Can one company really create a standard on its own?
I'm not at all sure about that. It doesn't encompass many of the things that I take "standard" to mean, and if we substitute what we really mean ("industry standard") then it certainly doesn't.
It's not a standard if nobody else uses it. And it's certainly not a standard if it doesn't actually exist yet.
Maybe it's the IT guy in me, but I really see "Corporation-specific, patented, bespoke proprietary protocol to replicate functionality already present in established standards, and used to justify the removal of another standard for a different type of hardware entirely". That doesn't speak the word "standard" to me.
It's like Microsoft XPS. A bad copy of PDF done wrong and then enforced on parts of the market not bright enough to know better.
Hopefully it will go as well. I've never once received an XPS file in an email, from a website, or via a file-sharing service, for instance.
Slashdot Commentor Cites 'Stupidity' As Reason To Remove 3.5mm Headphone Jack
But then, I honestly don't care as I don't use their products. I just hope nobody is stupid enough to follow suit like they did with the no-expansion-card thing and then had to backtrack.
To be honest, if I was Samsung, I'd now release a phone with TWO headphone sockets. Because almost every kid I know has a headphone doubler or does the "one-earbud-for-you, one-for-your-friend" thing. And then let the market decide.
Your home NAS doesn't need to be signed at all. It just needs a cert.
Your family will get a warning, you just tell them to press okay.
If you're smart enough to activate a NAS on a DNS entry that resolves to it, with port-forwards into your local network, you're smart enough to sign a cert on that domain if you really want to.
Hell, Let's Encrypt makes it a matter of downloading a program on Windows, Linux or Mac and running it. You could do that for a subdomain.dyndns.org if you could really be bothered.
Certificates are free. Good certificates are cheap. Better certificates are far from prohibitive for a one-off cost for a major commercial product.
And certificates for such things are NOT REQUIRED to be signed by a well-known CA. Almost all routers, switches, etc. have admin interfaces that aren't when you first get them.
And if my £50 home router can let me generate certificates, including roots, for SSL, IPSEC, RADIUS, SSH, etc. etc. etc. then there's really no excuse.
It's LITERALLY two lines of openssl invocations on first startup. Or even "click here to regenerate the default certificate" and then it's up to the user whether they do or not and adds in a bit of randomness to when they do press it.
And, honestly, Apache is simple and IIS is - I hate to say it - even simpler. Generate a CSR. Get it signed. Plug it back in. Hell, my CA offers a page of instructions on 20+ different products to generate, sign and plug in certificates. If you can't set up Apache, you shouldn't be allowed to touch SSL, agreed. But if you can set up Apache but then think the process for SSL is too complex after Googling for it once, I'm not sure you should be developing any apps either.
Literally, most of these things do not require a CA-signed SSL key and even major commercial products like Smoothwall etc. don't do that. You can put in a CA-signed on. You can re-generate your own. But there's ZERO need for them to all come with a default one that every other customer with the same product has access to the private key for.
Hell, whenever you set up a Smoothwall from scratch, it regenerates the SSH etc. keys as one of the first things it does (with that little ASCII-grid randomness thing, if you've ever seen that). That's no more difficult than:
if(first_time_setup)
generate_new_key()
And the code for that function is literally a single OpenSSL command invocation or a couple of lines of setup and choice of cipher type.
Ideally, done after NTP time sync or based on the first access by the user or similar, but it's hardly a chore.
Please describe how you intend to fake a certificate that signs Facebook, say, from a CA that my browser will recognise without warning?
Although there have been instances of that, the CAs in question have basically hate their roots REVOKED from major browsers for doing such things, and with certificate pinning and modern browsers, there's no way to fake your way around HTTPS even if you can sniff and interfere with every single packet.
Those "MITM" things that workplaces and schools use to see inside HTTPS? They ALL require your device to recognise their signing certificate FIRST or they throw up browser warnings all over the place, and things like Chrome will REFUSE to go to GMail etc. if they see it's using a fake certificate.
So don't believe the hype. HTTPS is fine. Just use a modern browser and make sure the sites you're using are pinning their certificates. If you're paranoidly worried, remove all the trusted certs from your OS before your start and only trust the individual website's after you've checked it's the real cert from another machine.
Or have you just heard "You can break HTTPS" or "My school can see my secure pages" and think that means without your co-operation or without full physical and administrative access to your device first?
"Apple set up some Irish subsidiaries a mere four years after it was founded. Foreign sales, which account for 60% of Appleâ(TM)s profits, are routed through these Irish subsidiaries and taxed nowhere. How is this possible, when the intellectual property that supports the value of Appleâ(TM)s products is in the United States?
Apple has an Irish holding company with no operations or employees at the top of its foreign operations. This company also serves as a group finance company. Apple Inc., the U.S. parent of the whole group, pays U.S. tax on the investment earnings of this company. Otherwise, the holding company pays no tax to any government, and has not paid tax for five years. It claims tax residence nowhere."
Demonstrating, yet again, that the US only cares about its own, and nothing and nobody else. Such an insular country and people, obsessed with money (you mention rich foreigners, nowhere do you discuss any other aspect they may have).
And who the hell wants a baby that's going to be taxed when it's born to foreign parents, lived its life on foreign soil, and never knew the US at all? That's baby tourism. What you're talking about before that is actually immigration, which is universal (they are 30,000 people in France at the moment trying to get to the UK, the demand has little to do with it being a benefit to the country they are trying to get to).
Those people coming in to the US, they have citizenship of other countries. Those countries - without exception - do not tax them while they spend their lives in the US. The US tax people who have left the US, however. Until their denounce their citizenships entirely.
This means that your students never stray outside your borders. They can't. They can't afford to be taxed by others and by the US at the same time.
This means that your professors and other academics cannot travel and work outside the US. Not without being penalised much more than their peers in other countries, or denouncing their citizenship - which is a one-way street. If they want to go work on a project on an Australian telescope, they are double-taxed all they time they do, unless they decide to leave the US permanently and live and work in the other hundreds of countries the world over that don't do that to them.
