I have had a few rebranded VASCO keyfob with eBay/PayPal's label on it. They tend to die after 2-3 years due to battery life, and recently, I was unable to find a link to buy a new one and activate it.
Yes, now we have Google Authenticator, Duo, and other items, but the simplicity of a keyfob which did nothing but display a six digit number made it decently secure, without having to reply on a phone, tablet, or other device.
Same here. HOA pays for my TV [1], Internet comes out of my pocket, so to me, it is the same cost. Even though I watch YouTube far more than TV, it is the same cost for me in the end. Although Spectrum's app for watching TV on a mobile device is a nice freebie.
[1]: Technically, I pay the HOA, and they pay for the TV...
I would probably say that performance is probably dead last on any software company's mind, unless something is so slow that it gathers user complaints of affects the use of a device (for example, an embedded controller in a vend a goat machine is having a software loop that fires off every five seconds, winding up taking 6-7 seconds to complete, or a daily backup taking 26-27 hours to complete.)
Performance can always be improved, but oftentimes, it is a case of diminishing returns. In reality, it will not even be looked at, because most software, the developers are thanking their respective deities that it built, passed unit tests, and was able to be built in an executable. Stuff like security and performance... waaay low on the list.
The problem is that making identity part of the site is one of the reasons people abhor FB, especially if you don't want your personal picture on the account. All it takes is one person reporting the account.
Reddit already does well with getting rid of obvious trolls, be it alerts or shadowbans. We don't need another site demanding "papers, please" to use it.
I agree with you there. Android has the ability to have a useful, hierarchical filesystem and method to organize apps. It just is a matter of it not being implemented.
I've personally given up on the latest and greatest launcher that is thrown at me on a phone, and just use Nova Launcher. That way, regardless of make/model, I have the same look. You are right, it isn't perfect and brings oddball issues, but it at least ensures some UI consistency, which is a strong point for iOS.
I wonder why Android can't have some bigger improvements to it. Google has a lot of developer resources, and some items added might make it a lot more developer and enterprise friendly:
A hypervisor comes to mind, so Android can have a VM for work, a VM for home, etc. This is especially useful with dual-SIM phones, or a phone using the SIM for one VM, and Google Voice for another.
A filesystem like APFS with deduplication, bit rot protection, encryption provisions on a block level, and other items.
A way to have nandroid built into the OS, so not just/data, but the entire phone, ROM, apps, and stored stuff can be dumped out as a backup. This would make life a lot easier should an OTA update cause a bricking.
The ability to scale down the OS to fit on phones 4+ years old, and work well (as in run all existing apps.) If Windows, which is an OS far more complex, can do this, it would be useful if Android could run on devices with far fewer CPUs/RAM/storage, as there is a big market for lower end Android devices, especially as the economy worsens.
The ability to do containerization.
The ability to do OTA updates as compressed diffs, so even if/system was modified, updates can still take.
I know I'm being contrary, but what is wrong with the trades? Even here in the US, a plumber, HVAC tech, electrician, mortician, and other "humdrum" jobs are still ways to eke out a decent living. Even in recession times, people need their pipes fixed, their dead embalmed and buried, and so on. Germany teaching trades is still a lot better than what we have here in the US, where once out of high school, that is pretty much it for subsidized education.
What we get is a lot of people that have great stuff... but do we really need yet another fleshlight app in the store competing with many others, doing the same thing with spewing ads and slurping as much data as the device/user allows? What we really need are companies who pave more roads, be it writing new protocols, doing new peer to peer things, offering better bandwidth at the Internet's edges, etc. It may not pay more for the quarter, but it will be something for the long haul. A few things that come to mind:
An upgrade to the OpenPGP standard with SaltPack's improvements (forward secrecy, etc.) A file archive standard that is a superset of OpenPGP's "PGPZip" packets, with error correction, ability to split files and have recovery records... pretty much what WinRAR brings to the table, except F/OSS so people can build on it. A better WORM filesystem than UDF, with cryptographic signing of written packets and ECC in the filesystem to easily find/repair bit rot. We used to have 400+ DVD autochangers in the 1990s/early 2000s. Why not replace the DVD player with a BD-XL player. Or, why not have something like Sony's 3.3 TB optical drive (with $188.57 cartridges) be made into a popular, consumer grade appliance. This would be great for ransomware-resistant backups without relying on the cloud.
There is so much that can be done... it just needs people to not focus on what the crowd is doing, but actually blaze a trail and have a payoff that might be incredible.
When I was in school, they taught from a globe and using both the Mercator projection, as well as the orange peel projection. That way, any questions about why Greenland being so huge were promptly answered. One of the main uses of the globe was showing how Russia was placed, as it is winds up distorted in most maps.
