Titanium Backup with the sync feature is as close to ideal as one can get on Android. Its encryption mechanism is remarkably sane, where it stores an encrypted copy of the private key with each backup file and used the public key on schedule. Plus, you can archive those huge games and get them off your phone, while keeping the saved data.
I have yet to have a usable Android backup restore correctly. I might get some stuff, but I wind up reloading and rebuilding anyway. iOS is a little bit better, but a lot of stuff doesn't get backed up either... and there is no way (outside of a jailbreak) to archive apps off with their data, or just the app data, as the backups are all or nothing.
My question is... are the regulations enforced? Sarbanes-Oxley comes to mind of regulations that sounded good, but the only time it really got enforced on a public basis, was when someone went over their catch limit fishing.
I wouldn't mind seeing consistency with regs across nations, and some merging of standards (HIPAA, CJIS, FERPA, FISMA, FedRAMP, PCI-DSS 3.2.) Of course, some things can't overlap, but most of the stuff can. Have the certification be done by a fair third party, like a UL listing, but for security.
This is what I find ironic. The US aside (and this is a debate to itself), Europe is pretty much the "lit city on the hill" when it comes to civilization, where every other nation in the world stands in their shadow when it comes to personal freedoms. Why does Europe want to lose its moral leadership? By demanding censorship, what becomes the difference between France and North Korea, Germany and Iran, or Spain and Daesh controlled territory, except for the degree and brutality of what is censored?
Even then, one country can decide all speech from another place is "illegal". Not to mention the religious conflicts. Then, there is the question of what hate speech is. Most people agree that live beheadings are hate speech, but the line can be drawn so far that anything disagreeing with a country's ideology can be considered that.
Then, there is the fact that this censorship doesn't really do much good. Look at how the Nazi sites went to the dark web, where they now can't be monitored or policed. Driving this stuff underground just means that LEOs have an exponentially harder job. It also will make people make something more robust than TOR for dark web sites, similar to how the eDonkey P2P network was tossed for decentralized tracking BitTorrent. I can see someone inventing a stateful, distributed, encrypted storage network that would trade cryptocurrency for drive space, and that being the place where censored stuff moves to.
My question is... where does the First Amendment end and overt bribery begin? As it stands now, the CU verdict has pretty much put any electable seat in the country up for sale. Or, do we just want to say that the invisible hand will take care of all this, as we ride down the lassez faire ideology into another Great Depression?
Physical security and electronic security are two different fronts. With physical security, if a security guard left a guard unlocked, there is physical evidence. With electronic security, all a company has to say is something along the lines of "hackers will win no matter what, so why bother?" and they will get off with, at best, a stern talking-to.
The past shows this to be true. Ever see a large company actually suffer because of a security breach? Definitely not, especially after they do the PR gambits and demand people sign their life away in return for a few attoseconds of credit monitoring service.
With the way things are, I wouldn't see telecommuting happening anytime soon. Of course, it would make sense, but it is a Prisoner's Delimma type of thing. If everyone telecommutes but you, you have more physical face time with the bigwigs, so you will likely be better off when it comes to promotions and raises as opposed to people who are just pixels on a Skype session.
California also has amenities, be it clean beaches with no jellyfish, and a lot of stuff to do within a reasonable driving distance, with a whole lot of climate ranges, be it the mountains, desert, and almost everything in between. I really don't see real estate prices dropping there anytime soon, just like Tokyo's don't drop. I could be wrong though.
There are many parties influencing the election. What is the difference between anonymous donations that are protected as free speech (under the Citizens United verdict) hiring shills versus a sovereign nation doing the same thing. Ideally, elections should be closer to Canada, where there is no advertising permitted so candidates have to stand on their own merits.
Or just dispense with the pretexts, and just auction the seats off to the highest bidder. Money is free speech, right, as per that SCOTUS decision.
