Utterly stupid reply - begs the question who modded this up... It's like saying, when will they go after Bosch, because their coffee machines only run their own system?!
If Google created and ran a mostly closed-source OS on their own hardware, then they won't be in any violation, except perhaps not allowing other browsers on the OS. Thus, since Apple's iOS in mostly closed-source and runs on their OWN platform, and they don't give out iOS to any other manufacturer, Apple isn't in violation of anti-trust laws.
Exactly the same reason why Microsoft was in violation of anti-trust, because they give out their software to other hardware/manufacturers (OEMs) to utilise and sell on, however, they go even further by forcing the manufacturer to disable the hardware/software in such a way (or usually based on a contract) that the OEM can't sell their systems with software from other providers, such as BeOS/Netscape/Linux/etc.
And telemetry can be disabled by opening Task Scheduler and looking through all the schedules tasks, along with the disabling "Customer Experience Improvement Program" which is what opts the user into telemetry collection in the first place.
Err, no, WinXP was the best OS Microsoft ever made. Win 7 has countless annoying usability issues - some of which are fixed by Classic Shell and 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, including usability issues with the start menu.
One of the most glaring problems is the lack of horizontal scrollbar in Windows Explorer in the folders pane. And when expanding a folder with double-click (rather than clicking "+", in the folders pane or on a pop-up folder selection box), for no reason, it spasmodically scrolls up and you can't see what just expanded!
I'm surprised no one else mentioned this, but from Edward Snowden's revelations, the docs highlighted the NSA has "major problems" getting into zoho, specifically their encrypted email service.
But I think zoho might be an Indian company (surprisingly); while the post mentions a "US Internet Company".
Snowdon's revelation also revealed that NSA didn't have much difficulty in monitoring hundreds of thousands of VPN's as well as having the ability to decrypt and intercept https comms [source].
Also agree with you - I also absolutely hate the damned ribbon!:)
But I'm not referring to the UI, in fact, I really like the UI of LibreOffice compared to MS Office!
Rather, what I meant is that LibreOffice is really buggy and behaves counter-intuitive, like the examples I gave + many others; such as advanced style management and assigning a style to a paragraph, only to find out it sometimes partially applies it, while maintaining other rules, and other times it correctly overrides the style with those defined - and countless other quirks and frustrating things such as this.
Not sure why it was down-modded, but its completely true: LibreOffice has so many bugs and strange quirks that it drives you crazy!
Something as simple as bullet points and modifying paragraphs spacing or adjusting the indentation on the ruler is enough to reveal its many flaws. I spent hours just playing with those settings trying to get the layout right on a basic document (CV), and although I eventually fixed it. I vowed never again to torture myself and just go back to MS Office.
At least I can say that I speak from experience, just like the time-waste that is the so-called "Linux desktop experience".
I guess the saying "Linux is only free if your time has no worth", also applies to LibreOffice, thus, it would absolutely suck for businesses and normal users.
I think you misunderstood the definition of "Windows 10 Cloud". i.e. it will be a minimal shell to start a browser, like Chromebooks.
Secondly, I believe since Windows 10, it almost always hibernates the system rather than full cold boot, thus, it literally takes seconds to start up again, especially with an SSD. Perhaps even faster than chromebooks, especially if the system hibernates with no open apps.
You could do the same thing with "DeepFreeze" software for Windows which protects the drive from any changes, such as misconfiguration, viruses, or malware. While you could "unfreeze" a small area of the drive for personal documents, or store your data in the cloud.
And of course, you get a full operating system, not one designed to use you as a product and exploit your personal data, especially in the case of Google.
No doubt, credit where credit is due and my hats off to MS in their browsers efficiency, however, it still doesn't change the fact that Microsoft's browser will always be seen as inferior like IE. I guess (sadly) the same as many people see Firefox as always bloated and inefficient compared to Chrome.
MS will no doubt use this to their advantage in ads as much as possible, but I don't think it will change the browser war - until perhaps they (like Google) also spend billions in advertising Edge all over the world in train stations to newspapers to billboards... all over the world!:)
But good news for the rest of us, hopefully it will force competition and hopefully get (especially) Mozilla to create a more efficient browser!
