In Canada, unlike the US, it was perfectly acceptable to intercept cellphone signals (the US barred receivers from the 850MHz cellphone ban, something that was only enforced economically in Canada (because US made equipment wasn't unblocked for Canada)).
However, the law has said that while you can listen in on any radio transmission, unless it's for public consumption, you cannot utilize the contents. So if someone gives you a hot stock tip, you are technically bound to not use it. Or if someone broadcasts their credit card number - you can hear it, but you can't use it (nevermind the credit card fraud).
Basically, yes, you can receive it for interest's sake, that's about it. You're individually expected to maintain the privacy between the parties involved still. Corporations are even under harsher terms than this, them having more resources to scrub the data they get.
They saw a sign that said, "Microsoft and Apple just ahead," and decided to keep going.
Except I don't think Apple and Microsoft have gone that far yet. Apple and Microsoft have done lots of evil things, but so far, they haven't gone after jailbreakers (Apple hasn't even done anything with the iPhone-dev team), and neither has Microsoft gone after Xbox360 modders (to play pirated games - that's all you can do with the mods). Both do play cat-and-mouse games between modders and jailbreakers, but that's just par for the course.
And I don't think either has gone after customers who've done it. They've gone after the stores who do it as a service, yes, but not the customers.
What Sony's done is like what DirecTV's done - get customer lists and start going after the customers themselves.
Gimme a break. These batteries are based on electro-chemistry. You know, interactions between molecules. Everything that goes on in batteries, all batteries, are nanoscale, by definition. Corrosion in the electrodes had been known and studied for ages. It is a damn chemical reaction that will happen at molecular level.
Except, we don't know why lithium-ion batteries age. That is, even if you treat them well, they'll eventually die out anywhere from 1-5 years. The clock starts ticking the moment they're manufactured, and their capacity decreases from that point onwards. Treating it well means it lasts a little longer, but they all have a well-defined expiry date.
It's why you never buy replacement LiIon batteries until you need it (the one you keep in storage will age at the same rate, maybe a little slower than the one in use), and avoid "New Old Stock" batteries like the plague. Even ones that have their charge maintained and never cycled die eventually. It's hard enough at times when you wonder if that battery on the shelf has been sitting around or you're looking at new stock.
Don't reward those assholes by paying for one of their products.
If you really want to annoy them, do something to publicise the existence, and improve the distribution of things like PSBreak. Having something like it fully documented so that anybody can assemble it from components and then posted everywhere would annoy Sony quite a bit more than a couple of photos on a website.
The PSGroove people are facing lawsuits over PSGroove, the open-source Jailbreak. Though, even that's been ported to iPhone-Linux, Android phones, Nokia phones, TI calculators, Atmel AVR dev boards )original port), etc. Porting it to anything and everything, mirroring the code, and even patching it to support backups (most of the PSGroove ports use the original code which disables Blu-Ray) would be far more effective.
Kids, pay attention, this is how wars get started.
This started over 20 years ago when the Chinese Government made rare earth metals a national priority and the US Government (and everyone else) sat on their thumbs.
The USA has been busy with oil for so long, they took their eye off a quite a few other strategic resources.
It's also why one should pay attention to climate change, if if one doesn't think it's caused by humans. The first war over climate change will be over... water. The earth has a lot of water, but a very tiny amount of it is actually drinkable. As the climate changes with droughts becoming more common, and former sources of freshwater drying up or getting contaminated.
Wars are fought over resources. Oil. Rare earth. Water.
Rare earth can be "mined" from discarded electronics as well. Pretty soon the US will stop exports of electronics for recycling and keep it internal so they can be recycled.
Much of the spam I get is just one short sentence, followed by a link to a URL in Russia or somewhere. Are there actually people out there who would trust their charge card numbers or personal information to a website that does not look like a reputable company? The fact that such spam keeps getting sent out suggests that there must be enough responses to make it worthwhile.
Probably not, actually. Just that some idiot with money asked about marketing services, handed over the cash, and walked away. I think the actual proportion of spam that sells stuff is quite low (only so many people can pay for a service that doesn't quite generate any revenue), but spam is now used as a way to distribute the more lucrative products - botnet bots, keyloggers, and other stuff. It's a bit more indirect, but far easier way to grab stuff like credit cards and other things that one could use to get money.
Even those websites are probably nothing more than drive-by download sites for bots.
Hopefully that'll drop the prices on PATA drives, which seem to have all but disappeared except for WD ones.
I have a NAS box which uses 4 160GB PATA drives. I'm looking to replace them with 4 500GB PATA drives (it doesn't have SATA). The cheapest place I found them was Best Buy, for $90 (Canadian) each. The only place that had them possibly cheaper was Newegg, and I'd only save $5/drive, but lose out in that they were OEM drives and Newegg's bubblewrapped cluster of drives packaging means I might as well have them shipped back to manufacturer as RMA (where they will be promptly returned as "insufficient packaging").
I considered getting a new box, but that means having to either buy a new similar box ($600+ with 4 drives) or a 4-bay empty NAS box ($200+ plus drives). Plus another box to manage and maintain backups for. These NAS boxes run Linux inside, so should they ever go tits up, I can rig up a bunch of USB adapters to mount them.
Things are bad when it's BEST BUY of all places that has it cheapest.
He meant himself: Sculley admits it was a mistake to hire Sculley to run the company.
The only reason Sculley was hired (he says it himself) was because Apple's Board of Directors didn't want someone as young as Jobs to be CEO. (For the right or wrong decisions). Jobs was supposed to take the CEO's spot otherwise - he was a practical shoo-in for the job.
Things might've been different had Sculley merely been a puppet and left Jobs to do the real CEO's job. Sculley would then just be the "respected and wiser" face in image only.
Well, given I haven't updated my 3.15 PS3, but also have a 3.41 update firmware on my hard drive. And given all updates beyond 3.41 were more of ways to stamp out jailbreaks than actual features (well, there's the crippled 3D Blu-Ray support... but anyone with 3DTVs would probably want a better 3D Blu-Ray player that what the PS3 gives you).
