Very interesting timing on this story. Friday my son's iPhone 7 was stolen at school around 11 AM. Before he made it home at 3 PM his iPhone had been taken over - he had emails between 2:42 and 2:45 showing where someone had changed his gmail password, logged into his gmail account on a different phone, changed the password on his Apple account (which used the gmail account for the Apple ID), and disabled Find My Phone on his stolen phone (and the email from Apple helpfully indicated that now the device could be reset and logged into without the Apple ID credentials). The IP address that was done from was at his high school (the phone did not have cellular service - he used it with WiFi only).
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that someone at this relatively small school knew how to take over an iPhone locked with a 6 digit passcode. It appears that gmail was the weak link here. My guess is to what happened is that since the google apps were installed on the iPhone, when a "lost password" was triggered from a different phone, Google sent a reset code to the stolen phone. I haven't bothered to try and test this, but my hunch is that the reset code that Google sent to his phone was a notification accessible while the phone was locked.
The lesson I have learned here (in any case, since the first step that occurred was his Google account password was changed and logged into from a different phone) is NEVER use gmail addresses for your Apple ID. That was the attack vector, and if it is too easy for someone to change your gmail password, then it's too easy for them to take over your hardware devices as well.
If SpaceX pulls this off, it will revolutionize connectivity around the world. Many, many ISP monopolies (companies that have a stranglehold on small isolated populated areas due to buying up their telco or cable) will FINALLY have to compete. There are vast stretches of the United States with utter crap internet offerings. This is going to shake up everything from internet, to the cell phone carriers, to the "internet of things".
There are many multi-billion dollar companies that stand to lose tremendous amounts of money from this, while the general population of the world stands to gain a great deal of freedom and choice. Again, if SpaceX pulls this off, it will be one of the milestones in modern human history, and it will make SpaceX unbelievably wealthy.
And once again the misnomer "Screen recording" is being used inaccurately in the headline to draw more attention. "Screen recording" is a phrase that has a specific meaning, and there is no screen recording going on. I don't feel like typing it all again... https://slashdot.org/comments....
(I'm not condoning or defending this practice, but just clarifying that the screen is not literally being recorded and streamed as video)
No, they are not literally recording your screen. Phrasing it in that way is FUD. iOS requires special permissions for that. What they are doing (which I have long suspected FB of doing) is to simply report all your user input within the app. By knowing the state of the app, coupled with your exact actions, they can potentially replay what you would have seen. This allows them to know what you spent the most time looking at. If a customer zooms in on a photo of an item they're selling, then what specifically were they zooming in on? If they see a common pattern there then they can provide closeups of the parts of the product people are most interested in by default.
This is really no different than having 5 buttons in an app, and tracking which buttons are clicked most, and removing the buttons that no one ever uses. That's been going on in UI design for ages. This is more precise and can involve tools that allow the "replay" of sessions allowing someone to see what the user would have seen as they interacted. Going back 20 years, my software tracked which widgets the user interacted with. I could then do the same set of actions they did and *gasp* I would be seeing the same thing they must have seen as they used the software. That's not "secretly recording your screen". I guess by that definition the undo / redo history of thousands of apps mean they also secretly record the screen as well.
In the case of FB I have long suspected that FB tracks the time you "hover" over a post, or more simply, the points at which users momentarily halt their incessant and never-ending scrolling when they finally see something that catches their eye. Then FB will start showing you more related posts, even though you didn't like or interact with the post - they simply know you stopped scrolling and spent time looking at it for some reason. You better believe they infer meaning from that.
If it's contrast based then there could be problems. I just tried it wearing headphones, and it was blurring them along the sides of my face. Most of the people I meet with wear headsets, so that might get annoying. So I suppose if you have a light skin color and a light background, or a dark skin color and a dark background, then there could be issues. It's not like it's using a kinect or iPhone X style 3D scanner.
We're pretty much to the point where only Microsoft and Sony are competing against each other in the console market. Nintendo's hardware and software titles are so different than either MS or Sony that you would own a Switch or DS because you want that specific type of gaming. Then in addition to the Nintendo you would get an XBox, PS, or even a gaming PC, for that kind of more traditional console gaming. Sure, there is some overlap and there are titles that are available for Switch that are also available for XBox and PS4, but that is more of a "bonus" to the Switch than its bread and butter.
