Let's see here. It's an Android phone that has ALMOST vanilla Android... but it still has to go through Essencial for updates, so it's vanilla Android with one of the biggest problems of non-vanilla Android.
The phone suffered delays, left early adopters angry, and had major camera issues on release. The flashy stuff about it is either useless, surface level only or cosmetic, or just following trends. Ceramics body makes the device more brittle and heavy (poor combination) without offering any protection advantage other than being a bit more scratch proof. Same for titanium. Essencially, you are much more prone to damage this camera than most others in the market. The Moto Mod style port only has a 360 camera to show, which is something most people don't care about. Doesn't have a headphone jack or an SD card reader, make it less than "essencial". And of course, the company didn't pay attention to one of the most essencial parts of a phone: the camera. I just hope that at least it gets nice reception and has a good fast Wi-fi chip in it. Otherwise, there doesn't really seem to be anything essencial about it.
The death knell was the price. And I'm honestly not sure if lowering at this point in time will do it any favors. Some people will reconsider, but the hype is over, and generous people already said that "well, perhaps the next model". Not so generous people will be skipping the brand altogether.
I'd say that people should get a VPN when they actually understand how it works, what it can do for you, and why you need it, if you really do. If you don't know this, you will be wasting your money. It's not a be all end all for security, it's usefulness is limited to certain scenarios and situations, and most people still don't use one.
But in a general sense, you could get a VPN as soon as you started using the Internet to traffic sensitive information of any sort, even if you need parents or someone else to set it up for you, knowing the reasoning behind it.
I still think that for the most part, people don't need to worry about it. It has become prevalent in ads and sponsorship on tech news channels and whatnot, Tunnelbear being one of the most blatant to show up everywhere, but their slogan does not present the whole truth of it - "browse privately and securely", as Linus is always saying.:P
It's far more important for a kid, teen or user in general to first learn and understand best privacy and security practices on the Internet before even considering a VPN. Stuff that you don't need to pay for. Most common problems people have, like falling to fishing e-mails, downloading malware, getting their online identities stolen, thoughtlessly sharing sensitive information on social networks, and stuff like that - VPNs won't protect you from most of that.
Poor analogy, but you can think more or less like this: a bulletproof car. See that it's pointless to buy a bulletproof car if you are going to use it to go to shady neighborhoods flashing your money around as soon as you step out of it. Your bulletproof car won't prevent you from getting mugged in the streets once you exit it.
And sure, VPNs can be useful even for single users, specially those who are traveling a lot, who use unsecure networks, or just don't care about securing their own home network, but there are far more important and basic things than that when it comes to privacy and security.
To be clear, Mastercard in the US. Several other countries haven't been using signature for credit cards for well over a decade now. I dunno why US credit card issuers decided to keep antiquated systems for so long, perhaps because you guys didn't go through periods of rampant fraud and cloning as much as we did, but it's true: the last time I had to sign a credit card slip was over 10 years ago. Perhaps closer to 15.
My current bank uses biometric vein scanner technology in their ATMs... because you know, not even chip and pin is secure these days anymore.
But then pre-packages the information to be sent surreptiously with your daily or weekly Google report. I dunno what people find so useful in assistants, crap like this, plus embedded AI to identify objects when you are taking photos and whatnot, but I see it as overengineering stuff and offering little to no convenience (when not actually making things even harder to do) while using you as testbed for future data collection schemes and whatnot.
This function in particular can only go both ways: either collect the data to send later and use it to sell more music to you, or as some future implementation of DRM that we're simply not quite aware of. It's giving more vain justifications for people to get used to the idea of having always on listening devices. We're not long from getting to a point where no one can know for sure if they are getting recorded all the time because a personal device, or devices of other people around you might have an always listening function in it recording everything. This is the type of future we're walking towards because people are blindly following shitty trends mandated by these corporations.
Does Google use an open source encryption standard that can't be cracked? Would this measure work in all browsers without limitations? Is Google completely left out of the equation not being able to collect any data or metadata from e-mails?
If the answer is no for any of those questions, Gmail is not the most secure e-mail provider on the planet, and in fact it's worse than many freely available options out there. Want extra protections involving USB keys for your devices? Get a Yubikey.
USB Type-C basically inherited all the problems that USB had and made it worse by haphazardly introducing new capabilities and more power.
Honestly, I'd rather much prefered if the USB consortium got USB 2.0, made it really transparent, organized and standardized, forcing everyone that used it to either have all capabilities in it, or at the very least properly classify and name what they were including, and called THAT USB Type-C than the mess they made with it.
I'd happily trade all this mess for the priviledge of purchasing a smartphone knowing that it'll have MHL, OtG, and enough power to connect some 3 accessories in it rather than whatever USB Type-C brought. It just doubled down on stupidity and anti-consumer practices and left it at that.
Now, it just got more confusing than ever, it's less of a standard than it was with regular USB, consumers knows even less what their ports are capable of, manufacturers continue the shady practice of hiding what their implementation included or not, and it's just a continuation of the shitty mess that we had before - only worse because a whole ton of functionalities are being moved to the port (stuff like video interface, high voltage charging, reliance as a single port to be used in conjunction with a dongle, etc etc), with devices coming out that eliminated other standards for the sake of one that consumers don't know whether it'll work for some stuff or not, whether it's compatible with some dongles or not.
It's a hot mess, and unfortunately we cannot expect this crap to be solved in a long time. We already had the initial problem with badly made cables and badly made chargers that were killing devices, we had situation with reviewers having to test dozens of dongles with dozens of laptops to see if they work or not, we have all sorts of configurations regarding data throughput and support for other accessories... is it Thunderbolt compatible? Is it USB Type-C 3.1 rev A or B? Is data speed transfer full both ways, full one way and half another? Can you use it to charge? What functionalities of this dongle it supports? Can you use MHL through it? Can it drive a monitor? Do you need extra juice to make this dongle work? Can I use the charger that came with yout USB Type-C smartphone with my USB Type-C smartphone without it blowing up? Can I use another cable other than the one that came with the box for a data connection to my PC? Does my smartphone support the direct USB Type-C to USB Type-C connection that is coming up on new chargers even though my smartphone didn't come with a cable like that?
