Even more crazy, this changes the very definition of "airplane mode" from "all radios off" to "cell radio off, but wifi and bluetooth radio okay". Current devices don't even have such a mode!
Not true, as another poster here on Slashdot corrected me a few months ago.
Apparently, airplane mode turns them all off initially, but you can separately enable them.
So, it turns out, you can actually put a device into airplane mode, and the re-enable wifi and bluetooth. Which to me seems to defeat the purpose, but I'm sure there are reasons.
Airplane mode doesn't apparently force them to be disabled, but just turns them off initially. I was quite surprised by this. But I did confirm it on two different devices thereafter.
And how many non-techies even have a clear idea of the distinction?
You mean the one where they explain how to use a seatbelt for everyone who hasn't been in a car in the last 40 years?
No kidding. People who fly a lot don't listen anyway.
Seatbelts work thusly, popcorn lights on the floor, nearest exit may be behind you (already noted before I sat down), location of the lavs and reminder of the smoke detectors, my stuff under the seat in front of me or stowed in the hatch, air mask may fall (may not inflate, put on mine first before rendering assistance), safety card in front of you with the vomit bag and boring magazine, safety vest is inflated with this handle or these tubes (after you exit the aircraft so yo don't get stuck in the door), laughable flotation device under your seat which is more useful to spotting wreckage than saving your life.
Once you've heard it the first 50 times or so, there's not exactly anything new in there.
If you just rip them why not buy the songs on amazon as mp3s and back them up yourself?
Because I still like having something physical, to be perfectly honest.
Buying MP3s to me feels like I've not bought anything, and the way I buy and find music is usually from sifting through the CD racks in music stores. I don't set out thinking "gee, what I need is what I just heard on the radio" (because I don't listen to the radio), it's more of a "hey, what's this stuff" kind of process. Much more tactile and random, and lets me discover stuff that's in and around the other stuff I like -- I've discovered a whole bunch of punk just from looking through the stacks and at album covers and realizing "this must be psychobilly, I'm buying it".
And then I just rip the CDs at a bitrate slightly higher than where I've ever been able to tell the difference with the CD, and shelve the CD with all of the other ones. I've gone into music stores and dropped several hundred dollars in one go as I've found a bunch of stuff I recognized as being something I'd be interested in.
Licensed digital copy of movies, downloadable from iTunes-- which I was already using anyway (yeah, whatever). At that point, I can watch it on my iPod or my Apple TV -- sadly, I can't watch on my Android tablet, but can still dust off my first gen iPad to watch movies on planes. But you can usually buy the combo pack which has Blu Ray, DVD, and the Digital copy for only slightly more than just the Blu Ray.
When I discovered I could play movies from my iPod onto the TV in the hotel room when I travel on business, then suddenly business travel didn't suck nearly so bad. Room service and The Avengers is a whole lot more enjoyable than, well, room service and whatever the hell is on TV. I can watch part of a movie on the plane and finish it on the TV in the hotel room. I just usually bring a half dozen or so movies on a business trip, and I'm good to go
Why not just rip the blu ray?
Honestly I assume that by now it's exceedingly annoying to try to rip those things, and the one I can download from iTunes is pretty much there and good to go in much less time. And spending too much time on it isn't exactly how I want to spend my time these days.
I tend to only watch things once so I don't buy a lot of media.
I tend to watch and re-watch movies quite a bit, so I've historically bought quite a lot of them. I've got some movies which are likely to get re-watched between 2 and 6 times/year.
And others can't coordinate their schedules to play with friends, so they prefer pickup games with strangers.
LOL, when I first started playing video games, there was 1 joystick, two buttons, and you had to put in quarters.
Somewhere along the way I got bypassed, and don't have the preternatural reflexes required for a lot of games. My nephews started kicking my ass when they were in their mid-teens -- the last thing I want is to play a game with strangers and get my ass handed to me by a 10 year old. I don't need an object lesson in being lousy at video games, I can look at the stack of games that I've gotten stuck on and given up for that.
Fewer and fewer games for Microsoft and Sony consoles support split screen multiplayer for two reasons
Well, the only ones I play with other people are essentially turn based, like golf or some of the Kinect stuff -- I'm about as far from an 1337 g4m3r as you're gonna get.