What you've got is a system that keeps all the worst - the "baby tourists", the illegal immigrants, the jobless and the stupid - and punishes anyone who wants to see the world, work internationally, or do any kind of international collaboration. It's called brain-drain and double-taxation is the PERFECT way to cause it.
And the problem is that it's a self-reinforcing problem. The more stupid people that stay and the more clever, innovative, and internationally-demanded that leave, the more people left behind think it's a "good thing", and you end up with a Donald Trump situation where the whole world are looking at you thinking "You fucking idiots" and yet half your country are cheering him on because everyone with a brain already left or will be forced out.
You're not alone - Brexit is going to have roughly the same effect unless they can guarantee rights for EU people already working here, but we're not stupid enough to tax them for even trying to go and work with the rest of the world
My girlfriend is a Dr (which means something over here), and Italian - Italy PAID HER to come to the UK. They PAID HER to study here. They do not tax her while she's not at home. The UK PAY HER over the odds to come here, as only a handful of people can do her job, which is taxed in the UK only.
She works in a NHS hospital diagnosing genetic diseases and cancers.
Her friends, almost to a person, are all EU, or foreign citizens. Mexico, Spain, France, Italy, Romania, Poland, Russia. They ALL PAID their people to come to the UK, get educations, make the big bucks and send money home. Because they know that nothing beats international experience, recognition, education and talent. They don't tax anything while they're not on their home soil.
Those people are going to retire back to the country, or they are going to qualify quickly and bring back foreign expertise, techniques, standards and better ways of doing things - for free. They are going to earn bigger money than their home countries could afford (my gf literally laughs at what Italy will pay her to do the same job over there) and send it home. And they will have well-rounded, collaborative careers.
The US are basically fining people for wanting to go to the rest of the world. You can't study abroad. You can't work abroad. Even places like China and Korea don't stop that for their academics. Hell, you get less holidays than just about every other country in the
It's easy to make more profit than your competitors when you're aren't paying any tax, in any country that you operate in.
Strangely bad for PR when it gets on the news, though. And strangely ends up changing from a hush-hush golf-and-a-posh-meal secret deal with the local ministers to laws being changed to prevent it happening when it does make the news.
Starbucks found that out in the UK.
So, technically, Apple don't make 40% of the profits in the Silicon Valley. Because those profits aren't properly taxed. And they aren't registered as profit in Silicon Valley at all. They are registered as profit only in Ireland. Which was charging them basically 0% tax. They are the LEAST profitable company in Silicon Valley, or else the US taxman would have had their share a long time ago.
But they are in fact the most profitable in Ireland, while also being the least taxed. Strange that.
I could earn twice what I do if I didn't have to pay tax.
And I could make any company outstrip all its competitors if it didn't have to pay tax (get company, make no changes, stop paying tax, bang, you just doubled your profit most likely, and can lower prices or buy suppliers to put your competitors out of the market).
I'm much more interested in an article entitled "Who pays the most tax in Silicon Valley?"
Given that most of the other EU countries are seeing precisely zip of Apple's taxes anyway (because Ireland are charging them at a rate of 0.005%), every country won't be sorry to see them go either.
Literally, they are doing masses of business in the EU and paying "less tax than a sausage stall".
If they are a US company taxing themselves in the US, then we have taxes that capture that when they sell product in the EU. If they are a EU company taxing themselves in the EU, then we see direct taxes from them. When they are playing one EU country off against the entire rest of the world, nobody sees any tax, but the country that allows them to do it get a few thousand jobs for the price.
What we have is a country in need of jobs willing to sacrifice tax on the sly, until it got caught, to keep them. Meanwhile, everybody else is pissed that Apple aren't paying a penny to the UK, Germany, France, etc. while making BILLIONS from customers in those countries. And the EU is just as big a market at the US.
This has nothing to do with WHERE they are taxed. It's to do with what tax they are paying. And they are paying fuck all. And they moved out of the US specifically so they COULD pay fuck-all, and now that's caught up with them and there's no safe-haven left in Europe, where they continue to pay fuck-all.
And now they've twigged that running a complicated tax evasion scheme - no matter how "legal" it appeared at first, but certainly isn't now the EU commission has caught wind of it - to pay the same taxes as they would have to pay in the US is actually going to cost them more.
So they're "graciously" agreeing to go back to the US, spin it as positive PR, and pay ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more tax, the same as everybody else, for once in their life and abandon their complicated tax evasion and foreign offices designed to do nothing more than evade tax.
In other words: "Shit, they noticed, and even Ireland can't pretend they didn't know they were giving us billions in free money for no reason, we'll have to start paying "real" tax from now on... May as well do that from home."
Go and survey all the apes in the wild. Everything from murder to falling out of trees, to predators, to falling-out-of-trees-while-fleeing-predators.
Most animals DO NOT die of old-age. That's a very human-centric view.
Getting eaten is visible on the fossils. Disease is often visible too, or suspected only because there are no other injuries (which is suspicious in itself). Even Tutankhamen is thought to have had several fractures when he died and he was only a boy.
For a tree-dwelling species, dying from falling out of a tree is right up there. Once you slip once, whether learning toddler, careless adolescent or fleeing adult, you break bones that are a) visible on your skeleton and b) crippling to your ability to survive.
No antibiotics. No way to monitor or stem blood loss (especially internally). No knowledge to heal the bone. No painkillers. Can't keep up with the pack. You're dead. Hell, you could have just picked the rotten branch and by the time your weight was on it, it was too late to do anything.
Watch a cat. The most graceful of animals. Sure-footed. Sleek. Can land on their feet from stories up. Able to leap up and down trees at stupendous speeds with little or no warning, dive over obstacles, sprint faster than you ever could.
In the last year, from three cats in my house, two have fallen off a windowsill more times than I care to mention, one got trapped in a catflap (by backing out of it while half-way, requiring human intervention because it just kept pulling on it while its tail was caught in the flap the wrong way to escape the flap), one got stuck in a tree, one has a supreme deathwish where sitting in front of moving cars is concerned and only saved by driver prudence (i.e. me), one has come back with bloodied paws on more than one occasion (believed to be from a bad jump down from said tree again, onto sharp ground!), and that's not counting modern hazards, predators, actions made under panic, running between human legs on stairs, etc. for a domestic cat roaming a small garden territory.
