All this furor over Epic Scale bitcoin miner, and none over other crud like Wajam that uTorrent installs?
Have a look at the last image in this article. "...may change your local proxy settings...collect...URLs of the pages you visit...content of encrypted webpages...Wajam may protect itself from other software that tries to wrongfully interfere with it."
Yikes. Lenovo got spanked pretty hard for packaging advertising malware that MITMs your encrypted sessions, but at least theirs doesn't officially threaten a counterstrike against your antivirus too.
No arguments on the dick part, but if the vendor-supplied software has basically an "overclock" tickbox built right in (some videocard driver packages have this), he may not be 100% wrong to take them back under warranty. Under US law at least, there are implied warranties for "fitness for a particular purpose", which a company cannot always disclaim once that company has implied them (this varies by state to some extent). A good example is a pickup truck that comes with a ball hitch and is shown in the TV ads towing a camper. This creates an implied warranty that the truck is fit for towing something equivalent to the camper shown in the ad, and the vendor placing scary language otherwise in the warranty/manual may not necessarily dissolve that warranty. Likewise, nVidia might be worried that placing a user-accessible 'overclock button' right in the UI would create such a warranty and make them liable for implied warranty claims from OC'ed laptops.
(Whether OC'ing the GPU should be able to permanently damage the GPU or laptop in the first place is another issue, but being covered by some other threads in this discussion.)
I was running the Windows version (yeah yeah, here's my geek card), and starting around April of last year, it began to suffer some significant issues, starting with "molasses mode", which was fixed and replaced with frequent crashes and the Black/White Screen of Death (the window contents, or significant portions thereof, would fail to render once FF had been open for a couple days and/or many tabs were open, displaying either white or black rectangles). The latter seemed to come and go by release, but the crashing persisted long enough, and through enough releases (both home and work installations, Win7 and even XP, beh... cleaning out and reinstalling FF made no difference) that I threw in the towel on FF some months back. If they have truly fixed all of this for good, I might reconsider, except that a FF crash still takes down the entire browser (a Chrome crash, just reload the tab and it didn't happen), and FF just looks and acts like Chrome any, so why bother switching back?
Also, don't crash constantly. Especially, don't work and look exactly like Chrome and crash constantly, because Chrome works and looks exactly like Chrome but doesn't crash constantly.
Advertising. Location service can now not only tell what store you're shopping in, but which floor.
The more user-friendly side-effect is for outdoor activities (tracking runs, hikes, etc.) - much more accurate elevation change info than GPS, whose vertical resolution is terrible.
"...people have been home-brewing their own content-driven lighting like this for a while, but this is the first I've seen that looks like a simple add-on."
There's a reason for this. What they are trying to sell is Ambilight, and Ambilight is patented.
Google "ambilight clone" and you'll find hundreds of open designs you can easily build yourself - patent holders generally don't (or can't) touch distribution of paper designs - but they're not legal to sell commercially.
For a totally unsolicited datapoint, I'm an American EE with about a decade in the industry and see this notation semi-regularly. Still can't explain US distributors' hatred of nanofarads as a unit, though.
Ah, those were the days. At my HS the teachers were wise and would personally clear the memory on your calculator themselves. A fake "Mem cleared" program circulated widely. It not just intercepted the keystrokes you would use to actually clear the memory, but even displayed the text dimly (probably by clearing and rewriting the string rapidly) to simulate the fact that clearing the memory on a TI-8x also reset the screen contrast to (extraordinarily dim) factory default.
This has nothing to do with "banning municipal broadband" today, and everything to do with not granting a power at the Fed level that would let a future FCC in 1-2 election cycles do exactly that.
FTFA:
"If the history of American politics teaches us anything, it is that one political party will not remain in power for perpetuity. At some point, to quote Sam Cooke, 'a change is gonna come,'" Berry said. "And that change could come a little more than two years from now. So those who are potential supporters of the current FCC interpreting Section 706 [of the Telecommunications Act] to give the Commission the authority to preempt state laws about municipal broadband should think long and hard about what a future FCC might do with that power."
