I'll agree with the author with one single thing: it really isn't good that the face recognition tech is getting normalized and spread out as much, which is something that Apple tends to do through it's cult like fanbase and media love affair.
But let's be realistic for a moment here. First of all, public security cameras are already a thing, plus dashcams in some countries. And plenty of relatively good software for face recognition and identification are already out there, in real time and without any need for special cameras. In fact, we're already over face recognition and now encroaching on general recognition which is a full complexity step beyond it. Software that can use real time input of regular cameras to identify not only face, but also objects, animals, landscapes, even with some interpretation about the data. Not only that, the tech and code is already open source: https://pjreddie.com/darknet/y... For this particular application of surveillance technology, Apple isn't going to make much of a difference with a Face ID thing in their smartphones... we're already past Orwellian surveillance.
Second, iPhone X isn't even the first to do it. Samsung already had both face recognition and iris recognition in the failed Note S7, current S8, Note 8 and one Galaxy Tab. Not to mention how Microsoft came with Windows Hello years ago. So the timeframe for panicking has already passed if it's about personal devices with facial scanners.
The tech is already here, and no matter what one or another company does, it will be developed and used. Unfortunately, governments, policies and law hasn't quite catched up to the dangers of so much erosion of privacy, but we'll eventually have to get there, probably not without a very horrible round of feeling the consequences of living in a society that doesn't have almost any privacy protection anymore.
But like I said, it's too late to panic. In fact, it's the sort of short sightedness that lead us to this situation. If people are really feeling creeped out only now because Apple released some new phone with a whole bunch of old tech borrowed from past devices, then people are really trailing behind times.
Apple even sometimes tries to save face posing as a costumer friendly corporation that cares for stuff like privacy, but that's not where people should be looking at. It's governments, governmental agencies, the frequent overstepping of citizens rights, all the revelations that came from multiple whistleblower cases... you see, nothing is changing. There is no public outcry and outrage. The Snowden leaks would have to have ended in a complete revolution and overturning of political power to stop something like an Orwellian dystopia. It's too late now. It certainly won't be as obvious or as clear as in, say, the 1984 novel, but it's already happening, make no mistake.
You can have absolute certainty that DARPA is probably already funding multiple projects for robots and cameras with advanced facial and object recognition cameras to be potentially deployed in several scenarios in the future. You can bet that autonomous cars in the future will do double duty in identifying people and potential criminal scenarios. We already live in a suveillance state, and things are only going to get worse, particularly with governments that are all about bravado, show of strength, and activelly persecuting citizens inside of their own nation because of their skin color or previous nationality. Apple is but a drop in the ocean.
That's all fine and dandy, but people have to understand what the guy is talking about in it's own cultural context:
The japanese market has been famous for quite a while to have a very tiny PC gaming market. It's still in the last place even if it advances a bit, because it was never very successful. You have consoles not doing very well in recent years, with XBox One being a huge failure. If you count Switch as a console though, we might see a complete reversal since absurd lines are forming to get a lottery ticket to buy one. Portables comes in second place, and there's probably no other country that proportionally buys as many portables as Japan does. 3DS is still a huge success even after all this time and after all the puzzling new versions, but probably the most striking thing is that the Vita is a success in Japan despite failing in the west. New Vita games are still coming out in Japan. But the real first place there is mobile. Nothing quite sells like mobile games in Japan. It has sprung out of nowhere and completely dominated the gaming market in a matter of years.
But hey, I'd love for the PC games market to grow more in Japan... you can always find some of the most unique, weird, and different ideas coming out in doujin games (japanese indie games). If they have a bigger local market, more devs will come, and with more money in the bank, more chances of proper localizations.
I don't need a linux based privacy focused smartphone to compete with iOS or Android... it just needs to be there and serve as an option. But it needs to have real products at competitive prices and fully working on the market.
Doesn't even need to be for an end consumer, but a fully functional option for businesses and enterprise.
This post is sorely lacking tons of information and the few that are in it are wrong. CCleaner is NOT a malware cleaning app. It's a registry and regular file cleaner software. Furthermore, let's dig into the case:
- This ONLY affects the 32-bit version of CCleaner and CCleaner Cloud, which accounts for some 3% of Piriform users. If you are using 64-bit version, you are probably safe. From Piriform’s website: “This compromise only affected customers with the 32-bit version of the v5.33.6162 of CCleaner and the v1.07.3191 of CCleaner Cloud. No other Piriform or CCleaner products were affected.”;
- From Piriform’s accessment, here’s the actual danger: “The compromise could cause the transmission of non-sensitive data (computer name, IP address, list of installed software, list of active software, list of network adapters) to a 3rd party computer server in the USA. We have no indications that any other data has been sent to the server. Working with US law enforcement, we caused this server to be shut down on the 15th of September before any known harm was done.”
- The investigation is still ongoing, but Piriform is saying that the issue has been solved, that no harm was done, and what seems like it didn’t originate from official CCleaner/Piriform sources. Which is to say, it could be embedded code that was inserted on 3rd party download websites. There is further explanation on Talos' post how it was a sofisticated attack because whoever did it managed to put up a valid cert on the infected version of Ccleaner though, so there should be more information coming out as the investigation proceeds.
Chapman there must really be sucking Tim Cook's cock to go this far to write a counter culture convoluted piece about Unabomber and technology dependance using one among the most uninspired, feature cloning, iPhone releases of Apple's history...
From the article: "Once the latest iPhone is in stores, some consumers will decide they simply can’t live without it. The rest of us may eventually find that whatever our preferences, neither can we."
What a load of bullshit. Did someone pay this guy to put iPhone X there, or is he this brainwashed? Does he live in some paralell world were Android doesn't have 85% of the market share while iOS holds less than 15%? The absolute majority of people can't even afford and iPhone X in the first place. Living in a bubble of ignorance apparently.