So having said all that, MS isn't afraid of Nintendo, because the average XBox gamer wouldn't be totally drawn away from that brand to Nintendo (nor would they to iOS or Android). However they do have Sony in their sights, and by offering this ability (where Sony does not) they are adding value and distinction to their product compared to their competitor.
I have a revolutionary idea... hear me out. If soda companies would distribute drinks in glass bottles - pretty thick bottles so they're tough and hard to break - and include a "deposit" surcharge when the beverage was purchased, then when the customer returned the empty bottle they would get the deposit back. Then the softdrink company could sterilize the bottle and reuse it over and over!
Now, get this... imagine if milk was also sold in glass bottles. And, in tune with the modern convenience of Amazon where things are delivered right to your door, the milk could be delivered right to your home. Here's the kicker... you could leave your empty milk bottles right at your door, so the delivery person could then pick up your empty bottles for reuse! Zero waste!
A big part of this is that forecasts and current conditions have vastly smaller location granularity than in the past. In 1980, for a given state, you'd be lucky to obtain specific forecasts for maybe 10-15 large cities in the entire state (less for smaller states). I'm sure most of you have seen weather where it rained at your house, but just a few blocks down the street they didn't get rain at all. When your forecast granularity is representative of hundreds of square miles, then of course you can never be very accurate for that entire area.
Now the forecast is latitude and longitude based, and the precision is vastly finer. That alone increases the accuracy tremendously. Weather forecasts now are also down to "minutely" (as in hourly or daily) time spans. Again, same thing. When your forecast broke the entire day into "night" and "day" periods, you can never be very accurate. Most weather apps now forecast what will happen in the next hour down to the minute ("Light rain will begin in around 12 minutes"). It's easy to be accurate when you can forecast such a small time into the future.
There are many reasons weather is more accurate now, everything from the lead time (if your forecast has to be in to the newspaper before 5 AM so it can meet the press deadline, then you're accuracy will be reduced compared to a forecast calculated the moment it is asked for), to the technology that allows people to ask for and view data when they want it for a very specific area.
Yes but Nintendo's focus will be on "portability" and using the joycon as a pointer or playing games multiplayer is marginally useful in a portable way (IE using the built in display as a portable device). So Nintendo could embed just the physical controls on the device and make that static (like a 2DS did away with the hinges), and have an HDMI port in the back. If someone whats to play on a TV then they can use the device as a controller, plus link joy-cons to them for other players or games that absolutely require them.
That way Nintendo doesn't have to include joy-cons in the bundle for it to be playable. They may couple this with a slightly smaller screen, again, to focus on portability.
I say there is a really good chance we will see a Switch with built in physical controls.
So... as usual the summary (and even TFA in this case) had me confused about what is going on here. At first I thought Google was redistributing Apple's internal iOS apps. I thought maybe they were embedding iOS apps within their own apps or something. Anyway here's what this is about.
An enterprise developer license for iOS allows a developer to sign an app for limited *internal* distribution of an app. This is for testing and enterprise use internally within the company the license was issued to. This is in contrast to apps intended for public distribution, which as we know can only be done through the iOS App Store, and which requires Apple to approve the app.
What Facebook and Google have been doing is publicly distributing what should be internal-use-only apps to the public - apps that would not be approved by Apple for various reasons (including privacy issues) - through their enterprise developer license. So it's clearly a violation Apple's terms, and it sounds like both FB and Google are doing the overreaching data collection through these special apps.
Apple has reacted, disabling the signing keys for these apps so they no longer function.
For who? You? The vast majority of web browsing is now done on mobile devices, and the mobile browsers don't have ad blocking by default. Thus the vast majority of people using the internet are not using ad blockers, and I very much doubt the web is *useless* for them.
What do hiring practices have to do with the bad things Facebook is doing? Facebook's mandates, behavior, policies, etc, all come from the top. Facebook is not the result of employees going rogue and doing their own thing. It's exactly what Zuckerberg wants it to be. So this "hiring practices" garbage is completely unrelated (probably to do with the Color of Change organization and forcing FB to hire a minimum amount of non-Caucasian employees).
Further, I don't see how Instagram, Whatsapp, etc, directly contribute to Facebook's problem. The three platforms are currently so separate in every way that forcing FB to sell them will not penalize FB in any way. They'll just get their money back, and Facebook, the social media platform, will be exactly the same as it is now. Perhaps, maybe, splitting them from FB will protect user privacy in some way on those platforms, but that is assuming that user privacy was even protected on those platforms prior to FB. Or that a breach would never occur had FB not bought them.
