Why do we need a report for this? This was known from start. Anyone who thought otherwise has to be either blind or completely disconnected with reality. If you got into the service thinking you'd have the same conditions of a regular stable job, you were conned. Get out. Things won't get better. Uber drivers who are putting their livelihoods in stake for the company only have themselves and their ignorance to blame for. I'm sorry, but it's the f*cking true. In this case, I have absolutely no sympathy. Wake up and smell the coffee or something.
Remember people, Uber was never created to replace cabs. It's NOT a "taxi-hailing app". What an idiotic way to call the service. It never was, nor it'll ever be. It was supposed to be ride sharing. The concept was to get a little bit of money to give people rides during your commute or something, it was never designed for people to make a living. The whole thing was built in a way to make the company be as disconnected from people who used it (from both sides) in the first place. It's eBay, it's Craigslist, it's Gazelle.
Uber and all other similar companies will invest all their money to keep this concept as is because they cannot operate otherwise. They might have lost some cases in courts, but the company will always keep fighting to be seen as a service to connect clients and costumers. To think that Uber cares about drivers and passangers worries is dangerous is misguided. They don't care. Moves towards those directions is purely for PR and image purposes, it's not and has never been the core of it. Their only real worry is making the app available without fail for as long as possible.
They cannot operate as a taxi service, because taxi service already exists and it's fundamentally different. It's also not charity, the money has to come from somewhere. If you as a passanger where asking yourself how taxi service can be so much more expensive than Uber, there's your answer.
The original concept has been warped beyond belief, people who hate cabs (or just wanted to pay less for the service) used it as a weapon against traditional taxi service, people who had regulated jobs with basic welfare protections, proper working hours, and minimum wages were displaced, and now there's nothing that can be done. The concept already became too big to go away, Uber has become a company with enough power and wealth to lobby politicians and hire expensive legal teams in courts. And really, it's everyones' fault. Passengers for not thinking how much it costs to keep taxi service up and running, drivers for thinking Uber would offer a proper job replacement in comparison to taxis, Uber for selling itself as something it's not, and Taxi services for not updating and rethinking itself into something that could compete better.
You know what the solution is for the situation Uber created? This apparently forgotten thing called taxi service. It's Uber with proper hours, proper wages, proper regulation. It's nothing people haven't been saying since the whole business first started. And to be perfectly clear, it's not all that much different from comission based jobs.
It's no use whinning, protesting, complaining or making a fuss about it. The basis on how Uber operates depends on it not being treated like a taxi cab company. It's like a freelancer expecting to have all the benefits of a government job or something. It's simply not gonna happen. Ride sharing companies would die before modifying their entire business model. Not because the company is so adamant about it or anything like that, it'd simply be easier. Uber becoming a company that actually hire drivers directly, pay regular wages, and have all the proper welfare guarantees in place is as distance as Apple becoming an open source company designing software and hardware to be modified and built by 3rd parties. It could be done, but it makes no sense.
And in the end, it's not all that much different from your regular food truck thing or something. You work the hours needed, you find the spots that wi
Avoiding some confusion in the comments, Paris is making all public transportation free for one or two days alone, to reduce the ammount of smog/particulate matter in the air. No, they are not making public transportation free indefinitely, this is an emergency measure... not all that different from similar stuff that China and India already did.
These are predicted to happen in several cities around the world in particular atmospheric conditions... if things keeps getting worse though, you can predict that soon, along with heavy snow days, we'll also have heavy smog days for some cities.
I dunno what this spokesperson is complaining about.
The DMCA system is already plenty abused on YouTube, all the revenue generated on YouTube works the same way for all. In fact, YouTube kinda went out of their way overstepping common law and creating all sorts of anti-consumer provisions to conform to music and movie industry demands. Labels have their official channels there on the service, they agreed to the same stuff all creatives on YouTube also do. That is, assuming YouTube didn't close even more profitable deals with record labels behind the scenes.
If YouTube is so bad, labels can simply delete their channels and stick to music streaming services instead. You know, there are plenty of channels to go for, including crap like Tidal.
What the music industry won't talk about, of course, is reach. It's the same exact reason why piracy always have a negative outlook without we ever hearing about positive impacts it had in several entertainment industries. It's why they won't pull channels from YouTube despite all this whinning.
How long have we been hearing complaints about YouTube coming from the music industry? Why the hell are they still there if it's this bad after all these years? The answer is pretty obvious. YouTube is not Spotify, Apple or Deezer. It's not even comparable. It's not a dedicated music streaming service. It's a general purpose video streaming platform. YouTube has over a billion users, while all these other services put together won't reach even a hundred million. YouTube's reach is tenfold at the very minimum, and to a wider variety of people.
You wanna expose your content to a public like that, that's the price to pay. And of course platforms dedicated only to music will generate more revenue, it is their main business after all.
For the whole bring jobs back idea, honestly, it doesn't sound like a bad thing... of all the alternatives, this one sounds the most sensible I guess.
Trump would never be able to force Apple (and other electronics companies) to bring all the manufacturing currently done in places like Shenzhen to the US... that would not only require absurd ammounts of taxation plus building up from scratch entire cities worth of infrastructure, you'd also need to close deals with a whole bunch of third party manufacturers to make it happen at absurd costs.
An iPhone - as well as several other smartphones, tablets, laptops and whatnot - is nothing more than a huge assembly of parts from different brands on the hardware side. It works in China and has to happen there because manufacturing of all these third party parts happen closeby.
The best case scenario I can see for companies like Apple bringing back a few jobs to the US would be by closing some sort of deal for them to build assembly centers in the US. Parts would still have to be shipped from China, and this will still come with a huge overhead in production costs, but for a company the size of Apple it could probably still be done.
It isn't a great move in a general sense though. It'll make Apple products more expensive, lots of overhead costs with no advantages (other than the job openings), costumers will definitely pay for this, and it doesn't make any sense from a business standpoint. And the whole thing will make less sense for tech companies that don't operate like Apple - don't have a cult following, charges closer to manufacturing costs, etc.
You see, Brazil has similar type operations. We have importation taxes here that can get up to 120% the original product costs. It's dumb protectionism. What the brazilian government did over the years was closing deals with electronics companies to bring some assembly factories into the country. It didn't really work. Electronics "made in Brazil" got shit reputation because it has always been outdated and more shoddily made than chinese counterparts. Tons of brazilian brands went bankrupt and lives in the margin being equated with generic no name chinese brands. They end up being as expensive as foreign products because of overhead costs to import all parts necessary, keep wages at the national minimum, among other stuff.
It's just how the economy of electronics works these days. Specially for devices like smartphones and tablets, your assembly line needs to be close to where components are being made. This allows for a quick revision and upgrade turnaround. If you take assembly factories to the other side of the world, the upgrade cycle of several lines of products will have to change.
Like I said though, this is probably the most sensible choice among several others to bring some of the jobs back to the US. Foxconn will just open a token symbolic factory in the US while keeping most of it's manufacturing still in China, Apple will deal with the extra costs, and the end consumer will pay the price. Apple also already handles well not having the latest and greatest specs since it controls hardware and software by itself, and their price point is flexible enough already.
