Technically, if I measure uptime for the Google Cloud, the Azure Cloud and iCloud against my in-house servers (which are nothing spectacular and most people here wouldn't be impressed), over the last three years, I win hands-down.
And that's not counting "theoretical" outages, but actual outages where it happened in the working day in our region for services we use.
Cloud is just another computer. Use it as such. Supplement it with a replica / backup / alternative.
I bought my gf a tablet from Amazon that was the cheapest Windows 10 tablet I could find.
It came with a one-year's Office 365 subscription and cost 100 GBP (that's about $124). It had a removable keyboard, just like the Surface, it functions well as a tablet, runs "full" Windows (she uses it for her Steam games, Skype, etc.).
There's no need to pay $300+ for an iPad when you can have a Windows laptop for that, or three Windows tablets of a similar size
The "brand" was something like Linc or similar. Who cares? It's in the "throwaway when it goes wrong" category, after the first year of warrantied use. She's had it now for over 2 and still uses it every day.
It amazes me that the iPad is so damn expensive in the first place, given what it is.
That they bolt on about 50% profit for the phone model is chickenfeed in comparison.
Honestly, I bought a GBP 5 Android tablet the other day. Technically it beat most of the iPad Mini specs that are its closest rival. Sure, you can argue "screen resolution" but why would you on such a tiny device to start with?
Have your students never heard of Google Earth? You don't need to buy a single thing, it's free for educational users.
And that gives a damn-near perfect, rotatable, zoomable view of anything you like and you can even get plugins that compare area, measurements, etc. using proper sphere-following routes.
But, no, let's continue printing things out on 2D paper that is GUARANTEED to be distorted, and then argue about what distortion we prefer.
Putting a bunch of people in VR-space with all the resources in the world generally teaches them nothing. Otherwise we wouldn't need universities, you'd just rent the books from the library and then pay the exam boards to sit your degree.
Aside from the lectures, which are just by-rote education that could be replaced, you have to assess, understand, inspire, assist and generally be useful to the students. That's why the biggest expensive of education is generally staffing. Those Dr's, PhD's, Professors, etc. don't come cheap, and their time in teaching is limited (you buy them off by making them teach in exchange for being provided facilities and funding for their research).
Given that, it's a human-hungry industry, resources are secondary. Almost all universities today publish their entire courses online, with all the materials and all the coursework. They were doing it when I did a degree almost 20 years ago (back then it was all on the FTP server, which everyone had a login to and quite a lot was available publicly).
And you can't just assign twice as many students to the same staff, you would need to hire more staff, who all need to be educated too.
If you think that any part of education is about providing reading material and then letting kids and/or adults just get on with it, you severely misunderstand how the world works.
In fact, if anything, all those dorms, teams and frats are the anti-thesis of education and likely the first thing to go. No other country does the last two with any seriousness, for instance. You don't get to Oxford just because you're a decent rower.
If anything, education's future is firmly in being available offline. Sure, you can do online degrees, but they are held in contempt for the most part. The online parts are secondary to the whole purpose and who's going to pay more than the bare minimum for them to reprint last year's PDF just to sit an online degree that's worthless?
You can modernise it - providing video streams to an lecturer or assistant for one-to-one sessions, but you don't need less people, actually you need more to do that.
My bank's staff are mainly based overseas. That doesn't mean they can avoid tax.
It's a question of the market - New Zealanders are paying for products, the tax is disappearing out of the country and going elsewhere and New Zealand sees very benefit from selling that product.
You are still TRADING in the jurisdiction even if you're not actually there. The same argument was tried in the EU, Ireland, UK, etc. and lost.
You are trading in the country (because they have an Apple NZ subsite for a start), selling apps and devices to the country, testing your product for compliance in that country, providing support to the country (via an overseas support agency? Nothing unusual about that), but also paying no tax in that country.
There are very, very,very few things that you can do en-masse for a foreign country that won't attract local tax there.
What on earth makes you think you can't make drones that fly-by pre-fab instructions, literally just a list of GPS co-ordinates? That's a 10-year-old's science project.
Prepare fleet of drones, spread them out all over the place, or just instruct them to all wake up and fly at a certain time / date to a certain location from myriad hidden locations.
You can garner all the attention you like, if the drones are just commercial stuff bought off Amazon, you wouldn't even be able to trace the purchase most of the time.
Or, literally, release one a night with instruction to fly off, land on a rooftop that doesn't get much attention, and wait for the signal.
We can't even find people who shine lasers and fly drones over Heathrow airport for a laugh, what makes you think you can track home-brew drones from a determined attacker?