I've actually just watched one fall off a sofa because it was sitting on the back of it, went to rub against my hand, misjudged it, and fell to the floor. It shook it off, but it completely messed up a simple action. And this was a young cat, not a kitten or something too-old-to-survive.
It's like saying a professional juggler never drops his balls, or that a professional acrobat never misses a leap. Ask them. They ALL do. They just don't always do it every show. But put enough shows on (i.e. climb enough trees) and it will happen eventually.
Few animals EVER reached old age, unless they were impregnable or zero-risk animals (e.g. tortoises, elephants until humans came along - slow, ploddering, no jumping, etc). Almost none of the hunter-cats ever really get to old-age because they all die of simple injury or infection of injury. There's not much to challenge an old established-pride lion, but the simplest of slips on a rock will kill him.
The only reason Apple are in Ireland in the first place is that someone wanted all this tax stuff to just slip by under a regime designed to ignore it - pretty much.
Here, we'll throw a few jobs your way and a free round of golf, and you won't tax us like the UK, EU, US, Australia, etc. would if we did it there. That's the deal.
So if Apple are made to pay it anyway, they'll just take their ball elsewhere, where someone will turn a blind eye for less, which is why Ireland are APPEALING the decision...
There's an app that views my home CCTV camera on iPad. I install it, purely to make the iPad "do something" during the course of the day. The others allocated to the IT department are in cupboards and drawers, uncharged and unused.
So I put my camera up on my iPad and use it as remote CCTV for my house while I'm at work.
Every 8 hours or so, it crashes the iPad back to black screen, Apple logo, progress bar, back into lock-screen.
Sure, it's a misbehaving app. Sure it's probably a memory leak or similar. But it takes out the entire machine, with alarming regularity - and it's not the only time that happens, it just happens to trigger it more reliably than other things.
And yet this iPad is on the latest iOS within minutes of it happening (it's only other purpose is to see what iOS 9.3 or whatever broke this time around).
Yes, I've switched iPads. But the students still say that similar things happen to theirs, sometimes in the middle of lessons. That's just *shite* for anything running in the 21st Century and not doing anything more difficult than viewing a video stream off the Internet.
Because pressing the wrong buttons makes screens crack, batteries explode, device just turn off, touchscreens to wear (sometimes to the point of vertical / horizontal lines on the screen), etc. etc. etc.? Yeah, okay.
I try my best not to bias my opinion against Apple - mainly because I'm forced to work with them - but I have to say this just confirms my own numbers.
I work in schools so I deal with all kinds of devices from servers and PCs down to smartwatches and phones. As "IT" I also get lots of people use me as their personal technical support (my employer doesn't mind, and even encourages it as a value-add for other staff, so long as it doesn't interfere with real work).
Pretty much across the board, people with iPads, iPhones and Macs experience many more failures per device than the rest. I don't even SEE Android users after setting up the email on their phones (something we have to do for them, by policy, so we know they aren't just buying new phones and setting them up themselves). iPhone people also seem to break their screens SO OFTEN that it's just laughable.
I have precisely one dead Samsung tablet "on the pile", and no end of iPods, iPads, iPhones and other gadgets.
The Mac Minis, especially those sold as "servers"? Laughable. The Mac desktops? Laughable.
And then when you do this not just on a "per-device" basis, but on "per-value" basis, it gets even sillier as you can buy 2-3 or more of the competition for the price of one Apple. You don't get any more work done for that price either, and certainly don't get less failures.
A member of staff brought in some things from clearing out their mother's house after she died. One was a BBC Micro, complete and working. We snapped that up. Then they said "Oh, and I have a Mac at home that just stopped working, it's only a year or two old, I suppose you want that?"
She was quite surprised by our answer. Needless to say, we spent the afternoon with "BOOP-BEEP" startup sounds as we played about with the BBC, but nobody wanted the Mac. Nobody even asked the spec. Literally nobody in the IT office cared about it.
But I have no doubt she ran out and just bought another Mac. Like the person who had a MacBook Pro that nearly exploded because the battery bulged like fuck in it and we refused to touch it and told them to get it off-site (we're a school, so there are kids and I do NOT want some personal device brought on site, exploding, and hurting someone - I am NOT going to do the paperwork and deal with the stupendous health-and-safety aftermath of something like that) and dispose of it elsewhere as soon as they could.
I'm forced to support Apple, against my wishes, and I try really hard to spin positives from what they offer. But I literally can't find enough to justify. It's basically popular "because it's popular", like designer trainers or something. In terms of actual figures on almost any aspect, Apple devices are atrocious.
Of course this kind of things happens, on any OS. But you test.
If you haven't noticed that you've introduced a blue-screen (literally, things that SHOULD NOT happen) within a few hours of pushing out an update, even if it only activates on a small percentage of a popular product, then you're not testing, not recording logs, not reporting crashes in enough detail, not reading crash reports, and just don't care.
We're talking mass-market OS on massive amounts of machines. Pushing something that causes a brand-name device to instantly BSOD even 10% of machines is just a stupendous lack of testing.
At least the "we'll break all your webcams that don't use the colour-space we want to use" change was deliberate.
"Amazon's initial business plan was unusual; it did not expect to make a profit for four to five years. This "slow" growth caused stockholders to complain about the company not reaching profitability fast enough to justify investing in, or to even survive in the long-term.... It finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001: $5 million"
Seven years it took to hit profit, but they knew that and said it would be like that all along.
I suspect that Amazon's turnover and revenue were significantly higher than anything Uber's ever seen, and I suspect they never lost $1.2bn at any stage of their inception.
There's lots of research demonstrating that long periods of time spent near campfires cause serious health issues. Absent cleaning the air, such as with a complete air-conditioning and filtering setup, it is unhealthy for humans to be near a campfire for any significant length of time.... so this isn't viable.
