For comparison, Apple's Homekit is compatible with 195 products...
Which is exactly how apple wants it. I bet 100% of those products are made or licensed by Apple.
Yes. And to get an Apple HomeKit license means you have to concentrate on security - Apple actually pentests your hardware against common vulnerabilities. Amazon and Google Home have liberal licenses - get as many devices working, who cares if they make it so they're weak on security?
Even more, HomeKit devices must be able to work offline. Alexa and Google Home devices require The Cloud(tm). However, if you are completely within your home, Apple requires a HomeKit compatible device to not touch the Internet at all. Doesn't matter what it is - if you ask the lamp to turn on, you cannot talk to a server on the internet. You have to talk to the lamp directly and turn it on.
The only time you can reach over the internet is if the controller is away from the house in which case you don't really have much of an option but use the internet to communicate.
Naturally, it's far easier to add support for Google Home and Alexa, especially if you make it require internet service and don't care about security. HomeKit requires a higher level of attention and thus only people who aren't making cheap crap to spy on you need apply. Especially since in-home offline use is not an option, it's required.
It's also making stuff harder to repair, because new vulnerabilities mean you lose the ability to fix it yourself.
Think about a fingerprint reader. In days gone by, they were simply cameras and you got an image from them, then run your algorithms on them. But nowadays it's such a big deal that fingerprint data must be encrypted and if your hardware supports it, sent over a secure bus to a secure processor, using PKI encryption to ensure both endpoints haven't been compromised.
All this because a bad actor can replace a fingerprint reader with a compromised version that perhaps either stores an image of a fingerprint for later replay attacks, or transmits it to a third party (via RF or other means - fingerprint readers are large chips). So now the device itself needs to tell the other end that it hasn't been changed out with a malicious version. But as we see, it breaks repairs - you cannot replace anything the fingerprint assembly is bound to anymore.
You're bound to see this with other things like recognition cameras, touch screens and other things eventually too. Touch screens and displays are next - soon you'd want authentication functionality done in a "secure mode" where the user OS no longer authenticates or locks the system - it simply calls out to a "secure OS" that verifies everything is in order (no security-critical hardware was been replaced or otherwise tampered with) then pops up the lock screen. And until the secure software releases the display and touchscreen, the user OS cannot display or get input. But again, it means break your screen, you need to get an authorized repair (can't have screens transmit everything you see to a third party, or selectively take screenshots when they recognize something being displayed).
And why would you do this? Well, it would make those grey box things no longer functional - if the secure OS has the screen and touch locked out, it makes it hard to break into the user OS - you're at the mercy of whatever the user OS may give you over that one port - without the code, the user OS can display a "do you trust this device" dialog that never can be shown or interacted with because the secure software has taken control of the display and touch hardware, and thus the user OS prevents access to user data.
All this means though, the inability to change screens.
In the case of Apple and Qualcomm, they apparently prefer a compiler that will let them distribute a proprietary (non-free, user-subjugating) derivative. Brad Kuhn, President of Software Freedom Conservancy, has predicted that as soon as Apple finds the compiler to be good enough they'll stop their upstream contributions.
Well, several reasons. First was GPLv3 which most companies are extremely wary of. Apple began investment in LLVM long before GCC went GPLv3 - LLVM was available as a limited functionality toolchain since OS X 10.3 or so. I think Apple fully switched a year or two after GCC made the switch.
The second reason is code duplication - GCC is intentionally hard to modularize - generally decided as a way to enforce the GPL. Apple and XCode needed modularity so they could neat tricks like in-place compilation (the compiler regenerates the code as you fix the error), as well as syntax error highlighting (it finds an error as you make it).
Since Apple was effectively rewriting a front end compiler for these functions, they contributed that to make CLang, as well as using bits and pieces of LLVM since it was much easier to integrate.
One side effect is the standardization of compilers - before LLVM, everyone had their own compilers, all with varying stages of compatibility for code. Nowadays, it seems everyone has abandoned their own compilers and standardized on LLVM, with interesting effects. It's done interesting things including having final compilation postponed until runtime where you can take the IR bytecode and then use it to target either the main CPU, GPU, DSP or other accelerator at runtime.
Another thing is drivers often need to compile code at runtime. Instead of everyone having crappy compilers (and having to be driver-version-dependent because some versions come with lame compilers), you have drivers with generally good compilers.
Toolchain quality has gone up significantly the past few years
Yeah, it's too bad to have your marketing campaign splashed around the web and talked about.
True, normally that's a good thing, but when the first association people have of it is "iPhone clone", maybe... not so much.
Doubly so when it hits the press and everyone associates the ad with iPhones instead
"HTC's newest smartphone has launched, but there's just one problem - it's an iPhone! Photos of HTC's newest smartphone, instead of showing the phone itself, showed an iPhone instead..."
While this is a good feature I don't trust Google's motives. They have done this to drive more business toward AdWords, that would never get blocked
Is AdWords even a thing anymore? I don't think I've seen one of those in a LONG time.
You have to remember Google is more than AdWords. AdWords is probably a tiny part of their business, given they bought out the big ad networks like DoubleClick, AdMob and many others a long time ago. Enough so that all those flashy pop-up ads that annoy you on relatively legitimate sites? Most likely an Alphabet company. They own like 95% of online marketing, leaving the 5% to scrap among the porn sites, torrent sites and other sites of questionable nature.
And yes, Google is keeping a hold on that data, otherwise why would they change their privacy policy to allow ALL Alphabet companies to share your data around?
