Look dude, it's quite obvious you hate silicon valley and millenials, plus the idea of gentrification, but this is nothing really new nor recent, much less exclusive to millenials or silicon valley. Including the renaming of the idea or separation from stuff like frat houses, roommates or student dormitories.
Think you are some sort of genius for making the association? Think again.
Co-living and other shared styles of housing have been around since early 20th century in one form or another, in several different countries if you didn't know about it including Japan, Denmark, and others. It's far from being a Silicon Valley thing, and it's targeted towards single people who just graduated and are looking for jobs or just started working, particularly in urban areas where rent is cost prohibitive.
And neither the idea of having ammenities in commonground areas, the gentrification part, positive spins or the general philosophy of it is anything new. It's just how the market works. This is ad targetting. It passes a specific image not only of what you should expect of the space you'll be living in, but also of people landlords are looking for in tenants.
While some people might find this kinda fake or stupid, it's actually not. Saves a whole lot of money and time, plus it's a very effective marketing strategy. And more importantly, this isn't so dissimilar to things like stars and categorization of hotels, vacation spots, and whatnot.
Considering every breach, hack and leak that has already happened, and how much the tech industry is trying to push these spying devices into peoples' lives, 40% is still far from being good enough. The average consumer should be fighting back this trend of smart assistants and IoT devices like it was some sort of pandemic.
This also happened here in Brazil... can't remember if it was on national level or just some states. You can say Microsoft bought the change, that it's a stupid move, and a whole lot of other stuff... which is something Linux evangelists always do. But the reality of it is: Linux is still not a good OS for certain scenarios.
Even back when Brazil was fully into the whole declaration that it was switching to open source software and Linux in general, in actual public buildings what you'd actually see was desktops running some version of Windows with office installed... and most likely someone playing Solitaire or something.
There are multiple problems involved, and it's simply not going to go away. Support is a huge one. Not only it's harder to find someone to solve problems going from small to big on Linux distros, support for Windows machines (whatever the brand may be) will often "get" the enterprise/business coverage better.
Even finding tutorials for simple things, articles, online courses and whatnot is harder when not outright impossible for some Linux distros.
This difficulty also extends to porting application specific software, maintenance of those, plus the historical advantage that Windows already has. Chances are, most people working with computers nowadays had their first contact and learned how to use a computer on Windows. That's a hard thing to break.
And I'm far from being a Windows lover myself... I hate some of the decisions Microsoft made for Windows 10, I have a laptop running Ubuntu, and Linux is pretty much essencial on the server side. But I've heard this story before, and I've seen why it happens, going from large scale governmental adoption down to individual experiences.
Simply put, Linux nowadays can work well in a very pre-packaged, idealized, and boxed in scenario that most "switching to linux" tutorials will show, as well as online courses, books and whatnot. But if your personal usage deviates just a tiny little bit from that, which is the case for the vast majority of people, things tend to break down fast and hard.
It's just like the overall recommendations on stuff like Chromecast, cheap laptop recommendations, desktop configurations and whatnot. The old: this will be perfect if whoever is using it will only need a browser, a word processor, and some other basic features. Yes, it should be. But I think people overestimate too much how many people can stick to only that while also ignoring stuff like standards, what people working in certain businesses and certain scenarios really need, how it affects the relationship between the business, other businesses and their clients, etc.
When you go down to individual scenarios is where the weaknesses starts to show. I had a personal experience not with Linux, still annedoctal, but that serves as a representative example: I tried switching to LibreOffice during my journalism course. It was all fine and dandy 'till it started to become evident how much of the university standards, model examples, the entire standardization for final term sheets, projects and whatnot were all entirely build on Office and there was no reliable way to convert everything to an open format.
It's not only about the people working there, it's also about standards estabilished years ago, clients, other businesses and companies who have a relationship with them, among several other things. You can see it more or less like a cultural component.
Let's see... Ubuntu running on top of Android provided that you have a Galaxy S8 or Note 8, and that you buy an expensive docking station to make it work. Ok then.
Look, Bill Gates can get a lot of things wrong, that much anyone can tell. But quite frankly the smugness of the columnist is quite hillarious, on how stupid someone can be. As if he's more equipped to know how Bill's investment will pan out from a very superficial reading, like in comparison to a guy who made his top 3 world fortune position out of a garage upstart and is currently driving one of the most effective and important foundations in the world. Smugness tied to ignorance, good way to show the entire world how much of an idiot you are.
With the sort or money and power Gates has, he can turn any desolate land into paradise. He could build a tropical paradise out of Antarctica. It's the sort of backing that made places like Las Vegas and Disney.
Climate change, massive wildfires, hotter summer? Does this guy even know who he's talking about? There's a whole range of ways to make the region profitable. And even if he doesn't, people have to understand that the stuff Bill Gates invest on these days are not always running around profit.
You can hate his Microsoft years and whatnot all you want, and you can throw arguments about tax deductions and whatnot against his foundation all you want, the fact is that there's probably no one else in the world right now investing more on charitable causes. We're talking billions of dollars often on causes that will have no financial return.
