Yeah, I got a bunch of these in the span of week. First time I was curious, but I decided to wait. Of course, two days later, I got another one. Two days after that, two more.
It had a very old password in it, not even sure when I last used it. It was also a really old email address, something I haven't used in nearly two decades now, at least for logins and passwords.
Something interesting I saw also - when I searched fro a local Discount Tire, my iPhone revealed the correct location exactly, as did OpenStreetMaps (which you'd expect). But from Duck Duck Go, it was located on the wrong side of the service street it lies along... it kind of seems like maybe Duck Duck Go is just handing off a GPS location and not leaning on Apple Maps understanding of where businesses are really located.
And that's a good thing - it reduces the amount of data that Apple is getting. While Apple is about privacy, why not take the extra step to make sure Apple isn't getting useful information?
Sure the location will end up wrong from time to time, but it means Apple only gets coordinates rather than information that was searched for. And even if Apple promises to keep it secret, why take the chance? Just give a GPS coordinate and let Apple try to figure out which of a dozen businesses a user searched for.
No need to provide more information than needed, after all.
I don't want autoplay anything in my browser. Especially audio and video. I use a plugin that aims to disable a lot of autoplay, but it doesn't always work. Why not have a browser flag that tells sites "I don't want autoplaying multimedia content"? I know crappy sites with video ads would ignore it, but more legitimate sites could respect it, potentially allowing them to save on bandwidth by not sending content to me that I don't want. I know I can stop it all by turning off JS entirely, but it's so integrated into so much of the web now that even simple sites barely work without it.
Why make it a plugin? The browser can do it already. All it needs to do is before it starts a video playing, to ensure that the request to play comes from the UI - not a javascript command or anything else.
This is HTML video we're talking about - it's not like the browser doesn't have come control over its playback.
It's not even a new technique - IE's "popup" blocker worked in the same fashion - if you attempted to create a new window, IE looks back to see if a UI operation (click, etc) caused it (and only within a limited stack - no saving the click to pop up later - you pop up only if the user clicks). It's why popups only generally react to clicks - no longer do you load a page and have popups appear suddenly.
Another fun one was having a website pop up an alert box. Scam sites used this to put up dialogs you couldn't dismiss because they would pop up, you'd close it, and they'd pop up before you could close the window. So now every browser gives you the option of ignoring further alerts.
Or maybe invest more in plasma wave linear accelerators which can potentially be much smaller.
Wouldn't work - wrong kind of particle accelerator.
There are two kinds of particle accelerators, and you use one or the other depending on the science you want to do.
The LHC is basically a particle accelerator - you take two particles (consisting of multiple quarks) and slam them into each other. This generates lots of collisions, and the quarks smashing into each other generate all sorts of new particles. As you can see, an accelerator like the LHC is used to perform "new science" - to discover what can only be done by colliding lots of random quarks and particles together to see what new forms of particles you get. This works because the particles you collide aren't uniform (a neutron or proton is not a homogeneous thing - and they can have three or four quarks). Thus when they collide, you're smashing things with varying energy and composition, to form new things of varying composition. Thus when trying to discover the undiscovered, like the Higgs boson, you need this kind of collider - it generates the random variations and energies you need to discover.
The other type of collider uses electrons, which are very precise. You use these colliders to perform in-depth science - if you're probing stuff, the fact that you can control the electron beam precisely is why it's good - the energy distribution is highly controlled so you can probe the properties of whatever you're exploring. If you find a way to reliably make Higgs, for example. you can use this kind of collider to probe its properties. And since they are only accelerating really light electrons, they can be much smaller to get them to higher energy levels. Accelerators like the LHC have to accelerate heavy particles by comparison so it takes a lot more energy and time.
...why anyone would want to use biometric passcodes to unlock anything so private as a cell phone is today.
I know, most people don't seem to value privacy, but if you have any at all, doing biometric should be a no go from the start.
Because passwords are inconvenient. You unlock your phone dozens or hundreds of times a day. It was discovered a PIN (a simple 4 digit PIN) made it so inconvenient that people wouldn't bother. Sure they set it up, but after a few days of constant entry, they disable it. This lead to something like 80% of all phones not having a PIN - just swipe to unlock.
With biometrics, you can have your complex PIN and most of the time you're using the phone it doesn't get in the way - your phone unlocks just before you use it. Making life convenient, and protecting the data on your phone because now it's protected by a PIN. So your use of the phone is like before, but now it's not unlocked - it's protected. I believe Apple discovered after TouchID that 90% of phones were now locked with a PIN or password (it's mandatory to set something up when using TouchID).
You tell me - which is more secure - that 80% of people were walking around with phones that were not protected, or 90% of phones that had a PIN or password, but had biometrics?
Security is about tradeoffs. You can secure something to the level of Fort Knox, and for some things, that might be appropriate. But other things it gets in the way.
Let's say you're testing an OS update and in order to test it, you must sign the update using an offline airgapped server. So you build it, copy the build to a thumbdrive, go to the machine, get it signed, walk back to your desk, and test it. Only to find a bug, which you fix, build, sign, and test. After a few trips of this (especially if said server requires a walk), well, you'll find ways around it so you don't have to sign the build before your test.
