Tesla sold 250,000 cars worldwide in 2018 (of all different kinds). 2018 saw 78,700,000 cars sold in 2018.
Tesla represent 0.3% of the car market last year. And that's *just* last year. Overall, in terms of all the cars in the world, you can add a couple of zeroes after the dot.
Electric cars, and Teslas in particular, are a teensy, tiny minority of all the cars out there, and a teensy proportion of new sales. You wouldn't know it from all the press they get, but they are less popular than Linux on desktop PC's (so, not counting Chromebooks, Android tablets, smartphones, etc.).
To build on just ONE point that I happen to agree with (eating Tesla's lunch)
Musk is a salesman. He sells a good pitch. But the giants can stamp on him any time they like. The fact is that they don't need to - he's not a threat. He can take the hit for all the problems of self-driving cars and electric cars, they can push out a token model to make it look like they're doing something, and thus put back that point where they have to convince petrolheads that a battery-powered EV with hardly any charging points (worldwide) is somehow a good choice for them. They're just waiting for the switch.
To hear Musk (and others) speak, you'd think BMW are scrambling to catch up. They're not. They just don't care. Their EV models make them no more than Tesla, which is a drop in the ocean to them. It's chicken-feed to them, in a niche market. And one they can own any time they like.
But while petroleum is still the primary fuel, they need to sell as much of that technology, patents, models and parts as possible until they can come up with a comparable car that would operate just as well in the real world in terms of charging, distance, etc.
He's the guinea pig. He's taking the hit. For less than one tenth what they spend on R&D each year, they could put the entire company out of business.
Not only do they know this, they want that. Because it can only go one of two ways: Either his name become synonymous with electric cars, and then they bring out one that's better than his, cheaper and with a big brand name on it. Or he crashes and burns and they point at him and go "There, you see?".
He's just not a threat. And it's not four years down the line, it's 16. And he's still not a threat, despite being WAY ahead of where people expected him to actually get (shorting stock etc.). He funds the company from his own coffers, throwing it on stuff that Ford et al probably just have sitting in a lab somewhere. They don't sell it yet... that would be stupid, it would be copied in seconds and either flop or everyone would demand it and then it would become commodity. It's better to release your new product AFTER your competitor just spent all their time designing and releasing theirs. It helps your sales and as a benefit HURTS theirs right at the time they need to make their money back.
Instead, they wait, and save it to one-up whoever does blink first. Maybe Ford or one of them won't make it another decade, like Kodak couldn't survive the transition to digital imaging. But for sure most of the others will. If anything they are much more worried about ditching diesels at the moment, or re-engineering them. Notice that the dieselgate was because they didn't want to admit that - to be within pollution guidelines - they had to dial back performance. They didn't want that to happen to their customers. And you think their customers would accept a Tesla in its place? Not yet.
Tesla is a noisy sales company. "Disruptive", some call it. But it's just ripples in a pond to the major vehicle manufacturers who can out-manufacture, out-patent, out-engineer and out-sell Tesla whenever they want. That's why people were shorting Tesla - even if everything "goes right", they'll get bought up or shut down.
I have seen orders of magnitude more cars on the road that I've never heard of, than Teslas. Tesla
It's seems insane, but it's actually true. It's called the Mpemba effect.
In this particular experiment, it's a combination of VERY cold air temperatures, using boiling (steaming) water that's already trying to evaporate, injecting it quickly into a fast-moving air-stream (the windchill is the extreme part, not the basic air temperature), over as large a volume as possible (so it spreads more).
If you wanted to flash-freeze something as quickly as possible, that's what you'd do - put it in a cold, fast-flowing fluid stream, and spreading it as much as possible to make the droplets small.
I've been using LibreOffice to open up old formats because it does a damn sight better job that Word has ever done.
P.S. try opening an old Publisher file in any other version of Publisher than the one it was created with whatsoever.
If your business literally has SO MANY documents that you can't afford to lose the formatting on that it's a business issue, you should have converted them to signed, timestamped PDF years ago for archival purposes. And probably created a template that *does* work in LibreOffice, Google Docs, Word and anything else you might be likely to use. It's really not hard. Even for a fancy background/letterhead.
"We save everything only in Word 2006" is the cause of your problem. Not "Some third-party software slightly messes up the formatting when we open up decade-old files". If you'd PDF'd for archival purposes and, maybe, kept the original Word template around for anything that you apply the formatting to, you would have a working archive and precisely one template to "change" to make it work in LibreOffice or any other office suite.
UK person, on a UK keyboard, on a UK-language Windows machine with a UK-language mainstream browser (Chrome, latest stable).
And I still get this crap:
£
Every time I put in a UK pound sign.
Every other website, no problem at all. SoylentNews (based on MUCH newer Slashcode), no problem at all. Literally no weird settings, multiple computers, etc. etc.
Oh, and I paid to "Disable Advertising" and I still get adverts anyway and the box randomly unchecks itself.
Slashdot is basically unmaintained from what I can see. Fortunately, I don't use any of the same passwords etc. anywhere else, as I'm just waiting for the first compromise.
I don't do the phone thing. I have a phone, it works, I'm happy. And "it works" includes things like SSH + port-forwarding apps to stream live TV from my tvheadend server over the Internet, so it's not like I'm just tapping out texts and nothing else. I have 10 apps just for devices / VPN etc. in work, it's my satnav for all of Europe (CoPilot), etc. etc.
So I have an S5 Mini, because my S4 Mini got gummed up over the years as I updated and because you can't probably tell the official version of Android to JUST FECKING SAVE EVERYTHING ON SD, I got tired of moving apps only for them to be moved back to the tiny internal storage every time they update.
Anyway, the S5 Mini still has the same problems, just slightly less often because the internal storage isn't quite so pathetic. But I stick with them because they have IR-blasters built in that are supported by apps I have, to turn on my kit when I'm in work/at home.
I relegated the S4 to just be a "remote control / TV" at home (handy to watch the TV on the phone in the kitchen while I'm washing up, etc.). One day it went a bit funny and it was clear that it wasn't going to recover and needed reinstallation.
So I picked up LineageOS at that point, and flashed it. And, feck. If the phone isn't twice as fast and slick as it's ever been, without half the bundled apps, just works and does some things even better than the S5 Mini with the "official" OS. It's actually now a BETTER phone than the S5 Mini because of the OS alone.
Sadly, the S5 Mini doesn't have a proper supported LineageOS or that would go too (if it does crash-and-burn, it will definitely get the LineageOS treatment).
Everything past those things doesn't interest me. They all lose ports and functionality, removeable/replaceable parts, cost a bomb and can't be LineageOS'd for the most part. My next phone will have to be a research project, and only if/when the S5 Mini that gets day-to-day use dies and can't be LineageOS'd properly.
I don't understand what happened to the smartphone industry. I just want a modern phone. I will pay extra on the price to get rid of the standard manufacturer apps etc. permanently. I will pay extra for those "legacy" ports that eat up less room that any of the multi-camera, curved-screen, display-notch shite that they put out now.
Likely my next "phone" won't be a phone. It'll be a mini-clamshell tablet/PC. For the price of a smartphone, you can get a full Windows Intel PC, with replaceable batteries, proper keyboard and joystick, somewhat resembling a Nintendo DS. It could run Steam, ffs. The call functionality is relatively minor to me at that point. The 4G/5G will mean a million times more. I'd happily buy a "phone" which doesn't have voice calling, in fact. So long as I can do WhatsApp (i.e. it has a phone number), I'm happy.
Phones overboarded on the useless features where a decent OS install could have doubled their speed and battery life. They focused on all the shite I don't want and removed all the stuff I do. They became huge, fragile and hard to repair. My S4 Mini has been down three flights of stairs to my knowledge. There's barely a scratch on it.
Given a clamshell PC-like device, with 2 or more SIM slots (eSIMs even better if they take off) and a replaceable battery. I'll pay literally TWICE what I'll be prepared to pay for even the top of the line phone (P.S. Obviously I would not pay what *they* want me to pay for a top of the line phone).
