Yeah, I guess they should also celebrate how they dodged the Superfish lawsuit with a slap on the wrist and how the law has basically approved their shady tactics on installing malware on firmware and putting spyware on their laptops to scam costumers out of their data. *clap clap*
As if everyone who had any contact with the Windows Store didn't know this was comming.
I'll tell you why Microsoft is extending the deadline: because Windows Store is a piece of shit, horrible crappy experience that no one should be subjected to and it should've been euthanized together with Windows Phones and Surface RT a long loooong time ago. Microsoft is trying to escape liability for selling an overpriced underpowered hardware that comes with a OS that makes the entire thing less useful than a smartphone.
I dunno who the shit for brains was that put the Windows 10S monstrosity in practice, but it's insisting on an error that had so much insisting in the past years that I frankly don't even know what to take from it anymore. It's downright cult-like fanatical brainwashed stuff.
If Microsoft went back to the drawing board, started developing an entire other OS from nothing, they'd still have something better today even if it also wasn't stellar by any modern metrics.
And I'm only saying this as someone who had a Windows Phone, and had to deal with that store in the past with a Windows tablet that came with Windows 8. It is worse than Apple Store and Google Play Store in almost everything. In fact, even for novice users I'd recomment Ubuntu over it. Sure, you'll be hard pressed to find some novice level support and help for Linux in general, but at least you'll find something. Windows Store doesn't even have that because no one uses it.
Oh, and that talk about the Store getting better overtime, about it offering a more secure environment, about devs eventually coming to make apps for it, and about it being the future? Microsoft has been preaching that crap for years and years now. Back when Nokia was still it's own company.
This case is specially bad because it wasn't just once that Lenovo slipped on this... superfish was only the first of 3 times the company was caught red handed with shady tactics: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/n...
It's why I don't recommend their stuff anymore nor I'll ever buy anything from Lenovo ever again. Unfortunatelly, the overall tech press keeps advertising their shit and falling head over heels for it.
New flagship my ass. I see that it's not only in Brazil that brands and operators keep trying to push mid rangers and even budget phones as flagships. It's no wonder I keep seeing people getting some crappy old budget Samsung phone with an extremely outdated Android version thinking it's the latest flagship or something.
Here are the most effective tools ever made to combat piracy: Steam, Netflix, Crunchyroll, Kickstarter, iTunes, etc etc. Get my drift? This battle isn't gonna be won by crackdowns, and it will never be fully won at all. It can only be mitigated by very convenient, cheap, and fair legal systems for content sales and streaming.
Here's the thing: there's still an unlimited ammount of resources and tech available for pirates to use... the more you try clamping down on whatever tech is available, the more pirates will double down on alternatives.
There might've been a crackdown on torrent websites, but the category is pretty much alive and well without any signs of change. The so called crackdown didn't leave even a dent on the category as a whole. It doesn't really matter if popular torrent websites gets taken down, a whole bunch more will pop up out of nowhere hosted in countries that don't care about nor listen to Hollywood demands. And even if MPAA, RIAA, Hollywood studios and whatnot were able to suddently shut down each and every source of torrent files (will never happen), I'm willing to bet that it wouldn't take days before something new pops up. Torrents are not still used because it's the optimal strategy... it's just what people grew used to and I guess convenient to keep running. But if DMCA companies finally have their way and start really coming down too strongly on those, pirates will just... level up their game. There files being found on Google Drive are probably not even the surface level of the whole thing... this is just people who don't know better putting files up in places that are easily found. I can't imagine any pirate who knows better putting files up in places known for having an open door policy for law enforcement.
An encrypted torrenting channel on the dark web. An unified encrypted system going through secure systems for file sharing. Secure messaging or e-mail systems being leveraged to share files. Even for Google Drive and other cloud storage websites piracy could work and be left alone right there... it's quite simple: encrypt the files, fragment them and distribute in inconspicuous bits, build a player that consolidate and decrypt files before playing, and it's done. This is pretty much what happened in early days of piracy... there were a multitude of file sharing systems, several of them created for legitimate purposes, appropriated by pirates to share copyrighted content.
If people analyze the trajectory that piracy went through the years, it's pretty incredible. File sharing websites, cloud storage services, primitive chat systems like IRC, the entire evolution of P2P file sharing, e-mail, FTP... every step of the way in matters of file sharing on the Internet had a pirate hand at some point.
And I have no doubt that somewhere someone must be developing a system that is fully encrypted, untraceable, and de-centralized... if something like that isn't already available. Because there will always be a fundamental need on the Internet for sharing files in a secure and private manner, and whatever form that takes, pirates will eventually be able to appropriate that.
But this is something known for lots of people since the early days of piracy... even before Napster I guess. The essencial problem with it is that piracy became normalized... as it can mostly be equated to just file sharing if you take the vilification out of the equation. There are entire countries that grew reliant on it for access to entertainment for a huge part of their population, and once it became normalized, where there's a will, there's a way. You can't give enough powers to Hollywood and DMCA organizations to go after everyone because that'd be essencially giving them the keys to the entire Internet. And not only people will oppose that, governments and other businesses also will.
It doesn't matter on what side you are - for or against piracy, I mean. It's an unstoppable driving force, equalizer, phenomena, and culture overall.
