...and she was destroyed by him among independents and fence-sitters, who were (as always) the kingmakers in this election.
Cut the pseudo-profound bullshit. Your cherry-picked statistics do not mean what you imply they mean. We don't even have to dissect the tricky issues of brand name recognition and DNC favoritism of Hillary to see that.
Instead of spraining your neck with this head-shaking, maybe you should instead be talking about how the left in this country can fix itself. I think a good starting point would be to stop embracing this pro-establishment and pro-moderate bullshit, and stop Hillary was actually some sort of really good candidate who was torpedoed by 'teh fascists'.
After Brexit, racist and xenophobic attacks went up dramatically
So say your police, who are (very unfortunately) not to be trusted. Go look at their reaction to the Rotherham child rapes or Undercover Mosque. Your policing by consent philosophies, so wonderful in principle (and no, I don't excuse the current state of American policing, not in the slightest), have long ago turned sour resulted in your police forces forming alliances with some of the vilest segments of your society. (No, I don't mean "the Musims"; I mean, "the Islamists" and "the criminals, or at least the ones who can at least keep shit quiet and orderly.")
Keep on pretending that this is about fascio-sexist-racism at your peril. I mean fuck,, two thirds of the women in my family voted for Trump (and they all voted for Obama. Twice.)
If the racists are emboldened by Trump, it will be a side effect. (As it was in Brexit, if indeed the reports are accurate.) Harp on these side effects at your own peril. People very much do not like sensible conversations about immigration and global jihadism being turned into this stupid leftist caricature every damn it.
Democracy has failed,
No, people like you have failed us. You've failed the dialog. Your self-flagellating hyperbole seemed pretty spot in some of those dark Bush II years, but it's turned into one big anti-intellectual (not to mention anti-American / anti-West) joke now. Not that Trump is in any way some sort of alternative to the thinking and nuanced person; of course he wasn't. But he was easily, easily stoppable. You had a thousand chances, but you blew it all with your "orange Hitler", "move to Canada", "Democracy is broken" bullshit.
Except that our best hope to fix this is to keep voting for third party candidates anyway, demonstrate the hunger for change on both sides of the aisle. You really think that everyone who is Democrat wants to be a Democrat, and everyone who is a Republican wants to be a Republican? No, of course not. Many would love to start their own parties, get some kind of strange parliamentarian-lite system going in this country (it would definitely be a milder version due the fundamental differences between American Presidential-syle and Westminster-style governments, but coalitions would still happen all the time in the legislatures.)
Stop taking the short view. Supporting third parties, even when they cannot possibly win, is one of our best tools for agitating for electoral reform, even if it is still somewhat of a long shot. I strongly believe that it also would've meant Donald J. Trump would've never lasted nearly as long in this election cycle. We needed a real cutthroat anti-establishment challenger, and the system failed us.
Yup. Bernie could have won against Trump. Biden could have won against Trump (although I understand the issue there is he didn't really want to run.) I even think Elizabeth Warren could have won against Trump.
Virtualy any serious (or indeed unserious) person willing to project a a sensible anti-establishment persona, and not say the kind stupid horseshirt Trump has said, and also not be trailing decades of sordid little establishment-class skeletons like Hillary... I tend to believe any of those people could have beaten Trump. We wanted a person in charge for a change; the democratic establishment instead gave us a lizard. One of the more reptilian lizards to saunter by in a while, really.
And so people voted for the blabbering airhead instead of the lizard. People of or for the left: please learn your lesson. Reform politics. Create an "alt-left"... or just continue down your current path, keep making your token snide remarks and behold as the right destroys everything.
People in the US need to realise that US guns in US hands kill a LOT of people around the world.
Cut the ignorant self-flagellating shit! This is one of the many reasons why the left is suffering in this country! First of, American-made guns are ridiculously overpriced, particularly in those poor-er parts of the world where these conflicts of the worst. The specs and machines are freely available.
Beyond that, people like you still quote six or even seven figure casualty numbers in Iraq, despite the fact that those people overwhelmingly did NOT die from American guns in American hands. They largely died because they killed each other, and we (incompetently) failed to prevent that. Yes, Iraq was moronic and caused (and continues to cause) untold suffering. We all know that. That doesn't mean you're going to score any points with this Fahrenheit 9/11 level hyperbole any more. Stop destroying the left. A lot of us would really like to live here.
Mexican Walls
Which is (in the form of a literal wall) extremely stupid, but despite the fact that ELEVEN MILLION people have made it over here illegally, wreaking havoc on the economy and societies in myriad wars (e.g. minimum wage cheating), people like you still want to imply that his problem shouldn't be solved, or that it will do damage if we solve it.
Nonsense, self-destructive nonsense. You can't argue it's infeasible to ship back 11M illegal immigrants and then five minutes later talk about how "a wall" (no not a physical one, and sure Trump is a populist dumbass for all his statements implying such) is inherently undesirable. The solution, the compromise has been (for reasonable people) very clear for literally decades now:
Republicans get their "wall"; Democrats get "path to citizenship" amnesty for the millions of people who have settled here for years and are great, contributing members of society. Every reasonable person on either side of the aisle should have been agitating for this compromise. Both of these things are correct and moral to desire.
The one thing this doesn't address, wild card of how many legal immigrants to let in, is something both sides need to agree to disagree on, but illegal immigration has never, ever been an acceptable alternative to any thinking person.
grabbing women inappropriately
Like Bill fucking Clinton, the man Hillary said she was going to put in charge of "fixing our economy" (presumably as a member of her cabinet.)
I'm not going to analyze his quotes to death any more (guess what, he most certainly did not admit to assaulting anyone. His entire obnoxiously macho thesis was that the women "let him" grope them; that is generally what's known as "consent" to reasonable people); the point should be clear by now that sexual scandals have run their course. Rapists should be arrested and imprisoned. If there's not enough evidence because women don't tend to come forward until decades later (generally only after someone hits the headlines), then our police and more importantly our culture need to change. Slut-shaming needs to be banished from the Earth[1], and quite frankly women need to start carrying guns (or at least pepper spray), fighting back, and not taking any of this shit lying down. (That may seem to veer perilously close to victim-blaming, but the sad fact is if there's a rash of car thefts you really do have to mention, at some point, the importance of locking your doors or getting Lojack.)
But that's orthogonal to someone's political significance. If he's committed crimes (against women or against anyone else), arrest the motherfucker. If not, oh well. People are pretty much bored with sexual scandals in politics right now. This shit literally jumped the shark like 17 years ago, but the left somehow has not gotten the message.
potential dismantling of major world alliances and free trade deals, and the potenti
Jesus fucking Christ. I didn't want this (as my posting record will certainly show), but there is that smug desire to wag fingers and say I told you, isn't there?
The moment Brexit happened, I strongly suspected Trump was headed for the White House. Two completely unrelated things, you say? Not at all. The point is this: Project Fear has run its course. If you tell people "Oh No, if you don't vote for the status quo, warts and all, things will get so so bad!", they will be inclined to tell you to go fuck yourself up an ass with a cactus. And if the Brits were willing to do that, for fuck's sake, Americans surely were as well.
