"Misinformation". Caught trying to bully people for exclusivity, products already came out to prove the dirty tactic was working, and refused to reply to questions made by costumers, people covering the subject, and whatnot. More likely caught red handed with shady tactics to corner the market and wanted to avoid a lawsuit. See guys, it wasn't only that nVidia was trying to put nVidia products into a separate brand than the competition, it's that they wanted exclusivity, they were shutting down access for bloggers and YouTubers for covering the subject, and the whole thing was done under threats against manufacturers and brands not being able to have access to all the benefits of a partner program if they didn't follow suit. The very basic strategy of "do you know who we are? If you don't do this you will never work with us again". Branding doesn't come cheap, which means most smaller manufacturers and even bigger ones didn't really want to create an entire new brand just to differentiate something that every freaking gamer worth their money already knew about. Most of the branding they've created for gamers was exactly that - to different products that were for gaming. Not to differentiate products that used x brand of graphics card. So what it effectively does is putting an extra barrier for smaller manufacturers to offer a line with AMD cards. And why the f*ck should nVidia be allowed to mandate desktop and laptop manufacturers to create a separate brand for their cards alone? Should manufacturers now also create a new brand only for Intel Wi-fi chips? For y brand of Ram memory? etc etc... see, of course the specs have to be clear, but there is no reason to force manufacturers to create separate branding for each and every component on a gaming rig. Can you imagine anyone in this particular market category being confused about desktops and laptops coming with an nVidia graphics card and an AMD one? With all the labeling and all the front page specs ads that we have?
This is great news, I hope the community comes up with great new ways of using the Switch that Nintendo isn't willing to do. Dual booting Android, being able to backup *gasp, such a novel notion* your saves, among several other things that the Switch has the hardware to do, but it doesn't because Nintendo fears it might create a pathway for a hack or something. Nintendo might hate it, but this could potentially make the Switch a thousand times more enticing for costumers. And yes, pirates will make use of the exploit. But I hate the fact that Nintendo keeps stepping back on features their paying costumers want just because of the potential for exploits. If the company is going to adopt an anti-consumer posture because of fears of piracy and exploits, I'd rather they end up with an unpatchable device so they can be freed of speculative crap.
Now Nintendo, your precious Switch is already wide open. Get to working on the features we are asking for. Signed, a paying costumer.
Yes, RCS is a replacement for SMS which is also not encrypted, but this is about Chat, the app that Google is packaging this protocol with standard in all Android phones in a near future, possibly in the next Android update. An no, just because RCS is a protocol doesn't mean it couldn't have included encryption there. It should have, but Google caved in to anti-privacy government and carrier demands. So the complaint still stands and is still fair. Stop apologizing for Google's crappy offerings.
At first, the answer is "obviously", but in this particular case things might be more complex than it looks. Why? Because both companies are smaller than the competition. It is a bad thing that companies like those need to merge to compete in the first place, no question about that. Then again, this means a closer to 3rd player will result from this merger. Which could potentially bring closer competition against Verizon and AT&T. Which could bring benefits to costumers.
On the other hand it'll probably be shitty for the people working there, and the scenario for closer competition with benefits to costumers is only a possibility. Given the records, it might be a distant possibility. The other possibility is the merger resulting in yet another giant joining the mob, oligopoly to adopt the exact same shitty practices because now they have dominance over several regions. I'm not familiar on how the current services of these companies are, but if they are as crappy as some say, I have a hard time imagining it'll get any better.
For the most part, corporations always gets shittier towards costumers the bigger they grow.
It should be obvious by now, right? I mean, if anyone thinks Cambridge Analytica was an isolated case... they must be clueless politicians who think any of this is new. Dude, Facebook has been harvesting this data from it's inception basically... and the whole games and apps thing was founded on the idea of allowing other companies to do exactly that. Obviously, they'll say it's to empower users and let more functionalities flow in, but if Facebook really had any intention of not letting others make use of the data they were harvesting, there would be privacy and security measures put in place there in the first place. Make no mistake, Facebook always knew this shit was happening. They might not have predicted that the data would be exploited and weaponized for political propaganda in such a bare and flagrant way, specially they might not have predicted that they'd be caught red handed, but it's not like they didn't know mass data harvesting was happening. They knew, they didn't care enough to do anything about it, and they probably profited a whole ton because of it. And let me tell you something: other social networks are just the same. They are also doing it, but Facebook was basically chosen as the symbolic lynchpin to be appaled against the practice. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and several other social networks have been embroigled in several private data scandals over the past couple of decades or so, they always comes with the same justifications, and they always react poorly. We always have a round of excuses, saying they are sorry, saying they'll try to do better, until the whole thing dwindles from public perception and they can resume focusing on what they care most: profitability and investors demands. A practice which, let me remind people, the government is also at fault - creating virtual traps and honeypots for mass surveillance efforts. If opaque data harvesting and shady usage of said data is something to be indignated about, let the government first look at the mirror and then start judging the private sector for following their example. People should know that neither Facebook nor other social networks will change from this. They have no choice. Their profitability depends on this. And you can make all your boycotting campaigns, your pedestal posts about leaving social networks, and all your anti-corporation posts... it will change nothing. Because not only said social networks already have a firm grasp on the majority of population that cares nothing about privacy, they already secured a way of harvesting data on you even if you are not on social networks yourself.
Let me ask something here because I might not be seeing the complete picture. Is this a bad thing? If so, why?