The ironic thing is that this is just a US problem. The German student has his education paid for by the Fatherland. The Chinese student, similar. It is only the US that forces student loans that can't be dumped in any way.
If the US were a farm, it would be out of business in a year... even the dumbest person in agriculture that if you want a crop harvest in the fall, you have to plant seeds in the spring.
What is real innovation? The problem is that the VCs in SV have a narrow focus of what companies they want to get behind. The companies either spit out ads, suck as much data as possible, or both. This is why the Meitu app is such a media darling, even though it does so relatively little. Nothing else appears interesting to the VC people.
Companies that build foundations (say a company that is looking at an offline messaging protocol as a secure replacement for E-mail internally) will never get funded. While companies that have no revenue except ads are the unicorn startups.
I would say that things might change. The US military will be getting a shot in the arm for budgets, so it won't be surprising to see a lot of businesses trying to sell the same stuff, except with a camo, "tacti-cool" flair. However, the companies doing this will likely not be from SV, but from states like Texas and Virginia where there is more of an entrenched DoD contractor base.
I have no need for one of these things. My smartphone can do voice stuff, why do I need another appliance that always listens and always uploads what is around it? If I want another device to watch what I do, I'll just buy another microwave.
Exactly. Do we need watches to be "smart" being yet another screen with bloated apps and coded by the cheapest people hirable? Not really. Having apps designed for low power, low CPU, low RAM, and low storage will bring a better benefit than trying to compete with WatchOS and Android head to head.
Every time I read about a new OS for IoT devices, it likely is about some new feature, but because of the mentality that security has no ROI, it means the new device is now an IoT toy for the blackhats.
If Swatch wanted to do things "right", the OS in question would be something lightweight like QNX, heavily compartmentalized (think SELinux), and done "right" from the ground up, so OS updates are as infrequent as possible, and when they come, they are ideally features, not fixing some obvious bug that should have been caught well earlier in the dev cycle.
I hope they think it through, make a lightweight, secure OS, designed to run on hardware that runs days to weeks between charges. A watch doesn't need tons of apps slurping up CPU. Instead, they should design with a philosophy similar to the original PalmOS. Black/white, do something simple, do it well.
I should have been clearer about this. The US was not interested in turning Russia into a colony, but ensuring other countries don't do that (especially Japan.)
It makes for some history that not many people tend to know about, and some Russians still view the holding of those cities as a sore point, even now.
If the population crashed by that amount, the US would have to have a decade's lead on military technology, otherwise CONUS would be overrun by a country with more population. This already happened. When some plague thinned the native American population to 1/10 it was back in the 1600s, it was relatively easy for colonists to get a foothold and push the natives aside. This can easily happen again, and with how quickly an invasion can happen (hours with planes, days via ship), if the US population cratered to that level, the 100 million left would be rounded up and slaughtered by the billions from other nations.
Russia knows this. When they had their revolution and instability, many countries went and seized their land for various reasons. Including the US (Murmansk, Arcangel, and Vladivostok) , although the US did leave.
There are ways to secure from all but the most determined. For example, on Android, encrypting/data with a password separate from your screen locker PIN ensure that someone power cycling the phone is dealing with a 30+ character passphrase, which will be a lot harder to guess than 4-6 digits. Using a firewall program, one can block outgoing network communications. Backups can be handled by Titanium Backup (which has a very well thought out encryption system.) If xPrivacy were updated, that would provide further protection by allowing apps to slurp data... but the data they getting is bogus and random.
You really don't have to change your UI. I've moved to Nova Launcher on Android, so regardless of what manufacturer of device, that stays the same. It may not be as cool looking as the latest Samsung or Huawei interface, but it stays consistent. Similar when using a custom keyboard app.
You are not paranoid, you are smart. I keep my financial stuff in a VM, and keep my Web browsing in another VM [1]. Separation of stuff is common sense, especially with all the stuff that runs in a browser that is untrusted.
This makes me wonder... why doesn't a phone maker use VMs in phones? ARM already has a built in hypervisor (the "worlds" functionality that allows for trusted and untrusted), why not use that, coupled with back-end deduplication and encryption. With a phone that has 2+ SIM cards, it would allow for a work and a home VM to work, make calls pretty much independantly, and never interfere with each other. This way, someone's banking app can be on the same phone, but well separated from the general personal-use instance.
[1]: I have found Hyper-V seeming to be pretty secure in the "stuff isn't getting out of here" department. I could be wrong though.
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Correction. My keyfobs didn't "just" die. It took them a few years to run out of battery life. However, it would be nice if they were still offered.
I have had a few rebranded VASCO keyfob with eBay/PayPal's label on it. They tend to die after 2-3 years due to battery life, and recently, I was unable to find a link to buy a new one and activate it.