Second, publishers want to sell multiple copies to a household.
Ah, but what the publishers want doesn't concern me at all. In fact, what the publishers want is usually an indication that it's the worst possible thing for me. Like buying a second copy of a game.
Mine would be if not for Netflix and Amazon prime.
My internet is metered, and I pay for my bandwidth. So my preference is still to buy the Blu Ray that comes with a Digital Copy (not that evil Ultraviolet) and use that. That way I only download a much smaller amount of files and can watch the disc whenever I want.
Video game updates are another reason you might want to connect it. Some games really needed the updates, Bugthesda looking at you here.
When Microsoft started putting ads in my home screen and video games, that was when I disconnected it permanently.
The only game I've got from Bethesda is Skyrim, and I haven't found it too buggy. Besides, they might fix some of the exploits or cheats I rely on.:-P
Until you can't play the game anymore because the last gen console's multiplayer servers have been shut down for good.
Which, if you'd read my entire post where I said I don't play games on-line, you wouldn't be suggesting.
For some of us, video games are played alone/with friends in our basement or living room, with no networking involved -- the way it was meant to be done.;-)
For me (and I realize I'm a relatively smaller minority of gamers), on-line gaming carries absolutely zero appeal. And all of the 'social' aspects (like badges and winning coins and spending real money to get better stuff) is equally meaningless to me.
To me, when I'm in the mood and have time, I'll fire up the video game, play a while, and then turn it off. Driving games, Tiger Woods, Skyrim, the wife's dancing games for the Kinect... none of these are the kinds of things I want to play against someone on the internet.
My video game console doesn't get connected to the network, and is completely air-gapped. And I can't say I've ever felt I was missing out on anything. In fact, the brief period I had it on-line was enough to convince me that I definitely don't want it.
Well, the DVD/Blu-ray activation could theoretically save them couple bucks per console if they don't have to pay licensing for those technologies on consoles that never get activated.
Who, exactly, does Sony have to pay? Didn't they create the BluRay spec and pretty much own it?
At which point I should expect some imaginary money to be moved around. Selling you a device which half works sounds like the usual crap I expect from Sony -- which is why I haven't owned anything made by Sony in quite some time.
This is just their usual "screw the consumer" policies. And I'm not willing to play their game.
Of course, the lack of backward compatibility on both the PS4 and the Xbox One means that anybody intending to buy either console will need to hang onto its predecessor unless they're willing to discard their entire games library for it
Which means for some of us, buying a spare last-gen console and ignoring the new ones is a viable option.
I don't play the latest and greatest games because, well, video games lapped me about 15+ years ago. I also don't play games on-line, so most of the new 'features' don't really interest me.
Which means if I bought a spare XBox 360 and put it on a shelf, I probably get more value out of it than one of the newest consoles.
Something old people like me still use as our primary way of buying music.
I still trawl through the CDs in the store to buy most of mine. I've discovered more music by looking for specific record labels or just looking through one of several sections to see if there's anything shiny in there. I've discovered a lot of great music that way.
Every now and then when I'm on a trip I'm lucky enough to find one of the really huge music stores which has just tons of stuff I'm interested in. On those days I'll drop a few hundred bucks on CDs.
Granted, the CD gets used for the first play and then gets ripped and shelved for storage.
For some of us, we still like picking out physical CDs in the store and actually owning something tangible.
A Yahoo spokesperson insisted that the company had "strict controls in place to protect the security of our datacenters" and that "we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.""
Yahoo may not have given it, but it sure sounds like the NSA has done it anyway.
f you can physically access and modify a machine, you can change the way it behaves. Is this really news?
This part of the article is what struck me:
After watching some videos from the vendor Inves on the machine's operations and reading through the machine's documentation, Santamarta came to the conclusions that some of the security claims the vendor makes were somewhat specious.
"Unfortunately, some of these claims are not completely true and others are simply false. It is possible to understand how Secureuro works; we can access the firmware and EEPROM without even needing hardware hacking. Also, there is no encryption system protecting the firmware"
So it sounds more like the company said "our stuff is secure, awesome, and hax0r proof", and someone essentially said "challenge accepted".