I have a couple of domains that I always felt extremely uncomfortable for them demanding that I list personally identifiable data to register, and that it would be exposed in listings for anyone and everyone to find out if they wanted to. This single fact always gave me pause on publishing stuff and speaking my voice out for the potential of having trolls and whatnot finding out my private information and essencially doxing me. I dunno how exactly things work in other countries, but I was never given the option to make this information anonymized or private - not even paying more for it.
So, I might be missing something here, but personally, good riddance. And see that I'm not saying the info shouldn't be given... for criminal cases and whatnot, the information should still be there. Just not exposed bare in public.
I'm not an Apple user anyways, but I was expecting Apple to at least try to go after this. I mean, I do understand how hard it is to come up with a perfect mix on this, but I'm expecting that at some point we'd have devices flexible enough to work both in tablet or laptop/desktop mode without any compromises.
This is probably something that'd have to be lead by Apple, like it or not. Microsoft is absolutely clueless on what to do with Windows these days, what with scaring away people with telemetry, trying to force stupid old ideas like Windows 10S, and just running out of stock for it's last Windows phone units. Android and Chromecast just won't do. Linux has all but killed it's first and last attempts on adapting to smartphones and tablets, there are no big active developments, and it just seems that the OS will never work well with those.
I haven't gave up on my dream of having a single device/hardware for all though. But with Windows laptops using mobile CPUs showing up, smartphones becoming more powerful by the day, and the need for a more streamlined computing experience... I'm not sure why Cook would outright deny the whole thing like that. Obviously, it plays against the company. They'd be selling one less device per costumer there. This is the point I hate corporations going for anti cannibalization stuff instead of what's best for costumers.
I guess some people might be too young or have too short memories, but this is nothing new. It's a tactic played well by his father that he must've learned exactly how to play from an young age. Make threats and become belligerent when a new US president shows up, escalate aggression, call the world's attention, put everyone on high alert. Internally you ramp up nationalism, tell citizens their way of living is being threatened, ramp up defense, the leader gets to say he'll do everything to defend the "greatest country" or some bullshit. Then he goes on diplomacy mode, say he wants peace and negotiation, make promises to see how the global landscape will react, try to cut out deals to cut through sanctions and whatnot, play the good guy while secretly building up for the next round with weapons development. Rinse and repeat. That's all there is to it. It's a cycle that has basically happened to every US president in the past couple of decades or so. It works, there is no better way of dealing with it, and it guarantees that North Korea will remain a dictatorship for a very long time.
Be it Silicon Valley or the government itself, the problem is that all those people are living in bubbles brought by income inequality. Doesn't matter how much sympathy you have, when you live your life completely surrounded by people that are in a similar situation to yours, and you cannot bother to see other peoples' needs and everyday lives outside your bubble, you cannot understand what you need to do to get in touch with them. But this has always been a reality. Silicon Valley is no exception. It's just another elite group. The major problem I see these days with Trumpism and all is the polarization and absolute unwillingness to recognize that such a thing exists. It is no secret, perhaps only not perceived by the most fanatical Trump fans. He doesn't and has never leaded anything "for the people". He does it for himself. He only "gets" his own interests, the only right thing for him is the way he does things, he's never wrong, and he accepts no outside input unless it's aligned with his own. If there are any good outcomes from his government, it'll be about things that attend his own agenda. This is nothing new. It has been clear as day and out there for anyone to see for years before the election - he's basically just acting the way he always did, as a prepotent boss, on his shows, and whatnot. Silicon Valley is much of the same crap. People keep throwing money at these self professed geniouses that seemingly never had any experiences hanging around with us "normies". What you get is a bunch of startups creating crap that only makes sense for themselves. An overpriced juice pack squeezer, a hipster vending machine, urban mobility for the 1%, mobile apps that only solves their own perceived problems. The US will never get out of those loops until it seriously starts working on the income gap problem.
This is also why China is winning. Despite all the flaws of the country, which are huge, the people working there to make things are closer to the average worldwide citizen reality. And even China is quickly becoming elitized, because that's just the model it's following.
It was what... close to a decade ago now? When Steve Jobs made that post about Flash not being on i devices. Back then, him and a whole bunch of fanboy tech blogs said that it was the end of Flash, that it was not worth keeping it, etc etc. Back then I also made a prediction that Flash would be going nowhere anytime soon, and that despite it's flaws, until HTML 5 came around and even then, Flash would still be around just because of how ubiquitous it had become, how some of it's functionalities cannot be fully replaced by anything else that we had available back at the time. While I agreed that it was a cesspool of vulnerabilities and that Macromedia couldn't make the platform work, due to Flash being used on millions of websites in even small things like ad banners and whatnot, it would take a very very long time for it to go away. 5% is still too much. Sure, most of those websites are probably abandoned by now, and a whole bunch of other cases must be on websites that have clueless or no administration at all, still keeping some old flash banner or something. But like I predicted, it really took years upon years for the Internet in parts of the world to even be useful without Flash. In the US, trends might get around faster, but in other countries you still had some big services relying on Flash to do some ridiculous stuff to the point you could only use the webpage if you had the plugin installed. That forceful nature of Apple to assume their "way" has to be uniformly better for everyone is just another bullet point by now on why I never adopted Apple devices in the first place. Again, while I agreed that Flash had to go at some point, I really didn't like how it being bad was used to justify why Flash pages didn't work on i devices. But perhaps it was just better that way. Apple got pretty well estabilished as a company that makes products for people to use the way the company wants them to, not the way the users do. And it has worked very well for them.