This might be the only real reason to lose the jailbreak...
Anyhow, I wonder what Microsoft has to counter this - their Fall Update is due soon. They need to give Netflix out for free at the minimum, but the 5.1/1080p support is also required. Fun times.
It's certainly a problem for those who still need to use Java 1.4 or Java 5 (which are out of security support now, but are still widely mandated in the industry).
Including, surprisingly, Android.
OpenJDK 1.6 works with Android, but if you want to use the official one they recommend, you have to use 1.5 (Java 5) because of some oddball parser issues in official Oracle JDK 1.6.
So one's choices are ot use the unsupported OpenJDK 1.6 with Android, or the unsupported (but Android-supported) JDK 1.5. Bleh.
I hope Android 3.0 fixes this. This is an issue on Ubuntu 10.04 and onwards, as JDK 1.5 is no longer in the repository and you have to do some hacks to get 9.x JDK 1.5 in...
You simply flood the network with control messages. That will effectively DoS the tower. What kind of control messages? Well, sending an SMS is a control message. Setting up and tearing down data and voice connections are other control messages, and all are done on behalf of apps.
Supposedly, one of the major reasons AT&T is having issues with the iPhone is because the iPhone actually does this, a lot. Control channel bandwidth is limited and normally, you don't have much going across it (because it's just call setup/teardown and the like). But with the meteoric rise of SMS and data usage, the control channel actually is in somewhat of a bandwidth crunch.
Europe and Asia have no problems with iPhones as they've gone to a dynamic bandwidth control channels because of the popularity of SMS. North America until recently didn't need to. So now control channels are somewhat packed with text messages, and you introduce the iPhone with its aggressive power management that tears down data connections ASAP. So a data channel might be established and torn down to view one web page or whenever an app requests data. Most phones prior to this created a data channel and hung onto it until it idled for a long period of time (after all, you're billed by the packet, so keeping the data channel open costs nothing, and it means it's always ready when you need it so you don't have to wait to establish the data channel again and again).
I can see a few apps that constantly abuse this which can easily take down a network. Setting up/taking down a voice call, setting up/taking down the data connection, do it fast enough and you can really clog up the tower. Enough people do this and the tower can be put out of service because it's stuck establishing and taking down connections so fast that no one else can get in.
Raw bandwidth wise though, you're not likely to do anything other than slow down due to congestion if the tower's uplink gets saturated.
In fact, that's what the IM client did - it established and tore down connections very quickly. A phone with aggressive power management (required on Android) would basically be spewing out control messages all day. This can be made more painful if the carrier makes notes in a database for billing purposes.
So, when silk worms finally do make silk as strong as spiders' silk, then will those silk moths be able to open their own cocoons?
It's usually easier to cultivate silkworms because after the cocoon is made you want to collect them before they escape (and ruin the cocoon - you want unbroken thread). The process of silk making is you basically boil the cocoon to kill the worm inside, then you very varefully find the end of it and unwind the cocoon. It's a pretty manual process, but when they spin silk they often have 10-15 cocoons spinning in a vat of water being unwound with the threads being spun together. Yes, it also means near the end you have a carcass that drops out. Like little thread bobbins floating in water, except instead of the bobbin at the end you get a dead silkworm.
But if the silk is too strong for them to get out, then they die in the cocoon without reproducing, which seems like a good idea to prevent spread (though you'd probably have to toss the cocoon as well - too much broken thread).
I don't know where this myth comes from, but the 3G ones DO have a true GPS. Perhaps people think that 'assisted GPS' means 'fake GPS'. Wrong. It just means that the real GPS gets some help from the cellular network to quickly get a first position fix. After that it functions like any other GPS, and without that help it just takes a little longer to get the fix.
Probably because there's actually several different levels of Assisted GPS.
First one would be "fake GPS" where it's really a 1-channel GPS receiver and uses the cell network to provide the missing satellites - usually the cell towers do the computation for you and they know your location. Many "dumbphones" do this (remember when you had to pay for locations eervices?).
Another form would be where the cell tower broadcasts the local GPS information and combined with the received satellite signal, the onboard AGPS chip computes your location. Featurephones often use this variant, and most E911 is done this way as well.
The iPad, iPhone and probably every smartphone out there instead uses this third form which is GPS with network bootstrap. In GPS, the module needs to download some data known as the almanac, which details the location of the satellites in the sky. It's a slow download, which is why a GPS cold start can take easily 15 minutes of solid signal (we're talking a few hundred bits per second). A warm start (the GPS has a moderately recent almanac that it can use immediately, plus knows where it was last) means it just has to acquire the satellites and do the calculations, which can take 15-45 seconds while it updates the almanac data in the background. Of course, if you're attached to the cell network, you suddenly have two more pieces of information - the cell network can provide the current almanac at much faster speeds so cold-starting takes much less time, as well as providing initial GPS data (similar to the second form of AGPS above) so you can get a rough fix in seconds. Without this asssistance, it'll work standalone just fine, but with it, it can get a fix extremely quickly and improve on it as it acquires more satellites on its own. Even cold-starting a GPS is relatively quick if it can grab the almanac this way.
The confusion comes because there's many forms of assistance - from just bootstrapping to letting the cell tower figure it out.
Apple takes it one further as well since CoreLocation uses GPS, but also supports WiFi geolocation (if a connection's available) as well as cell-tower geolocation.
I was thinking much the same thing... What we're actually seeing here isn't spying, but a form of undercover work.
Privacy is a function of sharing information with a limited set of people. You may want your wife to see you naked, but that doesn't mean you want everybody walking by your house to look in your bathroom window. You may want to share that embarrassing problem with your doctor, but that doesn't mean you want it in the newspaper. You may want your credit counselor to know about all your bad debt, but that doesn't mean you talk about it at the company picnic. You may want your friends to know where you're going to be this weekend, but that doesn't mean you want government workers to keep an eye on your movements.
But it's also a function of discretion on the user's part. You protect your privacy by having translucent bathroom windows and curtains, doctor-patient priviledge, and discretion to not talk about it.