The only way to really penalize FB is to somehow fragment their primary Facebook platform in some way. Like totally strip the advertising company out of FB. FB gets some small flat rate from ads shown on its platform (no more ad auction to the highest "bidder", etc) and the dynamic market of selling advertising is then its own entity (or entities). Or force some other 3rd party source of posts into the user's stream. So every 2nd or 3rd post a user sees is totally independent of FB and out of their control. That could be an ad, or something the user has followed in some way external to FB. The point is that FB would have zero control over that information being inserted into the user's stream. Then other companies could innovate and compete for the user's interactions and attention, and FB would have to then compete as well. This would result in a better user experience since users will follow and interact with what they like most.
First off, the mouse (and touchpad) is overused. As you've discovered, you can interact much more efficiently with a keyboard. The worst possible interaction is having to continuously switch back and forth between input methods. There's a reason for that and I'll explain. I've written on this before (and I've never seen much discussion about it), but I'll go ahead and expound on it.
The mouse is a virtual representation INSIDE the computing environment. You control a virtual construct (the pointer) on the display using a device in our world. Because the representation is virtual, you have to synchronize your brain with the pointer every time you begin using it. That includes when you switch from the keyboard to the mouse. That's because it is a visual representation - you must see the pointer and watch it to control it. This is something subconscious, but each person has developed a "synchronization" pattern or habit for mouse use. It's a natural thing that has to occur to try and improve the inherit inefficiency. Most people will move the mouse pointer in some way to try to locate it visually - spotting a moving object is much more efficient than a static object (plus many programs hide mouse pointer when the user starts typing, and only show it again when it is moved). This synchronization has to happen before you can position the mouse on the widget you want to interact with. I suppose some people use other techniques, like parking the mouse somewhere relative to where they last used it. I notice that I do tend to park the mouse off of the thing I'm typing in automatically. However you will find you move the mouse in some typical way to locate it visually and connect with it.
Because visual processing is one of the most expensive senses that our brain deals with, having to constantly synchronize visually with a mouse pointer is a relatively "expensive" process in terms of the neurons firing to make use of it.
So now the keyboard... the computer keyboard is the exact opposite. It is a physical construct that represents the computer environment in the real world. There is a key labeled "A" that when pressed triggers the letter "A" in the computer environment. Because the keyboard exists in our physical world it is much more natural for us to interact with it - it is "real". We also do a subconscious synchronization every time we go to use the keyboard, however since it is a physical object, we use the sense of touch (and often vision, but peripherally). The great thing is this can occur without having to stare intently at the keyboard. So, if you pay close attention, you will find you do some synchronization pattern every time you go to type. Try it sometime. Take your hands off the keyboard, close your eyes, and go to type something. For me, I feel for the edge of my laptop with the outside edges of my palms (the little finger sides). I also notice I feel for the left side of the spacebar with my left thumb and the left edge of the keyboard with my left little finger. This all happens quickly and without thinking - we just know how our keyboards feel. That is because our brains are wired to interact with spatial objects, and the keyboard is exactly that.
So to sum it up - the mouse is a representation inside the virtual environment of the computer, the keyboard is a physical representation in the real world. We're better interacting with real things because we can apply more of our senses to it and it's something we do naturally.
You may be onto something here. The gyroscopic effect of the wheels, which can each be rotated individually, could be used to orient the vehicle. It already has climate control, slots for drink stowage, and a box for storing spacesuit gloves. Outgassing by cracking a window could be used to provide thrust if maneuvering was required.
There should be a way to adhere to the letter of the law, yet give Russia the shaft. Like.... set up data storage centers in Russia to store all Russian user data. However the data first goes to the US where it is encrypted with keys only residing on US servers. On retrieval it passes again through non-Russian servers for decryption. So yes, the data is safe and sound in Russia, and is only stored in Russia. However it can't be utilized from there. I'm sure the Russian oligarchs will sleep extremely well at night knowing their citizens data is so securely stored and encrypted. Because, you know, they always have the best interests of their comrades at heart.
The US has no law that prevents its citizens from using online services anywhere in the world. No, it is not reasonable for countries to demand that data about citizens reside in some specific country for "audit". Let me use an analogy. A Russian citizen sees an advertisement for my product in a magazine. They mail my company an international money order, and we ship them the product. Do I have to have an office space in Russia in which to physically store their name, address and invoice information since I have it written down in a ledger in some other country? How reasonable is that? What "privacy" are they trying to protect about their dear citizens anyway?