...the OLPC idea was not bad at it's core, but the execution was poor and it eventually got replaced by commercial ideas. First of all, historical perspective. This was over 10 years ago, couple of years before even Netbooks which also failed but was a commercial counter proposition of sorts. Back then, we didn't have tablets, the first iPhone was still to be announced (it was launched in 2007 too), laptops were hugely expensive, and there was no de-facto option for cheaper kids oriented devices. I think at most schools had some sort of partnership with Microsoft with a lab filled with older Windows Me PCs... which anyone can understand how crappy an experience that would be.:P
Problem at execution: It came as a grand announcement, one laptop for every kid in schools that needed it, accessibility for the masses, education, etc etc. But the execution failed. It was supposed to be 100 bucks, but that price quickly raised when the people behind it realized it was impossible, at the time, to make a durable laptop with enough power to be useful, given that it'd be passing through lots of students hands. There were delays, partner conflicts, criticism on adoption of x or y hardware and software, some thoughts for and against going with open source stuff, etc etc etc. Initial batches often got stolen or broken, the software experience and design was subpart in functionality, and in the end the project, from it's inception, was just a couple of years or so away from the explosion in popularity for smartphones, tablets, and whatnot. Funding, which initially attracted lots of big players and names, soon ran dry. Commercial counterparts that tried to match the pricing scheme also came out few years later... netbooks, EEE PCs (tabletops), among others. Nowadays, with tablet and smartphone prices as they are, together with devboards and portable computers... it just doesn't make any sense anymore as a product category.
And I feel that the entire philosophy of OLPCs suffers from a plague in thinking that is still here to this day: the overestimation of a market often envisioned by tech savvy people, of folks that "don't need a whole lot from a computer". Chromebooks, underpowered devices, Linux boxes, stick computers, plus a whole bunch of other stuff fits the same product category.
You see, a whole ton of people think that there is this huge vast market of non-computer savvy people for which an underpowered device will do more than enough. I've never seen concrete numbers on this, but there is always some project somewhere of devices targeted for those. But more often than not, it's exactly these supposedly non-tech savvy consumers that will always have one specific but strong need for a computer that takes them away from this imaginary category. The market is way more complex than that. It's not only what they might use a computer for, it's the network of support, the learning rate, the environment the device is inserted on, niche needs, usability cases, accessory and peripheral compatibility, specific software, plus a whole bunch of other stuff that will really tell if a product will fit someone's needs or not.
I'm saying this as someone who fell into the "it's enough" trap over and over again until I realized it was a waste of money. My mom is borderline computer illiterate. She uses it for work as a real estate agent, and for the longest time her needs were around e-mail checking, browsing, and typing Word stuff. So the EEE PC, older desktops and laptops of mine, tiny computers and others are actually on the list of stuff I tried getting from my mom. She currently has my older iPad 2, a Kangaroo PC, and she had several of my older smartphones until I got her an LG Stylus G4, which is now being replaced for a Xiaomi Mi A1 Android One edition.
You see, I have realized that when you are thinking of hardware for people like her, you need to think about the needs on a micro and macro scale. Sometimes, not being tech savvy enough implies needing more hard
"Take personal responsibility for your own social life. Go back to engaging flesh and blood people without tech companies serving as an intermediary. Eschew the narcissistic impulse to broadcast the excruciating minutiae of your life to the world. Refuse to accept the mandate that you must participate in social media in order to participate in society. Reclaim your autonomy."
How about YOU stop assuming others use social networks for the crap you probably used it for?
...and city channel moderator, I'll say this: it won't work. People left Orkut to get on Facebook for a reason. If you never used it, think about MySpace rebranding itself and trying to become relevant once again.
Sorry guys, you are realizing this too late. Chinese conglomerates are buying everything that's cash strapped and might have some use for them in the future. In the particular case of schools, I'm not even sure if chinese government interference is as bad as american government interference anymore... at least the first one is not completely guaranteed, and there will be some pressure for regulation on the neutrality of educational material. The second not only is currently set to destroy the entire system, it's also often trying to butt in with religious crap and let the market work it's way kinda mentality.
...someone using Ubunto on their smartphone. Oh no wait, you guys cancelled that one. How about a young guy going into the settings to check if telemetry is off. https://news.slashdot.org/stor... If you want more ideas, I'll be here all day.
While that might be half true, it's also true that the vast majority of the entire Android market doesn't have, and might not ever have access to this latest Android version that is supposedly as secure as the competition. So the point is moot.
In fact, the only way to get that version of Android anytime soon would be by getting a Pixel phone. Because that's the only device that has the latest core/vanilla Android version. Other than that, perhaps a few Android One and Go devices. And that, for the global Android market, must be way bellow 1% of users. I'm not sure if it's even 0.01% of the global market.
Beyond that, Google cannot guarantee anything, because they really don't know. Most of the security and privacy breaches in the platform's history remains unpatched for a metric ton of Android devices, a whole ton of problems that emerged in recent years regarding spyware, telemetry, smartphone brands harvesting personally identifiable information surreptiously (thanks OnePlus), and a bunch of other safety problems came from Android skins/forks that Google has no way to completely control. And no, even Project Treble and other initiatives will be enough - they'll help, but they won't be enough. And then the deathknell of supposed safety: as long as you can sideload apks into an Android device, it can never be considered as secure as a walled garden closed off system as iOS. Of course, lots of Android users (including myself) gladly accepts the risk for the openness, but that alone is enough for Android to never be as "safe" a platform as iOS. It's about the paradigm, not the OS.