Quite likely, these innovations are really more of a final chance - Alphabet knows they're big. Huge, gigantic. They know it's all too easy to sneak in a bad ad through their many ad networks and it'll be impossible to screen for. By starting small, they hope that when someone sneaks in a bad ad, Chrome would block it automatically.
Imagine the reputation hit that would ensue should Alphabet/Google get known for bringing about a massive malware attack because someone snuck something through. At least this way, they hope to have it contained before it spreads too far and brings about massive clampdowns.
Also I'm sure it's why they try to disassociate themselves - I'm sure most of the public doesn't know that popunder they clicked away was delivered by an Alphabet company who is related to Google.
So, by the sound of it, Seagate still has the highest failure rates - by far - for mechanical drives.
In general, yes.
I'm not really surprised though, given how much cost-cutting goes on - the real reason is they are stupidly cheap - HGST drives are horrendously expensive (but yeah, they have a way lower failure rate) and WD drives are somewhere in the middle. And yes, if retailers can heavily discount Seagate drives, it really means they didn't cost too much to begin with.
So far the worst drives universally are the "green" ones - really cheap, but really poor quality no matter who made them. Those fail rapidly and always.
Lets say I'm a software engineer for some handset company mostly doing low level stuff (drivers/kernels/etc) I'm pretty familiar with the code base but pretty clueless on encryption. If I decided to peruse the code looking for backdoors, how hard would it be? I'm not expecting backdoor.NSA() or anything like that, but would it look to me like a bug I might fix spontaneously (ok, submit bug report, email to whomever asking it be assigned to me, fix problem, wait for it to be assigned to me, take ownership of bug, check in, close bug. But you know what I mean).
Wrong level - most backdoors will happen at the middleware, framework or application leverl. At best, the low level programmer might notice a permission bit is off on a node or file but that's about it.
Framework and middleware backdoors can be hard to spot unless you traverse exevery line of code. Moreso for something that spans multiple languages like Android and thus you have to go from Java to JNI to C++ and the code to do so is a bit obtuse because it's the JVM.
And then the code's all spread through the code tree, so you're digging through massive libraries spread across 10 directories with some really bizarre code paths that jump through many different hoops. (One Android version had 3 different DHCP clients throughout the code, I think it's down to two in the latest releases, but the way they were triggered was somewhat hacky.). With enough creativity, you can make it so very innocent lines of code are spread around that form a powerful backdoor.
No buttons, no directional controller, no rumble packs, crappy framebuffers with low-rent API's. I love games and I love game devices. I collect consoles and micros from the 1990's mostly. So, I'm definitely biased. I just don't "get" the appeal of gaming on a phone. I guess that it's because a parent will buy a phone for their kid so they can use it as a leash to track them. The kid gets unlimited gaming access, albeit on a shit-platform.
What I really wonder is what these kids will do when they get old. You won't be able to find that old phone with a sealed battery. It'll be way way way gone to the landfill. The games will also still be squirreled away into an "app store" etc... I have cartridges. They don't have DRM etc...
Games don't need buttons or rumble packs to play. In fact, there's a whole slew of great mobile games that won't translate well to a controller - the likes of Jetpack Joyride, Collossotron, Threes, plenty of table games etc. Fast paced shooters they are not, but then again, mobile isn't really suited for that kind of game. And it's perfectly fine - the best games on any platform make use of the platform's best features and try not to imitate features that don't exist (i.e., games that require buttons and d-pads). Even Angry Birds took mobile gaming for a while because it was designed for mobile in mind.
And I'm eliminating all the F2P games that are really just money suckers - there are really good games out there for free or low cost.
As for longevity, well, plenty of PS4 and Xbox One owners are going to find out too - digital downloads are the most popular way of buying games - no more physical discs. Makes you kind of want the old Xbox One DRM system that allowed you to at least sell your digital games with limitations. Better than not being able to do it at all like we have now.
Are these design patents? The Blue Jeans Cable case comes to mind here.
Why not reference everyone's favorite rounded corner patent case? (Because that also was a design patent).
Though, one thing with design patents is they are generally checklists - if your item has everything in the checklist, it's violating the patent. If you change one thing so it's similar, but not covered by the patent, it's no longer violating.
Hence, rounded corners with a grid of icons for a display with said grid featuring a row of static icons as well (which matches no Android OS out there - because Google avoids it - the home screen (the only screen with a fixed row of static icons) has widgets that tell time, weather, etc as well (not a grid of icons). The App Launcher doesn't have a static row of icons, etc).. Samsung TouchWiz though, at the time...
So Nikola needs to prove Tesla checks all the boxes, while Tesla needs to show in no configuration does it check all the boxes.
...the actual reason for the changes has to do with another country telling Amazon and Google to quit enabling Signal, or else?
Potentially true. Except the "or else" part is more about the #1 weakness of domain fronting - you're allowing third party control of your branding.
Sure, it works by making your traffic look like legitimate traffic to the site in question, except that legitimate traffic can be hijacked and made to look malicious.
Remember that file on the FCC website that said the FCC disavows Ajit Pai and such? It's the same effect - it was not a file created by the FCC, but someone creatively uploaded a file that got posted on the FCC website and made to look like it came from the FCC. Same issue here.
You can do a lot of damage if you can say your traffic came from Google and is illegitimate, and something like Signal lets you control what appears to come and go from Google and Amazon.
What's the point of bothering to encode names on a fucking microchip so small that no one can read it? At that point, I'm sure that any piece of matter has atoms arranged in a random pattern such that my name (and any number of other people's names) appears represented on it somewhere in the sequence..