Could've talked about the first iPhones and how some markets converted to it, smartphones in general, something else like IoT devices and always listening always dialing back crap like Google Home or Amazon Echo, the entire cloud thing as a whole, but nooo, had to put iPhone X in the title like a moronic sheeple. Are people really this gullible? No one needs an iPhone X. The majority of Apple fanboys don't need it, and I doubt most will buy it. It has no features that makes it a must. In fact, the vast majority of iPhone users are on older versions of the smartphone.
I can live without an iPhone X just fine... in fact, I can live without a Samsung Galaxy S8, which the iPhone X is basically a clone of. If you are feeling pressured to get any of those, what you really need is to check your priorities. Much like Chicago Tribune apparently needs to check the crap they are putting up as advertorial.
And to be perfectly honest, I lived for a couple of months late last year with a dumbphone - calls and SMS only. It's fine. There are some jobs you absolutely need to have a smartphone (like, you know, marketing, app development obviously, jobs that absolutely demand you to always be reachable, and a few others), but other than those you can live without one. And you probably should try doing it for sometime.
It'd be isolating in some cultures to live without a cellphone and computer connected to the Internet, but you know... even for those, plenty of people still do worldwide. So yeah, individuals can resist. Doesn't mean that you need to, but you certainly can.
Saying 2017 is "officially the year of Linux desktop" is pure bullshit anyways, so he could be using a Surface Studio for all I care. Linux dominates a whole ton of categories, including servers and supercomputers, but let's cut the bullshit right there. Linux doesn't even have the same marketshare Windows 8.1 has, which has the same marketshare of Windows XP. Windows 10 has like over double of both put together, and Windows 7 almost double of Windows 10. That's how distant Linux is. Mac OS has a bigger market share than all Linux distros put together on desktops.
In any case, it's just weird... it's not like you can't make presentations on Linux or anything like that. Doesn't look good when the president of a foundation doesn't actively use what he's supposed to be promoting though.
The phone looks good, but let's recap: - no headphone jack; - "premium" materials that makes the phone more expensive, harder but more brittle, and heavier without good reason other than aesthetics; - no SD card reader; - very bad initial costumer support; - delays and broken promises; - "stock" Android that's not really stock - it has almost no difference from vanilla Android (apart from the 360 camera software), but in truth Essencial is still a middleman between Android updates and the non-skin they have there. - flagship price for the first phone of the brand that, predictably, already had several bumps on release - wonky camera, os/software not customized to deal with the selfie camera bump, some fingerprint reader weirdness...
People should just wait for Essencial Phone 2 or whatever comes next if Andy Rubin keeps going. Unfortunately, there isn't a single thing that makes this phone unique or essencial in any sense. Not the price, not specs, not new features, not camera, not software. The phones that are coming out with Android One deserves far more to be called essencial.
There was absolutely no reason to withdraw from it, and some republicans are only now starting to realize this.
Paris Climate Agreement needs no renegotiation because it's non-binding, it's been criticized for asking too little too late, it was a political and diplomatic move without any negative consequences - other than being a symbolic gesture that doesn't really change much.
Even worse, a smart politician could use it in their favor right now. Even if the objective isn't met, it's far into the future, so he/she could just say that his/her political party did everything they could during their term to get there, but other administrations endded up not following it properly. It's the perfect excuse for a political party to return to power when things gets more dire in the future.
What happened there was the usual Trump blindness when trying to undo everything Obama did that got some attention under his administration on the premisse that everything he did was bad in some way, stupid campaign promisses filled with misinformation and vilification, plus Trump being an idiot that only listens to cospiracy theory alt-right channels.
Worst of all: if Trump just kept quiet and didn't step back from the agreement, the US would probably hit it's target anyways. Governments are not leading the way on this - the global economy is. The economy is moving independent of governmental interference towards renewables, generating less garbage, developing electric cars, closing down fossil fuel power plants, and a bunch of other stuff. We're moving away from fossil fuels because it became economically feasible and attractive to do so, from an international standpoint.
Stepping down from the accord just painted the US as a country to be sidestepped for doing all sorts of businesses that will be moving tech towards cleaner goals - which is why so many US corporations were quick to announce they'd keep following the accord regardless of what the government is talking. It's not because those corporations are "good" or environmentaly friendly or some bullshit. It's because the global economy right now is aligned with those goals.
Notice how many news we hear these days about China's progressive moves towards clean energy. That's because China is trying to get the worldwide leadership on that particular topic. Trump just made it this much easier for another country to assume the position of global leader in a topic that lots of people are paying close attention to.
But now the damage has already been done. With or without renegotiation, it doesn't matter. Republicans can either be outright denied a renegotiation, which will continue looking bad for US in general, or they can get the agreement renegotiated which will keep them on a list of countries that are still in denial of a problem that needs firm stances, not because it's some charity or plead for help from another country, but because of their own interests.
I dunno what the government has to do with this particular deal, but if fears of intellectual property going to another country is the real reason here, isn't this a bit too little too late already?
Not sure if people realize this, but chinese conglomerates have been buying american technology companies for quite a while now. Not only tech too... let's see if some people recognize some of the "american giants" that are now owned by chinese conglomerates: AMC movie theater chain, Smithfield Foods, Legendary Entertainment Group, Dick Clark Productions, General Electric, The Waldorf-Astoria, whole bunch of Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons Resort, Riot Games, Ingram Micro, International Data Group (IDG of Computerworld/Macworld fame), Motorola (bought by Google, re-sold to Lenovo), Terex Corp... heck, Chicago Stock Exchange might end up sold to a chinese conglomerate. Think about that.
A whole ton of intellectual property already went out of the country. And sure, I'm not against countries trying to keep their intellectual property inside the country... in the past, the US is well known for doing similar business with BRICS countries, taking over a whole ton of businesses and research from those to get a hold of IPs. But it kinda sounds like there's more to that.