Ford ring you up and say "If you sell that for less than 50% profit, you'll never be allowed another Ford car again".
It's illegal, and more importantly immoral, no matter what terminology you want to translate from the Russian using.
And that applies whether it's YOU or a Ford dealer who's already bought the cars from you, or a third-party dealer who legally owns the cars they have to sell on.
You cannot determine the price of your products. You cannot impose conditions on goods post-sale. Almost all first-world legal systems prevent such things.
Once the shop has the iPhones in their possession, it's up to THEM what they sell them for, not Apple. Because - for instance - imagine if they DON'T sell. That guy would never be able to recoup even the tiniest part of his money, even at a loss, because "Apple said no".
I - as an EU citizen - would be perfectly entitled to sure the US government if there was any hint they were accessing my data (e.g. Facebook, Microsoft, etc.) - as they have requested of a number of multinational tech companies.
That would be a can of worms that they would not won't opened.
The path to a good job or a successful career has never been the reason for education.
It's the path to a good brain able to comprehend the world and not be an idiot. Especially not one that thinks bright people somehow get all the best jobs (hey, look, a President...)
EVERYONE should go to college. You are SUPPOSED to spend lots of money on education. As in you should be spending at least as much as healthcare on it (if we can get governments to reduce military spending to allow that, it might even be possible to put in MULTIPLES of the healthcare budget into education). An individual has no guarantee of success from that, but society - on average - will benefit. It doesn't take much to realise that.
But any kid that ever bought "you'll get a good job just by doing this one simple trick", and any parent who ever reiterated that to them honestly needs to go back to school themselves.
Don't educate for the promise of money in the future. That's just ridiculous. It's like becoming a pianist because a pianist you once knew earned a lot. Educate for the sake of education. Like becoming a pianist because you love the sound of music.
The Android fingerprint API is one way too. You can train, you can ask the hardware to recognise, but at no point do you get access to the raw fingerprint data.
Also, the iPhone 5S is vulnerable to EXACTLY the attack I describe, as was the Galaxy S5. The newer models are also no different, in that respect.
Apple Pay and the iTunes store also both allow use of fingerprints for purchases. Therefore it's not just "convenience", but security too.
A bit of wood glue and carbon paper and you can take a snapshot of a fingerprint smudge on a screen, and turn it into an authenticatable fingerprint in about five minutes.
All fingerprint readers suffer the same problem, to differing degrees, but a fingerprint is bog-useless for "securing" your phone. It's literally in the "prank on your friends" territory to unlock it.
There's a reason that my Samsung shows several different lock screen methods (swipe, PIN, passcode, etc.), each with a security (High Security, Medium Security, Low Security, etc.) underneath and the fingerprint one? It says NOTHING underneath. Just a blank space where they should be saying "Waste of time"
First, they admitted lowering the key size. Then they asked IBM to keep quite about attacks on it.
Sure, at a later date, they were making changes to strengthen it but you are assuming that they still have the same intention.
When an agency keeps secrets about an attack on the algorithm secret for 20+ years, while it was still an "authorised" algorithm, they aren't working in your interest.
Because whether your data is on the front page of the evening news, flying across monitored connections all round the internet, broadcast in morse code over the airwaves, or stored in a file in your enemy's data capture centres, you can transmit your data (and they can capture and store it) over plaintext channels and yet THEY STILL CAN'T READ IT. Because they don't have the private key.
Hell, they can even send you a message (using your public key) and nobody but you can read it.
This is PRECISELY the point of encryption.
The only other element is to make the encrypted data have no detectable pattern (i.e. be indistinguishable from random data) but that's really a consequence of "your enemy not being able to work out the key" - if they could find a pattern, they've found a weakness in your encryption.
TLS has nothing to do with the underlying encryption. That hasn't been broken, but the trust put into the people verifying identities has been misplaced. That's an entirely different matter.
Not surprising, really, given that's exactly what encryption was invented for. To military standards. For military purposes. To prevent other militaries doing exactly what you don't want them to do.
All the scaremongering around encryption "being broken" by these "acres of datacentre" junk is just that - scaremongering. Hell, didn't the NSA recently ask for help breaking Skype? I'm sure there's a certain amount of misdirection there (I'm still not convinced on EC cryptography, which was brought along with the help of the NSA choosing certain curves), but nobody has yet shown practical attacks against large enough primes used in PKE.
So far, everything they've done is via side-channel attacks and those are present in every system anyway. And when you have these organisations paying for tools that can open up iPhones, you know that they are struggling to cope.