The mechanism they describe is also classical physics.
You can use classical physics to do quantum stuff.
Quantum Key Distribution uses polarized light, and one interesting property is that unless the polarizes are orthogonal to each other, you're going to have a non-zero probability of light going through. So what you do at the sender end is send pulses of polarized light at random polarizations (say, 0 degrees, 0 degrees, 90 degrees, 45 degrees, 135 degrees, etc). Of course, the pulses are coded to represent your bit pattern, so a pulse could mean a 1, no pulse could mean 0.
At the receiver end, the receiver picks a random polarization and measures the output - either light, or no light. It doesn't matter which.
What happens after sending a copious amount of data is the two ends then compare their polarizer settings and discard the bits where the polarizer setting did not match (e.g., sender used 0 degrees, receiver used 45 degrees). Most of the data will be discarded, but you'll have plenty more where by chance both sender and receiver picked the same polarizer.
You can then do a quick hash to compare the final results - the two hashes should be the same.
Now what happens if someone taps the line? Well, they don't know the polarizer settings, so at best they're going to guess. But the act of inserting the eavesdropping polarizer into the bitstream changes the polarization of the light! If the sender uses 0 degrees, and the eavesdropper uses 45 degrees, light will have a 50% chance of going through the polarizer. But even stranger, at the receiver, if they use a 0 degree polarizer or a 90 degree polarizer, light again will have a 50% chance of getting through. So even though the sender and receiver may both use a 0 degree polarizer, the eavesdropper using a 45 degree polarizer has changed the end result. Maybe the eavesdropper gets lucky, maybe not.
Doing it for a large number of bits and you'll detect the line tap too easily because of it.
If you want to see this in action, you can do the standard two polarizer test, set them orthogonally to each other (so the two polarizers let no light through). Now add a third polarizer AFTER than two polarizers and oddly, you'll get light going through! It doesn't have to be in the middle of the polarizer stack - just the act of the third polarizer interacts with the other two such that some light now goes through where it didn't before makes things extra spooky.
It's a pretty good editor considering it works fairly flawlessly on all operating systems. The UI visualizers have gotten pretty good too, considering they also work on all operating systems.
It should, since it's really just a modified version of IntelliJ IDE which has been around long enough. Between IntelliJ and Eclipse, those two IDEs have pretty much been adopted as the development environments for a ton of embedded stuff, because they're easy to adapt, provide all the editor niceties you expect, and are multiplatform, so rather than back in the old days of having to develop your own or hope to license something like Green Hills environments, you can get a full featured environment for free.
I will admit though that Android Studio/IntelliJ does feel a lot more polished and integrated than the Eclipse based ones. As someone who routinely works on the Android PDK (the actual Android OS itself), I had to use Android studio to develop some test and library code. It handled all the icky bits for me (though it could use help on creating the JNI bindings I needed - it was possible but wasn't as intuitive as everything else).
Let them do it. I'll vote with my wallet. I'm subscribed to Netflix and Prime (prime more for shipping than videos, but I occasionally watch things I find on there). And CuriosityStream but that's like $3 per month.
That's all I'm subscribing to. If another competitor comes along that offers GENERAL content that's better than Netflix I might would one day switch from one to the other, but I'm not subscribing to a separate service for every single media company.
Trust me, if enough of these new services fail, they'll go back to looking at licensing their content to a third party streaming service rather than doing it themselves.
This is actually in effect A La Carte. You remember the movement to get cable to "unbundle" channels so you don't have to pay $5/month to get a bunch of channels.
Well, streaming services are now the same - instead of paying one price for one service with a bunch of channels, you're going to pay a dozen services to get a dozen channels.
And now that it's happening, you want to go back to the "bundling" that happened with cable just because you don't want to subscribe to a dozen services?
Pushing a button in a screenless device does not show the current price of the item you pretend to buy, which may differ from the price it used to be when you acquired the button. And if you do not have elephant memory, you do not even remember the original price.
Seems like a fair ruling to me.
And quantity, too.
The dash buttons don't say anything about quantity or price. You may have ordered a 24-pack of paper towels for $10 and got the button, but who's to say that the next time you push it, it's not a 24-pack for $15 (you bought it on sale, which happens often enough)? Or even more dastardly, it's 12 for $10 (or more likely, a 20 pack).
Same with the other stuff - it's all stuff you use like laundry detergent and such, and the stuff comes in varying quantity and pricing.
Hell, I don't know what happens if it out of stock - maybe you only want the 24 pack and if you run out to just wait rather than they send you a 12 pack.
As I recall, Mythbusters did a test of the effect of sounds on plants. When their data surprisingly DID clearly show an effect, they reminded viewers that their experiment wasn't rigorously scientific, and the results could have been caused by some experimental error. It was pretty clear they were not expecting that result, and didn't quite believe it.
You have to remember that most science is not done by "Eureka!", but instead happens with "That's odd...".