That he could do the initial reverse engineering without ever even having had the device (he downloaded just the free firmware) tells me that this device was pretty ripe for the picking.
Because it seems like at least some form of life in the universe besides us is a near statistical certainty.
We used to think stars with planets would be pretty rare. Now we find planets all over the place, and find them at an ever increasing pace.
Are you telling me that across billions and billions of galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars, leading to billions and billions and billions (and billions) of planets, that life in the universe evolved on only one single planet sounds plausible? Because it sure doesn't to me. In fact, it sounds outrageous.
Besides, to quote Monty Python... And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
It's not just snakes, I think the human brain is pretty hard-wired for most forms of predator.
I was at an outdoor/fishing show once, and as I came around a corner and looked up, about 50 feet in front of me was a tiger which had been stuffed and mounted. Not having seen many tigers before, I wasn't prepared for the sheer size of the damned thing.
My brain registered an immediate "holy shit, run" -- because I suspect some primitive part of our brain is wired to say to us "you do not want to mess with that".
This all happened before there was time for conscious thought. So I'm pretty sure it isn't just snakes -- my guess is deep in the primitive parts of your brain is a catalog of things to avoid.
And, my brain was telling me that something 11 feet long and several hundred pounds of big furry predator was not something to tangle with.
I'm not surprised by this even in the slightest -- because I've personally experienced an immediate flight response, and it wasn't even a live tiger. Once I got closer to it, I confirmed to myself that if I was out in the open and saw one of those things, it would be time for a clean pair of shorts.:-P
What you really want to say is "I had a crummy adolescence, but it's only because I was super-smart!" Which is... very sad.
Stop spreading that ridiculous myth!
But... but... it's the only thing that soothes the crushing existential pain.;-)
And, for the record, I think it could be a generational thing -- because up through high-school, interest in computers was a very rare thing for all but the highly nerdy, and in university my comp. sci classes to begin with were pretty much made up of the socially awkward introverted weirdos across the board, at least the ones who passed; the rest some how ended up not continuing on. But over the span of a few years I could see differences and see that the classes had a slightly different makeup of people.
But in the early 80s, the people who were geeks, pretty much were the stereotypical archetypes. They hadn't yet invented the jock-geek subspecies I saw come a long much later, and the rocker-geek subspecies was a cultural impossibility at the time.
Believe it or not, for some of us (to varying degrees), that myth wasn't as far from the truth as one might think. Of course, the nerd umbrella also included that one autistic kid in the school, the music geeks, and the fat guy with adenoids. Not all the nerds were into computers -- but the egregious social awkwardness was unmistakable from orbit.;-)
So, show some care -- for some of us, Breakfast Club is a surprisingly accurate depiction of the social strata in schools in the 80s. Some of us related to that 'myth' more than anything else, even if it is a little cliche.:-P
In the real world, there's always a smaller, smarter, hungrier competitor, so the most politically-connected company gets the regulators to write rules that keep them out of the market.
Horseshit.
In the real world there's always more large corporations willing to try to get the regulators to set up special deals for them.
In the real world, if you didn't have regulation, you would still be having babies die of being poisoned by melamine laced formula from China.
As long as there's an advantage to be had and profit to be made, there's always going to be things companies will do to maximize their profits which directly harms other people. If there's no regulation, there's no consequences.
The market as so often gets pitched to us is incapable of solving these problems.
Without regulation, Enron and other fraudulent things would happen all the time and your economy would be even more of a Ponzi scheme than it is now. Without regulation, your environment would be so polluted as to be unlivable. It really would be survival of the least scrupulous and with the most money, and everyone else would be fucked.
Maybe in your capitalist fantasy land all of these would be self correcting problems. The problem is it would take decades, kill loads of people, and destroy most of your society along the way. And it likely still wouldn't do half of what people claim it would.
Pure laissez faire capitalism is as much of a unicorn as the socialist workers paradise is. The problem nobody seems to like to acknowledge is pure capitalism will fuck you just as deeply as pure socialism -- only in entirely different ways.