People often don't realize how much he and his foundation did because most of the stuff it's currently investing on are ways to address basic health, hygiene and sanitation problems in the poorest countries, so we don't directly see results as much, but for certain regions in the world his contributions probably advanced things several decades in years time.
He's not the kinda guy who is gonna be worried about infrastructure problems in an arid region. He's the guy who has the best chances of finding out a way of solving such problems there, and then selling or sharing the knowledge to do the same to other parts of the world.
I was planning to get one once they update the hardware, increase internal space, store savegames in the cloud, stuff like that. But with it's explosive success, I'm not sure if it'll happen anytime soon...
War is peace Freedom is slavery Ignorance is strength
Stop trying to doublespeake the issue, you cannot treat things differently just because it's covenient to you. Encryption is either strong, or weak and thus useless, there is no middleground, you cannot devise a way to make it weak for some case scenarios while being strong for others because this defeats it's ultimate purpose.
There is zero reason to pursue something like this because the moment US based companies start using a crippled encryption scheme like that is the moment hackers will find a way to exploit it, and criminals will switch to encryption systems made in a country that does not have such ignorant moronic people in the DOJ barking crap like that. Or do these morons really thing that criminals will go "oh hey, these chat apps have US weakened and backdoored encryption and we are commiting crimes in the US, let's use it!". Fucking stupid.
You know what encryption is about? Reducing the rampant privacy erosion that has been happening in recent years because DOJ and other US governmental agencies cannot control their hunger for data. Crimes were solved well before this age of constant mass surveillance and privacy invasion at dystopic scales. Police should be able to do their jobs without having to step on the privacy of everyone they can reach, and arguably sometimes they can do a better job when they are not focusing so much on how to better collect data without anyone knowing about it.
So you can go suck a cock Rosenstein. No one wants to live in a totalitarian state where your half assed ideas comes to fruition. Fucking deal with the reality that there will always be methods for criminals to lock information down in ways that they become unaccessible.
Long long time ago I used Xmarks to store mine... and I was even considering switching back to Firefox not long ago. Glad I didn't now. My bookmarks are my preciousss.... But since we touched the topic, anyone knows of an open source good alternative to store and organize bookmarks offline, safely outside the cloud? I mean, you could just basically use an HTML editor after exporting the whole thing, but there must be something a bit more... elegant for this, right?
Look, it's quite obvious that the vast majority of Amazon Prime subscribers and the general public would not want the company to have a key to their locks, nor let delivery people enter their homes... but I think 4 to 5% is actually a pretty huge number right there. I don't think many people are reading this right. Personally, I'd never agree with that too, but I simply don't have to pay for the service. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure there are tons of people with reasonable excuses to get something like that. Yes, it's still a huge security and privacy issue, but I can certainly see some cases where it becomes a necessity. People who are never home during delivery hours, people with disabilities that have a hard time getting to the door, people who already rely on in home delivery services for whatever reason. Might seen like a dumb idea for some, but for specific people it could be life changing. Specially considering how many products Amazon deals with these days.
Isn't the material recyclable? Sounds like a good justification to just go dig all the tapes that went directly to the trash and reuse it's component parts...
Unless it's using something like Android TV or an embedded Chromecast, which some recent TV offerings do, the answer is a definitive no. If it's a Samsung TV, then it's an pretty blatant and obvious NO, all caps. Samsung, LG and Vizio were already caught red handed with active spying practices, and some of them are facing or faced lawsuits because of it. Just unplug it. Without smart TV features, it's just a plain TV, which is the safest option as it always was.
And no, it's not illogical to prevent some devices from connecting to the Internet. The reality of it is that the less stuff you have connected, the less chance you have of getting spied upon and your data being collected. This also applies to IoT devices and other Internet connected devices. If it does not make sense for a service to be connected to the Internet, it shouldn't be. You already have a proper dedicated device for all the "smart" needs, you don't need the often poorly updated with crappy hardware duplicate that came with the TV.
Basic principle of privacy and security standards, limit the stuff you have connected, always measure the convenience of devices versus the privacy risks they can bring. Something that it just seems that lots of people don't realize these days, which is why we'll soon miss the days we didn't have all details of our lives exposed to hackers, advertisers and big corporations.
A single smartphone and a computer is bad enough as is, adding security cameras, TVs, refrigerators, thermostats, smart bulbs, automated blinds, always listening assistants, and whatever more is out there is not simply wrong, it's just plain stupid. People barely have any knowledge or control of simple routers and their desktop computers, let alone all these smart home crap that most don't even really need. People and the tech industry in general are just marching towards a path of no return, we already have growing evidence on how damaging the move is, but people are usually blind to it because they still didn't face their first identity theft case, or something of the like. By the time most people realize the problem it'll already be too late. Data is out there, either publicly exposed or being sold in huge packages of information to be exploited on the dark web, and there will be nothing you can do about it.