Thus an unexpected result could mean poor scientific controls invalidate the results, or it could be the basis of further study. Either way it generally means trying to reproduce the results to see whether it can be repeated.
Quite likely what happened is Jamie and Adam wrote up a paper and submitted it at least to a university for further study. It can happen for the oddest things as well. You can be producing a video for YouTube only to make a scientific breakthrough. Science happens.
If this is powerful enough to damage a CMOS/CCD sensor then it is most certainly also doing damage to biological tissue in eyeballs.
If this is doing "thermal damage" to CMOS/CCDs, essentially chunks of glass, then it is doing more damage to biological tissues.
It depends on the laser. Common ones used for LIDAR is 800nm and 1550nm. 800nm can injure the eye, so its use in LIDARs and such where it might hit an eye accidentally mean its power limited to prevent damage.
The thing with 1550nm is that it can't make it to the retina - the fluid in the eyeball is opaque to light at 1550nm, so the power limits are higher because it takes a lot more power to damage the eye when you have to go through the eyeball liquid first (and it's a lot of water so it will take a fair amount of energy before you actually cause real damage).
Of course, camera sensors aren't filled with eyeball fluid and thus the full power of the laser will be able to destroy the sensitive pixels in the array.
The longer the government shutdown lasts, the more this sounds like slavery. I mean not quite, because ostensibly air traffic controllers could quit and become baristas at Starbucks or whatever (assuming the government does not compel them to not do so), but pretty close.
Particularly appalling is the fact that during the shutdown, all vacations are cancelled, and anyone on vacation is required to immediately terminate that vacation and return to work (because after all, otherwise everyone essential would take vacations), creating pretty significant hardship, particularly given that it happened during the Christmas holiday. I'm pretty sure if I worked for the federal government, I'd have said, "Screw you. I quit," and I'm not even a millennial. I can't imagine how they didn't have an absolute exodus.
Well, most federal workers are off, just off. Unpaid leave, effectively (for now). There are however about 400,000 workers deemed "essential" to the functioning of the country, including ATC, TSA and other workers who are forced to work without pay.
What's happening now is that those workers are basically calling in sick - because they have to attend to a second job to get some money flowing in.
And imagine how much worse it is for those in a highly stressful job (Air Traffic Controller ranks in the top 10, if not #1 most stressful job). Now you have the added stress of working for free and worrying about the mortgage, food, etc. This isn't good.
TSA agents are similar - they aren't highly paid people (about $30K or so annually), and now have to work long hours with no pay dealing with an increasingly irate public.
And now half your coworkers call in sick because they need some money.
The economy will grind to a halt - the highly efficient air transport system cannot sustain such pressure. Already you see some of the effects - long lineups at security, for example. But you'll see it worse in the air because stressed out controllers can't do anything to reduce their stress, other than to hold air traffic back. So instead of being able to have an aircraft take off and land every minute or so, they will be forced to slow down the rate - one aircraft every couple of minutes halves the airport throughput, but it will become a necessity in order to lower their stress. Ditto for increased spacing between aircraft so a burned out controller will have more time to think and process. This will lead to inevitable delays.
Farmers are missing their subsidies as well, which may not matter to you, but they need the money to buy their supplies on time so they can plant on time.
Of course, one wonders why they don't just give him his wall, and pay for it with a new "wall tax" that basically reverses the big tax cut that was given. He gets his wall, the tax cuts are effectively rescinded and you get to nail supporters with a new tax to pay for it.
Unlikely because it never billed itself as "Choose your own Adventure".
And there are so many different ways around the trademark, you don't actually have to use the phrase "Choose your own adventure" at all. "Interactive Movie" or "Choose what happens" or "Make your choice" are things you could use.
Chooseco didn't go after the concept of a branching storyline, just a trademark.
It should be noted that they're probably branching out - they did release a nice board game a few months back. But again, it's not the concept, but the trademark.
You used to see this with black neighborhoods unable to get mortgages because of their zip code. When you put numbers into a database without regard to what comes out you can end up with crap like this.
Actually that's because the law was set up that way - if you were white, congratulations you could get a mortgage, but if you were black, too bad, loan denied.
It was a technique known as "redlining" - be white and live in a nice white suburb, great!
The unfortunate thing is its effects are still felt today.
...from house/white brands that you find in supermarkets and stores around the world?
Say, Kirkland cashews and batteries, Win-Dixie bread and cleaning wipes, Kennmore appliances. And many more brands in europe, from retailers as diverse as Carrefour, aldi and "El corte ingles"
All big retail chains have white/house brands that compete with all the other brands. And all retailers use their retail/POS data to know what items move and which one would benefit them most if they decided to enter with a white brand...
So? what's different in this case?
Because it doesn't take much for Amazon to just returning a list of products, to returning a list of products, ordered by Amazon house brands first. Amazon's search results are like Google's - being on the first page matters, a lot. So if Amazon is giving preferential treatment to Amazon's own house brands (and there are a lot of them, AmazonBasics is just a small player) it may not be giving a fair shot to competitors.