How would a single factory would "transform Wisconsin into "Wisconn Valley.""?
I dunno if Walker understands this, but Foxconn is not moving it's entire operation there. This is basically taxpayer money wasted on a huge incentive package to end up with a factory that, sure, will give some people jobs, but that is not in any way dissimilar to factories in countries like Brazil, Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, Czech Republic, India, Malaysia or Mexico. All of those having currency exchange and cheaper labor advantages which are being counter balanced by the incentive package there. My bet would be that operations will last as long as the subsidy keeps going, if the factory operations are profitable that is.
Oh, and juuust so people know, Foxconn fired 60,000 employees last year to replace them with automation.
It's not an innovation or development hub, just an assembly factory. And if it's anything like the factories in these other countries, it'll be importing parts from China to be assembled. I don't know if many people realize this, but all companies that are in the forefront of TV panel technology these days are located solely in Asia, particularly South Korea, China, Taiwan and Japan. See that I'm not talking about TV brands, but the brands behind TV panels... big brands that everyone knows: LG, Samsung, Sharp. Names people might not have heard about: Chi Mei Optoelectronics, AU Optronics, Chunghwa Picture Tubes, Wistron Optronics, Delta Group, TPV Technology. Those are all, without exception, asian companies that dominate the tv panel technology R&D. Most tech companies around TV panel tech that were american either closed down, or got bought by chinese investment groups.
These fuckers... they really think people are idiots to beliebe in such outlandish claims. WE NEED TO COLLECT YOUR DATA AND SELL IT FOR YOUR PRIVACY AND SECURITY
What's next? We need to double the price or your current plan because that prevents you from wasting it all on booze and drugs?
It's for specific cases like these that I wanted to see Linux distros getting a true, solid working mobile commercial version with continuous support and enterprise/business adoption... And yes, I know Android is based on a Linux kernel, but I'm talking more like Ubuntu Mobile expanding and going forward, or something else.
Because honestly, I'm not sure how much replacing iOS devices with Android devices in cases like these will help. Fanboyism aside, Android devices have as many if not more potential problems in comparison to Apple stuff, particularly in business and enterprise scenarios.
Connection issues, scanner issues? Android devices also have those. Replaceable batteries? Perhaps the company they closed a deal with (Zebra) still has devices with replaceable batteries, but this is clearly going away on Android devices in general... I think the last flagship phone that had it was the LG V20, and the update to it (V30 released recently) is sealed with no easy replacement for battery. Not even cheaper phones or phones with alternative markets (active lines, rugged lines, etc) are coming with the option anymore.
They'll eventually have to go with external battery cases and whatnot.
How would a Linux mobile help? Well, I guess it really depends how the whole implementation would work really... and it wouldn't be easy. But it'd really be best not to get tied to Google or Apple for cases like those, to have an OS that could be installed in multiple mobile configurations, to have access to code to configure it down to devices' specific functions, etc etc.
When you are on iPods, iPads, iPhones, or Android devices you are basically running a whole bunch of useless crap on top of the software you really need for sales floors and warehouse management. Not to talk about privacy and security worries, the world could really use right now an alternative to big corporation devices for tasks like these.
And I'm no Linux fanatic myself... Android phone user and Windows 10 desktop here. It's just that I think the lack of competition in this area is bringing a whole lot of problems recently.
Just so people know, this has nothing to do with regular Windows software, just Windows Store apps... which no one cares about. https://blogs.windows.com/wind... "Starting with the Fall Creators Update, we’re extending this experience to other device capabilities for apps you install through the Windows Store."
Steve Gibson will have a field day with this one... I wonder how many more eggredious displays of a total lack of security practices it'll take to entirely close the thing down.
It has been known in the iPhone repair community that these specific iPhone models have a factory problem known as "touch IC disease" that makes them prematurely fail way faster than other models. It's basically a soldering issue on a component that's in a sensitive place (that heats too much), which ends up losing contact and stop working.
Apple is just trying to deflect the problem here by saying that the company cannot be expected to keep warranties over their pre-stipulated time, without recognizing the issue in itself. https://ifixit.org/blog/8309/i...
But yes, Apple is a corporation like any other, and people should just realize that. They have used the exact same strategy for past problems, at least initially, some very well known like antennagate, bendgate, Apple Maps, Purple Haze, poor iCloud security practices, and others.
And yeah, that whole thing about a robot disassembling and iPhone because Apple is an environment friendly company that cares about eWaste? That's just bullshit and marketing propaganda. Having a robot arm that quickly disassembles iPhones means nothing when your company is lobbying against stuff like Right to Repair Bill. And of course it doesn't help when the company fails to recognize problems like the one on this case, telling costumers that they have no responsibility for a design failure that will ultimately land a whole bunch of those iPhone 6 and 6 Plus on the garbage, or on repair places they don't support nor care for.
Data was leaked, management enjoyed a great round of insider trading, they botched up the page for verifying if your information was leaked, and now the most obvious next step: scapegoating.
What can we expect next? Shut up settlements after a long protracted court battle meant to make people forget about it, slap on the wrist from government/justice, just for the next rounds of leak to prove that they have learned nothing.
Equifax hack is the end of privacy even for those who are careful about it. You can be as paranoid as you want to, once your personal sensitive data is being taken and stored by companies that are this careless about it, it's over.
Oooh, but an open source software had an exploit in it. That's what they have to say? Motherfuckers, ALL software potentially has exploits in them. It's why for sensitive data competent companies employ several layers of security so that even if parts of it fail, attackers still won't have access to it. You are not a fucking backyard business or some kid's lemonade stand. If you are going to claim this level of ignorance for leaking all that data out, the rational decision would be closing doors down, getting out of the fucking market, and leave it to grown ups to handle since you are clearly too incompetent to do so.