Phones turned themselves into multipurpose devices in a race to the bottom, then priced themselves as if there were no other devices in the world capable of doing those things. Meanwhile, I could pick up something that does more, costs less, works better, and would be something that other people probably would be more interested in than "Oh, you have the new phone that everyone else bought"...
Smartphone microphones are deceptively tiny nowadays. Sometimes the only reason you know they are there is because of a small hole.
They can be surface mount, literally a mm or so, and not at all obvious as being a microphone (but if they aren't being deliberately hidden, they likely have acoustic-friendly surroundings, like plastics funnels and shields around them).
You have now reached the point (actually a while ago) where technology is so tiny, pervasive and cheap that you don't actually have a clue what is in anything any more. You can get spy cams that you can barely tell are cameras - so tiny they rival anything that Hollywood ever featured in a tie-pin. And you can buy them for next-to-nothing from a thousand Chinese sites.
Nobody knew this thing was there because either a) nobody looked or b) nobody who looked ever saw it.
Now consider that almost everything gets teardowns, repairability ratings, reverse-engineered, etc. nowadays... it's unlikely that nobody ever looked.
Personally, I find all speech recognition absolute trash.
This applies to everything from Ford in-car recognition through to Siri, Alexa and the Google assistants.
You all have to stop speaking. Then you have to state clearly your phrase. Then, literally something like 20-30% of the time it's completely unable to recognise even in a clean-room environment.
Even if I speak perfectly to them, it's quicker just to type, every single time. Even if that means getting up, going to my phone, picking it up, signing into it, going into Google, and typing.
People laugh me off when I say this and then I watch them try three or four times and NOT NOTICE they are doing that. And that's with simple keyword-laden phrases in a clean-room sound environment ("Alexa, sing me a song" is the one most people go for).
That's before you even get CLOSE to speaking to a native speaker about things like Google Translate, etc. They will laugh you out of the room more often than not. They are pathetic at translation, beyond how to say hello, order a salmon or sing happy birthday. The tourist-phrases, they work because the listener is more forgiving of you. Individual words basically play "thesaurus" for you. You try and translate a business document and you'll be laughed out of the contract.
I used to live with an Italian and I sat in a room full of Italian relatives (not a million miles from English, and quite an easy language to parse by audio) for about an hour with a translate app and we gave up on audio about 10 minutes in. Even then the translations often gave spontaneous bursts of laughter on both sides.
People really overblow speech recognition. You're clean-rooming it, multiple-retrying it, conveniently ignoring it's mistakes and re-interpreting it without realising.
P.S. I'm native English, only speak English, only ever spoken English. I work in private schools, so my pronunciation can be made perfect in one flick of my brain. One sales guy suggested that teachers write their school reports via Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I laughed so hard I had to leave the room when I was told that. Guess what... despite dozens of trials of all kinds of software, nobody has ever done it, even for a single child, even for a single report, even for a single subject, despite the fact that we use Google Docs for everything (so teachers could happily dictate into a Google Doc)
If you're storing personal data, of any kind, as a business, as a user of a business (i.e. any business using Apple devices) or as a personal user - where such personal data INCLUDES just the required data for signing up to iCloud in the first place, let alone anything you store on them - GDPR applies.
That's why you can ask Facebook for a copy of all your personal data, and if you're storing / processing ANY personal data (e.g. an employee's iCloud login details, any client's files whatsover that get auto-synced to iCloud, or any photograph of a real person whether taken with an iPad or iPhone by ANYONE - company or personal) then that is subject to GDPR.
Seriously, it's my FUCKING JOB. We don't use iCloud. But having ANYTHING in an iTunes account (required to make any use of an iPad or iPhone or even an iMac if you want to use the iTunes store to get, say, OS updates), then that data is subject to GDPR and legal requests.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that Apple has to judge whether it's personal data when the owner of the account requests it? No. That companies NEVER use iPhones, iPads or iMacs? Crap. That you can use such devices without being required to enter personal data (including credit card numbers lately)? Bollocks.
They are subject to GDPR. They do not comply with GDPR. Neither do they say "Oh, that data wouldn't be subject to GDPR" (because that would be an outright lie.
You've either never used their products, or have zero understanding of GDPR compliance.
Every single competing similar product - even, especially, those that are for "consume" use, but also those for "enterprise" use - supplies GDPR compliance by default because they are required to.
If you're storing my name and an email/password/date of birth/address/phone number (all of which iTunes/iCloud stores) then you're subject to GDPR. Whether those details are made up or not, even.
So they don't deal with, say, educational users via Apple School Manager at all, then?
And GDPR applies to ALL personal data, commercial data isn't covered. It has to be linked to a person.
I can issue a GDPR request to ANY company (or organisation, or individual) that is storing or processing my personal data. And I can *be* someone that is storing or processing other's personal data. And both legally REQUIRE GDPR compliance by the processor in question.
iCloud is no difference to ALL THE OTHER personal cloud suppliers that comply with GDPR.
In my professional capacity as an IT Manager, I requested, demanded and ultimately have never received - despite hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment in Apple kit - a GDPR compliance statement that the compulsory inspectorate for my industry, the data protection authorities in my country, or my employers themselves, would accept. As in, I didn't just get something they didn't like, but Apple could not, did not, and refuse to supply such compliance, where ALL their major competitors did.
I don't care what they SAY they are doing. They are refusing to state that they meet their legal obligations, thus they are making us unable to state that we meet our legal obligations, thus after months of discussion, complaints and refusals to comply, their services and equipment were removed and the company blacklisted.
I will not go to jail or get sacked because Apple won't say that they are GDPR compliant to me on paper, like EVERYONE ELSE did. Most of them didn't even need to be asked. It was literally, GDPR is now law, here's our compliance statement.
Apple do not, have not, and I believe CAN not comply with GDPR, which is a basic, legally-required tenet of operating as a data processor in the UK and EU. And here "data processor" is basically every company that stores any kind of company record.
Your assertions about Apple are parroting of their PR statements and vague guesses at what their internal processes are (which aren't described). In the "reality", they are NOT GDPR-compliant and thus no company that needs to be GDPR-compliant can possibly use them.
Seriously, go search "iCloud GDPR compliance" and then "Google GDPR compliance".
The closest thing Apple says is "as part of our work towards GDPR compliance" and "features will be available". Whereas any decent cloud service gives you cast iron written guarantees that are accepted by the UK DPO.
Apple iCloud is run on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud instances in all kinds of territories, and they can't even be bothered to pass on the guarantees of those same places to their own customers because they just shift your iCloud data anywhere they like.
Literally. I spent six months asking, pre-GDPR, no answer. They failed to provide anything other than their current "working towards"-like statements they have on their website, whereas every other cloud provider instantly gave me a written guarantee for my legal territory.
Read their statements on their website. They don't say they are GDPR-compliant, even when they release their "new GDPR features". Because they're not. And currently can't be.
And that cost them every bit of business in my workplace, even if other workplaces in the same industry didn't bother to do their diligence and even try to get a statement from them, but just assuming that iCloud would be GDPR-compliant.
Apple don't give a shit about your privacy or personal data. Hell, they don't even store it themselves most of the time, but just hire their competitors to do so! The Register has run articles on it from time to time but nobody seems to care.
I see any digital content as, at best, a long-term lease, and price accordingly.
I spent ages looking for a particular 1970's BBC sitcom online. You could get series 1 and 2 anywhere, series 3 was just non-existent online. But it was last filmed in the 1970's. It's played ENDLESSLY on the free digital TV channels. But you can't buy it.
The only place that I could buy it from came along much later was the BBC Store. Literally, the second someone told me about it I was willing to buy it, and I put it on my wishlist. The next month, that service was terminated, people were refunded, the content was no more.
At that point it was the finally nail for me. I don't mind having stuff online, but I wouldn't buy anything to get the online copy specifically. I don't mind getting things cheap online, knowing that in a few years they may disappear. I won't buy multiple copies of the same movie on different sites just to watch them. And I spread my content over several such services so at least I'll have something to watch if any one of them tanks.
But, when it comes down to it, if I don't have it on DVD or saved from a download, it's just not worth it. Ironically, the best services for that are BBC iPlayer and DVB itself. Just press record on the Kodi instance and you get an H264 file out of it. Maybe it has ads, who cares? It's digital so you just slide the slider past them.
