- people tend to look suspiciously to TOR and automatically assume it's for nefarious purpose. (You could be accused to be a drug dealer, just because of the tangled wires). In practice that means that content distribution networks such as cloudflare will always ask you to solve captcha before proceeding
Actually, it's not because of TOR. It's because - guess what - people abuse the heck out of tor.
CloudFlare doesn't give Tor users the captcha for nothing. They've just noted that traffic from a certain IP is generally bad traffic. If you set up your own Tor exit node, CloudFlare doesn't know if it's Tor - but they know your IP will be spewing garbage at their servers and all traffic from that IP will see the same captcha.
Basically, all the other Tor users are using it for nefarious purposes - i'm sure the first day you set up an exit node things work great. But soon enough someone will use your exit node for DDoS.
/. has supported Unicode for over a decade now (it was implemented as part of Slashdot.jp, for obvious reasons).
The problem has always been people who do nothing but use Unicode to abuse the site layout - there's a lot of Unicode codepoints out there and a lot of them have side effects that allow you to easily mess up websites. It's a sure sign of "Unicode is so easy let's add it" and then two days later the comment area is rendered useless because all the trolls abuse it.
And besides screwing up site layouts using the various text flow codepoints (e.g., RTL override) they can also add all the various character adornments that can render a single sentence into a huge block of black. And since most Unicode renderers do not properly handle hundreds of adornments, you end up with a black blob int he middle of the webpage./. took the easy way out and added a character whitelist - which only includes the ASCII table set. In theory they could add more characters to the whitelist as well, but they haven't.
A small charging generator does make sense for a stop and go vehicle.
And for dealerships who hate electric vehicles because they require much less maintenance and service. Remember, a dealership's income comes mostly from service - new car sales are basically sold very little above cost - maybe $1000 or so above invoice.
So as long as they can sell you an ICE engine with all the required servicing, they'll be happy to sell you oil changes and all the other stuff you need.
The mac mini used to have a reason to exist, back when it had four cores. That was the only time, though. Nobody is quite sure why Apple expected to sell the cost-reduced version.
At least that you can blame on Intel. The Mac Mini's motherboard (the "logic board" in Apple speak) is a single socket. There's only one chip Intel makes that shares a socket with both i5s and i7s, which lets you have a quad core i5, but only a dual core i7.
I still have an Altos 586. It's an 8086 box that runs Microsoft Xenix (from before they sold it off to create SCO). It's an 8086-based machine with 512k of RAM, a 10MB hard drive, and it has 5 RS-232 ports so five users can be logged in simultaneous on the Xenix system, which is a port of Series 3 UNIX that Microsoft produced. Yes, Microsoft was a UNIX software vendor back in the day.
Five concurrent users on an 8086 processor with 512K of RAM. From Microsoft. With dazzling hardware designed by Altos, of course.
Interestingly, MS-DOS installable device drivers were actually modeled after Xenix's device drivers - using a "strategy" and then an "interrupt" routine. Additional MS-DOS niceties (including use of file handles) were again inspired by Xenix.
MS-DOS 1.0 was an interesting beast - it was designed basically to handle CP/M programs, even though CP/M only existed on 8-bit machines at the time. There was at best an unreleased version of CP/M for 16-bit machines but nothing for the 8088.
So Microsoft made QDOS with CP/M interfaces because Microsoft saw that since you were going to port code anyways, Microsoft wrote a source code translator - you gave it your CP/M source code, and it spat out something that would run on the IBM PC PC-DOS/MS-DOS 1.0 because it emulated all the CP/M interfaces.
This was done as the anticipation was CP/M would remain the OS into the future - after all, CP/M for 16-bit was announced.
Of course, when that didn't happen, Microsoft created MS-DOS 2.0 with much better and more modern interfaces, including filehandles (instead of file control blocks) which allowed for hierarchical directories. CP/M basically died after people migrated from 8-bit machines.
That's the real problem. But micropayments has been something the Internet has needed since before the.com bust version 1.0. And heck, there have been dozens of micropayment schemes invented every year until the dotcom bust.
The problem always has been it is inefficient to send money around the world - the variety of banking laws and regulations has pretty much ensured that compliance costs will always be high enough that sending someone money will always be chewed up in fees.
No, cryptocurrency mining will not be the saviour, because you know what? The same thing that you hate ads for, cryptocurrency miners are able to do too. In the end, whether it's to show you another popup or mine currency, it's all javascript. And there's nothing stopping any mining script from tracking you all over the web, either. Right now, it's only a few sites that have it, so tracking isn't too useful, but when every site does it, it will be tracking you just like advertising does.
Hell, there's nothing other than a website's honor to not run both ads and miners on their page.
And anyone saying "as long as I'm not on battery"? Ha, you guys make me laugh. It'll start with websites being told they're on battery when they're not, and then ignoring the "on battery" status and running anyways when site revenues go down.
The Internet has always needed a micropayment system. So much so that dozens have probably been proposed daily until the first dot-com bust. But the variety of banking regulations has pretty much ensured that any amount under a dollar is inefficient and is chewed up in fees. And cryptocurrencies haven't really figured it out either - for they too have handling fees and often ridiculous waits for the actual transaction to happen. If it can take 3 days for a few bucks in Bitcoin to be locked down, imagine what would happen when you want to send 3 cents.