1. Most USB Type-C implementations in devices are half assed and skips a whole ton of features, including the video transmission support. Unfortunately, it's just the way it goes... for all the promises made with USB Type-C, it mostly carried all of the problems standard USB already had. Among USB Type-C implementations on the market right now there must be at least half a dozen ways it's implemented or more... two or 4 lane for data, HDMI support or not, 2 way power or not, daisy chaining capabilities or not, a variety of how much power it can handle and all sorts of other stuff. Not only that, but device manufacturers makes it incredibly hard, when not downright impossible, for you to find out what exactly they have in their devices. Particularly for smartphones, it's never explicited, not even in technical specifications. Much like USB OtG in the past, plus MHL, and several other capabilities, those were all hidden from the costumer. So, it highly depends on what device you have if you'll even be able to get a video signal or not. Which in turn demotivates manufacturers to develop dongles, accessories and devices with a full USB Type-C implementation in mind;
2. Proprietary standards for video transmission. As far as I know, since before USB-C, you had Miracast (Microsoft and others), AirPlay (Apple), WiDi (Intel) and something called DIAL which is the standard Chromecast uses. Those are all for wireless video transmissions, and all of them are proprietary. And these are not the only ones, just standards tied to better known brands. For wired via USB you had stuff like MHL and SlimPort, the later pretty much dead now. As far as I know, USB Type-C potentially has wired video support (implementation depends on manufacturer) for one standard alone: HDMI Alt Mode, which is an extention of MHL. Some USB Type-C dongles designed more for laptops have it, but again, it depends if the device itself will work with it. I don't know of any smartphones that can handle it, potentially because of power limitations, but perhaps there is some out there. If you wanna go this route, look for the full featured hubs that Kensington makes - but those are wired, so I guess it's not your case. Then there's Thunderbolt 3, which shares the same connector of USB Type-C, which can also have support for DisplayPort Alt Mode in a similar fashion. Kensington also makes full featured hubs for those. There are several other brands, but this is the one I've seen tested and working.
So you see, it's not only about having the connectors or not, it's also about having the hardware, firmware and software - protocols for video transmission and whatnot. And those are why it's pretty hard to find the solution you are looking for. I don't know about any dedicated protocol specific for USB Type-C devices to work with wireless video transmission, and I'm not sure if there's any real advantage to make something this specific... wireless transmission protocols are usually developed as an independent thing regardless of what standard for connector is used.
The closest thing I can suggest for what you want is a Miracast compatible dongle. I personally have one from Actiontec model ScreenBeamMini2. It's similar to a Chromecast, it came before Chromecasts were around, you'll need to connect it to the TV's HDMI port and also power it with a regular USB cable. The difference to Chromecasts is that it's not tied to Google or Chrome, for compatible devices it'll mirror the entire screen. But you'll need to see about that compatibility... Windows tablets and laptops usually are compatible, and several brands of smartphones also are. But if it's not explicit anywhere that the device is Miracast compatible, you'll have to dig deeper to see if it is.
The problem with development is that the tech is low selling, didn't catch a mainstream market, is spread out because of proprietary standards, and has to deal with that extreme fragmentation in standards implementation and compati
The fact that we even need studies like this to show to some politicians and people is just ridiculous, but it does show the ignorant age we're living in... Dude, it's been at least a couple of decades now that we have violent games, and not only several of the most successful franchises in existence could be considered violent games, the gaming industry itself has been the biggest among entertainment industries for quite a while now. We're talking about hundreds of millions of gamers in the US alone, going well above billions worldwide. A fairly significant share of those are playing supposedly violent games. If those have any significant effects in behaviour, we'd be living something close to Mad Max these days. You have to quite frankly be a moron and completely ignorant on the subject these days to think violent games would make people violent. A whole ton of the most notorious shooting cases and terrorist attacks are completely disconnected with games, and the few that are never implied that violent games were the cause - it was usually psychological disorders tied to bullying, paranoia or depression. As most should know, correlation does not mean causation. If you are violent yourself and you play violent games, that does not mean the game is producing that violence, it just means that violent people might prefer playing violent games, which is only logical. Not that the games causes violent behaviour, not that games have some magical behavioural transforming power, not that violent games are only liked by violent people. There are tons and tons and tons of people (including myself) who have played 200+ hours of games like Counter Strike and whatnot, who would never want to shoot someone else, or even want to own a gun. And yet, we need studies to prove some morons who don't know what they are talking about that violent games is not the root cause for violence in real life. It's fucking amazing. Having to waste all this time and money because of such ignorance.
That's another way to attack the problem, but you can see in itself the advantage for an RSS reader - it doesn't have to load a whole ton of pages and their formats, it's easier on limited dataplans and on the browser itself.:D
That actually depends on source. Some blogs/websites display full content, some don't. You still have to click through if you wanna make a comment, for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
"Misinformation".
Caught trying to bully people for exclusivity, products already came out to prove the dirty tactic was working, and refused to reply to questions made by costumers, people covering the subject, and whatnot.
More likely caught red handed with shady tactics to corner the market and wanted to avoid a lawsuit.