As always, read the entire article. The lawsuit is bullshit, the company never sold any product with the patented tech, and it wasn't anything but a design composed of components iLife did not develop. It's a patent troll through and through. Nintendo is also appealing the decision, so this isn't final.
... I've been saying that Hyperloop is either a huge scam, or something else I'm still having a hard time to imagine.
Let's be clear here: The current company that has the most advanced Hyperloop version (Hyperloop One) which is obviously still in very early prototype stages basically stole maglev propulsion system and slapped it into some poorly designed vacuum tunnel to see if it could make whatever Musk scribbled in some napkin. In fact, the first public test Hyperloop One made was just a maglev propulsion system similar to that employed in several other countries that are currently already running actual train test lines (like Japan), or have actual completed train lines (like China and South Korea).
Almost everything one could point out as Hyperloop prototypes being "successful" can be single handedly attributed to maglev tech. There hasn't been a single significant technological contribution that I know of so far coming from Hyperloop companies, and I still didn't hear a proper explanation on how the heck these companies are planning to build entire tunnels over large stretches of land that would make it any more feasible or more economical over regular train tracks or maglev train tracks.
The entire idea of Hyperloop puts a whole ton of disadvantages, extra costs, potential problems, among several other things on top of a maglev train to get some theorical speed advantage that's even further into the future and more infeasible than actually making a single working short route from one city to another. It loses flexibility, you need to spend exponentially more (because of the tunnels operating in near vacuum), you are limited to pods of limited sizes, the entire infrastructure becomes far more succeptible to stuff like earthquakes, terrorist attacks, and just plain wear and tear, it'll be mostly point A to B with no stops for efficiency, plus a ton of other stuff to worry about which maglev trains don't have to deal with in their current operational status.
Yet, for some reason (money laundering, Simpsons monorail style scam, major spec stealing of foreign technology, or who knows what), some European countries plus US and UAE are investing on this. It makes no straight faced sense.
And I've been saying this in all my comments on the matter: maglev trains are still evolving, getting faster, more robust and better overall - as shown by this article. People joke about it being China and whatnot, but overall, maglev trains are plenty secure. Hyperloop might be theoretically faster because it's basically maglev train cars inside a near vacuum tube, but that's only for the theoretical top speeds, which makes investing on it based only on that as much sense as investing on a F1 car prototype for consumers. Just because it theoretically can reach such speeds doesn't mean that it ever will, or even should.
You wanna see how riding a Hyperloop could potentially be in the future? Go to China, Japan, South Korea or some other country with maglev trains, ride one, but keep seated the entire way and close the blinds. At least if we are to take Musk's designs and Hyperloop One designs seriously. Also imagine being cramped in a far tighter space, and paying a whole lot more for the priviledge - because the costs of building the whole thing up will have to come from somewhere.
The more I hear about it, the more it sounds like Concorde elevated to exponential and surreal levels of unfeasibility.
For those who don't know - think tanks are basically evangelizers, they are hired and paid for government lobbying. Specially if they are located in DC. It's like having your high level 3rd party marketing team making public statements and celebrating that your company was successfully sued. In their official page, no less. This isn't even backroom talk, it's basically doing the opposite you were hired for.
Blade Runner is not a prediction of the future, it's science fiction adapted for the big screen. And as such, it's not about portrayal of future based on attempts of getting it accurate or right, but rather using what serves the plot best. Still, this is a kind of naive approach to analysis of futurism in general. Anyone could pick a future prediction and say we do it wrong because of this or that. One could just as well pick another example to say we center too much on mundane everyday life stuff and don't focus enough on sophisticated technologies beyond comprehension. Truth of the matter is: we don't know because there are just too many variables. Often, the select few that "gets it right" is mostly by chance, or by some insider look that enables them to tell that the chances of certain types of technologies progressing have good chances of becoming a new paradigm. And the press and general media makes good work of selecting those who got it right to say they were visionaires or some such.
Here's the thing: we're all producing some level of futurism ourselves. The ones that gets attention are those who can present it to a major public with strong enough ideas that drives peoples' imaginations. By design, the brand of popular futurism will mostly get it wrong because it needs to be far fetched to get peoples' attention. Boring, down to earth predictions usually gets burried, no one cares.
The sirens are going at full force in several countries of the world. A whole lot of countries are tumbling into the cycle of dictatorship and tyranny after enjoying a good time of democracy. It's already happened in several middle eastern countries, it's happening in South America and some Asian countries, and it's spreading out. Enjoy while you can folks, and leave stories of hope behind. Because our grandkids might need it.
It's not a competition. Cable will fit better certain types of TV watchers, cord cutting will fit others better. And it's a plenty different selection of stuff. But the whole idea is that cord cutting is an option now, and I hope more and more people start adapting to it and stop giving money to these oligopolies.
And I do get where the guy who wrote the original article is coming from. Disney is taking their content out of Netflix, a bunch of other production studios, branches and whatnot are creating their own video streaming services, and content is being fragmented instead of getting formed around single services.