The list goes on and on and on, people have to dig through YouTube channels, blogs and reviews websites to know the answer, most of them are non-official and are still not there, and ever single new smartphone, laptop or whatever that comes out using the standard needs to go through this tedious and stupid process because the USB consortium could not define those.
No decent port that dares call itself a standard should need a Google engineer reviewing cables and connectors in his free time on Amazon to say if it's safe to use or not. Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful to Benson Leung for doing it, but the fact that he needs to do it is ridiculous and makes USB Type-C laughable as a "standard".
It's this ridiculous scenario where you have to put down your money on very expensive consumer electronics not knowing what you are really gonna get. Which is fucking stupid and should be unnacceptable in this day and age. Yet here we are.
Much like Bluetooth 5 (which is another joke of a standard), I was hopeful for USB Type-C when it was first announced. I dunno if it's stupidity or corporate greed, but yet another thing ruined by these people who don't seem to get what standards are made for.
And it's specially sad because if USB Type-C was a decent standard, there is so much more that could be done with smartphones, tablets and laptops that I don't even like thinking too much about. Stuff like that Samsung Dex thing? It'd be someth
You know also a good way of blocking most of those? Using ad blockers and other privacy oriented plugins, most of which Edge does not support.
And then, people should know that these tests are always giving different results because the stats change all the time... here: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Well, I dunno how things are there in the US, but if it's anything like Brazil (and I think it is), people should be celebrating on the streets.
Cable TV companies are oligopolies, some of the biggest companies in the country, and they abused their position in every way possible. Price gouging, exploiting legal loopholes for shady tie-ins, bundling sales, chopping up consumer rights in every way possible, offering the worst costumer service imaginable, using aggressive marketing tactics and whatnot.
And they constantly keep trying to change the rules and force the costumers to either pay more, or receive less, on lame justifications that they don't have enough money to upgrade their infrastructure, all the while posting record profits every year.
A whole set of consumer laws in recent years were passed because of them, including anti spam/telemarketing call laws, the entire net neutrality debacle, a bunch of stuff regarding how call centers should work to attend their costumers, etc etc.
Every year they come up to threaten yet another restringent rule that will kill connection for a significant portion of their users. As if they could re-write the contracts we agreed upon when signing up for the service.
The more market share for cable TV shrinks, the better for everyone as I see it. It'll be better for people who likes their cable, as the companies will have to fight to keep them and give them better service, and more options for us who never cared about cable in the first place.
I went over a decade having to pay for cable just because there was some shady bundling crap that made it cheaper to pay for the entire package rather than paying for Internet alone. The majority of the country are still stuck on this deal because they have no other options. Like I said, oligopolies. They will price fix, they will close deals behind curtains to dominate certain areas, they will exploit people as much as they can.
Fortunately, I moved to a place where there's fiber Internet available... jumped at the opportunity as fast as I could, it's like I'm finally getting what I pay for. No more unexplained outages, a fair working connection for the price I pay (which is lower than if I had to pay for the cable TV/Internet bundle), good costumer service, and no lies on speed, throttling practices and data caps.
I just sent a complaint towards OnePlus, will not be recommending it anymore for anyone, and the OnePlus 3 will be my last OnePlus device.
It's not like I didn't think this could happen, I was hoping that it wouldn't because quite frankly, any business these days should be monitored for stuff like that.
But now, my relationship with this company is done. Very sad because the OnePlus 3 is a great device overall for the price. Up until now I was recommending it for people looking for high end capabilities with a fair price. Now, it's over. I will be recommending against it, just like I recommend against puchasing anything from Lenovo.
Even sadder is that privacy conscious people are getting curbed into a corner with fewer and fewer options to chose from.
They probably have people in government that's not as stupid as Trump... not exactly hard to accomplish.
Here's the thing, this isn't only about China and reducing polution there. Clean energy is quite clearly a skyrocketing global trend, whatever the reason you might believe in. It should be clear for everyone, even climate change deniers and people that believes in some big conspiracy about BIG RENEWABLE or whatever, that whoever dominates technology and production of clean energy resources will have a whole ton of money as countries in the entire world starts investing in it.
US companies will keep pursuing it, sure, because they are not stupid, and countries announcing lofty goals only serves to put more fuel *cough* into the trend. Trump getting out of the Paris agreement just shows how much of a doofus he is. Of course it won't stop american companies to pursuit what will become an extremely profitable business, but it definitely doesn't help.
And yes, this is a very cynical outlook on the whole thing, but I highly doubt any of the big corporations or governments care about stuff like our health or cleaning up the mess. China's extremely strict dictatorship doesn't give two shits about their citizens dying of lung related disease or having to swim through smog during certain periods of the year. They'd let half the population die while living in an air filtered bubble. If they really cared they wouldn't be in the state they are.
But this is about money and power. While Trump is wasting time trying to repeal everything Obama did, and try to do every ignorant thing he promised in his campaign because he's a sociopath that can never admit he's wrong, the chinese government will be investing full force on renewables because they want the country to serve as a role model, as a souce of technology, and as an industrial source of solutions for renewables in general.
The balance has already been shifting towards China for a while now, renewables might be the thing that will tip the scale on their side over. Which I personally don't see as a great thing overall, but it's happening.
It has become plain impossible for an average social network user to avoid something like this.
I'd guess IP, location, or perhaps even something else ousted her. And Facebook doesn't give a fuck, because it's that sort of thing that helps them convince advertisers to pay them money.
I have a Galaxy Tab S2. A Chromebook cannot replace it. I don't hate it or anything like that, but it's all about the formfactor and usage.
First of all, it's extremely disingenuous to brush off something like "Nowadays, a Chromebook runs the same apps from the same Google Play Store". Sure, if you consider the fact that most apps don't work well, several of them crashes, have weird bugs, etc etc. No, a Chromebook does not run the same apps from the same Google Play Store. Far far faaaar from it. It might eventually happen? Well, that's something you have to pray Google keeps working on. It's something I've been hearing since the compatibility was announced. It still didn't happen.