Just because it is easier to try and regulate digital things does not make this any more reasonable.
Oh, and let me explain something else. The US dominates globally in the online arena. You get a perk by being the winner, and that perk is that your technology is in demand globally. The economic and capitalistic environment in the US fosters the environment in which the tech products that dominate the world are created. So you have a country like Russia, who wants to have unreasonable control over its citizens, essentially jealous of this fact - a huge imbalance in people patronizing US online services vastly more than Russian online services. If Russia cannot compete in this space, and cannot attract users (even within their own country) to services created within Russia, then they pass laws like this to try and get their grimy fingers on at least some of the data.
The ironic part is you worry about "American spying" on Russians, when Russians have way, way more to fear from their own government spying on them. You are essentially saying that it's perfectly fine for Russia to spy on their citizens, and have the ability to track *everything* they do online. As long as it isn't America doing it that's perfectly okay. Companies like Apple are basically giving US agencies a big middle finger, and implementing stuff at the hardware level to protect user's data. You think that would happen if Apple were a Russian company?
Anyway, nice attempt at spinning this and justifying Russia's lack of rights and privacy abuses against its own citizens.
Using the term "dark pattern" while discussing a UI design is about the stupidest and confusing thing you could do. I was literally thinking there was some visual element that was dark. How about call it "deceptive", "misleading" or "confusing"? Sheesh. Your job is to write. Take a little pride in your work and think about what your words actually convey.
Maybe it's my carrier (US Cellular), but I get zero spam texts. I never have gotten them. Spam phone calls? Yes. A few a day currently. However I do not get spam texts. Now I don't know if they have preventative measures in place or what, but either no one attempts to send them to me, or they are doing an extremely effective job blocking them. I didn't even realize spam texts were a problem for some.
Slashdot Mirror
Very interesting timing on this story. Friday my son's iPhone 7 was stolen at school around 11 AM. Before he made it home at 3 PM his iPhone had been taken over - he had emails between 2:42 and 2:45 showing where someone had changed his gmail password, logged into his gmail account on a different phone, changed the password on his Apple account (which used the gmail account for the Apple ID), and disabled Find My Phone on his stolen phone (and the email from Apple helpfully indicated that now the device could be reset and logged into without the Apple ID credentials). The IP address that was done from was at his high school (the phone did not have cellular service - he used it with WiFi only).
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that someone at this relatively small school knew how to take over an iPhone locked with a 6 digit passcode. It appears that gmail was the weak link here. My guess is to what happened is that since the google apps were installed on the iPhone, when a "lost password" was triggered from a different phone, Google sent a reset code to the stolen phone. I haven't bothered to try and test this, but my hunch is that the reset code that Google sent to his phone was a notification accessible while the phone was locked.
The lesson I have learned here (in any case, since the first step that occurred was his Google account password was changed and logged into from a different phone) is NEVER use gmail addresses for your Apple ID. That was the attack vector, and if it is too easy for someone to change your gmail password, then it's too easy for them to take over your hardware devices as well.
If SpaceX pulls this off, it will revolutionize connectivity around the world. Many, many ISP monopolies (companies that have a stranglehold on small isolated populated areas due to buying up their telco or cable) will FINALLY have to compete. There are vast stretches of the United States with utter crap internet offerings. This is going to shake up everything from internet, to the cell phone carriers, to the "internet of things".
There are many multi-billion dollar companies that stand to lose tremendous amounts of money from this, while the general population of the world stands to gain a great deal of freedom and choice. Again, if SpaceX pulls this off, it will be one of the milestones in modern human history, and it will make SpaceX unbelievably wealthy.
And once again the misnomer "Screen recording" is being used inaccurately in the headline to draw more attention. "Screen recording" is a phrase that has a specific meaning, and there is no screen recording going on. I don't feel like typing it all again... https://slashdot.org/comments....
(I'm not condoning or defending this practice, but just clarifying that the screen is not literally being recorded and streamed as video)
No, they are not literally recording your screen. Phrasing it in that way is FUD. iOS requires special permissions for that. What they are doing (which I have long suspected FB of doing) is to simply report all your user input within the app. By knowing the state of the app, coupled with your exact actions, they can potentially replay what you would have seen. This allows them to know what you spent the most time looking at. If a customer zooms in on a photo of an item they're selling, then what specifically were they zooming in on? If they see a common pattern there then they can provide closeups of the parts of the product people are most interested in by default.