One service like Netflix is way cheaper than paying cable with some 200 channels or something like that, but the underlying truth about this is that it's only cheap because Netflix came early to the game, closed very lucrative deals with studios and whatnot to put their content there, and as soon as those studios starts figuring out how to do it by themselves, they'll start cancelling contracts and branching off. It is by no coincidence that Netflix is investing heavily in original content, and that Apple and other big corporations are investing money on it too - it's because of this current tendency of studios branching off and creating their own streams.
Makes it bad for people who wants to watch a whole bunch of content that is thinly distributed around half a dozen services or more. It's too much to handle, and you start going for aggregators that are not often as easy to deal with than just cable, the price starts getting close to cable subscription too.
It is true though that if you do take advantage of the fact that cable TV aggregates tons of content for a more or less fixed price, in order for you to do the same for streaming services it can get pricy and hard to handle plenty fast. I can understand the reluctance of families with very ecletic tastes to cord cut, specially when there's no one tech savvy there (or with not time) to handle the administration of it. You get one dad or son who wants to watch live sports, plus a kid who watches cartoon channels, a wife or whatever who watches cooking shows and variety stuff, perhaps a grandfather who has to watch live news, and a few other variables and you have a recipe for cord cutting not being an attractive solution.
Practices to be expected from big corporations... the troublesome thing about this is if that sort of product and practice is what passes for a company as big as Logitech, can you imagine the shoddy crap and stuff that's coming out from smaller brands? That's why we end up with Mirai Botnet and the whole problem with IoT devices being used as DDoS fodder.
What do you mean still exist? Logitech is still the biggest keyboard and mouse company worldwide, they dominate in several categories from business to gaming, and the company itself has never been more profitable than in recent years: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/l...
Responsible? That would obviously be whoever is making the products, selling them, and turning a profit on it, period. But who should care about it is an entirely other matter... everyone from chip makers, to product developers, assembly lines, government, stores that are buying and selling the stuff as well as costumers/businesses that are getting the products should be looking into it.
Unfortunately, there's no easy answer as to solve the entire conundrum. This might be one case were we'll eventually need government interference and regulation there to safeguard public privacy and security just as much as we have quality standards and aproval processes regarding radiation levels, what sorts of materials were used in electronics, and stuff like that.
And I think soon we'll end up with independent businesses whose sole purpose is do independent testing for security and privacy... I mean, they are already there seem as security analysts and whatnot, but things will probably ramp up as businesses have more to lose.
It's not a great route to go through, but I really can't think of anything else that would do the job. At some point, the overall Cyberwarfare will escalate to a point that electronics in general will need to go through extensive testing before entering the country.
The problem here is two fold, and the comparison to desktop interfaces and iOS is unfair. Different than the examples given, skeuromorphism used in audio software wasn't appropriated to make the interface look more user friendly or familiar.... there are some practical reasons for it.
Number one, physical control interfaces that tie to the software to give users an actual physical interface (such as midi controlers, sound boards, studio mixers and whatnot). Controls have to look exactly like them and behave exactly like them because it's more for monitoring rather than actual control.
Number two, they are replications of actual physical hardware that exists or existed, and part of the reasoning for them is to provide a lower cost replication of the actual hardware, for people who wants to mess with it, or for people who had those and knows how to use the original.
With those two reasons in mind, you can also consider that most professional audio software are developed with expandability in mind - that people getting seriously into it will eventually move to physical controls. And then, the other thing is how people are taught around it. Levels, knobs, buttons, digital led panels and whatnot are all heavily tied to certain types of effects or controls - it's better for you to learn that way because in the future you might be dealing with audio specific hardware instead of computer software.
So yeah, I can understand people wanting something less skeuromorphic and that can be more fit to desktop use or something like that, and I imagine there has been attempts to go that way... but much like FPS games using gamepads versus keyboard and mouse, I think for the vast majority of musicians, audio engineers, producers and whatnot, keyboard and mouse or touchscreens will never replace typical physical audio/effect controls. The physicality of audio controls is very much tied to performance and real time fine tunning.
Smart TVs should've been enough for people to know why we should never have started going for IoT devices in the first place, unfortunately people are too dumb to notice such things. When they first appeared, some over a decade ago, it already had all the problems they still have today. Long lasting appliance (TVs), tied to some extremely crappy hardware running a horrible OS that was never updated and got useless in less than a year, riddled with security and privacy problems that no one used past a novelty thing. Now that pretty much all brands had some sort of scandal regarding smart TV leaking data, being used to spy on owners and whatnot, they are still there for some reason. It's pretty much the worst way to do just about anything they are programmed to do. They have clunky outdated apps, last less than a smartphone or any other device, and brands drop support as soon as the new line of TVs comes out.
I have one, because I got in a deal where I got two TVs for the price of one. And fortunately enough, my model has a separate remote control for the smart TV functions which I shoved in a drawer after purchase and never used it. That's the smartest thing you can do with your smart TV - never use the smart functions. Possible exceptions for brands like Sony that uses Android TV instead of some poorly developed and badly maintained proprietary OS, but even those might be worse than just shoving a Chromecast or some other tabletop device there.
This is just the way security goes. Things get increasingly fragile when we're talking about targeted attacks. Most people still don't need to worry about this in generalized attacks seeking for massive ammounts of data, but for targeted attacks social engineering always seems to find a way to work around security schemes.
