"Android 4.3 really ups the game. All of my google services migrated over just by logging in. Most of my apps came too, but some bugged."
Bugged I presume by a couple of three-letter agencies? Seriously, I'd stick to my generic China tab, which I can very well afford to brick and run fast enough for my browsing, ebook reading and occasional puzzle games. Here's a car analogy: Not everybody needs a Lexus to go to work.
According to a note, the asterisk indicates that it requires "a closed-source firmware blob, but the system is functional and bootable without the blob."
Why the choice of Vivante over the more popular Mali architecture, which among the ARM-based GPUs has the most mature third-party FOSS support in the Lima driver project (http://limadriver.org/)? There's also third-party FOSS support for the Vivante GPU, but it's much less mature (https://github.com/laanwj/etna_viv).
" It looks like they have been afflicted with the same "our way or the highway" disease that is ruining Gnome and Windows."
But isn't ruining Apple? Even Google is starting to lock down Android with the addition of even more "security" features in Android 4.3+. I think it's an industry-wide disease. Sucks to be a power-user.
Keylogger? Well, there's a simple hack for that. At home prepare a text file with something like sequences liike "iliketodefacebooksucks". At work copy the relevant part and paste into your favorite search engine. Pasting "face" will probably be enough. Or you can do it the hard way. Copy-pasting letter by letter from a text file that contains all the letters of the English alphabet plus the dot.
Note: the above procedure assumes you can connect to a VPN or third party proxy that bypasses the host files, firewall, etc.
"By the way it's only a matter of time before governments begin to dictate (at least de facto) that you must be on at least one of the major social networks, so saying that you don't want to is not going to be an issue."
What you're suggesting will only make the work of the spy agencies of the world all the much easier. When FB accounts become legally binding, then, guess what, you can get arrested, and not just suspended, for registering as Albert Einstein Tarkovksy. I can tolerate FB so long as there's no obvious legal consequences for being an online schizophrenic.
We're now in the age of Big Data crime enforcement, where to be abnormal, in the sense of deviating too far from the median/norm is all it takes to be flagged as a suspect. The danger I see in the future is that, in order to avoid being caught in the net of the federal surveillance agencies people will deliberately start acting within the "norm", like visiting the sites online, Facebook/Twitter/G-something for your communication needs, or CNN/Fox/BBC for your "news", or whatever local site is "popular" in your area. To have an opinion will be to choose from an approved list, much like a multiple-choice exam or, worse, like the presidential election.
That's probably why Google is also developing hands-free driving technology. So everybody can use Google Glass even when they're driving, er, being driven to work. Google Car = the most expensive taxi ride you'll ever get. Makes me wonder whether in the future we'll evolve into big-headed space worms.
Just curious, why is the conference even called "Blackhat"?
According to Wiki (a very reasonable defintion): "A "black hat" hacker is a hacker who "violates computer security for little reason beyond maliciousness or for personal gain" (Moore, 2005). Black hat hackers form the stereotypical, illegal hacking groups often portrayed in popular culture, and are "the epitome of all that the public fears in a computer criminal". Black hat hackers break into secure networks to destroy data or make the network unusable for those who are authorized to use the network."
So instead of attending shouldn't the NSA be arresting the participants? Not that I actually favor such an act, but that appears to be the "legal" thing to do. Maybe it's better off called "Whitehat" or maybe "Greyhat" since the conference is partly about revealing new threats that concerned computer security experts can study and defend against?
I'm sure this phone can be a desktop replacement for computers older than, say, five years. So if you happen to be jumping from Windows XP, this should meet the criteria of desktop replacement. The only problem with high-end Android phones as a desktop replacement is the touch-based input system. Now if Canonical has really figured out how to make the Gimp, LibreOffice, maybe even Steam run smoothly on ARM hardware then UbuPhone will be as good a desktop replacement as any mainstream Linux distribution. Of course if you're a hardcore gamer, nothing short of an i7 running Win 7 would fit your definition of a desktop computer.
I suspect they're doing it for the buzz. I mean, if they're really serious about meeting their financing goal why choose a lesser known crowd funding site like Indie Gogo? I won't be surprised if some mysterious "donor" suddenly doubles the pledged amount at the last minute.