These IoT thingies have more power than the PC I had 15 years ago. And many of them do hardly anything with it. That is just... strange.
You can thank smartphones for that, which have driven down the cost of embedded processors significantly.
When I started, a 200MHz StrongARM processor was considered high end, and 400MHz processors were on the way. If you're lucky, they had 32MB of RAM. At the time, the average desktop was 500-800MHz with 128-512MB of RAM. You wouldn't dare run desktop applications on the embedded processor (even though they ran Linux and could) - it was just too painful.
Even when the iPhone came out, it ran a 400MHz processor with 128MB of RAM. But just 10 years later, we've got 2.5GHz processors with 4+GB of RAM on our phones. And we're pushing processing power that is starting to meet or exceed what low-end PCs are capable of.
Likewise, the embedded market has followed the same trend - if you want, those 200MHz processors are still available. But you can get a multi-core multi-GHz processor for basically the same price.
The two WORST SELLING Macs on Apple's lineup - the Mac Pro and Mac Mini.
And they always have been that way, before the Mac Pro became the trash can style computer - back when it was the super expandable computer with expansion slots and everything.
Neither of them are technically "dead" since Apple will sell you a new one that's years old and due for refreshes, but they're not stunning sellers that Apple finds worthy of putting more than the minimal amount of engineering effort into.
The Mac Pro does have a future - a tiny one for the tiny population of people who really need the power it has. The Mac Mini has always been more vague since other than a small desktop PC, it was always in a weird spot - did Apple position it as a living room computer driving the big screen TV, or as a regular desktop PC?
Anyhow, both have historically been poor sellers for several models now - both Mac Pro and Mac Mini owners have wondered for several generations of hardware - prior to the trash can design and even back wen Minis had optical drives.
Considering how smart the people running schools are, the "got caught" part is the only one that really surprised me.
Well, he only got caught because he got greedy. Had he just changed his grades by a few points, no one would've noticed.
Every knows if the D student started getting As. But if you change it from D to D+ or C-, not so much. Even a B could be plausible if the kid has been getting some tutoring
Also lithium fires can't be put out with water - it just makes them even worse. So the only fire suppression system in a plane that would work on them (other than a bucket of sand) would also suffocate the passengers.
Nope, not even starving the flame of oxygen works.
The problem is not just one cell venting (with flame). The deal is that reaction generates so much heat that it causes other cells to vent as well to become a runaway reaction. This brought down a UPS plane in 2001 when one battery vented and caused the rest of the batteries to vent as well from the heat . The fire suppression system even had a low pressure option - it vents the cargo hold outside, removing the oxygen. It iddn't put it out.
Incidentally, water helps only because it cools the cells back down - if you can keep the cells from heating up, you're fine.
Signing your signature on the line or your card was never about security.
It was about contracts.
Signing the back of your card means you agree with the Cardholder Agreement between you and your issuer. Merchants need to check the signature of the card because if it isn't signed, or signed incorrectly, it means the bearer (i.e., who holds the credit card) does NOT agree to the terms of the agreement and thus any transaction made can be null and void.
The cardholder agreement is that little piece of contract stating if you use the card, you agree to pay it off, interest rate, late payments, fraud, etc and all the other terms of the credit card. A merchant who does not verify your card can get screwed if you refuse to pay since you refused to agree with the agreement.
The slip that you sign is the same deal - it basically says you the bearer agree to pay the amount shown on the slip per your card holder agreement. If you do not agree, you do not sign the slip (this is especially true if the slip is incorrect - do NOT sign it). When doing a dispute, the credit card company looks at the slip and sees if it was signed. In the old days where they had the carbon paper slips and the slider machines that go ka-thunk as you used them, tearing the slip up has the same effect.
That's it. That's all the signatures meant.
And if you had "See ID" or something written on your card, the merchant is actually supposed to cut up the card - it is not a valid card (no on agreed to its use so its presentation means it must be destroyed as it's use is fraudulent).
With Chip+PIN, entering your PIN is basically agreeing to the charges, and since the PIN and everything is held securely inside the crypto processor on the smart card, it verifies you as the valid user.
And yes, this is why "Card Not Present" transactions are far more risky - you the merchant are basically relying on the good will of the customer to uphold their end of the agreement despite not actually having a signed agreement to do so.
It's that in China, SIM cards are highly controlled. The government basically wants a full blown profile on you from your name and date of birth, to your political leanings, whether you want beef or chicken in your sandwich and whether or not you know what the letters V, P and N could stand for.
Pass that, you get your SIM card and have cellphone service.
Problem is, it's a supply-managed system - the Chinese government controls cellphone access by controlling SIM card availability.
eSIMs or embedded UICCs (Universal Integrated Chip Carriers) are regular SIM cards, however they are provisioned remotely. Instead of physically installing a SIM card, the contents of a SIM card are transferred to the device (and in the case of keys, generated onboard and the other half given out).