I wouldn't buy any of the movies I have now over again until I was assured there was a "Steam" of movies - a service where I can get almost any movie, no matter how old, buy it once, double-click to download and play it, watch it offline and keep the file around even if it went completely muppet.
There isn't one. There doesn't look likely to be one. Ultraviolet was *never* even in my consideration. If anything, the movie industry has set itself up for failure because its next generation of customers have little interest and just assume that they can watch everything on demand illegally without comeback, and never buy permanent media.
Video stores are dead. Cinema may have growing revenues but only because it's so damn expensive (and the last few times I have gone to the cinema, I did it on coupon and deals and got the movie for basically nothing, bought no extras, and even in opening weeks of new movies I've pretty much been the only person in there). There is no one service that caters for everyone, and people just buy Kodi boxes and stuff or just plain stream it over ever-shifting link sites that remind me of what my generation did for MP3.
I buy all my content legally, and they slowly eked away all the possible ways for me to do that reliably. So rather than consume their content, I just stopped. Now until it's literally in the bargain-basement price-range, and out already for a few years, I don't even bother.
I think I'd rather have a games-night (with or without friends) any day than a movie-night, and not only is the games industry doing better than the movie industry now, but video games aren't the only kind of games you can play together.
Most of them are old news. Most of them are tiny little independent website that suffered breaches because of things like Wordpress plugins years out of date, etc. Most of them are Russian, Korean and other such websites. The "big" websites in there, their data is basically just culled from the big breaches that we already know about. Everything else is just random spam and junk. Quite of lot of it is probably so outdated and useless that it's of no use whatsoever any more.
I ran HaveIBeenPwned over my domains (including work) about it. Given that we see a regular staff flux, and staff sign up to all kinds of outside services on their work accounts, something would show. And my personal domains have been in the wild for years and I use individual usernames@mydomain.com as burner accounts for things I *know* are dodgy and are gonna get spammed / hacked.
I got literally 80-90% nonsense (i.e. that email literally has NEVER existed, just made up nonsense, off-by-ones, truncated or padded versions of other usernames on the list, etc.). The rest was just things like known forum-leaks where your username and password for Joe Blogg's Cake Emporium got onto the net. The same was true of all my domains - thousands of users, many of them have left and left their accounts active on defunct sites, decades of history, all kinds of external services plugged into on a regular basis.
And nothing that even hinted at a valid username and password combination.
Some kid copy/pasted every "leak" they found in the wild, in the process hitting upon data not only years out of date but also incorrectly formatted and column-sliced so that a lot of nonsense came out. They shoved it into a folder somewhere and someone found it.
Just because it has 2 billion entries means nothing. I probably have 100+ accounts, just from my recent stuff online, let alone everything back to the ages of some of those "leaks". And 90% of it is absolute made-up junk.
That takes it down to 18 million people affected before you even start. 18 million people probably use the password "password" for at least one account that they don't care about.
It's not a huge leak of ultra-secret information from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, governments, etc. It's a copy-paste of every tiny leak that's already happened, back to decades-old exploits of tiny mom'n'pop websites, collected into one (presumably multi-gigabyte) file.
There would be more damaging information in even a single multi-gigabyte customer database from any major supermarket. At least it would stand a decent chance of being correctly formatted, up-to-date, containing recent details, and have something "potentially damaging" inside it.
That surely only applies if you are transmitting things unencrypted.
One of the prime reasons to use encryption is because it operates over even an insecure channel to secure it. Someone faking or stealing IP traffic still can't read your encrypted data because that's the entire point.
Obviously, if you're worried about it, you use proper cryptographic endpoint verification. Then it doesn't matter. You'll notice tampering immediately. You *EXPECT* your enemy to record every single byte of everything you send. Because it literally won't help them one jot. Not even if they know what you were sending at some point in the future (known-plain-text attacks aren't possible with modern encryption).
People fussing over DNS interception, BGP routing etc. are missing the critical point. They may affect *connectivity*. i.e. can you talk to the intended endpoint. What they can never affect is *veracity*. You are either talking to the chosen endpoint or you're not. People can't pretend to be the endpoint unless they've got the correct private key, etc. etc.
This is why SSH, TLS, IPSec, etc. all exist.
Treat the Internet as an untrusted network medium (why on Earth would you do anything else!?) and apply security accordingly. Pretending that a BGP announcement, even from your own ISP, is in any way secure is stupidity. You secure it IN SPITE of that. Even Google's inter-data-centre links weren't secure because they just assumed the medium was secure and didn't encrypt. Only when it was revealed that certain agencies were sniffing that traffic did they solve the problem - by encryption.
Sod the honour system, the honour system is in people assuming they are talking to the endpoint without checking, no matter who says.
BGP etc. routing attacks become useless precisely the second that you encrypt traffic by default. You can no more fake being "Facebook.com" than you can being some IP address. Without the right certificate the other end, the correct certificate signing chain, the correct certificate authority, the correct certificate pinning, etc. then modern sites and browsers will throw errors no matter what you do to try to pretend to be a secured endpoint, or act as a man-in-the-middle.
The problems come from people assuming security exists, rather than assuming it doesn't, and layering more on top anyway.
Hell, WPA2 isn't secure, because anyone can pretend to be the BSSID of any advertised Wifi point. It's secured by the endpoints layering over encryption. You should be VPN'ing over even internal wireless.
You can't secure something like the Internet en masse. So don't. Secure the endpoint, and just assume that EVERYONE can see every byte out of your connection.
I would posit only that this shows that Apple are terrible at sourcing products, especially bespoke non-standard products of their own design.
This tells you several things about: a) the practicality of their designs, b) their deliberate awkwardness to manufacture, c) their patent portfolio, d) their ability to "think outside the box".
So you couldn't buy a custom-made screw. And you didn't know that in time for production. And that stymied however-many-million-dollars of product from going into production.
And we're not talking some aircraft-grade, ultra-thin, super-duper-magical screw. But a screw to hold, say, a motherboard to a case, or a case together (but their Mac cases didn't have screws, did they?). You couldn't have just bought a bunch of M3/M4/M5 screws and drilled appropriate holes?
This says everything you need to know about Apple, not what Texas can or can't produce. They'd rather create weird shit that serves no purpose that can't be fulfilled with a 1/10th of a cent screw that you can pick up anywhere, and pass that cost down to you, blaming American manufacturing when they own inability to design, source, plan and manufacture a simple fixing shows them up.
Not really... the gameplan just shifted focus, that's all.
Make a website in Javascript / Python / whatever that chats with other users, and the same happens.
It's always a rare event. Millions of home-computer-creators never were successful monetising their businesses. It's literally just down to luck. Still is. There are millions of crappy websites, but Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. all got lucky.
Not to mention things like large open-source projects, etc.
The things you talk about are the one-in-a-million events. They're still happening. Just not in the same areas, because things like enterprise scalability in most regions people want them are already available (thus you have competition above your level), but there's always niche projects and places where there is no direct competition.
The part of the Moon that faces us, faces us. It hasn't faced outer space in all of recorded human history, pre-history, etc.
The other side has ALWAYS been the backside pointing out into space.
If the near side of the Moon was getting hit with things, there'd be serious questions about where the fuck that stuff was coming from (yes, you might get the occasional glancing blow slip between the Earth and Moon, but to actually hit the Moon at speed, it means it came from us!
The front side of Moon (which doesn't change relative to us) is a shield for the front side of the Earth (which changes all the time - or else the Moon would be permanently overhead from only one hemisphere)... and the Earth is a shield for the front side of the Moon.
Anything that WOULD have hit that front side of the Moon hits our backside instead. Anything that hits the backside of the Moon doesn't get to hence.
Hence:
- Pockmarked backside of the Moon. - Clean front side of the Moon (to us). - Earth pockmocked all over.
Thus, when choosing the first ever set of Moon landing missions you have a choice of two landing sites - one rough, pockmarked, subject to meteorites, dark, cold, from which you cannot see / communicate with the Earth. One smooth, no meteorites, bright, warm (relatively), from which you can see / communicate with the Earth.