Should I say it? Does it need to be said? Bernie could have won, easily. Probably a dozen others could've done the same. I personally think Biden could've easily won because the man is not a phony. Elizabeth Warren might have easily won too; I'm not sure. For millennia, people haven been bitching thatpoliticians are phony and yet it's somehow impossible to elect someone who isn't phony. Guess what? It's not impossible. Now, in this case I'm pretty sure people settled on a rank phony-ness of a much different sort, a non-standard phonyness over the standard one, but...
But Jesus fucking Christ, all of this dumb shit about racism and sexism... all of these red herrings that NO ONE on the fence gave a crap about after the man gave you a mountain of potent ammunition to use against him. Scream and scream and scream hysterically at us if we don't agree he's "orange Hitler". No, no he's not Hitler or a racist, obviously fucking not. He's an airhead who barely pays attention to what he's even saying, a sycophant, a man who was a registered Democrat not that long ago, someone who was able to broach a few important topics that no one else was willing to broach, even if he make a complete mess if it every time he tried to talk sense. Just broaching the topic was enough.
Instead of a curse, I'll try to end with a blessing:
May the old guard of the Republicans finally disintegrate entirely, may the evangelicals slowly grow quiet and chasten with the realization that genitalia-centered regulation and shaming is no longer going to be a priority in this country, may the alt-right toss out its more vile elements and turn into something that's actually worth listening to now and then, and may the left in this country grow the fuck up and realize that merely being less anti-intellectual and more "moderate" (especially compared to the left in other Western democracies) is not enough.
This wasn't the way to do it; definitely wasn't the smart way to do it, and I risk spraining my neck from shaking my head but at the same time... alone in the kitchen, coming in for a quick snack but then finding myself pacing absentmindedly and staring at the ceiling... I have to admit cracking a smile or three. Moronic and foot-shooting as this whole thing has been, it does give me a little bit of hope. If reasonableness fails against cynicism, I guess stupidity and bombast can sometimes carry the day, for whatever Pyrrhic victory that's worth.
Now let's just hope we can all survive the next four years.
Basically, yes. There are a lot of effective ways to 'bootstrap' such a scheme. The most effective privacy-protecting method is one that even a non-geek could fully understand and utilize: new OS install (more broadly speaking, a machine that's never been used for regular personal use), cantenna, then a road trip to find a hotspot in a busy area that's located a good distance away from one's normal hangouts.
A geek can enhance that setup using Tor or VPNs or MAC address spoofing, but those things are basically just icing.
Well of course if your adversary model isn't a state actor like this, it's probably not worth bothering with hardened xen vm and Tor to begin with - especially if you're going to ruin it with PIA at the exit point.
I disagree that Qubes (the "hardened Xen VM") isn't worth the bother. Regardless of your security concerns, if you ever find yourself using VMs heavily Qubes is a great option that requires very little effort relative to the power it offers. (It's not good for 3d gaming at the moment; that's the biggest indictment I have of it right now.)
I'm also not convinced PIA (or another VPN) post- exit point "ruins" Tor usage, if you've taken proper precautions in the purchase and setup. None of these comparisons are open and shut cases, I'll grant you that, but with Qubes it should be easy to set up and quite robust if you know what you're doing (...I assume you'd just chain together two ProxyVMs, one Tor and one commercial VPN, both with fail-hard configs, and call it a day?)
Just use the VPN naked like the average pirate (anonymity set!), or even just umatrix (almost undetectable unless actively probed for).
For existing Linux users (i.e. fairly savvy power users, but not necessarily experts), Qubes isn't that much extra effort and it lets you use VPNs *properly* and in a fine-grained manner (so you can have all of the "normal" traffic you wish.) VPNs on Qubes are certainly a hell of a lot easier to properly use than uMatrix, which I wouldn't recommend to anyone who wasn't already enamored with the uBlock Origins way of doing things and wanting more. (And they're also obviously a half-measure that's mainly/only just going to protect you from advertising network tracking.)
One brief clarification: obviously, not all resistive touchscreens were created equal in those days (I've used some pretty horrible ones), but the higher quality ones, such as were found in Maemo devices or my old Zaurus, did possess the advantages I mentioned. Compare that to very high accuracy capacitive screens, which either didn't yet exist or weren't yet cheap enough to be available in (even high end) consumer-level devices.
1) Everyone uses glass. Presumably if plastic were better and easy to manufacture (in 2007) we'd be seeing phones with it now.
For many years I had (and then my girlfriend had, who has managed to shatter literally every other phone she's owned, before or since) a capacitive phone that used plastic. It was almost perfect, *except* for the friction from swiping (and the fact that you needed a screen protector if you wanted protection from scratches, which has a similarly undesirable effect on finger friction.) I'm positive they could address this friction if they really put their minds to it, but I'm also sure industry leaders realize that falling prices, gradually plateauing performance improvements, and carrier subsidization make it a bad idea to build mobile devices too sturdy.
All that aside, Apple was the large driver for the mass switch to capacitive (and I've already conceded this was the one truly interesting thing, IMO, that the iPhone 1 brought to the table), and glass capacitive at that. My comments in my previous thread was regarding glass screens was in the context of Apple's philosophy on durability, and that point stands absolutely even if you wanted to quibble about the tradeoffs of plastic screens.
OK now we have established they were first with that crucial triple.
I think it's a very overrated and contrivied triple. It's not what you should be caring about; it's just the only thing you can come up with if you examine the iPhone 1 with the preconceived notion that it must have been technologically revolutionary.
* Capacitive screen: The N900's UI was much more responsive and usable on a resistive screen. I actually thought it had a capacitive screen until I tried to zoom. Actually, that was about the only difference in practice... to zoom, you had to do a little spiral movement. This was very slightly less convenient (two-finger zooming allows you to get the exact size you want perhaps a half-second faster), but it was still very easy to do, and the resistive touchscreen did give you much better precision, for people who cared about that sort of thing. The only other advantage to capacitive is in durability, but this is largely wasted so long as industry leaders refuse to develop plastic screens for their higher-end devices.
2) As far as high speed web rendering. Remember the iphone supported wifi. It also was sold exclusively with AT&T's unlimited data 3G plan. The whole point of the device was to drive up the demand for data usage.
I cannot emphasize enough how ridiculous it is that you are placing "high speed rendering" over a decent data connection in your prioritization here. 3G was something like 5 years old when the EDGE-only iPhone 1 came out. I had an EDGE-only Symbian phone in early 2006 that one of my friends (admittedly an early adopter) repeatedly ribbed me about. Mobile websites (such as actually existed in that era) rendered just fine on that phone, which cost me $50 after 1-year carrier subsidization contract. This argument of yours is a total non-starter no matter how I look at it.
in the United States Nokia wasn't the competition. Nokia USA was dismal.
You've no idea what you're talking about. Pre-iPhone, they were massive over here. Yes, they had more of a reputation for cheaper "candybar" phones, but they also had multiple higher-end devices for anyone who cared to look and it was obvious that Maemo/Meego was going to end up on their new flagship.