See guys, it wasn't only that nVidia was trying to put nVidia products into a separate brand than the competition, it's that they wanted exclusivity, they were shutting down access for bloggers and YouTubers for covering the subject, and the whole thing was done under threats against manufacturers and brands not being able to have access to all the benefits of a partner program if they didn't follow suit.
The very basic strategy of "do you know who we are? If you don't do this you will never work with us again".
Branding doesn't come cheap, which means most smaller manufacturers and even bigger ones didn't really want to create an entire new brand just to differentiate something that every freaking gamer worth their money already knew about. Most of the branding they've created for gamers was exactly that - to different products that were for gaming. Not to differentiate products that used x brand of graphics card.
So what it effectively does is putting an extra barrier for smaller manufacturers to offer a line with AMD cards.
And why the f*ck should nVidia be allowed to mandate desktop and laptop manufacturers to create a separate brand for their cards alone?
Should manufacturers now also create a new brand only for Intel Wi-fi chips? For y brand of Ram memory? etc etc... see, of course the specs have to be clear, but there is no reason to force manufacturers to create separate branding for each and every component on a gaming rig.
Can you imagine anyone in this particular market category being confused about desktops and laptops coming with an nVidia graphics card and an AMD one? With all the labeling and all the front page specs ads that we have?
I, for one, welcome out cows overlords
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This is great news, I hope the community comes up with great new ways of using the Switch that Nintendo isn't willing to do.
Dual booting Android, being able to backup *gasp, such a novel notion* your saves, among several other things that the Switch has the hardware to do, but it doesn't because Nintendo fears it might create a pathway for a hack or something.
Nintendo might hate it, but this could potentially make the Switch a thousand times more enticing for costumers.
And yes, pirates will make use of the exploit. But I hate the fact that Nintendo keeps stepping back on features their paying costumers want just because of the potential for exploits. If the company is going to adopt an anti-consumer posture because of fears of piracy and exploits, I'd rather they end up with an unpatchable device so they can be freed of speculative crap.
Now Nintendo, your precious Switch is already wide open. Get to working on the features we are asking for.
Signed, a paying costumer.
Yes, RCS is a replacement for SMS which is also not encrypted, but this is about Chat, the app that Google is packaging this protocol with standard in all Android phones in a near future, possibly in the next Android update.
An no, just because RCS is a protocol doesn't mean it couldn't have included encryption there.
It should have, but Google caved in to anti-privacy government and carrier demands.
So the complaint still stands and is still fair.
Stop apologizing for Google's crappy offerings.
At first, the answer is "obviously", but in this particular case things might be more complex than it looks.
Why? Because both companies are smaller than the competition.
It is a bad thing that companies like those need to merge to compete in the first place, no question about that.
Then again, this means a closer to 3rd player will result from this merger. Which could potentially bring closer competition against Verizon and AT&T. Which could bring benefits to costumers.
On the other hand it'll probably be shitty for the people working there, and the scenario for closer competition with benefits to costumers is only a possibility. Given the records, it might be a distant possibility. The other possibility is the merger resulting in yet another giant joining the mob, oligopoly to adopt the exact same shitty practices because now they have dominance over several regions.
I'm not familiar on how the current services of these companies are, but if they are as crappy as some say, I have a hard time imagining it'll get any better.
For the most part, corporations always gets shittier towards costumers the bigger they grow.
It should be obvious by now, right?
I mean, if anyone thinks Cambridge Analytica was an isolated case... they must be clueless politicians who think any of this is new.
Dude, Facebook has been harvesting this data from it's inception basically... and the whole games and apps thing was founded on the idea of allowing other companies to do exactly that. Obviously, they'll say it's to empower users and let more functionalities flow in, but if Facebook really had any intention of not letting others make use of the data they were harvesting, there would be privacy and security measures put in place there in the first place.
Make no mistake, Facebook always knew this shit was happening. They might not have predicted that the data would be exploited and weaponized for political propaganda in such a bare and flagrant way, specially they might not have predicted that they'd be caught red handed, but it's not like they didn't know mass data harvesting was happening. They knew, they didn't care enough to do anything about it, and they probably profited a whole ton because of it.
And let me tell you something: other social networks are just the same. They are also doing it, but Facebook was basically chosen as the symbolic lynchpin to be appaled against the practice. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and several other social networks have been embroigled in several private data scandals over the past couple of decades or so, they always comes with the same justifications, and they always react poorly. We always have a round of excuses, saying they are sorry, saying they'll try to do better, until the whole thing dwindles from public perception and they can resume focusing on what they care most: profitability and investors demands.
A practice which, let me remind people, the government is also at fault - creating virtual traps and honeypots for mass surveillance efforts.
If opaque data harvesting and shady usage of said data is something to be indignated about, let the government first look at the mirror and then start judging the private sector for following their example.
People should know that neither Facebook nor other social networks will change from this. They have no choice. Their profitability depends on this. And you can make all your boycotting campaigns, your pedestal posts about leaving social networks, and all your anti-corporation posts... it will change nothing. Because not only said social networks already have a firm grasp on the majority of population that cares nothing about privacy, they already secured a way of harvesting data on you even if you are not on social networks yourself.
Let me ask something here because I might not be seeing the complete picture.
Is this a bad thing? If so, why?
I have a couple of domains that I always felt extremely uncomfortable for them demanding that I list personally identifiable data to register, and that it would be exposed in listings for anyone and everyone to find out if they wanted to.