Can gaff tape fix something that was born fundamentally broken?
First of all, the music industry is in no need of saving. It never has been, it only grew up with the Internet era, and all the doom and gloom we've been hearing in the past few decades ammounts to a bunch of whinning from people who are still living in the past. It's self evident and you just have to stop a minute to think about it.
Artists and musicians have always taken a minor fraction of all profits the industry makes, and if anything we have far more famous artists these days with far more money than artists had in the past. It's downright ridiculous to think that a industry that generates multiple millionaires a year, all of those who are getting pennies on a dollar for their work, is in any need of "saving".
That's despite piracy worries, despite all the music industry complaints about digital distribution paying little to them, despite the music industry pouring truckloads of money on fruitless stuff like DRM, lawsuits, and a whole bunch of others. I posit the entire industry would be just that much richer these days if they did absolutely nothing about piracy and overall copyright infringements, investing instead on better ways to sell music on the cheap in digital distribution from start.
The fact is that some big labels are getting left behind because they refuse to adapt to new paradigms of music distribution, they get entrenched in old ways, and then another company comes up, seizes the opportunity and sweeps profitability away from them. And then, when they realize that their way isn't working anymore, they start whinning and crying about it saying that the music industry is going away because piracy or something else. It isn't. It's just the cries of old men who did not care about evolving.
Blockchain technology can do little. If it's about securing details of original recordings for those who care about it, sure, why not? But that matters little on the overall scheme of things. As long as you can play a track and capture audio from it, the information will get lost.
And the music industry might be big and powerful, but there's a hard limit to what they can demand from costumers, be if final users or businesses. You just cannot expect everyone to adopt blockchain technology when it's not in anybody's best interest to replace hardware, software, and whatnot just because the industry said so. It's just the same as DRM. Movie and music industry has been trying to force it down people's throat for years now, people have always found a way to strip it right off, bypass or get around it, to keep consuming as they always did.
But this has been clear for a long time now. We've been saying this for long enough to fall on deaf ears. The gaming industry more or less understood this after years and years of wasting money and making costumers furious with anti-piracy crap: Steam did it because it provided a convenient and cheap way of playing games. Platforms like GoG is taking all the old games from an era of aggressive anti-piracy strategies, stripping them all off, and selling those without it. And it works.
But these big labels can keep getting together to divise ways of implementing even more crap to shove down unwilling costumers' throats, as they always did. What will happen next is that companies who knows how to deal with the situation will take over, artists will flock to those platforms as costumers will also do. And then we can all see this dark chapter of corporative greed in music industry and other entertainment related industries come to a close.
Keep it as a burner phone, or give it away for someone who doesn't care about the smart part. You can basically see it as an ancient Android phone, or an even more ancient iPhone. Because that's the state of apps, and the OS is dead.
Alarm clock, mp3/video player, etc. Games? It's a fraction of what Android and iOS have, but hey, perhaps give it to a kid that wants to play Minecraft on a smartphone for some reason. A few of the biggest game devs also probably have some of their games there. That is to say, it's better than nothing, but still worse than most other options.
I wouldn't even recommend wasting time with it if you are a developer... Windows Phone was built to be a similar walled garden thing like iPhones, there's even less resources to make use of and less cross app communication, so unless you are really willing to waste your time, you should instead be looking into app development for either Android or iOS. I mean, Windows Phone is going nowhere, and no one will care about it not long from now anyways.
It's like they don't have any shame at all... Oh wait, they don't. Of course they don't.
It's a company that profits from digging up people's information, storing it in an insecure manner, where executives thought it was fine and dandy to hold up breach information for just enough time do some insider trading, save their own asses, and leave costumers to burn.
And can you take a wild guess on what side the current administration in which no one watches the watchmen will take?
Huh, I never thought about this idea of smartphones competing with VR, but I guess it's one more to the list.
- They are too expensive. We're talking about a market that's less than 1% of the world. VR cannot be and will not be popular or mainstream ever until it gets cheap enough for everyone to at least give it a go. Why do you think gaming became mainstream? Because of piracy, basically;
- Bad initial marketing strategy. VR should've gone the way of multiplayer games first and foremost. How did multiplayer games got popularized? By popping up on places where you could play by the hour, like Lan houses, cybercafes and whatnot. The whole deal is expensive, people are not willing to pay a fortune just to try it, so at least for now in a stage that there's not a whole lot of compeling content to try, it should've started as a B2B thing;
- The VR sickness problem. It'll never be for everyone because lots of people cannot deal with the side effects of using VR for prolonged periods of time. Tech could advance in this area, but we're not there just yet, and I dunno if this push for VR will last long enough to overcome it;
- Wearing something obstrusive and uncomfortable. Both VR and AR will have better chances of working out when they come in a form factor that is closer to sunglasses or lenses. We have several huge obstacles to overcome to get there, and again, I dunno if the current push is strong enough to keep things going until we get there.
The undivided attention problem is not that much of an issue, as long as you have something that deserves it. And if notifications and smartphone related stuff is really that much of an issue, you could just connect your smartphone to your computer and divise a system for that content to go through anyways.
"To reproduce the procedure, the steps are as follows: 1. Root the device. 2. Remount the file system that contains the trustlets (e.g., “mount -o rw,remount/system”). 3. Replace the current trustlets with the corresponding (vulnerable) ones from an older-version image. 4. Use the device as normal."
Slashdot Mirror
...this Black Mirror episode.
I'll agree with the author with one single thing: it really isn't good that the face recognition tech is getting normalized and spread out as much, which is something that Apple tends to do through it's cult like fanbase and media love affair.