But that's not even the point.... it was technologically superior to the iPhone and there were Maemo devices predating the iPhone 1. That's my main thesis here. I could grant you that they had a "dismal" USA presence (a ridiculous claim), and that still wouldn't affect my thesis that Apple's success was based on marketing and superior business decisions, not superior and innovative design.
It seems to me that leaves pre-paid credit cards, but the places that sell them also seem to have a lot of cameras and I'm not sure how many VPS providers would accept them.
From my understanding, they appear (from the vendor's point of view) to be indistinguishable from regular credit cards. The DEA and plenty of three-letter organizations aren't happy about their existence though, and there's definitely going to be a push at some point to require ID every time you want to load money.
With "cameras" we're back into that slightly awkward point of the conversation where one must pause and say "...and what, pray tell, are you up to again that this is actually going to matter?" Not that there aren't legitimately righteous people persecuted in this country (as in all countries), but when we reach this level of paranoia we have to consider the strong possibility that the majority of people who would need to legitimately worry about cameras (i.e. not merely people being extra-paranoid for fun) are engaged in some serious organized crime, if not actual terrorism.
But, well... cameras obviously have significant limitations. You don't have to be a geek to figure that one out.
Quick note: there are obviously more details to worry about, and I did gloss over some steps there... but it's not a terribly arduous process.
You don't need to be a command line wizard; you don't need to understand the full intricacies of iptables (although honestly this won't hurt.) But mainly, you just need to understand how things work at a 30,000 foot level. I'd say it's a "power user" distro much more than it's an "expert" distro.
Also, do you really need an "untainted" exit if your entry is rock solid (cantenna, etc.) ? Seems like a fairly niche need, that.
Regardless (mainly because this is an interesting problem to consider), the best possible exit plan for the super paranoid would probably just be buying your own cloud servers with anon funds and essentially creating your own VPN (mixing in Tor, commercial VPNs or whatever else suits your fancy as desired.)
Or would that just make you look even more suspicious? That's the double-edge of any clever scheme you come up with; if "the adversary" is omniscient enough, cleverness might stick out like a sore thumb.
Commercial VPN still has the problem of your traffic being very *interesting*, and your patterns showing in the drawer of *interesting* sflow logs (though most are just pirates, there are plenty of fools too).
Getting untainted exit is nominally difficult. Depending on your insight into tier1 taps, you might be better off with chaining tor to vpngate which mostly goes through consumer broadband.
I view the exit node as being the primary potential (likely?) bad actor to worry about, but of course if we're concerned first and foremost about how things look from your ("real") ISP's point of view, there's almost no way to look normal. As a dozen people here have said already: if that's your big worry, get a cantenna, change your MAC and find a hotspot to use that isn't in your name. Anything short of that is probably going to fail. (As you imply, there is a TON of three letter agency interest in both VPNs and Tor.)
However, the original ask slashdot question seemed more worried about surveillance on the end of the websites and remote services, which is much more manageable (and a bit less suspicious/conflicted/worrying) issue than trying to not only hide everything from your own ISP, but also to hide the fact that you're hiding anything from your own ISP.
It's a bit like the difference between some random anonymous person asking how smoke bombs are made and some random anonymous person asking how actual bombs are made. Just because I'm strongly pro-freedom of information doesn't mean that I would be completely incurious about the person's motivations, in that latter case...
And when you use Tor, you become very interesting.
Which is why anyone who is serious about using Tor can/should use commercial VPNs with in ProxyVMs Qubes to shield oneself. (Or you could do this in iptables in a single arbitrary distro probably... but that's insanity.)
There are two different ways you could do this: a VPN to connect to Tor gateway (so your "real" ISP doesn't see you), or a VPN to connect to post-exit node (because Tor exit nodes are inherently suspect.) I don't see why you couldn't do both, though obviously your risk of performance issues goes up the more extra steps you create.
Tor is definitely a lightning rod for all kinds of nastiness from many different sorts of unpleasant actors. For the ultra-paranoid, it certainly has its uses but it should never be thought of as an easy or lazy option.
Install Qubes OS on a spare SSD, preferably on a computer that supports vt-d properly (older business class notebooks can be really good here if you're on a budget.) Choose KDE or XFCE for your DE, and decide whether you want to use Debian or Fedora for your templates[1]. Configure your DispVM to use a ProxyVM for connectivity using commercial VPN, paid for using bitcoin/giftcards/prepaid credit cards if you're feeling paranoid. (This will be something like $3 / month, depending on who you're buying with.) Make sure you configure the ProxyVM to fail-hard if you lose your connection to the VPN, as opposed to connecting over clearnet in the event of a VPN failure.
(Optional: use a Tor ProxyVM instead of a commercial VPN ProxyVM. Qubes does ship with Tor and Whonix VMs for this very purpose but this is tricky business... Tor exit nodes are definitely not to be trusted. If you did this, I would advise using a VPN layer in addition to Tor in order to protect yourself from the exit node... just make sure the VPN hop is coming AFTER Tor, not before. Also, expect plenty of transient performance hits.)
Next, customize your DispVM's browser to include extensions such as uBlock Origins[2], self-destructing cookies[3], and a user agent randomizer (which you should configure to only change to the more popular browsers currently in use.)
The result of all of this? Your DispVM is a stateless VM; all data is lost every time it's shut down (Joanna currently has it set to auto-shut down every time you close the browser, which I find annoying as hell but I guess it's handy for a lot of people.) Your browser extensions will help guard against tracking in-between DispVM restarts. And by configuring it to use the ProxyVM, you'll never using your real IP address (and ideally you should alter your exit point from the VPN as well.) Unlike most VPN setups, a bug or exploit in the browser or in anything else in the DispVM's operating system will not leak data over the un-VPNed internet.
None of what I just said is trivial to set up, but guides are available and this setup would be extremely robust and easy to use (once configured.) The core of the Qubes UI/UX is in fact quite user-friendly, with an emphasis on GUI tools. It's also a pretty nifty hypervisor even if you don't give a toss about the increased security. It's damn fast, easily portable between different physical machines, templates are handy as hell, and all of your windows from all of your VMs (including your Windows 7 VMs) can appear in a single desktop with a single taskbar, alt-tab menu, etc. (KDE or XFCE; your choice.)
1. You could also built your own template using some other distro (like Ubuntu) if you really wanted. Templates allow you to have multiple VMs with different personal files but with the same apps and configuration (installing anything to the template instantly installs it on all VMs based on that Template.) Also, they're stupid fast.
2. This is basically Adblock Plus done right, with a dash of Request Policy and Noscript tossed in for good measure. You can easily toggle between blacklisting and whitelisting philosophies; it's awesome. (Note that uMatrix is available from the same author for people who want even more fine-grained control.) Note your whitelists / blacklists will be lost every time you shut down your DispVM, so if you've done a lot of tinkering be sure to export them and send them to another stateful VM to merge back into the DispVM image eventually. (This can be done with a simple right-click in a file browser.)
3. Not the best general purpose cookie manager but it's the easiest to use, particularly in a DispVM setup
Hence your idea would not work. It is actually a classic counter example in every book about encryption.
It absolutely would work and has been repeatedly implemented in existing products (most famously the Truecrypt derivatives, though I'm not personally a big fan of theirs.) I'm just not sure you understand the purpose of this approach, or indeed the context of this conversation.