It's about risk. The risk of you cooking your food (thus exposing you to carcinogenics) compared to the risk of eating uncooked food (which we did for MILLIONS OF YEARS) is a trade-off.
Do you sacrifice those temporary, mostly reversible health issues (comparatively vanishingly small compared to the general risk of take-off and space travel in general, to be honest) for the opportunity to live and work in an entirely new environment?
To be honest, mining is an incredibly dangerous profession. Scouting the bottom of the oceans too. Diving near oil rigs. All of these things are MUCH HIGHER RISK than the health effects of prolonged space travel. And people do them every single day.
Even simulated gravity doesn't solve the problems of space travel, so even your solution is completely useless in terms of combating all - or even the significant - health risks. Radiation would be the killer, long-term.
To be honest, there are thousands of people, most of them sane, educated and intelligent, willing to sign up to a one-way mission to Mars.
In the same way that for centuries, people fought to get to the top of Everest or to the middle of the arctic poles. Of course it wasn't without risk. It can't be. But that's how you discover the risk, reduce them and compensate for what you can't reduce.
So re-using a fuel tank as a habitat in space is just one sensible method of reducing risk - of having to send up more junk to live in, so you don't have to live in cramped conditions, or needlessly spend money on more accommodation when you could spend it on safety gear or fire tests or whatever.
Here. Have a $2 case for your phone for if you ever drop it.
I bought mine on my smartphone, we have this thing called "online shopping" nowadays.
Seriously, though, with the exception of stupid people doing stupid things to their phones (like wandering around without cases or putting them on the toilet while they flush, etc.) and shitty Apple screens that cost a fortune to repair, it's really not that big an issue. I've never broken a phone screen. Ever. I've destroyed any number of laptops (usually by their hinges breaking through too much use), but not a smartphone.
And, yes, mine's tumbled down stairs, onto concrete, out of my pocket off a windowsill and down the back of a bunch of desks, all sorts. Hell, it spends it's ENTIRE LIFE in my pocket being bent, sat-on, smashed against my bunch of keys (with hard metal caribiner for a keyring), etc.
The crappy $2 leather case with plastic edges means nothing breaks unless you smash it face down onto a rock, and it doesn't scratch unless you're an idiot. My previous phone had the same case (literally the cheapest shite on Amazon) and after 4 years it was dog-eared and had dents all over the plastic case but that was it - the phone came out looking like the day it went in. And that took at least two "straight out of the case, spewing battery out" hard tumbles.
Note, I work in schools so I get a LOT of repairs come my way, so I see some carnage. Per-pupils iPads for a start, and I send at least 2 a week on average off for repair.
But phones? Out of all the school-provided staff smart phones, I've never sent one off for repair or had one broken beyond repair before it was decided it was obsolete. Even taking into account random people asking me to look at "IT stuff", iPhone screen-cracks are repairable and I get about one a year. I've yet to have to repair any other model of phone (and, no, we don't use exclusively Apple even for staff phones, just the opposite in fact - we have everything from Lumia to Samsung).
Sorry, but the days of a smartphone being fragile and your laptop robust are long gone. Most laptops these days, and the cheap Chromebooks, are almost made of god-damn paper, they're so shit. Don't even get me started on those things with hinges that wrap-around to become a tablet. The MOST VULNERABLE bit of the laptop and you make it undergo even more stress? Great idea.
The most pointless, short, useless and under-described "demo" I've ever seen.
I'm not familiar with Overwatch's spec but pretty much they show one short-range view of two static robots turn the corner to walk up some stairs with some skyboxes, then jump back and that's IT. Nothing there performance-related. And we know why. Compared to a real graphics card, it can't compete.
All the other stuff was pretty meh too. Oh look, it's faster than previous generations. Cool. I should hope so otherwise it's pointless trying to sell it.
Anyone else read the bit about automatic fsck of FAT filesystems on USB insertion?
I'm presuming that it'll be optional but still - way to fuck everyone's USB sticks and SD cards up.
Auto-fsck is a stupid idea. At worst, do it read-only and warn (like Windows does). But just fixing up the filesystem without asking the user first? A good way to trash stuff.
But lists get sold, stolen and passed on, and it's not just your email.
I got an email from a company selling educational IT furniture (highly specific to my job). Except it went to my personal email. And when I looked it was sent to a unique email alias at my domain (I use unique emails for every website, company, etc. that I give email to - one of the beauties of owning a domain of your own).
That email was ONLY given to RM (Research Machines), and I hadn't had any dealings with them for several years. Not since I took half their custom away in a London Borough and they got pissed and refused to co-operate.
Turns out the guy who set up the furniture company used to work for RM. Strange that. He just decided to take the company list with him, contact details and all, and use it to sell his wares from his own company. I reported him, nothing happened.
But if you're a minimum wage employee in a call centre that just got sold out to another country, I can see the temptation, and I can understand stealing the list and selling it on. It's not really the company's fault, all they can do is sack the person responsible but your data is already out there, and another will just come along. What I don't get is how MASS exports happening without people noticing. But your data, in anyone's system, isn't secure and can easily be sold on like this.
Sell a couple of addresses a week of people you had to look up to manage their account legitimately, to the right people, and you can make good money. Especially if you pick and choose the best customers who you know have money, etc.
But TPS etc. does bog-all. And they don't stop, you've just exhausted one leak, that's all. There'll be another.
Easiest way to stop this shit? Throw the landline in the bin (BT obviously have zero interest in blocking this shit, in my experience), move to mobile and disable any phone call coming in from a non-CLI number. And you can "block" immediately any number that does get through.
People ask me why I don't answer my mobile but instead switch to Google. I search for unknown numbers first and just block them if they are listed on those "whocalledme" websites as spammers.
Same for email. Abuse the email I give, it just gets redirected to/dev/null forever more.
Slashdot Mirror
Can one company really create a standard on its own?
I'm not at all sure about that. It doesn't encompass many of the things that I take "standard" to mean, and if we substitute what we really mean ("industry standard") then it certainly doesn't.
It's not a standard if nobody else uses it. And it's certainly not a standard if it doesn't actually exist yet.