It'd be great if Android apps worked well on a Chromebook, but the absolute vast majority of it doesn't. It's the problem of smartphone designed apps running on tablet formfactor but multiple times worse.
Next on the list, hardware design wise, it's the same problem of trying to use a hybrid as a tablet. The keyboard being there for typing is great for some applications, but when you want to use the device as a tablet, it's a huge annoyance and burdensome. Just try it for yourself. Reading comics or eBooks, playing simple games, watching content. The extra weight and bulk needed for the keyboard works against a tablet type usage.
OS wise, it might be closer to being a true hybrid in comparison to say Windows or MacOS, but it's still not quite there.
Going offline. Provided that Android tablets by themselves are also not great on this area, but Chromebooks are even worse. You have to go through a whole ton of configurations to enable some offline functionality, and since regular Android apps are far from working well right now, it only makes things harder.
I'm not saying that Chromebooks are bad though... they can be great, depending on usage. But truth of it, you are inside Google's walled garden. It's a jack of all trades, master of none. It barely works as an Android tablet, and scrapes the basic functionalities of a full laptop, which you might be fine with. But it's no full replacement for anything.
A key problem with the Linux phone is figuring out timing.
Personally, I have no doubts that not only there's demand for a device like that these days, but it'll only increase as more and more people gets their identity stolen, their private content thrawled through, and their personal security ravaged overtime. It's the direction we're walking to, and we're currently only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
But a private Linux phone only has chances of keep going when there's enough money and interest into it to keep projects going. Kickstarting a project is one thing, delivering on time is another, but the important part here is a stream of development and the upgrade path.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very glad that this was backed, but I really don't want to see yet another privacy oriented project dying off because of lack of support.
Was sick. Heh. If Microsoft was sick back when they got Nokia I'd still rather have the lightly sick Microsoft than the pestilence ridden with Windows 10S bullshit, "telemetry" pile of crap with weak excuses that Microsoft has become. Windows Phones are dead now, XBox One is a weaker platform than XBox 360 was, the entire Surface line is either a continuation of past products or new models that are not selling well, the company is losing evangelists as a whole in recent years. If your fucking grand plan for Microsoft's future is to continue insisting on the piss poor Microsoft Store, on overpriced devices with half backed OS ideas, on privacy erosion, opaqueness, aggressive anti consumer practices for updating to Windows 10, and more of that crap, the only people "believing" in the future of Microsoft are your board members Nadella. For the first time in my entire Windows based computing life I decided to delve a bit deeper into Linux, keep a secondary device with Ubuntu, and move most of my stuff to NAS storage devices. It's the one era of Microsoft that is truly making me consider switching to something else. I'm not seeing anything in recent years that came close to what Bill or even Ballmer did. Their eras might have had several misshaps, but they all had very strong accomplishments. Keep in mind that Windows 7 was from the Ballmer era. All the crap that came after it was Nadella. He might have created an internal culture of happy people living in a bubble who cannot see the needs and interests of their clients, but that's all that is. Augmented reality, which for some stupid reason Microsoft decided to call Mixed Reality when it's really not, is late to the game and has a very weak showing. It's not competing with anything that's out there right now, be it on price for AR in smartphones or in capabilities with Oculus Rift or HTC Vive for PC. It's as late to the game as Windows Phone was, and it'll eventually die off in the same way. The stuff that sets it apart from the competition is priced so high that no one can afford it - Hololens. It was the first to show up, and it's still at prototype stage. AI talks are coming mostly from Google these days, and "futuristic computing" is just a blanket term that has no concrete feel for the vast majority of consumers.
But indeed, it's to be expected from the current CEO to think so highly of himself while failing to see what the company had best in the past. It's showing on Microsoft software and products. And if things keep going this way, it'll be the whole reason why I'll quit being a costumer once and for all.
People like to wax poetic about free speech and freedom of speech, but most people don't understand it nor have ever researched what it is, and how it differs from anarchy and chaos.
First of all, there is no free speech in private spaces. Whenever you are using a social media service, blog commenting system, internet forum, webpage hosted by a provider, among several other spaces on the Internet your speech is limited to what has been stipulated on terms of services, policies and other contracts that you agreed to when you opened an account. It's always been this way, and this won't change. If you think you have some right to free speech in some service you are using on the Internet, you are wrong.
The concept of Freedom of Speech was created for, and applies strictly to public spaces. It was created to preserve the rights of people and journalists to criticize the government, period. It is in good standards for democratic societies in general, and private companies in these societies tries to follow the idea as close as possible, but it is not guaranteed. On the other hand, a whole metric ton of laws were made involving speech to bar everything from human rights violations to general prejudice, hatred, targeting, unjust enrichment, among others. In fact, most democratic countries in the world today have specific laws against racism, prejudice against minorities, symbols related to parties and ideologies with historial ties to hatred and prejudice, incitation to hatred, among others. US is kind of an outlier in this because there are grey areas in law, but a white supremacist in most countries would end up in jail depending on their public attitude.
Particularly for ads and offers of products and services the law is already there. False advertising applies to miracle cures and diets. The problem is on monitoring and application of the law, as well as exploitation of loopholes in law. It is impossible to monitor and punish everyone that comes up with bullshit on the Internet, the solution for that is critical reasoning and a society that is better educated and better apt to detect bullshit and better select their sources. The problem here is not what is permissible in society as a whole, the problem is people who keeps promoting, reading content, and using sources that has blatantly lied in the past, continues spewing crap without any basis, build their discourse on bullshit, and keeps being supported by ignorant masses who cannot take minutes of their time to properly research what they are swallowing whole.