Online, there is no privacy unless you take action. Relying on a third-party for that action isn't action (i.e., relying on Facebook to keep your "private" actions isn't). Posting on facebook may appear more secure than sending an email, but it really isn't, and you're just relying on someone else to assume they won't use your information for their benefit. If you want to be private, you encrypt your email. With facebook, it's harder, but youc an still encrypt your posts before you post it. Relying on facebook's privacy settings is like assuming your company's IT admins can't read your email.
Or think about it this way - why has "email DRM" failed? Friends repost, retwit, resend etc. all the time. Your plans for the weekend might just get into the government's hands due to indiscretions by your friends. Once it's posted out there, it's best to consider it out in the wild for anyone to see.
If you have 4-5 different platforms with equal marketshare, malware authors need to invest significantly more to see the same level of returns..
Then you would likely see more attacks coming from common elements of those very different platforms, such as Flash, Acrobat, or other plug-ins that would have different code bases but similar designs on all platforms. Or Office, or via Javascript, or Java, or CSS or any other common element.
Actually, that's probably why we're seeing so much more attacks via PDF and SWF (Flash) these days. In between Windows 7 and Vista's security model (far tighter than XP) and the rise of alternative platforms, people are attacking Flash and PDF because it's the easiest vector in. It's also why in those Pwn2Own contests you see at CanSecWest, the hacks are almost always due to some user application - a modern OS like Linux, Windows and OS X either firewall off or don't have vulnerable services running by default open to the world anymore. The easiest way in is via an application, preferably one that's installed everywhere, like Flash and a PDF reader with close to 100% installation rate on all OSes.
Another popular vector is pirated apps - Mac botnets form when people download the latest software like Microsoft Office, Snow Leopard, iLife, etc., via Bittorrent (crafty people tacked on an extra "botnet" installation package to the download) - this has happened with certainty to Office 2008 and iLife 2009. On Windows, it's also via trojaned installers, but less so because many installs are signed, so the trojans wrap around keygens and cracks (someone produces a keygen or a crack, and some malware author wraps their trojan dropper around it. It's why most anti-virus target keygens specifically because it's an exceedingly popular target - probably most keygens you find are infected). The last method is the most blatant and you see it on usenet a lot - people posting a million identical files that only differ in file name - file sizes and the like are identical, which are true trojans, meant to grab careless google searches and anyone not thinking why a video that should be gigabytes in size is only 500K.
Worms still exist, but the environment they live in has pretty much gotten really hard to propagate in. The new malware is the trojan because it's so easy to embed in other software, or just pick up careless searches. Or via files people don't anticipate will be an issue, like flash and PDF.
The highest country had only a 3.66% detected infection rate. I think this really shows how ineffective the malware removal tool is. Judging by the non IT run computers that I come in contact with, approximately 100% are filled to the brim with toolbars, random processes, and odd start up programs.
Except, it isn't.
MSRT (Malicious Software Removal Tool) is NOT an antimalware/antispyware/antivirus solution (Microsoft's version of that is called Microsoft Security Essentials). MSRT is a small tool run once every Patch Tuesday to remove what Microsoft deems extremely bad.
It does not remove anything else other than the few bad things it's looking for - you can compare antivirus scanners and the like against how many they catch (10s of thousands), and MSRT really targets under 100 or so per month - the ones that seem to cause the most crashes and the like that come in via the crash reporter. It's a very targeted antimalware tool, and has been credited with crippling botnets in the past when come Patch Tuesday, vast swaths of computers suddenly have the botnet removed quite ungracefully.
MSRT predates MSE (and OneCare) and was used as a way to get rid of particular pieces of malware for a few years now. It's limited because it's free and comes automatically (if you have updates enabled), so Microsoft has been very careful with MSRT to not trample on anti-virus sellers by not making it run all the time (it runs at most once a month) and not having a comprehensive antivirus database (it only targets the few Microsoft deem worthy). It's also why you have to install MSE yourself - it will never be bundled with Windows (anti-trust).
1) Carriers must send out a notification and receive acknowledgement when 80% of a item in a plan is reached (each is treated separately, so 80% of texts, 80% of voice minutes, 80% of data bytes, etc). Ditto at 90% and just before the limit is reached. 2) Carriers must notify when the plan limit is reached *AND* inform customer of cost of going over that item in plan (e.g., additional voice minutes are $0.20/minute, etc.) 3) Carriers must notify on roaming what roaming rates are for various services 4) Carriers must allow customer to set user-specified hard limit to cost when going over, with appropriate notifications when 80%, 90% and hard limits are reached. (Hard limit may be set at $0, meaning you cannot go over) 5) Carriers must inform customer at time of purchase of hard limit is available, and get customer approval if the hard limit option is declined. This approval must be separate from other documents the customer signs and sees (i.e., you cannot have a plan of "you cannot have a hard limit"). If customer doesn't decline but for some reason doesn't set a hard limit, it will be set at 2x monthly plan cost (e.g., if your plan is $50/month, your hard limit is $100).
I will allow carriers to upsell customers during any notification.
You basically want to balance the carrier's want of making money, with the customer's need to not get outrageous bills. I ask for acknowledgement to ensure the customer cannot claim they did not receive the notification. Customers that feel ultra-responsible can decline hard limits which gives explicit proof that customer knows what they're getting into. It's also said during the initial purchase so carriers cannot simply omit the hard limit, and if they do, it's 2x the plan amount.
Carriers seem to think that people can pay whatever they will charge, and that's simply not the case. There are probably lots of people who cannot handle their bill exceeding the nominal amount as well. I suppose the real question is why carriers don't try to be realistic and work with customers in some fashion to pre-emptively avoid bill shock.
I seem to remember some sites using Verified by Visa and then abandoning it. Perhaps they found that shoppers were abandoning their shopping carts after having set up VBV before and then forgetting their VBV username and password.
Well, few reasons.
1) Merchants love it because the customer gets stiffed with the charges (you can't chargeback a merchant if it was done via 3DS (3D Secure, aka Verified by Visa and MasterCard's equivalent). I only do VBV on a merchant I know. Unknown merchants, I'd probably trust Paypal a bit more.