VPN's may only protect you from your own ISP, but what about the biggest spyware organisations, such as Google/Facebook? They all rely on browser fingerprinting more than anything else these days, and subtly transmitting information back in an encoded form, including mouse movement patterns to learn about the individual.
Sure, you can use addons like adblockplus, noscript, decentraleyes, etc to some degree, but many times they break websites as more and more sites are utilising javascript exclusively for a website to function, including third-party scripts, such as GoogleTagManager, etc. Just recently discovered that the popular London travel website TfL also contains a third-party tracker, without which their journey planner doesn't work, thus the website doesn't work with Firefox's disconnect.me privacy list.
I think the point is, yes, it's only now that HTML5/Javascript has become some-what mature enough to replace Flash, especially the major use of which is video's. And it's only now that browser makers are finally taking the plunge to purge Flash.
But the point is, Steve Jobs saw this coming long long ago, while html5/css3 was still in draft, but basic support for video and other animations had started to appear. Read Jobs' post to get an insight, and it's exactly what he mentions, including the proprietary nature of Flash and it's fate by Adobe alone.
Err, Javascript killed Java?! Clearly you've never worked for or interviewed recently for any enterprise environment.
If anything, Microsoft's.NET hurt Java, but it still hasn't displaced it, and it's still king in enterprise, multi-scale, multi-threaded environments, even where performance and dependability is required.
But this doesn't mean that Flash wasn't a resource hog on modern computers, not to mention, a monolithic block placed on a web page. While HTML5 solved many of the issues, including accessibility and seo compatibility... although to be fair, HTML5 and Javascript has its own set of issues, i.e. they're also becoming a massive memory and cpu hog.
I still use Flash where possible for video, as it's a lot smoother and less CPU intensive on my circa-2005 cpu, especially on WinXP which only has basic support for earlier video types.
Thanks. However, what most people, and clearly the documentary author, still don't seem to realise is that the Qur'aan is primarily transmitted orally, while the written text is just a back-up. I know what you're thinking - Chinese whispers? Well for some reason, it doesn't apply to the Qur'aan (as we believe God Himself has chosen to protect it).
The proof of that is simple, attend any mosque, and watch the imaam perform the morning, or evening prayer reading the Qur'aan without any text - and if he makes even a slight mistake, you'll notice at least several people behind the imaam instantly correct him; going so far as to correct the pronunciation as well as missing a single letter during recital. Most Muslims in the world should know at least 1 or 2 chapters of the Qur'aan from memory, I myself know several with correct pronunciation ("tajweed").
Just to point out, the Arabic Qur'aan when it's translated, such as in English, is no longer considered the Qur'aan, it's just an interpretation.
And thus, if all the Qur'aan copies in the world were destroyed, a handful of Muslims can get together to recreate it from memory within a matter of day(s).
Wow, pretty ignorant comment, and I know better than to feed the trolls, but...
Muslims don't claim "exclusive self-correctness/righteousness", rather God has told us in the Qur'aan that anyone who believes in Him Alone without associating partners, and His Messengers and the Last Day will have their reward with God. However, most people, including majority of Muslims will enter hellfire first (God knows best who and how many), that includes anyone who prays, fasts, does charitable deeds, etc. Because of other sins and selfishness, and taking advantages of others, killing, etc, but especially doing good deeds to show-off (which is a form of associating partners with God).
Islam came to supplant other religions/way of life, as God tells us in the Qur'aan that many (countless) Messengers and Prophets have been sent before, including Moses and Jesus, but their message was only meant for their people for a few generations before another Warner was sent. The first Prophet was Adam (to his own children), and the last being Muhammad (to all generations).
If praying gets you to heaven, then god dammit, pray fucking continuously till you starve and die and go to heaven sooner
Perhaps that message would be more fittingly directed towards Buddhists and Monks?
No religion or Warner came after Islam and Muhammad because God told us explicitly that this would be the final message to humanity and final Prophet. However, we (like the Christian, and some-what Jews) also believe that Jesus will return to re-establish peace and once again correct people who had deviated away from the straight path.
You would do justice to your own self and your soul by reading the Qur'aan with an open mind, but more importantly, open heart. As the Qur'aan states, "God doesn't guide the criminals, rebellious, and hard-hearted people".