But let's be realistic for a moment here. First of all, public security cameras are already a thing, plus dashcams in some countries. And plenty of relatively good software for face recognition and identification are already out there, in real time and without any need for special cameras. In fact, we're already over face recognition and now encroaching on general recognition which is a full complexity step beyond it. Software that can use real time input of regular cameras to identify not only face, but also objects, animals, landscapes, even with some interpretation about the data. Not only that, the tech and code is already open source:
https://pjreddie.com/darknet/y...
For this particular application of surveillance technology, Apple isn't going to make much of a difference with a Face ID thing in their smartphones... we're already past Orwellian surveillance.
Second, iPhone X isn't even the first to do it. Samsung already had both face recognition and iris recognition in the failed Note S7, current S8, Note 8 and one Galaxy Tab. Not to mention how Microsoft came with Windows Hello years ago. So the timeframe for panicking has already passed if it's about personal devices with facial scanners.
The tech is already here, and no matter what one or another company does, it will be developed and used. Unfortunately, governments, policies and law hasn't quite catched up to the dangers of so much erosion of privacy, but we'll eventually have to get there, probably not without a very horrible round of feeling the consequences of living in a society that doesn't have almost any privacy protection anymore.
But like I said, it's too late to panic. In fact, it's the sort of short sightedness that lead us to this situation. If people are really feeling creeped out only now because Apple released some new phone with a whole bunch of old tech borrowed from past devices, then people are really trailing behind times.
Apple even sometimes tries to save face posing as a costumer friendly corporation that cares for stuff like privacy, but that's not where people should be looking at. It's governments, governmental agencies, the frequent overstepping of citizens rights, all the revelations that came from multiple whistleblower cases... you see, nothing is changing. There is no public outcry and outrage. The Snowden leaks would have to have ended in a complete revolution and overturning of political power to stop something like an Orwellian dystopia. It's too late now. It certainly won't be as obvious or as clear as in, say, the 1984 novel, but it's already happening, make no mistake.
You can have absolute certainty that DARPA is probably already funding multiple projects for robots and cameras with advanced facial and object recognition cameras to be potentially deployed in several scenarios in the future. You can bet that autonomous cars in the future will do double duty in identifying people and potential criminal scenarios. We already live in a suveillance state, and things are only going to get worse, particularly with governments that are all about bravado, show of strength, and activelly persecuting citizens inside of their own nation because of their skin color or previous nationality. Apple is but a drop in the ocean.
That's all fine and dandy, but people have to understand what the guy is talking about in it's own cultural context:
The japanese market has been famous for quite a while to have a very tiny PC gaming market.
It's still in the last place even if it advances a bit, because it was never very successful.
You have consoles not doing very well in recent years, with XBox One being a huge failure.
If you count Switch as a console though, we might see a complete reversal since absurd lines are forming to get a lottery ticket to buy one.
Portables comes in second place, and there's probably no other country that proportionally buys as many portables as Japan does.
3DS is still a huge success even after all this time and after all the puzzling new versions, but probably the most striking thing is that the Vita is a success in Japan despite failing in the west. New Vita games are still coming out in Japan.
But the real first place there is mobile. Nothing quite sells like mobile games in Japan. It has sprung out of nowhere and completely dominated the gaming market in a matter of years.
But hey, I'd love for the PC games market to grow more in Japan... you can always find some of the most unique, weird, and different ideas coming out in doujin games (japanese indie games). If they have a bigger local market, more devs will come, and with more money in the bank, more chances of proper localizations.
I don't need a linux based privacy focused smartphone to compete with iOS or Android... it just needs to be there and serve as an option.
But it needs to have real products at competitive prices and fully working on the market.
Doesn't even need to be for an end consumer, but a fully functional option for businesses and enterprise.
This post is sorely lacking tons of information and the few that are in it are wrong.
CCleaner is NOT a malware cleaning app. It's a registry and regular file cleaner software.
Furthermore, let's dig into the case:
- This ONLY affects the 32-bit version of CCleaner and CCleaner Cloud, which accounts for some 3% of Piriform users. If you are using 64-bit version, you are probably safe. From Piriform’s website: “This compromise only affected customers with the 32-bit version of the v5.33.6162 of CCleaner and the v1.07.3191 of CCleaner Cloud. No other Piriform or CCleaner products were affected.”;
- From Piriform’s accessment, here’s the actual danger: “The compromise could cause the transmission of non-sensitive data (computer name, IP address, list of installed software, list of active software, list of network adapters) to a 3rd party computer server in the USA. We have no indications that any other data has been sent to the server. Working with US law enforcement, we caused this server to be shut down on the 15th of September before any known harm was done.”
- The investigation is still ongoing, but Piriform is saying that the issue has been solved, that no harm was done, and what seems like it didn’t originate from official CCleaner/Piriform sources. Which is to say, it could be embedded code that was inserted on 3rd party download websites. There is further explanation on Talos' post how it was a sofisticated attack because whoever did it managed to put up a valid cert on the infected version of Ccleaner though, so there should be more information coming out as the investigation proceeds.
If you wanna dig more into the whole thing, here's Piriform's official statement:
https://www.piriform.com/news/...
And here's Talos security accessment of the case:
http://blog.talosintelligence....
Chapman there must really be sucking Tim Cook's cock to go this far to write a counter culture convoluted piece about Unabomber and technology dependance using one among the most uninspired, feature cloning, iPhone releases of Apple's history...
From the article: "Once the latest iPhone is in stores, some consumers will decide they simply can’t live without it. The rest of us may eventually find that whatever our preferences, neither can we."
What a load of bullshit. Did someone pay this guy to put iPhone X there, or is he this brainwashed?
Does he live in some paralell world were Android doesn't have 85% of the market share while iOS holds less than 15%?
The absolute majority of people can't even afford and iPhone X in the first place. Living in a bubble of ignorance apparently.