And people may buy from those brands, not knowing that the results of the first page actually are all Amazon-owned brands.
Google was fined for doing this - putting their own services higher in the search results.
These "patches"are getting to be almost as complex as the feature updates. Why would security updates be changing so much? Even mitigating a complex attack shouldn't require a registry hack to fix broken functionality.
Looks like Home and Pro users are guinea pigs for more than just the semi annual updates now. How did this even make it out of testing?
Windows is a complex tangled mess of code. A lot of it has to do with a lot of backwards compatibility. including backwards compatibility to things that they shouldn't be making compatible (e.g., private interfaces).
Some companies, like Apple, give you a "tough luck" attitude if you use private interfaces. It's why software breaks between OS revisions, and even between OS updates - if your program is digging deep within the OS and making calls it shouldn't, there you go. Though at times, Apple has broken published interfaces - mostly because the documentation said one thing, and API did another, and Apple fixed the bug so the API matches the documentation, breaking every app calling that API since they worked around the bug.
Microsoft chooses not to do this (since it would mean things would break constantly - it's shocking the number of shortcuts developers make). The problem is, if they change a private API, there's no knowing what would break. Sure, they test against reasonable configurations, but if some network driver decided it needed to dig deep and now Microsoft patches that API, it would break.
According to TFA, this was caused by stolen devices being in areas without a cell signal, and falling back on WiFi access point geolocation. Further, the area in question has very few access points, so phones can potentially pick up these residential access points from thousands of feet away. Then they are geolocated to the exact position of the access point.
A solution is to disable SSID on your home router(s) so that these data-grabbing sniffers won't see it and try to geolocate off of it.
No, this was the result of bad IP geolocation information. Basically the guy's house happened to be where they said "South Africa" was because that's the best area they could get for an IP.
Anyhow, WiFi geolocation (more accurate than GPS, actually) doesn't care about SSID. It only uses MAC addresses that are transmitted in the beacon packets. All any device has to do is switch channels and listen to capture the AP MAC addresses and signal strength. Send that information to Google and you'll get back a pretty good location. Same goes for cell towers - the modem will scan for available cell towers, note their IDs (this includes all cell towers in all bands it can receive, including ones that you don't have service for) and do the same thing.
The problem is the devices last pinged some tracker from an IP and that was last that device was heard of, and that IP had only country level resolution.
(The US database of countries contains latitudes and longitudes that are often returned when you look up a country to get a specific location, and a lot of these IP geolocation companies use it without realizing the radius of uncertainty is "country" and not "city block").
There's a rather notable tidbit I didn't see in this article that I saw from another: "Alienware is using its proprietary Dell Graphics Form Factor (DGFF) cards for GPUs in the Area-51m, and since neither Nvidia nor AMD has promised that theyâ(TM)ll make future chips compatible with that format, Alienware canâ(TM)t promise future upgrades either."
Not to mention there WAS an interchangable GPU formfactor out there - it's called MXM. It's designed for laptops and both nVidia and AMD supported it, as did a few laptop manufacturers at the time (including Dell).
Instead, it just died because no one used it in a while.
So to me, this looks like either Bell severely misunderstood Google's and Facebook's business model, or they are hoping their customers are dumb and gullible enough to actually fall for this "humble proposal" of theirs.
My vote is on the latter.
It's Bell. That's more than enough.
In Canada, there's a telecommunications ombudsman, and let's just say Bell leads the pack in complaints by a WIDE margin.
As in Bell gets over 4700 complaints, while Rogers follows Bell with nearly 1500 complaints. Telus gets nearly 900.
Hell, we had Bell as our provider of business internet and telephone, and we just switched to Telus for same. Not only does the fractional T1 for phones cost MUCH less money, but the internet got upgraded from 100Mbps to gigabit, for the same price we were playing. And we've had far fewer issues - especially with things like billing.
And it wasn't like we didn't give Bell a chance - they offered us gigabit internet as well for the same price. Except that after signing the contract, Bell stalled and stalled and stalled, and we withdrew. We waited 6 months for Bell to sign before we gave up on waiting. Within a month, Telus had switched out the phone lines to their exchanges, and within 2 months the internet was set up (there were a few hiccups with the mounting of their equipment - we didn't provide a mount to their specifications which delayed things).
Sadly, Bell and Bad Customer Service just go together.
If China wants to do something that's perfectly legal for them, US law doesn't "trump" it, even if that happens to be US president's name.
Depends on the technology licenses. If that equipment contained any US export controlled technology, then yes heads will roll.
After all, ZTE was basically given the death sentence by being barred from buying US technology for re-selling the technology to restricted countries. At least, until the President was handed some half billion dollars of "investment" and China granting them rare and valuable trademark protection. Not just one, but several more later on.
Does it still have "ME" ? If so can it be fully disabled ? If disabled can it be validated ?
If not, "Thanks but no thanks"
Every one has ME. Even the disabled ones still require ME.
ME is required to boot the processor (it's not easy to boot modern complex processors with variables clocks and power sources.