Arguing that municipal broadband networks could discourage investment by private companies, Berry said, "Itâ(TM)s not hard, then, to imagine a future FCC concluding that taxpayer-funded, municipal broadband projects themselves are barriers to infrastructure investment. So if the current FCC were successful in preempting state and local laws under Section 706, what would stop a future FCC from using Section 706 to forbid states and localities from constructing any future broadband projects? Nothing that I can see."
They can be delicious if prepared correctly. The main problem with carp is the pin-bones all through the flesh - you can't just split them down the middle, peel out the skeleton and enjoy, so many folks give them a pass. They're also a fairly thick fish, and with those bones it's not really practical to fillet them, so cooking them through without overcooking some part can be tricky. Slow smoking works great - a slab of smoked fish is basically finger food anyway and usually pinched off in small pieces, so it makes the bones less of an issue.
Ads were not an original part of free web hosts' user agreements during much of the the Web 1.0 bubble (only the usual "we can change this agreement whenever we like" clause) - and in the area where a static 468x60 banner was the gold standard, few could have forseen the evilness that was the popup ad. (Disclaimer: I tried Geocities and Angelfire circa 1997. Angelfire at the time appeared to be a medical transcription company that happened to have some server space left over.)
I know a couple radfems and social justice, professional victim types, and use a very similar test for the stuff they are always parroting: I call it the Black People test. Replace every occurrence of "men", "white straight males", etc. with "black people" and re-read it. If posting the revised copy under your name would get you fired from your day-job, it fails the test.
While the "water droplets spontaneously jumping off superhydrophobic surfaces" effect is interesting in itself, the mechanism of stripping charge from those droplets as they leave the apparatus sounds like a variation of the Kelvin water-drop energy harvester from 1867. In this case, rather than charge separation via the cross-connected cups, electric-double-layer charge-separation occurs between the droplet and the hydrophobic surface, causing the two to come away similarly unbalanced when the droplet jumps away.
"For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place..."
Neither here nor there, but this is the kind of language companies usually use just after being spanked for discriminatory-like* practices.
* "Can't have my name attached to a post about controversial topic X in the current political climate whilst keeping my day job -> excluded from the service -> more controversial ideological groups more excluded -> discrimination!"...I wonder if someone's trying to scratch up a case to this effect...
In principle I would agree, however, the idea of parking this nuanced distinction on the desk of a regulatory bureaucrat makes my neck hairs stand at attention.
While I'm admittedly not an expert in cryptography or trusted computing schemes in general, I don't see how this differs on a technical level from numerous other code-signing schemes with a central certificate authority (CA) (and its chain of delegations) blessing "good" code and revoking such blessings. Well known examples include Securicode / Windows Driver Signing, the anti-consumer bits of UEFI, etc. Can anyone shed some further light on how this is different?
As with other such systems, it assumes the existence of a benevolent authority that cannot be hacked, the cooperation of all packer vendors, the cooperation of all packer *users* (who are not malware authors)... and all packer users who *are* malware authors never hearing of it.
The only main difference I can see (and its potential downfall for its purpose) is that end-users don't pay for certificates. While that's great for end-users (driver signature enforcement in x64 Windows versions is pretty close to extortion IMO), this seems to break down for any packers that are not a licensed commercial product where an explicit, one-on-one packer-vendor to packer-user relationship exists. This excludes any freeware and open-source packers*, where any schmuck can just download and run it (and even modify it) without key exchanges or other communication with its author.
Conversely, if any old schmuck can obtain a fresh signature at any time ("it's free!"), what's to stop any old schmuck from doing exactly that? The stipulations that the system is free to both end-users and packer vendors, bankrolled entirely by A/V vendors out of the goodness of their hearts, suggests any background-checking that occurs as a condition of generating a signature can't be very exhaustive.