Re-reading your prior post, you said it would "only" add multiplicative security in a brute force situation. Well, uh, that's fine. That's not a "flaw" by any means. No one should expect it to magically guard against pure brute force attacks except to the extent that more keys are (if we assume the algorithms are equally strong) equivalent to a single larger key.
The purpose in having more than one algorithm is to guard against vulnerabilities in one or more of the algorithms, which was and is the entire point of this little subthread. In a symmetric context, Serpent and AES are known to be vulnerable to the XLS attack (this is a very small # known plaintext attack that is not currently a feasible alternative to brute force but further discoveries might change that.) Twofish is not, but it is theoretically vulnerable to some other known plaintext attack (you need something like a petabyte of known plaintext; I forget) that Serpent and AES are not vulnerable to. Thus, if you double encrypt, once using Twofish and then once using AES, with two different keys, you are guarding against both of those vulnerabilities pretty damn effectively.
So no at the time it also was not ahead and wouldn't be even similar for almost 2 years.
Uh no, that was only one year later. And by "similar", you mean "much, much better as it actually had 3G, an open app store, functioning MMS, and a decent keyboard."
You really think that year is so important? Fine; I could go back in time to 2006 and talk about what was available then if you want. Well before the iPhone came out, I had an Sharp Zaurus that was pretty amazing and could be easily modded to run Angstrom / OpenZaurus linux. Cost me just $300ish with no contract required. It wasn't a phone (although it had wifi via a CF card slot) and it wasn't quite as slim as it could've been and yes capacitive screens were a net win (not as important as you seem to think they are, though), but again: The writing was on the wall.
Everyone knew that phones were going to turn into more general-purpose devices with larger displays. Everyone knew the hardware was finally getting cheap enough to make it feasible (particularly when carrier subsidization was factored in.) Everybody knew the massive appeal of having more capable phones (the cameraphone revolution proved that.) Apple got in early with an inferior product (but *different*, and it turns out that's what matters... at least, that's all that matters whenever they manage to trap the public in the RDF) and forced everyone else to play catchup, but they were only "leading" in a business and marketing sense of the term, not in an innovative or sound-design sense.
If you want to argue Apple did the marketing better, and correctly judged that being seen as the innovator by rushing a crappier product to market to beat the competition by a few months was worth the tradeoffs from a business point of view, you'll get little argument from me. My thesis is basically that Apple's modern success has been 80% marketing (and also related supply side market-influencing behavior), 10% cost-cutting design, 5% technical & ergonomic design, 5% other. Obviously, they have to be doing *something* right; I just strongly dispute the importance of their technical or ergonomic innovation.
Nokia has slipped with Maemo and was focusing on the MeeGo project which would still take years.
Maemo was, IIRC (feelin' too lazy to check Wikipedia), already shipping on N800-like devices around the time the iPhone 1 came out. It took them another year or two to put an actual phone in it and that was an abysmal business decision, but the fact remains that Maemo was contemporary and it kicked the shit out of the iPhone 1 and G1, and it was obvious they were going to put it on an actual phone soonish. Like I said, the writing was on the wall. It's not visionary to do something that your competitor is obviously/apparently gearing up to do any month now.
Meego was supposedly going to be even better, but I used an N800 briefly and trust me, Maemo blew the Android and iOS of the day out of the water. (Palm's WebOS supposedly had some strong potential as well, but I never tinkered with it myself.)
Actually, in retrospect I think that the holdup for Maemo on phones (and maybe Android was well) may have been the battery life. People don't remember those days when your phone would last days without needing a recharge. Apple's hailstorm of enthusiasm got people to accept the reality of charging their phone on a daily basis and Nokia quickly said "Oh shit, I guess we don't need to work on power consumption after all!" and quickly stuffed Maemo into the N800, but by then it was too late and they were considered copycats.
As for Android at the time it was working on a blackberry clone with small screens and a keyboard.
And a quality hard keyboard is still the only sane input method for people who are serious about things. A lack of a keyboard was a money saving measure, that's all. A durability-enhancing measure? Well obviously not; not with the glass digitizers and non-removable batteries and emphasis on maximum thinness... Apple has never particularly cared about durability. But cheap procurement and QC is much, much easier to achieve when there are no moving parts.
And many idiots, such as yourself, will pretend the iPhone doesn;t shit all over Android when it comes to usability, features, and stability.
The G1, N800 and many, many other contemporary higher end smartphones completely destroyed the iPhone 1. There's no contest whatsoever there. That was my main thesis there.
Look, we get it. Your nerd dick is big. Go to your bedroom and jack off to RMS like a good little sheep.
Or maybe I just understand that "Android" isn't a singular phone? Nor "iPhone" for that matter. Jesus fucking Christ. Claiming that one destroys the other across the board in those three areas instantly disqualifies you from intelligent conversation, 'geeky' or otherwise.
Capacitive touchscreen was the only interesting thing they really brought to the table, but they screwed it up by getting the world to standardize on glass digitizers (I've seen two devices with plastic ones and, other than some friction issues, they are AWESOME. Lighter and incredibly durable.)
high speed web rendering
Rather worthless without 3G, which plenty of phones in that price range had (the iPhone was EDGE-only, although it did require a data plan.)
animation based interaction
Which was laggy as hell (for the G1 and most other earlier devices as well.) Not really a plus.
Nokia had much better better UIs --smoother and more powerful even though they were using resistive touchscreens. Granted, these devices were marketed as micro-computers and for some reason it took them longer to stick an actual phone in it (in the form of the tragically underrated N800), but the writing was on the wall. The development of Android far predated the release of the iPhone as well.
Apple pounced with an under-speced, over-priced product that did a few flashy things that weren't yet common (but other phones in that price range had), and then they screamed and screamed at the top of their lungs that they were doing it first and doing it best.
They also emphasized that you could use your phone as an MP3 player, which was something the vast majority of new phones could do (even phones running OSes like Symbian), but the public was, for whatever reason, under-utilizing this.
I think you should watch the introductory video to get an idea of how much Job's ideas contrasted with the competition at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That's ok; I'll visit the RDF re-education center some other time. I examined the first iPhone when it was first introduced and noticed these issues immediately. I thought the MMS issue would kill it for sure but alas, I underestimated the momentum their iPod and OS X devisions had given them.
I'm not the one who insists on talking about Apple constantly. Why is this shit on the front page? This is one of those cultural things you can't help but be informed about, because everyone else will not shut up about it. If it was just a somewhat interesting, somewhat overrated, overpriced "premium" product that certain people bought and enjoyed that would be fine and I wouldn't have anything to say about it, but no, the propaganda machine must be maintained and everyone else must at minimum acknowledge that "at least they have good hardware!" so that you can feel good about your purchase.
This is completely on-topic of me. Q: Why does Apple now have 104% of all smartphone profits? A: Because through a combination of factors, they've convinced people that they produce a premium product and so can charge a premium price, despite often having underwhelming specs for that price. Plus some other stuff generally related to their undeserved status as market-maker.
Um, a naked black hole is actually a very specific thing (a singularity without an event horizon) that may or may not even exist in nature. Just skimming the article, this sounds like an ordinary black hole to me.