The "ME disabled" firmware simply does enough to boot the processor up and halts, so you lose functionality like dynamic voltage and frequency selection (DVFS), important for mobile processors, as well as the ability to sleep and standby the CPU. (Technically you also lose the ability to turn off the CPU, but that's easily worked around since turning off the PC works)
If you are not offering a free product, you are just asking me to do pay for everything to test a product. My time is not free either, and you asking for me and my company to commit to an unknown product. You can offer it for free while we try to see if we can get it work.
The problem with free trials is they're never long enough - a week, a month? Especially something like this where it may not go down for a while.
Maybe the thing is to offer a free month of monitoring at which point unlimited messages or notifications can be sent, then after that month (this is to get it integrated in your systems), you get N notifications for free, however long it takes with emails reminding you you're still on the plan and how many free notifications you have left before you should subscribe. After all, if you have it monitoring a website, and your website is reliable, you may never actually get a chance to test it in reality in a month.
This reminds me of the situation with Appleâ(TM)s Time Machine network backups - they allowed third-party support, then eventually killed off the Airport line of routers (which had Time Machine support baked in).
If Apple is loosening the reins on its AirPlay streaming, it makes me wonder if theyâ(TM)re planning to kill off the Apple TV soon.
They allowed third-party support for ages - most NAS devices for years have support for Time Machine and this was not a new thing. Apple only cancelled their Airports because the home router space is becoming much too crowded - why spend $200 on an Apple when a Netgear supporting the latest and greatest can be had for $150?
It's why Apple existed the monitor business as well - plenty of companies making really decent monitors for half of what an Apple monitor costs basically means there's no justification to buy an Apple monitor, and the fact that monitors are pretty much commodities now means Apple can't really innovate or improve in the area. An Apple 30" monitor was great back in the day when everyone was stuck with 15" and 17" monitors, but with 24" 1080p monitors becoming ultra common and 28" 4K monitors are practically everywhere, there's no room for Apple to compete.
For the AppleTV, AirPlay was something Apple licensed ages ago - practically all networked AV receivers support it today, and many new ones support the latest AirPlay2 protocol.
But more importantly, the AppleTV is working in a space that is under-developed. As long as Apple feels they can bring innovation into it, the AppleTV will be around. And given the primary competition is Roku, there's still plenty they can do.
Since you can't sideload on Apple products, you can only install Apple approved encryption which is worthless if you are trying to not trust Apple.
You can sideload in iOS since iOS 8 - nearly 4 years ago.
Sure you need a Mac, and Apple requires you to compile the code yourself, but there is a very healthy collection of apps that Apple never approves (all open-source of course).
More dodgy sites will let you sideload any app from MacOS and Windows (typically used to install pirated apps).
Sideloading has been available and accessible for years now.
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Yeah, I got a bunch of these in the span of week. First time I was curious, but I decided to wait. Of course, two days later, I got another one. Two days after that, two more.
It had a very old password in it, not even sure when I last used it. It was also a really old email address, something I haven't used in nearly two decades now, at least for logins and passwords.
And that's a good thing - it reduces the amount of data that Apple is getting. While Apple is about privacy, why not take the extra step to make sure Apple isn't getting useful information?
Sure the location will end up wrong from time to time, but it means Apple only gets coordinates rather than information that was searched for. And even if Apple promises to keep it secret, why take the chance? Just give a GPS coordinate and let Apple try to figure out which of a dozen businesses a user searched for.
No need to provide more information than needed, after all.
Why make it a plugin? The browser can do it already. All it needs to do is before it starts a video playing, to ensure that the request to play comes from the UI - not a javascript command or anything else.
This is HTML video we're talking about - it's not like the browser doesn't have come control over its playback.
It's not even a new technique - IE's "popup" blocker worked in the same fashion - if you attempted to create a new window, IE looks back to see if a UI operation (click, etc) caused it (and only within a limited stack - no saving the click to pop up later - you pop up only if the user clicks). It's why popups only generally react to clicks - no longer do you load a page and have popups appear suddenly.
Another fun one was having a website pop up an alert box. Scam sites used this to put up dialogs you couldn't dismiss because they would pop up, you'd close it, and they'd pop up before you could close the window. So now every browser gives you the option of ignoring further alerts.
Wouldn't work - wrong kind of particle accelerator.
There are two kinds of particle accelerators, and you use one or the other depending on the science you want to do.
The LHC is basically a particle accelerator - you take two particles (consisting of multiple quarks) and slam them into each other. This generates lots of collisions, and the quarks smashing into each other generate all sorts of new particles. As you can see, an accelerator like the LHC is used to perform "new science" - to discover what can only be done by colliding lots of random quarks and particles together to see what new forms of particles you get. This works because the particles you collide aren't uniform (a neutron or proton is not a homogeneous thing - and they can have three or four quarks). Thus when they collide, you're smashing things with varying energy and composition, to form new things of varying composition. Thus when trying to discover the undiscovered, like the Higgs boson, you need this kind of collider - it generates the random variations and energies you need to discover.