Of course, this is a problem - since the government can't deny you a SIM card if you have an eSIM, and who's to say you can't fake your way into getting one if you don't have to present all your papers to get one?
orcing me to subscribe to 12 streaming services to get access to the content
So you would rather pay $150/month for ONE service that gets you the content you want?
Because that's the whole cable model - sell you lots of content prepackaged and people hated it. They want the ability to pick and choose their content ("a la carte"). But the flip side of it is having to pick up and join many separate services to get the content you want.
So either you want 12 services but the ability to finely pick what you want, or you one one big service you send one big check to every month to get the content.
Anyhow, you can bet the Kodi guys are also behind it. Piracy boxes are the thorn to Kodi - when they break, angry customers flood the Kodi forums (and promptly get banned). Plus, it hurts Kodi's image as a kick ass media player because people are associating Kodi with piracy.
yeah, so basically if that commercial software company don't send you any notice, you can safely assume you are secure, right?
Which is almost never the case.
The company in question loves sending lots of alerts out. Usually because they have a new version out, and hey, why not pay us $$$$ to upgrade?
This is especially true if there's an ongoing support contract - remember, your vendors are trying to get more money out of you and thus will blast you with all sorts of upgrades and freebies that you get because you paid for it. Got to make it look like you're getting something for all the money you're forking over. Especially if it will lead to opportunities to get even more money.
due to manufacturers and vendors choosing NOT to fix this for whatever reason (they simply don't care, not cost effective, not enough users to justify the effort, product no longer sold, product too old, product is EOL, etc, etc)....
In an ideal world, you'd patch both the client AND the AP. Doing so eliminates all the vulnerabilities.
But even if you can't, updating the AP already eliminates a whole class of vulnerabilities. Updating the client by itself, the same.
So the best results are had by updating everything. But even if you can't, updating the AP alone can help a lot.
So update what you can, and the older stuff, well, it was already vulnerable anyways from other flaws so I wouldn't worry too much about this.
My only question is where the UBNT stuff is... firmware 3.9 is supposed to fix it, but all I see for the Unifi stuff is 3.8.
iPods and iTunes saved the Mac Book lines and iMacs yet Timmy killed the iPods save the Touch and will soon kill iTunes because of all the free stuff like internet radio in preference for his subscriptions model.
Selective honesty is Mr. Timmy Cook's name.
First, the iPods really have not been selling. iPod sales have been down for the past 10 years. The iPhone killed the iPod. That has been true since the iPhone was released, and Apple's sales reports bear that out.
Second, the iPod wasn't killed. The iPod was end of lifed - most likely the PortalPlayer CPU that powers them was out of production years ago, and Apple finally exhausted all the leftover parts from the very last production run of them. There are simply no more parts available.
It's why the iPod Classic died years ago - Toshiba stopped making the hard drives required when it became obvious that SSDs were rapidly gaining in capacity. Today, you can upgrade your iPod Classic with flash-based storage for not very much money.
The iPod was an anomaly - it's clear the product was long obsolete, so Apple having it hang around was highly unusual. Perhaps Apple bought up all the spare parts without realizing just how long they would last.
The iPod Touch is around because it's not relying on an obsolete SoC to power it - it's u sing Apple's own SoC and Apple can dictate when they will stop production of that chip.
As for iTunes, well, Apple knows less and less people use it with their iPhones and stuff, so why maintain a piece of software that everyone hates and doesn't use anymore? Granted, they quietly released an update to 12.6.3 that keeps all the functionality, but less and less people were using iTunes anyways for downloading and backing up iPhones (even though it allows the most complete backups).
The manufacturing flaw he was referring to was the complete absence of any cooling fans. The cracks were the result of the high heat. As far as learning from his mistakes Jobs wasn't very good at that as he made the same mistake years earlier with the Apple///. His stubborn opposition to cooling fans doomed both.
No, it was intentionally designed to be without a fan. A fan would destroy the very reason for the G4 Cube to exist - as a art-like object.
It was designed to be a very pretty looking quiet machine. A fan would only ruin its quietness. It's why it has a huge cooling vent on the top - to act as a chimney and expel heat.
The problem was it could get so hot through use that it would crack the nice case, and the elevated temperatures were not good on the electronics.
It's a nice machine - very aesthetic, but that resulted in putting a lot of form over function which eventually killed the machine. Perhaps a small redesign to be a little bit bigger and thus have a much larger cooling chimney may have helped, though a lot of people decided it was a bit too forward looking and shunned the computer itself, so it sold poorly.
The network might be bulletproof, and from what I know it is well engineered, but if the a bank at the edge of the network has sloppy security practices, then conceivably fraudulent transactions can happen. With an analogy, If you write your paypal password on a post it note, and someone misuses it to do a payment, is paypal at fault?
Nope, but then again, the network wouldn't allow you to transfer funds from two unrelated banks - if a bank's poor security results in hackers having full access to their SWIFT account, then the network will reject any message that claims to be from anyone other than the bank in question.
So hackers may send the bank's money to their account, or from accounts hosted by that bank, but they can't cause another bank to transfer money over.