Why would you recommend Google spyware? Which is evidently even worse than Windows 10 spyware, which is desperately trying to be a Google-wannabe in personal data acquisition / exploitation.
Completely off-topic, I realise, but bear with me...
Can some athiests/agnostics explain to those of us who believe in God why they usually believe in "touch wood" / "knock wood" / tempting fate / fortune, when the belief in One God who exists outside of space and time, and created matter and the laws of physics, etc, makes more sense?
In Islam, the concept of "touch wood" is considered "shirk" (idolatry / polytheism) as it's assigning or giving an attribute of God to an entity or thing that He has created. So it goes against the science of the perfection of "tawheed" (Oneness of God or Unity of God), which makes a person outside of Islam.
Interesting post; however, which language do you utilise/advocate?
The fact that ~80% of the top 1 million web sites are utilising jQuery says a lot about why it became massive - i.e. consistency across browsers, and cuts-down on amount of JavaScript for doing basic things; and massively helps in DOM manipulation. And as far as I'm aware, Google doesn't utilise jQuery or any javascript libs/frameworks for their websites, including Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.
If you had mentioned some of the newer retarded frameworks, such as Angular, React, Vue, etc, then I would have been in complete agreement!
I'm also surprised you took a swing at W3C, of all, who are trying to make the web sane and standard tech across browsers, along with Mozilla.
And by the way, not all front-end devs are idiots, some come from C/Java back-end languages.
Not forgetting that WhatsApp is encrypted, so Google can't get at people's private data - the lifeblood of the organisation.
So naturally they'll do whatever it takes to mitigate it or move people away, just like they tried with Facebook. i.e. if a buy-out doesn't pan out, try to out-do them, if that doesn't work, then try to invade/fish the data by any other mean.
"We are willing to get it one way or another, with or without their deal!" - Eric Schmidt, 2010 - talking about the failed deal with Facebook and capturing their data.
Although intriguing and saddening that they've unlocked the iPhone 6 (but not 6s?).
What's more intriguing is that, why are Android phones so easy to break?! And why is it we never hear from Google/Microsoft wanting to protect its users against government surveillance, unlike Apple. ... I guess everyone is aware that Google is a corporate spying empire, and yet there are people here who still argue against Apple and advocate for Android spyware?
Would you advocate GMail/Hangouts over Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp ?
That's not exactly true. Although Google provide a nice little re-assuring interface, the fact their entire business model depends on gathering as much data about an individual and going deep into their lives*, I don't think it's exactly turning off data gathering, but rather not providing tailored ads. I believe Google also sells data to the highest bidders, especially governments and insurance firms. Because if their entire revenue was based on ads, what is quite interesting is that Google isn't fighting harder against ad blockers and instead, actively allow people to use YouTube / Mail / Search with an adblock / domain blocker.
But the more worrying aspect is their hidden trackers. Unlike facebook / microsoft, you can choose not to use their products and block their handful of domains. However, that's virtually impossible with Google, especially considering captcha / tag manager / syndication / Google's web api's / google user content / analytics, etc... the list goes.
* as the former CEO of Google (Eric Schmidt) said: "We know where you are; We know where you've been; We can more or less know what you're thinking about". As well as saying: "I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next".
I'm not defending MS doing it so openly, but we should put things in perspective and realise how powerful Google is compared to any other company. They even have their hands dirty in the system behind tax and health in various companies and governments, not to mention corporate email systems!
Slashdot Mirror
Utterly stupid reply - begs the question who modded this up...
It's like saying, when will they go after Bosch, because their coffee machines only run their own system?!
If Google created and ran a mostly closed-source OS on their own hardware, then they won't be in any violation, except perhaps not allowing other browsers on the OS. Thus, since Apple's iOS in mostly closed-source and runs on their OWN platform, and they don't give out iOS to any other manufacturer, Apple isn't in violation of anti-trust laws.
Exactly the same reason why Microsoft was in violation of anti-trust, because they give out their software to other hardware/manufacturers (OEMs) to utilise and sell on, however, they go even further by forcing the manufacturer to disable the hardware/software in such a way (or usually based on a contract) that the OEM can't sell their systems with software from other providers, such as BeOS/Netscape/Linux/etc.
It was only "backported" in the form of "recommended" (not "critical") telemetry updates, most of which can easily be removed.