The other type of collider uses electrons, which are very precise. You use these colliders to perform in-depth science - if you're probing stuff, the fact that you can control the electron beam precisely is why it's good - the energy distribution is highly controlled so you can probe the properties of whatever you're exploring. If you find a way to reliably make Higgs, for example. you can use this kind of collider to probe its properties. And since they are only accelerating really light electrons, they can be much smaller to get them to higher energy levels. Accelerators like the LHC have to accelerate heavy particles by comparison so it takes a lot more energy and time.
Because passwords are inconvenient. You unlock your phone dozens or hundreds of times a day. It was discovered a PIN (a simple 4 digit PIN) made it so inconvenient that people wouldn't bother. Sure they set it up, but after a few days of constant entry, they disable it. This lead to something like 80% of all phones not having a PIN - just swipe to unlock.
With biometrics, you can have your complex PIN and most of the time you're using the phone it doesn't get in the way - your phone unlocks just before you use it. Making life convenient, and protecting the data on your phone because now it's protected by a PIN. So your use of the phone is like before, but now it's not unlocked - it's protected. I believe Apple discovered after TouchID that 90% of phones were now locked with a PIN or password (it's mandatory to set something up when using TouchID).
You tell me - which is more secure - that 80% of people were walking around with phones that were not protected, or 90% of phones that had a PIN or password, but had biometrics?
Security is about tradeoffs. You can secure something to the level of Fort Knox, and for some things, that might be appropriate. But other things it gets in the way.
Let's say you're testing an OS update and in order to test it, you must sign the update using an offline airgapped server. So you build it, copy the build to a thumbdrive, go to the machine, get it signed, walk back to your desk, and test it. Only to find a bug, which you fix, build, sign, and test. After a few trips of this (especially if said server requires a walk), well, you'll find ways around it so you don't have to sign the build before your test.
You can use classical physics to do quantum stuff.
Quantum Key Distribution uses polarized light, and one interesting property is that unless the polarizes are orthogonal to each other, you're going to have a non-zero probability of light going through. So what you do at the sender end is send pulses of polarized light at random polarizations (say, 0 degrees, 0 degrees, 90 degrees, 45 degrees, 135 degrees, etc). Of course, the pulses are coded to represent your bit pattern, so a pulse could mean a 1, no pulse could mean 0.
At the receiver end, the receiver picks a random polarization and measures the output - either light, or no light. It doesn't matter which.
What happens after sending a copious amount of data is the two ends then compare their polarizer settings and discard the bits where the polarizer setting did not match (e.g., sender used 0 degrees, receiver used 45 degrees). Most of the data will be discarded, but you'll have plenty more where by chance both sender and receiver picked the same polarizer.
You can then do a quick hash to compare the final results - the two hashes should be the same.
Now what happens if someone taps the line? Well, they don't know the polarizer settings, so at best they're going to guess. But the act of inserting the eavesdropping polarizer into the bitstream changes the polarization of the light! If the sender uses 0 degrees, and the eavesdropper uses 45 degrees, light will have a 50% chance of going through the polarizer. But even stranger, at the receiver, if they use a 0 degree polarizer or a 90 degree polarizer, light again will have a 50% chance of getting through. So even though the sender and receiver may both use a 0 degree polarizer, the eavesdropper using a 45 degree polarizer has changed the end result. Maybe the eavesdropper gets lucky, maybe not.
Doing it for a large number of bits and you'll detect the line tap too easily because of it.
If you want to see this in action, you can do the standard two polarizer test, set them orthogonally to each other (so the two polarizers let no light through). Now add a third polarizer AFTER than two polarizers and oddly, you'll get light going through! It doesn't have to be in the middle of the polarizer stack - just the act of the third polarizer interacts with the other two such that some light now goes through where it didn't before makes things extra spooky.
It should, since it's really just a modified version of IntelliJ IDE which has been around long enough. Between IntelliJ and Eclipse, those two IDEs have pretty much been adopted as the development environments for a ton of embedded stuff, because they're easy to adapt, provide all the editor niceties you expect, and are multiplatform, so rather than back in the old days of having to develop your own or hope to license something like Green Hills environments, you can get a full featured environment for free.
I will admit though that Android Studio/IntelliJ does feel a lot more polished and integrated than the Eclipse based ones. As someone who routinely works on the Android PDK (the actual Android OS itself), I had to use Android studio to develop some test and library code. It handled all the icky bits for me (though it could use help on creating the JNI bindings I needed - it was possible but wasn't as intuitive as everything else).
This is actually in effect A La Carte. You remember the movement to get cable to "unbundle" channels so you don't have to pay $5/month to get a bunch of channels.
Well, streaming services are now the same - instead of paying one price for one service with a bunch of channels, you're going to pay a dozen services to get a dozen channels.
And now that it's happening, you want to go back to the "bundling" that happened with cable just because you don't want to subscribe to a dozen services?
And quantity, too.