Guess which one sensible people choose? Guess why the new Chinese lander is the FIRST to ever land on the dark-side, 50 years later? And whose plants experiments all died in hours from the extreme cold?
Honestly, because you spout conspiracy theory bullshit - think. Just for a moment. Just grab a decent reference and think about what it says for a minute or so.
And yet - there are almost no studies I can find where the statistics for Alzheimer's are directly correlative to dental health - literally it's death rate is low in low-health countries only because they die of other things first, but the incidence when that's factored out is the same.
Even between developed countries with insane dental habits versus those more lax (e.g. Europe etc. it's not neccessarily normal to floss every single day, especially if there's not something stuck), Alzheimer's prevalence is the same.
It's just not as simple as this summary seems to imply, and you can tell that by literally just comparing like-for-like countries that differ only in general dental habits (or even, say, against recorded instances of dental caries etc).
Any kind of correlation like that it going to jump out at any Alzheimer's researcher like a sore thumb - they work with these people all the time and record every detail they can to try to track down even the most minor of correlations, even informally.
P.S. Even the Wiki article on flossing says: "Several reviews, however, have failed to find any clear benefit over toothbrushing alone". It's literally only the US that flosses with any kind of gusto as a normal part of life.
"In response to an Associated Press investigation, the US government stopped recommending flossing in their 2015 U.S. dietary guidelines, having deliberately changed their focus to food and nutrition, and stated that effects of flossing had never been researched as required."
"Social Media Stars Agree To Abide By The Law That's Been In Place For Years Or Else Go To Jail"
They didn't "agree" to anything... and they shouldn't need to.
They got told to comply with long-established advertising laws in the UK, or else.
Unlike other countries, you can't just slip in a sponsored product into a tweet, movie, TV programme, etc. without either clearly stating that or it literally being incidental (e.g. a live program interviewing someone who says "Well, I bought a Tesla the other day..." as part of an anecdote, etc.).
You know what ruins some Hollywood movies? Blatant product placement. Literally stopping the movie and introducing bullshit adverts for no reason - and often for products not even available in some countries. Not just "Oh, they're drinking a Coke" or "He used an Apple Mac to hack into the mainframe" but "Hey, look at my new Nike's" (e.g. iRobot).
If you're commercially benefiting, you need to make that clear. It's pretty much that simple.
The bigger question is: Why do people follow such people (who just use them to monetise their "fame")? Why would anyone buy something because a celebrity they like "endorsed" it?
Someone was watching one of those trashy YouTube channels the other day - the ones where it's just a couple filming themselves and talking about the most inane and facile trivia while they do, interrupting their own sentence to "look at the little bird", etc. as they walk through town and all that nonsense. They literally had a merchandising channel. They had T-Shirts and all sorts and pushed it in the middle of their "vlogs".
Merchandising. For someone who films the most boring parts of their day (literally - they aren't funny, they aren't famous, they don't do anything, they just film themselves wandering around their OWN house!) and streams it to the Internet for others to sit and watch. If ever there was a sign that God doesn't exist, it's that we've got trash like that and not incurred an Apocalypse.
- Do you need a Windows app to run? It's probably cheaper, easier, more manageable and more likely to work if you just buy Windows. - Do you need to do that on a machine that you don't want to run Windows on? It's probably --all of the above again -- to just buy VMWare or virtualise Windows. VMWare can make Windows-native applications work like Linux-native applications without the desktop at all (i.e. you can drag, overlay, minimise just the window of the Windows program you want, just like it was a native Linux program). - Do you need to reduce all dependency on Microsoft operating systems (and their associated costs)? Then you're out of luck - most of this stuff is harder to get working and not as good, AND you end up having to install native library via winetricks etc. for almost anything of note. You're still running their software, frameworks, etc. - Do you need to run some random Windows app that nobody else cares about and is no longer supported on Windows? Chances are a) you really shouldn't and b) that won't work anyway. Even the "big" programs that are free and everyone can run, test and debug have thousands of bugs against them under Wine.
The use-case used to be "you can be a Windows person, and do everything a Windows person could do, without having to run Windows or pay Microsoft". That's just not deliverable. As time goes on, you're going to get further behind, too. I used Crossover for nearly a decade, with Office 2000. It worked. It worked quite well. Everything else was just a waste of time trying, to be honest.
It was actually quicker to wait for Microsoft to re-code and re-release Age of Empires 2 and a modern Windows application (AoE2 HD Edition) than for the original game to become stable and have sufficient performance under Wine as it had on Windows. The AoE2 GDI issues took forever to fix, caused all kinds of performance problems and I'm not even sure if they're solved today... (checks WineHQ... some golds and silvers for various incarnations but the original Age of Kings: Garbage... and ironically with the newest versions of Wine with 64 test results... and lots of winetricks and other workarounds).
If you want old Windows, virtualise. If you want Windows on your Linux, virtualise. If you want Windows-to-work-on-nothing-Windows, pretty much you only have one choice and that's poor.
It's a huge undertaking, a constantly-moving target, incredibly difficult, incredibly impressive, etc. etc. etc.
But in terms of "using" it... I paid someone else to make my Word 2000 work on Linux, gave up and used native LibreOffice ever since, and haven't ever used it for anything practical since then. Even SteamOS etc. has only very recently (when they realised that the Windows developers weren't going to re-write their games for it) introduced Wine emulation layers to try to run Windows games on Linux... and that's something Transgaming was doing... what? 15-20 years ago now? And never made a success of. And it only works on a small portion of the titles anyway.
Like ReactOS... it's a hobby project. A huge one with thousands of developers, but a hobby project. The effort would be so much better off elsewhere (e.g. an open-source VMWare that does half what VMWare can do in terms of desktop integration!), but people still bash on it because it's fun to get old games working on Linux.
I think similar to Samba's efforts to be an AD domain controller too... they should have just gone for "file access over the network", the necessary components for that, and then just left it. Dozens of man-years of effort to arrive at something that nobody really wants, deploys, tests or has a use-case for that isn't better catered for by saying "Let's not do Microsoft LDAP/AD" or "Let's just buy Windows Server".
Because that relies on at least 50% of the population understanding such an issue, then the one person they vote into power, by electing dozens of local representatives with differing views, actually caring the same about it and making it happen via policy without making worse things happen elsewhere that you don't want.
It's, quite simply, ridiculous to expect voting to affect such things.
"Not buying that shit" works a million times better, and talks directly to the people implementing such features.
And let me introduce you to what the entire world learned 20 years ago and thus killed retail:
You go to the shop. You pick up the phone. You get a free demo. You say "Thanks, I'll think about it." You consider it at home and order the phone from the supplier of your choice.
Alternatively, you order it, try it out for 30 days, return it if you're not happy with it.
Same for any white-goods (washing machines, dryers, kitchen appliances, etc.), phones, laptops, printers, etc. and has been forever. Hell, clothes. I returned a garden spade once because it was just useless.
Know who has one of the best returns processes that I've ever seen? Amazon.
Tip #2: Don't buy any phone that one of your friends / work colleagues doesn't already have. Because you can guarantee they are worthless because nobody else uses them. Friends also give free demos, real-world experience, no sales-spiel and no hard-sell.
(Notice: This also means that you don't buy the new iPhone whatever until you've actually touched it, experienced it outside of a sales-spiel - with cheerleading first-day actors, etc. - been able to use it, been made aware of any problems with it, and been able to actually purchase it without queuing up).
Slashdot Mirror
Everything above is an opinion, or unfounded.
Look at facts.
Tesla sold 250,000 cars worldwide in 2018 (of all different kinds).
2018 saw 78,700,000 cars sold in 2018.
Tesla represent 0.3% of the car market last year. And that's *just* last year. Overall, in terms of all the cars in the world, you can add a couple of zeroes after the dot.
Electric cars, and Teslas in particular, are a teensy, tiny minority of all the cars out there, and a teensy proportion of new sales. You wouldn't know it from all the press they get, but they are less popular than Linux on desktop PC's (so, not counting Chromebooks, Android tablets, smartphones, etc.).
