> Unless the only things you have hooked to your TV are an antenna and a > DVD player the chances are it already is connected to the Internet or > whatever you are using to view videos is connected. There are great reasons to > connect a TV to the internet, watching all the content you can get from the internet.
I prefer to connect an HDMI cable from my computer, which I know is updated/firewalled properly. BTW, a 30-foot HDMI cable is only 30 dollars Canadian at Home Depot http://www.primecables.com/p-3...
> A smart dishwasher might be sending sensor information to the manufacturer where > early signs of failure can be identified and you alerted prior to the dishwasher failing.
Beyond stupid. Howsabout a "trouble light" like in your car? Again, it's absolutely unnecessary for packets to traverse the internet for that to happen.
>A microwave oven might have a voice interactive control > system and the voice recognition is done in the cloud.
Beyond beyond stupid.
> Your dryer might communicate with the power company who gives you a discounted > rate if they are allowed to shut it off for short intervals to minimize peak power draw.
Or like, you know, do your laundry, etc, on weekends or after 7:00 PM weekdays to take advantage of "Time-of-Use Pricing" http://www.ontario-hydro.com/c...
> Add a tiny bit of smarts like changing the setpoints based on the time of day and day of > the week and you can save thousands of dollars a year in areas of the country where > time of day electric rates make off peak electricity 1/4th the cost of on peak electricity.
*A PROGRAMMABLE DIGITAL THERMOSTAT DOES NOT NEED TO BE INTERNET CONNECTED*
> Even smarter thermostats let me tells my thermostat remotely at a vacation home that > I'm coming for the weekend and to please switch from away mode to present mode.
If you can connect over the internet, so can the bad guys. If you want to risk a major security breach at your place for the convenience of not having to wait 2 hours for the temperature to get comfortable, your priorities are ass backwards.
> It's not ideal, but the most potent response isn't damage control ("only fucking shitlords say SJW") > or arm-waving, loudly announced corrections ("ACTUALLY, hacker means...") it is to relabel.
> Premature relabeling is futile and will probably make society miscategorize your subgroups further > (eg the tumblrs) but if your entire group is clearly stuck under old stereotypes it's probably best to > pack up and leave behind an empty shell for continued scapegoating, despite being uninhabited.
Blacks have "re-labelled" multiple times, but it hasn't helped their unerlying problems. E.g.
* "Colored People" as in NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).
> It's still marked as a beta right now. Hope they push hard and get > into general availability this year. It's useful. Running unmodified > console mode apps from the Ubuntu user space is a useful thing.
Have a look at Cygwin. http://cygwin.com/ It's a free linux environment running under Windows. It's published by Redhat, who know a thing or two about linux. And not just console apps, it's got X and the associated graphical appslications.
> Why are we limiting ourselves to just skin colors and ethnic background. Are other > species really being represented in high tech? I mean why are we not hiring Chimpanzees. > Studies have actually shown the Chimp mind actually has better problem solving > abilities than the Human brain. Sure they are 7 times as strong as we are and > can easily rip a human into shreds. That's not the point: it's all about the diversity.
> One of the flaws in Microsoft's strategy is that if you're going to force business > to retrain all there computer users every couple years because the user > interface in the latest incarnation of Windows is so different from the > previous version... then it's really a lot cheaper to switch to Linux and > only have to retrain your users once!
+10
Before I retired, it seemed that every few years, with every new version of Windows, you had to learn Windows all over again. Indeed, my employer had training sessions for the "new and improved" version. And don't get me started on how MS-Access ODBC queries against our Oracle database had to be painfully copy+pasted over to the new version each time MS Office was updated.
This is not about grumpy old farts resisting change. This is about employees trying to do their job, having the rug pulled out from under their feet every couple of years, and competent users being reduced to newbies. At home I use linux. I switched to ICEWM in early 2010, and I'm still using it. I use my computer to do stuff, not to explore "new and improved interfaces" every year or so.
And fer-cryin-out-loud, please stop pushing a stinking smartphone touch-based interface on desktops. One only has to look at how Firefox's market share has cratered since they forced the Atrocious^H^H^H^H^H Australis smartphone-oriented interface onto their desktop product. That's what drove me to Pale Moon.
