, go inside a gas station or something) and buy it. Sure, you can buy it from your phone or computer too - but it'll be valid only from 30 or 31st of January, no matter if you want to drive now. It's all for your benefit, you need to be protected, what if you change your mind?
We are getting bogged down in details. Now it's the poor students that only have a wide-screen laptop and not enough vertical resolution (note that this can be even a brand new Macbook Air STARTING from $999, with a resolution that was pathetic for a good phone from 3 generations ago). What I'm trying to say is that while they might be lacking enough vertical resolution or a certain type of video output or by now probably many are missing the capability to read CD/DVDs and some don't have any place to plug even a normal USB stick ... is not because because the hardware is too expensive or too exotic or dangerous or banned or whatever. It is just because they didn't feel the need to have whatever we say they're missing.
Imagine that, the horror, poor students!
NO. Guess what, they don't have because they don't need and don't want. Either a computer or protective gloves or a carpet with a unicorn. But not because you're so poor that you can't afford it, not in the USA. Having a place to stay, paying the bills, yea, that can be tricky. A computer you can get for free (sometimes directly from the trash) or for very, very cheap.
In which universe?! They START FROM $499 for the OLD model and everything except the SOC/RAM is sub-par (even for the times when it was launched) for what they claim to be (flagship): mediocre display (at least they don't put it upside-down by design lately), no microSD expansion capabilities, NO CAMERA STABILIZATION, no water protection except some dubious claims on twitter like "it will be fine for normal usage", no wireless charging. YES, it does have a headphone jack but even the wired earbuds aren't included and are something like $20.
And that is of course that is if you order from China and deal with all the hassle, from a company that was caught spying on the customers (via the phones) and where the credit cards used for purchase were not only "leaked" but also charged for random things (otherwise you wouldn't even hear about it as they were denying it even as all people who entered CC numbers in their site were charged).
What the heck! We have an important update, we recommend you update as soon as possible. BAM! All extensions except two gone, it has some blueish theme and many things look ... strange. Screw you Mozilla.
Seriously? "Malicious apps", "Wi-Fi tracking", "Lack of antivirus software", "Lack of security patches" (sweeping statement).
Give me a break. Please go and find a better boogeyman than totally crazy complains like "lower adoption rates of antivirus software on a smartphone compared to full-fledged PCs".
Just to be clear, the ONLY part that is new is "won't count towards Google Drive storage quotas".
Nothing changes, you could (since probably before Whatsapp was really popular) store the un-encrypted backups on GDrive and it's off by default and you are warned that they aren't encrypted. Local backups aren't encrypted too by the way, unless you have some kind of device encryption.
The end-to-end encryption is only on-the-fly. You start saving shit you need to trust the place you save it to. It's just like ssh, there is encryption for the connection and there is even an ephemeral symmetrical key agreed upon on the spot but you need to take care what to do with the stuff once you start logging or redirecting to files, etc.
Most people don't care anyway. Many of the services aren't end-to-end encrypted (Email, SMS, Yahoo Messanger - rest in peace-, Google Talk or whatever they call it nowadays, Facebook Messenger unless you're using secret conversation or something and so on).
Sure, they could encrypt the backups but the user would have to manage (think store safely) the keys. Do you really expect most users to be able to get the key they set/saved years ago when the old phone breaks (or is lost) and they need to restore the backup to a new phone? Especially if is a key with enough entropy (think a complicated passphrase) that they aren't supposed to be using anywhere else?
That is absolute bullshit. In 2009 they were still making new machines (completely new models) with/for XP like the legendary 9.5 hours EEE Pc 1000HE (yes, the battery is still pretty strong). XP got updates until 2014 and this can be trivially (one registry key) extended to 2019 (yes, they are still pushing updates for XP). Even without the registry "hack" Microsot still patched all XPs with the mega-emergency KB4012598 - that was last year, yes 2017.
Honor IS the cheapo brand of Huawei. Together with Xiaomi plus a lot of other small(er) players they DO deliver a lot of value and usable devices even under $200 (sometimes on special sales even into double digits).
However with Oneplus (as mentioned in TFA) the situation is totally different: they START at $500++ and that is if you order from China. And NO, you can't do better by shipping at Amazon or similar, you'll only get even more expensive devices and "international version no warranty" bla bla.
Cloning is easy only for things that were designed to be read easily, from mag-stripes to normal flash memory (for example) that is specifically designed to give you the data you're asking for. Otherwise in real world it is really, really, really hard to clone things. If you don't believe me go and clone a kidney, heck even a tooth; your body has all the needed information isn't it?
Even the SIM cards from 20+ years ago are pretty resistant to attempts to extract the keys from them, and even if there are a few vulnerabilities and the designs were in infancy. Still even for those it's a pretty complicated affair to get the keys out.
Now it's a different story, any such devices are much more tamper-proof. Unless there's a backdoor (which is really a vulnerability of any such system) I think even three letter agencies will have a very hard time to get into those. Especially that there won't be any push to get them cracked, it requires too much effort as opposed to just getting the data from the provider (from what I understand these are for 2FA not to hold arbitrary encryption keys).
It is hosted on youtube; they'll gladly stream it to anybody as they do with countless cat videos and such.
Most of those "fully exposed to internet" systems are "behind routers and firewalls"?