2) It seriously screws up with NoScript. I keep forgetting to enable the 3rd party site which usually results in screwing up the checkout process.
3) It makes it harder to do "one-click shopping". If you're a merchant that gets a lot of impulse buys, the more steps betwen "I want it" and "We got your order, it'll be shipped soon!" is more chances the user will cancel the order prior to completion. (And this is a very important point)
5) Forgetting your password can get your credit card locked out.
Quite honestly, 3DS is just another form of Wish-it-was two-factor security. It pretends to be more secure, but in reality it isn't.
There are two ways to do it properly - you could SMS people a password, but that screws with people like me who don't always carry their cellphone around, or perhaps build in an RSA key thingy inside the card itself. Chip cards (which have their own issues - really - the PIN's in the chip and the chip sends an "OK" or "Failed PIN" response - not any form of challenge-response packet to the bank, who should know your PIN, not your card) have powerful enough processors to do some RSA token like task. Given we can buy a calculator for under a dollar, there's no real reason why we can't have credit cards with two-factor support on them (and no PIN needs to be stored - the card will generate a code based on the entered PIN which the bank can validate).
Cinema (which has much higher resolution, so it is harder to fake) constantly amazes us with simple tricks like flattening the depth of field, rotating the camera to make small inclines look like cliffs, adjusting zoom while moving the camera to distort depth perceptions, etc.
Actually, it's not restricted to cinema. Anyone with a half-decent camera can do it. Still or video (especially since modern dSLRs support recording video). Heck, a surprising amount of video these days is captured on nothing more than "prosumer" style equipment (I think the season ender to House was recorded with a bunch of dSLRs).
You need a camera that lets you adjust aperature/zoom/focus manually to do it, but the tricks are well known, simple and anyone can do it. Heck, I think any photographer worth their salt knows these tricks when taking photos more for art than to capture a scene.
I think there is probably more involved than switching out the processor. You'd have to replace the current with another one that would be okay with existing cooling/power requirements. Otherwise you'd melt something. I suspect that's why they went with a 1.33GHz Core 2 Duo as opposed to a more powerful processor. I think Apple last updated the MBA mid 2009 but it was only a processor upgrade from 1.6 GHz to 1.83 GHz and 1.83 GHz to 2.13 GHz.
Actually, it's a bit simpler. The MBA just doesn't have enough space. The Core2Duo used in the MBA has an nVidia chipset, so you could get a decent GPU out of it. The MacBooks and MacBook Pros with the Core i3/i5/i7s have an Intel chipset, with the processor also having Intel graphics on it. This means Apple has to fit on a second nVidia chip onto the board in order to have better graphics capability (which is used by OS X for a lot of things - OpenCL, window compositing, accelleration, etc).
I'm sure Apple would've stuck an i3 into the MBA if they could, but the i3 CPU + Intel chipset + nVidia GPU just took too much space on the main board. So instead, they kept the old Core2Duo+nVidia chipset which saves a chip and gives you decent graphics still.
Or have we fallen in love with Intel graphics again? (I'm guessing Apple's last foray into playing with Intel graphics didn't go very well).
.NET CE is an implementation of the same CLI spec, just for a different platform. I'm not sure if Mono runs on WinCE, but it does run on Linux/ARM, which would count as an analog.
Actually,.NET CF (compact framework) is a reduced size version of the.NET framework - all the libraries etc. There's no "platform" for it - the.NET libraries are reduced in size through various means.
I have run apps I compiled using.NET CF on my desktop (after copying the requisite.NET CF libraries over from my ARM platform), and I have taken the exact same binaries and ran them on ARM, x86 (Windows CE), x86 (Windows XP), and MIPS. It's pretty neat to see it all just work - one binary. Was a command line app, too.
As far as guitar amps is concerned, semiconductor circuits can be made to perform in the manner that tubes do, and more reliably, but there's just too much myth and momentum for tubes for them to be obsoleted as they should be. And the "audiophiles" who prefer tubes fall into two overlapping categories, audiofools and audiofrauds.
Actually, tube amps and vinyl sound better especially in the past decade and a half. Tubes have a much better overdrive handling characteristic than solid state transistors do. Overdrive a solidstate amp and it clips. And if you've dealt with overdriven inputs, you know clipping sounds horrible. Overdrive a tube amp and it distorts, but in a fashion that's more appealing to the human ear. For vinyl, it's less concrete, but mostly because mastering tends to be better as you don't want to do the dynamic range compression crap that you do on CDs - it sounds especially bad on vinyl, it costs real estate (i.e., the disc plays for less time) and can cause tracking issues if the grooves potentially overlap (that said, some vinyls, unfortunately, are mastered from the original CD. Bleh.).
Guitar amps especially because you want the distortion - and clipping is not a useful distortion. You can do it with sufficiently good equipment in the digital realm - if you attenuate the inputs to maybe 2/3rds the nominal value (you want overdrive, and overdriving tends to far exceed nominal) and sample at a high bit-depth (because you're starting from a reduced dynamic range already). And then digitally add on the distortion and gain stages (but not too much gain as you don't want it to clip on the output!).
Other than overdriven characteristics though, solid-state amps far exceed the quantitive specs of tube amps in all areas except one - power handling. Big power amps are often tube because they can handle the kilowatts far easier than solid state transistors can. But it's also the reason why people want all-digital audio paths from their sources to the speakers. It's a lot harder to have clipping in the digital realm unless the source audio was clipped to begin with. But if you use line-level analogs, it's possible that your source may output a signal that exceeds the input levels of the next stage, causing inadvertent clipping even though both are line-level. I had a DVD player that would do this to an older a/v receiver - using the DVD player caused the CLIP light to be lit almost constantly.
Well, seeing as they couldn't keep the first PSP closed to hackers, what makes them think they will keep a Droid based one better protected.
But later PSPs are now pretty tightly locked. After all, what ever happened to that PSP Go hack? It's completely useless right now, but have CFW and it could be a great way to play PSP games in a smaller formfactor.