This is really no different than having 5 buttons in an app, and tracking which buttons are clicked most, and removing the buttons that no one ever uses. That's been going on in UI design for ages. This is more precise and can involve tools that allow the "replay" of sessions allowing someone to see what the user would have seen as they interacted. Going back 20 years, my software tracked which widgets the user interacted with. I could then do the same set of actions they did and *gasp* I would be seeing the same thing they must have seen as they used the software. That's not "secretly recording your screen". I guess by that definition the undo / redo history of thousands of apps mean they also secretly record the screen as well.
In the case of FB I have long suspected that FB tracks the time you "hover" over a post, or more simply, the points at which users momentarily halt their incessant and never-ending scrolling when they finally see something that catches their eye. Then FB will start showing you more related posts, even though you didn't like or interact with the post - they simply know you stopped scrolling and spent time looking at it for some reason. You better believe they infer meaning from that.
If it's contrast based then there could be problems. I just tried it wearing headphones, and it was blurring them along the sides of my face. Most of the people I meet with wear headsets, so that might get annoying. So I suppose if you have a light skin color and a light background, or a dark skin color and a dark background, then there could be issues. It's not like it's using a kinect or iPhone X style 3D scanner.
I have a love / hate relationship with LbreOffice. I love that it's free.
We're pretty much to the point where only Microsoft and Sony are competing against each other in the console market. Nintendo's hardware and software titles are so different than either MS or Sony that you would own a Switch or DS because you want that specific type of gaming. Then in addition to the Nintendo you would get an XBox, PS, or even a gaming PC, for that kind of more traditional console gaming. Sure, there is some overlap and there are titles that are available for Switch that are also available for XBox and PS4, but that is more of a "bonus" to the Switch than its bread and butter.
So having said all that, MS isn't afraid of Nintendo, because the average XBox gamer wouldn't be totally drawn away from that brand to Nintendo (nor would they to iOS or Android). However they do have Sony in their sights, and by offering this ability (where Sony does not) they are adding value and distinction to their product compared to their competitor.
I have a revolutionary idea... hear me out. If soda companies would distribute drinks in glass bottles - pretty thick bottles so they're tough and hard to break - and include a "deposit" surcharge when the beverage was purchased, then when the customer returned the empty bottle they would get the deposit back. Then the softdrink company could sterilize the bottle and reuse it over and over!
Now, get this... imagine if milk was also sold in glass bottles. And, in tune with the modern convenience of Amazon where things are delivered right to your door, the milk could be delivered right to your home. Here's the kicker... you could leave your empty milk bottles right at your door, so the delivery person could then pick up your empty bottles for reuse! Zero waste!
A big part of this is that forecasts and current conditions have vastly smaller location granularity than in the past. In 1980, for a given state, you'd be lucky to obtain specific forecasts for maybe 10-15 large cities in the entire state (less for smaller states). I'm sure most of you have seen weather where it rained at your house, but just a few blocks down the street they didn't get rain at all. When your forecast granularity is representative of hundreds of square miles, then of course you can never be very accurate for that entire area.
Now the forecast is latitude and longitude based, and the precision is vastly finer. That alone increases the accuracy tremendously. Weather forecasts now are also down to "minutely" (as in hourly or daily) time spans. Again, same thing. When your forecast broke the entire day into "night" and "day" periods, you can never be very accurate. Most weather apps now forecast what will happen in the next hour down to the minute ("Light rain will begin in around 12 minutes"). It's easy to be accurate when you can forecast such a small time into the future.
There are many reasons weather is more accurate now, everything from the lead time (if your forecast has to be in to the newspaper before 5 AM so it can meet the press deadline, then you're accuracy will be reduced compared to a forecast calculated the moment it is asked for), to the technology that allows people to ask for and view data when they want it for a very specific area.
How does Bell stand to make money off of this? Do they get some kind of kickback from Canadian streaming services?
Port scan it?
Yes but Nintendo's focus will be on "portability" and using the joycon as a pointer or playing games multiplayer is marginally useful in a portable way (IE using the built in display as a portable device). So Nintendo could embed just the physical controls on the device and make that static (like a 2DS did away with the hinges), and have an HDMI port in the back. If someone whats to play on a TV then they can use the device as a controller, plus link joy-cons to them for other players or games that absolutely require them.