To get people interested in STEM?
Because really, it's pretty neat that anyone can do it, and if you're even slightly interested, well, why not? More importantly, it piques interest in something that basically would've just been for scientists only. Getting the public "involved" costs very little (really, just a server - who knows if it really launches with said silicon wafer?).
Your attitude is more like "why bother with science fairs, they're just going to be reiterations of volcanoes, potato batteries and the like".
And any service which opens up the device to clean out dust would also not be a violation (since it's not a service provided without charge under the warranty). Opening the device for visual inspection - again, not a service provided for free under warranty. The sticker implies otherwise.
Unless the duster or inspector is so inept as to cause damage.
Opening up the unit is fine. Taking a peek inside is fine. But if you cause damage to it (perhaps you're vacuuming the unit to remove dust and knock a few components off), then it's not so fine - if it's traced someone cleaning it, then the warranty is gone for everything that person may have touched.
Now if you're careful and don't disturb anything, it's considered your warranty is intact. If you don't have a fine touch, perhaps you shouldn't open the stuff lest you cause non-warranty covered damage.
Though if your unit needs dusting while under warranty, it should probably be exhibiting symptoms that will be fixed under warranty. The risk of doing damage is high enough that I'd wait until the warranty was over anyways. And the sticker may change from "Warranty void if broken, tampered or removed" to "Warning: opening unit may void warranty". The difference is that the first sticker )what you usually get) means your warranty is gone the moment it's broken. The second implies you may lose your warranty if you say, ham-fist a cleaning operation, but is no longer an exclusion item.
It seems kinda obvious that a small country with a lot of visitors and a huge airport that serves more connecting traffic than local traffic would not really be a likely source of "dystopian complete monitoring." If they were using it for that, they'd be controlling people who are staying there, not people who are leaving or passing through. That control sure wouldn't last long if the person just left on an airplane.
Even if a person is worried about it being installed on the streets and chooses not to visit that place, it seems silly to also avoid connecting flights at their airport.
It's Singapore. why not do both? The population is already under heavy scrutiny anyways, why not apply it to itinerant travelers as well? (Face it, you're supposed to be fully identified, but people have gotten through with falsified IDs).
You have to remember they do a lot in the name of "efficiency" and such. Personal rights, privacy, etc., generally get in the way of those goals and must be eliminated. And heck, making people "disappear" that are inconvenient to the government wouldn't surprise me either, even if they were merely passing through.
It's the number of sites they can usefully post to that are limited, not the number of people who are able to post to them.
There are plenty of sites they can post to. They can even decide to put them online and *gasp* host the videos themselves!
Granted, the latter requires spending real money to buy service, but since these guys probably have a website anyways. Of course, I suppose the real danger is if they are promoting something with medical claims and the FDA goes after them..
Until some Einstein-wannabe thought USB-C would make a great cable to handle *everything*, but without any guarantees about *anything*. So now _every_. _single_. USB C device and cable now needs to have a spec sheet kept with them because you have no way of knowing just by looking at it, what features it supports. Does it do thunderbolt passthrough? Does it support video pass through? Power pass through?
Power is easy. It's 5V 0.5A unless your device specifically supports USB-PD. And USB-PD support (in the first version) is indicated by active signalling (at 24kHz) on the Vbus (+5V) line. Or in later revisions of USB-PD, through a dedicated line (this is to reflect the fact that USB-PD is now part of USB-C and not independent. The Vbus twiddling was when USB-C did not exist and thus had to work with the 4 existling lines. This also reflects on cabling).
For DisplayPort, ThunderBolt, HDMI, USB 3.2 multi-lane, etc., these use the "alt mode" pins on the connector. There is a signalling protocol in place to detect and assign which altmode protocol you wish to use - of which only one may be in action at any one time. Typically, your device only supports one mode as well, though granted, internal USB hubs may complicate things (e.g., a dock with ethernet and display and USB ports may be USB-based for the ethernet and USB ports, and altmode for the display, or it may be thunderbolt based for ethernet, USB for display and ports, or some combination).
USB PD can be challenging since current can flow either way - it can receive power or it can distribute power
Since according to the MPAA you've purchased a license to see the movie, shouldn't the theater let you see it as often as you like with the same ticket^H^H^H^H^H^Hlicense as long as the showing is not sold out?
You didn't purchase a license to see the movie though. You purchased a rental of a seat in the theatre for that specific movie.
Going to the theatres is not "buying a movie" in the sense that a digital download through iTunes/Amazon/Google/Vudu/etc is. It's a rental of a seat in a theatre that hopefully will show the movie stated.
It's just like buying a ticket to a play, or a ticket to a sporting event, or a plane ticket, or ticket to a cruise, etc. It just means you have the right to park your butt at the specified location for the specified times.
passive tech works not very efficient but works, with manual choke
For varying degrees of "works".
It's not just efficiency, it's basically ease of operation. One of the big things about modern cars is they are "twist and go". You twist the key (or push the button nowadays) and the car goes. Doesn't matter if the engine is hot (vapor lock is not an issue), very cold, or any other thing, including poor fuel. You want it to go, it goes, and unless something is very wrong, it will go. (You can even shoot out cylinders and while it stalls the engine, you can have a V8 engine with 6 dead cylinders still barely run. It's not happy, but the computer is able to compensate and get you home, albiet slowly).
Anyhow, did you wonder why it took 300kW to do it? It's because an ECU is very well shielded to begin with - the metal body of the car already is a great faraday cage. But the ECU is also encased in a metal body because it's a very challenging environment with a lot of stray RF caused by all the high voltages around.