Here in Austin, flippers tend to be out of luck. A lot of houses are bought just for the land, then are promptly razed so a house that is as big as the property easements allow put in place, perhaps with separate "mother-in-law" places (which is legal here) so the homeowner can also get some juicy rent money as well.
If telecommuting does become popular, Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani investors will step in and pick up the slack. US real estate is definitely a safe bet. It isn't going anywhere, and there won't be any cat 5 hurricanes hitting California anytime soon.
Problem is that Bitcoin gives absolute tracability. If your wallet is known, every transaction you have ever done is public record. Yes, you can play shell games with tumbling (and hope the exchange doesn't just run off with your currency) or multiple wallets, but eventually, the wallets will be attributed to the person, and the transactions easily traced, with criminal/civil proceedings following.
It would be nice for a cryptocurrency to have more anonymity. That way, if someone is running for office, a transaction made 25 years ago for a lid of Mary Jane isn't dug up and used by the opposing candidate.
TouchID works, but other makers have caught up. I bought a cheapie LG Stylo 3 phone, and its fingerprint recognition is very solid. My older HTC A9 has both fingerprint recognition and facial recognition (where you can optionally set it to require that you blink before it will unlock.)
Facial recognition may be OK for some, but I prefer a dedicated action to unlock my device like hitting a button. That way, I'm assured the phone is locked unless I explicitly unlock it, as opposed to just holding it up to read an entry on the notifications screen.
I hope Apple keeps TouchID, especially with regards to things like Apple Pay.
I'm the same way. Ideally, I prefer being on the 4s/5s/6s side of Apple's cycle when it comes to new devices, just because the form factor and most of the engineering is already done, so the device is mainly issue fixes that can't be retrofitted (better antenna placement on the 4s, stiffer aluminum on the 6s, etc.)
The only exception to this seems to be this year. If Apple is going with a new design, it might be good to wait a year. Plus, Apple tends to up storage capacity then as well, so the phone may have 512GB of usable storage.
If you have a 6s, there is a battery recall program going on, because the 6s battery does suck. Check your serial number and go and get yourself a replacement battery if needed.
I have yet to see a single company change their employee policy for the better [1] because people have quit. If it is changed, it is because of a news media item, the government stepping in, competitor forcing them to change, of the company's ownership changed hands.
[1]: I've seen changes for the worse, where one policy was that if an employee was looking at glassdoor on a company network, it would be grounds for insta-firing, but not really for the better.
Zero interest as well, so if one is staying with T-Mobile, it isn't a financially foolish choice. Downside is that until the phone is paid off, T-Mobile will not unlock it.
This is only going to be more common. Russia, China, the EU, India, Pakistan all have laws going into effect that have actual teeth in them that are for data privacy.
Some of the laws actually are contradictory. The EU requires data to be retained on one hand for LEO access. On the other hand, data must be destroyed when it isn't used.
It is ironic that the US is the only civilized in the country in the world right now without data production guidelines except in specialized environments (medical, financial)... and even those guidelines are not enforced (Sarbanes Oxley hasn't been used for much other than having a fisherman arrested for going over the bag limit.)
Has FB done much to earn my trust? Let me count the ways...
Mention something in a message, and see ads about it forever more. The fact that they demand real life info about you, and will "Zucc" your account if not. Makes a great place for stalkers. The fact that web forums, and many other things are moved to FB groups. Too many eggs in a non private basket. The fact that is difficult to remove stuff. The only mass delete utility is a Chrome extension, and it has to be run a number of times to remove posts, likes, etc. Even with Reddit, I can run a script and clean an account out completely. The fact that some sites require FB for authentication. The fact that even if I am not on there, I still get tagged in images, and an account is sort of built even without me creating it.
Austin as well. I've seen stores selling $700 single serve cappuccino machines (where the cartridge one pops in has the milk and everything else in it)... and people buy them.