Most of the time probably. But ARM SoCs have an advantage over even an i3 that tries to brute force every operation. ARM SoCs have special chips to do certain tasks (ASICs). So I wouldn't be too surprised if a high-end smartphone can actually encode certain videos faster than an ATOM. I know, for one thing, that my dual-core off-brand China tablet can play h264 videos smoother than my ATOM-based "HTPC".
But I went down the China cheap pad route. No need to pay extra for something that'll go obsolete in a year. Hardware and software get upgraded at the same time;-) If possible, get the model with the latest Android version because firmware support is spotty at best (although this is improving with some manufacturers now offering OTA updates). Or you can check if there's an active Cyanogenmod developer for the model so your tablet will be worth at least one Android revision (e.g. from 4.2 to 4.3).
Most of the apps I need are from F-Droid or downloaded from the developer site and installed/upgraded via adb. For example, I use the VLC for Android nightly builds at http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/armv7-android/, which I install via a command like "adb install -r VLC-debug-20130726-1426.apk". The -r option is for reinstall, which is is how an app is upgraded, something which took me months to find out as there's no explicit upgrade command.
" i guess you think women in short skirts are asking to be raped?"
I say it depends. If she wears it within a cosmopolitan Western city, then no. But she shouldn't try that when traveling through some deeply conservative country where tradition dictates that a woman should cover herself up from head to toe.
"The only other country I know of that had a similar experiment in freedom is France, but their experiment died a lot faster."
Actually there are lots of country that had a similar experiment in nation building, many of them in the same New World hemisphere. Haiti was a republic founded by former African slaves, so that might count as the black African analog, on a smaller scale, of the white European USA.
Practically all of South America is made up of countries that tried their hand at republican democracy after cutting their ties to the motherland, Spain (Portugal in the case of Brazil). It's probably not coincidental the New World is where you'll find the most number of countries that have adopted the presidential form of government with its famous separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers. The rest of the nominally democratic world are run by parliaments where the de facto leader and head of government is a prime minister with the power to both make and implement laws, along with the official mascot, a queen, emperor or ceremonial president.
This wouldn't have so great an impact if the companies involved operated and overwhelmingly served customers in a single country, even one as mighty as the US. But what about those who want VPN services to China or some Middle Eastern countries with a restricted direct line to the Net? Maybe this would give a boost to non-credit-based online payment services, even BitCoin. The downside is that you'd lose the ability to get your money back if a transaction falls through and so should be more careful who you're dealing with.
Well, at least it's better than seeking asylum in China, which has practically taken the old Soviet Union as the major US bogeyman, besides those faceless/nameless fundamentalist terrorists. Russia is nominally more free than China and is probably less free than the US only because of the way Putin and his gang has dominated Russian politics, where there's no organized opposition comparable in size and influence to either of the two mainline US parties.
"Still it is difficult not to feel a little shame from the fact we all belong to the same species."
Both the attacker and the attacked belong to the same species.
Seriously I'd be ashamed if I was at and near the scene of the crime and did nothing about it. As another poster said, why should I be ashamed of the actions of some oversexed scumbag hundred of miles away from me? Otherwise we should all be ashamed every time some person with social standing/gender/race/etc similar to ours does something horrible.
I have to disagree. Culture is increasingly being homogenized. I mean, the differences in lifestyle between say a person in China or Russia and a person in the US, while still great, is less today than in the past. Why? Probably because even with country-wide "firewalls" enough foreign "culture" filters through from one country to another. Even if you're living in some Middle Eastern theocracy, porn is just a click or tap away, although, of course, you may need to take more precautions than looking over you shoulder.
There appears coincidentally to be a connection between the Nobel and this so-called World Food Prize. The Nobel awards were started by the man who invented dynamite. The Food Prize, according to the NY Times, "was started in 1987 by Norman E. Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for bringing about the Green Revolution, which vastly increased grain output, and who thought there should be a Nobel Prize for agriculture". One may well argue that dynamite contributed to world peace in the same way the Green Revolution, with its focus on massive crop monocultures, contributed to global food production.