Anyhow, Sony would either put out a locked down Android that's bacially only connected to the PSN store only, and attempts to root it would be met with firmware updates. Of course, since everything is tied to PSN, your phone is effectively a brick until you update. Heck, I'm sure Sony could get everything from Google except the marketplace app and neuter the ability to sideload apps.
Either that, or you do the OtherOS thing - Linux runs inside a hypervisor like it did on the PS2 and PS3 (until Sony took that feature away).
Canada used to be fractured between GSM and CDMA as well but enough pressure was brought to bear that the CDMA carrier ended up rolling out HSPA+ to compete directly with the established GSM/HSPA carriers and now people in Canada can choose Rogers, Fido (city focused brand of Rogers), Bell, Telus or Virgin (city focused brand of Bell) as a carrier and buy either a subsidized (locked) iPhone from one of those carriers or an unsubsidized unlocked model from Apple stored directly.
Still is. Some phones, like the Palm Pre, are "CDMA" only. (Scarequotes refer to the marketing term, not the technology).
But there are two reasons why Bell and Telus also have HSPA+ networks.
First, "CDMA" as we known it has no 4G solution. Thus, any "CDMA" carrier can either go WiMax (Sprint), or LTE (Verizon, and rest of world).
Secondly, and more importantly, Bell was a big sponsor of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Guess what phones power the majority of the world? Yes, GSM phones. Bell was paying for the Olympics, and all that juicy roaming revenue was going to go straight to... Rogers, their competitor. By rolling out a 3G network in advance, they can try to capture back some of that roaming revenue instead of giving it all away.
It's not that the CRTC forced them or anything - if it wasn't for the Olympics, they wouldn't bother with HSPA+, and just go straight to LTE.
Though I'm sure Rogers was hoping the iPhone would be "exclusive" to them for awhile and not suddenly have Bell and Telus also selling iPhones.
As others have said.. seriously? Have you not played with an Android (or any other smart phone on Verizon?) You can download and install your own apps with or without a store.. Windows Mobile, Android, BB OS, etc.
Carriers are just wising up to the fact that Motorola, HTC, etc., are really still their bitches when it comes to Android phones. As they figure out more and more of Android, the restrictions will be coming down the pipeline. This can be seen as each carrier pre-loads each Android phone with tons of crapware.
And AT&T's already restricting the ability to sideload apps. Sure you can use ADB and other commands to push apps still (they just removed the checkbox), but it's getting to the point where the phones are not only getting more and more locked down, but carriers are realizing that they don't have to be so open anymore.
Hell, didn't Verizon announce their own Android app store? Who's gonna bet that the Google Marketplace app suddenly disappears from Verizon phones?
I suppose it's pretty sad that it's only Apple to smack down the carriers - you can be sure AT&T among others wish that Apple would preload a bunch of their apps onto their phones already instead of having to fight it out in the App Store or include a brochure with every sale to say how to improve your AT&T iPhone experience by downloading their apps.
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In Canada, unlike the US, it was perfectly acceptable to intercept cellphone signals (the US barred receivers from the 850MHz cellphone ban, something that was only enforced economically in Canada (because US made equipment wasn't unblocked for Canada)).
However, the law has said that while you can listen in on any radio transmission, unless it's for public consumption, you cannot utilize the contents. So if someone gives you a hot stock tip, you are technically bound to not use it. Or if someone broadcasts their credit card number - you can hear it, but you can't use it (nevermind the credit card fraud).
Basically, yes, you can receive it for interest's sake, that's about it. You're individually expected to maintain the privacy between the parties involved still. Corporations are even under harsher terms than this, them having more resources to scrub the data they get.
Except I don't think Apple and Microsoft have gone that far yet. Apple and Microsoft have done lots of evil things, but so far, they haven't gone after jailbreakers (Apple hasn't even done anything with the iPhone-dev team), and neither has Microsoft gone after Xbox360 modders (to play pirated games - that's all you can do with the mods). Both do play cat-and-mouse games between modders and jailbreakers, but that's just par for the course.
And I don't think either has gone after customers who've done it. They've gone after the stores who do it as a service, yes, but not the customers.
What Sony's done is like what DirecTV's done - get customer lists and start going after the customers themselves.
Except, we don't know why lithium-ion batteries age. That is, even if you treat them well, they'll eventually die out anywhere from 1-5 years. The clock starts ticking the moment they're manufactured, and their capacity decreases from that point onwards. Treating it well means it lasts a little longer, but they all have a well-defined expiry date.
It's why you never buy replacement LiIon batteries until you need it (the one you keep in storage will age at the same rate, maybe a little slower than the one in use), and avoid "New Old Stock" batteries like the plague. Even ones that have their charge maintained and never cycled die eventually. It's hard enough at times when you wonder if that battery on the shelf has been sitting around or you're looking at new stock.
The PSGroove people are facing lawsuits over PSGroove, the open-source Jailbreak. Though, even that's been ported to iPhone-Linux, Android phones, Nokia phones, TI calculators, Atmel AVR dev boards )original port), etc. Porting it to anything and everything, mirroring the code, and even patching it to support backups (most of the PSGroove ports use the original code which disables Blu-Ray) would be far more effective.
It's also why one should pay attention to climate change, if if one doesn't think it's caused by humans. The first war over climate change will be over ... water. The earth has a lot of water, but a very tiny amount of it is actually drinkable. As the climate changes with droughts becoming more common, and former sources of freshwater drying up or getting contaminated.
Wars are fought over resources. Oil. Rare earth. Water.
Rare earth can be "mined" from discarded electronics as well. Pretty soon the US will stop exports of electronics for recycling and keep it internal so they can be recycled.
Probably not, actually. Just that some idiot with money asked about marketing services, handed over the cash, and walked away. I think the actual proportion of spam that sells stuff is quite low (only so many people can pay for a service that doesn't quite generate any revenue), but spam is now used as a way to distribute the more lucrative products - botnet bots, keyloggers, and other stuff. It's a bit more indirect, but far easier way to grab stuff like credit cards and other things that one could use to get money.
Even those websites are probably nothing more than drive-by download sites for bots.