I read his "essay" in full. It's not completely bad, it has few good points, it has several bad ones, but ultimately this is about the image of the company. All in all, no matter how much he tried to make it technical, cold or like a scientific study, it's still basically - men are biologically more apt to some types of jobs rather than women, the "extreme left" is hindering Google as a business, and attempts to bring more women into the company is getting to some extremes he doesn't like and feels threatened by. Are there possibly some extreme left inside Google that is blindly against his views? Probably yes. Could they have had a hand in leaking the essay which ultimately led to him being fired? Also probably yes. But ultimately, the problem is that Google could not keep him as an employee without it becoming a huge liability. He's smart enough to realize that. His defense will fail because Google will put it up that his attempt of "mutual aid or protection" was obviously damaging to the company as a whole, to several employees, and to general company policies. He has no ground to stand. The press took his essay to say it's an attempt to biologically label women as inferior. It's not exactly that, nor it is what the full thing is about, but that's the image that was left. With this, it's pretty much unsustainable to keep him there both for Google's image as a company, and as an employee that would most likely create an internal divide that the company really cannot afford. Now, Google is a company that has been struggling, spending a whole ton of money, and reforming itself internally to adopt a more progressive role and go exactly against speeches like his. This is probably the current money sinkhole there, as it is on several other social networks. His steps towards a better company, at least some of them, are not bad per se, but the way he put it isn't great for anyone. It's all about the tone. There's a bunch of useful stuff in his write up, but unfortunately, it came with a bunch of other stuff that threw mud in entire areas where Google is investing a whole lot of money and effort. It calls for elimination of parts of Google. It certainly wasn't only mutual aid and protection, it was also an attack on parts of Google's internal structure. And to make things worse, he politicized his views - the sort of polarization that Google and other big companies are definitely trying to run away from. There's a lot of unjustified and baseless labeling in his speech where he keeps trying to defend stereotypification and labeling with general statistics. It's poor science at best, prejudice at worst. If Google kept him there, even if the argument was in defense of free speech or whatever, it would bring the polarization and toxicity of political discussions inside the company more than it probably already is. This is a personal opinion of course, but I think Google did the right thing. Even if he somehow wins his complaint, in the long run it'll be far less damaging to the company as a whole.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the convenience and progression of other standards killed it?
Newer standards like the latest HDMI or USB Type-C, plus older ones like DisplayPort are making the whole video+audio thing a one cable matter, there's not a whole lot of incentive to go beyond that. I also have to say that standardization and how different types of media used the Dolby standards and stuff like THX and whatnot were pretty inconsistent. This is one of the things that made me give up the bother.
I guess the newer soundbars that can do some really advanced and neat stuff regarding surround sound might be the final nail to the coffin, but optical audio has been dying for quite a while now. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that it never quite caught on in a mainstream sense... I dunno many people who uses it. Then again, a whole ton of people I know just uses plain TV speakers, or crappy generic pair of speakers for computers.
I have some really old Logitech 5.1 speakers that I used Toslink/spdif for quite a while... it made sense back in a time you either used that or 3/4 different analog audio cables for the job. This was back some 15 years ago.
Problem is that a whole lot of content that was supposed to be Dolby Digital and THX certified came with all sorts of different levels for center channel and subwoofer, I'd often have to tweak it individually, and at some point it started bothering me so much that I ended up just skipping the whole deal and turning on the double stereo setting and leaving it at that (it uses plain regular stereo sound and replicates the same thing for the front and back speaker set). Also a problem that everytime you wanted to watch regular content without DD and THX you had to switch the profile manually.. perhaps newer speaker sets does this automatically. But on my set the result is a mutting of dialogues and overall audio weirdness that was just irritating.
It was certainly worth for a few stuff, but just doesn't make a whole lot of sense anymore. Harder and more expensive to get working switchers and extenders, you have to worry a whole lot more on installation, it's less flexible and you can't tuck it around some corners without risking to break the cable, and then the advantage on interference and whatnot is just not quite there anymore. Newer standards are pretty shielded, hiss and hums will most likely only bother audiophiles.
Not only that, but wireless transmission advanced quite a bit too. Back then it was either impossible or cost prohibitive to get a device to transmit audio+video wirelessly. It's still not exactly cheap these days, but it's reasonable enough.
A pitty though. Because another huge issue is simply stagnation. The standard never changed or evolved much.
I've been repeating this for quite a while now, but I dunno for what reason, people have apparently forgotten all about the case involving the Canadian Mounted Police, a master decryption key for all non-enterprise accounts, and extremely crappy response from your same very own John Chen who was also the CEO back at the time.
If anyone was stupid enough to fall into the obvious and very false statement that the new Blackberry had better costumer protection in place in comparison to Apple or other Android brands, it's on you for not doing very basic research. It's like getting surprized with a new round of scandals of Lenovo laptops having malware pre-loaded on their bios. There have been enough cases to know what the position of the company is. If you are still throwing your money at them, you are just reinforcing the behavior and proving to them that it's acceptable. John Chen has said nothing there that he didn't already say in the past. While he is the CEO of the company, such behavior is to be expected. Anyone who cares about their own personal privacy and about having proper standards on costumer protection should've already let go of the brand by now.