People should bare in mind that this is at most an educated guess made by disassembling a single unit and speculating about limits of current tech battery design. They were not hired by Samsung, they are not an official body of investigation, and they didn't have access to anything in the design in manufacturing process.
It's quite possible that they are right, but they are not explaining anything there, just speculating.
Now, it'd be extremely sad if the Note 7 was killed because of such a design oversight, because quite honestly, that's borderline amateurish. It could happen, as similar problems happen in most brands. Just that Samsung made the omission in the worst component possible.
We have examples of problems in antennas, cameras, lenses, connectors, shoddy speakers, crappy GPS chips, poor materials used in bits and pieces, among several other stuff... the difference is that if you have something wrong with battery, the consequences might not be only working poorly, ending up in glitches and whatnot. The consequence might be an explosion. Which is probably the worst thing hardware can do.:P
Anyways, the device is as dead as it can be. Which is plenty bad, because it'd probably be a best seller otherwise. Hopefully though, the lesson is learned by all manufacturers. It simply isn't worth sacrificing battery security to make the device thinner, or to shove extra mAh in there. The worst part is that I can bet all you want that fans of the Note line would definitely not be bothered much with having a smaller battery or a slightly thicker phone. It's all about the stylus and screen size.
Back to the topic, I'd wait for further investigation for a final conclusion. Disassembling a single device and taking guesses is not that much better from theories that have been thrown around so far.
Stop skirting around the theme and get to the point: the fact that data collection is obligatory and there is no option to completely disable it is the problem itself. Data collection in Windows systems have always been there more or less, the problem is how it became something that cannot be disabled, which is bad specially for companies with sensitive data.
I don't care if Microsoft can post updates faster and enhance security with it, the way they figure that out is the company's own responsibility. Stuff like that cannot be pinned down as something users should be responsible for, specially for OSs that are still essencially commercial in nature.
This has always been the problem with data collection schemes, and it'll continue being regardless if Microsoft PR talks it'll improve the experience or not. It's the same crappy excuse that all companies that profit on data collection use. All of them say the exact same thing. So I couldn't care less on what Microsoft PR declares they'll do with it, it doesn't diminish the disgust in any way. Privacy has always been a matter of principle, not on what some company says it'll do after the fact.
If they want to go that route, fine, keep sending data back and making it harder and harder for clients to dial back on that shit. But don't expect users to change their views if they are not willing to back down. Windows 10 will keep having and deserving the image of being an OS that spy on it's users. And that's exactly what it does. It's extracting data from people's desktop, doing it's best to make that invisible, and taking away options to disable it.
Much like they forced the Windows 10 update down lots of people's throats using some very dirty tactics, there's no excuse for what they are doing with ads and with stealing user data. I don't care if they say it's anonymized or whatever, I don't want my desktop sending anything back, period. People who are against this trend don't want to hear your promises on what you'll do with the data, we don't care. We're going for alternative routes that are not opting for data collection. That's it.
For anyone still wondering why the snooper charter is a very very bad idea... and this is only a single problem out of a huge list. Here's what to expect:
Most of these are coming directly from security agencies and the police itself, but what do people think will happen once ISPs and multiple governmental agencies are able to log content from Internet users? Be prepared folks. It's not about only about you doing bad and questionable things. It's specially about all the people with access to your private lives willing to ruin it or turn it into a profitable business.
US, Canada, India, UK... I guess this golden era of democracy is over. Here comes another round of dictatorships, population control and whatnot. Quite the dark heritage we're leaving for future generations.
still shortsighted, but I guess a billion times better than what India is going through right now.
Make no mistake people. All this crap around cashless society has absolutely zero to do with the costs of production, and all to do about population control, bank power, and the end of privacy. Once cash stops existing, that's it... you have zero independent financial control. All your earnings will be at banks hands. All the more reason for banks to exploit clients, toy with their money, and hold a get out of jail free card if they f*ck things up.
I guess one could say that we're already too deep into the whole sh*t swamp to go back, specially in cases like South Korea, but this is kinda the equivalent in economy terms of solving poverty by killing all the poor people.
Cash, in all countries, is the type of revenue that all the poorest, excluded from society, in the most fragile parts, minority conditions and whatnot depends on. Killing cash won't solve their problems, it'll only aggravate things.
But I don't need to talk much about it. We'll soon see the resulting catastrophe that will happen in India if they don't revert the decision. It'll be a huge shitshow. I don't even know if there will be anything recognizable left of the country a year from now if they continue going that way, mark my words.
DURR HURR TRUMP WILL HAVE ACCESS TO AN EMERGENCY MESSAGING SYSTEM THAT ANY PRESIDENT BEFORE AND AFTER HIM SHOULD ALSO HAVE DURR HURR
Yeah, that's how idiotic this post sounded. What's the next headline? This just in, Trump will have a spot in the oval office? OMG, he might start a fire there and shit on the floor! OMG! He'll mind blowingly have secret service access? OMG! He might use them to kill all democrats! He'll definitely tell them to rape your daughters late at night! They let him speak with Obama, and other high political figures! Do you think he told them I peed my blankies when I was a kid?
You guys elected him. Now, shut the fuck up about it. Give if a fucking rest. When and if he starts implementing bad policies in office, THEN you start complaining. Sound like a bunch of retards that can only overreact to crap that doesn't matter... you deserve Trump. That's what this is.
I love how GoPro keeps trying to put a positive spin to it.... of course, those statements were made for shareholders.
"GoPro also said Black Friday camera unit sales were up more than 35% year-over-year at leading U.S. retailers" Up more than 35% on Black Friday and in the year they finally released a new line after two years... that's little to nothing. Last year they had no new products to show, and the hype was already dead... I'd say a 35% increase from last year is still a defeat - GoPro Hero 5 launch didn't have much of an effect.
"GoPro said its Hero5 Black camera has been the best-selling digital-imaging device in the U.S. since it launched Oct. 2, citing NPD Group data" What's a digital-imaging device? A special category created for GoPro? Because it sure doesn't figure in the best selling cameras category, and on camcorders previous models seems to be selling more than the current (at least according to Amazon)... because price.
"GoPro shares climbed more than 4% in premarket trading Wednesday on the news" Climbing 4% from this close to the historical lowest it has ever been is not much... just search for GoPro stock price and set the graph to 5 years. Truth is, the company stock has been in freefall since August last year... the new releases managed to stop it a bit, but not reverse the trend. The hype is over. GoPro needs to lower prices, cut the fat, and reinvent itself. Too bad the Karma thing failed hard though...
It's bad for all those people losing jobs, but unfortunately, if GoPro keeps going the same way it has been, they won't be able to recover. Honestly, I think it's still not enough. They'll need to come up with a completely new concept for the next line that really goes out of the original mold. Return to their core idea. Offer a new more portable than ever camera that is cheaper than any other brand and accessible enough for anyone to get. If the GoPro Hero 6 is anything like a GoPro Hero 5 with spec updates, the company will be dead right after it.