Neither system can actually exist in the extreme forms people like to advocate. Taken to their extremes, they're both full of shit.
We deregulated high-speed internet access 10 years ago and since then we've seen enormous consolidation and monopolies, so left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight.
So, the conclusion is de-regulation is bad for consumers, but good for businesses.
Gee, I'm shocked. De-regulation basically is carte blanche to screw over your customers and not be accountable to anybody.
The whole mentality of "it's good as long someone is making profit" will be the death of us.
The 'free market' is a lie, and it always has been. Consumers don't have perfect information, and corporations will lie cheat and steal to improve their bottom line.
That de-regulation would ever improve anything for consumers has always been a big lie.
How about you spend some time working on stuff which protects our identity and privacy instead of rolling over and giving the advertisers what they want?
I have no interest in a location service, so it damned well better be something which is easily disabled.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true, as another poster here on Slashdot corrected me a few months ago.
Apparently, airplane mode turns them all off initially, but you can separately enable them.
So, it turns out, you can actually put a device into airplane mode, and the re-enable wifi and bluetooth. Which to me seems to defeat the purpose, but I'm sure there are reasons.
Airplane mode doesn't apparently force them to be disabled, but just turns them off initially. I was quite surprised by this. But I did confirm it on two different devices thereafter.
Well, that's a separate question. :-P
No kidding. People who fly a lot don't listen anyway.
Seatbelts work thusly, popcorn lights on the floor, nearest exit may be behind you (already noted before I sat down), location of the lavs and reminder of the smoke detectors, my stuff under the seat in front of me or stowed in the hatch, air mask may fall (may not inflate, put on mine first before rendering assistance), safety card in front of you with the vomit bag and boring magazine, safety vest is inflated with this handle or these tubes (after you exit the aircraft so yo don't get stuck in the door), laughable flotation device under your seat which is more useful to spotting wreckage than saving your life.
Once you've heard it the first 50 times or so, there's not exactly anything new in there.
Because I still like having something physical, to be perfectly honest.
Buying MP3s to me feels like I've not bought anything, and the way I buy and find music is usually from sifting through the CD racks in music stores. I don't set out thinking "gee, what I need is what I just heard on the radio" (because I don't listen to the radio), it's more of a "hey, what's this stuff" kind of process. Much more tactile and random, and lets me discover stuff that's in and around the other stuff I like -- I've discovered a whole bunch of punk just from looking through the stacks and at album covers and realizing "this must be psychobilly, I'm buying it".
And then I just rip the CDs at a bitrate slightly higher than where I've ever been able to tell the difference with the CD, and shelve the CD with all of the other ones. I've gone into music stores and dropped several hundred dollars in one go as I've found a bunch of stuff I recognized as being something I'd be interested in.
Licensed digital copy of movies, downloadable from iTunes-- which I was already using anyway (yeah, whatever). At that point, I can watch it on my iPod or my Apple TV -- sadly, I can't watch on my Android tablet, but can still dust off my first gen iPad to watch movies on planes. But you can usually buy the combo pack which has Blu Ray, DVD, and the Digital copy for only slightly more than just the Blu Ray.
When I discovered I could play movies from my iPod onto the TV in the hotel room when I travel on business, then suddenly business travel didn't suck nearly so bad. Room service and The Avengers is a whole lot more enjoyable than, well, room service and whatever the hell is on TV. I can watch part of a movie on the plane and finish it on the TV in the hotel room. I just usually bring a half dozen or so movies on a business trip, and I'm good to go
Honestly I assume that by now it's exceedingly annoying to try to rip those things, and the one I can download from iTunes is pretty much there and good to go in much less time. And spending too much time on it isn't exactly how I want to spend my time these days.
I tend to watch and re-watch movies quite a bit, so I've historically bought quite a lot of them. I've got some movies which are likely to get re-watched between 2 and 6 times/year.
LOL, when I first started playing video games, there was 1 joystick, two buttons, and you had to put in quarters.
Somewhere along the way I got bypassed, and don't have the preternatural reflexes required for a lot of games. My nephews started kicking my ass when they were in their mid-teens -- the last thing I want is to play a game with strangers and get my ass handed to me by a 10 year old. I don't need an object lesson in being lousy at video games, I can look at the stack of games that I've gotten stuck on and given up for that.