To build on just ONE point that I happen to agree with (eating Tesla's lunch)
Musk is a salesman. He sells a good pitch. But the giants can stamp on him any time they like. The fact is that they don't need to - he's not a threat. He can take the hit for all the problems of self-driving cars and electric cars, they can push out a token model to make it look like they're doing something, and thus put back that point where they have to convince petrolheads that a battery-powered EV with hardly any charging points (worldwide) is somehow a good choice for them. They're just waiting for the switch.
To hear Musk (and others) speak, you'd think BMW are scrambling to catch up. They're not. They just don't care. Their EV models make them no more than Tesla, which is a drop in the ocean to them. It's chicken-feed to them, in a niche market. And one they can own any time they like.
But while petroleum is still the primary fuel, they need to sell as much of that technology, patents, models and parts as possible until they can come up with a comparable car that would operate just as well in the real world in terms of charging, distance, etc.
He's the guinea pig. He's taking the hit. For less than one tenth what they spend on R&D each year, they could put the entire company out of business.
Not only do they know this, they want that. Because it can only go one of two ways: Either his name become synonymous with electric cars, and then they bring out one that's better than his, cheaper and with a big brand name on it. Or he crashes and burns and they point at him and go "There, you see?".
He's just not a threat. And it's not four years down the line, it's 16. And he's still not a threat, despite being WAY ahead of where people expected him to actually get (shorting stock etc.). He funds the company from his own coffers, throwing it on stuff that Ford et al probably just have sitting in a lab somewhere. They don't sell it yet... that would be stupid, it would be copied in seconds and either flop or everyone would demand it and then it would become commodity. It's better to release your new product AFTER your competitor just spent all their time designing and releasing theirs. It helps your sales and as a benefit HURTS theirs right at the time they need to make their money back.
Instead, they wait, and save it to one-up whoever does blink first. Maybe Ford or one of them won't make it another decade, like Kodak couldn't survive the transition to digital imaging. But for sure most of the others will. If anything they are much more worried about ditching diesels at the moment, or re-engineering them. Notice that the dieselgate was because they didn't want to admit that - to be within pollution guidelines - they had to dial back performance. They didn't want that to happen to their customers. And you think their customers would accept a Tesla in its place? Not yet.
Tesla is a noisy sales company. "Disruptive", some call it. But it's just ripples in a pond to the major vehicle manufacturers who can out-manufacture, out-patent, out-engineer and out-sell Tesla whenever they want. That's why people were shorting Tesla - even if everything "goes right", they'll get bought up or shut down.
I have seen orders of magnitude more cars on the road that I've never heard of, than Teslas. Tesla
Hot water can cool quicker than cold water.
It's seems insane, but it's actually true. It's called the Mpemba effect.
In this particular experiment, it's a combination of VERY cold air temperatures, using boiling (steaming) water that's already trying to evaporate, injecting it quickly into a fast-moving air-stream (the windchill is the extreme part, not the basic air temperature), over as large a volume as possible (so it spreads more).
If you wanted to flash-freeze something as quickly as possible, that's what you'd do - put it in a cold, fast-flowing fluid stream, and spreading it as much as possible to make the droplets small.
Strange. Have you got the MS fonts installed?
I've been using LibreOffice to open up old formats because it does a damn sight better job that Word has ever done.
P.S. try opening an old Publisher file in any other version of Publisher than the one it was created with whatsoever.
If your business literally has SO MANY documents that you can't afford to lose the formatting on that it's a business issue, you should have converted them to signed, timestamped PDF years ago for archival purposes. And probably created a template that *does* work in LibreOffice, Google Docs, Word and anything else you might be likely to use. It's really not hard. Even for a fancy background/letterhead.
"We save everything only in Word 2006" is the cause of your problem. Not "Some third-party software slightly messes up the formatting when we open up decade-old files". If you'd PDF'd for archival purposes and, maybe, kept the original Word template around for anything that you apply the formatting to, you would have a working archive and precisely one template to "change" to make it work in LibreOffice or any other office suite.
Was useless from the beginning.
No different to a Do Not Call list but with zero enforcement.
Was always doomed to fail.
I am literally more surprised that somebody BOTHERED to implement it at all.
Guarantee you that the submitter of the story benefits from that intermediate link, and that the Slashdot team know that.
Though, the "Slashdot effect" is literally non-existent nowadays, and this is just a tiny niche website now.
UK person, on a UK keyboard, on a UK-language Windows machine with a UK-language mainstream browser (Chrome, latest stable).
And I still get this crap:
£
Every time I put in a UK pound sign.
Every other website, no problem at all. SoylentNews (based on MUCH newer Slashcode), no problem at all. Literally no weird settings, multiple computers, etc. etc.
Oh, and I paid to "Disable Advertising" and I still get adverts anyway and the box randomly unchecks itself.
Slashdot is basically unmaintained from what I can see. Fortunately, I don't use any of the same passwords etc. anywhere else, as I'm just waiting for the first compromise.
I don't do the phone thing. I have a phone, it works, I'm happy. And "it works" includes things like SSH + port-forwarding apps to stream live TV from my tvheadend server over the Internet, so it's not like I'm just tapping out texts and nothing else. I have 10 apps just for devices / VPN etc. in work, it's my satnav for all of Europe (CoPilot), etc. etc.
So I have an S5 Mini, because my S4 Mini got gummed up over the years as I updated and because you can't probably tell the official version of Android to JUST FECKING SAVE EVERYTHING ON SD, I got tired of moving apps only for them to be moved back to the tiny internal storage every time they update.
Anyway, the S5 Mini still has the same problems, just slightly less often because the internal storage isn't quite so pathetic. But I stick with them because they have IR-blasters built in that are supported by apps I have, to turn on my kit when I'm in work/at home.
I relegated the S4 to just be a "remote control / TV" at home (handy to watch the TV on the phone in the kitchen while I'm washing up, etc.). One day it went a bit funny and it was clear that it wasn't going to recover and needed reinstallation.
So I picked up LineageOS at that point, and flashed it. And, feck. If the phone isn't twice as fast and slick as it's ever been, without half the bundled apps, just works and does some things even better than the S5 Mini with the "official" OS. It's actually now a BETTER phone than the S5 Mini because of the OS alone.
Sadly, the S5 Mini doesn't have a proper supported LineageOS or that would go too (if it does crash-and-burn, it will definitely get the LineageOS treatment).
Everything past those things doesn't interest me. They all lose ports and functionality, removeable/replaceable parts, cost a bomb and can't be LineageOS'd for the most part. My next phone will have to be a research project, and only if/when the S5 Mini that gets day-to-day use dies and can't be LineageOS'd properly.
I don't understand what happened to the smartphone industry. I just want a modern phone. I will pay extra on the price to get rid of the standard manufacturer apps etc. permanently. I will pay extra for those "legacy" ports that eat up less room that any of the multi-camera, curved-screen, display-notch shite that they put out now.
Likely my next "phone" won't be a phone. It'll be a mini-clamshell tablet/PC. For the price of a smartphone, you can get a full Windows Intel PC, with replaceable batteries, proper keyboard and joystick, somewhat resembling a Nintendo DS. It could run Steam, ffs. The call functionality is relatively minor to me at that point. The 4G/5G will mean a million times more. I'd happily buy a "phone" which doesn't have voice calling, in fact. So long as I can do WhatsApp (i.e. it has a phone number), I'm happy.
Phones overboarded on the useless features where a decent OS install could have doubled their speed and battery life. They focused on all the shite I don't want and removed all the stuff I do. They became huge, fragile and hard to repair. My S4 Mini has been down three flights of stairs to my knowledge. There's barely a scratch on it.
Given a clamshell PC-like device, with 2 or more SIM slots (eSIMs even better if they take off) and a replaceable battery. I'll pay literally TWICE what I'll be prepared to pay for even the top of the line phone (P.S. Obviously I would not pay what *they* want me to pay for a top of the line phone).
Phones turned themselves into multipurpose devices in a race to the bottom, then priced themselves as if there were no other devices in the world capable of doing those things. Meanwhile, I could pick up something that does more, costs less, works better, and would be something that other people probably would be more interested in than "Oh, you have the new phone that everyone else bought"...