Not that I like that... GoPro helped bring prices of action cameras to the absolute lowest, made the competition work hard to offer similar products, and made an entire category of camcorders a thing. Technology for the line of camcorders improved quite a lot over the years thanks to their initial evolution. They promoted extreme sports in a way never seen before, and their cameras were used for a bunch of cool new stuff. But the company has to go to a new direction and not try to re-invent the wheel right now, or it'll soon be too late.
Gotta imagine that at some point regarding prices of litigation after a major catastrophe, prices of trying to come up with a fix, risks of total collapse, among several other things, a construction company might just decide to keep paying specialists, analysts and whatnot to keep denying the whole thing while they prepare to flee the country with as much money as possible.
I mean, a misstep of this level must involve a whole lot of people. Construction company aside, wouldn't governmental regulators and such end up caught in the mess if the worst happened?
Well, I wasn't expecting Great Britain to be the first one to fall, but it's not too off the mark with all the policies around public cameras and such...
It'll only take the first leaks on politicians who decided to go for this, leaks around powerful corporation CEOs, general governmental leaks, blackmailing, database hacking of ISPs or those agencies, plus a whole bunch of problems that can and probably will happen from now on for them to regret it. It'll be too late by then, but you know how it goes.
It's a huge ammount of information that can be exploited for all sorts of things passing too many hands. Doesn't take a child's level of understanding what will happen next.
It isn't a secret to anyone how incompetent some ISPs and governmental agencies can be while handling sensitive information, it isn't a secret to anyone how abused some surveillance tools can get by the hands of organizations that were supposed to be responsible while using them, it's not a secret how much information leaked and hacked from all sorts of sources can be acquired on the dark net, it doesn't take a genious to tell how easy it'd be for a ISP employee or a disgruntled police member or whatever to just get the all that data and dump it somewhere for a quick buck. If whoever has ill intention is smart enough, it'd be easy to go through all that data and pinpoint highly profitable targets to blackmail.
Can't be helped. Stupid people only learn the hard way it seems. Get yourselves a good VPN and watch the ensuing shitstorm.
Also, non-brits be prepared for charters like these to come to your own countries as it might take a bit of time for things to explode.
People, specially politicians apparently, cannot be bothered with "complex" concepts like the importance of privacy for a democratic state. They'll need a rude awakening to understand. And now, they'll have it.
Does it do anything that you cannot do by just going into your Google profile?
If you go to myaccount.google.com, on sign-in and security you can manage all connected apps and sites, on device activity you can see devices used to login with your account, and on personal info & privacy you can control what Google logged from your activity. Obviously, there are also options to delete your Google account altogether, and I doubt this app thing will do anything more than that.
If it doesn't, it's just too risky to give your account info like that for the extra convenience. Just get into your profile and adjust things yourself, it's not that hard.
Also, no matter what these deletion services tell you, they cannot guarantee that some of that info won't be kept in some Google or other website services. They'll be limited to Google's API after all.
For everything else, it's just better to go the pre-emptive route. Use private/anonymous browsing, create separate accounts, VPN, Tor, etc.
Sounds great but, shouldn't we be seeking battery technology OUTSIDE Lithium these days? I mean, if we're gonna take breakthrough battery research anyways, I'd rather go with something... less flammable.:P
Fake news might be a problem, which has been extremely sensationalized in the past few months, but authoritarianism wouldn't make it any better. If anything, it'd just take fake news to it's ultimate consequences. Better to have fake news that are exposed as fake than having fake news spread by a government that will turn them into real news at their own convenience.
Education, better critical reasoning, being able to tell what is better for yourself and in turn for your country will always be the more difficult but ultimately better route. Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes will always try to appeal to people's sense of fear and inaction. People who want the state/government to take control of every aspect of their lives can move to a country like North Korea to see how it's like. They have tons of "real news" to share with you, how their leader is God on Earth, how their country is the best, how their technology is the most advanced, etc.
So yeah Ren Xianling, you can shove your promotion of censorship up your ass. I can handle what I choose to believe myself on the Internet. And the last organization I'll trust to select what I should and should not hear is the government. Very precious coming from a government that actively puts people in jail and blocks webpages that talks about Tianamen Square protests, having some backwards moral police with feet firmly planted back in the dark ages with a whole lot of puritanism going on, among some other ridiculous stuff.
I personally don't have any problems with chinese people, companies and ideas... but get the f*ck outta here with their politics. Country where a bunch of people kill themselves because they feel trapped into workplaces with no welfare and no human rights... what a great government. And if you dare complaining about it, you end up in jail for spreading some "fake news" . heh
I'm gonna guess because of oportunity, but the EFF should close deals with publishings regarding electronic law, rights and such for a Humble Bundle, if possible. Maybe security, privacy, hardware and software oriented towards those, stuff like that. LEGO is fine, but no connections there...
We've been there. Seems no one remembers the industrial revolution anymore.
First of all, it won't happen overnight. People often forget that to this day, we still have people living exactly like most of the civilization lived a thousand years ago. We still have large parts of the world living in an economy of subsistence... you work to eat everyday, period. And this isn't only because of poverty or income inequality, sometimes it's just because whatever level of technolgy a society needs, is what they'll use.
People who are panicking about robots replacing everything and every job have to think bigger, that's all there is to it. Human societies and cultures are more or less self adjusting, we simply can't have robots "taking all the jobs".
Here's a very simple reason why: if robots takes all the jobs, no one has money to spend on the stuff robots are making anymore, there's no money to maintain them, stuff like that has already happened. Economies don't work the way most people think. What's the use of a factory churning out a billion of expensive fancy gadgets if no one has the money or will to purchase them? In the ultimate scenario that's probably over a millenia from now, when robots can provide all basic needs and luxuries humans can ask for, we'll simply work in whatever we want. No need for jobs, just work.
This is why, in the modern era, a whole lot of attention and value has moved to stuff like fashion, entertainment, and other non-essencial businesses. Because there's money to be made there. We don't depend on any of that to live, yet we have a huge part of economies on it. We'll always be able to shift the market and create new jobs in areas that might not be considered important today. Who in their right mind would think, just a few decades ago, that some folks would be making a living these days by playing games, recording it, and showing it to others? And if someday money is not a thing anymore, it'll become recognition, accomplishment, fame, power, or something else.
In the past, jobs that were replaced by modern industrialization were also way more valuable than they are today. Caravans transporting goods from town to town. Handcrafters that to do pottery, pans, and utensils for everyday tasks. Blacksmiths. Woodworkers. Alchemists.
We have plenty of extinct jobs that were replaced by some degree of automation these days, and transitional periods will always happen.
Fears of displacement on jobs like drivers, factory working, transport and whatnot. Again, it won't happen overnight. Do we really need any more proof of that than Chinese companies doing most of the manufacturing work of the world? It should come as no surprise to anyone that we haven't even left the industrial revolution just yet... countries like US might not have that many factories and conditions of the industrial revolution around anymore, but that's only because China has them all.
People who thinks that autonomous driving will suddently invade the streets and take over, I'm afraid they'll be sorely disappointed. Not only it'll still take decades for the technology to mature, for autonomous cars and trucks to completely replace regular vehicles it'll take centuries, if even. We're yet in the infancy of automation and robots that can take general work, and it's a very very slow progress.