* While the IEEE materials refer to the proof-of-concept running on "a modified version of UPX", a well-known F/OSS packer, this almost certainly has to do with the ability to quickly bodge this feature in due to easy source code access, and very little to do with whether the actual author of UPX is complicit in or aware of the system, or whether this scenario can possibly work in the real-world for open-source packers with anonymous downloads.
Still does. I just bought, and then returned, a Moto X after discovering that Motorola's "unlock your bootloader" page is a sham. Tried it on a brand-new, retail, unlocked device and got "Your device does not qualify for bootloader unlocking" . The better part of an hour going round in circles with their tech support and they are unable (or unwilling) to even state the criteria that would, theoretically, make a device "qualify".
(An aside: While most companies might claim unlocking or rooting a device "could" void the warranty, it's usually with a wink and a nudge as long as the device is factory-restored before RMA'ing or at least not obviously bricked. A couple have software tamper flags that can likewise be reset. Motorola, on the other hand, uses the device serial # to generate and return - by email - a bootloader unlock code, and immediately blacklists the device for warranty service the moment they do so, whether you actually use the code or not.)
Hackaday had a similar discussion just over a month ago. The consensus there seems to be likewise that it is probably a scam. (Or *extremely* optimistic kid who has seen a few of the technologies involved work on paper. But more likely a scam.)
Heh. For our military this seems very counterintuitive. AFAICT the push in recent years has been toward anything that reduces unnecessary cognitive loading in heated situations, and frees up their tactical senses (eyes & ears) generally. At my day-job a recent project was a tactile display vest specifically to replace voice and hand-arm signaling, keeping soldiers' eyes and ears free for other matters. Basically a dense array of vibrotactile drivers (like what makes your phone buzz) that can display messages on the skin, which is basically "unused bandwidth" thus far. Blocking vision with AR, and in a very obvious way, seems counter to this trend.
Slashdot Mirror
Through-the-body communication chips have been around a while; you can click-n-buy them right on Digikey.
http://www.microchip.com/pageh...
All this furor over Epic Scale bitcoin miner, and none over other crud like Wajam that uTorrent installs?
Have a look at the last image in this article. "...may change your local proxy settings...collect...URLs of the pages you visit...content of encrypted webpages...Wajam may protect itself from other software that tries to wrongfully interfere with it."
Yikes. Lenovo got spanked pretty hard for packaging advertising malware that MITMs your encrypted sessions, but at least theirs doesn't officially threaten a counterstrike against your antivirus too.
No arguments on the dick part, but if the vendor-supplied software has basically an "overclock" tickbox built right in (some videocard driver packages have this), he may not be 100% wrong to take them back under warranty. Under US law at least, there are implied warranties for "fitness for a particular purpose", which a company cannot always disclaim once that company has implied them (this varies by state to some extent). A good example is a pickup truck that comes with a ball hitch and is shown in the TV ads towing a camper. This creates an implied warranty that the truck is fit for towing something equivalent to the camper shown in the ad, and the vendor placing scary language otherwise in the warranty/manual may not necessarily dissolve that warranty. Likewise, nVidia might be worried that placing a user-accessible 'overclock button' right in the UI would create such a warranty and make them liable for implied warranty claims from OC'ed laptops.
(Whether OC'ing the GPU should be able to permanently damage the GPU or laptop in the first place is another issue, but being covered by some other threads in this discussion.)
I was running the Windows version (yeah yeah, here's my geek card), and starting around April of last year, it began to suffer some significant issues, starting with "molasses mode", which was fixed and replaced with frequent crashes and the Black/White Screen of Death (the window contents, or significant portions thereof, would fail to render once FF had been open for a couple days and/or many tabs were open, displaying either white or black rectangles). The latter seemed to come and go by release, but the crashing persisted long enough, and through enough releases (both home and work installations, Win7 and even XP, beh... cleaning out and reinstalling FF made no difference) that I threw in the towel on FF some months back. If they have truly fixed all of this for good, I might reconsider, except that a FF crash still takes down the entire browser (a Chrome crash, just reload the tab and it didn't happen), and FF just looks and acts like Chrome any, so why bother switching back?