Don't buy into IoT, smart appliances, and this absurd need to connect everything to the Internet or the cloud. Let go of the hype, apply critical reasoning, and don't connect more than what's strictly necessary. Don't trade the potential for a future catastrophe inside your home, or the complete erosion of privacy, just because you think you absolutely need minor conveniences.
Hate me all you want, but I need to be clear on this. Given the current security landscape, the constant hacks, the constant reveals of weak security practices and of devices being breached left and right, if you buy something that is Internet connected and it has controls that can be used to put your own life in danger, it'll be at least partially your own fault. You have not only been fooled into the hype, but you also funded this entire charade. And we all know that singular cases matters nothing to these huge corporations. If you wanna be part of collateral damages, a guinea pig that is paying to be experimented on, that's your call.
...that we even need a law to pass for something like this, but here we are. People might not realize this, but repair shops will be there, doesn't matter if these laws pass or not. They have been playing very important roles for sometime now, like finding out design flaws, being a major part in class action lawsuits for problems that manufacturers fails to admit, and pointing out major issues that big brands keep trying to hide from consumers. Then, of course - as pointed out in the article - serving as competition to the overly inflated offerings of extended repair and other forms of ripping clients off from manufacturers.
I fixed a couple of my own smartphones, a washer/dryer machine and a vacuum cleaner myself... official options, when they were even available, were all priced too high to justify the fix (being a better option to just buy a new one) for most of those. Then there are grievances of authorized/official repair places taking ridiculous ammounts of time to fix some of them. You end up a victim of the worst monopoly practices. I just came to the realization that it was worth investing in tools and time to learn just a little bit of how these electronics work, it ends up saving a whole lot of money and time. It's also great to educate yourself better on how these things actually work.
For the LG washer dryer in particular I'd need to either somehow take it to the shop, probably needing to pay for transport and all the hassle that it means, pay for probably a month worth of dry cleaners if it even got fixed, and then pay for the service which would certainly be priced waaay over what it really cost. All it took was buying the faulty part myself and install it pretty easily. Fixed in a week, and only because I had to wait for the part to arrive. Total time spent actually fixing it? An hour at most. It'd be far more work just to take the damn thing down 16 floors, let alone all the rest.
It's important for the law to pass though because it forces manufacturers to provide schematic and parts for it to be done. Right now, we have to rely on shady sources and grey market pieces. And then there's the entire eWaste discussion. One piece of electronic that you fix instead of buying a new one is one less device that will end up in a warehouse somewhere to be shipped to some foreign country with no human rights with people living in the middle of trash and pollutants.
The single argument that I always see thrown around against the right to repair is always about intellectual property and whatnot. If you ever hear it, it's bullshit. Restricting access to schematics and parts are not enough to stop competition from stealing tech if they want to, because it's extremely easy these days to just disassemble and copy the design if anyone wants to. There's no secret sauce in consumer electronics these days anymore. In fact, most manufacturers uses very common parts that are often not even made by the main brand anymore... it needs to be done that way because of mass production.
The deterrent for stealing intellectual property has always been lawsuits for violation. Yes, electronics these days are way more complex than the time in the past when electronic makers even included schematics with the product out of the box, but even if complexity has increased, methods of production are more or less the same. Smartphones in particular uses a whole bunch of components that are not proprietary and freely available in the market, and the parts that are proprietary you won't be able to reproduce with simple schematics anyways.
So definitely agreed. Right to repair is ultimately better in several fronts for consumers in general, and it's also a way to prevent brands and manufacturers to stop exploiting costumers.
Color me surprised, yet another move from Ajit Pai against societies' best interest and for corporations and conglomerates to fill their pockets. Wow, who would've thought. And of course it comes right after a huge string of natural disasters that killed people all around and destroyed property everywhere, where the role of local media played an important role on informing people of what's happening. I'm sure nothing bad will come out of it, such as local broadcasting stations being sold left and right, closing doors and abandoning the communities they had a presence and important role as source of information. Nonono.
It's pretty easy Microsoft. STOP collecting data from us without our consent. There you go, nothing of interest for the government to secretly get from you.
You know, if you are going to copy paste the article anyways, better put the parts people will be asking questions about: "These changes are not expected to significantly affect the supply of permits since the quota is determined largely by the number of vehicle deregistrations, the regulator said. The limit on vehicle growth rate will be reviewed again in 2020."
Slashdot Mirror
Look dude, it's quite obvious you hate silicon valley and millenials, plus the idea of gentrification, but this is nothing really new nor recent, much less exclusive to millenials or silicon valley. Including the renaming of the idea or separation from stuff like frat houses, roommates or student dormitories.
Think you are some sort of genius for making the association? Think again.
Co-living and other shared styles of housing have been around since early 20th century in one form or another, in several different countries if you didn't know about it including Japan, Denmark, and others.