So if a bank doesn't want to pay for security, and they get hacked, well, it's their money being drained away
This is the thing about ads in apps. Those ads have to come from somewhere and you are putting a lot of trust in the person who's delivering those ads that those ads are trojans. Now you as a firmware company might also have your own ad agency (I know weird combination) as well, so basically people come to you and you design and deliver the ad. But if that's not you (more likely situation), then someone else designs the ad and sends it to the delivery network, the delivery network either sends it directly to the device or sends it on upstream to someone who aggregates these things to be sent out to the device. etc, etc, etc... Fun stuff.
The big difference about ads in apps and ads in the OS itself is at least ads in apps are limited by permissions granted to the main app itself. Sure there are plenty of ways to break out of the Android sandbox, but in general, that's why apps are sandboxed to begin with.
Ads in the main OS though can have full run of the OS, permissions be damned. It's why you can install apps without popping up the dialog (something in-app ads need to ask the user). From the looks of things, it looks like it ran with full system permissions, so the ads bascially had full root permissions to do whatever they wanted. Including maintaining a root session for themselves.
Seriously. Most of us have cores sitting idle. Instead of being abused / tracked / annoyed / occasionally infected by advertising, why not let sites do a small amount of mining while we visit?
What's the real difference? How do you know the miner script isn't doing tracking / infesting your PC with malware? The javascript behind it is exactly the same - whether it's annoying displaying an ad, or mining.
If you say it's because it's first party, remember advertising started out that way too - every site handled their own advertising. Then came along ad networks which made it easier for website creators to have ads. It's only a matter of time before mining becomes a network and all you have to do is join a mining network. Said mining network can also track you across the web like ads do, as well as potentially be infected with dodgy scripts that install all sorts of weird crap, like ads do.
Actually if Google has to pay out billions just to keep Apple from going to Bing, I'd say it's pretty decisive evidence AGAINST market dominance. Market dominating companies don't have to bribe retailers for shelf space.
Actually, they do.
First, retailers are adapting to an Amazon world, and you have to realize when you walk into the store, you are not the customer. The manufacturer is, and they paid for their product to be put on the rack in a certain way. It's obvious if you look for a tell-tale sign like an empty rack - no retailer would dare let a rack that could hold product be empty, but if the space was rented and retailer has no product that fits int that rack, it goes empty. (It's why Best Buy has had, for the longest time, a rack for PS Vita that had nothing but accessories, and the games were empty).
Second, Apple can choose more than just Bing. They could chose DuckDuckGo as the default provider. Or Apple could simply ask when it first starts up. Sometimes that money is less about ensuring dominance and more about putting competitors off the podium - if Apple were to display a selection choice, it would probably be alphabetically ordered, so Bing and DuckDuckGo will all appear ahead of Google search.
Third, retailers do not give space away - if they're renting out the racks, just because you're the market leader doesn't mean you get a rack for free. You still have to pay, you still have to supply product (retailer will re-order from you, so if you wish to keep them stocked, you fulfill their orders). But if you pay for a rack, you get a rack, even if someone else buys a whole aisle.
Bingo. All the companies involved in making SoCs will be looking to cut out the ARM licensing fee. ARM typically takes $1-10 million up front plus 1-2% per chip, so you can see how their customers would be eager to keep that for themselves.
So what kind of performance are we talking about? Are they equivalent to the latest and greatest (and thus most expensive licensing) ARMs? Or are we only running them at 25MHz on an FPGA? (And what kind of FPGA? Since there's a range from $10 FPGAs to $100,000 FPGAs).
Also important is cost - do you know why most TVs are smart? It's because the SoCs now are so fast that after the basic TV management software is put in, you're barely using 1% of it. The SoC is so cheap, you can choose between a 100MHz ARM TV SoC, or one that uses a mass produced smartphone chip code and get a quad core 1.5GHz SoC for less money.
Hell, even in the microcontroller space things can be screwy with the proliferation of microcontroller ARM chips. Nothing like coding up something with real 32-bit integers and stuff.
So other than niche open-source hardware laptops... is there a market?
Indeed. I think it's safe to assume three things: some are lying, some are honest, and we can't really distinguish between the two.
Here's the truth.
ALL VPN PROVIDERS LOG. All of them. They have to.
The question is how long they retain that log.
Why do they log? Easy - they need to maintain accounting information - after all, you can't log into a VPN service more than N times (N = dependent on provider - some allow one connection each per type - PPTP, OpenVPN, etc, others allow only one connection in total, others may allow two or more connections).. So obviously if you're logged in (hint: logged), there's a log entry in some database somewhere - you're logged into some VPN server.
If they don't log, they won't survive because you can buy one account and share it with all your friends.
Oh, and while you're on, they log you connection information - which server and for how long. Also, while you're logged in, your username and final VPN server IP is associated with each other.
MOST good providers will, upon disconnecting, delete that log entry, so there is no longer any association between you and the VPN IP address you were using.
Also, there is something called a "Real Time DMCA" - you can collect copyright notices in real time.
So here are the tips for using a VPN properly:
1) NEVER use any sort of "port forward" function on the VPN. There is nothing that will identify you quicker than a port forward that is now an association between your activity, your account, your computer and you. Sorry, but since a listening port is associated with a target user's PC (i.e., yours), this is a really good way to identify a user (real time DMCA).