Also, don't crash constantly. Especially, don't work and look exactly like Chrome and crash constantly, because Chrome works and looks exactly like Chrome but doesn't crash constantly.
And excellent 3rd-party hardware support.
Counter-predatory-pricing botnets: It's only a matter of time.
Advertising. Location service can now not only tell what store you're shopping in, but which floor.
The more user-friendly side-effect is for outdoor activities (tracking runs, hikes, etc.) - much more accurate elevation change info than GPS, whose vertical resolution is terrible.
"...people have been home-brewing their own content-driven lighting like this for a while, but this is the first I've seen that looks like a simple add-on."
There's a reason for this. What they are trying to sell is Ambilight, and Ambilight is patented.
Google "ambilight clone" and you'll find hundreds of open designs you can easily build yourself - patent holders generally don't (or can't) touch distribution of paper designs - but they're not legal to sell commercially.
(N)ation-(S)tate (A)ctors... I see what you did there.
For a totally unsolicited datapoint, I'm an American EE with about a decade in the industry and see this notation semi-regularly. Still can't explain US distributors' hatred of nanofarads as a unit, though.
Ah, those were the days. At my HS the teachers were wise and would personally clear the memory on your calculator themselves. A fake "Mem cleared" program circulated widely. It not just intercepted the keystrokes you would use to actually clear the memory, but even displayed the text dimly (probably by clearing and rewriting the string rapidly) to simulate the fact that clearing the memory on a TI-8x also reset the screen contrast to (extraordinarily dim) factory default.
People plinking a drone when it flies over their yard (or any public field) and getting a free Xbox or whatever it was carrying.
This has nothing to do with "banning municipal broadband" today, and everything to do with not granting a power at the Fed level that would let a future FCC in 1-2 election cycles do exactly that.
FTFA:
"If the history of American politics teaches us anything, it is that one political party will not remain in power for perpetuity. At some point, to quote Sam Cooke, 'a change is gonna come,'" Berry said. "And that change could come a little more than two years from now. So those who are potential supporters of the current FCC interpreting Section 706 [of the Telecommunications Act] to give the Commission the authority to preempt state laws about municipal broadband should think long and hard about what a future FCC might do with that power."
Arguing that municipal broadband networks could discourage investment by private companies, Berry said, "Itâ(TM)s not hard, then, to imagine a future FCC concluding that taxpayer-funded, municipal broadband projects themselves are barriers to infrastructure investment. So if the current FCC were successful in preempting state and local laws under Section 706, what would stop a future FCC from using Section 706 to forbid states and localities from constructing any future broadband projects? Nothing that I can see."
They can be delicious if prepared correctly. The main problem with carp is the pin-bones all through the flesh - you can't just split them down the middle, peel out the skeleton and enjoy, so many folks give them a pass. They're also a fairly thick fish, and with those bones it's not really practical to fillet them, so cooking them through without overcooking some part can be tricky. Slow smoking works great - a slab of smoked fish is basically finger food anyway and usually pinched off in small pieces, so it makes the bones less of an issue.
Ads were not an original part of free web hosts' user agreements during much of the the Web 1.0 bubble (only the usual "we can change this agreement whenever we like" clause) - and in the area where a static 468x60 banner was the gold standard, few could have forseen the evilness that was the popup ad. (Disclaimer: I tried Geocities and Angelfire circa 1997. Angelfire at the time appeared to be a medical transcription company that happened to have some server space left over.)
Just wait 'til they start touching your bases. I could do without that.
I know a couple radfems and social justice, professional victim types, and use a very similar test for the stuff they are always parroting: I call it the Black People test. Replace every occurrence of "men", "white straight males", etc. with "black people" and re-read it. If posting the revised copy under your name would get you fired from your day-job, it fails the test.