Hopefully that'll drop the prices on PATA drives, which seem to have all but disappeared except for WD ones.
I have a NAS box which uses 4 160GB PATA drives. I'm looking to replace them with 4 500GB PATA drives (it doesn't have SATA). The cheapest place I found them was Best Buy, for $90 (Canadian) each. The only place that had them possibly cheaper was Newegg, and I'd only save $5/drive, but lose out in that they were OEM drives and Newegg's bubblewrapped cluster of drives packaging means I might as well have them shipped back to manufacturer as RMA (where they will be promptly returned as "insufficient packaging").
I considered getting a new box, but that means having to either buy a new similar box ($600+ with 4 drives) or a 4-bay empty NAS box ($200+ plus drives). Plus another box to manage and maintain backups for. These NAS boxes run Linux inside, so should they ever go tits up, I can rig up a bunch of USB adapters to mount them.
Things are bad when it's BEST BUY of all places that has it cheapest.
The only reason Sculley was hired (he says it himself) was because Apple's Board of Directors didn't want someone as young as Jobs to be CEO. (For the right or wrong decisions). Jobs was supposed to take the CEO's spot otherwise - he was a practical shoo-in for the job.
Things might've been different had Sculley merely been a puppet and left Jobs to do the real CEO's job. Sculley would then just be the "respected and wiser" face in image only.
Well, given I haven't updated my 3.15 PS3, but also have a 3.41 update firmware on my hard drive. And given all updates beyond 3.41 were more of ways to stamp out jailbreaks than actual features (well, there's the crippled 3D Blu-Ray support... but anyone with 3DTVs would probably want a better 3D Blu-Ray player that what the PS3 gives you).
This might be the only real reason to lose the jailbreak...
Anyhow, I wonder what Microsoft has to counter this - their Fall Update is due soon. They need to give Netflix out for free at the minimum, but the 5.1/1080p support is also required. Fun times.
Including, surprisingly, Android.
OpenJDK 1.6 works with Android, but if you want to use the official one they recommend, you have to use 1.5 (Java 5) because of some oddball parser issues in official Oracle JDK 1.6.
So one's choices are ot use the unsupported OpenJDK 1.6 with Android, or the unsupported (but Android-supported) JDK 1.5. Bleh.
I hope Android 3.0 fixes this. This is an issue on Ubuntu 10.04 and onwards, as JDK 1.5 is no longer in the repository and you have to do some hacks to get 9.x JDK 1.5 in...
http://source.android.com/source/download.html
Actually, yes, it is possible.
You simply flood the network with control messages. That will effectively DoS the tower. What kind of control messages? Well, sending an SMS is a control message. Setting up and tearing down data and voice connections are other control messages, and all are done on behalf of apps.
Supposedly, one of the major reasons AT&T is having issues with the iPhone is because the iPhone actually does this, a lot. Control channel bandwidth is limited and normally, you don't have much going across it (because it's just call setup/teardown and the like). But with the meteoric rise of SMS and data usage, the control channel actually is in somewhat of a bandwidth crunch.
Europe and Asia have no problems with iPhones as they've gone to a dynamic bandwidth control channels because of the popularity of SMS. North America until recently didn't need to. So now control channels are somewhat packed with text messages, and you introduce the iPhone with its aggressive power management that tears down data connections ASAP. So a data channel might be established and torn down to view one web page or whenever an app requests data. Most phones prior to this created a data channel and hung onto it until it idled for a long period of time (after all, you're billed by the packet, so keeping the data channel open costs nothing, and it means it's always ready when you need it so you don't have to wait to establish the data channel again and again).
I can see a few apps that constantly abuse this which can easily take down a network. Setting up/taking down a voice call, setting up/taking down the data connection, do it fast enough and you can really clog up the tower. Enough people do this and the tower can be put out of service because it's stuck establishing and taking down connections so fast that no one else can get in.
Raw bandwidth wise though, you're not likely to do anything other than slow down due to congestion if the tower's uplink gets saturated.
In fact, that's what the IM client did - it established and tore down connections very quickly. A phone with aggressive power management (required on Android) would basically be spewing out control messages all day. This can be made more painful if the carrier makes notes in a database for billing purposes.
It's usually easier to cultivate silkworms because after the cocoon is made you want to collect them before they escape (and ruin the cocoon - you want unbroken thread). The process of silk making is you basically boil the cocoon to kill the worm inside, then you very varefully find the end of it and unwind the cocoon. It's a pretty manual process, but when they spin silk they often have 10-15 cocoons spinning in a vat of water being unwound with the threads being spun together. Yes, it also means near the end you have a carcass that drops out. Like little thread bobbins floating in water, except instead of the bobbin at the end you get a dead silkworm.
But if the silk is too strong for them to get out, then they die in the cocoon without reproducing, which seems like a good idea to prevent spread (though you'd probably have to toss the cocoon as well - too much broken thread).
Probably because there's actually several different levels of Assisted GPS.
First one would be "fake GPS" where it's really a 1-channel GPS receiver and uses the cell network to provide the missing satellites - usually the cell towers do the computation for you and they know your location. Many "dumbphones" do this (remember when you had to pay for locations eervices?).
Another form would be where the cell tower broadcasts the local GPS information and combined with the received satellite signal, the onboard AGPS chip computes your location. Featurephones often use this variant, and most E911 is done this way as well.
The iPad, iPhone and probably every smartphone out there instead uses this third form which is GPS with network bootstrap. In GPS, the module needs to download some data known as the almanac, which details the location of the satellites in the sky. It's a slow download, which is why a GPS cold start can take easily 15 minutes of solid signal (we're talking a few hundred bits per second). A warm start (the GPS has a moderately recent almanac that it can use immediately, plus knows where it was last) means it just has to acquire the satellites and do the calculations, which can take 15-45 seconds while it updates the almanac data in the background. Of course, if you're attached to the cell network, you suddenly have two more pieces of information - the cell network can provide the current almanac at much faster speeds so cold-starting takes much less time, as well as providing initial GPS data (similar to the second form of AGPS above) so you can get a rough fix in seconds. Without this asssistance, it'll work standalone just fine, but with it, it can get a fix extremely quickly and improve on it as it acquires more satellites on its own. Even cold-starting a GPS is relatively quick if it can grab the almanac this way.