Really?
Smartphone microphones are deceptively tiny nowadays. Sometimes the only reason you know they are there is because of a small hole.
They can be surface mount, literally a mm or so, and not at all obvious as being a microphone (but if they aren't being deliberately hidden, they likely have acoustic-friendly surroundings, like plastics funnels and shields around them).
That was the mic on an iPhone 4, for instance:
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardow...
You have now reached the point (actually a while ago) where technology is so tiny, pervasive and cheap that you don't actually have a clue what is in anything any more. You can get spy cams that you can barely tell are cameras - so tiny they rival anything that Hollywood ever featured in a tie-pin. And you can buy them for next-to-nothing from a thousand Chinese sites.
Nobody knew this thing was there because either a) nobody looked or b) nobody who looked ever saw it.
Now consider that almost everything gets teardowns, repairability ratings, reverse-engineered, etc. nowadays... it's unlikely that nobody ever looked.
Personally, I find all speech recognition absolute trash.
This applies to everything from Ford in-car recognition through to Siri, Alexa and the Google assistants.
You all have to stop speaking. Then you have to state clearly your phrase. Then, literally something like 20-30% of the time it's completely unable to recognise even in a clean-room environment.
Even if I speak perfectly to them, it's quicker just to type, every single time. Even if that means getting up, going to my phone, picking it up, signing into it, going into Google, and typing.
People laugh me off when I say this and then I watch them try three or four times and NOT NOTICE they are doing that. And that's with simple keyword-laden phrases in a clean-room sound environment ("Alexa, sing me a song" is the one most people go for).
That's before you even get CLOSE to speaking to a native speaker about things like Google Translate, etc. They will laugh you out of the room more often than not. They are pathetic at translation, beyond how to say hello, order a salmon or sing happy birthday. The tourist-phrases, they work because the listener is more forgiving of you. Individual words basically play "thesaurus" for you. You try and translate a business document and you'll be laughed out of the contract.
I used to live with an Italian and I sat in a room full of Italian relatives (not a million miles from English, and quite an easy language to parse by audio) for about an hour with a translate app and we gave up on audio about 10 minutes in. Even then the translations often gave spontaneous bursts of laughter on both sides.
People really overblow speech recognition. You're clean-rooming it, multiple-retrying it, conveniently ignoring it's mistakes and re-interpreting it without realising.
P.S. I'm native English, only speak English, only ever spoken English. I work in private schools, so my pronunciation can be made perfect in one flick of my brain. One sales guy suggested that teachers write their school reports via Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I laughed so hard I had to leave the room when I was told that. Guess what... despite dozens of trials of all kinds of software, nobody has ever done it, even for a single child, even for a single report, even for a single subject, despite the fact that we use Google Docs for everything (so teachers could happily dictate into a Google Doc)
HEADTHUMP.
It doesn't matter. In fact, it's WORSE.
If you're storing personal data, of any kind, as a business, as a user of a business (i.e. any business using Apple devices) or as a personal user - where such personal data INCLUDES just the required data for signing up to iCloud in the first place, let alone anything you store on them - GDPR applies.
That's why you can ask Facebook for a copy of all your personal data, and if you're storing / processing ANY personal data (e.g. an employee's iCloud login details, any client's files whatsover that get auto-synced to iCloud, or any photograph of a real person whether taken with an iPad or iPhone by ANYONE - company or personal) then that is subject to GDPR.
Seriously, it's my FUCKING JOB. We don't use iCloud. But having ANYTHING in an iTunes account (required to make any use of an iPad or iPhone or even an iMac if you want to use the iTunes store to get, say, OS updates), then that data is subject to GDPR and legal requests.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that Apple has to judge whether it's personal data when the owner of the account requests it? No. That companies NEVER use iPhones, iPads or iMacs? Crap. That you can use such devices without being required to enter personal data (including credit card numbers lately)? Bollocks.
They are subject to GDPR. They do not comply with GDPR. Neither do they say "Oh, that data wouldn't be subject to GDPR" (because that would be an outright lie.
You've either never used their products, or have zero understanding of GDPR compliance.
Every single competing similar product - even, especially, those that are for "consume" use, but also those for "enterprise" use - supplies GDPR compliance by default because they are required to.
If you're storing my name and an email/password/date of birth/address/phone number (all of which iTunes/iCloud stores) then you're subject to GDPR. Whether those details are made up or not, even.
So they don't deal with, say, educational users via Apple School Manager at all, then?
And GDPR applies to ALL personal data, commercial data isn't covered. It has to be linked to a person.
I can issue a GDPR request to ANY company (or organisation, or individual) that is storing or processing my personal data. And I can *be* someone that is storing or processing other's personal data. And both legally REQUIRE GDPR compliance by the processor in question.
iCloud is no difference to ALL THE OTHER personal cloud suppliers that comply with GDPR.
Reality:
In my professional capacity as an IT Manager, I requested, demanded and ultimately have never received - despite hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment in Apple kit - a GDPR compliance statement that the compulsory inspectorate for my industry, the data protection authorities in my country, or my employers themselves, would accept. As in, I didn't just get something they didn't like, but Apple could not, did not, and refuse to supply such compliance, where ALL their major competitors did.
I don't care what they SAY they are doing. They are refusing to state that they meet their legal obligations, thus they are making us unable to state that we meet our legal obligations, thus after months of discussion, complaints and refusals to comply, their services and equipment were removed and the company blacklisted.
I will not go to jail or get sacked because Apple won't say that they are GDPR compliant to me on paper, like EVERYONE ELSE did. Most of them didn't even need to be asked. It was literally, GDPR is now law, here's our compliance statement.
Apple do not, have not, and I believe CAN not comply with GDPR, which is a basic, legally-required tenet of operating as a data processor in the UK and EU. And here "data processor" is basically every company that stores any kind of company record.
Your assertions about Apple are parroting of their PR statements and vague guesses at what their internal processes are (which aren't described). In the "reality", they are NOT GDPR-compliant and thus no company that needs to be GDPR-compliant can possibly use them.
Seriously, go search "iCloud GDPR compliance" and then "Google GDPR compliance".
The closest thing Apple says is "as part of our work towards GDPR compliance" and "features will be available". Whereas any decent cloud service gives you cast iron written guarantees that are accepted by the UK DPO.
Ask them for a GDPR compliance statement.
The tumbleweed will be deafening.
Apple iCloud is run on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud instances in all kinds of territories, and they can't even be bothered to pass on the guarantees of those same places to their own customers because they just shift your iCloud data anywhere they like.
Literally. I spent six months asking, pre-GDPR, no answer. They failed to provide anything other than their current "working towards"-like statements they have on their website, whereas every other cloud provider instantly gave me a written guarantee for my legal territory.
Read their statements on their website. They don't say they are GDPR-compliant, even when they release their "new GDPR features". Because they're not. And currently can't be.
And that cost them every bit of business in my workplace, even if other workplaces in the same industry didn't bother to do their diligence and even try to get a statement from them, but just assuming that iCloud would be GDPR-compliant.
Apple don't give a shit about your privacy or personal data. Hell, they don't even store it themselves most of the time, but just hire their competitors to do so! The Register has run articles on it from time to time but nobody seems to care.
Well, I hope you learned the lesson.
I see any digital content as, at best, a long-term lease, and price accordingly.
I spent ages looking for a particular 1970's BBC sitcom online. You could get series 1 and 2 anywhere, series 3 was just non-existent online. But it was last filmed in the 1970's. It's played ENDLESSLY on the free digital TV channels. But you can't buy it.
The only place that I could buy it from came along much later was the BBC Store. Literally, the second someone told me about it I was willing to buy it, and I put it on my wishlist. The next month, that service was terminated, people were refunded, the content was no more.
At that point it was the finally nail for me. I don't mind having stuff online, but I wouldn't buy anything to get the online copy specifically. I don't mind getting things cheap online, knowing that in a few years they may disappear. I won't buy multiple copies of the same movie on different sites just to watch them. And I spread my content over several such services so at least I'll have something to watch if any one of them tanks.