To the point, there is no failure on two factor here. There's a failure on mobile networks' security checks for highly sensitive operations like transfering a number to another device. It's taken lightly when it shouldn't. But people have been talking about cases like these for a while now, recommending that instead of using SMS, you'd better use apps like Google Authenticator and whatnot, inside a locked down phone.
SMS is also vulnerable to interception, so there's also that. Apps like Google Authenticator are vulnerable only when someone gets hold of your phone unlocked, which SMS also is. But if someone hijacks your phone number alone and puts it into another device, they cannot replicate authenticator apps. It's tied to the device.
If you want everything cable offers, cord cutting is not for you. And it'll probably never be. Cable companies will always flex their muscles to keep some exclusive content there to force people to keep paying them. They are still huge monopolies, and thanks to them tying different types of services under a single brand, I don't see a future where they stop being monopolies.
For me personally it's more like a legal option to piracy. For over a decade I was forced to pay for cable basically because it was cheaper to get a basic cable package tied to Internet and landline than getting cable Internet by itself.
Then finally fiber became available, I switched as soon as I heard about it and never looked back. I pay less for a huge improvement on the stuff that I care about, and none of the crap I never used in the first place. And now that services like Netflix and Crunchyroll are available, movies, series and anime just became available for me at reasonable prices without having to resort to piracy. Well, almost none of the content on Crunchyroll was available on cable anyways, and cable never gave me the convenience of watching whenever I wanted to like Netflix. In fact, in the past I relied far more on movie rental services than on cable per se.
So yes, if you so strongly want content that is likely to be cable exclusives, you are not cord cutting anytime soon. But that's not really the point of cord cutting. Also, you just went and forgot about a whole metric ton of reasons why people with cable TV are also signing up for those services. Like all the shows your kids will want to watch on a tablet or smartphone, like a la carte service without having to rely on DVR solutions, among others.
It's not as cut and dry as this snippet is trying to pass. Cord cutting is ultimately an alternative. And if you are not willing to budge on your watching habits, you are ultimately no different than old people who can't deal with new tech. There's nothing wrong with that, but cord cutting is probably not for you.
Aren't fully autonomous drones already banned? So this is a no brainer.
People will confuse things, but it's undoubtely a treaty that should be made, much like several others already in place.
This isn't dissimilar to treaties around land mines, chemical weapons, biological warfare and others. Yes, there will be countries that won't adhere to it, killer robots will end up being developed, and we'll have violations of treaties over the years... but this is a call for a coalition against development and deployment of killer robots.
I hope all the best for them fully knowing it's an uphill battle... How many projects with similar promisses we've heard about in the past?
I'd really love to use older smartphones as a Linux box of sorts, even if there are downsides to it... put it to good use instead of turning it into eWaste and all.
Supreme Court has been asked nothing... this is an appeal from a lost lawsuit to higher court. And it'll probably not be taken, let alone pass. Either way, it's Google's win. If they win, they keep the trademark and the term doesn't become generic. If it becomes generic though, it only works as marketing material for them with the term being cemented as searching for content on the Internet.
I honestly would've liked to see Intel keeping Atom development going to see next generations to Cherry Trail... low powered small PCs seemed to have a good future there if only Atom kept going for some more years.
Here are several problems with the whole thing: Foxconn can get better qualified and cheaper labor in several of the other countries they currently already have factories at. It's pretty uncertain if Wisconsin will have a workforce to cover for those jobs - it's not about numbers or people looking for jobs, but specialization. An LCD plant is nothing by itself... so either Foxconn is planning for an assembly plant to come next, or they'll just ship most of the production back to China so that those screens are used in actual products. Either way, infrastructure will have major influence there - if it gets too expensive to transport those things, eventually they'll decide it isn't worth it. And weirdly enough, LCDs are being replaced by AMOLED panels in recent smartphones and other electronics. Not sure if there's any flexibility in these production lines to switch the types of panels they produce - technology is substantially different.
So yeah, it's a pretty big bet. These factories are pretty much unsustainable without government incentives and money, so you can expect that the government will be paying for a long time to keep production there. It's just the nature of the beast.
Foxconn has factories in Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, India, Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, Czech Republic, South Korea, China of course, and it acquired former Sharp plants in Japan. In China, just last year, one of their plants fired 60,000 workers because they automated part of the production line.
One can only hope that this thing isn't being rushed, that Wisconsin is drafting the contract in a way not to get screwed if the whole thing goes sour, and that it really brings jobs to the state. But honestly, the balance tips towards Foxconn in almost every front. I imagine there's almost no advantage in having a factory in the US for the company aside from having physical presence there. It's a PR and marketing move that only makes sense if the US government pays for part of the losses that the company will take in comparison of building that plant in any of the other countries they already have a presence at.
Bing comes as a default search engine (as does Edge), it's obligatory to use in Windows 10S, and Microsoft offers freebies for people who use it (a big reason why the percentage is so big in the US - Bing rewards is not available in several countries). Sure, some people use and like it, but I'd say 9% worldwide is a huge failure when you are trying to sway the market with agressive strategies like those.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I guess they should also celebrate how they dodged the Superfish lawsuit with a slap on the wrist and how the law has basically approved their shady tactics on installing malware on firmware and putting spyware on their laptops to scam costumers out of their data. *clap clap*
As if everyone who had any contact with the Windows Store didn't know this was comming.