The dash buttons don't say anything about quantity or price. You may have ordered a 24-pack of paper towels for $10 and got the button, but who's to say that the next time you push it, it's not a 24-pack for $15 (you bought it on sale, which happens often enough)? Or even more dastardly, it's 12 for $10 (or more likely, a 20 pack).
Same with the other stuff - it's all stuff you use like laundry detergent and such, and the stuff comes in varying quantity and pricing.
Hell, I don't know what happens if it out of stock - maybe you only want the 24 pack and if you run out to just wait rather than they send you a 12 pack.
You have to remember that most science is not done by "Eureka!", but instead happens with "That's odd...".
Thus an unexpected result could mean poor scientific controls invalidate the results, or it could be the basis of further study. Either way it generally means trying to reproduce the results to see whether it can be repeated.
Quite likely what happened is Jamie and Adam wrote up a paper and submitted it at least to a university for further study. It can happen for the oddest things as well. You can be producing a video for YouTube only to make a scientific breakthrough. Science happens.
It depends on the laser. Common ones used for LIDAR is 800nm and 1550nm. 800nm can injure the eye, so its use in LIDARs and such where it might hit an eye accidentally mean its power limited to prevent damage.
The thing with 1550nm is that it can't make it to the retina - the fluid in the eyeball is opaque to light at 1550nm, so the power limits are higher because it takes a lot more power to damage the eye when you have to go through the eyeball liquid first (and it's a lot of water so it will take a fair amount of energy before you actually cause real damage).
Of course, camera sensors aren't filled with eyeball fluid and thus the full power of the laser will be able to destroy the sensitive pixels in the array.
Well, most federal workers are off, just off. Unpaid leave, effectively (for now). There are however about 400,000 workers deemed "essential" to the functioning of the country, including ATC, TSA and other workers who are forced to work without pay.
What's happening now is that those workers are basically calling in sick - because they have to attend to a second job to get some money flowing in.
And imagine how much worse it is for those in a highly stressful job (Air Traffic Controller ranks in the top 10, if not #1 most stressful job). Now you have the added stress of working for free and worrying about the mortgage, food, etc. This isn't good.
TSA agents are similar - they aren't highly paid people (about $30K or so annually), and now have to work long hours with no pay dealing with an increasingly irate public.
And now half your coworkers call in sick because they need some money.
The economy will grind to a halt - the highly efficient air transport system cannot sustain such pressure. Already you see some of the effects - long lineups at security, for example. But you'll see it worse in the air because stressed out controllers can't do anything to reduce their stress, other than to hold air traffic back. So instead of being able to have an aircraft take off and land every minute or so, they will be forced to slow down the rate - one aircraft every couple of minutes halves the airport throughput, but it will become a necessity in order to lower their stress. Ditto for increased spacing between aircraft so a burned out controller will have more time to think and process. This will lead to inevitable delays.
Farmers are missing their subsidies as well, which may not matter to you, but they need the money to buy their supplies on time so they can plant on time.
Of course, one wonders why they don't just give him his wall, and pay for it with a new "wall tax" that basically reverses the big tax cut that was given. He gets his wall, the tax cuts are effectively rescinded and you get to nail supporters with a new tax to pay for it.
Unlikely because it never billed itself as "Choose your own Adventure".
And there are so many different ways around the trademark, you don't actually have to use the phrase "Choose your own adventure" at all. "Interactive Movie" or "Choose what happens" or "Make your choice" are things you could use.
Chooseco didn't go after the concept of a branching storyline, just a trademark.
It should be noted that they're probably branching out - they did release a nice board game a few months back. But again, it's not the concept, but the trademark.
Actually that's because the law was set up that way - if you were white, congratulations you could get a mortgage, but if you were black, too bad, loan denied.
It was a technique known as "redlining" - be white and live in a nice white suburb, great!
The unfortunate thing is its effects are still felt today.
If you like comedy videos, Adam Ruins Everything has a nice doc about it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
More discussion - https://legallysociable.com/20...
Because it doesn't take much for Amazon to just returning a list of products, to returning a list of products, ordered by Amazon house brands first. Amazon's search results are like Google's - being on the first page matters, a lot. So if Amazon is giving preferential treatment to Amazon's own house brands (and there are a lot of them, AmazonBasics is just a small player) it may not be giving a fair shot to competitors.
And people may buy from those brands, not knowing that the results of the first page actually are all Amazon-owned brands.
Google was fined for doing this - putting their own services higher in the search results.
Windows is a complex tangled mess of code. A lot of it has to do with a lot of backwards compatibility. including backwards compatibility to things that they shouldn't be making compatible (e.g., private interfaces).
Some companies, like Apple, give you a "tough luck" attitude if you use private interfaces. It's why software breaks between OS revisions, and even between OS updates - if your program is digging deep within the OS and making calls it shouldn't, there you go. Though at times, Apple has broken published interfaces - mostly because the documentation said one thing, and API did another, and Apple fixed the bug so the API matches the documentation, breaking every app calling that API since they worked around the bug.