We cannot expect every social network to monitor and classify everything their users put up on a daily basis. It's not humanly possible. I don't think people realize how many posts, videos and photos are uploaded every minute on these social networks... here's an approximation from 4 years ago: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
We're talking about hundreds of thousands of posts every minute on Facebook. Close to 100 hours of video on YouTube. 300 blog posts on Wordpress alone. 500 new websites. Every minute of every single day. There are not enough people in the world to curate all this, so these companies need to use algorithms, which will never be perfect for the job. In fact, for them to be even close to good they'd need to be running on a computational level close to a human brain, which we are still far far faaaaar away from achieving.
The rush against fake news, spam, neo nazis, hate speech, and all the stuff that has been sensationalized just recently has always been there on some level. It's the whole problem of having few news sources that can be heavily scrutinized and monitored versus everyone being a potential source of information.
And all the stuff social network companies have been doing recently is all welcome, but it's also at most a stop gap solution. No matter how much
This is all that Google has been in recent years. Half assed blind bets with zero focus. They'll announce some big feature, big service, interesting tech application, and then instead of making it better and more accessible they'll just stay quiet for months and years, abandon it, and then "deprecate" it silently. Empty promises, premature ejaculation.
On the other hand, if there's some hype around some sort of functionality, instead of integrating it on their older services, they'll create new ones, like not only one or two but sometimes 4 or 5 different versions with different names for no good reason, and then screw up the entire ecossystem fracturing userbase towards multiple overlapping services. And then, when understandably none of the versions have good adoption because everyone is left confused at the prospect of trying multiple apps to do something they already use another app for, then the strategy falls back to the standard. Keep quiet, abandon it, and deprecate.
Google isn't evil anymore... it's just stupid. It became a victim of stretching itself out too thin, and creating an internal culture that lives in small bubbles. They cannot get their dev teams together to come up with a unified concept of anything anymore. The company cannot think big anymore. It doesn't seem to have unified concepts for whatever pure functionality, it's just a bunch of scattershot ideas. Most of the Google mainstays are all getting up to a full decade old. The search engine, maps, Gmail, Chrome, Android. What has Google produced internally in the past 5 years or so that is still going strong?
This has been proven by payment systems, by chat apps, by new stuff like Google Assistant not integrating well or making use of other Google services, by different apps that overlaps functions of others... it's like different parts of Google have absolutely no idea what other parts are making, and they keep churning out whatever, deciding what to do with what's left behind later on.
I'll just avoid new Google stuff as much as possible. You have no way of knowing what will survive, you can't rely on it, and channels of communication on development are as opaque as they can be. We are basically alpha testers. It's easier for me personally to invest on apps and services that have devs or a company focused on it, and dependant on it for the sake of their businesses.
The worst part of it all is that at least when the company was still young, it used that sort of strategy for new ideas. Now it only picks crap from the hype pile, re-hashes it, and see if it sticks. Crap like Allo and Duo. They don't even have a spine to risk completely eliminating Hangouts and several other chat platforms to consolidate into one thing and offer it as a single chat solution. It's all half assed and without focus.
Regardless of what it ends up being, I already know the marketing narrative. They started before Ford, they went through a million prototypes, and that's why you need to pay them 10x the price of a regular car.
This particular battle of semantics has been going on for a while now, and much like previous battles (hoverboard, drones, HDR in 4K), it'll be won by advertisers who don't know better.
The point is building interest in a generic marketing term even if it comes at the cost of the original meaning of the word. Scientific or technical terms (and in some cases, terms made up by sci-fi authors) have always been appropriated, it'll keep happening.
But is AI being overhyped? Definitely. Because behind all the AI craze, the real interest for several companies is in user data collection which is becoming the new coin of the day. It is a very convenient way for tech companies to imply that there are some vague gains to be had using their products while not mentioning that they are harvesting your data or saying that they need to do it "because the AI needs it to work better". Notice how it's also super convenient for companies and services to use vague terms like that because they not only "fancy up" their products, it also serves as a convenient scapegoat when things go south (see how "algorithms" is losely employed by social media networks to put the blame on for mishaps).
For those who didn't see the dimention of this overhyping just yet, here's a comprehensive list of a whole ton of products and services where the term is used, most of which have zero AI in it: https://medium.com/imlyra/a-li... Some of them barely have any intelligence on them at all.
Here's what will keep happening during the next years: entire "systems" that are riddled with horrible security practices and no competent personel to care of it will come crashing down after years of negligence. I dunno how many of them will be in such a spectacular cascade of revelations, but I imagine that a sizeable portion will be. Security professionals and conscious people have been warning for a while that stuff like that was going to eventually happen, but businesses, services and corporations small and large have not only been ignoring things so far, they have been introducing more and more points of failure over the years. We are only starting to walk in the middle of a minefield. By the end of it, if we didn't already go to a full blown war, privacy will be dead for a whole ton of people, rights violated and trampled. It's pretty much the perfect storm crime/theft/scam. All that data that's being leaked, hacked into, collected and harvested to be sold, or actively spied and taken in real time is accumulating somewhere, perhaps in databases inside the darknet, by criminals and hacker groups, by corporations that will eventually take advantage of it. It'll be terabytes upon terabytes of sophisticated dossier databases that will give all sorts of private information about anyone with a single search. People don't react to it and don't seem to care all that much because that information can be exploited slowly. Who cares if someone got his/her identity stolen, as long as it's not happening to me it's ok. But one day it will. And then, it's no use getting angry and trying to fight against it because much as yourself once did, no one cares. This is our future.
Oh yeah, iPhones are too complex to repair... which is probably why lots of independent repair shops are doing it at lower prices than official Apple repair, faster and more reliably. I bet they are also trying to spare people the complexity of it by lobbying against any laws that would allow independent repair shops to fix their stuff.
This probably also has nothing to do with the fact that independent repair shops are often the ones finding out about design flaws and overall problems of iPhones that would never have been disclosed if people didn't have the choice... like the touch ID disease case. Nonono.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, of course this happened.
Let's see here. It's an Android phone that has ALMOST vanilla Android... but it still has to go through Essencial for updates, so it's vanilla Android with one of the biggest problems of non-vanilla Android.
The phone suffered delays, left early adopters angry, and had major camera issues on release.