I'll tell you why Microsoft is extending the deadline: because Windows Store is a piece of shit, horrible crappy experience that no one should be subjected to and it should've been euthanized together with Windows Phones and Surface RT a long loooong time ago.
Microsoft is trying to escape liability for selling an overpriced underpowered hardware that comes with a OS that makes the entire thing less useful than a smartphone.
I dunno who the shit for brains was that put the Windows 10S monstrosity in practice, but it's insisting on an error that had so much insisting in the past years that I frankly don't even know what to take from it anymore. It's downright cult-like fanatical brainwashed stuff.
If Microsoft went back to the drawing board, started developing an entire other OS from nothing, they'd still have something better today even if it also wasn't stellar by any modern metrics.
And I'm only saying this as someone who had a Windows Phone, and had to deal with that store in the past with a Windows tablet that came with Windows 8. It is worse than Apple Store and Google Play Store in almost everything. In fact, even for novice users I'd recomment Ubuntu over it. Sure, you'll be hard pressed to find some novice level support and help for Linux in general, but at least you'll find something. Windows Store doesn't even have that because no one uses it.
Oh, and that talk about the Store getting better overtime, about it offering a more secure environment, about devs eventually coming to make apps for it, and about it being the future? Microsoft has been preaching that crap for years and years now. Back when Nokia was still it's own company.
This case is specially bad because it wasn't just once that Lenovo slipped on this... superfish was only the first of 3 times the company was caught red handed with shady tactics:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/n...
It's why I don't recommend their stuff anymore nor I'll ever buy anything from Lenovo ever again.
Unfortunatelly, the overall tech press keeps advertising their shit and falling head over heels for it.
New flagship my ass. I see that it's not only in Brazil that brands and operators keep trying to push mid rangers and even budget phones as flagships.
It's no wonder I keep seeing people getting some crappy old budget Samsung phone with an extremely outdated Android version thinking it's the latest flagship or something.
Here are the most effective tools ever made to combat piracy: Steam, Netflix, Crunchyroll, Kickstarter, iTunes, etc etc.
Get my drift? This battle isn't gonna be won by crackdowns, and it will never be fully won at all. It can only be mitigated by very convenient, cheap, and fair legal systems for content sales and streaming.
Here's the thing: there's still an unlimited ammount of resources and tech available for pirates to use... the more you try clamping down on whatever tech is available, the more pirates will double down on alternatives.
There might've been a crackdown on torrent websites, but the category is pretty much alive and well without any signs of change. The so called crackdown didn't leave even a dent on the category as a whole.
It doesn't really matter if popular torrent websites gets taken down, a whole bunch more will pop up out of nowhere hosted in countries that don't care about nor listen to Hollywood demands.
And even if MPAA, RIAA, Hollywood studios and whatnot were able to suddently shut down each and every source of torrent files (will never happen), I'm willing to bet that it wouldn't take days before something new pops up. Torrents are not still used because it's the optimal strategy... it's just what people grew used to and I guess convenient to keep running. But if DMCA companies finally have their way and start really coming down too strongly on those, pirates will just... level up their game.
There files being found on Google Drive are probably not even the surface level of the whole thing... this is just people who don't know better putting files up in places that are easily found. I can't imagine any pirate who knows better putting files up in places known for having an open door policy for law enforcement.
An encrypted torrenting channel on the dark web. An unified encrypted system going through secure systems for file sharing. Secure messaging or e-mail systems being leveraged to share files.
Even for Google Drive and other cloud storage websites piracy could work and be left alone right there... it's quite simple: encrypt the files, fragment them and distribute in inconspicuous bits, build a player that consolidate and decrypt files before playing, and it's done.
This is pretty much what happened in early days of piracy... there were a multitude of file sharing systems, several of them created for legitimate purposes, appropriated by pirates to share copyrighted content.
If people analyze the trajectory that piracy went through the years, it's pretty incredible. File sharing websites, cloud storage services, primitive chat systems like IRC, the entire evolution of P2P file sharing, e-mail, FTP... every step of the way in matters of file sharing on the Internet had a pirate hand at some point.
And I have no doubt that somewhere someone must be developing a system that is fully encrypted, untraceable, and de-centralized... if something like that isn't already available. Because there will always be a fundamental need on the Internet for sharing files in a secure and private manner, and whatever form that takes, pirates will eventually be able to appropriate that.
But this is something known for lots of people since the early days of piracy... even before Napster I guess. The essencial problem with it is that piracy became normalized... as it can mostly be equated to just file sharing if you take the vilification out of the equation. There are entire countries that grew reliant on it for access to entertainment for a huge part of their population, and once it became normalized, where there's a will, there's a way.
You can't give enough powers to Hollywood and DMCA organizations to go after everyone because that'd be essencially giving them the keys to the entire Internet. And not only people will oppose that, governments and other businesses also will.
It doesn't matter on what side you are - for or against piracy, I mean. It's an unstoppable driving force, equalizer, phenomena, and culture overall.
As always, read the entire article.