A Monsanto executive winning this award shouldn't be surprising, even without the allegations of financial "compensation". The Green Revolution was all about increasing the supply of food, never mind the quality, or the ecological or social side effects. At who knows what cost, there's no question Monsanto technology helps increase food output.
While the dictionary defintion definitely allows for such use of the word "merge", I tend to think of "merge" as being an activity between entities of fairly similar sizes. I mean, it sounds odd to say that you "merged" with the hotdog you just ate, although technically that would be correct. Another example might be a small web start-up that was acquired by Google or Facebook.
Facebook and Google's biggest innovation is that they made privacy unfashionable for their hundreds of millions of users. Oh sure, there are still privacy advocates but more and more they sound like those weird basement geeks with too much time and not enough money in their hands. Now when we hear about government surveillance we simply shrug, thinking that it can't be that bad because even Google is doing it. And we know that Google can't possibly be evil.
Your apt-fu is a bit wanting. There's still traces of the program in the Debian archives:
$ apt-cache search songbird pidgin-musictracker - Plugin for Pidgin which displays the current music track in your status xul-ext-useragentswitcher - Iceweasel/Firefox addon that allows the user to choose user agents $ apt-cache show xul-ext-useragentswitcher | grep -B2 Songbird
The User Agent Switcher extension adds a menu and a toolbar button to
switch the user agent of the browser. It is designed for Firefox, Flock,
Seamonkey and Songbird, it comes with a set of predefined useragent string
So while Songbird itself can't be downloaded, other programs still reference it.
But can your decent console do word processing, image editing, programming and all the other stuff that geeks like to do? Sure, if playing shooters and other graphically intensive games is your ENTIRE life, go ahead and buy that console. Any halfway decent PC, even Win8-hobbled ones is far, far more versatile and useful than any console.
Slashdot Mirror
"Android 4.3 really ups the game. All of my google services migrated over just by logging in. Most of my apps came too, but some bugged."
Bugged I presume by a couple of three-letter agencies? Seriously, I'd stick to my generic China tab, which I can very well afford to brick and run fast enough for my browsing, ebook reading and occasional puzzle games. Here's a car analogy: Not everybody needs a Lexus to go to work.
This part of the specs caught my attention (http://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page#Features):
"Vivante GC2000 OpenGL ES2.0 GPU, 200Mtri/s, 1Gpix/s (*)"
According to a note, the asterisk indicates that it requires "a closed-source firmware blob, but the system is functional and bootable without the blob."
Why the choice of Vivante over the more popular Mali architecture, which among the ARM-based GPUs has the most mature third-party FOSS support in the Lima driver project (http://limadriver.org/)? There's also third-party FOSS support for the Vivante GPU, but it's much less mature (https://github.com/laanwj/etna_viv).
" It looks like they have been afflicted with the same "our way or the highway" disease that is ruining Gnome and Windows."
But isn't ruining Apple? Even Google is starting to lock down Android with the addition of even more "security" features in Android 4.3+.
I think it's an industry-wide disease. Sucks to be a power-user.
Keylogger? Well, there's a simple hack for that. At home prepare a text file with something like sequences liike "iliketodefacebooksucks". At work copy the relevant part and paste into your favorite search engine. Pasting "face" will probably be enough. Or you can do it the hard way. Copy-pasting letter by letter from a text file that contains all the letters of the English alphabet plus the dot.
Note: the above procedure assumes you can connect to a VPN or third party proxy that bypasses the host files, firewall, etc.
" Unless you plan to be running along the road to charge your laptop, I'd say it's pretty inconvenient to recharge your devices that way."
Nothing like a good early morning jog to charge up mind, body, and MacBook . On the other hand, kinetic motion charging should be more efficient.
As for stealing amperes, how noticeable is the difference between a car charging just itself and a car charging itself and a small electronic device?
capcha: overrode
"By the way it's only a matter of time before governments begin to dictate (at least de facto) that you must be on at least one of the major social networks, so saying that you don't want to is not going to be an issue."
What you're suggesting will only make the work of the spy agencies of the world all the much easier. When FB accounts become legally binding, then, guess what, you can get arrested, and not just suspended, for registering as Albert Einstein Tarkovksy. I can tolerate FB so long as there's no obvious legal consequences for being an online schizophrenic.