I'd say that the idea that new technology will create new jobs is just a part of it. With only that, people will always think: "Ok, but I see less jobs created by tech than jobs eliminated by it", which always seems to be logical. I mean, if you have a factory that employs a thousand people for basic jobs, you'll probably need just ten specialized workers and robots to do the same thing. Where then, all the other 990 goes? We will get scenarios like Detroit, this is innevitable. But that's always been the case. We'll have displacements, we'll have disruptions, we'll have extinction of jobs, we'll have further specializations, societies move on. There's no need to panic. This is how things have always worked.
It's a little bit of all theories, it's not new, and it has been amplified by current events.
First of all, there's no epidemic of misinformation. What happens is that there has always been an epidemic of lack of critical reasoning. Tabloid journalism is as old as journalism itself, and too many people have favored it since ancient times.
In fact, none of the stuff mentioned is new. Confirmation bias? Sensationalism? Lack of credibility coming from tabloid journalism? These are all stuff that have always been out there.
It could be argued that this blaming of specific social networks (such as Facebook and Twitter) is also part of tabloid journalism. There are definitely some people trying to blame them for stuff that they don't particularly like themselves, like the results of a democratic election of an US president. Because it's easy to take a company as scapegoat while ignoring that none of the fake news and none of the people who believe it are part of the company itself.
The fact is that US citizens elected Trump whether you like it or not. And Facebook or Twitter didn't vote for him. In fact, if anything these companies' CEOs and employees were probably against him becoming president.
Blogs like Gizmodo who keeps posting these idiotic whinning posts trying to blame Facebook for Trump being elected are just like kids in denial... they simply don't want to admit living in a country that is not aligned with their own personal political views.
We're currently at a transitional period from traditional journalism to Internet portals and blogs, so there will be some confusion regarding the new media. It certainly allows fake news to spread in an easier way, but it also allows a broader range of news in general, different perspectives, and coverage overall.
Personally, I don't see it as a bad thing. Journalism just has a new dimension... it became a tool for information that has more potential and that is more powerful, for the good and bad. It is not controlled or limited by a handful of huge news corporations anymore. If we as a society is letting it take a turn for the bad, we only have ourselves to blame. The way journalism and information spreads in society is just a reflection of it.
It's up to us to learn how to use it. We can't expect to be babysitted everytime something defies our ability to use critical reasoning. If people are being fooled by something as trivial as fake news, and cannot be bothered with something as basic as fact checking, we get the results we deserve. That's not a problem with how news work, that's a problem with education and culture.
Traditional journalism has always been swayed by popularity. You really don't have to go too far into history to see it. It's a huge mistake to think we always had impartial coverage in the past, or that the results of elections would be different if it wasn't for social networks and whatnot.
With Trump as president and a republican majority in congress, how much - realistically speaking - do you think privacy will last in the US? My guess is: not too long.
Here's a prediction: forget Apple, this has all to do with public service and government's power. With all the stuff Trump promised, he'll just lean on the side - as several republican politicians do, and some liberals too - of ignorance, pushing for laws and forcefully having their way regarding encryption, fundamentally weakening security and privacy for all. These people cannot understand the importance of privacy and strong encryption, they'll always dismiss the importance of it by seeing only how criminals can potentially use it, because they are essencially blind on how much their own lives depend on it.
Companies' stances on those will weaken and collapse overtime, cases of abuse of power will rise, and hacker activity will gain new grounds. Police and government will innevitably end up leaking or being hacked for very sensitive information, information from innocent people that was never meant to go public will, press will come after the government harder than ever, and it'll start an information/cyber civil war as Trump's government already doesn't like the press a whole lot.
Of course, crime and criminal activity won't go down because of that. Even if the US weakens their own stance on privacy and security, that does not mean other countries will follow suit. But businesses and people dependant on services located in the US will be forced to conform.
Banks and other types of secure services will suffer from this because every device now has some sort of backdoor or weakened encryption, private data from people inside the government that was favorable for weakening encryption will leak, but now it's too late to go back - the damage is done.
Private companies that feel threatened by all the measures being taken by the FBI and sanctioned by the government will, with enough pressure, move to countries that understands the importance of privacy and encryption. It'll take a while because it has to reach a point of making economical sense, but it will.
All the morons who were favorable on weakening iPhone and other devices encryption will come crying talking how they didn't know that making security weak for criminals also meant making security weak for everyone else, which in turn just made criminals' lives easier.
But of course, this will only help the fear and paranoia agenda of the current office anyways, so in the next election the candidate who shouts louder will continue winning the races.
It's extremely enticing for law enforcement with such a miopic, poor understanding and complete ignorance of how encryption came to be to dismiss it just so that they can catch more criminals, "terrorists" and whatnot. Short term wins, they are one step ahead, and blahblah. But if we can't have law enforcement thinking on the mid to long term, it can be as damaging as letting vigilante forces control crime in your country.
Power corrupts, and eventually all the data the FBI, NSA and police forces are collecting on innocent civilians will be used for bad - it's probably already happening, we just don't have all the cases in hand to show.
What's the point really? I think the market has more than proven that software trumps over and over hardware everytime new models for x or y brand comes out. Here's the summary of what I heard coming from Macbook Pro users with this new release:
1. Some declare it's prefect, all Apple decisions were great, they had orgasms fingering the new OLED strip, blah blah; 2. Some hated some of Apple's decisions in different degrees or specs, but they've waited up to 4 years for a new model, they'll upgrade anyways, and make do with whatever bullshit Apple is forcing them to, since there's basically no other option for MacOS; 3. Some hated everything about the new model. So they'll just keep the old model 'till a new Macbook Pro with everything they want comes out.
See what's common there? In the end, no one got out of the ecossystem. For the vast majority of Macbook users, a comparison with PC laptops of similar specs is kinda useless... just some weird reason to create attrition. This is specially true to professional usages... if you are dependant or used to anything that is only available on macs, you are out of luck.
Yes, there are exceptions, but they just seem to be the minority. And then, for this minority a general outlook on specs won't be enough. They'll all have different needs for a new machine, so they'll have to look closely into options.
But you know, it's not by pure chance that Apple is risking to do the stuff they are... it's just this. They've reached a critical mass of people locked into the ecossystem that they feel it's good enough to take unpopular measures just to lock people further in, to save on manufacturing, to save on redesign, to force proprietary standards and whatnot. Any other business would do the same.
And apparently,the new Macbook Pro will have record sales despite all the whinning. It is what it is.
And if you heard something about bendgate or about it being a problem with people who dropped their phones, just know that there has been multiple reported cases of phones that never suffered any physical damages, and that were never put inside tight back pockets and whatnot that also had the defect.
It usually happens overtime. Solder balls from a specific chip gets loose or cracks, which then causes the issue.
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Why do we need a report for this? This was known from start. Anyone who thought otherwise has to be either blind or completely disconnected with reality. If you got into the service thinking you'd have the same conditions of a regular stable job, you were conned. Get out. Things won't get better. Uber drivers who are putting their livelihoods in stake for the company only have themselves and their ignorance to blame for. I'm sorry, but it's the f*cking true. In this case, I have absolutely no sympathy. Wake up and smell the coffee or something.