The lawsuit is bullshit, the company never sold any product with the patented tech, and it wasn't anything but a design composed of components iLife did not develop. It's a patent troll through and through.
Nintendo is also appealing the decision, so this isn't final.
... I've been saying that Hyperloop is either a huge scam, or something else I'm still having a hard time to imagine.
Let's be clear here: The current company that has the most advanced Hyperloop version (Hyperloop One) which is obviously still in very early prototype stages basically stole maglev propulsion system and slapped it into some poorly designed vacuum tunnel to see if it could make whatever Musk scribbled in some napkin. In fact, the first public test Hyperloop One made was just a maglev propulsion system similar to that employed in several other countries that are currently already running actual train test lines (like Japan), or have actual completed train lines (like China and South Korea).
Almost everything one could point out as Hyperloop prototypes being "successful" can be single handedly attributed to maglev tech. There hasn't been a single significant technological contribution that I know of so far coming from Hyperloop companies, and I still didn't hear a proper explanation on how the heck these companies are planning to build entire tunnels over large stretches of land that would make it any more feasible or more economical over regular train tracks or maglev train tracks.
The entire idea of Hyperloop puts a whole ton of disadvantages, extra costs, potential problems, among several other things on top of a maglev train to get some theorical speed advantage that's even further into the future and more infeasible than actually making a single working short route from one city to another. It loses flexibility, you need to spend exponentially more (because of the tunnels operating in near vacuum), you are limited to pods of limited sizes, the entire infrastructure becomes far more succeptible to stuff like earthquakes, terrorist attacks, and just plain wear and tear, it'll be mostly point A to B with no stops for efficiency, plus a ton of other stuff to worry about which maglev trains don't have to deal with in their current operational status.
Yet, for some reason (money laundering, Simpsons monorail style scam, major spec stealing of foreign technology, or who knows what), some European countries plus US and UAE are investing on this. It makes no straight faced sense.
And I've been saying this in all my comments on the matter: maglev trains are still evolving, getting faster, more robust and better overall - as shown by this article. People joke about it being China and whatnot, but overall, maglev trains are plenty secure.
Hyperloop might be theoretically faster because it's basically maglev train cars inside a near vacuum tube, but that's only for the theoretical top speeds, which makes investing on it based only on that as much sense as investing on a F1 car prototype for consumers. Just because it theoretically can reach such speeds doesn't mean that it ever will, or even should.
You wanna see how riding a Hyperloop could potentially be in the future? Go to China, Japan, South Korea or some other country with maglev trains, ride one, but keep seated the entire way and close the blinds. At least if we are to take Musk's designs and Hyperloop One designs seriously. Also imagine being cramped in a far tighter space, and paying a whole lot more for the priviledge - because the costs of building the whole thing up will have to come from somewhere.
The more I hear about it, the more it sounds like Concorde elevated to exponential and surreal levels of unfeasibility.
For those who don't know - think tanks are basically evangelizers, they are hired and paid for government lobbying. Specially if they are located in DC.
It's like having your high level 3rd party marketing team making public statements and celebrating that your company was successfully sued. In their official page, no less.
This isn't even backroom talk, it's basically doing the opposite you were hired for.
Blade Runner is not a prediction of the future, it's science fiction adapted for the big screen.
And as such, it's not about portrayal of future based on attempts of getting it accurate or right, but rather using what serves the plot best.
Still, this is a kind of naive approach to analysis of futurism in general. Anyone could pick a future prediction and say we do it wrong because of this or that. One could just as well pick another example to say we center too much on mundane everyday life stuff and don't focus enough on sophisticated technologies beyond comprehension.
Truth of the matter is: we don't know because there are just too many variables.
Often, the select few that "gets it right" is mostly by chance, or by some insider look that enables them to tell that the chances of certain types of technologies progressing have good chances of becoming a new paradigm. And the press and general media makes good work of selecting those who got it right to say they were visionaires or some such.
Here's the thing: we're all producing some level of futurism ourselves. The ones that gets attention are those who can present it to a major public with strong enough ideas that drives peoples' imaginations. By design, the brand of popular futurism will mostly get it wrong because it needs to be far fetched to get peoples' attention.
Boring, down to earth predictions usually gets burried, no one cares.
The sirens are going at full force in several countries of the world.
A whole lot of countries are tumbling into the cycle of dictatorship and tyranny after enjoying a good time of democracy.
It's already happened in several middle eastern countries, it's happening in South America and some Asian countries, and it's spreading out.
Enjoy while you can folks, and leave stories of hope behind. Because our grandkids might need it.
It's not a competition. Cable will fit better certain types of TV watchers, cord cutting will fit others better. And it's a plenty different selection of stuff.
But the whole idea is that cord cutting is an option now, and I hope more and more people start adapting to it and stop giving money to these oligopolies.
And I do get where the guy who wrote the original article is coming from. Disney is taking their content out of Netflix, a bunch of other production studios, branches and whatnot are creating their own video streaming services, and content is being fragmented instead of getting formed around single services.