It's far from being a Silicon Valley thing, and it's targeted towards single people who just graduated and are looking for jobs or just started working, particularly in urban areas where rent is cost prohibitive.
And neither the idea of having ammenities in commonground areas, the gentrification part, positive spins or the general philosophy of it is anything new. It's just how the market works. This is ad targetting. It passes a specific image not only of what you should expect of the space you'll be living in, but also of people landlords are looking for in tenants.
While some people might find this kinda fake or stupid, it's actually not. Saves a whole lot of money and time, plus it's a very effective marketing strategy. And more importantly, this isn't so dissimilar to things like stars and categorization of hotels, vacation spots, and whatnot.
Considering every breach, hack and leak that has already happened, and how much the tech industry is trying to push these spying devices into peoples' lives, 40% is still far from being good enough. The average consumer should be fighting back this trend of smart assistants and IoT devices like it was some sort of pandemic.
This also happened here in Brazil... can't remember if it was on national level or just some states.
You can say Microsoft bought the change, that it's a stupid move, and a whole lot of other stuff... which is something Linux evangelists always do.
But the reality of it is: Linux is still not a good OS for certain scenarios.
Even back when Brazil was fully into the whole declaration that it was switching to open source software and Linux in general, in actual public buildings what you'd actually see was desktops running some version of Windows with office installed... and most likely someone playing Solitaire or something.
There are multiple problems involved, and it's simply not going to go away. Support is a huge one. Not only it's harder to find someone to solve problems going from small to big on Linux distros, support for Windows machines (whatever the brand may be) will often "get" the enterprise/business coverage better.
Even finding tutorials for simple things, articles, online courses and whatnot is harder when not outright impossible for some Linux distros.
This difficulty also extends to porting application specific software, maintenance of those, plus the historical advantage that Windows already has. Chances are, most people working with computers nowadays had their first contact and learned how to use a computer on Windows. That's a hard thing to break.
And I'm far from being a Windows lover myself... I hate some of the decisions Microsoft made for Windows 10, I have a laptop running Ubuntu, and Linux is pretty much essencial on the server side. But I've heard this story before, and I've seen why it happens, going from large scale governmental adoption down to individual experiences.
Simply put, Linux nowadays can work well in a very pre-packaged, idealized, and boxed in scenario that most "switching to linux" tutorials will show, as well as online courses, books and whatnot. But if your personal usage deviates just a tiny little bit from that, which is the case for the vast majority of people, things tend to break down fast and hard.
It's just like the overall recommendations on stuff like Chromecast, cheap laptop recommendations, desktop configurations and whatnot. The old: this will be perfect if whoever is using it will only need a browser, a word processor, and some other basic features. Yes, it should be. But I think people overestimate too much how many people can stick to only that while also ignoring stuff like standards, what people working in certain businesses and certain scenarios really need, how it affects the relationship between the business, other businesses and their clients, etc.
When you go down to individual scenarios is where the weaknesses starts to show.
I had a personal experience not with Linux, still annedoctal, but that serves as a representative example: I tried switching to LibreOffice during my journalism course. It was all fine and dandy 'till it started to become evident how much of the university standards, model examples, the entire standardization for final term sheets, projects and whatnot were all entirely build on Office and there was no reliable way to convert everything to an open format.
It's not only about the people working there, it's also about standards estabilished years ago, clients, other businesses and companies who have a relationship with them, among several other things. You can see it more or less like a cultural component.
There you go, it was made for you:
https://www.theverge.com/2015/...
Let's see... Ubuntu running on top of Android provided that you have a Galaxy S8 or Note 8, and that you buy an expensive docking station to make it work. Ok then.
Look, Bill Gates can get a lot of things wrong, that much anyone can tell.
But quite frankly the smugness of the columnist is quite hillarious, on how stupid someone can be.
As if he's more equipped to know how Bill's investment will pan out from a very superficial reading, like in comparison to a guy who made his top 3 world fortune position out of a garage upstart and is currently driving one of the most effective and important foundations in the world. Smugness tied to ignorance, good way to show the entire world how much of an idiot you are.
With the sort or money and power Gates has, he can turn any desolate land into paradise. He could build a tropical paradise out of Antarctica. It's the sort of backing that made places like Las Vegas and Disney.
Climate change, massive wildfires, hotter summer? Does this guy even know who he's talking about? There's a whole range of ways to make the region profitable.
And even if he doesn't, people have to understand that the stuff Bill Gates invest on these days are not always running around profit.
You can hate his Microsoft years and whatnot all you want, and you can throw arguments about tax deductions and whatnot against his foundation all you want, the fact is that there's probably no one else in the world right now investing more on charitable causes. We're talking billions of dollars often on causes that will have no financial return.
People often don't realize how much he and his foundation did because most of the stuff it's currently investing on are ways to address basic health, hygiene and sanitation problems in the poorest countries, so we don't directly see results as much, but for certain regions in the world his contributions probably advanced things several decades in years time.