While the "water droplets spontaneously jumping off superhydrophobic surfaces" effect is interesting in itself, the mechanism of stripping charge from those droplets as they leave the apparatus sounds like a variation of the Kelvin water-drop energy harvester from 1867. In this case, rather than charge separation via the cross-connected cups, electric-double-layer charge-separation occurs between the droplet and the hydrophobic surface, causing the two to come away similarly unbalanced when the droplet jumps away.
"For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place..."
Neither here nor there, but this is the kind of language companies usually use just after being spanked for discriminatory-like* practices.
* "Can't have my name attached to a post about controversial topic X in the current political climate whilst keeping my day job -> excluded from the service -> more controversial ideological groups more excluded -> discrimination!" ...I wonder if someone's trying to scratch up a case to this effect...
In principle I would agree, however, the idea of parking this nuanced distinction on the desk of a regulatory bureaucrat makes my neck hairs stand at attention.
While I'm admittedly not an expert in cryptography or trusted computing schemes in general, I don't see how this differs on a technical level from numerous other code-signing schemes with a central certificate authority (CA) (and its chain of delegations) blessing "good" code and revoking such blessings. Well known examples include Securicode / Windows Driver Signing, the anti-consumer bits of UEFI, etc. Can anyone shed some further light on how this is different?
As with other such systems, it assumes the existence of a benevolent authority that cannot be hacked, the cooperation of all packer vendors, the cooperation of all packer *users* (who are not malware authors)... and all packer users who *are* malware authors never hearing of it.
The only main difference I can see (and its potential downfall for its purpose) is that end-users don't pay for certificates. While that's great for end-users (driver signature enforcement in x64 Windows versions is pretty close to extortion IMO), this seems to break down for any packers that are not a licensed commercial product where an explicit, one-on-one packer-vendor to packer-user relationship exists. This excludes any freeware and open-source packers*, where any schmuck can just download and run it (and even modify it) without key exchanges or other communication with its author.
Conversely, if any old schmuck can obtain a fresh signature at any time ("it's free!"), what's to stop any old schmuck from doing exactly that? The stipulations that the system is free to both end-users and packer vendors, bankrolled entirely by A/V vendors out of the goodness of their hearts, suggests any background-checking that occurs as a condition of generating a signature can't be very exhaustive.
* While the IEEE materials refer to the proof-of-concept running on "a modified version of UPX", a well-known F/OSS packer, this almost certainly has to do with the ability to quickly bodge this feature in due to easy source code access, and very little to do with whether the actual author of UPX is complicit in or aware of the system, or whether this scenario can possibly work in the real-world for open-source packers with anonymous downloads.
Still does. I just bought, and then returned, a Moto X after discovering that Motorola's "unlock your bootloader" page is a sham. Tried it on a brand-new, retail, unlocked device and got "Your device does not qualify for bootloader unlocking" . The better part of an hour going round in circles with their tech support and they are unable (or unwilling) to even state the criteria that would, theoretically, make a device "qualify".
(An aside: While most companies might claim unlocking or rooting a device "could" void the warranty, it's usually with a wink and a nudge as long as the device is factory-restored before RMA'ing or at least not obviously bricked. A couple have software tamper flags that can likewise be reset. Motorola, on the other hand, uses the device serial # to generate and return - by email - a bootloader unlock code, and immediately blacklists the device for warranty service the moment they do so, whether you actually use the code or not.)
Hackaday had a similar discussion just over a month ago. The consensus there seems to be likewise that it is probably a scam. (Or *extremely* optimistic kid who has seen a few of the technologies involved work on paper. But more likely a scam.)
Heh. For our military this seems very counterintuitive. AFAICT the push in recent years has been toward anything that reduces unnecessary cognitive loading in heated situations, and frees up their tactical senses (eyes & ears) generally. At my day-job a recent project was a tactile display vest specifically to replace voice and hand-arm signaling, keeping soldiers' eyes and ears free for other matters. Basically a dense array of vibrotactile drivers (like what makes your phone buzz) that can display messages on the skin, which is basically "unused bandwidth" thus far. Blocking vision with AR, and in a very obvious way, seems counter to this trend.