Well, the only ones I play with other people are essentially turn based, like golf or some of the Kinect stuff -- I'm about as far from an 1337 g4m3r as you're gonna get.
Ah, but what the publishers want doesn't concern me at all. In fact, what the publishers want is usually an indication that it's the worst possible thing for me. Like buying a second copy of a game.
My internet is metered, and I pay for my bandwidth. So my preference is still to buy the Blu Ray that comes with a Digital Copy (not that evil Ultraviolet) and use that. That way I only download a much smaller amount of files and can watch the disc whenever I want.
When Microsoft started putting ads in my home screen and video games, that was when I disconnected it permanently.
The only game I've got from Bethesda is Skyrim, and I haven't found it too buggy. Besides, they might fix some of the exploits or cheats I rely on. :-P
Which, if you'd read my entire post where I said I don't play games on-line, you wouldn't be suggesting.
For some of us, video games are played alone/with friends in our basement or living room, with no networking involved -- the way it was meant to be done. ;-)
For me (and I realize I'm a relatively smaller minority of gamers), on-line gaming carries absolutely zero appeal. And all of the 'social' aspects (like badges and winning coins and spending real money to get better stuff) is equally meaningless to me.
To me, when I'm in the mood and have time, I'll fire up the video game, play a while, and then turn it off. Driving games, Tiger Woods, Skyrim, the wife's dancing games for the Kinect ... none of these are the kinds of things I want to play against someone on the internet.
My video game console doesn't get connected to the network, and is completely air-gapped. And I can't say I've ever felt I was missing out on anything. In fact, the brief period I had it on-line was enough to convince me that I definitely don't want it.
Who, exactly, does Sony have to pay? Didn't they create the BluRay spec and pretty much own it?
At which point I should expect some imaginary money to be moved around. Selling you a device which half works sounds like the usual crap I expect from Sony -- which is why I haven't owned anything made by Sony in quite some time.
This is just their usual "screw the consumer" policies. And I'm not willing to play their game.
Which means for some of us, buying a spare last-gen console and ignoring the new ones is a viable option.
I don't play the latest and greatest games because, well, video games lapped me about 15+ years ago. I also don't play games on-line, so most of the new 'features' don't really interest me.
Which means if I bought a spare XBox 360 and put it on a shelf, I probably get more value out of it than one of the newest consoles.
Something old people like me still use as our primary way of buying music.
I still trawl through the CDs in the store to buy most of mine. I've discovered more music by looking for specific record labels or just looking through one of several sections to see if there's anything shiny in there. I've discovered a lot of great music that way.
Every now and then when I'm on a trip I'm lucky enough to find one of the really huge music stores which has just tons of stuff I'm interested in. On those days I'll drop a few hundred bucks on CDs.
Granted, the CD gets used for the first play and then gets ripped and shelved for storage.
For some of us, we still like picking out physical CDs in the store and actually owning something tangible.
Yahoo may not have given it, but it sure sounds like the NSA has done it anyway.
Sounds like a porn title to me. ;-)
This part of the article is what struck me:
So it sounds more like the company said "our stuff is secure, awesome, and hax0r proof", and someone essentially said "challenge accepted".
That he could do the initial reverse engineering without ever even having had the device (he downloaded just the free firmware) tells me that this device was pretty ripe for the picking.
We appoint the fox to guard the hen-house.
Expect a wave of business-friendly rules coming out of the FCC as he writes in everything he's ever lobbied for.
Maybe Bernie Madoff could be considered to chair the SEC next?
Because it seems like at least some form of life in the universe besides us is a near statistical certainty.
We used to think stars with planets would be pretty rare. Now we find planets all over the place, and find them at an ever increasing pace.
Are you telling me that across billions and billions of galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars, leading to billions and billions and billions (and billions) of planets, that life in the universe evolved on only one single planet sounds plausible? Because it sure doesn't to me. In fact, it sounds outrageous.
Besides, to quote Monty Python ... And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
Pitch? Player? Fan? Broom? Arena? Quaffle? Bludger? Snitch?