Just a regular, hairless yet non-naked black hole. That's what it sounds like.
Slashdot Mirror
...and she was destroyed by him among independents and fence-sitters, who were (as always) the kingmakers in this election.
Cut the pseudo-profound bullshit. Your cherry-picked statistics do not mean what you imply they mean. We don't even have to dissect the tricky issues of brand name recognition and DNC favoritism of Hillary to see that.
Instead of spraining your neck with this head-shaking, maybe you should instead be talking about how the left in this country can fix itself. I think a good starting point would be to stop embracing this pro-establishment and pro-moderate bullshit, and stop Hillary was actually some sort of really good candidate who was torpedoed by 'teh fascists'.
After Brexit, racist and xenophobic attacks went up dramatically
So say your police, who are (very unfortunately) not to be trusted. Go look at their reaction to the Rotherham child rapes or Undercover Mosque. Your policing by consent philosophies, so wonderful in principle (and no, I don't excuse the current state of American policing, not in the slightest), have long ago turned sour resulted in your police forces forming alliances with some of the vilest segments of your society. (No, I don't mean "the Musims"; I mean, "the Islamists" and "the criminals, or at least the ones who can at least keep shit quiet and orderly.")
Keep on pretending that this is about fascio-sexist-racism at your peril. I mean fuck,, two thirds of the women in my family voted for Trump (and they all voted for Obama. Twice.)
If the racists are emboldened by Trump, it will be a side effect. (As it was in Brexit, if indeed the reports are accurate.) Harp on these side effects at your own peril. People very much do not like sensible conversations about immigration and global jihadism being turned into this stupid leftist caricature every damn it.
Democracy has failed,
No, people like you have failed us. You've failed the dialog. Your self-flagellating hyperbole seemed pretty spot in some of those dark Bush II years, but it's turned into one big anti-intellectual (not to mention anti-American / anti-West) joke now. Not that Trump is in any way some sort of alternative to the thinking and nuanced person; of course he wasn't. But he was easily, easily stoppable. You had a thousand chances, but you blew it all with your "orange Hitler", "move to Canada", "Democracy is broken" bullshit.
And you're still doing it.
Except that our best hope to fix this is to keep voting for third party candidates anyway, demonstrate the hunger for change on both sides of the aisle. You really think that everyone who is Democrat wants to be a Democrat, and everyone who is a Republican wants to be a Republican? No, of course not. Many would love to start their own parties, get some kind of strange parliamentarian-lite system going in this country (it would definitely be a milder version due the fundamental differences between American Presidential-syle and Westminster-style governments, but coalitions would still happen all the time in the legislatures.)
Stop taking the short view. Supporting third parties, even when they cannot possibly win, is one of our best tools for agitating for electoral reform, even if it is still somewhat of a long shot. I strongly believe that it also would've meant Donald J. Trump would've never lasted nearly as long in this election cycle. We needed a real cutthroat anti-establishment challenger, and the system failed us.
Yup. Bernie could have won against Trump. Biden could have won against Trump (although I understand the issue there is he didn't really want to run.) I even think Elizabeth Warren could have won against Trump.
Virtualy any serious (or indeed unserious) person willing to project a a sensible anti-establishment persona, and not say the kind stupid horseshirt Trump has said, and also not be trailing decades of sordid little establishment-class skeletons like Hillary... I tend to believe any of those people could have beaten Trump. We wanted a person in charge for a change; the democratic establishment instead gave us a lizard. One of the more reptilian lizards to saunter by in a while, really.
And so people voted for the blabbering airhead instead of the lizard. People of or for the left: please learn your lesson. Reform politics. Create an "alt-left"... or just continue down your current path, keep making your token snide remarks and behold as the right destroys everything.
People in the US need to realise that US guns in US hands kill a LOT of people around the world.
Cut the ignorant self-flagellating shit! This is one of the many reasons why the left is suffering in this country! First of, American-made guns are ridiculously overpriced, particularly in those poor-er parts of the world where these conflicts of the worst. The specs and machines are freely available.
Beyond that, people like you still quote six or even seven figure casualty numbers in Iraq, despite the fact that those people overwhelmingly did NOT die from American guns in American hands. They largely died because they killed each other, and we (incompetently) failed to prevent that. Yes, Iraq was moronic and caused (and continues to cause) untold suffering. We all know that. That doesn't mean you're going to score any points with this Fahrenheit 9/11 level hyperbole any more. Stop destroying the left. A lot of us would really like to live here.
Mexican Walls
Which is (in the form of a literal wall) extremely stupid, but despite the fact that ELEVEN MILLION people have made it over here illegally, wreaking havoc on the economy and societies in myriad wars (e.g. minimum wage cheating), people like you still want to imply that his problem shouldn't be solved, or that it will do damage if we solve it.
Nonsense, self-destructive nonsense. You can't argue it's infeasible to ship back 11M illegal immigrants and then five minutes later talk about how "a wall" (no not a physical one, and sure Trump is a populist dumbass for all his statements implying such) is inherently undesirable. The solution, the compromise has been (for reasonable people) very clear for literally decades now:
Republicans get their "wall"; Democrats get "path to citizenship" amnesty for the millions of people who have settled here for years and are great, contributing members of society. Every reasonable person on either side of the aisle should have been agitating for this compromise. Both of these things are correct and moral to desire.
The one thing this doesn't address, wild card of how many legal immigrants to let in, is something both sides need to agree to disagree on, but illegal immigration has never, ever been an acceptable alternative to any thinking person.
grabbing women inappropriately
Like Bill fucking Clinton, the man Hillary said she was going to put in charge of "fixing our economy" (presumably as a member of her cabinet.)
I'm not going to analyze his quotes to death any more (guess what, he most certainly did not admit to assaulting anyone. His entire obnoxiously macho thesis was that the women "let him" grope them; that is generally what's known as "consent" to reasonable people); the point should be clear by now that sexual scandals have run their course. Rapists should be arrested and imprisoned. If there's not enough evidence because women don't tend to come forward until decades later (generally only after someone hits the headlines), then our police and more importantly our culture need to change. Slut-shaming needs to be banished from the Earth[1], and quite frankly women need to start carrying guns (or at least pepper spray), fighting back, and not taking any of this shit lying down. (That may seem to veer perilously close to victim-blaming, but the sad fact is if there's a rash of car thefts you really do have to mention, at some point, the importance of locking your doors or getting Lojack.)
But that's orthogonal to someone's political significance. If he's committed crimes (against women or against anyone else), arrest the motherfucker. If not, oh well. People are pretty much bored with sexual scandals in politics right now. This shit literally jumped the shark like 17 years ago, but the left somehow has not gotten the message.
potential dismantling of major world alliances and free trade deals, and the potenti
Jesus fucking Christ. I didn't want this (as my posting record will certainly show), but there is that smug desire to wag fingers and say I told you, isn't there?
The moment Brexit happened, I strongly suspected Trump was headed for the White House. Two completely unrelated things, you say? Not at all. The point is this: Project Fear has run its course. If you tell people "Oh No, if you don't vote for the status quo, warts and all, things will get so so bad!", they will be inclined to tell you to go fuck yourself up an ass with a cactus. And if the Brits were willing to do that, for fuck's sake, Americans surely were as well.