The confusion comes because there's many forms of assistance - from just bootstrapping to letting the cell tower figure it out.
Apple takes it one further as well since CoreLocation uses GPS, but also supports WiFi geolocation (if a connection's available) as well as cell-tower geolocation.
But it's also a function of discretion on the user's part. You protect your privacy by having translucent bathroom windows and curtains, doctor-patient priviledge, and discretion to not talk about it.
Online, there is no privacy unless you take action. Relying on a third-party for that action isn't action (i.e., relying on Facebook to keep your "private" actions isn't). Posting on facebook may appear more secure than sending an email, but it really isn't, and you're just relying on someone else to assume they won't use your information for their benefit. If you want to be private, you encrypt your email. With facebook, it's harder, but youc an still encrypt your posts before you post it. Relying on facebook's privacy settings is like assuming your company's IT admins can't read your email.
Or think about it this way - why has "email DRM" failed? Friends repost, retwit, resend etc. all the time. Your plans for the weekend might just get into the government's hands due to indiscretions by your friends. Once it's posted out there, it's best to consider it out in the wild for anyone to see.
Actually, that's probably why we're seeing so much more attacks via PDF and SWF (Flash) these days. In between Windows 7 and Vista's security model (far tighter than XP) and the rise of alternative platforms, people are attacking Flash and PDF because it's the easiest vector in. It's also why in those Pwn2Own contests you see at CanSecWest, the hacks are almost always due to some user application - a modern OS like Linux, Windows and OS X either firewall off or don't have vulnerable services running by default open to the world anymore. The easiest way in is via an application, preferably one that's installed everywhere, like Flash and a PDF reader with close to 100% installation rate on all OSes.
Another popular vector is pirated apps - Mac botnets form when people download the latest software like Microsoft Office, Snow Leopard, iLife, etc., via Bittorrent (crafty people tacked on an extra "botnet" installation package to the download) - this has happened with certainty to Office 2008 and iLife 2009. On Windows, it's also via trojaned installers, but less so because many installs are signed, so the trojans wrap around keygens and cracks (someone produces a keygen or a crack, and some malware author wraps their trojan dropper around it. It's why most anti-virus target keygens specifically because it's an exceedingly popular target - probably most keygens you find are infected). The last method is the most blatant and you see it on usenet a lot - people posting a million identical files that only differ in file name - file sizes and the like are identical, which are true trojans, meant to grab careless google searches and anyone not thinking why a video that should be gigabytes in size is only 500K.
Worms still exist, but the environment they live in has pretty much gotten really hard to propagate in. The new malware is the trojan because it's so easy to embed in other software, or just pick up careless searches. Or via files people don't anticipate will be an issue, like flash and PDF.
Here's one proposal:
1) Carriers must send out a notification and receive acknowledgement when 80% of a item in a plan is reached (each is treated separately, so 80% of texts, 80% of voice minutes, 80% of data bytes, etc). Ditto at 90% and just before the limit is reached.
2) Carriers must notify when the plan limit is reached *AND* inform customer of cost of going over that item in plan (e.g., additional voice minutes are $0.20/minute, etc.)
3) Carriers must notify on roaming what roaming rates are for various services
4) Carriers must allow customer to set user-specified hard limit to cost when going over, with appropriate notifications when 80%, 90% and hard limits are reached. (Hard limit may be set at $0, meaning you cannot go over)
5) Carriers must inform customer at time of purchase of hard limit is available, and get customer approval if the hard limit option is declined. This approval must be separate from other documents the customer signs and sees (i.e., you cannot have a plan of "you cannot have a hard limit"). If customer doesn't decline but for some reason doesn't set a hard limit, it will be set at 2x monthly plan cost (e.g., if your plan is $50/month, your hard limit is $100).
I will allow carriers to upsell customers during any notification.
You basically want to balance the carrier's want of making money, with the customer's need to not get outrageous bills. I ask for acknowledgement to ensure the customer cannot claim they did not receive the notification. Customers that feel ultra-responsible can decline hard limits which gives explicit proof that customer knows what they're getting into. It's also said during the initial purchase so carriers cannot simply omit the hard limit, and if they do, it's 2x the plan amount.
Carriers seem to think that people can pay whatever they will charge, and that's simply not the case. There are probably lots of people who cannot handle their bill exceeding the nominal amount as well. I suppose the real question is why carriers don't try to be realistic and work with customers in some fashion to pre-emptively avoid bill shock.
Well, few reasons.
1) Merchants love it because the customer gets stiffed with the charges (you can't chargeback a merchant if it was done via 3DS (3D Secure, aka Verified by Visa and MasterCard's equivalent). I only do VBV on a merchant I know. Unknown merchants, I'd probably trust Paypal a bit more.
2) It seriously screws up with NoScript. I keep forgetting to enable the 3rd party site which usually results in screwing up the checkout process.
3) It makes it harder to do "one-click shopping". If you're a merchant that gets a lot of impulse buys, the more steps betwen "I want it" and "We got your order, it'll be shipped soon!" is more chances the user will cancel the order prior to completion. (And this is a very important point)
4) It's extremely insecure, and can offer a great way to phish. Heck, we've got previous Slashdot articles on the subject. Why "Verified by Visa" system is insecure and Net Shoppers Bullied into "Verified by Visa" program.
5) Forgetting your password can get your credit card locked out.
Quite honestly, 3DS is just another form of Wish-it-was two-factor security. It pretends to be more secure, but in reality it isn't.
There are two ways to do it properly - you could SMS people a password, but that screws with people like me who don't always carry their cellphone around, or perhaps build in an RSA key thingy inside the card itself. Chip cards (which have their own issues - really - the PIN's in the chip and the chip sends an "OK" or "Failed PIN" response - not any form of challenge-response packet to the bank, who should know your PIN, not your card) have powerful enough processors to do some RSA token like task. Given we can buy a calculator for under a dollar, there's no real reason why we can't have credit cards with two-factor support on them (and no PIN needs to be stored - the card will generate a code based on the entered PIN which the bank can validate).