Yes, now we have Google Authenticator, Duo, and other items, but the simplicity of a keyfob which did nothing but display a six digit number made it decently secure, without having to reply on a phone, tablet, or other device.
Same here. HOA pays for my TV [1], Internet comes out of my pocket, so to me, it is the same cost. Even though I watch YouTube far more than TV, it is the same cost for me in the end. Although Spectrum's app for watching TV on a mobile device is a nice freebie.
[1]: Technically, I pay the HOA, and they pay for the TV...
I would probably say that performance is probably dead last on any software company's mind, unless something is so slow that it gathers user complaints of affects the use of a device (for example, an embedded controller in a vend a goat machine is having a software loop that fires off every five seconds, winding up taking 6-7 seconds to complete, or a daily backup taking 26-27 hours to complete.)
Performance can always be improved, but oftentimes, it is a case of diminishing returns. In reality, it will not even be looked at, because most software, the developers are thanking their respective deities that it built, passed unit tests, and was able to be built in an executable. Stuff like security and performance... waaay low on the list.
The problem is that making identity part of the site is one of the reasons people abhor FB, especially if you don't want your personal picture on the account. All it takes is one person reporting the account.
Reddit already does well with getting rid of obvious trolls, be it alerts or shadowbans. We don't need another site demanding "papers, please" to use it.
I'm fairly open-minded about it. As long as they don't make Digg's mistakes, a Facebook competitor is a good thing.
I agree with you there. Android has the ability to have a useful, hierarchical filesystem and method to organize apps. It just is a matter of it not being implemented.
I've personally given up on the latest and greatest launcher that is thrown at me on a phone, and just use Nova Launcher. That way, regardless of make/model, I have the same look. You are right, it isn't perfect and brings oddball issues, but it at least ensures some UI consistency, which is a strong point for iOS.
I wonder why Android can't have some bigger improvements to it. Google has a lot of developer resources, and some items added might make it a lot more developer and enterprise friendly:
A hypervisor comes to mind, so Android can have a VM for work, a VM for home, etc. This is especially useful with dual-SIM phones, or a phone using the SIM for one VM, and Google Voice for another.
A filesystem like APFS with deduplication, bit rot protection, encryption provisions on a block level, and other items.
A way to have nandroid built into the OS, so not just /data, but the entire phone, ROM, apps, and stored stuff can be dumped out as a backup. This would make life a lot easier should an OTA update cause a bricking.
The ability to scale down the OS to fit on phones 4+ years old, and work well (as in run all existing apps.) If Windows, which is an OS far more complex, can do this, it would be useful if Android could run on devices with far fewer CPUs/RAM/storage, as there is a big market for lower end Android devices, especially as the economy worsens.
The ability to do containerization.
The ability to do OTA updates as compressed diffs, so even if /system was modified, updates can still take.
I think Nova Launcher offers that, but I could be wrong.
I know I'm being contrary, but what is wrong with the trades? Even here in the US, a plumber, HVAC tech, electrician, mortician, and other "humdrum" jobs are still ways to eke out a decent living. Even in recession times, people need their pipes fixed, their dead embalmed and buried, and so on. Germany teaching trades is still a lot better than what we have here in the US, where once out of high school, that is pretty much it for subsidized education.
What we get is a lot of people that have great stuff... but do we really need yet another fleshlight app in the store competing with many others, doing the same thing with spewing ads and slurping as much data as the device/user allows? What we really need are companies who pave more roads, be it writing new protocols, doing new peer to peer things, offering better bandwidth at the Internet's edges, etc. It may not pay more for the quarter, but it will be something for the long haul. A few things that come to mind:
An upgrade to the OpenPGP standard with SaltPack's improvements (forward secrecy, etc.)
A file archive standard that is a superset of OpenPGP's "PGPZip" packets, with error correction, ability to split files and have recovery records... pretty much what WinRAR brings to the table, except F/OSS so people can build on it.
A better WORM filesystem than UDF, with cryptographic signing of written packets and ECC in the filesystem to easily find/repair bit rot.
We used to have 400+ DVD autochangers in the 1990s/early 2000s. Why not replace the DVD player with a BD-XL player. Or, why not have something like Sony's 3.3 TB optical drive (with $188.57 cartridges) be made into a popular, consumer grade appliance. This would be great for ransomware-resistant backups without relying on the cloud.
There is so much that can be done... it just needs people to not focus on what the crowd is doing, but actually blaze a trail and have a payoff that might be incredible.
When I was in school, they taught from a globe and using both the Mercator projection, as well as the orange peel projection. That way, any questions about why Greenland being so huge were promptly answered. One of the main uses of the globe was showing how Russia was placed, as it is winds up distorted in most maps.