Should I say it? Does it need to be said? Bernie could have won, easily. Probably a dozen others could've done the same. I personally think Biden could've easily won because the man is not a phony. Elizabeth Warren might have easily won too; I'm not sure. For millennia, people haven been bitching thatpoliticians are phony and yet it's somehow impossible to elect someone who isn't phony. Guess what? It's not impossible. Now, in this case I'm pretty sure people settled on a rank phony-ness of a much different sort, a non-standard phonyness over the standard one, but...
But Jesus fucking Christ, all of this dumb shit about racism and sexism... all of these red herrings that NO ONE on the fence gave a crap about after the man gave you a mountain of potent ammunition to use against him. Scream and scream and scream hysterically at us if we don't agree he's "orange Hitler". No, no he's not Hitler or a racist, obviously fucking not. He's an airhead who barely pays attention to what he's even saying, a sycophant, a man who was a registered Democrat not that long ago, someone who was able to broach a few important topics that no one else was willing to broach, even if he make a complete mess if it every time he tried to talk sense. Just broaching the topic was enough.
Instead of a curse, I'll try to end with a blessing:
May the old guard of the Republicans finally disintegrate entirely, may the evangelicals slowly grow quiet and chasten with the realization that genitalia-centered regulation and shaming is no longer going to be a priority in this country, may the alt-right toss out its more vile elements and turn into something that's actually worth listening to now and then, and may the left in this country grow the fuck up and realize that merely being less anti-intellectual and more "moderate" (especially compared to the left in other Western democracies) is not enough.
This wasn't the way to do it; definitely wasn't the smart way to do it, and I risk spraining my neck from shaking my head but at the same time... alone in the kitchen, coming in for a quick snack but then finding myself pacing absentmindedly and staring at the ceiling... I have to admit cracking a smile or three. Moronic and foot-shooting as this whole thing has been, it does give me a little bit of hope. If reasonableness fails against cynicism, I guess stupidity and bombast can sometimes carry the day, for whatever Pyrrhic victory that's worth.
Now let's just hope we can all survive the next four years.
Or Driftnet, if you're feeling particularly lazy.
Basically, yes. There are a lot of effective ways to 'bootstrap' such a scheme. The most effective privacy-protecting method is one that even a non-geek could fully understand and utilize: new OS install (more broadly speaking, a machine that's never been used for regular personal use), cantenna, then a road trip to find a hotspot in a busy area that's located a good distance away from one's normal hangouts.
A geek can enhance that setup using Tor or VPNs or MAC address spoofing, but those things are basically just icing.
Well of course if your adversary model isn't a state actor like this, it's probably not worth bothering with hardened xen vm and Tor to begin with - especially if you're going to ruin it with PIA at the exit point.
I disagree that Qubes (the "hardened Xen VM") isn't worth the bother. Regardless of your security concerns, if you ever find yourself using VMs heavily Qubes is a great option that requires very little effort relative to the power it offers. (It's not good for 3d gaming at the moment; that's the biggest indictment I have of it right now.)
I'm also not convinced PIA (or another VPN) post- exit point "ruins" Tor usage, if you've taken proper precautions in the purchase and setup. None of these comparisons are open and shut cases, I'll grant you that, but with Qubes it should be easy to set up and quite robust if you know what you're doing (...I assume you'd just chain together two ProxyVMs, one Tor and one commercial VPN, both with fail-hard configs, and call it a day?)
Just use the VPN naked like the average pirate (anonymity set!), or even just umatrix (almost undetectable unless actively probed for).
For existing Linux users (i.e. fairly savvy power users, but not necessarily experts), Qubes isn't that much extra effort and it lets you use VPNs *properly* and in a fine-grained manner (so you can have all of the "normal" traffic you wish.) VPNs on Qubes are certainly a hell of a lot easier to properly use than uMatrix, which I wouldn't recommend to anyone who wasn't already enamored with the uBlock Origins way of doing things and wanting more. (And they're also obviously a half-measure that's mainly/only just going to protect you from advertising network tracking.)
One brief clarification: obviously, not all resistive touchscreens were created equal in those days (I've used some pretty horrible ones), but the higher quality ones, such as were found in Maemo devices or my old Zaurus, did possess the advantages I mentioned. Compare that to very high accuracy capacitive screens, which either didn't yet exist or weren't yet cheap enough to be available in (even high end) consumer-level devices.
1) Everyone uses glass. Presumably if plastic were better and easy to manufacture (in 2007) we'd be seeing phones with it now.
For many years I had (and then my girlfriend had, who has managed to shatter literally every other phone she's owned, before or since) a capacitive phone that used plastic. It was almost perfect, *except* for the friction from swiping (and the fact that you needed a screen protector if you wanted protection from scratches, which has a similarly undesirable effect on finger friction.) I'm positive they could address this friction if they really put their minds to it, but I'm also sure industry leaders realize that falling prices, gradually plateauing performance improvements, and carrier subsidization make it a bad idea to build mobile devices too sturdy.
All that aside, Apple was the large driver for the mass switch to capacitive (and I've already conceded this was the one truly interesting thing, IMO, that the iPhone 1 brought to the table), and glass capacitive at that. My comments in my previous thread was regarding glass screens was in the context of Apple's philosophy on durability, and that point stands absolutely even if you wanted to quibble about the tradeoffs of plastic screens.
OK now we have established they were first with that crucial triple.
I think it's a very overrated and contrivied triple. It's not what you should be caring about; it's just the only thing you can come up with if you examine the iPhone 1 with the preconceived notion that it must have been technologically revolutionary. * Capacitive screen: The N900's UI was much more responsive and usable on a resistive screen. I actually thought it had a capacitive screen until I tried to zoom. Actually, that was about the only difference in practice... to zoom, you had to do a little spiral movement. This was very slightly less convenient (two-finger zooming allows you to get the exact size you want perhaps a half-second faster), but it was still very easy to do, and the resistive touchscreen did give you much better precision, for people who cared about that sort of thing. The only other advantage to capacitive is in durability, but this is largely wasted so long as industry leaders refuse to develop plastic screens for their higher-end devices.
2) As far as high speed web rendering. Remember the iphone supported wifi. It also was sold exclusively with AT&T's unlimited data 3G plan. The whole point of the device was to drive up the demand for data usage.
I cannot emphasize enough how ridiculous it is that you are placing "high speed rendering" over a decent data connection in your prioritization here. 3G was something like 5 years old when the EDGE-only iPhone 1 came out. I had an EDGE-only Symbian phone in early 2006 that one of my friends (admittedly an early adopter) repeatedly ribbed me about. Mobile websites (such as actually existed in that era) rendered just fine on that phone, which cost me $50 after 1-year carrier subsidization contract. This argument of yours is a total non-starter no matter how I look at it.
in the United States Nokia wasn't the competition. Nokia USA was dismal.
You've no idea what you're talking about. Pre-iPhone, they were massive over here. Yes, they had more of a reputation for cheaper "candybar" phones, but they also had multiple higher-end devices for anyone who cared to look and it was obvious that Maemo/Meego was going to end up on their new flagship.