The flashy stuff about it is either useless, surface level only or cosmetic, or just following trends.
Ceramics body makes the device more brittle and heavy (poor combination) without offering any protection advantage other than being a bit more scratch proof. Same for titanium. Essencially, you are much more prone to damage this camera than most others in the market.
The Moto Mod style port only has a 360 camera to show, which is something most people don't care about.
Doesn't have a headphone jack or an SD card reader, make it less than "essencial".
And of course, the company didn't pay attention to one of the most essencial parts of a phone: the camera.
I just hope that at least it gets nice reception and has a good fast Wi-fi chip in it. Otherwise, there doesn't really seem to be anything essencial about it.
The death knell was the price. And I'm honestly not sure if lowering at this point in time will do it any favors. Some people will reconsider, but the hype is over, and generous people already said that "well, perhaps the next model". Not so generous people will be skipping the brand altogether.
Too little, too late.
Whatever... wake me up when there are factories with robots building robots that builds robots that makes humans.
Or better yet, don't wake me up... it's comfy in VR space.
I'd say that people should get a VPN when they actually understand how it works, what it can do for you, and why you need it, if you really do. If you don't know this, you will be wasting your money. It's not a be all end all for security, it's usefulness is limited to certain scenarios and situations, and most people still don't use one.
But in a general sense, you could get a VPN as soon as you started using the Internet to traffic sensitive information of any sort, even if you need parents or someone else to set it up for you, knowing the reasoning behind it.
I still think that for the most part, people don't need to worry about it. It has become prevalent in ads and sponsorship on tech news channels and whatnot, Tunnelbear being one of the most blatant to show up everywhere, but their slogan does not present the whole truth of it - "browse privately and securely", as Linus is always saying. :P
It's far more important for a kid, teen or user in general to first learn and understand best privacy and security practices on the Internet before even considering a VPN. Stuff that you don't need to pay for. Most common problems people have, like falling to fishing e-mails, downloading malware, getting their online identities stolen, thoughtlessly sharing sensitive information on social networks, and stuff like that - VPNs won't protect you from most of that.
Poor analogy, but you can think more or less like this: a bulletproof car. See that it's pointless to buy a bulletproof car if you are going to use it to go to shady neighborhoods flashing your money around as soon as you step out of it. Your bulletproof car won't prevent you from getting mugged in the streets once you exit it.
And sure, VPNs can be useful even for single users, specially those who are traveling a lot, who use unsecure networks, or just don't care about securing their own home network, but there are far more important and basic things than that when it comes to privacy and security.
To be clear, Mastercard in the US. Several other countries haven't been using signature for credit cards for well over a decade now.
I dunno why US credit card issuers decided to keep antiquated systems for so long, perhaps because you guys didn't go through periods of rampant fraud and cloning as much as we did, but it's true: the last time I had to sign a credit card slip was over 10 years ago. Perhaps closer to 15.
My current bank uses biometric vein scanner technology in their ATMs... because you know, not even chip and pin is secure these days anymore.
But then pre-packages the information to be sent surreptiously with your daily or weekly Google report.
I dunno what people find so useful in assistants, crap like this, plus embedded AI to identify objects when you are taking photos and whatnot, but I see it as overengineering stuff and offering little to no convenience (when not actually making things even harder to do) while using you as testbed for future data collection schemes and whatnot.
This function in particular can only go both ways: either collect the data to send later and use it to sell more music to you, or as some future implementation of DRM that we're simply not quite aware of. It's giving more vain justifications for people to get used to the idea of having always on listening devices. We're not long from getting to a point where no one can know for sure if they are getting recorded all the time because a personal device, or devices of other people around you might have an always listening function in it recording everything. This is the type of future we're walking towards because people are blindly following shitty trends mandated by these corporations.
Does Google use an open source encryption standard that can't be cracked?
Would this measure work in all browsers without limitations?
Is Google completely left out of the equation not being able to collect any data or metadata from e-mails?
If the answer is no for any of those questions, Gmail is not the most secure e-mail provider on the planet, and in fact it's worse than many freely available options out there.
Want extra protections involving USB keys for your devices? Get a Yubikey.
USB Type-C basically inherited all the problems that USB had and made it worse by haphazardly introducing new capabilities and more power.
Honestly, I'd rather much prefered if the USB consortium got USB 2.0, made it really transparent, organized and standardized, forcing everyone that used it to either have all capabilities in it, or at the very least properly classify and name what they were including, and called THAT USB Type-C than the mess they made with it.
I'd happily trade all this mess for the priviledge of purchasing a smartphone knowing that it'll have MHL, OtG, and enough power to connect some 3 accessories in it rather than whatever USB Type-C brought. It just doubled down on stupidity and anti-consumer practices and left it at that.
Now, it just got more confusing than ever, it's less of a standard than it was with regular USB, consumers knows even less what their ports are capable of, manufacturers continue the shady practice of hiding what their implementation included or not, and it's just a continuation of the shitty mess that we had before - only worse because a whole ton of functionalities are being moved to the port (stuff like video interface, high voltage charging, reliance as a single port to be used in conjunction with a dongle, etc etc), with devices coming out that eliminated other standards for the sake of one that consumers don't know whether it'll work for some stuff or not, whether it's compatible with some dongles or not.
It's a hot mess, and unfortunately we cannot expect this crap to be solved in a long time. We already had the initial problem with badly made cables and badly made chargers that were killing devices, we had situation with reviewers having to test dozens of dongles with dozens of laptops to see if they work or not, we have all sorts of configurations regarding data throughput and support for other accessories... is it Thunderbolt compatible? Is it USB Type-C 3.1 rev A or B? Is data speed transfer full both ways, full one way and half another? Can you use it to charge? What functionalities of this dongle it supports? Can you use MHL through it? Can it drive a monitor? Do you need extra juice to make this dongle work? Can I use the charger that came with yout USB Type-C smartphone with my USB Type-C smartphone without it blowing up? Can I use another cable other than the one that came with the box for a data connection to my PC? Does my smartphone support the direct USB Type-C to USB Type-C connection that is coming up on new chargers even though my smartphone didn't come with a cable like that?