In fact, if you're willing to settle for post-millennium vehicles, disrupting the keyfob-car communications will generally be far easier - the windows in the passenger compartment don't generally block RF, and the signal levels are weak since keyfobs are powered by itty coin cell batteries with poor peak power performance, so they don't have much transmit power. (I had to replace the battery in my keyfob - it still measured 3V, while batteries that are generally dead used in PCs measure pretty damn close to 0.5V. Heck, even my watch which died suddenly had a battery that measured around 0.5V. No doubt the battery was low, so it couldn't supply the necessary power for the transmitter)
b) No computer ever ran at 1.023 MHz. It was either a nice multiple of 1Mhz or maybe a multiple of 3.579545Mhz (ie. using the TV output circuit's color clock crystal to drive the CPU).
Well, it could be used to drive the TV output circuit, OR, it was used because it's a stupidly cheap high speed crystal. You have to remember except for a few frequencies, most crystals would have to be specially cut for the desired frequency. This occurs even today, where most oscillators are either 32.768kHz (real time clock), 12MHz (USB 1.1/2.0 interfaces), 19MHz, or 27MHz. Or the two TV frequencies (3.58 and 4.43MHz).
But back then, before we had the influx of many devices with standardized frequencies, there were only a few standard crystals - mostly related to TV or radio frequencies. And custom-cut crystals were expensive, so you generally wanted crystals that could be ordered trivially easy, which meant limiting yourself to bog standard TV or radio IF crystals.
Another crystal was 4.43361875 MHz - this was used in PAL countries and divided into as well.
People grew very adept at multiplying and dividing the frequencies - the IBM PC's 4.77MHz was derived from the 3.58MHz crystal (even IBM couldn't get away from bog-standard crystals) - at a ratio of 4/3.
To me, the whole auto-play thing is bizarre and ridiculous from any basic security standpoint.
This is not an auto-play bug. Auto play is disabled by default nowadays.
The problem happens before auto-play - basically you present a filesystem so corrupted that the filesystem driver aborts, which causes the kernel to stop. Windows happens to try to mount every partition it can automatically, so if you present a filesystem so corrupt it aborts the filesystem driver, it can kill the kernel.
Of course, Linux is somewhat safer in this respect - given the kernel behavior isn't to mount filesystems. However, it's not much of a safety net - unless you were plugging it in for another reason, presumably you were intending to access the disk and will need to mount it at some point. Of course, depending on the filesystem driver, some can crash, others will simply fail.
Anyhow, I remember this from NT4 days - where there was a specific STOP code similar to "NTFS_FAILED_TO_MOUNT". Yes, NT4 would BSOD if it couldn't mount an NTFS partition. Had this happen with a failing secondary (backup) disk. The disk would read a few sectors fine, then return errors and Windows was not happy with that. Obviously for Windows 2000, Microsoft had to fix this error - the era of external disks meant you can't simply BSOD every time you had a corrupt filesystem, because that would be a really common event.
We have plenty of generic drugs and for most every condition. There are a few (very few) drugs in the US that have absolutely no generic or biosimilar counterpart. I would easily say that 95% of the brand-name drugs you hear about or see advertised are designer or a slight tweak to a previous med. There are virtually no novel drugs in the pipeline. Source: I'm a clinical Pharmacist.
One thing Canada doesn't allow is direct-to-consumer drug advertising. US commercials are filled with "Are you feeling XXX? Perhaps you have condition YYYY. Consult your doctor and see if ZZZZ is right for you!". This is one way to bypass generic drugs - if you're asking for them by name, there's no option to buy the generic version of the same drug.
And pharmacists here are generally quick to ask if you'd want a generic or the branded stuff - it can affect things like extended health drug coverage -
crap that is broadcast on it all day, every day. Right wing political rants, conspiracy theorists, and religious kooks have taken over all the space between the baseball games. Every station broadcasts continuous running advertisements interrupted occasionally by "programming", which is itself mostly advertising. We have a lot of stupid people in the US, but how even they listen to that for more than a few minutes at a time?
AM broadcast radio is going the same way SW radio (also AM broadcast, except at higher frequencies) did back in the 80s and 90s. The big players give up on it, then the religious nuts take over, then it fades into obscurity.
I don't think AM radio is dying. I listen to AM radio and it's great for talk radio.
Sure there's a lot of right win conspiracy stuff, but so what? You know what ISN'T on AM? iHeartRadio, aka ClearChannel!
iHeartRadio/ClearChannel basically turned the entire FM band into blandness. Which is why it's dying (between satellite and internet radio, both of which offer far more interesting selections) . At least the AM bands are populated with more interesting content - sports, news, and other stuff.
Orphaned how? A Time Capsule device is just their Time Machine feature wrapped in a piece of hardware, but the feature exists without the Tim Capsule, and is, in fact, how most users are using it already. All you need for Time Machine is a hard drive connected to your Mac. The Time Capsule was just a simple way of putting that drive on your network instead of next to your machine.
And most Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances from basically anyone, including the one built into most higher end routers that let you share files from a hard drive support Time Machine, too.
So your network backup storage isn't really going away either - if you have a somewhat decent router that can share files off an attached USB hard disk, or a NAS appliance, chances are you can back up to it via Time Machine.
because faucets with foot pedal or that can be activated with elbow don't exist?
it's a sanitation improvement when the thing doesn't work at all?
get real anon, stop trying to defend the mental retardation
Foot pedal controls need installation of something into the floor. If it's mechanical, it means you need to run water to a valve on the floor then to the tap, which is a lot of plumbing. Then you need a shutoff valve so you can service the valve and taps as necessary without turning off building water supply, so it's either more stuff you bury in the floor (often concrete) or you're running pipes everywhere.