That way Nintendo doesn't have to include joy-cons in the bundle for it to be playable. They may couple this with a slightly smaller screen, again, to focus on portability.
I say there is a really good chance we will see a Switch with built in physical controls.
So... as usual the summary (and even TFA in this case) had me confused about what is going on here. At first I thought Google was redistributing Apple's internal iOS apps. I thought maybe they were embedding iOS apps within their own apps or something. Anyway here's what this is about.
An enterprise developer license for iOS allows a developer to sign an app for limited *internal* distribution of an app. This is for testing and enterprise use internally within the company the license was issued to. This is in contrast to apps intended for public distribution, which as we know can only be done through the iOS App Store, and which requires Apple to approve the app.
What Facebook and Google have been doing is publicly distributing what should be internal-use-only apps to the public - apps that would not be approved by Apple for various reasons (including privacy issues) - through their enterprise developer license. So it's clearly a violation Apple's terms, and it sounds like both FB and Google are doing the overreaching data collection through these special apps.
Apple has reacted, disabling the signing keys for these apps so they no longer function.
Any white hats create a DB lookup tool to allow people to check if their account was compromised?
Without ad blocking the web would be useless
For who? You? The vast majority of web browsing is now done on mobile devices, and the mobile browsers don't have ad blocking by default. Thus the vast majority of people using the internet are not using ad blockers, and I very much doubt the web is *useless* for them.
What do hiring practices have to do with the bad things Facebook is doing? Facebook's mandates, behavior, policies, etc, all come from the top. Facebook is not the result of employees going rogue and doing their own thing. It's exactly what Zuckerberg wants it to be. So this "hiring practices" garbage is completely unrelated (probably to do with the Color of Change organization and forcing FB to hire a minimum amount of non-Caucasian employees).
Further, I don't see how Instagram, Whatsapp, etc, directly contribute to Facebook's problem. The three platforms are currently so separate in every way that forcing FB to sell them will not penalize FB in any way. They'll just get their money back, and Facebook, the social media platform, will be exactly the same as it is now. Perhaps, maybe, splitting them from FB will protect user privacy in some way on those platforms, but that is assuming that user privacy was even protected on those platforms prior to FB. Or that a breach would never occur had FB not bought them.
The only way to really penalize FB is to somehow fragment their primary Facebook platform in some way. Like totally strip the advertising company out of FB. FB gets some small flat rate from ads shown on its platform (no more ad auction to the highest "bidder", etc) and the dynamic market of selling advertising is then its own entity (or entities). Or force some other 3rd party source of posts into the user's stream. So every 2nd or 3rd post a user sees is totally independent of FB and out of their control. That could be an ad, or something the user has followed in some way external to FB. The point is that FB would have zero control over that information being inserted into the user's stream. Then other companies could innovate and compete for the user's interactions and attention, and FB would have to then compete as well. This would result in a better user experience since users will follow and interact with what they like most.
First off, the mouse (and touchpad) is overused. As you've discovered, you can interact much more efficiently with a keyboard. The worst possible interaction is having to continuously switch back and forth between input methods. There's a reason for that and I'll explain. I've written on this before (and I've never seen much discussion about it), but I'll go ahead and expound on it.
The mouse is a virtual representation INSIDE the computing environment. You control a virtual construct (the pointer) on the display using a device in our world. Because the representation is virtual, you have to synchronize your brain with the pointer every time you begin using it. That includes when you switch from the keyboard to the mouse. That's because it is a visual representation - you must see the pointer and watch it to control it. This is something subconscious, but each person has developed a "synchronization" pattern or habit for mouse use. It's a natural thing that has to occur to try and improve the inherit inefficiency. Most people will move the mouse pointer in some way to try to locate it visually - spotting a moving object is much more efficient than a static object (plus many programs hide mouse pointer when the user starts typing, and only show it again when it is moved). This synchronization has to happen before you can position the mouse on the widget you want to interact with. I suppose some people use other techniques, like parking the mouse somewhere relative to where they last used it. I notice that I do tend to park the mouse off of the thing I'm typing in automatically. However you will find you move the mouse in some typical way to locate it visually and connect with it.
Because visual processing is one of the most expensive senses that our brain deals with, having to constantly synchronize visually with a mouse pointer is a relatively "expensive" process in terms of the neurons firing to make use of it.