The list goes on and on and on, people have to dig through YouTube channels, blogs and reviews websites to know the answer, most of them are non-official and are still not there, and ever single new smartphone, laptop or whatever that comes out using the standard needs to go through this tedious and stupid process because the USB consortium could not define those.
No decent port that dares call itself a standard should need a Google engineer reviewing cables and connectors in his free time on Amazon to say if it's safe to use or not. Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful to Benson Leung for doing it, but the fact that he needs to do it is ridiculous and makes USB Type-C laughable as a "standard".
It's this ridiculous scenario where you have to put down your money on very expensive consumer electronics not knowing what you are really gonna get. Which is fucking stupid and should be unnacceptable in this day and age. Yet here we are.
Much like Bluetooth 5 (which is another joke of a standard), I was hopeful for USB Type-C when it was first announced. I dunno if it's stupidity or corporate greed, but yet another thing ruined by these people who don't seem to get what standards are made for.
And it's specially sad because if USB Type-C was a decent standard, there is so much more that could be done with smartphones, tablets and laptops that I don't even like thinking too much about. Stuff like that Samsung Dex thing? It'd be someth
You know also a good way of blocking most of those? Using ad blockers and other privacy oriented plugins, most of which Edge does not support.
And then, people should know that these tests are always giving different results because the stats change all the time... here:
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Here:
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Just keep using whatever you like and feel more comfortable with, all browsers have their own vulnerabilities and risks.
Well, I dunno how things are there in the US, but if it's anything like Brazil (and I think it is), people should be celebrating on the streets.
Cable TV companies are oligopolies, some of the biggest companies in the country, and they abused their position in every way possible. Price gouging, exploiting legal loopholes for shady tie-ins, bundling sales, chopping up consumer rights in every way possible, offering the worst costumer service imaginable, using aggressive marketing tactics and whatnot.
And they constantly keep trying to change the rules and force the costumers to either pay more, or receive less, on lame justifications that they don't have enough money to upgrade their infrastructure, all the while posting record profits every year.
A whole set of consumer laws in recent years were passed because of them, including anti spam/telemarketing call laws, the entire net neutrality debacle, a bunch of stuff regarding how call centers should work to attend their costumers, etc etc.
Every year they come up to threaten yet another restringent rule that will kill connection for a significant portion of their users. As if they could re-write the contracts we agreed upon when signing up for the service.
The more market share for cable TV shrinks, the better for everyone as I see it. It'll be better for people who likes their cable, as the companies will have to fight to keep them and give them better service, and more options for us who never cared about cable in the first place.
I went over a decade having to pay for cable just because there was some shady bundling crap that made it cheaper to pay for the entire package rather than paying for Internet alone. The majority of the country are still stuck on this deal because they have no other options. Like I said, oligopolies. They will price fix, they will close deals behind curtains to dominate certain areas, they will exploit people as much as they can.
Fortunately, I moved to a place where there's fiber Internet available... jumped at the opportunity as fast as I could, it's like I'm finally getting what I pay for. No more unexplained outages, a fair working connection for the price I pay (which is lower than if I had to pay for the cable TV/Internet bundle), good costumer service, and no lies on speed, throttling practices and data caps.
I just sent a complaint towards OnePlus, will not be recommending it anymore for anyone, and the OnePlus 3 will be my last OnePlus device.
It's not like I didn't think this could happen, I was hoping that it wouldn't because quite frankly, any business these days should be monitored for stuff like that.
But now, my relationship with this company is done. Very sad because the OnePlus 3 is a great device overall for the price. Up until now I was recommending it for people looking for high end capabilities with a fair price. Now, it's over. I will be recommending against it, just like I recommend against puchasing anything from Lenovo.
Even sadder is that privacy conscious people are getting curbed into a corner with fewer and fewer options to chose from.
They probably have people in government that's not as stupid as Trump... not exactly hard to accomplish.
Here's the thing, this isn't only about China and reducing polution there. Clean energy is quite clearly a skyrocketing global trend, whatever the reason you might believe in. It should be clear for everyone, even climate change deniers and people that believes in some big conspiracy about BIG RENEWABLE or whatever, that whoever dominates technology and production of clean energy resources will have a whole ton of money as countries in the entire world starts investing in it.
US companies will keep pursuing it, sure, because they are not stupid, and countries announcing lofty goals only serves to put more fuel *cough* into the trend. Trump getting out of the Paris agreement just shows how much of a doofus he is. Of course it won't stop american companies to pursuit what will become an extremely profitable business, but it definitely doesn't help.
And yes, this is a very cynical outlook on the whole thing, but I highly doubt any of the big corporations or governments care about stuff like our health or cleaning up the mess. China's extremely strict dictatorship doesn't give two shits about their citizens dying of lung related disease or having to swim through smog during certain periods of the year.
They'd let half the population die while living in an air filtered bubble. If they really cared they wouldn't be in the state they are.
But this is about money and power. While Trump is wasting time trying to repeal everything Obama did, and try to do every ignorant thing he promised in his campaign because he's a sociopath that can never admit he's wrong, the chinese government will be investing full force on renewables because they want the country to serve as a role model, as a souce of technology, and as an industrial source of solutions for renewables in general.
The balance has already been shifting towards China for a while now, renewables might be the thing that will tip the scale on their side over. Which I personally don't see as a great thing overall, but it's happening.
...it's a trainwreck.
so he already prepared his speech for the times the company fires thousands of workers in favor of automation? Nice.
It has become plain impossible for an average social network user to avoid something like this.
I'd guess IP, location, or perhaps even something else ousted her.
And Facebook doesn't give a fuck, because it's that sort of thing that helps them convince advertisers to pay them money.
I have a Galaxy Tab S2. A Chromebook cannot replace it. I don't hate it or anything like that, but it's all about the formfactor and usage.