But, when it comes down to it, if I don't have it on DVD or saved from a download, it's just not worth it. Ironically, the best services for that are BBC iPlayer and DVB itself. Just press record on the Kodi instance and you get an H264 file out of it. Maybe it has ads, who cares? It's digital so you just slide the slider past them.
I wouldn't buy any of the movies I have now over again until I was assured there was a "Steam" of movies - a service where I can get almost any movie, no matter how old, buy it once, double-click to download and play it, watch it offline and keep the file around even if it went completely muppet.
There isn't one. There doesn't look likely to be one. Ultraviolet was *never* even in my consideration. If anything, the movie industry has set itself up for failure because its next generation of customers have little interest and just assume that they can watch everything on demand illegally without comeback, and never buy permanent media.
Video stores are dead. Cinema may have growing revenues but only because it's so damn expensive (and the last few times I have gone to the cinema, I did it on coupon and deals and got the movie for basically nothing, bought no extras, and even in opening weeks of new movies I've pretty much been the only person in there). There is no one service that caters for everyone, and people just buy Kodi boxes and stuff or just plain stream it over ever-shifting link sites that remind me of what my generation did for MP3.
I buy all my content legally, and they slowly eked away all the possible ways for me to do that reliably. So rather than consume their content, I just stopped. Now until it's literally in the bargain-basement price-range, and out already for a few years, I don't even bother.
I think I'd rather have a games-night (with or without friends) any day than a movie-night, and not only is the games industry doing better than the movie industry now, but video games aren't the only kind of games you can play together.
Honestly, it's really time to give it up.
Except...
Most of them are old news.
Most of them are tiny little independent website that suffered breaches because of things like Wordpress plugins years out of date, etc.
Most of them are Russian, Korean and other such websites.
The "big" websites in there, their data is basically just culled from the big breaches that we already know about.
Everything else is just random spam and junk.
Quite of lot of it is probably so outdated and useless that it's of no use whatsoever any more.
I ran HaveIBeenPwned over my domains (including work) about it. Given that we see a regular staff flux, and staff sign up to all kinds of outside services on their work accounts, something would show. And my personal domains have been in the wild for years and I use individual usernames@mydomain.com as burner accounts for things I *know* are dodgy and are gonna get spammed / hacked.
I got literally 80-90% nonsense (i.e. that email literally has NEVER existed, just made up nonsense, off-by-ones, truncated or padded versions of other usernames on the list, etc.). The rest was just things like known forum-leaks where your username and password for Joe Blogg's Cake Emporium got onto the net. The same was true of all my domains - thousands of users, many of them have left and left their accounts active on defunct sites, decades of history, all kinds of external services plugged into on a regular basis.
And nothing that even hinted at a valid username and password combination.
Some kid copy/pasted every "leak" they found in the wild, in the process hitting upon data not only years out of date but also incorrectly formatted and column-sliced so that a lot of nonsense came out. They shoved it into a folder somewhere and someone found it.
Just because it has 2 billion entries means nothing. I probably have 100+ accounts, just from my recent stuff online, let alone everything back to the ages of some of those "leaks". And 90% of it is absolute made-up junk.
That takes it down to 18 million people affected before you even start. 18 million people probably use the password "password" for at least one account that they don't care about.
It's not a huge leak of ultra-secret information from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, governments, etc. It's a copy-paste of every tiny leak that's already happened, back to decades-old exploits of tiny mom'n'pop websites, collected into one (presumably multi-gigabyte) file.
There would be more damaging information in even a single multi-gigabyte customer database from any major supermarket. At least it would stand a decent chance of being correctly formatted, up-to-date, containing recent details, and have something "potentially damaging" inside it.
Talk about overblown.
That surely only applies if you are transmitting things unencrypted.
One of the prime reasons to use encryption is because it operates over even an insecure channel to secure it. Someone faking or stealing IP traffic still can't read your encrypted data because that's the entire point.
Obviously, if you're worried about it, you use proper cryptographic endpoint verification. Then it doesn't matter. You'll notice tampering immediately. You *EXPECT* your enemy to record every single byte of everything you send. Because it literally won't help them one jot. Not even if they know what you were sending at some point in the future (known-plain-text attacks aren't possible with modern encryption).
People fussing over DNS interception, BGP routing etc. are missing the critical point. They may affect *connectivity*. i.e. can you talk to the intended endpoint. What they can never affect is *veracity*. You are either talking to the chosen endpoint or you're not. People can't pretend to be the endpoint unless they've got the correct private key, etc. etc.
This is why SSH, TLS, IPSec, etc. all exist.
Treat the Internet as an untrusted network medium (why on Earth would you do anything else!?) and apply security accordingly. Pretending that a BGP announcement, even from your own ISP, is in any way secure is stupidity. You secure it IN SPITE of that. Even Google's inter-data-centre links weren't secure because they just assumed the medium was secure and didn't encrypt. Only when it was revealed that certain agencies were sniffing that traffic did they solve the problem - by encryption.
Sod the honour system, the honour system is in people assuming they are talking to the endpoint without checking, no matter who says.
BGP etc. routing attacks become useless precisely the second that you encrypt traffic by default. You can no more fake being "Facebook.com" than you can being some IP address. Without the right certificate the other end, the correct certificate signing chain, the correct certificate authority, the correct certificate pinning, etc. then modern sites and browsers will throw errors no matter what you do to try to pretend to be a secured endpoint, or act as a man-in-the-middle.
The problems come from people assuming security exists, rather than assuming it doesn't, and layering more on top anyway.
Hell, WPA2 isn't secure, because anyone can pretend to be the BSSID of any advertised Wifi point. It's secured by the endpoints layering over encryption. You should be VPN'ing over even internal wireless.
You can't secure something like the Internet en masse. So don't. Secure the endpoint, and just assume that EVERYONE can see every byte out of your connection.
I would posit only that this shows that Apple are terrible at sourcing products, especially bespoke non-standard products of their own design.
This tells you several things about: a) the practicality of their designs, b) their deliberate awkwardness to manufacture, c) their patent portfolio, d) their ability to "think outside the box".
So you couldn't buy a custom-made screw. And you didn't know that in time for production. And that stymied however-many-million-dollars of product from going into production.
And we're not talking some aircraft-grade, ultra-thin, super-duper-magical screw. But a screw to hold, say, a motherboard to a case, or a case together (but their Mac cases didn't have screws, did they?). You couldn't have just bought a bunch of M3/M4/M5 screws and drilled appropriate holes?
This says everything you need to know about Apple, not what Texas can or can't produce. They'd rather create weird shit that serves no purpose that can't be fulfilled with a 1/10th of a cent screw that you can pick up anywhere, and pass that cost down to you, blaming American manufacturing when they own inability to design, source, plan and manufacture a simple fixing shows them up.
Not really... the gameplan just shifted focus, that's all.
Make a website in Javascript / Python / whatever that chats with other users, and the same happens.
It's always a rare event. Millions of home-computer-creators never were successful monetising their businesses. It's literally just down to luck. Still is. There are millions of crappy websites, but Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. all got lucky.
Not to mention things like large open-source projects, etc.
The things you talk about are the one-in-a-million events. They're still happening. Just not in the same areas, because things like enterprise scalability in most regions people want them are already available (thus you have competition above your level), but there's always niche projects and places where there is no direct competition.
Sigh... LITERALLY...
The part of the Moon that faces us, faces us. It hasn't faced outer space in all of recorded human history, pre-history, etc.
The other side has ALWAYS been the backside pointing out into space.
If the near side of the Moon was getting hit with things, there'd be serious questions about where the fuck that stuff was coming from (yes, you might get the occasional glancing blow slip between the Earth and Moon, but to actually hit the Moon at speed, it means it came from us!
The front side of Moon (which doesn't change relative to us) is a shield for the front side of the Earth (which changes all the time - or else the Moon would be permanently overhead from only one hemisphere) ... and the Earth is a shield for the front side of the Moon.
Anything that WOULD have hit that front side of the Moon hits our backside instead. Anything that hits the backside of the Moon doesn't get to hence.
Hence:
- Pockmarked backside of the Moon.