So now the keyboard... the computer keyboard is the exact opposite. It is a physical construct that represents the computer environment in the real world. There is a key labeled "A" that when pressed triggers the letter "A" in the computer environment. Because the keyboard exists in our physical world it is much more natural for us to interact with it - it is "real". We also do a subconscious synchronization every time we go to use the keyboard, however since it is a physical object, we use the sense of touch (and often vision, but peripherally). The great thing is this can occur without having to stare intently at the keyboard. So, if you pay close attention, you will find you do some synchronization pattern every time you go to type. Try it sometime. Take your hands off the keyboard, close your eyes, and go to type something. For me, I feel for the edge of my laptop with the outside edges of my palms (the little finger sides). I also notice I feel for the left side of the spacebar with my left thumb and the left edge of the keyboard with my left little finger. This all happens quickly and without thinking - we just know how our keyboards feel. That is because our brains are wired to interact with spatial objects, and the keyboard is exactly that.
So to sum it up - the mouse is a representation inside the virtual environment of the computer, the keyboard is a physical representation in the real world. We're better interacting with real things because we can apply more of our senses to it and it's something we do naturally.
They're subtly different but one question is an intelligent question that identifies bottlenecks. The other is a vanity request.
Isn't that why we raced Russia to the moon and won? For vanity? To be first?
You may be onto something here. The gyroscopic effect of the wheels, which can each be rotated individually, could be used to orient the vehicle. It already has climate control, slots for drink stowage, and a box for storing spacesuit gloves. Outgassing by cracking a window could be used to provide thrust if maneuvering was required.
And suddenly light bulbs in China got a little brighter.
Of course they are quiet. Lasers are based on light. However they wouldn't be quiet if they were sonic satellites, which they are not.
There should be a way to adhere to the letter of the law, yet give Russia the shaft. Like.... set up data storage centers in Russia to store all Russian user data. However the data first goes to the US where it is encrypted with keys only residing on US servers. On retrieval it passes again through non-Russian servers for decryption. So yes, the data is safe and sound in Russia, and is only stored in Russia. However it can't be utilized from there. I'm sure the Russian oligarchs will sleep extremely well at night knowing their citizens data is so securely stored and encrypted. Because, you know, they always have the best interests of their comrades at heart.
The US has no law that prevents its citizens from using online services anywhere in the world. No, it is not reasonable for countries to demand that data about citizens reside in some specific country for "audit". Let me use an analogy. A Russian citizen sees an advertisement for my product in a magazine. They mail my company an international money order, and we ship them the product. Do I have to have an office space in Russia in which to physically store their name, address and invoice information since I have it written down in a ledger in some other country? How reasonable is that? What "privacy" are they trying to protect about their dear citizens anyway?
Just because it is easier to try and regulate digital things does not make this any more reasonable.
Oh, and let me explain something else. The US dominates globally in the online arena. You get a perk by being the winner, and that perk is that your technology is in demand globally. The economic and capitalistic environment in the US fosters the environment in which the tech products that dominate the world are created. So you have a country like Russia, who wants to have unreasonable control over its citizens, essentially jealous of this fact - a huge imbalance in people patronizing US online services vastly more than Russian online services. If Russia cannot compete in this space, and cannot attract users (even within their own country) to services created within Russia, then they pass laws like this to try and get their grimy fingers on at least some of the data.
The ironic part is you worry about "American spying" on Russians, when Russians have way, way more to fear from their own government spying on them. You are essentially saying that it's perfectly fine for Russia to spy on their citizens, and have the ability to track *everything* they do online. As long as it isn't America doing it that's perfectly okay. Companies like Apple are basically giving US agencies a big middle finger, and implementing stuff at the hardware level to protect user's data. You think that would happen if Apple were a Russian company?
Anyway, nice attempt at spinning this and justifying Russia's lack of rights and privacy abuses against its own citizens.
Using the term "dark pattern" while discussing a UI design is about the stupidest and confusing thing you could do. I was literally thinking there was some visual element that was dark. How about call it "deceptive", "misleading" or "confusing"? Sheesh. Your job is to write. Take a little pride in your work and think about what your words actually convey.
Maybe it's my carrier (US Cellular), but I get zero spam texts. I never have gotten them. Spam phone calls? Yes. A few a day currently. However I do not get spam texts. Now I don't know if they have preventative measures in place or what, but either no one attempts to send them to me, or they are doing an extremely effective job blocking them. I didn't even realize spam texts were a problem for some.