First of all, it's extremely disingenuous to brush off something like "Nowadays, a Chromebook runs the same apps from the same Google Play Store". Sure, if you consider the fact that most apps don't work well, several of them crashes, have weird bugs, etc etc. No, a Chromebook does not run the same apps from the same Google Play Store. Far far faaaar from it. It might eventually happen? Well, that's something you have to pray Google keeps working on. It's something I've been hearing since the compatibility was announced. It still didn't happen.
It'd be great if Android apps worked well on a Chromebook, but the absolute vast majority of it doesn't. It's the problem of smartphone designed apps running on tablet formfactor but multiple times worse.
Next on the list, hardware design wise, it's the same problem of trying to use a hybrid as a tablet. The keyboard being there for typing is great for some applications, but when you want to use the device as a tablet, it's a huge annoyance and burdensome. Just try it for yourself. Reading comics or eBooks, playing simple games, watching content. The extra weight and bulk needed for the keyboard works against a tablet type usage.
OS wise, it might be closer to being a true hybrid in comparison to say Windows or MacOS, but it's still not quite there.
Going offline. Provided that Android tablets by themselves are also not great on this area, but Chromebooks are even worse. You have to go through a whole ton of configurations to enable some offline functionality, and since regular Android apps are far from working well right now, it only makes things harder.
I'm not saying that Chromebooks are bad though... they can be great, depending on usage. But truth of it, you are inside Google's walled garden. It's a jack of all trades, master of none. It barely works as an Android tablet, and scrapes the basic functionalities of a full laptop, which you might be fine with. But it's no full replacement for anything.
A key problem with the Linux phone is figuring out timing.
Personally, I have no doubts that not only there's demand for a device like that these days, but it'll only increase as more and more people gets their identity stolen, their private content thrawled through, and their personal security ravaged overtime.
It's the direction we're walking to, and we're currently only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
But a private Linux phone only has chances of keep going when there's enough money and interest into it to keep projects going. Kickstarting a project is one thing, delivering on time is another, but the important part here is a stream of development and the upgrade path.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very glad that this was backed, but I really don't want to see yet another privacy oriented project dying off because of lack of support.
Was sick. Heh.
If Microsoft was sick back when they got Nokia I'd still rather have the lightly sick Microsoft than the pestilence ridden with Windows 10S bullshit, "telemetry" pile of crap with weak excuses that Microsoft has become.
Windows Phones are dead now, XBox One is a weaker platform than XBox 360 was, the entire Surface line is either a continuation of past products or new models that are not selling well, the company is losing evangelists as a whole in recent years.
If your fucking grand plan for Microsoft's future is to continue insisting on the piss poor Microsoft Store, on overpriced devices with half backed OS ideas, on privacy erosion, opaqueness, aggressive anti consumer practices for updating to Windows 10, and more of that crap, the only people "believing" in the future of Microsoft are your board members Nadella.
For the first time in my entire Windows based computing life I decided to delve a bit deeper into Linux, keep a secondary device with Ubuntu, and move most of my stuff to NAS storage devices. It's the one era of Microsoft that is truly making me consider switching to something else.
I'm not seeing anything in recent years that came close to what Bill or even Ballmer did. Their eras might have had several misshaps, but they all had very strong accomplishments. Keep in mind that Windows 7 was from the Ballmer era. All the crap that came after it was Nadella. He might have created an internal culture of happy people living in a bubble who cannot see the needs and interests of their clients, but that's all that is.
Augmented reality, which for some stupid reason Microsoft decided to call Mixed Reality when it's really not, is late to the game and has a very weak showing. It's not competing with anything that's out there right now, be it on price for AR in smartphones or in capabilities with Oculus Rift or HTC Vive for PC. It's as late to the game as Windows Phone was, and it'll eventually die off in the same way.
The stuff that sets it apart from the competition is priced so high that no one can afford it - Hololens. It was the first to show up, and it's still at prototype stage.
AI talks are coming mostly from Google these days, and "futuristic computing" is just a blanket term that has no concrete feel for the vast majority of consumers.
But indeed, it's to be expected from the current CEO to think so highly of himself while failing to see what the company had best in the past. It's showing on Microsoft software and products. And if things keep going this way, it'll be the whole reason why I'll quit being a costumer once and for all.
People like to wax poetic about free speech and freedom of speech, but most people don't understand it nor have ever researched what it is, and how it differs from anarchy and chaos.
First of all, there is no free speech in private spaces. Whenever you are using a social media service, blog commenting system, internet forum, webpage hosted by a provider, among several other spaces on the Internet your speech is limited to what has been stipulated on terms of services, policies and other contracts that you agreed to when you opened an account.
It's always been this way, and this won't change. If you think you have some right to free speech in some service you are using on the Internet, you are wrong.
The concept of Freedom of Speech was created for, and applies strictly to public spaces. It was created to preserve the rights of people and journalists to criticize the government, period. It is in good standards for democratic societies in general, and private companies in these societies tries to follow the idea as close as possible, but it is not guaranteed.
On the other hand, a whole metric ton of laws were made involving speech to bar everything from human rights violations to general prejudice, hatred, targeting, unjust enrichment, among others. In fact, most democratic countries in the world today have specific laws against racism, prejudice against minorities, symbols related to parties and ideologies with historial ties to hatred and prejudice, incitation to hatred, among others. US is kind of an outlier in this because there are grey areas in law, but a white supremacist in most countries would end up in jail depending on their public attitude.
Particularly for ads and offers of products and services the law is already there. False advertising applies to miracle cures and diets. The problem is on monitoring and application of the law, as well as exploitation of loopholes in law.
It is impossible to monitor and punish everyone that comes up with bullshit on the Internet, the solution for that is critical reasoning and a society that is better educated and better apt to detect bullshit and better select their sources. The problem here is not what is permissible in society as a whole, the problem is people who keeps promoting, reading content, and using sources that has blatantly lied in the past, continues spewing crap without any basis, build their discourse on bullshit, and keeps being supported by ignorant masses who cannot take minutes of their time to properly research what they are swallowing whole.