Remember people, Uber was never created to replace cabs. It's NOT a "taxi-hailing app". What an idiotic way to call the service. It never was, nor it'll ever be. It was supposed to be ride sharing. The concept was to get a little bit of money to give people rides during your commute or something, it was never designed for people to make a living. The whole thing was built in a way to make the company be as disconnected from people who used it (from both sides) in the first place. It's eBay, it's Craigslist, it's Gazelle.
Uber and all other similar companies will invest all their money to keep this concept as is because they cannot operate otherwise. They might have lost some cases in courts, but the company will always keep fighting to be seen as a service to connect clients and costumers. To think that Uber cares about drivers and passangers worries is dangerous is misguided. They don't care. Moves towards those directions is purely for PR and image purposes, it's not and has never been the core of it. Their only real worry is making the app available without fail for as long as possible.
They cannot operate as a taxi service, because taxi service already exists and it's fundamentally different. It's also not charity, the money has to come from somewhere. If you as a passanger where asking yourself how taxi service can be so much more expensive than Uber, there's your answer.
The original concept has been warped beyond belief, people who hate cabs (or just wanted to pay less for the service) used it as a weapon against traditional taxi service, people who had regulated jobs with basic welfare protections, proper working hours, and minimum wages were displaced, and now there's nothing that can be done. The concept already became too big to go away, Uber has become a company with enough power and wealth to lobby politicians and hire expensive legal teams in courts. And really, it's everyones' fault. Passengers for not thinking how much it costs to keep taxi service up and running, drivers for thinking Uber would offer a proper job replacement in comparison to taxis, Uber for selling itself as something it's not, and Taxi services for not updating and rethinking itself into something that could compete better.
You know what the solution is for the situation Uber created? This apparently forgotten thing called taxi service. It's Uber with proper hours, proper wages, proper regulation. It's nothing people haven't been saying since the whole business first started. And to be perfectly clear, it's not all that much different from comission based jobs.
It's no use whinning, protesting, complaining or making a fuss about it. The basis on how Uber operates depends on it not being treated like a taxi cab company. It's like a freelancer expecting to have all the benefits of a government job or something. It's simply not gonna happen. Ride sharing companies would die before modifying their entire business model. Not because the company is so adamant about it or anything like that, it'd simply be easier. Uber becoming a company that actually hire drivers directly, pay regular wages, and have all the proper welfare guarantees in place is as distance as Apple becoming an open source company designing software and hardware to be modified and built by 3rd parties. It could be done, but it makes no sense.
And in the end, it's not all that much different from your regular food truck thing or something. You work the hours needed, you find the spots that wi
Avoiding some confusion in the comments, Paris is making all public transportation free for one or two days alone, to reduce the ammount of smog/particulate matter in the air. No, they are not making public transportation free indefinitely, this is an emergency measure... not all that different from similar stuff that China and India already did.
These are predicted to happen in several cities around the world in particular atmospheric conditions... if things keeps getting worse though, you can predict that soon, along with heavy snow days, we'll also have heavy smog days for some cities.
I dunno what this spokesperson is complaining about.
The DMCA system is already plenty abused on YouTube, all the revenue generated on YouTube works the same way for all.
In fact, YouTube kinda went out of their way overstepping common law and creating all sorts of anti-consumer provisions to conform to music and movie industry demands.
Labels have their official channels there on the service, they agreed to the same stuff all creatives on YouTube also do. That is, assuming YouTube didn't close even more profitable deals with record labels behind the scenes.
If YouTube is so bad, labels can simply delete their channels and stick to music streaming services instead. You know, there are plenty of channels to go for, including crap like Tidal.
What the music industry won't talk about, of course, is reach. It's the same exact reason why piracy always have a negative outlook without we ever hearing about positive impacts it had in several entertainment industries. It's why they won't pull channels from YouTube despite all this whinning.
How long have we been hearing complaints about YouTube coming from the music industry? Why the hell are they still there if it's this bad after all these years? The answer is pretty obvious. YouTube is not Spotify, Apple or Deezer. It's not even comparable. It's not a dedicated music streaming service. It's a general purpose video streaming platform. YouTube has over a billion users, while all these other services put together won't reach even a hundred million. YouTube's reach is tenfold at the very minimum, and to a wider variety of people.
You wanna expose your content to a public like that, that's the price to pay. And of course platforms dedicated only to music will generate more revenue, it is their main business after all.
For the whole bring jobs back idea, honestly, it doesn't sound like a bad thing... of all the alternatives, this one sounds the most sensible I guess.
Trump would never be able to force Apple (and other electronics companies) to bring all the manufacturing currently done in places like Shenzhen to the US... that would not only require absurd ammounts of taxation plus building up from scratch entire cities worth of infrastructure, you'd also need to close deals with a whole bunch of third party manufacturers to make it happen at absurd costs.
An iPhone - as well as several other smartphones, tablets, laptops and whatnot - is nothing more than a huge assembly of parts from different brands on the hardware side. It works in China and has to happen there because manufacturing of all these third party parts happen closeby.
The best case scenario I can see for companies like Apple bringing back a few jobs to the US would be by closing some sort of deal for them to build assembly centers in the US. Parts would still have to be shipped from China, and this will still come with a huge overhead in production costs, but for a company the size of Apple it could probably still be done.
It isn't a great move in a general sense though. It'll make Apple products more expensive, lots of overhead costs with no advantages (other than the job openings), costumers will definitely pay for this, and it doesn't make any sense from a business standpoint. And the whole thing will make less sense for tech companies that don't operate like Apple - don't have a cult following, charges closer to manufacturing costs, etc.
You see, Brazil has similar type operations. We have importation taxes here that can get up to 120% the original product costs. It's dumb protectionism. What the brazilian government did over the years was closing deals with electronics companies to bring some assembly factories into the country. It didn't really work. Electronics "made in Brazil" got shit reputation because it has always been outdated and more shoddily made than chinese counterparts. Tons of brazilian brands went bankrupt and lives in the margin being equated with generic no name chinese brands. They end up being as expensive as foreign products because of overhead costs to import all parts necessary, keep wages at the national minimum, among other stuff.
It's just how the economy of electronics works these days. Specially for devices like smartphones and tablets, your assembly line needs to be close to where components are being made. This allows for a quick revision and upgrade turnaround. If you take assembly factories to the other side of the world, the upgrade cycle of several lines of products will have to change.
Like I said though, this is probably the most sensible choice among several others to bring some of the jobs back to the US. Foxconn will just open a token symbolic factory in the US while keeping most of it's manufacturing still in China, Apple will deal with the extra costs, and the end consumer will pay the price. Apple also already handles well not having the latest and greatest specs since it controls hardware and software by itself, and their price point is flexible enough already.
People should bare in mind that this is at most an educated guess made by disassembling a single unit and speculating about limits of current tech battery design.
They were not hired by Samsung, they are not an official body of investigation, and they didn't have access to anything in the design in manufacturing process.