Elbow valves are similar - people just don't want to touch them. They get very adept at kicking the valves. Germophobes can react very strangely.
As for battery powered faucets, they are fine. If yours are constantly running out of battery, then the building manager needs to change them more often. They can last a surprisingly long time before the batteries actually need to be replaced even with near-constant use.
Fantastic as they may be, and innovative they once were, well, the rest of industry has pretty much undercut them.
Apple routers were expensive at several hundred bucks each. Sure they're better than the $20 daily special at Best Buy (or the $5 sepcial at Alibaba), you could get some very high end routers with the latest WiFi for less. And even "enterprise class" routers from the likes of Ubiquity Networks (UniFi WiFi APs, AmpliFi routers and mesh networks).
And a lot of them didn't require a Mac or iOS device to configure them, since they had web-based configuration systems.
There was going to be a point when consumers simply stopped buying Apple AirPorts in favor of the competition (of which the field is packed solid), and it was probably a long time ago. Apple under Tim Cook simply likes to hang onto stuff until it's no longer tenale and it's likely some part is now so obsolete Apple cannot build anymore. And given how crowded the field is (it's bad when any retail store has dozens of different models for sale), any new model Apple makes would have seriously strong competition.
iTunes has always had update problems for me in the past. (uninstall, multiple reboots, install, to get it to work) I'm just hoping that this means I can keep iTunes up to date without a huge hassle going forward.
Yes, because iTunes from the Microsoft App Store cannot have extra services (no more iPod helper services, bonjour services, etc), and Apple has to ditch the Apple Software Updater, so no more requests to install iCloud or other Apple software as well when you update iTunes.
Basically it's self contained, and the Microsoft App Store is responsible for keeping it updated.
So, why use it? Between Banshee and the plethora of alternatives available is there ANY functionality only available through iTunes?
Yes, full iOS backups. Did you know iCloud will not back up certain things? Personal things like password keychains and such are not backed up with iCloud (including stuff like location services MAC caches, the source of the "tracking" data a few years ago).
An iTunes backup will backup the apps on your device, or it should, so discontinued apps can be safely stored and installed on other devices you own even if they're no longer sold.
An ENCRYPTED iTunes backup will backup your entire iOS device, passwords and all, so if you want to make sure you absolutely have every bit of data, you need an encrypted backup.
The reason for this is obvious - passwords and such Apple doesn't want in iCloud - because it means any law enforcement request for iCloud data would leak 3rd party account information as well, so Apple does not want to be the "loophole" that lets law enforcement bypass the need to get warrants for services the user may use. So just because they get your iCloud data, it means they won't have access to your email, facebook or other account data and would have to subpeona those services independently.
Obviously, an unencrypted iTunes backup (a local backup) should expose sensitive data either, or it's a loophole to get at your personal information. (Why subpoena Apple when you can sync the phone and get at all the data on it?).
Thus, full backups require an encrypted backup so your PC will not have your phone's data in the clear.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
It's also making stuff harder to repair, because new vulnerabilities mean you lose the ability to fix it yourself.
Think about a fingerprint reader. In days gone by, they were simply cameras and you got an image from them, then run your algorithms on them. But nowadays it's such a big deal that fingerprint data must be encrypted and if your hardware supports it, sent over a secure bus to a secure processor, using PKI encryption to ensure both endpoints haven't been compromised.
All this because a bad actor can replace a fingerprint reader with a compromised version that perhaps either stores an image of a fingerprint for later replay attacks, or transmits it to a third party (via RF or other means - fingerprint readers are large chips). So now the device itself needs to tell the other end that it hasn't been changed out with a malicious version. But as we see, it breaks repairs - you cannot replace anything the fingerprint assembly is bound to anymore.
You're bound to see this with other things like recognition cameras, touch screens and other things eventually too. Touch screens and displays are next - soon you'd want authentication functionality done in a "secure mode" where the user OS no longer authenticates or locks the system - it simply calls out to a "secure OS" that verifies everything is in order (no security-critical hardware was been replaced or otherwise tampered with) then pops up the lock screen. And until the secure software releases the display and touchscreen, the user OS cannot display or get input. But again, it means break your screen, you need to get an authorized repair (can't have screens transmit everything you see to a third party, or selectively take screenshots when they recognize something being displayed).
And why would you do this? Well, it would make those grey box things no longer functional - if the secure OS has the screen and touch locked out, it makes it hard to break into the user OS - you're at the mercy of whatever the user OS may give you over that one port - without the code, the user OS can display a "do you trust this device" dialog that never can be shown or interacted with because the secure software has taken control of the display and touch hardware, and thus the user OS prevents access to user data.
All this means though, the inability to change screens.
Well, several reasons. First was GPLv3 which most companies are extremely wary of. Apple began investment in LLVM long before GCC went GPLv3 - LLVM was available as a limited functionality toolchain since OS X 10.3 or so. I think Apple fully switched a year or two after GCC made the switch.
The second reason is code duplication - GCC is intentionally hard to modularize - generally decided as a way to enforce the GPL. Apple and XCode needed modularity so they could neat tricks like in-place compilation (the compiler regenerates the code as you fix the error), as well as syntax error highlighting (it finds an error as you make it).
Since Apple was effectively rewriting a front end compiler for these functions, they contributed that to make CLang, as well as using bits and pieces of LLVM since it was much easier to integrate.