The funny thing... the idea is not so bad. Of course, the juicer part is built extremely well, and would have to be redesigned to be cheaper, but it could have wound up being the next K-cup standard, especially if the juicer was priced around $199 with various models, and juice bags sold not just by subscription, but at grocery stores.
However, it was the concern of DRM, the fact that it only could use bags from the maker, and the very limited supply of juice bags available that killed this product. Had bags been available from a lot more sources, things could have been different, and a product like this likely would have been salable.
With all the battery advances, it would be nice to see at least 3-4 types of batteries, with the chemistry optimal for each application:
1: Lead-acid battery replacements. Goal is for inexpensive technology to allow these to go below 50% SoC without permanent damage. Some research is done with graphite supercaps, to allow deeper discharge without damage, be as stated by another, I'll believe it once it hits Amazon.
2: Very high energy density. Cell phones are not getting any more thrifty with battery life, especially with the pressure to add GPU and other items, as well as the bloating of apps and other gewgaws to provide analytics to all the tons of companies sucking that data off the device.
3: A stable chemistry, so if the cell is punctured or breached, it doesn't cause an explosiion.
4: Long lived cells made for giving low amounts of power for years or decades.
5: Cells made to take extreme environments, be it radiation, cold in space, high pressures of deep sea exploration, etc.
What would be useful is lead-acid battery replacements, with chemistry that has a lot larger charge/discharge rate.
I can control what VPN I use. With an ISP, I really can't, where at best, I'd have cable or the telco. If one VPN has a bad privacy policy, I can switch fairly easily. Offshore? Easily done.
Of course, the VPN owner spilling the beans about what I'm doing is one thing... but if that is done and it is made public, the customer base of the VPN will disappear overnight.
Realistically, who would not be using a VPN with Wi-Fi links? So many places abuse it, from the restaurant chain that says that they can log every packet and sell the info as they see fit to the place that tries to MITM every connection with an oddball key... using a VPN is just like using FDE... a necessity.
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Titanium Backup with the sync feature is as close to ideal as one can get on Android. Its encryption mechanism is remarkably sane, where it stores an encrypted copy of the private key with each backup file and used the public key on schedule. Plus, you can archive those huge games and get them off your phone, while keeping the saved data.
I have yet to have a usable Android backup restore correctly. I might get some stuff, but I wind up reloading and rebuilding anyway. iOS is a little bit better, but a lot of stuff doesn't get backed up either... and there is no way (outside of a jailbreak) to archive apps off with their data, or just the app data, as the backups are all or nothing.
My question is... are the regulations enforced? Sarbanes-Oxley comes to mind of regulations that sounded good, but the only time it really got enforced on a public basis, was when someone went over their catch limit fishing.
I wouldn't mind seeing consistency with regs across nations, and some merging of standards (HIPAA, CJIS, FERPA, FISMA, FedRAMP, PCI-DSS 3.2.) Of course, some things can't overlap, but most of the stuff can. Have the certification be done by a fair third party, like a UL listing, but for security.
This is what I find ironic. The US aside (and this is a debate to itself), Europe is pretty much the "lit city on the hill" when it comes to civilization, where every other nation in the world stands in their shadow when it comes to personal freedoms. Why does Europe want to lose its moral leadership? By demanding censorship, what becomes the difference between France and North Korea, Germany and Iran, or Spain and Daesh controlled territory, except for the degree and brutality of what is censored?
Even then, one country can decide all speech from another place is "illegal". Not to mention the religious conflicts. Then, there is the question of what hate speech is. Most people agree that live beheadings are hate speech, but the line can be drawn so far that anything disagreeing with a country's ideology can be considered that.
Then, there is the fact that this censorship doesn't really do much good. Look at how the Nazi sites went to the dark web, where they now can't be monitored or policed. Driving this stuff underground just means that LEOs have an exponentially harder job. It also will make people make something more robust than TOR for dark web sites, similar to how the eDonkey P2P network was tossed for decentralized tracking BitTorrent. I can see someone inventing a stateful, distributed, encrypted storage network that would trade cryptocurrency for drive space, and that being the place where censored stuff moves to.