We cannot expect every social network to monitor and classify everything their users put up on a daily basis. It's not humanly possible. I don't think people realize how many posts, videos and photos are uploaded every minute on these social networks... here's an approximation from 4 years ago:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
We're talking about hundreds of thousands of posts every minute on Facebook. Close to 100 hours of video on YouTube. 300 blog posts on Wordpress alone. 500 new websites. Every minute of every single day.
There are not enough people in the world to curate all this, so these companies need to use algorithms, which will never be perfect for the job. In fact, for them to be even close to good they'd need to be running on a computational level close to a human brain, which we are still far far faaaaar away from achieving.
The rush against fake news, spam, neo nazis, hate speech, and all the stuff that has been sensationalized just recently has always been there on some level. It's the whole problem of having few news sources that can be heavily scrutinized and monitored versus everyone being a potential source of information.
And all the stuff social network companies have been doing recently is all welcome, but it's also at most a stop gap solution. No matter how much
...need I say more?
This is all that Google has been in recent years. Half assed blind bets with zero focus. They'll announce some big feature, big service, interesting tech application, and then instead of making it better and more accessible they'll just stay quiet for months and years, abandon it, and then "deprecate" it silently. Empty promises, premature ejaculation.
On the other hand, if there's some hype around some sort of functionality, instead of integrating it on their older services, they'll create new ones, like not only one or two but sometimes 4 or 5 different versions with different names for no good reason, and then screw up the entire ecossystem fracturing userbase towards multiple overlapping services. And then, when understandably none of the versions have good adoption because everyone is left confused at the prospect of trying multiple apps to do something they already use another app for, then the strategy falls back to the standard. Keep quiet, abandon it, and deprecate.
Google isn't evil anymore... it's just stupid. It became a victim of stretching itself out too thin, and creating an internal culture that lives in small bubbles. They cannot get their dev teams together to come up with a unified concept of anything anymore. The company cannot think big anymore. It doesn't seem to have unified concepts for whatever pure functionality, it's just a bunch of scattershot ideas. Most of the Google mainstays are all getting up to a full decade old. The search engine, maps, Gmail, Chrome, Android. What has Google produced internally in the past 5 years or so that is still going strong?
This has been proven by payment systems, by chat apps, by new stuff like Google Assistant not integrating well or making use of other Google services, by different apps that overlaps functions of others... it's like different parts of Google have absolutely no idea what other parts are making, and they keep churning out whatever, deciding what to do with what's left behind later on.
I'll just avoid new Google stuff as much as possible. You have no way of knowing what will survive, you can't rely on it, and channels of communication on development are as opaque as they can be. We are basically alpha testers. It's easier for me personally to invest on apps and services that have devs or a company focused on it, and dependant on it for the sake of their businesses.
The worst part of it all is that at least when the company was still young, it used that sort of strategy for new ideas. Now it only picks crap from the hype pile, re-hashes it, and see if it sticks. Crap like Allo and Duo. They don't even have a spine to risk completely eliminating Hangouts and several other chat platforms to consolidate into one thing and offer it as a single chat solution. It's all half assed and without focus.
Sociopaths fighting each other. All we needed.
Regardless of what it ends up being, I already know the marketing narrative.
They started before Ford, they went through a million prototypes, and that's why you need to pay them 10x the price of a regular car.
This particular battle of semantics has been going on for a while now, and much like previous battles (hoverboard, drones, HDR in 4K), it'll be won by advertisers who don't know better.
The point is building interest in a generic marketing term even if it comes at the cost of the original meaning of the word. Scientific or technical terms (and in some cases, terms made up by sci-fi authors) have always been appropriated, it'll keep happening.
But is AI being overhyped? Definitely. Because behind all the AI craze, the real interest for several companies is in user data collection which is becoming the new coin of the day. It is a very convenient way for tech companies to imply that there are some vague gains to be had using their products while not mentioning that they are harvesting your data or saying that they need to do it "because the AI needs it to work better".
Notice how it's also super convenient for companies and services to use vague terms like that because they not only "fancy up" their products, it also serves as a convenient scapegoat when things go south (see how "algorithms" is losely employed by social media networks to put the blame on for mishaps).
For those who didn't see the dimention of this overhyping just yet, here's a comprehensive list of a whole ton of products and services where the term is used, most of which have zero AI in it:
https://medium.com/imlyra/a-li...
Some of them barely have any intelligence on them at all.
Here's what will keep happening during the next years: entire "systems" that are riddled with horrible security practices and no competent personel to care of it will come crashing down after years of negligence.
I dunno how many of them will be in such a spectacular cascade of revelations, but I imagine that a sizeable portion will be.
Security professionals and conscious people have been warning for a while that stuff like that was going to eventually happen, but businesses, services and corporations small and large have not only been ignoring things so far, they have been introducing more and more points of failure over the years.
We are only starting to walk in the middle of a minefield. By the end of it, if we didn't already go to a full blown war, privacy will be dead for a whole ton of people, rights violated and trampled.
It's pretty much the perfect storm crime/theft/scam. All that data that's being leaked, hacked into, collected and harvested to be sold, or actively spied and taken in real time is accumulating somewhere, perhaps in databases inside the darknet, by criminals and hacker groups, by corporations that will eventually take advantage of it. It'll be terabytes upon terabytes of sophisticated dossier databases that will give all sorts of private information about anyone with a single search.
People don't react to it and don't seem to care all that much because that information can be exploited slowly. Who cares if someone got his/her identity stolen, as long as it's not happening to me it's ok. But one day it will. And then, it's no use getting angry and trying to fight against it because much as yourself once did, no one cares.
This is our future.
Oh yeah, iPhones are too complex to repair... which is probably why lots of independent repair shops are doing it at lower prices than official Apple repair, faster and more reliably.
I bet they are also trying to spare people the complexity of it by lobbying against any laws that would allow independent repair shops to fix their stuff.
This probably also has nothing to do with the fact that independent repair shops are often the ones finding out about design flaws and overall problems of iPhones that would never have been disclosed if people didn't have the choice... like the touch ID disease case. Nonono.