It's not just snakes, I think the human brain is pretty hard-wired for most forms of predator.
I was at an outdoor/fishing show once, and as I came around a corner and looked up, about 50 feet in front of me was a tiger which had been stuffed and mounted. Not having seen many tigers before, I wasn't prepared for the sheer size of the damned thing.
My brain registered an immediate "holy shit, run" -- because I suspect some primitive part of our brain is wired to say to us "you do not want to mess with that".
This all happened before there was time for conscious thought. So I'm pretty sure it isn't just snakes -- my guess is deep in the primitive parts of your brain is a catalog of things to avoid.
And, my brain was telling me that something 11 feet long and several hundred pounds of big furry predator was not something to tangle with.
I'm not surprised by this even in the slightest -- because I've personally experienced an immediate flight response, and it wasn't even a live tiger. Once I got closer to it, I confirmed to myself that if I was out in the open and saw one of those things, it would be time for a clean pair of shorts. :-P
But ... but ... it's the only thing that soothes the crushing existential pain. ;-)
And, for the record, I think it could be a generational thing -- because up through high-school, interest in computers was a very rare thing for all but the highly nerdy, and in university my comp. sci classes to begin with were pretty much made up of the socially awkward introverted weirdos across the board, at least the ones who passed; the rest some how ended up not continuing on. But over the span of a few years I could see differences and see that the classes had a slightly different makeup of people.
But in the early 80s, the people who were geeks, pretty much were the stereotypical archetypes. They hadn't yet invented the jock-geek subspecies I saw come a long much later, and the rocker-geek subspecies was a cultural impossibility at the time.
Believe it or not, for some of us (to varying degrees), that myth wasn't as far from the truth as one might think. Of course, the nerd umbrella also included that one autistic kid in the school, the music geeks, and the fat guy with adenoids. Not all the nerds were into computers -- but the egregious social awkwardness was unmistakable from orbit. ;-)
So, show some care -- for some of us, Breakfast Club is a surprisingly accurate depiction of the social strata in schools in the 80s. Some of us related to that 'myth' more than anything else, even if it is a little cliche. :-P
Yo Dawg, I hear you like Oracles ...
Only if you can stop all of the "all regulation sucks, the free market will solve the problem" posts as well.
Horseshit.
In the real world there's always more large corporations willing to try to get the regulators to set up special deals for them.
In the real world, if you didn't have regulation, you would still be having babies die of being poisoned by melamine laced formula from China.
As long as there's an advantage to be had and profit to be made, there's always going to be things companies will do to maximize their profits which directly harms other people. If there's no regulation, there's no consequences.
The market as so often gets pitched to us is incapable of solving these problems.
Without regulation, Enron and other fraudulent things would happen all the time and your economy would be even more of a Ponzi scheme than it is now. Without regulation, your environment would be so polluted as to be unlivable. It really would be survival of the least scrupulous and with the most money, and everyone else would be fucked.
Maybe in your capitalist fantasy land all of these would be self correcting problems. The problem is it would take decades, kill loads of people, and destroy most of your society along the way. And it likely still wouldn't do half of what people claim it would.
Pure laissez faire capitalism is as much of a unicorn as the socialist workers paradise is. The problem nobody seems to like to acknowledge is pure capitalism will fuck you just as deeply as pure socialism -- only in entirely different ways.
Neither system can actually exist in the extreme forms people like to advocate. Taken to their extremes, they're both full of shit.
So, the conclusion is de-regulation is bad for consumers, but good for businesses.
Gee, I'm shocked. De-regulation basically is carte blanche to screw over your customers and not be accountable to anybody.
The whole mentality of "it's good as long someone is making profit" will be the death of us.
The 'free market' is a lie, and it always has been. Consumers don't have perfect information, and corporations will lie cheat and steal to improve their bottom line.
That de-regulation would ever improve anything for consumers has always been a big lie.
Someone missed humor, but I'm not entirely convinced it was me.
What part of 'fiction' don't you understand? ;-)
How about you spend some time working on stuff which protects our identity and privacy instead of rolling over and giving the advertisers what they want?
I have no interest in a location service, so it damned well better be something which is easily disabled.