If you want to secure data, encrypt it and abide by all the necessary precautions for it (i.e. don't enter the passphrase on untrusted computers, etc.).
The whole point of encryption is that you can publish your data on the web and point EVERYONE at it (e.g. Wikileaks insurance file) and nobody can access it without the key. If you don't trust Google or similar to hold your files, only allow them access to the encrypted containers and not the decrypted files.
It's quite clear that encryption is doing its job. And if it wasn't, it would be fixed quite quickly (e.g. we're already preparing against quantum computing attacks).
I'm sorry, please state ANYTHING that guarantees a job?
I can't think of a single thing, even self-employment or starting your own company.
Any "educated" person who thinks they are entitled to a job just because they get a degree, or any qualification whatsoever, is really in need of thinking about the situation for two minutes.
If it was true, everyone would go for a degree, which would guarantee them all jobs, which would mean that you'd run out of jobs available for the next people to do that.
There isn't a qualification in the world that guarantees you a job, and if that's why you went for the qualification, you're an idiot.
You study something because you're interested in it. You get a job doing something because you're interested in it and/or you need the money.
The and/or bit there is what tells you that life interferes sometimes.
Out of all the people I know, the ones who are least employed, or employed in fields furthest from their course of study, are a qualified barrister (currently working in a library), a guy with about 6 doctorates (currently writing children's books) and an astrophysicist (currently teaching maths in senior school).
Slashdot Mirror
As quick as Windows Update.
What makes you think they'd target my Office 365 account rather than myself directly anyway?
And I can get another IP in about 10 minutes from my ISP, or use one of the multiple other ranges / connections that I have. Or just connect my phone.
That's at home. In work, it's even easier.
Nobody buys Microsoft cloud services because of DDoS protection of their office suite.
If anything, having a cloud office suite is actually the problem there. I can work in Word just fine while my external connection is down.
Technically, if I measure uptime for the Google Cloud, the Azure Cloud and iCloud against my in-house servers (which are nothing spectacular and most people here wouldn't be impressed), over the last three years, I win hands-down.
And that's not counting "theoretical" outages, but actual outages where it happened in the working day in our region for services we use.
Cloud is just another computer. Use it as such. Supplement it with a replica / backup / alternative.
And that's why your devices are expensive.
No idea of the brand.
No idea of the model.
Just works.
Go cheap.
I bought my gf a tablet from Amazon that was the cheapest Windows 10 tablet I could find.
It came with a one-year's Office 365 subscription and cost 100 GBP (that's about $124). It had a removable keyboard, just like the Surface, it functions well as a tablet, runs "full" Windows (she uses it for her Steam games, Skype, etc.).
There's no need to pay $300+ for an iPad when you can have a Windows laptop for that, or three Windows tablets of a similar size
The "brand" was something like Linc or similar. Who cares? It's in the "throwaway when it goes wrong" category, after the first year of warrantied use. She's had it now for over 2 and still uses it every day.
It amazes me that the iPad is so damn expensive in the first place, given what it is.
That they bolt on about 50% profit for the phone model is chickenfeed in comparison.
Honestly, I bought a GBP 5 Android tablet the other day. Technically it beat most of the iPad Mini specs that are its closest rival. Sure, you can argue "screen resolution" but why would you on such a tiny device to start with?
Have your students never heard of Google Earth? You don't need to buy a single thing, it's free for educational users.
And that gives a damn-near perfect, rotatable, zoomable view of anything you like and you can even get plugins that compare area, measurements, etc. using proper sphere-following routes.
But, no, let's continue printing things out on 2D paper that is GUARANTEED to be distorted, and then argue about what distortion we prefer.
Again, only in the US.
I think you misunderstand education.
Putting a bunch of people in VR-space with all the resources in the world generally teaches them nothing. Otherwise we wouldn't need universities, you'd just rent the books from the library and then pay the exam boards to sit your degree.
Aside from the lectures, which are just by-rote education that could be replaced, you have to assess, understand, inspire, assist and generally be useful to the students. That's why the biggest expensive of education is generally staffing. Those Dr's, PhD's, Professors, etc. don't come cheap, and their time in teaching is limited (you buy them off by making them teach in exchange for being provided facilities and funding for their research).
Given that, it's a human-hungry industry, resources are secondary. Almost all universities today publish their entire courses online, with all the materials and all the coursework. They were doing it when I did a degree almost 20 years ago (back then it was all on the FTP server, which everyone had a login to and quite a lot was available publicly).