It's quite possible that they are right, but they are not explaining anything there, just speculating.
Now, it'd be extremely sad if the Note 7 was killed because of such a design oversight, because quite honestly, that's borderline amateurish. It could happen, as similar problems happen in most brands. Just that Samsung made the omission in the worst component possible.
We have examples of problems in antennas, cameras, lenses, connectors, shoddy speakers, crappy GPS chips, poor materials used in bits and pieces, among several other stuff... the difference is that if you have something wrong with battery, the consequences might not be only working poorly, ending up in glitches and whatnot. The consequence might be an explosion. Which is probably the worst thing hardware can do. :P
Anyways, the device is as dead as it can be. Which is plenty bad, because it'd probably be a best seller otherwise. Hopefully though, the lesson is learned by all manufacturers. It simply isn't worth sacrificing battery security to make the device thinner, or to shove extra mAh in there.
The worst part is that I can bet all you want that fans of the Note line would definitely not be bothered much with having a smaller battery or a slightly thicker phone. It's all about the stylus and screen size.
Back to the topic, I'd wait for further investigation for a final conclusion. Disassembling a single device and taking guesses is not that much better from theories that have been thrown around so far.
Stop skirting around the theme and get to the point: the fact that data collection is obligatory and there is no option to completely disable it is the problem itself. Data collection in Windows systems have always been there more or less, the problem is how it became something that cannot be disabled, which is bad specially for companies with sensitive data.
I don't care if Microsoft can post updates faster and enhance security with it, the way they figure that out is the company's own responsibility. Stuff like that cannot be pinned down as something users should be responsible for, specially for OSs that are still essencially commercial in nature.
This has always been the problem with data collection schemes, and it'll continue being regardless if Microsoft PR talks it'll improve the experience or not. It's the same crappy excuse that all companies that profit on data collection use. All of them say the exact same thing. So I couldn't care less on what Microsoft PR declares they'll do with it, it doesn't diminish the disgust in any way. Privacy has always been a matter of principle, not on what some company says it'll do after the fact.
If they want to go that route, fine, keep sending data back and making it harder and harder for clients to dial back on that shit. But don't expect users to change their views if they are not willing to back down. Windows 10 will keep having and deserving the image of being an OS that spy on it's users. And that's exactly what it does. It's extracting data from people's desktop, doing it's best to make that invisible, and taking away options to disable it.
Much like they forced the Windows 10 update down lots of people's throats using some very dirty tactics, there's no excuse for what they are doing with ads and with stealing user data. I don't care if they say it's anonymized or whatever, I don't want my desktop sending anything back, period. People who are against this trend don't want to hear your promises on what you'll do with the data, we don't care. We're going for alternative routes that are not opting for data collection. That's it.
For anyone still wondering why the snooper charter is a very very bad idea... and this is only a single problem out of a huge list.
Here's what to expect:
https://www.wired.com/2013/09/...
http://animalnewyork.com/2014/...
http://www.kiro7.com/news/inve...
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news...
http://wncn.com/2016/02/10/nc-...
https://psmag.com/when-your-st...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
Most of these are coming directly from security agencies and the police itself, but what do people think will happen once ISPs and multiple governmental agencies are able to log content from Internet users? Be prepared folks. It's not about only about you doing bad and questionable things. It's specially about all the people with access to your private lives willing to ruin it or turn it into a profitable business.
US, Canada, India, UK... I guess this golden era of democracy is over. Here comes another round of dictatorships, population control and whatnot. Quite the dark heritage we're leaving for future generations.
still shortsighted, but I guess a billion times better than what India is going through right now.
Make no mistake people. All this crap around cashless society has absolutely zero to do with the costs of production, and all to do about population control, bank power, and the end of privacy. Once cash stops existing, that's it... you have zero independent financial control. All your earnings will be at banks hands. All the more reason for banks to exploit clients, toy with their money, and hold a get out of jail free card if they f*ck things up.
I guess one could say that we're already too deep into the whole sh*t swamp to go back, specially in cases like South Korea, but this is kinda the equivalent in economy terms of solving poverty by killing all the poor people.
Cash, in all countries, is the type of revenue that all the poorest, excluded from society, in the most fragile parts, minority conditions and whatnot depends on. Killing cash won't solve their problems, it'll only aggravate things.
But I don't need to talk much about it. We'll soon see the resulting catastrophe that will happen in India if they don't revert the decision. It'll be a huge shitshow. I don't even know if there will be anything recognizable left of the country a year from now if they continue going that way, mark my words.
DURR HURR TRUMP WILL HAVE ACCESS TO AN EMERGENCY MESSAGING SYSTEM THAT ANY PRESIDENT BEFORE AND AFTER HIM SHOULD ALSO HAVE DURR HURR
Yeah, that's how idiotic this post sounded.
What's the next headline? This just in, Trump will have a spot in the oval office? OMG, he might start a fire there and shit on the floor! OMG!
He'll mind blowingly have secret service access? OMG! He might use them to kill all democrats! He'll definitely tell them to rape your daughters late at night!
They let him speak with Obama, and other high political figures! Do you think he told them I peed my blankies when I was a kid?
You guys elected him. Now, shut the fuck up about it. Give if a fucking rest. When and if he starts implementing bad policies in office, THEN you start complaining.
Sound like a bunch of retards that can only overreact to crap that doesn't matter... you deserve Trump. That's what this is.
I love how GoPro keeps trying to put a positive spin to it.... of course, those statements were made for shareholders.
"GoPro also said Black Friday camera unit sales were up more than 35% year-over-year at leading U.S. retailers"
Up more than 35% on Black Friday and in the year they finally released a new line after two years... that's little to nothing. Last year they had no new products to show, and the hype was already dead... I'd say a 35% increase from last year is still a defeat - GoPro Hero 5 launch didn't have much of an effect.
"GoPro said its Hero5 Black camera has been the best-selling digital-imaging device in the U.S. since it launched Oct. 2, citing NPD Group data"
What's a digital-imaging device? A special category created for GoPro? Because it sure doesn't figure in the best selling cameras category, and on camcorders previous models seems to be selling more than the current (at least according to Amazon)... because price.
"GoPro shares climbed more than 4% in premarket trading Wednesday on the news"
Climbing 4% from this close to the historical lowest it has ever been is not much... just search for GoPro stock price and set the graph to 5 years.
Truth is, the company stock has been in freefall since August last year... the new releases managed to stop it a bit, but not reverse the trend.
The hype is over. GoPro needs to lower prices, cut the fat, and reinvent itself. Too bad the Karma thing failed hard though...
It's bad for all those people losing jobs, but unfortunately, if GoPro keeps going the same way it has been, they won't be able to recover. Honestly, I think it's still not enough. They'll need to come up with a completely new concept for the next line that really goes out of the original mold. Return to their core idea. Offer a new more portable than ever camera that is cheaper than any other brand and accessible enough for anyone to get.
If the GoPro Hero 6 is anything like a GoPro Hero 5 with spec updates, the company will be dead right after it.