Actually, it's not restricted to cinema. Anyone with a half-decent camera can do it. Still or video (especially since modern dSLRs support recording video). Heck, a surprising amount of video these days is captured on nothing more than "prosumer" style equipment (I think the season ender to House was recorded with a bunch of dSLRs).
You need a camera that lets you adjust aperature/zoom/focus manually to do it, but the tricks are well known, simple and anyone can do it. Heck, I think any photographer worth their salt knows these tricks when taking photos more for art than to capture a scene.
Actually, it's a bit simpler. The MBA just doesn't have enough space. The Core2Duo used in the MBA has an nVidia chipset, so you could get a decent GPU out of it. The MacBooks and MacBook Pros with the Core i3/i5/i7s have an Intel chipset, with the processor also having Intel graphics on it. This means Apple has to fit on a second nVidia chip onto the board in order to have better graphics capability (which is used by OS X for a lot of things - OpenCL, window compositing, accelleration, etc).
I'm sure Apple would've stuck an i3 into the MBA if they could, but the i3 CPU + Intel chipset + nVidia GPU just took too much space on the main board. So instead, they kept the old Core2Duo+nVidia chipset which saves a chip and gives you decent graphics still.
Or have we fallen in love with Intel graphics again? (I'm guessing Apple's last foray into playing with Intel graphics didn't go very well).
Actually, .NET CF (compact framework) is a reduced size version of the .NET framework - all the libraries etc. There's no "platform" for it - the .NET libraries are reduced in size through various means.
I have run apps I compiled using .NET CF on my desktop (after copying the requisite .NET CF libraries over from my ARM platform), and I have taken the exact same binaries and ran them on ARM, x86 (Windows CE), x86 (Windows XP), and MIPS. It's pretty neat to see it all just work - one binary. Was a command line app, too.
Actually, tube amps and vinyl sound better especially in the past decade and a half. Tubes have a much better overdrive handling characteristic than solid state transistors do. Overdrive a solidstate amp and it clips. And if you've dealt with overdriven inputs, you know clipping sounds horrible. Overdrive a tube amp and it distorts, but in a fashion that's more appealing to the human ear. For vinyl, it's less concrete, but mostly because mastering tends to be better as you don't want to do the dynamic range compression crap that you do on CDs - it sounds especially bad on vinyl, it costs real estate (i.e., the disc plays for less time) and can cause tracking issues if the grooves potentially overlap (that said, some vinyls, unfortunately, are mastered from the original CD. Bleh.).
Guitar amps especially because you want the distortion - and clipping is not a useful distortion. You can do it with sufficiently good equipment in the digital realm - if you attenuate the inputs to maybe 2/3rds the nominal value (you want overdrive, and overdriving tends to far exceed nominal) and sample at a high bit-depth (because you're starting from a reduced dynamic range already). And then digitally add on the distortion and gain stages (but not too much gain as you don't want it to clip on the output!).
Other than overdriven characteristics though, solid-state amps far exceed the quantitive specs of tube amps in all areas except one - power handling. Big power amps are often tube because they can handle the kilowatts far easier than solid state transistors can. But it's also the reason why people want all-digital audio paths from their sources to the speakers. It's a lot harder to have clipping in the digital realm unless the source audio was clipped to begin with. But if you use line-level analogs, it's possible that your source may output a signal that exceeds the input levels of the next stage, causing inadvertent clipping even though both are line-level. I had a DVD player that would do this to an older a/v receiver - using the DVD player caused the CLIP light to be lit almost constantly.
But later PSPs are now pretty tightly locked. After all, what ever happened to that PSP Go hack? It's completely useless right now, but have CFW and it could be a great way to play PSP games in a smaller formfactor.
Anyhow, Sony would either put out a locked down Android that's bacially only connected to the PSN store only, and attempts to root it would be met with firmware updates. Of course, since everything is tied to PSN, your phone is effectively a brick until you update. Heck, I'm sure Sony could get everything from Google except the marketplace app and neuter the ability to sideload apps.
Either that, or you do the OtherOS thing - Linux runs inside a hypervisor like it did on the PS2 and PS3 (until Sony took that feature away).
Still is. Some phones, like the Palm Pre, are "CDMA" only. (Scarequotes refer to the marketing term, not the technology).
But there are two reasons why Bell and Telus also have HSPA+ networks.
First, "CDMA" as we known it has no 4G solution. Thus, any "CDMA" carrier can either go WiMax (Sprint), or LTE (Verizon, and rest of world).
Secondly, and more importantly, Bell was a big sponsor of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Guess what phones power the majority of the world? Yes, GSM phones. Bell was paying for the Olympics, and all that juicy roaming revenue was going to go straight to... Rogers, their competitor. By rolling out a 3G network in advance, they can try to capture back some of that roaming revenue instead of giving it all away.
It's not that the CRTC forced them or anything - if it wasn't for the Olympics, they wouldn't bother with HSPA+, and just go straight to LTE.
Though I'm sure Rogers was hoping the iPhone would be "exclusive" to them for awhile and not suddenly have Bell and Telus also selling iPhones.
Carriers are just wising up to the fact that Motorola, HTC, etc., are really still their bitches when it comes to Android phones. As they figure out more and more of Android, the restrictions will be coming down the pipeline. This can be seen as each carrier pre-loads each Android phone with tons of crapware.
And AT&T's already restricting the ability to sideload apps. Sure you can use ADB and other commands to push apps still (they just removed the checkbox), but it's getting to the point where the phones are not only getting more and more locked down, but carriers are realizing that they don't have to be so open anymore.
Hell, didn't Verizon announce their own Android app store? Who's gonna bet that the Google Marketplace app suddenly disappears from Verizon phones?
I suppose it's pretty sad that it's only Apple to smack down the carriers - you can be sure AT&T among others wish that Apple would preload a bunch of their apps onto their phones already instead of having to fight it out in the App Store or include a brochure with every sale to say how to improve your AT&T iPhone experience by downloading their apps.