And telemetry can be disabled by opening Task Scheduler and looking through all the schedules tasks, along with the disabling "Customer Experience Improvement Program" which is what opts the user into telemetry collection in the first place.
Err, no, WinXP was the best OS Microsoft ever made.
Win 7 has countless annoying usability issues - some of which are fixed by Classic Shell and 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, including usability issues with the start menu.
One of the most glaring problems is the lack of horizontal scrollbar in Windows Explorer in the folders pane. And when expanding a folder with double-click (rather than clicking "+", in the folders pane or on a pop-up folder selection box), for no reason, it spasmodically scrolls up and you can't see what just expanded!
I'm surprised no one else mentioned this, but from Edward Snowden's revelations, the docs highlighted the NSA has "major problems" getting into zoho, specifically their encrypted email service.
But I think zoho might be an Indian company (surprisingly); while the post mentions a "US Internet Company".
Snowdon's revelation also revealed that NSA didn't have much difficulty in monitoring hundreds of thousands of VPN's as well as having the ability to decrypt and intercept https comms [source].
Also agree with you - I also absolutely hate the damned ribbon! :)
But I'm not referring to the UI, in fact, I really like the UI of LibreOffice compared to MS Office!
Rather, what I meant is that LibreOffice is really buggy and behaves counter-intuitive, like the examples I gave + many others; such as advanced style management and assigning a style to a paragraph, only to find out it sometimes partially applies it, while maintaining other rules, and other times it correctly overrides the style with those defined - and countless other quirks and frustrating things such as this.
Not sure why it was down-modded, but its completely true: LibreOffice has so many bugs and strange quirks that it drives you crazy!
Something as simple as bullet points and modifying paragraphs spacing or adjusting the indentation on the ruler is enough to reveal its many flaws. I spent hours just playing with those settings trying to get the layout right on a basic document (CV), and although I eventually fixed it. I vowed never again to torture myself and just go back to MS Office.
At least I can say that I speak from experience, just like the time-waste that is the so-called "Linux desktop experience".
I guess the saying "Linux is only free if your time has no worth", also applies to LibreOffice, thus, it would absolutely suck for businesses and normal users.
I think you misunderstood the definition of "Windows 10 Cloud".
i.e. it will be a minimal shell to start a browser, like Chromebooks.
Secondly, I believe since Windows 10, it almost always hibernates the system rather than full cold boot, thus, it literally takes seconds to start up again, especially with an SSD. Perhaps even faster than chromebooks, especially if the system hibernates with no open apps.
You could do the same thing with "DeepFreeze" software for Windows which protects the drive from any changes, such as misconfiguration, viruses, or malware. While you could "unfreeze" a small area of the drive for personal documents, or store your data in the cloud.
And of course, you get a full operating system, not one designed to use you as a product and exploit your personal data, especially in the case of Google.
No doubt, credit where credit is due and my hats off to MS in their browsers efficiency, however, it still doesn't change the fact that Microsoft's browser will always be seen as inferior like IE. I guess (sadly) the same as many people see Firefox as always bloated and inefficient compared to Chrome.
MS will no doubt use this to their advantage in ads as much as possible, but I don't think it will change the browser war - until perhaps they (like Google) also spend billions in advertising Edge all over the world in train stations to newspapers to billboards... all over the world! :)
But good news for the rest of us, hopefully it will force competition and hopefully get (especially) Mozilla to create a more efficient browser!
Hosts file (and your solution) won't protect you against your own ISP storing your browsing history and possibly selling it to a third-party.
Thanks, good reply :)
By the way, try using the <quote> tag next time when quoting the parent ;)
VPN's may only protect you from your own ISP, but what about the biggest spyware organisations, such as Google/Facebook?
They all rely on browser fingerprinting more than anything else these days, and subtly transmitting information back in an encoded form, including mouse movement patterns to learn about the individual.
Cookies/HTML5 storage are so last decade, as I've seen a growing number of companies (Cyberfend / iovation / iesnare / "cformanalytics", browser.id (navigator.io), etc) provide services specialising in tracking and individually identifying users - even surprisingly across devices, somehow.