Could've talked about the first iPhones and how some markets converted to it, smartphones in general, something else like IoT devices and always listening always dialing back crap like Google Home or Amazon Echo, the entire cloud thing as a whole, but nooo, had to put iPhone X in the title like a moronic sheeple. Are people really this gullible? No one needs an iPhone X. The majority of Apple fanboys don't need it, and I doubt most will buy it. It has no features that makes it a must. In fact, the vast majority of iPhone users are on older versions of the smartphone.
I can live without an iPhone X just fine... in fact, I can live without a Samsung Galaxy S8, which the iPhone X is basically a clone of. If you are feeling pressured to get any of those, what you really need is to check your priorities. Much like Chicago Tribune apparently needs to check the crap they are putting up as advertorial.
And to be perfectly honest, I lived for a couple of months late last year with a dumbphone - calls and SMS only. It's fine. There are some jobs you absolutely need to have a smartphone (like, you know, marketing, app development obviously, jobs that absolutely demand you to always be reachable, and a few others), but other than those you can live without one. And you probably should try doing it for sometime.
It'd be isolating in some cultures to live without a cellphone and computer connected to the Internet, but you know... even for those, plenty of people still do worldwide. So yeah, individuals can resist. Doesn't mean that you need to, but you certainly can.
Saying 2017 is "officially the year of Linux desktop" is pure bullshit anyways, so he could be using a Surface Studio for all I care.
Linux dominates a whole ton of categories, including servers and supercomputers, but let's cut the bullshit right there.
Linux doesn't even have the same marketshare Windows 8.1 has, which has the same marketshare of Windows XP.
Windows 10 has like over double of both put together, and Windows 7 almost double of Windows 10.
That's how distant Linux is. Mac OS has a bigger market share than all Linux distros put together on desktops.
In any case, it's just weird... it's not like you can't make presentations on Linux or anything like that. Doesn't look good when the president of a foundation doesn't actively use what he's supposed to be promoting though.
The phone looks good, but let's recap:
- no headphone jack;
- "premium" materials that makes the phone more expensive, harder but more brittle, and heavier without good reason other than aesthetics;
- no SD card reader;
- very bad initial costumer support;
- delays and broken promises;
- "stock" Android that's not really stock - it has almost no difference from vanilla Android (apart from the 360 camera software), but in truth Essencial is still a middleman between Android updates and the non-skin they have there.
- flagship price for the first phone of the brand that, predictably, already had several bumps on release - wonky camera, os/software not customized to deal with the selfie camera bump, some fingerprint reader weirdness...
People should just wait for Essencial Phone 2 or whatever comes next if Andy Rubin keeps going. Unfortunately, there isn't a single thing that makes this phone unique or essencial in any sense. Not the price, not specs, not new features, not camera, not software. The phones that are coming out with Android One deserves far more to be called essencial.
There was absolutely no reason to withdraw from it, and some republicans are only now starting to realize this.
Paris Climate Agreement needs no renegotiation because it's non-binding, it's been criticized for asking too little too late, it was a political and diplomatic move without any negative consequences - other than being a symbolic gesture that doesn't really change much.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion...
https://www.newscientist.com/a...
http://www.npr.org/sections/13...
Even worse, a smart politician could use it in their favor right now. Even if the objective isn't met, it's far into the future, so he/she could just say that his/her political party did everything they could during their term to get there, but other administrations endded up not following it properly. It's the perfect excuse for a political party to return to power when things gets more dire in the future.
What happened there was the usual Trump blindness when trying to undo everything Obama did that got some attention under his administration on the premisse that everything he did was bad in some way, stupid campaign promisses filled with misinformation and vilification, plus Trump being an idiot that only listens to cospiracy theory alt-right channels.
Worst of all: if Trump just kept quiet and didn't step back from the agreement, the US would probably hit it's target anyways. Governments are not leading the way on this - the global economy is.
The economy is moving independent of governmental interference towards renewables, generating less garbage, developing electric cars, closing down fossil fuel power plants, and a bunch of other stuff. We're moving away from fossil fuels because it became economically feasible and attractive to do so, from an international standpoint.
Stepping down from the accord just painted the US as a country to be sidestepped for doing all sorts of businesses that will be moving tech towards cleaner goals - which is why so many US corporations were quick to announce they'd keep following the accord regardless of what the government is talking. It's not because those corporations are "good" or environmentaly friendly or some bullshit. It's because the global economy right now is aligned with those goals.
Notice how many news we hear these days about China's progressive moves towards clean energy. That's because China is trying to get the worldwide leadership on that particular topic. Trump just made it this much easier for another country to assume the position of global leader in a topic that lots of people are paying close attention to.
But now the damage has already been done. With or without renegotiation, it doesn't matter. Republicans can either be outright denied a renegotiation, which will continue looking bad for US in general, or they can get the agreement renegotiated which will keep them on a list of countries that are still in denial of a problem that needs firm stances, not because it's some charity or plead for help from another country, but because of their own interests.
I dunno what the government has to do with this particular deal, but if fears of intellectual property going to another country is the real reason here, isn't this a bit too little too late already?
Not sure if people realize this, but chinese conglomerates have been buying american technology companies for quite a while now. Not only tech too... let's see if some people recognize some of the "american giants" that are now owned by chinese conglomerates:
AMC movie theater chain, Smithfield Foods, Legendary Entertainment Group, Dick Clark Productions, General Electric, The Waldorf-Astoria, whole bunch of Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons Resort, Riot Games, Ingram Micro, International Data Group (IDG of Computerworld/Macworld fame), Motorola (bought by Google, re-sold to Lenovo), Terex Corp... heck, Chicago Stock Exchange might end up sold to a chinese conglomerate. Think about that.