2) NEVER use a server that isn't busy. Real Time DMCA notices do not have to be delivered if the VPN provider cannot positively identify a user. If there is more than one user on a VPN server, it is no longer practical to identify which user did the activity. The activity will include source and destination ports, so if you're rotating your connections quickly, then the identifiers will be stale. (Another reason to not use port forwarding)
3) ALWAYS reconnect periodically. Once a day at least - it helps you avoid identification because it will rotate your outgoing IP on a regular basis as well as reset your VPN provider's log. DMCA requests will fail if you're not connected when they arrive. If you're especially paranoid, reconnect hourly.
Indeed. The most cost effective innovations are incremental improvements to existing products. Sure, we should fund an occasional moonshot, but that is not where most R&D money should be spent.
Exactly. The problem with moonshots is twofold. First, you have to make the final objective achievable - a moonshot that no one believes is possible will attract the gullible, but rational actors will not ante up.
The other problem with a moonshot is marketing. It's easy to sell an incremental innovation because people have the product, and can see why doing X to it will make it better. But if you invent a completely new product, now you have to get people to figure out why they want it. Think about a personal computer in the 70s - the general public was not envisioning why they'd need to have one. Sure hobbyists can see the potential, but a general household? You'd have to sell them on why they'd want one, when no one else had one, not even schools or businesses. (It took VisiCalc to give purpose to a business computer).
Whereas, it's the 50s and you'd created the microwave. Why would people want it? Easy - it reheats food quickly - what took half an hour in the oven takes 5 minutes.
Perhaps that's the true reason why academic "innovations" in crowdfunding make less money is simple marketing - if people can't figure out why they'd want one, they won't support it.
For Samsung the number was sinful 7. For Apple it will be hateful 8.
But Apple forgot to copy Samsung's "exploding" feature. You end up with a phone split in two, not a phone split in two and setting fires to houses, cars, etc.
Typical Apple copying everything but the important bits.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's not because of TOR. It's because - guess what - people abuse the heck out of tor.
CloudFlare doesn't give Tor users the captcha for nothing. They've just noted that traffic from a certain IP is generally bad traffic. If you set up your own Tor exit node, CloudFlare doesn't know if it's Tor - but they know your IP will be spewing garbage at their servers and all traffic from that IP will see the same captcha.
Basically, all the other Tor users are using it for nefarious purposes - i'm sure the first day you set up an exit node things work great. But soon enough someone will use your exit node for DDoS.
The problem has always been people who do nothing but use Unicode to abuse the site layout - there's a lot of Unicode codepoints out there and a lot of them have side effects that allow you to easily mess up websites. It's a sure sign of "Unicode is so easy let's add it" and then two days later the comment area is rendered useless because all the trolls abuse it.
And besides screwing up site layouts using the various text flow codepoints (e.g., RTL override) they can also add all the various character adornments that can render a single sentence into a huge block of black. And since most Unicode renderers do not properly handle hundreds of adornments, you end up with a black blob int he middle of the webpage. /. took the easy way out and added a character whitelist - which only includes the ASCII table set. In theory they could add more characters to the whitelist as well, but they haven't.
And for dealerships who hate electric vehicles because they require much less maintenance and service. Remember, a dealership's income comes mostly from service - new car sales are basically sold very little above cost - maybe $1000 or so above invoice.
So as long as they can sell you an ICE engine with all the required servicing, they'll be happy to sell you oil changes and all the other stuff you need.
At least that you can blame on Intel. The Mac Mini's motherboard (the "logic board" in Apple speak) is a single socket. There's only one chip Intel makes that shares a socket with both i5s and i7s, which lets you have a quad core i5, but only a dual core i7.
Interestingly, MS-DOS installable device drivers were actually modeled after Xenix's device drivers - using a "strategy" and then an "interrupt" routine. Additional MS-DOS niceties (including use of file handles) were again inspired by Xenix.
MS-DOS 1.0 was an interesting beast - it was designed basically to handle CP/M programs, even though CP/M only existed on 8-bit machines at the time. There was at best an unreleased version of CP/M for 16-bit machines but nothing for the 8088.
So Microsoft made QDOS with CP/M interfaces because Microsoft saw that since you were going to port code anyways, Microsoft wrote a source code translator - you gave it your CP/M source code, and it spat out something that would run on the IBM PC PC-DOS/MS-DOS 1.0 because it emulated all the CP/M interfaces.
This was done as the anticipation was CP/M would remain the OS into the future - after all, CP/M for 16-bit was announced.
Of course, when that didn't happen, Microsoft created MS-DOS 2.0 with much better and more modern interfaces, including filehandles (instead of file control blocks) which allowed for hierarchical directories. CP/M basically died after people migrated from 8-bit machines.
That's the real problem. But micropayments has been something the Internet has needed since before the .com bust version 1.0. And heck, there have been dozens of micropayment schemes invented every year until the dotcom bust.
The problem always has been it is inefficient to send money around the world - the variety of banking laws and regulations has pretty much ensured that compliance costs will always be high enough that sending someone money will always be chewed up in fees.