One service like Netflix is way cheaper than paying cable with some 200 channels or something like that, but the underlying truth about this is that it's only cheap because Netflix came early to the game, closed very lucrative deals with studios and whatnot to put their content there, and as soon as those studios starts figuring out how to do it by themselves, they'll start cancelling contracts and branching off. It is by no coincidence that Netflix is investing heavily in original content, and that Apple and other big corporations are investing money on it too - it's because of this current tendency of studios branching off and creating their own streams.
Makes it bad for people who wants to watch a whole bunch of content that is thinly distributed around half a dozen services or more. It's too much to handle, and you start going for aggregators that are not often as easy to deal with than just cable, the price starts getting close to cable subscription too.
It is true though that if you do take advantage of the fact that cable TV aggregates tons of content for a more or less fixed price, in order for you to do the same for streaming services it can get pricy and hard to handle plenty fast. I can understand the reluctance of families with very ecletic tastes to cord cut, specially when there's no one tech savvy there (or with not time) to handle the administration of it. You get one dad or son who wants to watch live sports, plus a kid who watches cartoon channels, a wife or whatever who watches cooking shows and variety stuff, perhaps a grandfather who has to watch live news, and a few other variables and you have a recipe for cord cutting not being an attractive solution.
Practices to be expected from big corporations... the troublesome thing about this is if that sort of product and practice is what passes for a company as big as Logitech, can you imagine the shoddy crap and stuff that's coming out from smaller brands?
That's why we end up with Mirai Botnet and the whole problem with IoT devices being used as DDoS fodder.
What do you mean still exist? Logitech is still the biggest keyboard and mouse company worldwide, they dominate in several categories from business to gaming, and the company itself has never been more profitable than in recent years:
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/l...
Responsible? That would obviously be whoever is making the products, selling them, and turning a profit on it, period.
But who should care about it is an entirely other matter... everyone from chip makers, to product developers, assembly lines, government, stores that are buying and selling the stuff as well as costumers/businesses that are getting the products should be looking into it.
Unfortunately, there's no easy answer as to solve the entire conundrum. This might be one case were we'll eventually need government interference and regulation there to safeguard public privacy and security just as much as we have quality standards and aproval processes regarding radiation levels, what sorts of materials were used in electronics, and stuff like that.
And I think soon we'll end up with independent businesses whose sole purpose is do independent testing for security and privacy... I mean, they are already there seem as security analysts and whatnot, but things will probably ramp up as businesses have more to lose.
It's not a great route to go through, but I really can't think of anything else that would do the job. At some point, the overall Cyberwarfare will escalate to a point that electronics in general will need to go through extensive testing before entering the country.
The problem here is two fold, and the comparison to desktop interfaces and iOS is unfair.
Different than the examples given, skeuromorphism used in audio software wasn't appropriated to make the interface look more user friendly or familiar.... there are some practical reasons for it.
Number one, physical control interfaces that tie to the software to give users an actual physical interface (such as midi controlers, sound boards, studio mixers and whatnot). Controls have to look exactly like them and behave exactly like them because it's more for monitoring rather than actual control.
Number two, they are replications of actual physical hardware that exists or existed, and part of the reasoning for them is to provide a lower cost replication of the actual hardware, for people who wants to mess with it, or for people who had those and knows how to use the original.
With those two reasons in mind, you can also consider that most professional audio software are developed with expandability in mind - that people getting seriously into it will eventually move to physical controls. And then, the other thing is how people are taught around it. Levels, knobs, buttons, digital led panels and whatnot are all heavily tied to certain types of effects or controls - it's better for you to learn that way because in the future you might be dealing with audio specific hardware instead of computer software.
So yeah, I can understand people wanting something less skeuromorphic and that can be more fit to desktop use or something like that, and I imagine there has been attempts to go that way... but much like FPS games using gamepads versus keyboard and mouse, I think for the vast majority of musicians, audio engineers, producers and whatnot, keyboard and mouse or touchscreens will never replace typical physical audio/effect controls. The physicality of audio controls is very much tied to performance and real time fine tunning.
Smart TVs should've been enough for people to know why we should never have started going for IoT devices in the first place, unfortunately people are too dumb to notice such things.
When they first appeared, some over a decade ago, it already had all the problems they still have today. Long lasting appliance (TVs), tied to some extremely crappy hardware running a horrible OS that was never updated and got useless in less than a year, riddled with security and privacy problems that no one used past a novelty thing.
Now that pretty much all brands had some sort of scandal regarding smart TV leaking data, being used to spy on owners and whatnot, they are still there for some reason.
It's pretty much the worst way to do just about anything they are programmed to do. They have clunky outdated apps, last less than a smartphone or any other device, and brands drop support as soon as the new line of TVs comes out.
I have one, because I got in a deal where I got two TVs for the price of one. And fortunately enough, my model has a separate remote control for the smart TV functions which I shoved in a drawer after purchase and never used it. That's the smartest thing you can do with your smart TV - never use the smart functions. Possible exceptions for brands like Sony that uses Android TV instead of some poorly developed and badly maintained proprietary OS, but even those might be worse than just shoving a Chromecast or some other tabletop device there.
Coincidence that Plex just tried to pull the same crap, or is this a new tendency that's going to spread through the market now?
This is just the way security goes. Things get increasingly fragile when we're talking about targeted attacks. Most people still don't need to worry about this in generalized attacks seeking for massive ammounts of data, but for targeted attacks social engineering always seems to find a way to work around security schemes.