A whole ton of intellectual property already went out of the country. And sure, I'm not against countries trying to keep their intellectual property inside the country... in the past, the US is well known for doing similar business with BRICS countries, taking over a whole ton of businesses and research from those to get a hold of IPs. But it kinda sounds like there's more to that.
Twitter, Facebook, Google and other companies keep blaming some sir or madamn called "algorithm" for everything they do wrong these days?
How would a single factory would "transform Wisconsin into "Wisconn Valley.""?
I dunno if Walker understands this, but Foxconn is not moving it's entire operation there. This is basically taxpayer money wasted on a huge incentive package to end up with a factory that, sure, will give some people jobs, but that is not in any way dissimilar to factories in countries like Brazil, Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, Czech Republic, India, Malaysia or Mexico.
All of those having currency exchange and cheaper labor advantages which are being counter balanced by the incentive package there. My bet would be that operations will last as long as the subsidy keeps going, if the factory operations are profitable that is.
Oh, and juuust so people know, Foxconn fired 60,000 employees last year to replace them with automation.
It's not an innovation or development hub, just an assembly factory. And if it's anything like the factories in these other countries, it'll be importing parts from China to be assembled. I don't know if many people realize this, but all companies that are in the forefront of TV panel technology these days are located solely in Asia, particularly South Korea, China, Taiwan and Japan. See that I'm not talking about TV brands, but the brands behind TV panels... big brands that everyone knows: LG, Samsung, Sharp. Names people might not have heard about: Chi Mei Optoelectronics, AU Optronics, Chunghwa Picture Tubes, Wistron Optronics, Delta Group, TPV Technology. Those are all, without exception, asian companies that dominate the tv panel technology R&D. Most tech companies around TV panel tech that were american either closed down, or got bought by chinese investment groups.
These fuckers... they really think people are idiots to beliebe in such outlandish claims.
WE NEED TO COLLECT YOUR DATA AND SELL IT FOR YOUR PRIVACY AND SECURITY
What's next? We need to double the price or your current plan because that prevents you from wasting it all on booze and drugs?
It's for specific cases like these that I wanted to see Linux distros getting a true, solid working mobile commercial version with continuous support and enterprise/business adoption...
And yes, I know Android is based on a Linux kernel, but I'm talking more like Ubuntu Mobile expanding and going forward, or something else.
Because honestly, I'm not sure how much replacing iOS devices with Android devices in cases like these will help. Fanboyism aside, Android devices have as many if not more potential problems in comparison to Apple stuff, particularly in business and enterprise scenarios.
Connection issues, scanner issues? Android devices also have those. Replaceable batteries? Perhaps the company they closed a deal with (Zebra) still has devices with replaceable batteries, but this is clearly going away on Android devices in general... I think the last flagship phone that had it was the LG V20, and the update to it (V30 released recently) is sealed with no easy replacement for battery. Not even cheaper phones or phones with alternative markets (active lines, rugged lines, etc) are coming with the option anymore.
They'll eventually have to go with external battery cases and whatnot.
How would a Linux mobile help? Well, I guess it really depends how the whole implementation would work really... and it wouldn't be easy. But it'd really be best not to get tied to Google or Apple for cases like those, to have an OS that could be installed in multiple mobile configurations, to have access to code to configure it down to devices' specific functions, etc etc.
When you are on iPods, iPads, iPhones, or Android devices you are basically running a whole bunch of useless crap on top of the software you really need for sales floors and warehouse management. Not to talk about privacy and security worries, the world could really use right now an alternative to big corporation devices for tasks like these.
And I'm no Linux fanatic myself... Android phone user and Windows 10 desktop here. It's just that I think the lack of competition in this area is bringing a whole lot of problems recently.
..reach around the same vertical range letting ISS crew see your burnt corpse when it explodes.
Just so people know, this has nothing to do with regular Windows software, just Windows Store apps... which no one cares about.
https://blogs.windows.com/wind...
"Starting with the Fall Creators Update, we’re extending this experience to other device capabilities for apps you install through the Windows Store."
Steve Gibson will have a field day with this one... I wonder how many more eggredious displays of a total lack of security practices it'll take to entirely close the thing down.
It has been known in the iPhone repair community that these specific iPhone models have a factory problem known as "touch IC disease" that makes them prematurely fail way faster than other models. It's basically a soldering issue on a component that's in a sensitive place (that heats too much), which ends up losing contact and stop working.
Apple is just trying to deflect the problem here by saying that the company cannot be expected to keep warranties over their pre-stipulated time, without recognizing the issue in itself.
https://ifixit.org/blog/8309/i...
But yes, Apple is a corporation like any other, and people should just realize that. They have used the exact same strategy for past problems, at least initially, some very well known like antennagate, bendgate, Apple Maps, Purple Haze, poor iCloud security practices, and others.
And yeah, that whole thing about a robot disassembling and iPhone because Apple is an environment friendly company that cares about eWaste? That's just bullshit and marketing propaganda. Having a robot arm that quickly disassembles iPhones means nothing when your company is lobbying against stuff like Right to Repair Bill. And of course it doesn't help when the company fails to recognize problems like the one on this case, telling costumers that they have no responsibility for a design failure that will ultimately land a whole bunch of those iPhone 6 and 6 Plus on the garbage, or on repair places they don't support nor care for.
Data was leaked, management enjoyed a great round of insider trading, they botched up the page for verifying if your information was leaked, and now the most obvious next step: scapegoating.
What can we expect next? Shut up settlements after a long protracted court battle meant to make people forget about it, slap on the wrist from government/justice, just for the next rounds of leak to prove that they have learned nothing.
Equifax hack is the end of privacy even for those who are careful about it. You can be as paranoid as you want to, once your personal sensitive data is being taken and stored by companies that are this careless about it, it's over.