No, cryptocurrency mining will not be the saviour, because you know what? The same thing that you hate ads for, cryptocurrency miners are able to do too. In the end, whether it's to show you another popup or mine currency, it's all javascript. And there's nothing stopping any mining script from tracking you all over the web, either. Right now, it's only a few sites that have it, so tracking isn't too useful, but when every site does it, it will be tracking you just like advertising does.
Hell, there's nothing other than a website's honor to not run both ads and miners on their page.
And anyone saying "as long as I'm not on battery"? Ha, you guys make me laugh. It'll start with websites being told they're on battery when they're not, and then ignoring the "on battery" status and running anyways when site revenues go down.
The Internet has always needed a micropayment system. So much so that dozens have probably been proposed daily until the first dot-com bust. But the variety of banking regulations has pretty much ensured that any amount under a dollar is inefficient and is chewed up in fees. And cryptocurrencies haven't really figured it out either - for they too have handling fees and often ridiculous waits for the actual transaction to happen. If it can take 3 days for a few bucks in Bitcoin to be locked down, imagine what would happen when you want to send 3 cents.
You can thank smartphones for that, which have driven down the cost of embedded processors significantly.
When I started, a 200MHz StrongARM processor was considered high end, and 400MHz processors were on the way. If you're lucky, they had 32MB of RAM. At the time, the average desktop was 500-800MHz with 128-512MB of RAM. You wouldn't dare run desktop applications on the embedded processor (even though they ran Linux and could) - it was just too painful.
Even when the iPhone came out, it ran a 400MHz processor with 128MB of RAM. But just 10 years later, we've got 2.5GHz processors with 4+GB of RAM on our phones. And we're pushing processing power that is starting to meet or exceed what low-end PCs are capable of.
Likewise, the embedded market has followed the same trend - if you want, those 200MHz processors are still available. But you can get a multi-core multi-GHz processor for basically the same price.
The two WORST SELLING Macs on Apple's lineup - the Mac Pro and Mac Mini.
And they always have been that way, before the Mac Pro became the trash can style computer - back when it was the super expandable computer with expansion slots and everything.
Neither of them are technically "dead" since Apple will sell you a new one that's years old and due for refreshes, but they're not stunning sellers that Apple finds worthy of putting more than the minimal amount of engineering effort into.
The Mac Pro does have a future - a tiny one for the tiny population of people who really need the power it has. The Mac Mini has always been more vague since other than a small desktop PC, it was always in a weird spot - did Apple position it as a living room computer driving the big screen TV, or as a regular desktop PC?
Anyhow, both have historically been poor sellers for several models now - both Mac Pro and Mac Mini owners have wondered for several generations of hardware - prior to the trash can design and even back wen Minis had optical drives.
Well, he only got caught because he got greedy. Had he just changed his grades by a few points, no one would've noticed.
Every knows if the D student started getting As. But if you change it from D to D+ or C-, not so much. Even a B could be plausible if the kid has been getting some tutoring
Nope, not even starving the flame of oxygen works.
The problem is not just one cell venting (with flame). The deal is that reaction generates so much heat that it causes other cells to vent as well to become a runaway reaction. This brought down a UPS plane in 2001 when one battery vented and caused the rest of the batteries to vent as well from the heat . The fire suppression system even had a low pressure option - it vents the cargo hold outside, removing the oxygen. It iddn't put it out.
Incidentally, water helps only because it cools the cells back down - if you can keep the cells from heating up, you're fine.
Signing your signature on the line or your card was never about security.
It was about contracts.
Signing the back of your card means you agree with the Cardholder Agreement between you and your issuer. Merchants need to check the signature of the card because if it isn't signed, or signed incorrectly, it means the bearer (i.e., who holds the credit card) does NOT agree to the terms of the agreement and thus any transaction made can be null and void.
The cardholder agreement is that little piece of contract stating if you use the card, you agree to pay it off, interest rate, late payments, fraud, etc and all the other terms of the credit card. A merchant who does not verify your card can get screwed if you refuse to pay since you refused to agree with the agreement.
The slip that you sign is the same deal - it basically says you the bearer agree to pay the amount shown on the slip per your card holder agreement. If you do not agree, you do not sign the slip (this is especially true if the slip is incorrect - do NOT sign it). When doing a dispute, the credit card company looks at the slip and sees if it was signed. In the old days where they had the carbon paper slips and the slider machines that go ka-thunk as you used them, tearing the slip up has the same effect.
That's it. That's all the signatures meant.
And if you had "See ID" or something written on your card, the merchant is actually supposed to cut up the card - it is not a valid card (no on agreed to its use so its presentation means it must be destroyed as it's use is fraudulent).
With Chip+PIN, entering your PIN is basically agreeing to the charges, and since the PIN and everything is held securely inside the crypto processor on the smart card, it verifies you as the valid user.
And yes, this is why "Card Not Present" transactions are far more risky - you the merchant are basically relying on the good will of the customer to uphold their end of the agreement despite not actually having a signed agreement to do so.
It's not tracking that's the problem.
It's that in China, SIM cards are highly controlled. The government basically wants a full blown profile on you from your name and date of birth, to your political leanings, whether you want beef or chicken in your sandwich and whether or not you know what the letters V, P and N could stand for.