We're now in the age of Big Data crime enforcement, where to be abnormal, in the sense of deviating too far from the median/norm is all it takes to be flagged as a suspect. The danger I see in the future is that, in order to avoid being caught in the net of the federal surveillance agencies people will deliberately start acting within the "norm", like visiting the sites online, Facebook/Twitter/G-something for your communication needs, or CNN/Fox/BBC for your "news", or whatever local site is "popular" in your area. To have an opinion will be to choose from an approved list, much like a multiple-choice exam or, worse, like the presidential election.
That's probably why Google is also developing hands-free driving technology. So everybody can use Google Glass even when they're driving, er, being driven to work. Google Car = the most expensive taxi ride you'll ever get. Makes me wonder whether in the future we'll evolve into big-headed space worms.
Just curious, why is the conference even called "Blackhat"?
According to Wiki (a very reasonable defintion): "A "black hat" hacker is a hacker who "violates computer security for little reason beyond maliciousness or for personal gain" (Moore, 2005). Black hat hackers form the stereotypical, illegal hacking groups often portrayed in popular culture, and are "the epitome of all that the public fears in a computer criminal". Black hat hackers break into secure networks to destroy data or make the network unusable for those who are authorized to use the network."
So instead of attending shouldn't the NSA be arresting the participants? Not that I actually favor such an act, but that appears to be the "legal" thing to do. Maybe it's better off called "Whitehat" or maybe "Greyhat" since the conference is partly about revealing new threats that concerned computer security experts can study and defend against?
I'm sure this phone can be a desktop replacement for computers older than, say, five years. So if you happen to be jumping from Windows XP, this should meet the criteria of desktop replacement. The only problem with high-end Android phones as a desktop replacement is the touch-based input system. Now if Canonical has really figured out how to make the Gimp, LibreOffice, maybe even Steam run smoothly on ARM hardware then UbuPhone will be as good a desktop replacement as any mainstream Linux distribution. Of course if you're a hardcore gamer, nothing short of an i7 running Win 7 would fit your definition of a desktop computer.
I suspect they're doing it for the buzz. I mean, if they're really serious about meeting their financing goal why choose a lesser known crowd funding site like Indie Gogo? I won't be surprised if some mysterious "donor" suddenly doubles the pledged amount at the last minute.
Most of the time probably. But ARM SoCs have an advantage over even an i3 that tries to brute force every operation. ARM SoCs have special chips to do certain tasks (ASICs). So I wouldn't be too surprised if a high-end smartphone can actually encode certain videos faster than an ATOM. I know, for one thing, that my dual-core off-brand China tablet can play h264 videos smoother than my ATOM-based "HTPC".
But I went down the China cheap pad route. No need to pay extra for something that'll go obsolete in a year. Hardware and software get upgraded at the same time ;-) If possible, get the model with the latest Android version because firmware support is spotty at best (although this is improving with some manufacturers now offering OTA updates). Or you can check if there's an active Cyanogenmod developer for the model so your tablet will be worth at least one Android revision (e.g. from 4.2 to 4.3).
Most of the apps I need are from F-Droid or downloaded from the developer site and installed/upgraded via adb. For example, I use the VLC for Android nightly builds at http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/armv7-android/, which I install via a command like "adb install -r VLC-debug-20130726-1426.apk". The -r option is for reinstall, which is is how an app is upgraded, something which took me months to find out as there's no explicit upgrade command.
" i guess you think women in short skirts are asking to be raped?"
I say it depends. If she wears it within a cosmopolitan Western city, then no. But she shouldn't try that when traveling through some deeply conservative country where tradition dictates that a woman should cover herself up from head to toe.
"The only other country I know of that had a similar experiment in freedom is France, but their experiment died a lot faster."
Actually there are lots of country that had a similar experiment in nation building, many of them in the same New World hemisphere. Haiti was a republic founded by former African slaves, so that might count as the black African analog, on a smaller scale, of the white European USA.