Oooh, but an open source software had an exploit in it. That's what they have to say? Motherfuckers, ALL software potentially has exploits in them. It's why for sensitive data competent companies employ several layers of security so that even if parts of it fail, attackers still won't have access to it. You are not a fucking backyard business or some kid's lemonade stand. If you are going to claim this level of ignorance for leaking all that data out, the rational decision would be closing doors down, getting out of the fucking market, and leave it to grown ups to handle since you are clearly too incompetent to do so.
Can gaff tape fix something that was born fundamentally broken?
First of all, the music industry is in no need of saving. It never has been, it only grew up with the Internet era, and all the doom and gloom we've been hearing in the past few decades ammounts to a bunch of whinning from people who are still living in the past. It's self evident and you just have to stop a minute to think about it.
Artists and musicians have always taken a minor fraction of all profits the industry makes, and if anything we have far more famous artists these days with far more money than artists had in the past. It's downright ridiculous to think that a industry that generates multiple millionaires a year, all of those who are getting pennies on a dollar for their work, is in any need of "saving".
That's despite piracy worries, despite all the music industry complaints about digital distribution paying little to them, despite the music industry pouring truckloads of money on fruitless stuff like DRM, lawsuits, and a whole bunch of others. I posit the entire industry would be just that much richer these days if they did absolutely nothing about piracy and overall copyright infringements, investing instead on better ways to sell music on the cheap in digital distribution from start.
The fact is that some big labels are getting left behind because they refuse to adapt to new paradigms of music distribution, they get entrenched in old ways, and then another company comes up, seizes the opportunity and sweeps profitability away from them. And then, when they realize that their way isn't working anymore, they start whinning and crying about it saying that the music industry is going away because piracy or something else. It isn't. It's just the cries of old men who did not care about evolving.
Blockchain technology can do little. If it's about securing details of original recordings for those who care about it, sure, why not? But that matters little on the overall scheme of things. As long as you can play a track and capture audio from it, the information will get lost.
And the music industry might be big and powerful, but there's a hard limit to what they can demand from costumers, be if final users or businesses. You just cannot expect everyone to adopt blockchain technology when it's not in anybody's best interest to replace hardware, software, and whatnot just because the industry said so. It's just the same as DRM. Movie and music industry has been trying to force it down people's throat for years now, people have always found a way to strip it right off, bypass or get around it, to keep consuming as they always did.
But this has been clear for a long time now. We've been saying this for long enough to fall on deaf ears. The gaming industry more or less understood this after years and years of wasting money and making costumers furious with anti-piracy crap: Steam did it because it provided a convenient and cheap way of playing games. Platforms like GoG is taking all the old games from an era of aggressive anti-piracy strategies, stripping them all off, and selling those without it. And it works.
But these big labels can keep getting together to divise ways of implementing even more crap to shove down unwilling costumers' throats, as they always did. What will happen next is that companies who knows how to deal with the situation will take over, artists will flock to those platforms as costumers will also do. And then we can all see this dark chapter of corporative greed in music industry and other entertainment related industries come to a close.
Keep it as a burner phone, or give it away for someone who doesn't care about the smart part.
You can basically see it as an ancient Android phone, or an even more ancient iPhone.
Because that's the state of apps, and the OS is dead.
Alarm clock, mp3/video player, etc.
Games? It's a fraction of what Android and iOS have, but hey, perhaps give it to a kid that wants to play Minecraft on a smartphone for some reason. A few of the biggest game devs also probably have some of their games there. That is to say, it's better than nothing, but still worse than most other options.
I wouldn't even recommend wasting time with it if you are a developer... Windows Phone was built to be a similar walled garden thing like iPhones, there's even less resources to make use of and less cross app communication, so unless you are really willing to waste your time, you should instead be looking into app development for either Android or iOS. I mean, Windows Phone is going nowhere, and no one will care about it not long from now anyways.
It's like they don't have any shame at all...
Oh wait, they don't. Of course they don't.
It's a company that profits from digging up people's information, storing it in an insecure manner, where executives thought it was fine and dandy to hold up breach information for just enough time do some insider trading, save their own asses, and leave costumers to burn.
And can you take a wild guess on what side the current administration in which no one watches the watchmen will take?
Huh, I never thought about this idea of smartphones competing with VR, but I guess it's one more to the list.
- They are too expensive. We're talking about a market that's less than 1% of the world. VR cannot be and will not be popular or mainstream ever until it gets cheap enough for everyone to at least give it a go. Why do you think gaming became mainstream? Because of piracy, basically;
- Bad initial marketing strategy. VR should've gone the way of multiplayer games first and foremost. How did multiplayer games got popularized? By popping up on places where you could play by the hour, like Lan houses, cybercafes and whatnot. The whole deal is expensive, people are not willing to pay a fortune just to try it, so at least for now in a stage that there's not a whole lot of compeling content to try, it should've started as a B2B thing;
- The VR sickness problem. It'll never be for everyone because lots of people cannot deal with the side effects of using VR for prolonged periods of time. Tech could advance in this area, but we're not there just yet, and I dunno if this push for VR will last long enough to overcome it;
- Wearing something obstrusive and uncomfortable. Both VR and AR will have better chances of working out when they come in a form factor that is closer to sunglasses or lenses. We have several huge obstacles to overcome to get there, and again, I dunno if the current push is strong enough to keep things going until we get there.
The undivided attention problem is not that much of an issue, as long as you have something that deserves it. And if notifications and smartphone related stuff is really that much of an issue, you could just connect your smartphone to your computer and divise a system for that content to go through anyways.
Yet another gullible government fooled by the monorail scam.
Here:
"To reproduce the procedure, the steps are as follows: /system”).
1. Root the device.
2. Remount the file system that contains the trustlets (e.g., “mount -o rw,remount
3. Replace the current trustlets with the corresponding (vulnerable) ones from an
older-version image.
4. Use the device as normal."