* There's a 28-person Mission Control Centre in Monaco (60 people to provide round-the-clock coverage)
* It needs a Russian Ilyushin IL-76 strategic airlifter, a four-engine jet originally designed to carry machinery and military supplies into remote parts of the USSR. Yes, a fossil-fuel-burning 4-engine jet.
* The Ilyushin IL-76 carries a ground crew. You see, the Solar Impulse needs people on the runway to grab its wings when it lands. This results in shutting down a regular airport for 20 minutes, and regular passenger flights being delayed for these special snowflakes.
* Oh yeah, the wingspan is so honking big that it won't fit in a regular hangar. And it's rather fragile, so you don't want it sitting out in the open. So the Ilyushin IL-76 also carries around an inflatable hangar.
* The plane *MUST AVOID CLOUDS*. That includes cirrus overcast above it, because then its solar cells don't work.
In short, it's an expensive publicity stunt. And since they needed an Ilyushin IL-76 jet to circumnavigate the globe with them, I repeat... the bit about "fossil fuel free" is absolute bullshit.
> What is it? > > Cygwin is: > > a large collection of GNU and Open Source tools which provide functionality similar to a Linux distribution on Windows. > > a DLL (cygwin1.dll) which provides substantial POSIX API functionality.
No need to accept Microsoft's half-assed implementation. With Cygwin, you get the whole kit+kaboodle. bash and various other shells. X Window client and server, Firefox, mutt, sendmail, whatever. Even gcc, so you can build from source. And it's free. If the PHBs at work insist, you can buy support from Redhat, who publishes it.
The scandal was two-sided... * Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky (did she inhale?) * Newsweek spiked a well-researched story about Clinton/Lewinsky
Hillary is quoted as saying...
> As exciting as these new developments are.... there are a number of serious > issues without any kind of editing function or gate-keeping function. What does it mean > to have the right to defend your reputation, or to respond to what someone says?
From the other side of the political spectrum...
> During a 2012 speech to online activists and citizen journalists, former > Alaska Governor Sarah Palin reminded them that "the new media rose up > precisely because the old media failed to tell the truth." And she also > discussed how much Drudge, who was fast becoming a de facto assignment > editor, upset the legacy press that ridiculed him and tried to diminish his > influence even though they were obsessively refreshing his home page. > > "That very first new media breakthrough was about 15 years ago when this > lowly little store clerk in a lowly little apartment equipped with his computer > and a modem broke one of the biggest stories of the decade. His name was > Matt Drudge and the rest is history," Palin said in 2012. "And in hindsight, we > see that the story he broke was more than just a president having an affair. > To me it was much, much more than that. It was about a major > old media publication that had spiked the story eleven times." > > She reminded today's citizen journalists that the mainstream press did not > spike the Lewinsky story to "check their facts" but "because as charter > members of that Democrat Media Complex they were protecting their guy."
I'm old enough to remember the JFK "Camelot era". Back then the public didn't know, but Kennedy was screwing everything in a skirt. Bill Clinton was a choir boy in comparison. But the MSM suppressed the story, and JFK was the "all-American boy".
The American lib-left love the MSM, because they control most of it, with the notable exception of Fox. Back in the JFK era, a president could do all sorts of wrongs, and get it hushed up, because the elite controlled the MSM. Today, not so much. Give me a wide-open internet, with different people pushing their different interpretations. I'll sort it out for myself. No thanks, I don't want Hillary editing/gatekeeping the news.
Yeah, out in the boonies, it works. But wait a few years, until you take a bus with a bunch of kids with iToys. You know how difficult it is to get a clear WiFi channel in a crowded environment? Well, the same thing will happen with Bluetooth. Your device will be fighting it out with a whole bunch of other devices over limited radio spectrum. The resulting fiasco is completely predictable.
This may sound like tinfoil-hat territory, but consider the following possibility. Software is allowed to cross borders... if a $100,000 annual licence fee is paid for "inspection". The big outfits like Microsoft and the big anti-virus companies like Symantec/Norton would have no problems finding $100,000 between the cushions of their sofas. It's loose change for them. But consider iptables, pfsense, tripwire, openssl, openssh etc, etc.
This would be impossible for a few volunteers to do for their pet projects. Patches are submitted by developers from all over the planet... export. Mailing list archives are accessable from all over the planet.. export. Github and Sourceforge are accessable from all over the planet...export. A strict interpretation could shut down any open source effort that peripherally touches security. A *REALLY* strict interpretation could include any security fixes to Firefox or Pale Mooon or any other Open Source program.