Practically all of South America is made up of countries that tried their hand at republican democracy after cutting their ties to the motherland, Spain (Portugal in the case of Brazil). It's probably not coincidental the New World is where you'll find the most number of countries that have adopted the presidential form of government with its famous separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers. The rest of the nominally democratic world are run by parliaments where the de facto leader and head of government is a prime minister with the power to both make and implement laws, along with the official mascot, a queen, emperor or ceremonial president.
This wouldn't have so great an impact if the companies involved operated and overwhelmingly served customers in a single country, even one as mighty as the US. But what about those who want VPN services to China or some Middle Eastern countries with a restricted direct line to the Net? Maybe this would give a boost to non-credit-based online payment services, even BitCoin. The downside is that you'd lose the ability to get your money back if a transaction falls through and so should be more careful who you're dealing with.
Well, at least it's better than seeking asylum in China, which has practically taken the old Soviet Union as the major US bogeyman, besides those faceless/nameless fundamentalist terrorists. Russia is nominally more free than China and is probably less free than the US only because of the way Putin and his gang has dominated Russian politics, where there's no organized opposition comparable in size and influence to either of the two mainline US parties.
"Still it is difficult not to feel a little shame from the fact we all belong to the same species."
Both the attacker and the attacked belong to the same species.
Seriously I'd be ashamed if I was at and near the scene of the crime and did nothing about it. As another poster said, why should I be ashamed of the actions of some oversexed scumbag hundred of miles away from me? Otherwise we should all be ashamed every time some person with social standing/gender/race/etc similar to ours does something horrible.
"culture has become more diverse, not less"
I have to disagree. Culture is increasingly being homogenized. I mean, the differences in lifestyle between say a person in China or Russia and a person in the US, while still great, is less today than in the past. Why? Probably because even with country-wide "firewalls" enough foreign "culture" filters through from one country to another. Even if you're living in some Middle Eastern theocracy, porn is just a click or tap away, although, of course, you may need to take more precautions than looking over you shoulder.
There appears coincidentally to be a connection between the Nobel and this so-called World Food Prize. The Nobel awards were started by the man who invented dynamite. The Food Prize, according to the NY Times, "was started in 1987 by Norman E. Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for bringing about the Green Revolution, which vastly increased grain output, and who thought there should be a Nobel Prize for agriculture". One may well argue that dynamite contributed to world peace in the same way the Green Revolution, with its focus on massive crop monocultures, contributed to global food production.
A Monsanto executive winning this award shouldn't be surprising, even without the allegations of financial "compensation". The Green Revolution was all about increasing the supply of food, never mind the quality, or the ecological or social side effects. At who knows what cost, there's no question Monsanto technology helps increase food output.
While the dictionary defintion definitely allows for such use of the word "merge", I tend to think of "merge" as being an activity between entities of fairly similar sizes. I mean, it sounds odd to say that you "merged" with the hotdog you just ate, although technically that would be correct. Another example might be a small web start-up that was acquired by Google or Facebook.
Maybe if desktop users shout loud enough MS will be convinced to roll back the interface formerly known as Metro into something grandmothers can love.
Facebook and Google's biggest innovation is that they made privacy unfashionable for their hundreds of millions of users. Oh sure, there are still privacy advocates but more and more they sound like those weird basement geeks with too much time and not enough money in their hands. Now when we hear about government surveillance we simply shrug, thinking that it can't be that bad because even Google is doing it. And we know that Google can't possibly be evil.
Your apt-fu is a bit wanting. There's still traces of the program in the Debian archives:
$ apt-cache search songbird
pidgin-musictracker - Plugin for Pidgin which displays the current music track in your status
xul-ext-useragentswitcher - Iceweasel/Firefox addon that allows the user to choose user agents
$ apt-cache show xul-ext-useragentswitcher | grep -B2 Songbird
The User Agent Switcher extension adds a menu and a toolbar button to
switch the user agent of the browser. It is designed for Firefox, Flock,
Seamonkey and Songbird, it comes with a set of predefined useragent string
So while Songbird itself can't be downloaded, other programs still reference it.
But can your decent console do word processing, image editing, programming and all the other stuff that geeks like to do? Sure, if playing shooters and other graphically intensive games is your ENTIRE life, go ahead and buy that console. Any halfway decent PC, even Win8-hobbled ones is far, far more versatile and useful than any console.