But that's not even the point.... it was technologically superior to the iPhone and there were Maemo devices predating the iPhone 1. That's my main thesis here. I could grant you that they had a "dismal" USA presence (a ridiculous claim), and that still wouldn't affect my thesis that Apple's success was based on marketing and superior business decisions, not superior and innovative design.
As for Maemo, Maemo used a
It seems to me that leaves pre-paid credit cards, but the places that sell them also seem to have a lot of cameras and I'm not sure how many VPS providers would accept them.
From my understanding, they appear (from the vendor's point of view) to be indistinguishable from regular credit cards. The DEA and plenty of three-letter organizations aren't happy about their existence though, and there's definitely going to be a push at some point to require ID every time you want to load money.
With "cameras" we're back into that slightly awkward point of the conversation where one must pause and say "...and what, pray tell, are you up to again that this is actually going to matter?" Not that there aren't legitimately righteous people persecuted in this country (as in all countries), but when we reach this level of paranoia we have to consider the strong possibility that the majority of people who would need to legitimately worry about cameras (i.e. not merely people being extra-paranoid for fun) are engaged in some serious organized crime, if not actual terrorism.
But, well... cameras obviously have significant limitations. You don't have to be a geek to figure that one out.
Quick note: there are obviously more details to worry about, and I did gloss over some steps there... but it's not a terribly arduous process.
You don't need to be a command line wizard; you don't need to understand the full intricacies of iptables (although honestly this won't hurt.) But mainly, you just need to understand how things work at a 30,000 foot level. I'd say it's a "power user" distro much more than it's an "expert" distro.
Also, do you really need an "untainted" exit if your entry is rock solid (cantenna, etc.) ? Seems like a fairly niche need, that.
Regardless (mainly because this is an interesting problem to consider), the best possible exit plan for the super paranoid would probably just be buying your own cloud servers with anon funds and essentially creating your own VPN (mixing in Tor, commercial VPNs or whatever else suits your fancy as desired.)
Or would that just make you look even more suspicious? That's the double-edge of any clever scheme you come up with; if "the adversary" is omniscient enough, cleverness might stick out like a sore thumb.
Commercial VPN still has the problem of your traffic being very *interesting*, and your patterns showing in the drawer of *interesting* sflow logs (though most are just pirates, there are plenty of fools too).
Getting untainted exit is nominally difficult. Depending on your insight into tier1 taps, you might be better off with chaining tor to vpngate which mostly goes through consumer broadband.
I view the exit node as being the primary potential (likely?) bad actor to worry about, but of course if we're concerned first and foremost about how things look from your ("real") ISP's point of view, there's almost no way to look normal. As a dozen people here have said already: if that's your big worry, get a cantenna, change your MAC and find a hotspot to use that isn't in your name. Anything short of that is probably going to fail. (As you imply, there is a TON of three letter agency interest in both VPNs and Tor.)
However, the original ask slashdot question seemed more worried about surveillance on the end of the websites and remote services, which is much more manageable (and a bit less suspicious/conflicted/worrying) issue than trying to not only hide everything from your own ISP, but also to hide the fact that you're hiding anything from your own ISP.
It's a bit like the difference between some random anonymous person asking how smoke bombs are made and some random anonymous person asking how actual bombs are made. Just because I'm strongly pro-freedom of information doesn't mean that I would be completely incurious about the person's motivations, in that latter case...
And when you use Tor, you become very interesting.
Which is why anyone who is serious about using Tor can/should use commercial VPNs with in ProxyVMs Qubes to shield oneself. (Or you could do this in iptables in a single arbitrary distro probably... but that's insanity.)
There are two different ways you could do this: a VPN to connect to Tor gateway (so your "real" ISP doesn't see you), or a VPN to connect to post-exit node (because Tor exit nodes are inherently suspect.) I don't see why you couldn't do both, though obviously your risk of performance issues goes up the more extra steps you create.
Tor is definitely a lightning rod for all kinds of nastiness from many different sorts of unpleasant actors. For the ultra-paranoid, it certainly has its uses but it should never be thought of as an easy or lazy option.
Install Qubes OS on a spare SSD, preferably on a computer that supports vt-d properly (older business class notebooks can be really good here if you're on a budget.) Choose KDE or XFCE for your DE, and decide whether you want to use Debian or Fedora for your templates[1]. Configure your DispVM to use a ProxyVM for connectivity using commercial VPN, paid for using bitcoin/giftcards/prepaid credit cards if you're feeling paranoid. (This will be something like $3 / month, depending on who you're buying with.) Make sure you configure the ProxyVM to fail-hard if you lose your connection to the VPN, as opposed to connecting over clearnet in the event of a VPN failure.
(Optional: use a Tor ProxyVM instead of a commercial VPN ProxyVM. Qubes does ship with Tor and Whonix VMs for this very purpose but this is tricky business... Tor exit nodes are definitely not to be trusted. If you did this, I would advise using a VPN layer in addition to Tor in order to protect yourself from the exit node... just make sure the VPN hop is coming AFTER Tor, not before. Also, expect plenty of transient performance hits.)
Next, customize your DispVM's browser to include extensions such as uBlock Origins[2], self-destructing cookies[3], and a user agent randomizer (which you should configure to only change to the more popular browsers currently in use.)
The result of all of this? Your DispVM is a stateless VM; all data is lost every time it's shut down (Joanna currently has it set to auto-shut down every time you close the browser, which I find annoying as hell but I guess it's handy for a lot of people.) Your browser extensions will help guard against tracking in-between DispVM restarts. And by configuring it to use the ProxyVM, you'll never using your real IP address (and ideally you should alter your exit point from the VPN as well.) Unlike most VPN setups, a bug or exploit in the browser or in anything else in the DispVM's operating system will not leak data over the un-VPNed internet.
None of what I just said is trivial to set up, but guides are available and this setup would be extremely robust and easy to use (once configured.) The core of the Qubes UI/UX is in fact quite user-friendly, with an emphasis on GUI tools. It's also a pretty nifty hypervisor even if you don't give a toss about the increased security. It's damn fast, easily portable between different physical machines, templates are handy as hell, and all of your windows from all of your VMs (including your Windows 7 VMs) can appear in a single desktop with a single taskbar, alt-tab menu, etc. (KDE or XFCE; your choice.)
1. You could also built your own template using some other distro (like Ubuntu) if you really wanted. Templates allow you to have multiple VMs with different personal files but with the same apps and configuration (installing anything to the template instantly installs it on all VMs based on that Template.) Also, they're stupid fast.
2. This is basically Adblock Plus done right, with a dash of Request Policy and Noscript tossed in for good measure. You can easily toggle between blacklisting and whitelisting philosophies; it's awesome. (Note that uMatrix is available from the same author for people who want even more fine-grained control.) Note your whitelists / blacklists will be lost every time you shut down your DispVM, so if you've done a lot of tinkering be sure to export them and send them to another stateful VM to merge back into the DispVM image eventually. (This can be done with a simple right-click in a file browser.)
3. Not the best general purpose cookie manager but it's the easiest to use, particularly in a DispVM setup
Hence your idea would not work. It is actually a classic counter example in every book about encryption.