Not that I like that... GoPro helped bring prices of action cameras to the absolute lowest, made the competition work hard to offer similar products, and made an entire category of camcorders a thing. Technology for the line of camcorders improved quite a lot over the years thanks to their initial evolution. They promoted extreme sports in a way never seen before, and their cameras were used for a bunch of cool new stuff. But the company has to go to a new direction and not try to re-invent the wheel right now, or it'll soon be too late.
Gotta imagine that at some point regarding prices of litigation after a major catastrophe, prices of trying to come up with a fix, risks of total collapse, among several other things, a construction company might just decide to keep paying specialists, analysts and whatnot to keep denying the whole thing while they prepare to flee the country with as much money as possible.
I mean, a misstep of this level must involve a whole lot of people. Construction company aside, wouldn't governmental regulators and such end up caught in the mess if the worst happened?
Well, I wasn't expecting Great Britain to be the first one to fall, but it's not too off the mark with all the policies around public cameras and such...
It'll only take the first leaks on politicians who decided to go for this, leaks around powerful corporation CEOs, general governmental leaks, blackmailing, database hacking of ISPs or those agencies, plus a whole bunch of problems that can and probably will happen from now on for them to regret it. It'll be too late by then, but you know how it goes.
It's a huge ammount of information that can be exploited for all sorts of things passing too many hands. Doesn't take a child's level of understanding what will happen next.
It isn't a secret to anyone how incompetent some ISPs and governmental agencies can be while handling sensitive information, it isn't a secret to anyone how abused some surveillance tools can get by the hands of organizations that were supposed to be responsible while using them, it's not a secret how much information leaked and hacked from all sorts of sources can be acquired on the dark net, it doesn't take a genious to tell how easy it'd be for a ISP employee or a disgruntled police member or whatever to just get the all that data and dump it somewhere for a quick buck. If whoever has ill intention is smart enough, it'd be easy to go through all that data and pinpoint highly profitable targets to blackmail.
Can't be helped. Stupid people only learn the hard way it seems. Get yourselves a good VPN and watch the ensuing shitstorm.
Also, non-brits be prepared for charters like these to come to your own countries as it might take a bit of time for things to explode.
People, specially politicians apparently, cannot be bothered with "complex" concepts like the importance of privacy for a democratic state. They'll need a rude awakening to understand. And now, they'll have it.
... on the constant mockery, this will be Dubya all over again, won't it?
Does it do anything that you cannot do by just going into your Google profile?
If you go to myaccount.google.com, on sign-in and security you can manage all connected apps and sites, on device activity you can see devices used to login with your account, and on personal info & privacy you can control what Google logged from your activity.
Obviously, there are also options to delete your Google account altogether, and I doubt this app thing will do anything more than that.
If it doesn't, it's just too risky to give your account info like that for the extra convenience. Just get into your profile and adjust things yourself, it's not that hard.
Also, no matter what these deletion services tell you, they cannot guarantee that some of that info won't be kept in some Google or other website services. They'll be limited to Google's API after all.
For everything else, it's just better to go the pre-emptive route. Use private/anonymous browsing, create separate accounts, VPN, Tor, etc.
Sounds great but, shouldn't we be seeking battery technology OUTSIDE Lithium these days? :P
I mean, if we're gonna take breakthrough battery research anyways, I'd rather go with something... less flammable.
Next you are gonna tell me my Terrafugia Transition will also delay? :P
Fake news might be a problem, which has been extremely sensationalized in the past few months, but authoritarianism wouldn't make it any better. If anything, it'd just take fake news to it's ultimate consequences. Better to have fake news that are exposed as fake than having fake news spread by a government that will turn them into real news at their own convenience.
Education, better critical reasoning, being able to tell what is better for yourself and in turn for your country will always be the more difficult but ultimately better route.
Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes will always try to appeal to people's sense of fear and inaction.
People who want the state/government to take control of every aspect of their lives can move to a country like North Korea to see how it's like. They have tons of "real news" to share with you, how their leader is God on Earth, how their country is the best, how their technology is the most advanced, etc.
So yeah Ren Xianling, you can shove your promotion of censorship up your ass. I can handle what I choose to believe myself on the Internet. And the last organization I'll trust to select what I should and should not hear is the government. Very precious coming from a government that actively puts people in jail and blocks webpages that talks about Tianamen Square protests, having some backwards moral police with feet firmly planted back in the dark ages with a whole lot of puritanism going on, among some other ridiculous stuff.
I personally don't have any problems with chinese people, companies and ideas... but get the f*ck outta here with their politics. Country where a bunch of people kill themselves because they feel trapped into workplaces with no welfare and no human rights... what a great government. And if you dare complaining about it, you end up in jail for spreading some "fake news" . heh
I'm gonna guess because of oportunity, but the EFF should close deals with publishings regarding electronic law, rights and such for a Humble Bundle, if possible. Maybe security, privacy, hardware and software oriented towards those, stuff like that. LEGO is fine, but no connections there...
We've been there. Seems no one remembers the industrial revolution anymore.
First of all, it won't happen overnight. People often forget that to this day, we still have people living exactly like most of the civilization lived a thousand years ago.
We still have large parts of the world living in an economy of subsistence... you work to eat everyday, period. And this isn't only because of poverty or income inequality, sometimes it's just because whatever level of technolgy a society needs, is what they'll use.
People who are panicking about robots replacing everything and every job have to think bigger, that's all there is to it. Human societies and cultures are more or less self adjusting, we simply can't have robots "taking all the jobs".
Here's a very simple reason why: if robots takes all the jobs, no one has money to spend on the stuff robots are making anymore, there's no money to maintain them, stuff like that has already happened. Economies don't work the way most people think. What's the use of a factory churning out a billion of expensive fancy gadgets if no one has the money or will to purchase them?
In the ultimate scenario that's probably over a millenia from now, when robots can provide all basic needs and luxuries humans can ask for, we'll simply work in whatever we want. No need for jobs, just work.
This is why, in the modern era, a whole lot of attention and value has moved to stuff like fashion, entertainment, and other non-essencial businesses. Because there's money to be made there. We don't depend on any of that to live, yet we have a huge part of economies on it. We'll always be able to shift the market and create new jobs in areas that might not be considered important today. Who in their right mind would think, just a few decades ago, that some folks would be making a living these days by playing games, recording it, and showing it to others? And if someday money is not a thing anymore, it'll become recognition, accomplishment, fame, power, or something else.
In the past, jobs that were replaced by modern industrialization were also way more valuable than they are today. Caravans transporting goods from town to town. Handcrafters that to do pottery, pans, and utensils for everyday tasks. Blacksmiths. Woodworkers. Alchemists.
We have plenty of extinct jobs that were replaced by some degree of automation these days, and transitional periods will always happen.
Fears of displacement on jobs like drivers, factory working, transport and whatnot. Again, it won't happen overnight. Do we really need any more proof of that than Chinese companies doing most of the manufacturing work of the world? It should come as no surprise to anyone that we haven't even left the industrial revolution just yet... countries like US might not have that many factories and conditions of the industrial revolution around anymore, but that's only because China has them all.