* People were fed up with carrier-crap on their phones * People were fed up with Google-crap on their phones * CyanogenMod offered a crap-free phone OS
The "Cyanogen Inc" outfit tried to cash on the popularity of CyanogenMod. But they turned around, sold out, and baked their own crap into the OS. https://techcrunch.com/2016/01... Yes, MS Cortana. If I wanted a smartphone run by MS, I'd buy an MS smartphone already. This was a major betrayal of why people use CyanogenMod. And "Cyanogen Inc" is paying the price.
GM can shut down any Onstar-equipped vehicle anywhere. Currently, it's being heralded as a good thing http://www.autobytel.com/auto-...
But, as Aldredge Ames and Jonathon Pollard proved, there will always be turncoats willing to sell extremely sensitive info. So you're Al Qaeda or ISIS, with connections to Saudi oil money. Or China or Russia or whoever. You need to buy, or blackmail, the info on how it's done. Here's a doomsday scenario...
The date is a December or January in the next few years. The forecast calls for major snowstorm in the US Northeast, followed by a brutal cold front. 6-to-10 hours before the storm is due to hit, the bad guys throw the switch in the middle of afternoon rush hour. The roads are clogged with stalled cars. There are so many stalled cars, that any "immune" vehicles wouldn't be able to get anywhere anyways. The smart drivers get out and try to find shelter in stores/hotels/wherever. The slower thinkers freeze to death in their cars.
Because the roads are clogged with dead cars, and the US is heavily into JIT (Just-In-Time) supply chains, grocery stores, supermarkets, convenience stores, etc, are soon running out of goods. Minor issues in the power grid go unfixed, because utility workers can't get from home to the dispatch site to the problem area. More and more of the US Northeast loses electricity, and people start freezing and starving to death. The president declares martial law, but thousands, if not millions, of people die in the ensuing chaos before order is restored.
Similar scenarios apply to anything that can be shut down "from the cloud". Imagine if Microsoft's authentication systems suddenly decided that your copy of Windows, and everybody else's, was bogus. The US shuts down. Taking over Nest thermostats durning a cold spell or a heat wave could also cause many thousands of casualties, and major chaos. It's eff-ing stupid to allow any one authority that much power, because they *WILL* get hacked, and the power *WILL* be used for evil. It's only a matter of time.
> They even decided to break compatibility > with regular Firefox addons... all for you!
Correction... Mozilla broke compatibility with regular Firefox addons, i.e. XUL in order to switch to the same model used by Chrome https://blog.mozilla.org/addon... If I wanted effing Chrome, I'd use effing Chrome already. Firefox's problem is that it's a Chrome wannabee.
Today's situation... ATT has to pay through the nose to Cisco/Juniper etal for network switches, and beg and plead for the specs ATT wants.
ATT's goal... ATT gets to slap the code with the specs they want, into a glorified Raspberry Pi or Nvidia GPU, maybe as firmware. And Cisco/Juniper/etal stocks are going to collapse. ATT is not in the network switch/router business. But it is a major capital cost for them. If they can roll-their-own, or get Foxconn to build to their specs, ATT stands to save a bundle of money. Imagine you're a taxi company. You're not in the car manufacturing business. But if you could get Foxconn to custom-build taxis for you at a fraction of the cost of what Ford or GM charges, you'd jump on the deal right away.
Are you proud of being a "citizen" and do you "brown bag" your lunch to avoid unhealthy fast-food joints? According to the City of Seattle, you're racist. http://dailycaller.com/2013/08...
And if your "brown bag lunch" contains a peanut-butter-sandwich, you're potentially in trouble in Portland. http://www.dailykos.com/story/... So yeah, I agree with parent post. If I wwere a white guy in the vicinity of a minority employee, I'd STFU and keep ineteraction to a minimum to minimize my risk of being hauled before some "Civil Rights Tribunal" for an off-the-cuff remark.
See http://thenextweb.com/facebook... Facebook is the ultimate "cloud service", and it too can delete your account and data... just because.
tldr; backup all your Facebook friends' (OK, maybe just the real friends) contact info offline. Ditto for calendars. Beware of syncing any device with facebook.