Microsoft chooses not to do this (since it would mean things would break constantly - it's shocking the number of shortcuts developers make). The problem is, if they change a private API, there's no knowing what would break. Sure, they test against reasonable configurations, but if some network driver decided it needed to dig deep and now Microsoft patches that API, it would break.
No, this was the result of bad IP geolocation information. Basically the guy's house happened to be where they said "South Africa" was because that's the best area they could get for an IP.
Anyhow, WiFi geolocation (more accurate than GPS, actually) doesn't care about SSID. It only uses MAC addresses that are transmitted in the beacon packets. All any device has to do is switch channels and listen to capture the AP MAC addresses and signal strength. Send that information to Google and you'll get back a pretty good location. Same goes for cell towers - the modem will scan for available cell towers, note their IDs (this includes all cell towers in all bands it can receive, including ones that you don't have service for) and do the same thing.
The problem is the devices last pinged some tracker from an IP and that was last that device was heard of, and that IP had only country level resolution.
(The US database of countries contains latitudes and longitudes that are often returned when you look up a country to get a specific location, and a lot of these IP geolocation companies use it without realizing the radius of uncertainty is "country" and not "city block").
Considering TFS says "the cause has remained a puzzle", astronomers would like to know the answer too.
Not to mention there WAS an interchangable GPU formfactor out there - it's called MXM. It's designed for laptops and both nVidia and AMD supported it, as did a few laptop manufacturers at the time (including Dell).
Instead, it just died because no one used it in a while.
It's Bell. That's more than enough.
In Canada, there's a telecommunications ombudsman, and let's just say Bell leads the pack in complaints by a WIDE margin.
As in Bell gets over 4700 complaints, while Rogers follows Bell with nearly 1500 complaints. Telus gets nearly 900.
Hell, we had Bell as our provider of business internet and telephone, and we just switched to Telus for same. Not only does the fractional T1 for phones cost MUCH less money, but the internet got upgraded from 100Mbps to gigabit, for the same price we were playing. And we've had far fewer issues - especially with things like billing.
And it wasn't like we didn't give Bell a chance - they offered us gigabit internet as well for the same price. Except that after signing the contract, Bell stalled and stalled and stalled, and we withdrew. We waited 6 months for Bell to sign before we gave up on waiting. Within a month, Telus had switched out the phone lines to their exchanges, and within 2 months the internet was set up (there were a few hiccups with the mounting of their equipment - we didn't provide a mount to their specifications which delayed things).
Sadly, Bell and Bad Customer Service just go together.
Depends on the technology licenses. If that equipment contained any US export controlled technology, then yes heads will roll.
After all, ZTE was basically given the death sentence by being barred from buying US technology for re-selling the technology to restricted countries. At least, until the President was handed some half billion dollars of "investment" and China granting them rare and valuable trademark protection. Not just one, but several more later on.
Every one has ME. Even the disabled ones still require ME.
ME is required to boot the processor (it's not easy to boot modern complex processors with variables clocks and power sources.
The "ME disabled" firmware simply does enough to boot the processor up and halts, so you lose functionality like dynamic voltage and frequency selection (DVFS), important for mobile processors, as well as the ability to sleep and standby the CPU. (Technically you also lose the ability to turn off the CPU, but that's easily worked around since turning off the PC works)
The problem with free trials is they're never long enough - a week, a month? Especially something like this where it may not go down for a while.
Maybe the thing is to offer a free month of monitoring at which point unlimited messages or notifications can be sent, then after that month (this is to get it integrated in your systems), you get N notifications for free, however long it takes with emails reminding you you're still on the plan and how many free notifications you have left before you should subscribe. After all, if you have it monitoring a website, and your website is reliable, you may never actually get a chance to test it in reality in a month.
They allowed third-party support for ages - most NAS devices for years have support for Time Machine and this was not a new thing. Apple only cancelled their Airports because the home router space is becoming much too crowded - why spend $200 on an Apple when a Netgear supporting the latest and greatest can be had for $150?
It's why Apple existed the monitor business as well - plenty of companies making really decent monitors for half of what an Apple monitor costs basically means there's no justification to buy an Apple monitor, and the fact that monitors are pretty much commodities now means Apple can't really innovate or improve in the area. An Apple 30" monitor was great back in the day when everyone was stuck with 15" and 17" monitors, but with 24" 1080p monitors becoming ultra common and 28" 4K monitors are practically everywhere, there's no room for Apple to compete.
For the AppleTV, AirPlay was something Apple licensed ages ago - practically all networked AV receivers support it today, and many new ones support the latest AirPlay2 protocol.
But more importantly, the AppleTV is working in a space that is under-developed. As long as Apple feels they can bring innovation into it, the AppleTV will be around. And given the primary competition is Roku, there's still plenty they can do.
You can sideload in iOS since iOS 8 - nearly 4 years ago.
Sure you need a Mac, and Apple requires you to compile the code yourself, but there is a very healthy collection of apps that Apple never approves (all open-source of course).
More dodgy sites will let you sideload any app from MacOS and Windows (typically used to install pirated apps).
Sideloading has been available and accessible for years now.