To the point, there is no failure on two factor here. There's a failure on mobile networks' security checks for highly sensitive operations like transfering a number to another device. It's taken lightly when it shouldn't.
But people have been talking about cases like these for a while now, recommending that instead of using SMS, you'd better use apps like Google Authenticator and whatnot, inside a locked down phone.
SMS is also vulnerable to interception, so there's also that. Apps like Google Authenticator are vulnerable only when someone gets hold of your phone unlocked, which SMS also is. But if someone hijacks your phone number alone and puts it into another device, they cannot replicate authenticator apps. It's tied to the device.
If you want everything cable offers, cord cutting is not for you. And it'll probably never be. Cable companies will always flex their muscles to keep some exclusive content there to force people to keep paying them. They are still huge monopolies, and thanks to them tying different types of services under a single brand, I don't see a future where they stop being monopolies.
For me personally it's more like a legal option to piracy. For over a decade I was forced to pay for cable basically because it was cheaper to get a basic cable package tied to Internet and landline than getting cable Internet by itself.
Then finally fiber became available, I switched as soon as I heard about it and never looked back. I pay less for a huge improvement on the stuff that I care about, and none of the crap I never used in the first place.
And now that services like Netflix and Crunchyroll are available, movies, series and anime just became available for me at reasonable prices without having to resort to piracy. Well, almost none of the content on Crunchyroll was available on cable anyways, and cable never gave me the convenience of watching whenever I wanted to like Netflix. In fact, in the past I relied far more on movie rental services than on cable per se.
So yes, if you so strongly want content that is likely to be cable exclusives, you are not cord cutting anytime soon. But that's not really the point of cord cutting. Also, you just went and forgot about a whole metric ton of reasons why people with cable TV are also signing up for those services. Like all the shows your kids will want to watch on a tablet or smartphone, like a la carte service without having to rely on DVR solutions, among others.
It's not as cut and dry as this snippet is trying to pass. Cord cutting is ultimately an alternative. And if you are not willing to budge on your watching habits, you are ultimately no different than old people who can't deal with new tech. There's nothing wrong with that, but cord cutting is probably not for you.
Aren't fully autonomous drones already banned? So this is a no brainer.
People will confuse things, but it's undoubtely a treaty that should be made, much like several others already in place.
This isn't dissimilar to treaties around land mines, chemical weapons, biological warfare and others. Yes, there will be countries that won't adhere to it, killer robots will end up being developed, and we'll have violations of treaties over the years... but this is a call for a coalition against development and deployment of killer robots.
I hope all the best for them fully knowing it's an uphill battle...
How many projects with similar promisses we've heard about in the past?
I'd really love to use older smartphones as a Linux box of sorts, even if there are downsides to it... put it to good use instead of turning it into eWaste and all.
Supreme Court has been asked nothing... this is an appeal from a lost lawsuit to higher court. And it'll probably not be taken, let alone pass.
Either way, it's Google's win. If they win, they keep the trademark and the term doesn't become generic. If it becomes generic though, it only works as marketing material for them with the term being cemented as searching for content on the Internet.
I honestly would've liked to see Intel keeping Atom development going to see next generations to Cherry Trail... low powered small PCs seemed to have a good future there if only Atom kept going for some more years.
We'll see how long the plant lasts.
Here are several problems with the whole thing: Foxconn can get better qualified and cheaper labor in several of the other countries they currently already have factories at. It's pretty uncertain if Wisconsin will have a workforce to cover for those jobs - it's not about numbers or people looking for jobs, but specialization. An LCD plant is nothing by itself... so either Foxconn is planning for an assembly plant to come next, or they'll just ship most of the production back to China so that those screens are used in actual products. Either way, infrastructure will have major influence there - if it gets too expensive to transport those things, eventually they'll decide it isn't worth it.
And weirdly enough, LCDs are being replaced by AMOLED panels in recent smartphones and other electronics. Not sure if there's any flexibility in these production lines to switch the types of panels they produce - technology is substantially different.
So yeah, it's a pretty big bet. These factories are pretty much unsustainable without government incentives and money, so you can expect that the government will be paying for a long time to keep production there. It's just the nature of the beast.
Foxconn has factories in Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, India, Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, Czech Republic, South Korea, China of course, and it acquired former Sharp plants in Japan.
In China, just last year, one of their plants fired 60,000 workers because they automated part of the production line.
One can only hope that this thing isn't being rushed, that Wisconsin is drafting the contract in a way not to get screwed if the whole thing goes sour, and that it really brings jobs to the state. But honestly, the balance tips towards Foxconn in almost every front. I imagine there's almost no advantage in having a factory in the US for the company aside from having physical presence there. It's a PR and marketing move that only makes sense if the US government pays for part of the losses that the company will take in comparison of building that plant in any of the other countries they already have a presence at.
Bing comes as a default search engine (as does Edge), it's obligatory to use in Windows 10S, and Microsoft offers freebies for people who use it (a big reason why the percentage is so big in the US - Bing rewards is not available in several countries).
Sure, some people use and like it, but I'd say 9% worldwide is a huge failure when you are trying to sway the market with agressive strategies like those.