This single fact always gave me pause on publishing stuff and speaking my voice out for the potential of having trolls and whatnot finding out my private information and essencially doxing me.
I dunno how exactly things work in other countries, but I was never given the option to make this information anonymized or private - not even paying more for it.
So, I might be missing something here, but personally, good riddance.
And see that I'm not saying the info shouldn't be given... for criminal cases and whatnot, the information should still be there. Just not exposed bare in public.
I'm not an Apple user anyways, but I was expecting Apple to at least try to go after this.
I mean, I do understand how hard it is to come up with a perfect mix on this, but I'm expecting that at some point we'd have devices flexible enough to work both in tablet or laptop/desktop mode without any compromises.
This is probably something that'd have to be lead by Apple, like it or not. Microsoft is absolutely clueless on what to do with Windows these days, what with scaring away people with telemetry, trying to force stupid old ideas like Windows 10S, and just running out of stock for it's last Windows phone units.
Android and Chromecast just won't do.
Linux has all but killed it's first and last attempts on adapting to smartphones and tablets, there are no big active developments, and it just seems that the OS will never work well with those.
I haven't gave up on my dream of having a single device/hardware for all though. But with Windows laptops using mobile CPUs showing up, smartphones becoming more powerful by the day, and the need for a more streamlined computing experience... I'm not sure why Cook would outright deny the whole thing like that. Obviously, it plays against the company. They'd be selling one less device per costumer there. This is the point I hate corporations going for anti cannibalization stuff instead of what's best for costumers.
But eventually, the market figures it out.
I guess some people might be too young or have too short memories, but this is nothing new.
It's a tactic played well by his father that he must've learned exactly how to play from an young age.
Make threats and become belligerent when a new US president shows up, escalate aggression, call the world's attention, put everyone on high alert. Internally you ramp up nationalism, tell citizens their way of living is being threatened, ramp up defense, the leader gets to say he'll do everything to defend the "greatest country" or some bullshit.
Then he goes on diplomacy mode, say he wants peace and negotiation, make promises to see how the global landscape will react, try to cut out deals to cut through sanctions and whatnot, play the good guy while secretly building up for the next round with weapons development.
Rinse and repeat. That's all there is to it. It's a cycle that has basically happened to every US president in the past couple of decades or so. It works, there is no better way of dealing with it, and it guarantees that North Korea will remain a dictatorship for a very long time.
Be it Silicon Valley or the government itself, the problem is that all those people are living in bubbles brought by income inequality.
Doesn't matter how much sympathy you have, when you live your life completely surrounded by people that are in a similar situation to yours, and you cannot bother to see other peoples' needs and everyday lives outside your bubble, you cannot understand what you need to do to get in touch with them.
But this has always been a reality. Silicon Valley is no exception. It's just another elite group.
The major problem I see these days with Trumpism and all is the polarization and absolute unwillingness to recognize that such a thing exists.
It is no secret, perhaps only not perceived by the most fanatical Trump fans. He doesn't and has never leaded anything "for the people". He does it for himself. He only "gets" his own interests, the only right thing for him is the way he does things, he's never wrong, and he accepts no outside input unless it's aligned with his own.
If there are any good outcomes from his government, it'll be about things that attend his own agenda.
This is nothing new. It has been clear as day and out there for anyone to see for years before the election - he's basically just acting the way he always did, as a prepotent boss, on his shows, and whatnot.
Silicon Valley is much of the same crap. People keep throwing money at these self professed geniouses that seemingly never had any experiences hanging around with us "normies".
What you get is a bunch of startups creating crap that only makes sense for themselves. An overpriced juice pack squeezer, a hipster vending machine, urban mobility for the 1%, mobile apps that only solves their own perceived problems.
The US will never get out of those loops until it seriously starts working on the income gap problem.
This is also why China is winning. Despite all the flaws of the country, which are huge, the people working there to make things are closer to the average worldwide citizen reality. And even China is quickly becoming elitized, because that's just the model it's following.
It was what... close to a decade ago now? When Steve Jobs made that post about Flash not being on i devices.
Back then, him and a whole bunch of fanboy tech blogs said that it was the end of Flash, that it was not worth keeping it, etc etc.
Back then I also made a prediction that Flash would be going nowhere anytime soon, and that despite it's flaws, until HTML 5 came around and even then, Flash would still be around just because of how ubiquitous it had become, how some of it's functionalities cannot be fully replaced by anything else that we had available back at the time.
While I agreed that it was a cesspool of vulnerabilities and that Macromedia couldn't make the platform work, due to Flash being used on millions of websites in even small things like ad banners and whatnot, it would take a very very long time for it to go away.
5% is still too much. Sure, most of those websites are probably abandoned by now, and a whole bunch of other cases must be on websites that have clueless or no administration at all, still keeping some old flash banner or something.
But like I predicted, it really took years upon years for the Internet in parts of the world to even be useful without Flash. In the US, trends might get around faster, but in other countries you still had some big services relying on Flash to do some ridiculous stuff to the point you could only use the webpage if you had the plugin installed.
That forceful nature of Apple to assume their "way" has to be uniformly better for everyone is just another bullet point by now on why I never adopted Apple devices in the first place.
Again, while I agreed that Flash had to go at some point, I really didn't like how it being bad was used to justify why Flash pages didn't work on i devices.
But perhaps it was just better that way. Apple got pretty well estabilished as a company that makes products for people to use the way the company wants them to, not the way the users do. And it has worked very well for them.