One side effect is the standardization of compilers - before LLVM, everyone had their own compilers, all with varying stages of compatibility for code. Nowadays, it seems everyone has abandoned their own compilers and standardized on LLVM, with interesting effects. It's done interesting things including having final compilation postponed until runtime where you can take the IR bytecode and then use it to target either the main CPU, GPU, DSP or other accelerator at runtime.
Another thing is drivers often need to compile code at runtime. Instead of everyone having crappy compilers (and having to be driver-version-dependent because some versions come with lame compilers), you have drivers with generally good compilers.
Toolchain quality has gone up significantly the past few years
True, normally that's a good thing, but when the first association people have of it is "iPhone clone", maybe... not so much.
Doubly so when it hits the press and everyone associates the ad with iPhones instead
"HTC's newest smartphone has launched, but there's just one problem - it's an iPhone! Photos of HTC's newest smartphone, instead of showing the phone itself, showed an iPhone instead..."
Is AdWords even a thing anymore? I don't think I've seen one of those in a LONG time.
You have to remember Google is more than AdWords. AdWords is probably a tiny part of their business, given they bought out the big ad networks like DoubleClick, AdMob and many others a long time ago. Enough so that all those flashy pop-up ads that annoy you on relatively legitimate sites? Most likely an Alphabet company. They own like 95% of online marketing, leaving the 5% to scrap among the porn sites, torrent sites and other sites of questionable nature.
And yes, Google is keeping a hold on that data, otherwise why would they change their privacy policy to allow ALL Alphabet companies to share your data around?
Quite likely, these innovations are really more of a final chance - Alphabet knows they're big. Huge, gigantic. They know it's all too easy to sneak in a bad ad through their many ad networks and it'll be impossible to screen for. By starting small, they hope that when someone sneaks in a bad ad, Chrome would block it automatically.
Imagine the reputation hit that would ensue should Alphabet/Google get known for bringing about a massive malware attack because someone snuck something through. At least this way, they hope to have it contained before it spreads too far and brings about massive clampdowns.
Also I'm sure it's why they try to disassociate themselves - I'm sure most of the public doesn't know that popunder they clicked away was delivered by an Alphabet company who is related to Google.
In general, yes.
I'm not really surprised though, given how much cost-cutting goes on - the real reason is they are stupidly cheap - HGST drives are horrendously expensive (but yeah, they have a way lower failure rate) and WD drives are somewhere in the middle. And yes, if retailers can heavily discount Seagate drives, it really means they didn't cost too much to begin with.
So far the worst drives universally are the "green" ones - really cheap, but really poor quality no matter who made them. Those fail rapidly and always.
Wrong level - most backdoors will happen at the middleware, framework or application leverl. At best, the low level programmer might notice a permission bit is off on a node or file but that's about it.
Framework and middleware backdoors can be hard to spot unless you traverse exevery line of code. Moreso for something that spans multiple languages like Android and thus you have to go from Java to JNI to C++ and the code to do so is a bit obtuse because it's the JVM.
And then the code's all spread through the code tree, so you're digging through massive libraries spread across 10 directories with some really bizarre code paths that jump through many different hoops. (One Android version had 3 different DHCP clients throughout the code, I think it's down to two in the latest releases, but the way they were triggered was somewhat hacky.). With enough creativity, you can make it so very innocent lines of code are spread around that form a powerful backdoor.
Games don't need buttons or rumble packs to play. In fact, there's a whole slew of great mobile games that won't translate well to a controller - the likes of Jetpack Joyride, Collossotron, Threes, plenty of table games etc. Fast paced shooters they are not, but then again, mobile isn't really suited for that kind of game. And it's perfectly fine - the best games on any platform make use of the platform's best features and try not to imitate features that don't exist (i.e., games that require buttons and d-pads). Even Angry Birds took mobile gaming for a while because it was designed for mobile in mind.
And I'm eliminating all the F2P games that are really just money suckers - there are really good games out there for free or low cost.
As for longevity, well, plenty of PS4 and Xbox One owners are going to find out too - digital downloads are the most popular way of buying games - no more physical discs. Makes you kind of want the old Xbox One DRM system that allowed you to at least sell your digital games with limitations. Better than not being able to do it at all like we have now.
Why not reference everyone's favorite rounded corner patent case? (Because that also was a design patent).
Though, one thing with design patents is they are generally checklists - if your item has everything in the checklist, it's violating the patent. If you change one thing so it's similar, but not covered by the patent, it's no longer violating.
Hence, rounded corners with a grid of icons for a display with said grid featuring a row of static icons as well (which matches no Android OS out there - because Google avoids it - the home screen (the only screen with a fixed row of static icons) has widgets that tell time, weather, etc as well (not a grid of icons). The App Launcher doesn't have a static row of icons, etc).. Samsung TouchWiz though, at the time ...
So Nikola needs to prove Tesla checks all the boxes, while Tesla needs to show in no configuration does it check all the boxes.
Potentially true. Except the "or else" part is more about the #1 weakness of domain fronting - you're allowing third party control of your branding.
Sure, it works by making your traffic look like legitimate traffic to the site in question, except that legitimate traffic can be hijacked and made to look malicious.
Remember that file on the FCC website that said the FCC disavows Ajit Pai and such? It's the same effect - it was not a file created by the FCC, but someone creatively uploaded a file that got posted on the FCC website and made to look like it came from the FCC. Same issue here.
You can do a lot of damage if you can say your traffic came from Google and is illegitimate, and something like Signal lets you control what appears to come and go from Google and Amazon.