My question is... where does the First Amendment end and overt bribery begin? As it stands now, the CU verdict has pretty much put any electable seat in the country up for sale. Or, do we just want to say that the invisible hand will take care of all this, as we ride down the lassez faire ideology into another Great Depression?
Physical security and electronic security are two different fronts. With physical security, if a security guard left a guard unlocked, there is physical evidence. With electronic security, all a company has to say is something along the lines of "hackers will win no matter what, so why bother?" and they will get off with, at best, a stern talking-to.
The past shows this to be true. Ever see a large company actually suffer because of a security breach? Definitely not, especially after they do the PR gambits and demand people sign their life away in return for a few attoseconds of credit monitoring service.
With the way things are, I wouldn't see telecommuting happening anytime soon. Of course, it would make sense, but it is a Prisoner's Delimma type of thing. If everyone telecommutes but you, you have more physical face time with the bigwigs, so you will likely be better off when it comes to promotions and raises as opposed to people who are just pixels on a Skype session.
California also has amenities, be it clean beaches with no jellyfish, and a lot of stuff to do within a reasonable driving distance, with a whole lot of climate ranges, be it the mountains, desert, and almost everything in between. I really don't see real estate prices dropping there anytime soon, just like Tokyo's don't drop. I could be wrong though.
There are many parties influencing the election. What is the difference between anonymous donations that are protected as free speech (under the Citizens United verdict) hiring shills versus a sovereign nation doing the same thing. Ideally, elections should be closer to Canada, where there is no advertising permitted so candidates have to stand on their own merits.
Or just dispense with the pretexts, and just auction the seats off to the highest bidder. Money is free speech, right, as per that SCOTUS decision.
Here in Austin, flippers tend to be out of luck. A lot of houses are bought just for the land, then are promptly razed so a house that is as big as the property easements allow put in place, perhaps with separate "mother-in-law" places (which is legal here) so the homeowner can also get some juicy rent money as well.
Forbidden doesn't mean it isn't done...
If telecommuting does become popular, Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani investors will step in and pick up the slack. US real estate is definitely a safe bet. It isn't going anywhere, and there won't be any cat 5 hurricanes hitting California anytime soon.
Problem is that Bitcoin gives absolute tracability. If your wallet is known, every transaction you have ever done is public record. Yes, you can play shell games with tumbling (and hope the exchange doesn't just run off with your currency) or multiple wallets, but eventually, the wallets will be attributed to the person, and the transactions easily traced, with criminal/civil proceedings following.
It would be nice for a cryptocurrency to have more anonymity. That way, if someone is running for office, a transaction made 25 years ago for a lid of Mary Jane isn't dug up and used by the opposing candidate.
TouchID works, but other makers have caught up. I bought a cheapie LG Stylo 3 phone, and its fingerprint recognition is very solid. My older HTC A9 has both fingerprint recognition and facial recognition (where you can optionally set it to require that you blink before it will unlock.)
Facial recognition may be OK for some, but I prefer a dedicated action to unlock my device like hitting a button. That way, I'm assured the phone is locked unless I explicitly unlock it, as opposed to just holding it up to read an entry on the notifications screen.
I hope Apple keeps TouchID, especially with regards to things like Apple Pay.
I'm the same way. Ideally, I prefer being on the 4s/5s/6s side of Apple's cycle when it comes to new devices, just because the form factor and most of the engineering is already done, so the device is mainly issue fixes that can't be retrofitted (better antenna placement on the 4s, stiffer aluminum on the 6s, etc.)
The only exception to this seems to be this year. If Apple is going with a new design, it might be good to wait a year. Plus, Apple tends to up storage capacity then as well, so the phone may have 512GB of usable storage.
If you have a 6s, there is a battery recall program going on, because the 6s battery does suck. Check your serial number and go and get yourself a replacement battery if needed.