...the OLPC idea was not bad at it's core, but the execution was poor and it eventually got replaced by commercial ideas. :P
First of all, historical perspective. This was over 10 years ago, couple of years before even Netbooks which also failed but was a commercial counter proposition of sorts.
Back then, we didn't have tablets, the first iPhone was still to be announced (it was launched in 2007 too), laptops were hugely expensive, and there was no de-facto option for cheaper kids oriented devices.
I think at most schools had some sort of partnership with Microsoft with a lab filled with older Windows Me PCs... which anyone can understand how crappy an experience that would be.
Problem at execution: It came as a grand announcement, one laptop for every kid in schools that needed it, accessibility for the masses, education, etc etc. But the execution failed. It was supposed to be 100 bucks, but that price quickly raised when the people behind it realized it was impossible, at the time, to make a durable laptop with enough power to be useful, given that it'd be passing through lots of students hands.
There were delays, partner conflicts, criticism on adoption of x or y hardware and software, some thoughts for and against going with open source stuff, etc etc etc.
Initial batches often got stolen or broken, the software experience and design was subpart in functionality, and in the end the project, from it's inception, was just a couple of years or so away from the explosion in popularity for smartphones, tablets, and whatnot.
Funding, which initially attracted lots of big players and names, soon ran dry.
Commercial counterparts that tried to match the pricing scheme also came out few years later... netbooks, EEE PCs (tabletops), among others.
Nowadays, with tablet and smartphone prices as they are, together with devboards and portable computers... it just doesn't make any sense anymore as a product category.
And I feel that the entire philosophy of OLPCs suffers from a plague in thinking that is still here to this day: the overestimation of a market often envisioned by tech savvy people, of folks that "don't need a whole lot from a computer". Chromebooks, underpowered devices, Linux boxes, stick computers, plus a whole bunch of other stuff fits the same product category.
You see, a whole ton of people think that there is this huge vast market of non-computer savvy people for which an underpowered device will do more than enough. I've never seen concrete numbers on this, but there is always some project somewhere of devices targeted for those.
But more often than not, it's exactly these supposedly non-tech savvy consumers that will always have one specific but strong need for a computer that takes them away from this imaginary category. The market is way more complex than that. It's not only what they might use a computer for, it's the network of support, the learning rate, the environment the device is inserted on, niche needs, usability cases, accessory and peripheral compatibility, specific software, plus a whole bunch of other stuff that will really tell if a product will fit someone's needs or not.
I'm saying this as someone who fell into the "it's enough" trap over and over again until I realized it was a waste of money. My mom is borderline computer illiterate. She uses it for work as a real estate agent, and for the longest time her needs were around e-mail checking, browsing, and typing Word stuff.
So the EEE PC, older desktops and laptops of mine, tiny computers and others are actually on the list of stuff I tried getting from my mom. She currently has my older iPad 2, a Kangaroo PC, and she had several of my older smartphones until I got her an LG Stylus G4, which is now being replaced for a Xiaomi Mi A1 Android One edition.
You see, I have realized that when you are thinking of hardware for people like her, you need to think about the needs on a micro and macro scale. Sometimes, not being tech savvy enough implies needing more hard
And I want to live in a luxurious high rise in Tokyo, so what?
I am really tired of crap like this:
"Take personal responsibility for your own social life. Go back to engaging flesh and blood people without tech companies serving as an intermediary. Eschew the narcissistic impulse to broadcast the excruciating minutiae of your life to the world. Refuse to accept the mandate that you must participate in social media in order to participate in society. Reclaim your autonomy."
How about YOU stop assuming others use social networks for the crap you probably used it for?
...and city channel moderator, I'll say this: it won't work. People left Orkut to get on Facebook for a reason. If you never used it, think about MySpace rebranding itself and trying to become relevant once again.
Sorry guys, you are realizing this too late. Chinese conglomerates are buying everything that's cash strapped and might have some use for them in the future.
In the particular case of schools, I'm not even sure if chinese government interference is as bad as american government interference anymore... at least the first one is not completely guaranteed, and there will be some pressure for regulation on the neutrality of educational material. The second not only is currently set to destroy the entire system, it's also often trying to butt in with religious crap and let the market work it's way kinda mentality.
YouTube Will 'Frustrate' Some Users With Ads So They use adblockers
There, fixed.
...closing down all outlets that are not seen as pro-regime.
Something we really don't need: a chinese sized North Korea.
...someone using Ubunto on their smartphone. Oh no wait, you guys cancelled that one.
How about a young guy going into the settings to check if telemetry is off.
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
If you want more ideas, I'll be here all day.
While that might be half true, it's also true that the vast majority of the entire Android market doesn't have, and might not ever have access to this latest Android version that is supposedly as secure as the competition. So the point is moot.
In fact, the only way to get that version of Android anytime soon would be by getting a Pixel phone. Because that's the only device that has the latest core/vanilla Android version. Other than that, perhaps a few Android One and Go devices. And that, for the global Android market, must be way bellow 1% of users. I'm not sure if it's even 0.01% of the global market.
Beyond that, Google cannot guarantee anything, because they really don't know. Most of the security and privacy breaches in the platform's history remains unpatched for a metric ton of Android devices, a whole ton of problems that emerged in recent years regarding spyware, telemetry, smartphone brands harvesting personally identifiable information surreptiously (thanks OnePlus), and a bunch of other safety problems came from Android skins/forks that Google has no way to completely control. And no, even Project Treble and other initiatives will be enough - they'll help, but they won't be enough.