To get people interested in STEM?
Because really, it's pretty neat that anyone can do it, and if you're even slightly interested, well, why not? More importantly, it piques interest in something that basically would've just been for scientists only. Getting the public "involved" costs very little (really, just a server - who knows if it really launches with said silicon wafer?).
Your attitude is more like "why bother with science fairs, they're just going to be reiterations of volcanoes, potato batteries and the like".
Unless the duster or inspector is so inept as to cause damage.
Opening up the unit is fine. Taking a peek inside is fine. But if you cause damage to it (perhaps you're vacuuming the unit to remove dust and knock a few components off), then it's not so fine - if it's traced someone cleaning it, then the warranty is gone for everything that person may have touched.
Now if you're careful and don't disturb anything, it's considered your warranty is intact. If you don't have a fine touch, perhaps you shouldn't open the stuff lest you cause non-warranty covered damage.
Though if your unit needs dusting while under warranty, it should probably be exhibiting symptoms that will be fixed under warranty. The risk of doing damage is high enough that I'd wait until the warranty was over anyways. And the sticker may change from "Warranty void if broken, tampered or removed" to "Warning: opening unit may void warranty". The difference is that the first sticker )what you usually get) means your warranty is gone the moment it's broken. The second implies you may lose your warranty if you say, ham-fist a cleaning operation, but is no longer an exclusion item.
It's Singapore. why not do both? The population is already under heavy scrutiny anyways, why not apply it to itinerant travelers as well? (Face it, you're supposed to be fully identified, but people have gotten through with falsified IDs).
You have to remember they do a lot in the name of "efficiency" and such. Personal rights, privacy, etc., generally get in the way of those goals and must be eliminated. And heck, making people "disappear" that are inconvenient to the government wouldn't surprise me either, even if they were merely passing through.
There are plenty of sites they can post to. They can even decide to put them online and *gasp* host the videos themselves!
Granted, the latter requires spending real money to buy service, but since these guys probably have a website anyways. Of course, I suppose the real danger is if they are promoting something with medical claims and the FDA goes after them..
Power is easy. It's 5V 0.5A unless your device specifically supports USB-PD. And USB-PD support (in the first version) is indicated by active signalling (at 24kHz) on the Vbus (+5V) line. Or in later revisions of USB-PD, through a dedicated line (this is to reflect the fact that USB-PD is now part of USB-C and not independent. The Vbus twiddling was when USB-C did not exist and thus had to work with the 4 existling lines. This also reflects on cabling).
For DisplayPort, ThunderBolt, HDMI, USB 3.2 multi-lane, etc., these use the "alt mode" pins on the connector. There is a signalling protocol in place to detect and assign which altmode protocol you wish to use - of which only one may be in action at any one time. Typically, your device only supports one mode as well, though granted, internal USB hubs may complicate things (e.g., a dock with ethernet and display and USB ports may be USB-based for the ethernet and USB ports, and altmode for the display, or it may be thunderbolt based for ethernet, USB for display and ports, or some combination).
USB PD can be challenging since current can flow either way - it can receive power or it can distribute power
You didn't purchase a license to see the movie though. You purchased a rental of a seat in the theatre for that specific movie.
Going to the theatres is not "buying a movie" in the sense that a digital download through iTunes/Amazon/Google/Vudu/etc is. It's a rental of a seat in a theatre that hopefully will show the movie stated.
It's just like buying a ticket to a play, or a ticket to a sporting event, or a plane ticket, or ticket to a cruise, etc. It just means you have the right to park your butt at the specified location for the specified times.
For varying degrees of "works".
It's not just efficiency, it's basically ease of operation. One of the big things about modern cars is they are "twist and go". You twist the key (or push the button nowadays) and the car goes. Doesn't matter if the engine is hot (vapor lock is not an issue), very cold, or any other thing, including poor fuel. You want it to go, it goes, and unless something is very wrong, it will go. (You can even shoot out cylinders and while it stalls the engine, you can have a V8 engine with 6 dead cylinders still barely run. It's not happy, but the computer is able to compensate and get you home, albiet slowly).
Anyhow, did you wonder why it took 300kW to do it? It's because an ECU is very well shielded to begin with - the metal body of the car already is a great faraday cage. But the ECU is also encased in a metal body because it's a very challenging environment with a lot of stray RF caused by all the high voltages around.
In fact, if you're willing to settle for post-millennium vehicles, disrupting the keyfob-car communications will generally be far easier - the windows in the passenger compartment don't generally block RF, and the signal levels are weak since keyfobs are powered by itty coin cell batteries with poor peak power performance, so they don't have much transmit power. (I had to replace the battery in my keyfob - it still measured 3V, while batteries that are generally dead used in PCs measure pretty damn close to 0.5V. Heck, even my watch which died suddenly had a battery that measured around 0.5V. No doubt the battery was low, so it couldn't supply the necessary power for the transmitter)
Well, it could be used to drive the TV output circuit, OR, it was used because it's a stupidly cheap high speed crystal. You have to remember except for a few frequencies, most crystals would have to be specially cut for the desired frequency. This occurs even today, where most oscillators are either 32.768kHz (real time clock), 12MHz (USB 1.1/2.0 interfaces), 19MHz, or 27MHz. Or the two TV frequencies (3.58 and 4.43MHz).
But back then, before we had the influx of many devices with standardized frequencies, there were only a few standard crystals - mostly related to TV or radio frequencies. And custom-cut crystals were expensive, so you generally wanted crystals that could be ordered trivially easy, which meant limiting yourself to bog standard TV or radio IF crystals.