The ironic thing is that this is just a US problem. The German student has his education paid for by the Fatherland. The Chinese student, similar. It is only the US that forces student loans that can't be dumped in any way.
If the US were a farm, it would be out of business in a year... even the dumbest person in agriculture that if you want a crop harvest in the fall, you have to plant seeds in the spring.
What is real innovation? The problem is that the VCs in SV have a narrow focus of what companies they want to get behind. The companies either spit out ads, suck as much data as possible, or both. This is why the Meitu app is such a media darling, even though it does so relatively little. Nothing else appears interesting to the VC people.
Companies that build foundations (say a company that is looking at an offline messaging protocol as a secure replacement for E-mail internally) will never get funded. While companies that have no revenue except ads are the unicorn startups.
I would say that things might change. The US military will be getting a shot in the arm for budgets, so it won't be surprising to see a lot of businesses trying to sell the same stuff, except with a camo, "tacti-cool" flair. However, the companies doing this will likely not be from SV, but from states like Texas and Virginia where there is more of an entrenched DoD contractor base.
Amazon Prime has a service where you can read books for free, but only a few at a time, and you have to "return" them when done.
I have no need for one of these things. My smartphone can do voice stuff, why do I need another appliance that always listens and always uploads what is around it? If I want another device to watch what I do, I'll just buy another microwave.
Exactly. Do we need watches to be "smart" being yet another screen with bloated apps and coded by the cheapest people hirable? Not really. Having apps designed for low power, low CPU, low RAM, and low storage will bring a better benefit than trying to compete with WatchOS and Android head to head.
Every time I read about a new OS for IoT devices, it likely is about some new feature, but because of the mentality that security has no ROI, it means the new device is now an IoT toy for the blackhats.
If Swatch wanted to do things "right", the OS in question would be something lightweight like QNX, heavily compartmentalized (think SELinux), and done "right" from the ground up, so OS updates are as infrequent as possible, and when they come, they are ideally features, not fixing some obvious bug that should have been caught well earlier in the dev cycle.
I hope they think it through, make a lightweight, secure OS, designed to run on hardware that runs days to weeks between charges. A watch doesn't need tons of apps slurping up CPU. Instead, they should design with a philosophy similar to the original PalmOS. Black/white, do something simple, do it well.
I should have been clearer about this. The US was not interested in turning Russia into a colony, but ensuring other countries don't do that (especially Japan.)
It makes for some history that not many people tend to know about, and some Russians still view the holding of those cities as a sore point, even now.
I'd rather have electric cars paid for by tax dollars than the same old fossil fuels crap. Saves money in the long run.
If the population crashed by that amount, the US would have to have a decade's lead on military technology, otherwise CONUS would be overrun by a country with more population. This already happened. When some plague thinned the native American population to 1/10 it was back in the 1600s, it was relatively easy for colonists to get a foothold and push the natives aside. This can easily happen again, and with how quickly an invasion can happen (hours with planes, days via ship), if the US population cratered to that level, the 100 million left would be rounded up and slaughtered by the billions from other nations.
Russia knows this. When they had their revolution and instability, many countries went and seized their land for various reasons. Including the US (Murmansk, Arcangel, and Vladivostok) , although the US did leave.
There are ways to secure from all but the most determined. For example, on Android, encrypting /data with a password separate from your screen locker PIN ensure that someone power cycling the phone is dealing with a 30+ character passphrase, which will be a lot harder to guess than 4-6 digits. Using a firewall program, one can block outgoing network communications. Backups can be handled by Titanium Backup (which has a very well thought out encryption system.) If xPrivacy were updated, that would provide further protection by allowing apps to slurp data... but the data they getting is bogus and random.
You really don't have to change your UI. I've moved to Nova Launcher on Android, so regardless of what manufacturer of device, that stays the same. It may not be as cool looking as the latest Samsung or Huawei interface, but it stays consistent. Similar when using a custom keyboard app.
You are not paranoid, you are smart. I keep my financial stuff in a VM, and keep my Web browsing in another VM [1]. Separation of stuff is common sense, especially with all the stuff that runs in a browser that is untrusted.
This makes me wonder... why doesn't a phone maker use VMs in phones? ARM already has a built in hypervisor (the "worlds" functionality that allows for trusted and untrusted), why not use that, coupled with back-end deduplication and encryption. With a phone that has 2+ SIM cards, it would allow for a work and a home VM to work, make calls pretty much independantly, and never interfere with each other. This way, someone's banking app can be on the same phone, but well separated from the general personal-use instance.
[1]: I have found Hyper-V seeming to be pretty secure in the "stuff isn't getting out of here" department. I could be wrong though.
Never had an issue with OS updates with CM/LineageOS and not installing GApps...