Maybe it's the IT guy in me, but I really see "Corporation-specific, patented, bespoke proprietary protocol to replicate functionality already present in established standards, and used to justify the removal of another standard for a different type of hardware entirely". That doesn't speak the word "standard" to me.
It's like Microsoft XPS. A bad copy of PDF done wrong and then enforced on parts of the market not bright enough to know better.
Hopefully it will go as well. I've never once received an XPS file in an email, from a website, or via a file-sharing service, for instance.
Slashdot Commentor Cites 'Stupidity' As Reason To Remove 3.5mm Headphone Jack
But then, I honestly don't care as I don't use their products. I just hope nobody is stupid enough to follow suit like they did with the no-expansion-card thing and then had to backtrack.
To be honest, if I was Samsung, I'd now release a phone with TWO headphone sockets. Because almost every kid I know has a headphone doubler or does the "one-earbud-for-you, one-for-your-friend" thing. And then let the market decide.
It doesn't matter, no domain required.
Your home NAS doesn't need to be signed at all. It just needs a cert.
Your family will get a warning, you just tell them to press okay.
If you're smart enough to activate a NAS on a DNS entry that resolves to it, with port-forwards into your local network, you're smart enough to sign a cert on that domain if you really want to.
Hell, Let's Encrypt makes it a matter of downloading a program on Windows, Linux or Mac and running it. You could do that for a subdomain.dyndns.org if you could really be bothered.
Certificates are free.
Good certificates are cheap.
Better certificates are far from prohibitive for a one-off cost for a major commercial product.
And certificates for such things are NOT REQUIRED to be signed by a well-known CA. Almost all routers, switches, etc. have admin interfaces that aren't when you first get them.
And if my £50 home router can let me generate certificates, including roots, for SSL, IPSEC, RADIUS, SSH, etc. etc. etc. then there's really no excuse.
It's LITERALLY two lines of openssl invocations on first startup. Or even "click here to regenerate the default certificate" and then it's up to the user whether they do or not and adds in a bit of randomness to when they do press it.
And, honestly, Apache is simple and IIS is - I hate to say it - even simpler. Generate a CSR. Get it signed. Plug it back in. Hell, my CA offers a page of instructions on 20+ different products to generate, sign and plug in certificates. If you can't set up Apache, you shouldn't be allowed to touch SSL, agreed. But if you can set up Apache but then think the process for SSL is too complex after Googling for it once, I'm not sure you should be developing any apps either.
Literally, most of these things do not require a CA-signed SSL key and even major commercial products like Smoothwall etc. don't do that. You can put in a CA-signed on. You can re-generate your own. But there's ZERO need for them to all come with a default one that every other customer with the same product has access to the private key for.
Hell, whenever you set up a Smoothwall from scratch, it regenerates the SSH etc. keys as one of the first things it does (with that little ASCII-grid randomness thing, if you've ever seen that). That's no more difficult than:
if(first_time_setup)
generate_new_key()
And the code for that function is literally a single OpenSSL command invocation or a couple of lines of setup and choice of cipher type.
Ideally, done after NTP time sync or based on the first access by the user or similar, but it's hardly a chore.
Is it? Really?
Please describe how you intend to fake a certificate that signs Facebook, say, from a CA that my browser will recognise without warning?
Although there have been instances of that, the CAs in question have basically hate their roots REVOKED from major browsers for doing such things, and with certificate pinning and modern browsers, there's no way to fake your way around HTTPS even if you can sniff and interfere with every single packet.
Those "MITM" things that workplaces and schools use to see inside HTTPS? They ALL require your device to recognise their signing certificate FIRST or they throw up browser warnings all over the place, and things like Chrome will REFUSE to go to GMail etc. if they see it's using a fake certificate.
So don't believe the hype. HTTPS is fine. Just use a modern browser and make sure the sites you're using are pinning their certificates. If you're paranoidly worried, remove all the trusted certs from your OS before your start and only trust the individual website's after you've checked it's the real cert from another machine.
Or have you just heard "You can break HTTPS" or "My school can see my secure pages" and think that means without your co-operation or without full physical and administrative access to your device first?
Seriously.
From http://www.forbes.com/sites/le...
"Apple set up some Irish subsidiaries a mere four years after it was founded. Foreign sales, which account for 60% of Appleâ(TM)s profits, are routed through these Irish subsidiaries and taxed nowhere. How is this possible, when the intellectual property that supports the value of Appleâ(TM)s products is in the United States?
Apple has an Irish holding company with no operations or employees at the top of its foreign operations. This company also serves as a group finance company. Apple Inc., the U.S. parent of the whole group, pays U.S. tax on the investment earnings of this company. Otherwise, the holding company pays no tax to any government, and has not paid tax for five years. It claims tax residence nowhere."
Demonstrating, yet again, that the US only cares about its own, and nothing and nobody else. Such an insular country and people, obsessed with money (you mention rich foreigners, nowhere do you discuss any other aspect they may have).
And who the hell wants a baby that's going to be taxed when it's born to foreign parents, lived its life on foreign soil, and never knew the US at all? That's baby tourism. What you're talking about before that is actually immigration, which is universal (they are 30,000 people in France at the moment trying to get to the UK, the demand has little to do with it being a benefit to the country they are trying to get to).
Those people coming in to the US, they have citizenship of other countries. Those countries - without exception - do not tax them while they spend their lives in the US. The US tax people who have left the US, however. Until their denounce their citizenships entirely.
This means that your students never stray outside your borders. They can't. They can't afford to be taxed by others and by the US at the same time.
This means that your professors and other academics cannot travel and work outside the US. Not without being penalised much more than their peers in other countries, or denouncing their citizenship - which is a one-way street. If they want to go work on a project on an Australian telescope, they are double-taxed all they time they do, unless they decide to leave the US permanently and live and work in the other hundreds of countries the world over that don't do that to them.
What you've got is a system that keeps all the worst - the "baby tourists", the illegal immigrants, the jobless and the stupid - and punishes anyone who wants to see the world, work internationally, or do any kind of international collaboration. It's called brain-drain and double-taxation is the PERFECT way to cause it.