I have yet to see a single company change their employee policy for the better [1] because people have quit. If it is changed, it is because of a news media item, the government stepping in, competitor forcing them to change, of the company's ownership changed hands.
[1]: I've seen changes for the worse, where one policy was that if an employee was looking at glassdoor on a company network, it would be grounds for insta-firing, but not really for the better.
Zero interest as well, so if one is staying with T-Mobile, it isn't a financially foolish choice. Downside is that until the phone is paid off, T-Mobile will not unlock it.
This is only going to be more common. Russia, China, the EU, India, Pakistan all have laws going into effect that have actual teeth in them that are for data privacy.
Some of the laws actually are contradictory. The EU requires data to be retained on one hand for LEO access. On the other hand, data must be destroyed when it isn't used.
It is ironic that the US is the only civilized in the country in the world right now without data production guidelines except in specialized environments (medical, financial)... and even those guidelines are not enforced (Sarbanes Oxley hasn't been used for much other than having a fisherman arrested for going over the bag limit.)
Has FB done much to earn my trust? Let me count the ways...
Mention something in a message, and see ads about it forever more.
The fact that they demand real life info about you, and will "Zucc" your account if not. Makes a great place for stalkers.
The fact that web forums, and many other things are moved to FB groups. Too many eggs in a non private basket.
The fact that is difficult to remove stuff. The only mass delete utility is a Chrome extension, and it has to be run a number of times to remove posts, likes, etc. Even with Reddit, I can run a script and clean an account out completely.
The fact that some sites require FB for authentication.
The fact that even if I am not on there, I still get tagged in images, and an account is sort of built even without me creating it.
I'd be looking to bounce ASAP. If you have a clearance, you should be easily making twice that, especially in SV, with costs of living so high.
Austin as well. I've seen stores selling $700 single serve cappuccino machines (where the cartridge one pops in has the milk and everything else in it)... and people buy them.
The funny thing... the idea is not so bad. Of course, the juicer part is built extremely well, and would have to be redesigned to be cheaper, but it could have wound up being the next K-cup standard, especially if the juicer was priced around $199 with various models, and juice bags sold not just by subscription, but at grocery stores.
However, it was the concern of DRM, the fact that it only could use bags from the maker, and the very limited supply of juice bags available that killed this product. Had bags been available from a lot more sources, things could have been different, and a product like this likely would have been salable.
With all the battery advances, it would be nice to see at least 3-4 types of batteries, with the chemistry optimal for each application:
1: Lead-acid battery replacements. Goal is for inexpensive technology to allow these to go below 50% SoC without permanent damage. Some research is done with graphite supercaps, to allow deeper discharge without damage, be as stated by another, I'll believe it once it hits Amazon.
2: Very high energy density. Cell phones are not getting any more thrifty with battery life, especially with the pressure to add GPU and other items, as well as the bloating of apps and other gewgaws to provide analytics to all the tons of companies sucking that data off the device.
3: A stable chemistry, so if the cell is punctured or breached, it doesn't cause an explosiion.
4: Long lived cells made for giving low amounts of power for years or decades.
5: Cells made to take extreme environments, be it radiation, cold in space, high pressures of deep sea exploration, etc.
What would be useful is lead-acid battery replacements, with chemistry that has a lot larger charge/discharge rate.
I can control what VPN I use. With an ISP, I really can't, where at best, I'd have cable or the telco. If one VPN has a bad privacy policy, I can switch fairly easily. Offshore? Easily done.
Of course, the VPN owner spilling the beans about what I'm doing is one thing... but if that is done and it is made public, the customer base of the VPN will disappear overnight.
Realistically, who would not be using a VPN with Wi-Fi links? So many places abuse it, from the restaurant chain that says that they can log every packet and sell the info as they see fit to the place that tries to MITM every connection with an oddball key... using a VPN is just like using FDE... a necessity.