It absolutely would work and has been repeatedly implemented in existing products (most famously the Truecrypt derivatives, though I'm not personally a big fan of theirs.) I'm just not sure you understand the purpose of this approach, or indeed the context of this conversation.
Re-reading your prior post, you said it would "only" add multiplicative security in a brute force situation. Well, uh, that's fine. That's not a "flaw" by any means. No one should expect it to magically guard against pure brute force attacks except to the extent that more keys are (if we assume the algorithms are equally strong) equivalent to a single larger key.
The purpose in having more than one algorithm is to guard against vulnerabilities in one or more of the algorithms, which was and is the entire point of this little subthread. In a symmetric context, Serpent and AES are known to be vulnerable to the XLS attack (this is a very small # known plaintext attack that is not currently a feasible alternative to brute force but further discoveries might change that.) Twofish is not, but it is theoretically vulnerable to some other known plaintext attack (you need something like a petabyte of known plaintext; I forget) that Serpent and AES are not vulnerable to. Thus, if you double encrypt, once using Twofish and then once using AES, with two different keys, you are guarding against both of those vulnerabilities pretty damn effectively.
A very similar approach can be used with asymmetric algorithms, particularly the quantum-computing vulnerable ones (RSA, ECC) combined with one of the asymmetric algorithms that does not appear to be vulnerable to quantum computing (but, as less-reviewed algorithms, might have other unknown weakness.)
So no at the time it also was not ahead and wouldn't be even similar for almost 2 years.
Uh no, that was only one year later. And by "similar", you mean "much, much better as it actually had 3G, an open app store, functioning MMS, and a decent keyboard."
You really think that year is so important? Fine; I could go back in time to 2006 and talk about what was available then if you want. Well before the iPhone came out, I had an Sharp Zaurus that was pretty amazing and could be easily modded to run Angstrom / OpenZaurus linux. Cost me just $300ish with no contract required. It wasn't a phone (although it had wifi via a CF card slot) and it wasn't quite as slim as it could've been and yes capacitive screens were a net win (not as important as you seem to think they are, though), but again: The writing was on the wall.
Everyone knew that phones were going to turn into more general-purpose devices with larger displays. Everyone knew the hardware was finally getting cheap enough to make it feasible (particularly when carrier subsidization was factored in.) Everybody knew the massive appeal of having more capable phones (the cameraphone revolution proved that.) Apple got in early with an inferior product (but *different*, and it turns out that's what matters... at least, that's all that matters whenever they manage to trap the public in the RDF) and forced everyone else to play catchup, but they were only "leading" in a business and marketing sense of the term, not in an innovative or sound-design sense.
Errr, N900, not N800. Got that mixed up in my head. N900 was the one I used.
Nokia has slipped with Maemo and was focusing on the MeeGo project which would still take years.
Maemo was, IIRC (feelin' too lazy to check Wikipedia), already shipping on N800-like devices around the time the iPhone 1 came out. It took them another year or two to put an actual phone in it and that was an abysmal business decision, but the fact remains that Maemo was contemporary and it kicked the shit out of the iPhone 1 and G1, and it was obvious they were going to put it on an actual phone soonish. Like I said, the writing was on the wall. It's not visionary to do something that your competitor is obviously/apparently gearing up to do any month now.
Meego was supposedly going to be even better, but I used an N800 briefly and trust me, Maemo blew the Android and iOS of the day out of the water. (Palm's WebOS supposedly had some strong potential as well, but I never tinkered with it myself.)
Actually, in retrospect I think that the holdup for Maemo on phones (and maybe Android was well) may have been the battery life. People don't remember those days when your phone would last days without needing a recharge. Apple's hailstorm of enthusiasm got people to accept the reality of charging their phone on a daily basis and Nokia quickly said "Oh shit, I guess we don't need to work on power consumption after all!" and quickly stuffed Maemo into the N800, but by then it was too late and they were considered copycats.
As for Android at the time it was working on a blackberry clone with small screens and a keyboard.
And a quality hard keyboard is still the only sane input method for people who are serious about things. A lack of a keyboard was a money saving measure, that's all. A durability-enhancing measure? Well obviously not; not with the glass digitizers and non-removable batteries and emphasis on maximum thinness... Apple has never particularly cared about durability. But cheap procurement and QC is much, much easier to achieve when there are no moving parts.
And many idiots, such as yourself, will pretend the iPhone doesn;t shit all over Android when it comes to usability, features, and stability.
The G1, N800 and many, many other contemporary higher end smartphones completely destroyed the iPhone 1. There's no contest whatsoever there. That was my main thesis there.
Look, we get it. Your nerd dick is big. Go to your bedroom and jack off to RMS like a good little sheep.
Or maybe I just understand that "Android" isn't a singular phone? Nor "iPhone" for that matter. Jesus fucking Christ. Claiming that one destroys the other across the board in those three areas instantly disqualifies you from intelligent conversation, 'geeky' or otherwise.
high speed web rendering
Rather worthless without 3G, which plenty of phones in that price range had (the iPhone was EDGE-only, although it did require a data plan.)
animation based interaction
Which was laggy as hell (for the G1 and most other earlier devices as well.) Not really a plus.
Nokia had much better better UIs --smoother and more powerful even though they were using resistive touchscreens. Granted, these devices were marketed as micro-computers and for some reason it took them longer to stick an actual phone in it (in the form of the tragically underrated N800), but the writing was on the wall. The development of Android far predated the release of the iPhone as well.
Apple pounced with an under-speced, over-priced product that did a few flashy things that weren't yet common (but other phones in that price range had), and then they screamed and screamed at the top of their lungs that they were doing it first and doing it best.
They also emphasized that you could use your phone as an MP3 player, which was something the vast majority of new phones could do (even phones running OSes like Symbian), but the public was, for whatever reason, under-utilizing this.
I think you should watch the introductory video to get an idea of how much Job's ideas contrasted with the competition at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That's ok; I'll visit the RDF re-education center some other time. I examined the first iPhone when it was first introduced and noticed these issues immediately. I thought the MMS issue would kill it for sure but alas, I underestimated the momentum their iPod and OS X devisions had given them.
I'm not the one who insists on talking about Apple constantly. Why is this shit on the front page? This is one of those cultural things you can't help but be informed about, because everyone else will not shut up about it. If it was just a somewhat interesting, somewhat overrated, overpriced "premium" product that certain people bought and enjoyed that would be fine and I wouldn't have anything to say about it, but no, the propaganda machine must be maintained and everyone else must at minimum acknowledge that "at least they have good hardware!" so that you can feel good about your purchase.
This is completely on-topic of me. Q: Why does Apple now have 104% of all smartphone profits? A: Because through a combination of factors, they've convinced people that they produce a premium product and so can charge a premium price, despite often having underwhelming specs for that price. Plus some other stuff generally related to their undeserved status as market-maker.
Um, a naked black hole is actually a very specific thing (a singularity without an event horizon) that may or may not even exist in nature. Just skimming the article, this sounds like an ordinary black hole to me.
Just a regular, hairless yet non-naked black hole. That's what it sounds like.