And the problem is that it's a self-reinforcing problem. The more stupid people that stay and the more clever, innovative, and internationally-demanded that leave, the more people left behind think it's a "good thing", and you end up with a Donald Trump situation where the whole world are looking at you thinking "You fucking idiots" and yet half your country are cheering him on because everyone with a brain already left or will be forced out.
You're not alone - Brexit is going to have roughly the same effect unless they can guarantee rights for EU people already working here, but we're not stupid enough to tax them for even trying to go and work with the rest of the world
My girlfriend is a Dr (which means something over here), and Italian - Italy PAID HER to come to the UK. They PAID HER to study here. They do not tax her while she's not at home. The UK PAY HER over the odds to come here, as only a handful of people can do her job, which is taxed in the UK only.
She works in a NHS hospital diagnosing genetic diseases and cancers.
Her friends, almost to a person, are all EU, or foreign citizens. Mexico, Spain, France, Italy, Romania, Poland, Russia. They ALL PAID their people to come to the UK, get educations, make the big bucks and send money home. Because they know that nothing beats international experience, recognition, education and talent. They don't tax anything while they're not on their home soil.
Those people are going to retire back to the country, or they are going to qualify quickly and bring back foreign expertise, techniques, standards and better ways of doing things - for free. They are going to earn bigger money than their home countries could afford (my gf literally laughs at what Italy will pay her to do the same job over there) and send it home. And they will have well-rounded, collaborative careers.
The US are basically fining people for wanting to go to the rest of the world. You can't study abroad. You can't work abroad. Even places like China and Korea don't stop that for their academics. Hell, you get less holidays than just about every other country in the
It's easy to make more profit than your competitors when you're aren't paying any tax, in any country that you operate in.
Strangely bad for PR when it gets on the news, though. And strangely ends up changing from a hush-hush golf-and-a-posh-meal secret deal with the local ministers to laws being changed to prevent it happening when it does make the news.
Starbucks found that out in the UK.
So, technically, Apple don't make 40% of the profits in the Silicon Valley. Because those profits aren't properly taxed. And they aren't registered as profit in Silicon Valley at all. They are registered as profit only in Ireland. Which was charging them basically 0% tax. They are the LEAST profitable company in Silicon Valley, or else the US taxman would have had their share a long time ago.
But they are in fact the most profitable in Ireland, while also being the least taxed. Strange that.
I could earn twice what I do if I didn't have to pay tax.
And I could make any company outstrip all its competitors if it didn't have to pay tax (get company, make no changes, stop paying tax, bang, you just doubled your profit most likely, and can lower prices or buy suppliers to put your competitors out of the market).
I'm much more interested in an article entitled "Who pays the most tax in Silicon Valley?"
Given that most of the other EU countries are seeing precisely zip of Apple's taxes anyway (because Ireland are charging them at a rate of 0.005%), every country won't be sorry to see them go either.
Literally, they are doing masses of business in the EU and paying "less tax than a sausage stall".
If they are a US company taxing themselves in the US, then we have taxes that capture that when they sell product in the EU. If they are a EU company taxing themselves in the EU, then we see direct taxes from them. When they are playing one EU country off against the entire rest of the world, nobody sees any tax, but the country that allows them to do it get a few thousand jobs for the price.
What we have is a country in need of jobs willing to sacrifice tax on the sly, until it got caught, to keep them. Meanwhile, everybody else is pissed that Apple aren't paying a penny to the UK, Germany, France, etc. while making BILLIONS from customers in those countries. And the EU is just as big a market at the US.
This has nothing to do with WHERE they are taxed. It's to do with what tax they are paying. And they are paying fuck all. And they moved out of the US specifically so they COULD pay fuck-all, and now that's caught up with them and there's no safe-haven left in Europe, where they continue to pay fuck-all.
And now they've twigged that running a complicated tax evasion scheme - no matter how "legal" it appeared at first, but certainly isn't now the EU commission has caught wind of it - to pay the same taxes as they would have to pay in the US is actually going to cost them more.
So they're "graciously" agreeing to go back to the US, spin it as positive PR, and pay ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more tax, the same as everybody else, for once in their life and abandon their complicated tax evasion and foreign offices designed to do nothing more than evade tax.
In other words: "Shit, they noticed, and even Ireland can't pretend they didn't know they were giving us billions in free money for no reason, we'll have to start paying "real" tax from now on... May as well do that from home."
And next to no customers, because the insurance is too steep and you lose $200m every now and then.
From the guy who brought you "autopilot" mode on the Tesla....
Everyone dies of something.
Go and survey all the apes in the wild. Everything from murder to falling out of trees, to predators, to falling-out-of-trees-while-fleeing-predators.
Most animals DO NOT die of old-age. That's a very human-centric view.
Getting eaten is visible on the fossils. Disease is often visible too, or suspected only because there are no other injuries (which is suspicious in itself). Even Tutankhamen is thought to have had several fractures when he died and he was only a boy.
For a tree-dwelling species, dying from falling out of a tree is right up there. Once you slip once, whether learning toddler, careless adolescent or fleeing adult, you break bones that are a) visible on your skeleton and b) crippling to your ability to survive.
No antibiotics. No way to monitor or stem blood loss (especially internally). No knowledge to heal the bone. No painkillers. Can't keep up with the pack. You're dead. Hell, you could have just picked the rotten branch and by the time your weight was on it, it was too late to do anything.
Watch a cat. The most graceful of animals. Sure-footed. Sleek. Can land on their feet from stories up. Able to leap up and down trees at stupendous speeds with little or no warning, dive over obstacles, sprint faster than you ever could.
In the last year, from three cats in my house, two have fallen off a windowsill more times than I care to mention, one got trapped in a catflap (by backing out of it while half-way, requiring human intervention because it just kept pulling on it while its tail was caught in the flap the wrong way to escape the flap), one got stuck in a tree, one has a supreme deathwish where sitting in front of moving cars is concerned and only saved by driver prudence (i.e. me), one has come back with bloodied paws on more than one occasion (believed to be from a bad jump down from said tree again, onto sharp ground!), and that's not counting modern hazards, predators, actions made under panic, running between human legs on stairs, etc. for a domestic cat roaming a small garden territory.