He's not the kinda guy who is gonna be worried about infrastructure problems in an arid region. He's the guy who has the best chances of finding out a way of solving such problems there, and then selling or sharing the knowledge to do the same to other parts of the world.
I was planning to get one once they update the hardware, increase internal space, store savegames in the cloud, stuff like that.
But with it's explosive success, I'm not sure if it'll happen anytime soon...
War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength
Stop trying to doublespeake the issue, you cannot treat things differently just because it's covenient to you.
Encryption is either strong, or weak and thus useless, there is no middleground, you cannot devise a way to make it weak for some case scenarios while being strong for others because this defeats it's ultimate purpose.
There is zero reason to pursue something like this because the moment US based companies start using a crippled encryption scheme like that is the moment hackers will find a way to exploit it, and criminals will switch to encryption systems made in a country that does not have such ignorant moronic people in the DOJ barking crap like that.
Or do these morons really thing that criminals will go "oh hey, these chat apps have US weakened and backdoored encryption and we are commiting crimes in the US, let's use it!". Fucking stupid.
You know what encryption is about? Reducing the rampant privacy erosion that has been happening in recent years because DOJ and other US governmental agencies cannot control their hunger for data. Crimes were solved well before this age of constant mass surveillance and privacy invasion at dystopic scales. Police should be able to do their jobs without having to step on the privacy of everyone they can reach, and arguably sometimes they can do a better job when they are not focusing so much on how to better collect data without anyone knowing about it.
So you can go suck a cock Rosenstein. No one wants to live in a totalitarian state where your half assed ideas comes to fruition. Fucking deal with the reality that there will always be methods for criminals to lock information down in ways that they become unaccessible.
Even though I understand the technical explanation behind this, Facebook is going to have a very very hard time suggesting such a thing
Should've been obvious from start.
Does it strip telemetry off tho?
Long long time ago I used Xmarks to store mine... and I was even considering switching back to Firefox not long ago.
Glad I didn't now. My bookmarks are my preciousss....
But since we touched the topic, anyone knows of an open source good alternative to store and organize bookmarks offline, safely outside the cloud?
I mean, you could just basically use an HTML editor after exporting the whole thing, but there must be something a bit more... elegant for this, right?
Look, it's quite obvious that the vast majority of Amazon Prime subscribers and the general public would not want the company to have a key to their locks, nor let delivery people enter their homes... but I think 4 to 5% is actually a pretty huge number right there.
I don't think many people are reading this right.
Personally, I'd never agree with that too, but I simply don't have to pay for the service. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure there are tons of people with reasonable excuses to get something like that.
Yes, it's still a huge security and privacy issue, but I can certainly see some cases where it becomes a necessity. People who are never home during delivery hours, people with disabilities that have a hard time getting to the door, people who already rely on in home delivery services for whatever reason.
Might seen like a dumb idea for some, but for specific people it could be life changing. Specially considering how many products Amazon deals with these days.
Isn't the material recyclable? Sounds like a good justification to just go dig all the tapes that went directly to the trash and reuse it's component parts...
Unless it's using something like Android TV or an embedded Chromecast, which some recent TV offerings do, the answer is a definitive no.
If it's a Samsung TV, then it's an pretty blatant and obvious NO, all caps. Samsung, LG and Vizio were already caught red handed with active spying practices, and some of them are facing or faced lawsuits because of it.
Just unplug it. Without smart TV features, it's just a plain TV, which is the safest option as it always was.
https://www.pcworld.com/articl...
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
http://bgr.com/2014/10/31/smar...
http://abcnews.go.com/Technolo...
https://www.consumerreports.or...
https://www.cnet.com/news/sams...
http://bgr.com/2013/11/20/lg-s...
And no, it's not illogical to prevent some devices from connecting to the Internet. The reality of it is that the less stuff you have connected, the less chance you have of getting spied upon and your data being collected. This also applies to IoT devices and other Internet connected devices. If it does not make sense for a service to be connected to the Internet, it shouldn't be. You already have a proper dedicated device for all the "smart" needs, you don't need the often poorly updated with crappy hardware duplicate that came with the TV.
Basic principle of privacy and security standards, limit the stuff you have connected, always measure the convenience of devices versus the privacy risks they can bring. Something that it just seems that lots of people don't realize these days, which is why we'll soon miss the days we didn't have all details of our lives exposed to hackers, advertisers and big corporations.
A single smartphone and a computer is bad enough as is, adding security cameras, TVs, refrigerators, thermostats, smart bulbs, automated blinds, always listening assistants, and whatever more is out there is not simply wrong, it's just plain stupid. People barely have any knowledge or control of simple routers and their desktop computers, let alone all these smart home crap that most don't even really need. People and the tech industry in general are just marching towards a path of no return, we already have growing evidence on how damaging the move is, but people are usually blind to it because they still didn't face their first identity theft case, or something of the like. By the time most people realize the problem it'll already be too late. Data is out there, either publicly exposed or being sold in huge packages of information to be exploited on the dark web, and there will be nothing you can do about it.