As far as I can tell, only Mozilla is attempting to reduce/fight this with their browser, especially as they recently removed the Battery status API, added disconnect.me to blacklist known trackers in v43, Font fingerprinting, etc.
Sure, you can use addons like adblockplus, noscript, decentraleyes, etc to some degree, but many times they break websites as more and more sites are utilising javascript exclusively for a website to function, including third-party scripts, such as GoogleTagManager, etc.
Just recently discovered that the popular London travel website TfL also contains a third-party tracker, without which their journey planner doesn't work, thus the website doesn't work with Firefox's disconnect.me privacy list.
Clueless post.
I think the point is, yes, it's only now that HTML5/Javascript has become some-what mature enough to replace Flash, especially the major use of which is video's. And it's only now that browser makers are finally taking the plunge to purge Flash.
But the point is, Steve Jobs saw this coming long long ago, while html5/css3 was still in draft, but basic support for video and other animations had started to appear. Read Jobs' post to get an insight, and it's exactly what he mentions, including the proprietary nature of Flash and it's fate by Adobe alone.
Steve Jobs was truly a visionary.
Err, Javascript killed Java?!
Clearly you've never worked for or interviewed recently for any enterprise environment.
If anything, Microsoft's .NET hurt Java, but it still hasn't displaced it, and it's still king in enterprise, multi-scale, multi-threaded environments, even where performance and dependability is required.
True, however, any hardware built after 2009 (perhaps earlier) has had mpeg4/h.264 hardware decoder built-in, and more recently, VP8/VP9 and h.265, even in on-board graphics hardware. Although saying that, Flash also began utilising (h.264) hardware decoding capability of graphics cards since late 2009 with version 10.1.
But this doesn't mean that Flash wasn't a resource hog on modern computers, not to mention, a monolithic block placed on a web page. While HTML5 solved many of the issues, including accessibility and seo compatibility... although to be fair, HTML5 and Javascript has its own set of issues, i.e. they're also becoming a massive memory and cpu hog.
I still use Flash where possible for video, as it's a lot smoother and less CPU intensive on my circa-2005 cpu, especially on WinXP which only has basic support for earlier video types.
Thanks.
However, what most people, and clearly the documentary author, still don't seem to realise is that the Qur'aan is primarily transmitted orally, while the written text is just a back-up. I know what you're thinking - Chinese whispers? Well for some reason, it doesn't apply to the Qur'aan (as we believe God Himself has chosen to protect it).
The proof of that is simple, attend any mosque, and watch the imaam perform the morning, or evening prayer reading the Qur'aan without any text - and if he makes even a slight mistake, you'll notice at least several people behind the imaam instantly correct him; going so far as to correct the pronunciation as well as missing a single letter during recital. Most Muslims in the world should know at least 1 or 2 chapters of the Qur'aan from memory, I myself know several with correct pronunciation ("tajweed").
Or attend the mosque during Ramadan and watch the imaam recite the entire Qur'aan from memory, sometimes he may make a mistake, but it's instantly picked up and corrected by us following the recital.
Just to point out, the Arabic Qur'aan when it's translated, such as in English, is no longer considered the Qur'aan, it's just an interpretation.
And thus, if all the Qur'aan copies in the world were destroyed, a handful of Muslims can get together to recreate it from memory within a matter of day(s).
Wow, pretty ignorant comment, and I know better than to feed the trolls, but...
Muslims don't claim "exclusive self-correctness/righteousness", rather God has told us in the Qur'aan that anyone who believes in Him Alone without associating partners, and His Messengers and the Last Day will have their reward with God.
However, most people, including majority of Muslims will enter hellfire first (God knows best who and how many), that includes anyone who prays, fasts, does charitable deeds, etc. Because of other sins and selfishness, and taking advantages of others, killing, etc, but especially doing good deeds to show-off (which is a form of associating partners with God).
Islam came to supplant other religions/way of life, as God tells us in the Qur'aan that many (countless) Messengers and Prophets have been sent before, including Moses and Jesus, but their message was only meant for their people for a few generations before another Warner was sent. The first Prophet was Adam (to his own children), and the last being Muhammad (to all generations).
If praying gets you to heaven, then god dammit, pray fucking continuously till you starve and die and go to heaven sooner
Perhaps that message would be more fittingly directed towards Buddhists and Monks?