- Clean front side of the Moon (to us).
- Earth pockmocked all over.
Thus, when choosing the first ever set of Moon landing missions you have a choice of two landing sites - one rough, pockmarked, subject to meteorites, dark, cold, from which you cannot see / communicate with the Earth. One smooth, no meteorites, bright, warm (relatively), from which you can see / communicate with the Earth.
Guess which one sensible people choose? Guess why the new Chinese lander is the FIRST to ever land on the dark-side, 50 years later? And whose plants experiments all died in hours from the extreme cold?
Honestly, because you spout conspiracy theory bullshit - think. Just for a moment. Just grab a decent reference and think about what it says for a minute or so.
And yet - there are almost no studies I can find where the statistics for Alzheimer's are directly correlative to dental health - literally it's death rate is low in low-health countries only because they die of other things first, but the incidence when that's factored out is the same.
Even between developed countries with insane dental habits versus those more lax (e.g. Europe etc. it's not neccessarily normal to floss every single day, especially if there's not something stuck), Alzheimer's prevalence is the same.
It's just not as simple as this summary seems to imply, and you can tell that by literally just comparing like-for-like countries that differ only in general dental habits (or even, say, against recorded instances of dental caries etc).
Any kind of correlation like that it going to jump out at any Alzheimer's researcher like a sore thumb - they work with these people all the time and record every detail they can to try to track down even the most minor of correlations, even informally.
P.S. Even the Wiki article on flossing says: "Several reviews, however, have failed to find any clear benefit over toothbrushing alone". It's literally only the US that flosses with any kind of gusto as a normal part of life.
"In response to an Associated Press investigation, the US government stopped recommending flossing in their 2015 U.S. dietary guidelines, having deliberately changed their focus to food and nutrition, and stated that effects of flossing had never been researched as required."
Alternate headline:
"Social Media Stars Agree To Abide By The Law That's Been In Place For Years Or Else Go To Jail"
They didn't "agree" to anything... and they shouldn't need to.
They got told to comply with long-established advertising laws in the UK, or else.
Unlike other countries, you can't just slip in a sponsored product into a tweet, movie, TV programme, etc. without either clearly stating that or it literally being incidental (e.g. a live program interviewing someone who says "Well, I bought a Tesla the other day..." as part of an anecdote, etc.).
You know what ruins some Hollywood movies? Blatant product placement. Literally stopping the movie and introducing bullshit adverts for no reason - and often for products not even available in some countries. Not just "Oh, they're drinking a Coke" or "He used an Apple Mac to hack into the mainframe" but "Hey, look at my new Nike's" (e.g. iRobot).
If you're commercially benefiting, you need to make that clear. It's pretty much that simple.
The bigger question is: Why do people follow such people (who just use them to monetise their "fame")? Why would anyone buy something because a celebrity they like "endorsed" it?
Someone was watching one of those trashy YouTube channels the other day - the ones where it's just a couple filming themselves and talking about the most inane and facile trivia while they do, interrupting their own sentence to "look at the little bird", etc. as they walk through town and all that nonsense. They literally had a merchandising channel. They had T-Shirts and all sorts and pushed it in the middle of their "vlogs".
Merchandising. For someone who films the most boring parts of their day (literally - they aren't funny, they aren't famous, they don't do anything, they just film themselves wandering around their OWN house!) and streams it to the Internet for others to sit and watch. If ever there was a sign that God doesn't exist, it's that we've got trash like that and not incurred an Apocalypse.
It's more:
- Do you need a Windows app to run? It's probably cheaper, easier, more manageable and more likely to work if you just buy Windows.
- Do you need to do that on a machine that you don't want to run Windows on? It's probably --all of the above again -- to just buy VMWare or virtualise Windows. VMWare can make Windows-native applications work like Linux-native applications without the desktop at all (i.e. you can drag, overlay, minimise just the window of the Windows program you want, just like it was a native Linux program).
- Do you need to reduce all dependency on Microsoft operating systems (and their associated costs)? Then you're out of luck - most of this stuff is harder to get working and not as good, AND you end up having to install native library via winetricks etc. for almost anything of note. You're still running their software, frameworks, etc.
- Do you need to run some random Windows app that nobody else cares about and is no longer supported on Windows? Chances are a) you really shouldn't and b) that won't work anyway. Even the "big" programs that are free and everyone can run, test and debug have thousands of bugs against them under Wine.
The use-case used to be "you can be a Windows person, and do everything a Windows person could do, without having to run Windows or pay Microsoft". That's just not deliverable. As time goes on, you're going to get further behind, too. I used Crossover for nearly a decade, with Office 2000. It worked. It worked quite well. Everything else was just a waste of time trying, to be honest.
It was actually quicker to wait for Microsoft to re-code and re-release Age of Empires 2 and a modern Windows application (AoE2 HD Edition) than for the original game to become stable and have sufficient performance under Wine as it had on Windows. The AoE2 GDI issues took forever to fix, caused all kinds of performance problems and I'm not even sure if they're solved today... (checks WineHQ... some golds and silvers for various incarnations but the original Age of Kings: Garbage... and ironically with the newest versions of Wine with 64 test results... and lots of winetricks and other workarounds).
If you want old Windows, virtualise.
If you want Windows on your Linux, virtualise.
If you want Windows-to-work-on-nothing-Windows, pretty much you only have one choice and that's poor.
It's a huge undertaking, a constantly-moving target, incredibly difficult, incredibly impressive, etc. etc. etc.
But in terms of "using" it... I paid someone else to make my Word 2000 work on Linux, gave up and used native LibreOffice ever since, and haven't ever used it for anything practical since then. Even SteamOS etc. has only very recently (when they realised that the Windows developers weren't going to re-write their games for it) introduced Wine emulation layers to try to run Windows games on Linux... and that's something Transgaming was doing... what? 15-20 years ago now? And never made a success of. And it only works on a small portion of the titles anyway.
Like ReactOS... it's a hobby project. A huge one with thousands of developers, but a hobby project. The effort would be so much better off elsewhere (e.g. an open-source VMWare that does half what VMWare can do in terms of desktop integration!), but people still bash on it because it's fun to get old games working on Linux.
I think similar to Samba's efforts to be an AD domain controller too... they should have just gone for "file access over the network", the necessary components for that, and then just left it. Dozens of man-years of effort to arrive at something that nobody really wants, deploys, tests or has a use-case for that isn't better catered for by saying "Let's not do Microsoft LDAP/AD" or "Let's just buy Windows Server".
Sell it to NASA.
They've been looking for ways to get rid of captured CO2 for decades. If you can use it to generate electricity too, I'm sure they'll be interested.
Much more likely though - this requires an input (the sodium?) that will cost more to source than you'll ever save.
Because that relies on at least 50% of the population understanding such an issue, then the one person they vote into power, by electing dozens of local representatives with differing views, actually caring the same about it and making it happen via policy without making worse things happen elsewhere that you don't want.
It's, quite simply, ridiculous to expect voting to affect such things.
"Not buying that shit" works a million times better, and talks directly to the people implementing such features.
Who the hell goes to a showroom to buy a phone?
And let me introduce you to what the entire world learned 20 years ago and thus killed retail:
You go to the shop.
You pick up the phone.
You get a free demo.
You say "Thanks, I'll think about it."
You consider it at home and order the phone from the supplier of your choice.
Alternatively, you order it, try it out for 30 days, return it if you're not happy with it.
Same for any white-goods (washing machines, dryers, kitchen appliances, etc.), phones, laptops, printers, etc. and has been forever. Hell, clothes. I returned a garden spade once because it was just useless.
Know who has one of the best returns processes that I've ever seen? Amazon.
Tip #2: Don't buy any phone that one of your friends / work colleagues doesn't already have. Because you can guarantee they are worthless because nobody else uses them. Friends also give free demos, real-world experience, no sales-spiel and no hard-sell.
(Notice: This also means that you don't buy the new iPhone whatever until you've actually touched it, experienced it outside of a sales-spiel - with cheerleading first-day actors, etc. - been able to use it, been made aware of any problems with it, and been able to actually purchase it without queuing up).
Honestly...