I read his "essay" in full. It's not completely bad, it has few good points, it has several bad ones, but ultimately this is about the image of the company.
All in all, no matter how much he tried to make it technical, cold or like a scientific study, it's still basically - men are biologically more apt to some types of jobs rather than women, the "extreme left" is hindering Google as a business, and attempts to bring more women into the company is getting to some extremes he doesn't like and feels threatened by.
Are there possibly some extreme left inside Google that is blindly against his views? Probably yes. Could they have had a hand in leaking the essay which ultimately led to him being fired? Also probably yes.
But ultimately, the problem is that Google could not keep him as an employee without it becoming a huge liability. He's smart enough to realize that. His defense will fail because Google will put it up that his attempt of "mutual aid or protection" was obviously damaging to the company as a whole, to several employees, and to general company policies. He has no ground to stand.
The press took his essay to say it's an attempt to biologically label women as inferior. It's not exactly that, nor it is what the full thing is about, but that's the image that was left.
With this, it's pretty much unsustainable to keep him there both for Google's image as a company, and as an employee that would most likely create an internal divide that the company really cannot afford.
Now, Google is a company that has been struggling, spending a whole ton of money, and reforming itself internally to adopt a more progressive role and go exactly against speeches like his. This is probably the current money sinkhole there, as it is on several other social networks.
His steps towards a better company, at least some of them, are not bad per se, but the way he put it isn't great for anyone.
It's all about the tone. There's a bunch of useful stuff in his write up, but unfortunately, it came with a bunch of other stuff that threw mud in entire areas where Google is investing a whole lot of money and effort. It calls for elimination of parts of Google. It certainly wasn't only mutual aid and protection, it was also an attack on parts of Google's internal structure. And to make things worse, he politicized his views - the sort of polarization that Google and other big companies are definitely trying to run away from. There's a lot of unjustified and baseless labeling in his speech where he keeps trying to defend stereotypification and labeling with general statistics. It's poor science at best, prejudice at worst.
If Google kept him there, even if the argument was in defense of free speech or whatever, it would bring the polarization and toxicity of political discussions inside the company more than it probably already is.
This is a personal opinion of course, but I think Google did the right thing. Even if he somehow wins his complaint, in the long run it'll be far less damaging to the company as a whole.
... Fucking Your Biological Clock Time (FYBCT)?
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the convenience and progression of other standards killed it?
Newer standards like the latest HDMI or USB Type-C, plus older ones like DisplayPort are making the whole video+audio thing a one cable matter, there's not a whole lot of incentive to go beyond that.
I also have to say that standardization and how different types of media used the Dolby standards and stuff like THX and whatnot were pretty inconsistent. This is one of the things that made me give up the bother.
I guess the newer soundbars that can do some really advanced and neat stuff regarding surround sound might be the final nail to the coffin, but optical audio has been dying for quite a while now. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that it never quite caught on in a mainstream sense... I dunno many people who uses it. Then again, a whole ton of people I know just uses plain TV speakers, or crappy generic pair of speakers for computers.
I have some really old Logitech 5.1 speakers that I used Toslink/spdif for quite a while... it made sense back in a time you either used that or 3/4 different analog audio cables for the job. This was back some 15 years ago.
Problem is that a whole lot of content that was supposed to be Dolby Digital and THX certified came with all sorts of different levels for center channel and subwoofer, I'd often have to tweak it individually, and at some point it started bothering me so much that I ended up just skipping the whole deal and turning on the double stereo setting and leaving it at that (it uses plain regular stereo sound and replicates the same thing for the front and back speaker set). Also a problem that everytime you wanted to watch regular content without DD and THX you had to switch the profile manually.. perhaps newer speaker sets does this automatically. But on my set the result is a mutting of dialogues and overall audio weirdness that was just irritating.
It was certainly worth for a few stuff, but just doesn't make a whole lot of sense anymore. Harder and more expensive to get working switchers and extenders, you have to worry a whole lot more on installation, it's less flexible and you can't tuck it around some corners without risking to break the cable, and then the advantage on interference and whatnot is just not quite there anymore. Newer standards are pretty shielded, hiss and hums will most likely only bother audiophiles.
Not only that, but wireless transmission advanced quite a bit too. Back then it was either impossible or cost prohibitive to get a device to transmit audio+video wirelessly. It's still not exactly cheap these days, but it's reasonable enough.
A pitty though. Because another huge issue is simply stagnation. The standard never changed or evolved much.
I've been repeating this for quite a while now, but I dunno for what reason, people have apparently forgotten all about the case involving the Canadian Mounted Police, a master decryption key for all non-enterprise accounts, and extremely crappy response from your same very own John Chen who was also the CEO back at the time.
Let me refresh people's memories:
https://www.theverge.com/2016/...
https://news.vice.com/article/...
http://blogs.blackberry.com/20...
https://www.computerworld.com/...
If anyone was stupid enough to fall into the obvious and very false statement that the new Blackberry had better costumer protection in place in comparison to Apple or other Android brands, it's on you for not doing very basic research.