And then the deathknell of supposed safety: as long as you can sideload apks into an Android device, it can never be considered as secure as a walled garden closed off system as iOS. Of course, lots of Android users (including myself) gladly accepts the risk for the openness, but that alone is enough for Android to never be as "safe" a platform as iOS. It's about the paradigm, not the OS.
The problem you are likely to find is two fold.
1. Most USB Type-C implementations in devices are half assed and skips a whole ton of features, including the video transmission support. Unfortunately, it's just the way it goes... for all the promises made with USB Type-C, it mostly carried all of the problems standard USB already had.
Among USB Type-C implementations on the market right now there must be at least half a dozen ways it's implemented or more... two or 4 lane for data, HDMI support or not, 2 way power or not, daisy chaining capabilities or not, a variety of how much power it can handle and all sorts of other stuff. Not only that, but device manufacturers makes it incredibly hard, when not downright impossible, for you to find out what exactly they have in their devices. Particularly for smartphones, it's never explicited, not even in technical specifications.
Much like USB OtG in the past, plus MHL, and several other capabilities, those were all hidden from the costumer.
So, it highly depends on what device you have if you'll even be able to get a video signal or not. Which in turn demotivates manufacturers to develop dongles, accessories and devices with a full USB Type-C implementation in mind;
2. Proprietary standards for video transmission. As far as I know, since before USB-C, you had Miracast (Microsoft and others), AirPlay (Apple), WiDi (Intel) and something called DIAL which is the standard Chromecast uses. Those are all for wireless video transmissions, and all of them are proprietary. And these are not the only ones, just standards tied to better known brands.
For wired via USB you had stuff like MHL and SlimPort, the later pretty much dead now.
As far as I know, USB Type-C potentially has wired video support (implementation depends on manufacturer) for one standard alone: HDMI Alt Mode, which is an extention of MHL. Some USB Type-C dongles designed more for laptops have it, but again, it depends if the device itself will work with it. I don't know of any smartphones that can handle it, potentially because of power limitations, but perhaps there is some out there. If you wanna go this route, look for the full featured hubs that Kensington makes - but those are wired, so I guess it's not your case.
Then there's Thunderbolt 3, which shares the same connector of USB Type-C, which can also have support for DisplayPort Alt Mode in a similar fashion. Kensington also makes full featured hubs for those. There are several other brands, but this is the one I've seen tested and working.
So you see, it's not only about having the connectors or not, it's also about having the hardware, firmware and software - protocols for video transmission and whatnot. And those are why it's pretty hard to find the solution you are looking for. I don't know about any dedicated protocol specific for USB Type-C devices to work with wireless video transmission, and I'm not sure if there's any real advantage to make something this specific... wireless transmission protocols are usually developed as an independent thing regardless of what standard for connector is used.
The closest thing I can suggest for what you want is a Miracast compatible dongle. I personally have one from Actiontec model ScreenBeamMini2. It's similar to a Chromecast, it came before Chromecasts were around, you'll need to connect it to the TV's HDMI port and also power it with a regular USB cable. The difference to Chromecasts is that it's not tied to Google or Chrome, for compatible devices it'll mirror the entire screen. But you'll need to see about that compatibility... Windows tablets and laptops usually are compatible, and several brands of smartphones also are. But if it's not explicit anywhere that the device is Miracast compatible, you'll have to dig deeper to see if it is.
The problem with development is that the tech is low selling, didn't catch a mainstream market, is spread out because of proprietary standards, and has to deal with that extreme fragmentation in standards implementation and compati
Making it a 'day of quiet reflection' instead of '2 minutes of hate' doesn't make it any less dystopic.
The fact that we even need studies like this to show to some politicians and people is just ridiculous, but it does show the ignorant age we're living in...
Dude, it's been at least a couple of decades now that we have violent games, and not only several of the most successful franchises in existence could be considered violent games, the gaming industry itself has been the biggest among entertainment industries for quite a while now.
We're talking about hundreds of millions of gamers in the US alone, going well above billions worldwide.
A fairly significant share of those are playing supposedly violent games.
If those have any significant effects in behaviour, we'd be living something close to Mad Max these days.
You have to quite frankly be a moron and completely ignorant on the subject these days to think violent games would make people violent.
A whole ton of the most notorious shooting cases and terrorist attacks are completely disconnected with games, and the few that are never implied that violent games were the cause - it was usually psychological disorders tied to bullying, paranoia or depression.
As most should know, correlation does not mean causation. If you are violent yourself and you play violent games, that does not mean the game is producing that violence, it just means that violent people might prefer playing violent games, which is only logical. Not that the games causes violent behaviour, not that games have some magical behavioural transforming power, not that violent games are only liked by violent people. There are tons and tons and tons of people (including myself) who have played 200+ hours of games like Counter Strike and whatnot, who would never want to shoot someone else, or even want to own a gun.
And yet, we need studies to prove some morons who don't know what they are talking about that violent games is not the root cause for violence in real life. It's fucking amazing. Having to waste all this time and money because of such ignorance.
That's another way to attack the problem, but you can see in itself the advantage for an RSS reader - it doesn't have to load a whole ton of pages and their formats, it's easier on limited dataplans and on the browser itself. :D
That actually depends on source. Some blogs/websites display full content, some don't. You still have to click through if you wanna make a comment, for instance.