And you can't just assign twice as many students to the same staff, you would need to hire more staff, who all need to be educated too.
If you think that any part of education is about providing reading material and then letting kids and/or adults just get on with it, you severely misunderstand how the world works.
In fact, if anything, all those dorms, teams and frats are the anti-thesis of education and likely the first thing to go. No other country does the last two with any seriousness, for instance. You don't get to Oxford just because you're a decent rower.
If anything, education's future is firmly in being available offline. Sure, you can do online degrees, but they are held in contempt for the most part. The online parts are secondary to the whole purpose and who's going to pay more than the bare minimum for them to reprint last year's PDF just to sit an online degree that's worthless?
You can modernise it - providing video streams to an lecturer or assistant for one-to-one sessions, but you don't need less people, actually you need more to do that.
My bank's staff are mainly based overseas. That doesn't mean they can avoid tax.
It's a question of the market - New Zealanders are paying for products, the tax is disappearing out of the country and going elsewhere and New Zealand sees very benefit from selling that product.
You are still TRADING in the jurisdiction even if you're not actually there. The same argument was tried in the EU, Ireland, UK, etc. and lost.
You are trading in the country (because they have an Apple NZ subsite for a start), selling apps and devices to the country, testing your product for compliance in that country, providing support to the country (via an overseas support agency? Nothing unusual about that), but also paying no tax in that country.
There are very, very ,very few things that you can do en-masse for a foreign country that won't attract local tax there.
What on earth makes you think you can't make drones that fly-by pre-fab instructions, literally just a list of GPS co-ordinates? That's a 10-year-old's science project.
Prepare fleet of drones, spread them out all over the place, or just instruct them to all wake up and fly at a certain time / date to a certain location from myriad hidden locations.
You can garner all the attention you like, if the drones are just commercial stuff bought off Amazon, you wouldn't even be able to trace the purchase most of the time.
Or, literally, release one a night with instruction to fly off, land on a rooftop that doesn't get much attention, and wait for the signal.
We can't even find people who shine lasers and fly drones over Heathrow airport for a laugh, what makes you think you can track home-brew drones from a determined attacker?
Video site shocked when people just want to use it to watch the damn video.
If a $200 drone costs your enemy $3m to take down, you really have advertised quite a large problem.
For a few thousand, you can cost your enemy so much money they'll think twice about bothering, which opens them up to attack.
Or, in the worst case, they are hemorrhaging money and you just pop down the toy shop once a month for another.
I have to say, the image of a swarm of drones must be really attractive to an attacker of any kind, especially if the response is overkill like this.
Same as being a fish in a large shoal. Through a few thousand against the most heavily defended places, one of them is bound to get through.
You go to sell your car.
Ford ring you up and say "If you sell that for less than 50% profit, you'll never be allowed another Ford car again".
It's illegal, and more importantly immoral, no matter what terminology you want to translate from the Russian using.
And that applies whether it's YOU or a Ford dealer who's already bought the cars from you, or a third-party dealer who legally owns the cars they have to sell on.
You cannot determine the price of your products. You cannot impose conditions on goods post-sale. Almost all first-world legal systems prevent such things.
Once the shop has the iPhones in their possession, it's up to THEM what they sell them for, not Apple. Because - for instance - imagine if they DON'T sell. That guy would never be able to recoup even the tiniest part of his money, even at a loss, because "Apple said no".
Three stories down:
"Hacking Victim Can't Sue Foreign Government For Hacking Him On US Soil, Says Court"
Well.. which is it?
God, my English has deteriorated beyond comprehension. Sorry!
Exactly the reason they know they can't allow it.
I - as an EU citizen - would be perfectly entitled to sure the US government if there was any hint they were accessing my data (e.g. Facebook, Microsoft, etc.) - as they have requested of a number of multinational tech companies.
That would be a can of worms that they would not won't opened.
Those people are idiots.
The path to a good job or a successful career has never been the reason for education.
It's the path to a good brain able to comprehend the world and not be an idiot. Especially not one that thinks bright people somehow get all the best jobs (hey, look, a President...)
EVERYONE should go to college. You are SUPPOSED to spend lots of money on education. As in you should be spending at least as much as healthcare on it (if we can get governments to reduce military spending to allow that, it might even be possible to put in MULTIPLES of the healthcare budget into education). An individual has no guarantee of success from that, but society - on average - will benefit. It doesn't take much to realise that.
But any kid that ever bought "you'll get a good job just by doing this one simple trick", and any parent who ever reiterated that to them honestly needs to go back to school themselves.