Pass that, you get your SIM card and have cellphone service.
Problem is, it's a supply-managed system - the Chinese government controls cellphone access by controlling SIM card availability.
eSIMs or embedded UICCs (Universal Integrated Chip Carriers) are regular SIM cards, however they are provisioned remotely. Instead of physically installing a SIM card, the contents of a SIM card are transferred to the device (and in the case of keys, generated onboard and the other half given out).
Of course, this is a problem - since the government can't deny you a SIM card if you have an eSIM, and who's to say you can't fake your way into getting one if you don't have to present all your papers to get one?
So of course, China bans it
So you would rather pay $150/month for ONE service that gets you the content you want?
Because that's the whole cable model - sell you lots of content prepackaged and people hated it. They want the ability to pick and choose their content ("a la carte"). But the flip side of it is having to pick up and join many separate services to get the content you want.
So either you want 12 services but the ability to finely pick what you want, or you one one big service you send one big check to every month to get the content.
Anyhow, you can bet the Kodi guys are also behind it. Piracy boxes are the thorn to Kodi - when they break, angry customers flood the Kodi forums (and promptly get banned). Plus, it hurts Kodi's image as a kick ass media player because people are associating Kodi with piracy.
Which is almost never the case.
The company in question loves sending lots of alerts out. Usually because they have a new version out, and hey, why not pay us $$$$ to upgrade?
This is especially true if there's an ongoing support contract - remember, your vendors are trying to get more money out of you and thus will blast you with all sorts of upgrades and freebies that you get because you paid for it. Got to make it look like you're getting something for all the money you're forking over. Especially if it will lead to opportunities to get even more money.
In an ideal world, you'd patch both the client AND the AP. Doing so eliminates all the vulnerabilities.
But even if you can't, updating the AP already eliminates a whole class of vulnerabilities. Updating the client by itself, the same.
So the best results are had by updating everything. But even if you can't, updating the AP alone can help a lot.
So update what you can, and the older stuff, well, it was already vulnerable anyways from other flaws so I wouldn't worry too much about this.
My only question is where the UBNT stuff is... firmware 3.9 is supposed to fix it, but all I see for the Unifi stuff is 3.8.
First, the iPods really have not been selling. iPod sales have been down for the past 10 years. The iPhone killed the iPod. That has been true since the iPhone was released, and Apple's sales reports bear that out.
Second, the iPod wasn't killed. The iPod was end of lifed - most likely the PortalPlayer CPU that powers them was out of production years ago, and Apple finally exhausted all the leftover parts from the very last production run of them. There are simply no more parts available.
It's why the iPod Classic died years ago - Toshiba stopped making the hard drives required when it became obvious that SSDs were rapidly gaining in capacity. Today, you can upgrade your iPod Classic with flash-based storage for not very much money.
The iPod was an anomaly - it's clear the product was long obsolete, so Apple having it hang around was highly unusual. Perhaps Apple bought up all the spare parts without realizing just how long they would last.
The iPod Touch is around because it's not relying on an obsolete SoC to power it - it's u sing Apple's own SoC and Apple can dictate when they will stop production of that chip.
As for iTunes, well, Apple knows less and less people use it with their iPhones and stuff, so why maintain a piece of software that everyone hates and doesn't use anymore? Granted, they quietly released an update to 12.6.3 that keeps all the functionality, but less and less people were using iTunes anyways for downloading and backing up iPhones (even though it allows the most complete backups).
No, it was intentionally designed to be without a fan. A fan would destroy the very reason for the G4 Cube to exist - as a art-like object.
It was designed to be a very pretty looking quiet machine. A fan would only ruin its quietness. It's why it has a huge cooling vent on the top - to act as a chimney and expel heat.
The problem was it could get so hot through use that it would crack the nice case, and the elevated temperatures were not good on the electronics.
It's a nice machine - very aesthetic, but that resulted in putting a lot of form over function which eventually killed the machine. Perhaps a small redesign to be a little bit bigger and thus have a much larger cooling chimney may have helped, though a lot of people decided it was a bit too forward looking and shunned the computer itself, so it sold poorly.
Nope, but then again, the network wouldn't allow you to transfer funds from two unrelated banks - if a bank's poor security results in hackers having full access to their SWIFT account, then the network will reject any message that claims to be from anyone other than the bank in question.
So hackers may send the bank's money to their account, or from accounts hosted by that bank, but they can't cause another bank to transfer money over.
So if a bank doesn't want to pay for security, and they get hacked, well, it's their money being drained away
The big difference about ads in apps and ads in the OS itself is at least ads in apps are limited by permissions granted to the main app itself. Sure there are plenty of ways to break out of the Android sandbox, but in general, that's why apps are sandboxed to begin with.
Ads in the main OS though can have full run of the OS, permissions be damned. It's why you can install apps without popping up the dialog (something in-app ads need to ask the user). From the looks of things, it looks like it ran with full system permissions, so the ads bascially had full root permissions to do whatever they wanted. Including maintaining a root session for themselves.
What's the real difference? How do you know the miner script isn't doing tracking / infesting your PC with malware? The javascript behind it is exactly the same - whether it's annoying displaying an ad, or mining.