No religion or Warner came after Islam and Muhammad because God told us explicitly that this would be the final message to humanity and final Prophet.
However, we (like the Christian, and some-what Jews) also believe that Jesus will return to re-establish peace and once again correct people who had deviated away from the straight path.
You would do justice to your own self and your soul by reading the Qur'aan with an open mind, but more importantly, open heart. As the Qur'aan states, "God doesn't guide the criminals, rebellious, and hard-hearted people".
If you want to know the real life of Muhammad as based on evidence, then watch the "Seerah" lecture series by Sheikh Yasir Qadhi on YouTube.
Peace.
Why would you recommend Google spyware?
Which is evidently even worse than Windows 10 spyware, which is desperately trying to be a Google-wannabe in personal data acquisition / exploitation.
Completely off-topic, I realise, but bear with me...
Can some athiests/agnostics explain to those of us who believe in God why they usually believe in "touch wood" / "knock wood" / tempting fate / fortune, when the belief in One God who exists outside of space and time, and created matter and the laws of physics, etc, makes more sense?
In Islam, the concept of "touch wood" is considered "shirk" (idolatry / polytheism) as it's assigning or giving an attribute of God to an entity or thing that He has created. So it goes against the science of the perfection of "tawheed" (Oneness of God or Unity of God), which makes a person outside of Islam.
Insightful, thanks... I hope parent is modded up!
Interesting post; however, which language do you utilise/advocate?
The fact that ~80% of the top 1 million web sites are utilising jQuery says a lot about why it became massive - i.e. consistency across browsers, and cuts-down on amount of JavaScript for doing basic things; and massively helps in DOM manipulation.
And as far as I'm aware, Google doesn't utilise jQuery or any javascript libs/frameworks for their websites, including Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.
If you had mentioned some of the newer retarded frameworks, such as Angular, React, Vue, etc, then I would have been in complete agreement!
I'm also surprised you took a swing at W3C, of all, who are trying to make the web sane and standard tech across browsers, along with Mozilla.
And by the way, not all front-end devs are idiots, some come from C/Java back-end languages.
Not forgetting that WhatsApp is encrypted, so Google can't get at people's private data - the lifeblood of the organisation.
So naturally they'll do whatever it takes to mitigate it or move people away, just like they tried with Facebook.
i.e. if a buy-out doesn't pan out, try to out-do them, if that doesn't work, then try to invade/fish the data by any other mean.
"We are willing to get it one way or another, with or without their deal!"
- Eric Schmidt, 2010 - talking about the failed deal with Facebook and capturing their data.
Although intriguing and saddening that they've unlocked the iPhone 6 (but not 6s?).
What's more intriguing is that, why are Android phones so easy to break?!
... I guess everyone is aware that Google is a corporate spying empire, and yet there are people here who still argue against Apple and advocate for Android spyware?
And why is it we never hear from Google/Microsoft wanting to protect its users against government surveillance, unlike Apple.
Would you advocate GMail/Hangouts over Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp ?
That's not exactly true.
Although Google provide a nice little re-assuring interface, the fact their entire business model depends on gathering as much data about an individual and going deep into their lives*, I don't think it's exactly turning off data gathering, but rather not providing tailored ads. I believe Google also sells data to the highest bidders, especially governments and insurance firms.
Because if their entire revenue was based on ads, what is quite interesting is that Google isn't fighting harder against ad blockers and instead, actively allow people to use YouTube / Mail / Search with an adblock / domain blocker.
But the more worrying aspect is their hidden trackers.
Unlike facebook / microsoft, you can choose not to use their products and block their handful of domains. However, that's virtually impossible with Google, especially considering captcha / tag manager / syndication / Google's web api's / google user content / analytics, etc... the list goes.
* as the former CEO of Google (Eric Schmidt) said: "We know where you are; We know where you've been; We can more or less know what you're thinking about".
As well as saying: "I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next".
The same can be said about any Google product from Android/ChromeOS to Search/Maps/Mail to Doubleclick/Captcha/Analytics/Tag Manager/APIs/+1/etc.
I'm not defending MS doing it so openly, but we should put things in perspective and realise how powerful Google is compared to any other company. They even have their hands dirty in the system behind tax and health in various companies and governments, not to mention corporate email systems!