People who thinks that autonomous driving will suddently invade the streets and take over, I'm afraid they'll be sorely disappointed. Not only it'll still take decades for the technology to mature, for autonomous cars and trucks to completely replace regular vehicles it'll take centuries, if even. We're yet in the infancy of automation and robots that can take general work, and it's a very very slow progress.
I'd say that the idea that new technology will create new jobs is just a part of it. With only that, people will always think: "Ok, but I see less jobs created by tech than jobs eliminated by it", which always seems to be logical. I mean, if you have a factory that employs a thousand people for basic jobs, you'll probably need just ten specialized workers and robots to do the same thing. Where then, all the other 990 goes? We will get scenarios like Detroit, this is innevitable. But that's always been the case. We'll have displacements, we'll have disruptions, we'll have extinction of jobs, we'll have further specializations, societies move on. There's no need to panic. This is how things have always worked.
It's a little bit of all theories, it's not new, and it has been amplified by current events.
First of all, there's no epidemic of misinformation. What happens is that there has always been an epidemic of lack of critical reasoning.
Tabloid journalism is as old as journalism itself, and too many people have favored it since ancient times.
In fact, none of the stuff mentioned is new. Confirmation bias? Sensationalism? Lack of credibility coming from tabloid journalism? These are all stuff that have always been out there.
It could be argued that this blaming of specific social networks (such as Facebook and Twitter) is also part of tabloid journalism.
There are definitely some people trying to blame them for stuff that they don't particularly like themselves, like the results of a democratic election of an US president. Because it's easy to take a company as scapegoat while ignoring that none of the fake news and none of the people who believe it are part of the company itself.
The fact is that US citizens elected Trump whether you like it or not. And Facebook or Twitter didn't vote for him. In fact, if anything these companies' CEOs and employees were probably against him becoming president.
Blogs like Gizmodo who keeps posting these idiotic whinning posts trying to blame Facebook for Trump being elected are just like kids in denial... they simply don't want to admit living in a country that is not aligned with their own personal political views.
We're currently at a transitional period from traditional journalism to Internet portals and blogs, so there will be some confusion regarding the new media. It certainly allows fake news to spread in an easier way, but it also allows a broader range of news in general, different perspectives, and coverage overall.
Personally, I don't see it as a bad thing. Journalism just has a new dimension... it became a tool for information that has more potential and that is more powerful, for the good and bad. It is not controlled or limited by a handful of huge news corporations anymore. If we as a society is letting it take a turn for the bad, we only have ourselves to blame. The way journalism and information spreads in society is just a reflection of it.
It's up to us to learn how to use it. We can't expect to be babysitted everytime something defies our ability to use critical reasoning. If people are being fooled by something as trivial as fake news, and cannot be bothered with something as basic as fact checking, we get the results we deserve. That's not a problem with how news work, that's a problem with education and culture.
Traditional journalism has always been swayed by popularity. You really don't have to go too far into history to see it. It's a huge mistake to think we always had impartial coverage in the past, or that the results of elections would be different if it wasn't for social networks and whatnot.
With Trump as president and a republican majority in congress, how much - realistically speaking - do you think privacy will last in the US?
My guess is: not too long.
Here's a prediction: forget Apple, this has all to do with public service and government's power. With all the stuff Trump promised, he'll just lean on the side - as several republican politicians do, and some liberals too - of ignorance, pushing for laws and forcefully having their way regarding encryption, fundamentally weakening security and privacy for all. These people cannot understand the importance of privacy and strong encryption, they'll always dismiss the importance of it by seeing only how criminals can potentially use it, because they are essencially blind on how much their own lives depend on it.
Companies' stances on those will weaken and collapse overtime, cases of abuse of power will rise, and hacker activity will gain new grounds.
Police and government will innevitably end up leaking or being hacked for very sensitive information, information from innocent people that was never meant to go public will, press will come after the government harder than ever, and it'll start an information/cyber civil war as Trump's government already doesn't like the press a whole lot.
Of course, crime and criminal activity won't go down because of that. Even if the US weakens their own stance on privacy and security, that does not mean other countries will follow suit. But businesses and people dependant on services located in the US will be forced to conform.
Banks and other types of secure services will suffer from this because every device now has some sort of backdoor or weakened encryption, private data from people inside the government that was favorable for weakening encryption will leak, but now it's too late to go back - the damage is done.
Private companies that feel threatened by all the measures being taken by the FBI and sanctioned by the government will, with enough pressure, move to countries that understands the importance of privacy and encryption. It'll take a while because it has to reach a point of making economical sense, but it will.
All the morons who were favorable on weakening iPhone and other devices encryption will come crying talking how they didn't know that making security weak for criminals also meant making security weak for everyone else, which in turn just made criminals' lives easier.
But of course, this will only help the fear and paranoia agenda of the current office anyways, so in the next election the candidate who shouts louder will continue winning the races.
It's extremely enticing for law enforcement with such a miopic, poor understanding and complete ignorance of how encryption came to be to dismiss it just so that they can catch more criminals, "terrorists" and whatnot. Short term wins, they are one step ahead, and blahblah. But if we can't have law enforcement thinking on the mid to long term, it can be as damaging as letting vigilante forces control crime in your country.
Power corrupts, and eventually all the data the FBI, NSA and police forces are collecting on innocent civilians will be used for bad - it's probably already happening, we just don't have all the cases in hand to show.
What's the point really? I think the market has more than proven that software trumps over and over hardware everytime new models for x or y brand comes out.
Here's the summary of what I heard coming from Macbook Pro users with this new release:
1. Some declare it's prefect, all Apple decisions were great, they had orgasms fingering the new OLED strip, blah blah;
2. Some hated some of Apple's decisions in different degrees or specs, but they've waited up to 4 years for a new model, they'll upgrade anyways, and make do with whatever bullshit Apple is forcing them to, since there's basically no other option for MacOS;
3. Some hated everything about the new model. So they'll just keep the old model 'till a new Macbook Pro with everything they want comes out.
See what's common there? In the end, no one got out of the ecossystem. For the vast majority of Macbook users, a comparison with PC laptops of similar specs is kinda useless... just some weird reason to create attrition. This is specially true to professional usages... if you are dependant or used to anything that is only available on macs, you are out of luck.
Yes, there are exceptions, but they just seem to be the minority. And then, for this minority a general outlook on specs won't be enough. They'll all have different needs for a new machine, so they'll have to look closely into options.
But you know, it's not by pure chance that Apple is risking to do the stuff they are... it's just this. They've reached a critical mass of people locked into the ecossystem that they feel it's good enough to take unpopular measures just to lock people further in, to save on manufacturing, to save on redesign, to force proprietary standards and whatnot. Any other business would do the same.
And apparently,the new Macbook Pro will have record sales despite all the whinning. It is what it is.
Do they have anything to make that claim?
For those who don't know, there is already an ongoing class action lawsuit in the works:
http://bgr.com/2016/08/31/ipho...
And if you heard something about bendgate or about it being a problem with people who dropped their phones, just know that there has been multiple reported cases of phones that never suffered any physical damages, and that were never put inside tight back pockets and whatnot that also had the defect.
It usually happens overtime. Solder balls from a specific chip gets loose or cracks, which then causes the issue.