I've actually just watched one fall off a sofa because it was sitting on the back of it, went to rub against my hand, misjudged it, and fell to the floor. It shook it off, but it completely messed up a simple action. And this was a young cat, not a kitten or something too-old-to-survive.
It's like saying a professional juggler never drops his balls, or that a professional acrobat never misses a leap. Ask them. They ALL do. They just don't always do it every show. But put enough shows on (i.e. climb enough trees) and it will happen eventually.
Few animals EVER reached old age, unless they were impregnable or zero-risk animals (e.g. tortoises, elephants until humans came along - slow, ploddering, no jumping, etc). Almost none of the hunter-cats ever really get to old-age because they all die of simple injury or infection of injury. There's not much to challenge an old established-pride lion, but the simplest of slips on a rock will kill him.
The only reason Apple are in Ireland in the first place is that someone wanted all this tax stuff to just slip by under a regime designed to ignore it - pretty much.
Here, we'll throw a few jobs your way and a free round of golf, and you won't tax us like the UK, EU, US, Australia, etc. would if we did it there. That's the deal.
So if Apple are made to pay it anyway, they'll just take their ball elsewhere, where someone will turn a blind eye for less, which is why Ireland are APPEALING the decision...
We use iPad Minis in school. Hundreds of them.
There's an app that views my home CCTV camera on iPad. I install it, purely to make the iPad "do something" during the course of the day. The others allocated to the IT department are in cupboards and drawers, uncharged and unused.
So I put my camera up on my iPad and use it as remote CCTV for my house while I'm at work.
Every 8 hours or so, it crashes the iPad back to black screen, Apple logo, progress bar, back into lock-screen.
Sure, it's a misbehaving app. Sure it's probably a memory leak or similar. But it takes out the entire machine, with alarming regularity - and it's not the only time that happens, it just happens to trigger it more reliably than other things.
And yet this iPad is on the latest iOS within minutes of it happening (it's only other purpose is to see what iOS 9.3 or whatever broke this time around).
Yes, I've switched iPads. But the students still say that similar things happen to theirs, sometimes in the middle of lessons. That's just *shite* for anything running in the 21st Century and not doing anything more difficult than viewing a video stream off the Internet.
Because pressing the wrong buttons makes screens crack, batteries explode, device just turn off, touchscreens to wear (sometimes to the point of vertical / horizontal lines on the screen), etc. etc. etc.? Yeah, okay.
I think they are also thinking people buried under the rubble, with phones, that might be able to pick up local wifi.
I try my best not to bias my opinion against Apple - mainly because I'm forced to work with them - but I have to say this just confirms my own numbers.
I work in schools so I deal with all kinds of devices from servers and PCs down to smartwatches and phones. As "IT" I also get lots of people use me as their personal technical support (my employer doesn't mind, and even encourages it as a value-add for other staff, so long as it doesn't interfere with real work).
Pretty much across the board, people with iPads, iPhones and Macs experience many more failures per device than the rest. I don't even SEE Android users after setting up the email on their phones (something we have to do for them, by policy, so we know they aren't just buying new phones and setting them up themselves). iPhone people also seem to break their screens SO OFTEN that it's just laughable.
I have precisely one dead Samsung tablet "on the pile", and no end of iPods, iPads, iPhones and other gadgets.
The Mac Minis, especially those sold as "servers"? Laughable.
The Mac desktops? Laughable.
And then when you do this not just on a "per-device" basis, but on "per-value" basis, it gets even sillier as you can buy 2-3 or more of the competition for the price of one Apple. You don't get any more work done for that price either, and certainly don't get less failures.
A member of staff brought in some things from clearing out their mother's house after she died. One was a BBC Micro, complete and working. We snapped that up. Then they said "Oh, and I have a Mac at home that just stopped working, it's only a year or two old, I suppose you want that?"
She was quite surprised by our answer. Needless to say, we spent the afternoon with "BOOP-BEEP" startup sounds as we played about with the BBC, but nobody wanted the Mac. Nobody even asked the spec. Literally nobody in the IT office cared about it.
But I have no doubt she ran out and just bought another Mac. Like the person who had a MacBook Pro that nearly exploded because the battery bulged like fuck in it and we refused to touch it and told them to get it off-site (we're a school, so there are kids and I do NOT want some personal device brought on site, exploding, and hurting someone - I am NOT going to do the paperwork and deal with the stupendous health-and-safety aftermath of something like that) and dispose of it elsewhere as soon as they could.
I'm forced to support Apple, against my wishes, and I try really hard to spin positives from what they offer. But I literally can't find enough to justify. It's basically popular "because it's popular", like designer trainers or something. In terms of actual figures on almost any aspect, Apple devices are atrocious.
Which is why MS should be testing their changes.
Of course this kind of things happens, on any OS. But you test.
If you haven't noticed that you've introduced a blue-screen (literally, things that SHOULD NOT happen) within a few hours of pushing out an update, even if it only activates on a small percentage of a popular product, then you're not testing, not recording logs, not reporting crashes in enough detail, not reading crash reports, and just don't care.
We're talking mass-market OS on massive amounts of machines. Pushing something that causes a brand-name device to instantly BSOD even 10% of machines is just a stupendous lack of testing.
At least the "we'll break all your webcams that don't use the colour-space we want to use" change was deliberate.
"Amazon's initial business plan was unusual; it did not expect to make a profit for four to five years. This "slow" growth caused stockholders to complain about the company not reaching profitability fast enough to justify investing in, or to even survive in the long-term. ... It finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001: $5 million"
Seven years it took to hit profit, but they knew that and said it would be like that all along.
I suspect that Amazon's turnover and revenue were significantly higher than anything Uber's ever seen, and I suspect they never lost $1.2bn at any stage of their inception.
It was also - as stated - highly unusual.