If you say it's because it's first party, remember advertising started out that way too - every site handled their own advertising. Then came along ad networks which made it easier for website creators to have ads. It's only a matter of time before mining becomes a network and all you have to do is join a mining network. Said mining network can also track you across the web like ads do, as well as potentially be infected with dodgy scripts that install all sorts of weird crap, like ads do.
Actually, they do.
First, retailers are adapting to an Amazon world, and you have to realize when you walk into the store, you are not the customer. The manufacturer is, and they paid for their product to be put on the rack in a certain way. It's obvious if you look for a tell-tale sign like an empty rack - no retailer would dare let a rack that could hold product be empty, but if the space was rented and retailer has no product that fits int that rack, it goes empty. (It's why Best Buy has had, for the longest time, a rack for PS Vita that had nothing but accessories, and the games were empty).
Second, Apple can choose more than just Bing. They could chose DuckDuckGo as the default provider. Or Apple could simply ask when it first starts up. Sometimes that money is less about ensuring dominance and more about putting competitors off the podium - if Apple were to display a selection choice, it would probably be alphabetically ordered, so Bing and DuckDuckGo will all appear ahead of Google search.
Third, retailers do not give space away - if they're renting out the racks, just because you're the market leader doesn't mean you get a rack for free. You still have to pay, you still have to supply product (retailer will re-order from you, so if you wish to keep them stocked, you fulfill their orders). But if you pay for a rack, you get a rack, even if someone else buys a whole aisle.
So what kind of performance are we talking about? Are they equivalent to the latest and greatest (and thus most expensive licensing) ARMs? Or are we only running them at 25MHz on an FPGA? (And what kind of FPGA? Since there's a range from $10 FPGAs to $100,000 FPGAs).
Also important is cost - do you know why most TVs are smart? It's because the SoCs now are so fast that after the basic TV management software is put in, you're barely using 1% of it. The SoC is so cheap, you can choose between a 100MHz ARM TV SoC, or one that uses a mass produced smartphone chip code and get a quad core 1.5GHz SoC for less money.
Hell, even in the microcontroller space things can be screwy with the proliferation of microcontroller ARM chips. Nothing like coding up something with real 32-bit integers and stuff.
So other than niche open-source hardware laptops... is there a market?
Here's the truth.
ALL VPN PROVIDERS LOG. All of them. They have to.
The question is how long they retain that log.
Why do they log? Easy - they need to maintain accounting information - after all, you can't log into a VPN service more than N times (N = dependent on provider - some allow one connection each per type - PPTP, OpenVPN, etc, others allow only one connection in total, others may allow two or more connections).. So obviously if you're logged in (hint: logged), there's a log entry in some database somewhere - you're logged into some VPN server.
If they don't log, they won't survive because you can buy one account and share it with all your friends.
Oh, and while you're on, they log you connection information - which server and for how long. Also, while you're logged in, your username and final VPN server IP is associated with each other.
MOST good providers will, upon disconnecting, delete that log entry, so there is no longer any association between you and the VPN IP address you were using.
Also, there is something called a "Real Time DMCA" - you can collect copyright notices in real time.
So here are the tips for using a VPN properly:
1) NEVER use any sort of "port forward" function on the VPN. There is nothing that will identify you quicker than a port forward that is now an association between your activity, your account, your computer and you. Sorry, but since a listening port is associated with a target user's PC (i.e., yours), this is a really good way to identify a user (real time DMCA).
2) NEVER use a server that isn't busy. Real Time DMCA notices do not have to be delivered if the VPN provider cannot positively identify a user. If there is more than one user on a VPN server, it is no longer practical to identify which user did the activity. The activity will include source and destination ports, so if you're rotating your connections quickly, then the identifiers will be stale. (Another reason to not use port forwarding)
3) ALWAYS reconnect periodically. Once a day at least - it helps you avoid identification because it will rotate your outgoing IP on a regular basis as well as reset your VPN provider's log. DMCA requests will fail if you're not connected when they arrive. If you're especially paranoid, reconnect hourly.
Exactly. The problem with moonshots is twofold. First, you have to make the final objective achievable - a moonshot that no one believes is possible will attract the gullible, but rational actors will not ante up.
The other problem with a moonshot is marketing. It's easy to sell an incremental innovation because people have the product, and can see why doing X to it will make it better. But if you invent a completely new product, now you have to get people to figure out why they want it. Think about a personal computer in the 70s - the general public was not envisioning why they'd need to have one. Sure hobbyists can see the potential, but a general household? You'd have to sell them on why they'd want one, when no one else had one, not even schools or businesses. (It took VisiCalc to give purpose to a business computer).
Whereas, it's the 50s and you'd created the microwave. Why would people want it? Easy - it reheats food quickly - what took half an hour in the oven takes 5 minutes.
Perhaps that's the true reason why academic "innovations" in crowdfunding make less money is simple marketing - if people can't figure out why they'd want one, they won't support it.
But Apple forgot to copy Samsung's "exploding" feature. You end up with a phone split in two, not a phone split in two and setting fires to houses, cars, etc.
Typical Apple copying everything but the important bits.
(Yes, that is sarcasm).