Don't educate for the promise of money in the future. That's just ridiculous. It's like becoming a pianist because a pianist you once knew earned a lot. Educate for the sake of education. Like becoming a pianist because you love the sound of music.
The Android fingerprint API is one way too. You can train, you can ask the hardware to recognise, but at no point do you get access to the raw fingerprint data.
Also, the iPhone 5S is vulnerable to EXACTLY the attack I describe, as was the Galaxy S5. The newer models are also no different, in that respect.
Apple Pay and the iTunes store also both allow use of fingerprints for purchases. Therefore it's not just "convenience", but security too.
Worse than that.
A bit of wood glue and carbon paper and you can take a snapshot of a fingerprint smudge on a screen, and turn it into an authenticatable fingerprint in about five minutes.
All fingerprint readers suffer the same problem, to differing degrees, but a fingerprint is bog-useless for "securing" your phone. It's literally in the "prank on your friends" territory to unlock it.
There's a reason that my Samsung shows several different lock screen methods (swipe, PIN, passcode, etc.), each with a security (High Security, Medium Security, Low Security, etc.) underneath and the fingerprint one? It says NOTHING underneath. Just a blank space where they should be saying "Waste of time"
Go read the history of DES.
First, they admitted lowering the key size.
Then they asked IBM to keep quite about attacks on it.
Sure, at a later date, they were making changes to strengthen it but you are assuming that they still have the same intention.
When an agency keeps secrets about an attack on the algorithm secret for 20+ years, while it was still an "authorised" algorithm, they aren't working in your interest.
Yes it is.
That's exactly the point.
Because whether your data is on the front page of the evening news, flying across monitored connections all round the internet, broadcast in morse code over the airwaves, or stored in a file in your enemy's data capture centres, you can transmit your data (and they can capture and store it) over plaintext channels and yet THEY STILL CAN'T READ IT. Because they don't have the private key.
Hell, they can even send you a message (using your public key) and nobody but you can read it.
This is PRECISELY the point of encryption.
The only other element is to make the encrypted data have no detectable pattern (i.e. be indistinguishable from random data) but that's really a consequence of "your enemy not being able to work out the key" - if they could find a pattern, they've found a weakness in your encryption.
TLS has nothing to do with the underlying encryption. That hasn't been broken, but the trust put into the people verifying identities has been misplaced. That's an entirely different matter.
There are already defences against this.
I'd be rather disappointed if military encryption specialists weren't already designing more and even using them in practice already.
Not surprising, really, given that's exactly what encryption was invented for. To military standards. For military purposes. To prevent other militaries doing exactly what you don't want them to do.
All the scaremongering around encryption "being broken" by these "acres of datacentre" junk is just that - scaremongering. Hell, didn't the NSA recently ask for help breaking Skype? I'm sure there's a certain amount of misdirection there (I'm still not convinced on EC cryptography, which was brought along with the help of the NSA choosing certain curves), but nobody has yet shown practical attacks against large enough primes used in PKE.
So far, everything they've done is via side-channel attacks and those are present in every system anyway. And when you have these organisations paying for tools that can open up iPhones, you know that they are struggling to cope.
If you want to secure data, encrypt it and abide by all the necessary precautions for it (i.e. don't enter the passphrase on untrusted computers, etc.).
The whole point of encryption is that you can publish your data on the web and point EVERYONE at it (e.g. Wikileaks insurance file) and nobody can access it without the key. If you don't trust Google or similar to hold your files, only allow them access to the encrypted containers and not the decrypted files.
It's quite clear that encryption is doing its job. And if it wasn't, it would be fixed quite quickly (e.g. we're already preparing against quantum computing attacks).
I'm sorry, please state ANYTHING that guarantees a job?
I can't think of a single thing, even self-employment or starting your own company.
Any "educated" person who thinks they are entitled to a job just because they get a degree, or any qualification whatsoever, is really in need of thinking about the situation for two minutes.
If it was true, everyone would go for a degree, which would guarantee them all jobs, which would mean that you'd run out of jobs available for the next people to do that.
There isn't a qualification in the world that guarantees you a job, and if that's why you went for the qualification, you're an idiot.
You study something because you're interested in it.
You get a job doing something because you're interested in it and/or you need the money.
The and/or bit there is what tells you that life interferes sometimes.
Out of all the people I know, the ones who are least employed, or employed in fields furthest from their course of study, are a qualified barrister (currently working in a library), a guy with about 6 doctorates (currently writing children's books) and an astrophysicist (currently teaching maths in senior school).