There's lots of research demonstrating that long periods of time spent near campfires cause serious health issues. Absent cleaning the air, such as with a complete air-conditioning and filtering setup, it is unhealthy for humans to be near a campfire for any significant length of time. ... so this isn't viable.
It's about risk. The risk of you cooking your food (thus exposing you to carcinogenics) compared to the risk of eating uncooked food (which we did for MILLIONS OF YEARS) is a trade-off.
Do you sacrifice those temporary, mostly reversible health issues (comparatively vanishingly small compared to the general risk of take-off and space travel in general, to be honest) for the opportunity to live and work in an entirely new environment?
To be honest, mining is an incredibly dangerous profession. Scouting the bottom of the oceans too. Diving near oil rigs. All of these things are MUCH HIGHER RISK than the health effects of prolonged space travel. And people do them every single day.
Even simulated gravity doesn't solve the problems of space travel, so even your solution is completely useless in terms of combating all - or even the significant - health risks. Radiation would be the killer, long-term.
To be honest, there are thousands of people, most of them sane, educated and intelligent, willing to sign up to a one-way mission to Mars.
In the same way that for centuries, people fought to get to the top of Everest or to the middle of the arctic poles. Of course it wasn't without risk. It can't be. But that's how you discover the risk, reduce them and compensate for what you can't reduce.
So re-using a fuel tank as a habitat in space is just one sensible method of reducing risk - of having to send up more junk to live in, so you don't have to live in cramped conditions, or needlessly spend money on more accommodation when you could spend it on safety gear or fire tests or whatever.
Here. Have a $2 case for your phone for if you ever drop it.
I bought mine on my smartphone, we have this thing called "online shopping" nowadays.
Seriously, though, with the exception of stupid people doing stupid things to their phones (like wandering around without cases or putting them on the toilet while they flush, etc.) and shitty Apple screens that cost a fortune to repair, it's really not that big an issue. I've never broken a phone screen. Ever. I've destroyed any number of laptops (usually by their hinges breaking through too much use), but not a smartphone.
And, yes, mine's tumbled down stairs, onto concrete, out of my pocket off a windowsill and down the back of a bunch of desks, all sorts. Hell, it spends it's ENTIRE LIFE in my pocket being bent, sat-on, smashed against my bunch of keys (with hard metal caribiner for a keyring), etc.
The crappy $2 leather case with plastic edges means nothing breaks unless you smash it face down onto a rock, and it doesn't scratch unless you're an idiot. My previous phone had the same case (literally the cheapest shite on Amazon) and after 4 years it was dog-eared and had dents all over the plastic case but that was it - the phone came out looking like the day it went in. And that took at least two "straight out of the case, spewing battery out" hard tumbles.
Note, I work in schools so I get a LOT of repairs come my way, so I see some carnage. Per-pupils iPads for a start, and I send at least 2 a week on average off for repair.
But phones? Out of all the school-provided staff smart phones, I've never sent one off for repair or had one broken beyond repair before it was decided it was obsolete. Even taking into account random people asking me to look at "IT stuff", iPhone screen-cracks are repairable and I get about one a year. I've yet to have to repair any other model of phone (and, no, we don't use exclusively Apple even for staff phones, just the opposite in fact - we have everything from Lumia to Samsung).
Sorry, but the days of a smartphone being fragile and your laptop robust are long gone. Most laptops these days, and the cheap Chromebooks, are almost made of god-damn paper, they're so shit. Don't even get me started on those things with hinges that wrap-around to become a tablet. The MOST VULNERABLE bit of the laptop and you make it undergo even more stress? Great idea.
The most pointless, short, useless and under-described "demo" I've ever seen.
I'm not familiar with Overwatch's spec but pretty much they show one short-range view of two static robots turn the corner to walk up some stairs with some skyboxes, then jump back and that's IT. Nothing there performance-related. And we know why. Compared to a real graphics card, it can't compete.
All the other stuff was pretty meh too. Oh look, it's faster than previous generations. Cool. I should hope so otherwise it's pointless trying to sell it.
Anyone else read the bit about automatic fsck of FAT filesystems on USB insertion?
I'm presuming that it'll be optional but still - way to fuck everyone's USB sticks and SD cards up.
Auto-fsck is a stupid idea. At worst, do it read-only and warn (like Windows does). But just fixing up the filesystem without asking the user first? A good way to trash stuff.
Lists get sold all the time.
I'm in the UK too, on TPS the same as you.
But lists get sold, stolen and passed on, and it's not just your email.
I got an email from a company selling educational IT furniture (highly specific to my job). Except it went to my personal email. And when I looked it was sent to a unique email alias at my domain (I use unique emails for every website, company, etc. that I give email to - one of the beauties of owning a domain of your own).
That email was ONLY given to RM (Research Machines), and I hadn't had any dealings with them for several years. Not since I took half their custom away in a London Borough and they got pissed and refused to co-operate.
Turns out the guy who set up the furniture company used to work for RM. Strange that. He just decided to take the company list with him, contact details and all, and use it to sell his wares from his own company. I reported him, nothing happened.
But if you're a minimum wage employee in a call centre that just got sold out to another country, I can see the temptation, and I can understand stealing the list and selling it on. It's not really the company's fault, all they can do is sack the person responsible but your data is already out there, and another will just come along. What I don't get is how MASS exports happening without people noticing. But your data, in anyone's system, isn't secure and can easily be sold on like this.
Sell a couple of addresses a week of people you had to look up to manage their account legitimately, to the right people, and you can make good money. Especially if you pick and choose the best customers who you know have money, etc.
But TPS etc. does bog-all. And they don't stop, you've just exhausted one leak, that's all. There'll be another.
Easiest way to stop this shit? Throw the landline in the bin (BT obviously have zero interest in blocking this shit, in my experience), move to mobile and disable any phone call coming in from a non-CLI number. And you can "block" immediately any number that does get through.
People ask me why I don't answer my mobile but instead switch to Google. I search for unknown numbers first and just block them if they are listed on those "whocalledme" websites as spammers.
Same for email. Abuse the email I give, it just gets redirected to /dev/null forever more.