It's like getting surprized with a new round of scandals of Lenovo laptops having malware pre-loaded on their bios. There have been enough cases to know what the position of the company is. If you are still throwing your money at them, you are just reinforcing the behavior and proving to them that it's acceptable.
John Chen has said nothing there that he didn't already say in the past. While he is the CEO of the company, such behavior is to be expected. Anyone who cares about their own personal privacy and about having proper standards on costumer protection should've already let go of the brand by now.
Don't buy into IoT, smart appliances, and this absurd need to connect everything to the Internet or the cloud. Let go of the hype, apply critical reasoning, and don't connect more than what's strictly necessary. Don't trade the potential for a future catastrophe inside your home, or the complete erosion of privacy, just because you think you absolutely need minor conveniences.
Hate me all you want, but I need to be clear on this. Given the current security landscape, the constant hacks, the constant reveals of weak security practices and of devices being breached left and right, if you buy something that is Internet connected and it has controls that can be used to put your own life in danger, it'll be at least partially your own fault. You have not only been fooled into the hype, but you also funded this entire charade. And we all know that singular cases matters nothing to these huge corporations. If you wanna be part of collateral damages, a guinea pig that is paying to be experimented on, that's your call.
...that we even need a law to pass for something like this, but here we are.
People might not realize this, but repair shops will be there, doesn't matter if these laws pass or not. They have been playing very important roles for sometime now, like finding out design flaws, being a major part in class action lawsuits for problems that manufacturers fails to admit, and pointing out major issues that big brands keep trying to hide from consumers.
Then, of course - as pointed out in the article - serving as competition to the overly inflated offerings of extended repair and other forms of ripping clients off from manufacturers.
I fixed a couple of my own smartphones, a washer/dryer machine and a vacuum cleaner myself... official options, when they were even available, were all priced too high to justify the fix (being a better option to just buy a new one) for most of those. Then there are grievances of authorized/official repair places taking ridiculous ammounts of time to fix some of them. You end up a victim of the worst monopoly practices.
I just came to the realization that it was worth investing in tools and time to learn just a little bit of how these electronics work, it ends up saving a whole lot of money and time. It's also great to educate yourself better on how these things actually work.
For the LG washer dryer in particular I'd need to either somehow take it to the shop, probably needing to pay for transport and all the hassle that it means, pay for probably a month worth of dry cleaners if it even got fixed, and then pay for the service which would certainly be priced waaay over what it really cost.
All it took was buying the faulty part myself and install it pretty easily. Fixed in a week, and only because I had to wait for the part to arrive. Total time spent actually fixing it? An hour at most. It'd be far more work just to take the damn thing down 16 floors, let alone all the rest.
It's important for the law to pass though because it forces manufacturers to provide schematic and parts for it to be done. Right now, we have to rely on shady sources and grey market pieces.
And then there's the entire eWaste discussion. One piece of electronic that you fix instead of buying a new one is one less device that will end up in a warehouse somewhere to be shipped to some foreign country with no human rights with people living in the middle of trash and pollutants.
The single argument that I always see thrown around against the right to repair is always about intellectual property and whatnot. If you ever hear it, it's bullshit. Restricting access to schematics and parts are not enough to stop competition from stealing tech if they want to, because it's extremely easy these days to just disassemble and copy the design if anyone wants to. There's no secret sauce in consumer electronics these days anymore. In fact, most manufacturers uses very common parts that are often not even made by the main brand anymore... it needs to be done that way because of mass production.
The deterrent for stealing intellectual property has always been lawsuits for violation. Yes, electronics these days are way more complex than the time in the past when electronic makers even included schematics with the product out of the box, but even if complexity has increased, methods of production are more or less the same. Smartphones in particular uses a whole bunch of components that are not proprietary and freely available in the market, and the parts that are proprietary you won't be able to reproduce with simple schematics anyways.
So definitely agreed. Right to repair is ultimately better in several fronts for consumers in general, and it's also a way to prevent brands and manufacturers to stop exploiting costumers.
"We won't let you cut the cord you damn ex-costumers, we'll cut the cord ourselves". o_O
Color me surprised, yet another move from Ajit Pai against societies' best interest and for corporations and conglomerates to fill their pockets. Wow, who would've thought.
And of course it comes right after a huge string of natural disasters that killed people all around and destroyed property everywhere, where the role of local media played an important role on informing people of what's happening.
I'm sure nothing bad will come out of it, such as local broadcasting stations being sold left and right, closing doors and abandoning the communities they had a presence and important role as source of information. Nonono.
It's pretty easy Microsoft. STOP collecting data from us without our consent. There you go, nothing of interest for the government to secretly get from you.
You know, if you are going to copy paste the article anyways, better put the parts people will be asking questions about:
"These changes are not expected to significantly affect the supply of permits since the quota is determined largely by the number of vehicle deregistrations, the regulator said. The limit on vehicle growth rate will be reviewed again in 2020."