Another crystal was 4.43361875 MHz - this was used in PAL countries and divided into as well.
People grew very adept at multiplying and dividing the frequencies - the IBM PC's 4.77MHz was derived from the 3.58MHz crystal (even IBM couldn't get away from bog-standard crystals) - at a ratio of 4/3.
This is not an auto-play bug. Auto play is disabled by default nowadays.
The problem happens before auto-play - basically you present a filesystem so corrupted that the filesystem driver aborts, which causes the kernel to stop. Windows happens to try to mount every partition it can automatically, so if you present a filesystem so corrupt it aborts the filesystem driver, it can kill the kernel.
Of course, Linux is somewhat safer in this respect - given the kernel behavior isn't to mount filesystems. However, it's not much of a safety net - unless you were plugging it in for another reason, presumably you were intending to access the disk and will need to mount it at some point. Of course, depending on the filesystem driver, some can crash, others will simply fail.
Anyhow, I remember this from NT4 days - where there was a specific STOP code similar to "NTFS_FAILED_TO_MOUNT". Yes, NT4 would BSOD if it couldn't mount an NTFS partition. Had this happen with a failing secondary (backup) disk. The disk would read a few sectors fine, then return errors and Windows was not happy with that. Obviously for Windows 2000, Microsoft had to fix this error - the era of external disks meant you can't simply BSOD every time you had a corrupt filesystem, because that would be a really common event.
One thing Canada doesn't allow is direct-to-consumer drug advertising. US commercials are filled with "Are you feeling XXX? Perhaps you have condition YYYY. Consult your doctor and see if ZZZZ is right for you!". This is one way to bypass generic drugs - if you're asking for them by name, there's no option to buy the generic version of the same drug.
And pharmacists here are generally quick to ask if you'd want a generic or the branded stuff - it can affect things like extended health drug coverage -
I don't think AM radio is dying. I listen to AM radio and it's great for talk radio.
Sure there's a lot of right win conspiracy stuff, but so what? You know what ISN'T on AM? iHeartRadio, aka ClearChannel!
iHeartRadio/ClearChannel basically turned the entire FM band into blandness. Which is why it's dying (between satellite and internet radio, both of which offer far more interesting selections) .
At least the AM bands are populated with more interesting content - sports, news, and other stuff.
And most Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances from basically anyone, including the one built into most higher end routers that let you share files from a hard drive support Time Machine, too.
So your network backup storage isn't really going away either - if you have a somewhat decent router that can share files off an attached USB hard disk, or a NAS appliance, chances are you can back up to it via Time Machine.
Foot pedal controls need installation of something into the floor. If it's mechanical, it means you need to run water to a valve on the floor then to the tap, which is a lot of plumbing. Then you need a shutoff valve so you can service the valve and taps as necessary without turning off building water supply, so it's either more stuff you bury in the floor (often concrete) or you're running pipes everywhere.
Elbow valves are similar - people just don't want to touch them. They get very adept at kicking the valves. Germophobes can react very strangely.
As for battery powered faucets, they are fine. If yours are constantly running out of battery, then the building manager needs to change them more often. They can last a surprisingly long time before the batteries actually need to be replaced even with near-constant use.
Fantastic as they may be, and innovative they once were, well, the rest of industry has pretty much undercut them.
Apple routers were expensive at several hundred bucks each. Sure they're better than the $20 daily special at Best Buy (or the $5 sepcial at Alibaba), you could get some very high end routers with the latest WiFi for less. And even "enterprise class" routers from the likes of Ubiquity Networks (UniFi WiFi APs, AmpliFi routers and mesh networks).
And a lot of them didn't require a Mac or iOS device to configure them, since they had web-based configuration systems.
There was going to be a point when consumers simply stopped buying Apple AirPorts in favor of the competition (of which the field is packed solid), and it was probably a long time ago. Apple under Tim Cook simply likes to hang onto stuff until it's no longer tenale and it's likely some part is now so obsolete Apple cannot build anymore. And given how crowded the field is (it's bad when any retail store has dozens of different models for sale), any new model Apple makes would have seriously strong competition.
Yes, because iTunes from the Microsoft App Store cannot have extra services (no more iPod helper services, bonjour services, etc), and Apple has to ditch the Apple Software Updater, so no more requests to install iCloud or other Apple software as well when you update iTunes.
Basically it's self contained, and the Microsoft App Store is responsible for keeping it updated.
Yes, full iOS backups. Did you know iCloud will not back up certain things? Personal things like password keychains and such are not backed up with iCloud (including stuff like location services MAC caches, the source of the "tracking" data a few years ago).
An iTunes backup will backup the apps on your device, or it should, so discontinued apps can be safely stored and installed on other devices you own even if they're no longer sold.
An ENCRYPTED iTunes backup will backup your entire iOS device, passwords and all, so if you want to make sure you absolutely have every bit of data, you need an encrypted backup.
The reason for this is obvious - passwords and such Apple doesn't want in iCloud - because it means any law enforcement request for iCloud data would leak 3rd party account information as well, so Apple does not want to be the "loophole" that lets law enforcement bypass the need to get warrants for services the user may use. So just because they get your iCloud data, it means they won't have access to your email, facebook or other account data and would have to subpeona those services independently.
Obviously, an unencrypted iTunes backup (a local backup) should expose sensitive data either, or it's a loophole to get at your personal information. (Why subpoena Apple when you can sync the phone and get at all the data on it?).
Thus, full backups require an encrypted backup so your PC will not have your phone's data in the clear.