> Editorâ(TM)s note: This is a guest post by Chris Leydon, a freelance videographer > and former startup founder. He organises the Tomorrow's Web series of > meetups and documents London's tech community with his video production > company Keyone Productions.
The "reason" he got for his Facebook account being disabled was...
> Upon investigation, we have determined that you are ineligible to use Facebook. > Unfortunately, for safety and security reasons, we cannot provide additional > information as to why your account was disabled. This decision is final.
He got onto Twiiter and actually managed to get the attention of a live person at Facebook UK, not some script-reader in Mumbai...
> I got a reply within an hour, saying that my query was being looked into, > but no guarantees on finding out why my account has been disabled or > reinstating it. The following day I received a further reply saying that > unfortunately, due to a shared personal connection, he was unable to > help or assist me in my situation because of a "user protection policy".
The consequences...
> Earlier on that day there had been an update to the Facebook page for the event > I was attending, a change of location. Instinctively I logged into Facebook and > saw that "Your account has been disabled message" again. I didn't know > where I was supposed to go and I couldn't check Facebook to find out either.
> No worries, I have the event stored in a calendar on my Windows Phone. > I flicked open to my calendar and looked for the appointment and it wasn't > there. The calendar was syncing with Facebook and when my account > became disabled, for security reasons, all of my Facebook events were > removed from my calendar. Shit.
> Not a problem, I'll phone Russell, he was organising the event so could tell > me where to go. I searched for Russell's number in my contacts and⦠> no results, he'd vanished. James? He was there as an email address and a > Twitter handle but no phone number. Sean? Same again. My phone's contacts > had been syncing with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but not actually > saving any data to the phone or Exchange. All of the numbers were being > pulled in from Facebook and without a Facebook account, I didn't have > any Facebook friends and no numbers to pull in. Fuck.
> Luckily my text messages were still safe, I wasn't completely lost. I found > an old text thread with Russell, phoned him and added the number as a > new contact to my phone. I was saved for the evening and it turned out > not to be quite the disaster I feared, but it started to dawn on me just how > much Iâ(TM)d grown to rely on one platform.
1) Share out the Windows drive to a BSD/Linux/Mac server, or allow the backup server to ssh or rsync into the Windows machine. Do *NOT* give the Windows machine write access to the backup server. If it's infected, it's not trustable. It might overwrite previous good good backups.
2) Use a *VERSIONING* backup system, so that you don't over-write January's good backup with February's encrypted backup.
3) Put in a few innocent-looking "canary" files that never change. If they do change or disappear, alarm bells go off. Start looking for ransomware *NOW*.
Slashdot Mirror
> Unless the only things you have hooked to your TV are an antenna and a
> DVD player the chances are it already is connected to the Internet or
> whatever you are using to view videos is connected. There are great reasons to
> connect a TV to the internet, watching all the content you can get from the internet.
I prefer to connect an HDMI cable from my computer, which I know is updated/firewalled properly. BTW, a 30-foot HDMI cable is only 30 dollars Canadian at Home Depot http://www.primecables.com/p-3...
> A smart dishwasher might be sending sensor information to the manufacturer where
> early signs of failure can be identified and you alerted prior to the dishwasher failing.
Beyond stupid. Howsabout a "trouble light" like in your car? Again, it's absolutely unnecessary for packets to traverse the internet for that to happen.
>A microwave oven might have a voice interactive control
> system and the voice recognition is done in the cloud.
Beyond beyond stupid.
> Your dryer might communicate with the power company who gives you a discounted
> rate if they are allowed to shut it off for short intervals to minimize peak power draw.
Or like, you know, do your laundry, etc, on weekends or after 7:00 PM weekdays to take advantage of "Time-of-Use Pricing" http://www.ontario-hydro.com/c...
> Add a tiny bit of smarts like changing the setpoints based on the time of day and day of
> the week and you can save thousands of dollars a year in areas of the country where
> time of day electric rates make off peak electricity 1/4th the cost of on peak electricity.
*A PROGRAMMABLE DIGITAL THERMOSTAT DOES NOT NEED TO BE INTERNET CONNECTED*
> Even smarter thermostats let me tells my thermostat remotely at a vacation home that
> I'm coming for the weekend and to please switch from away mode to present mode.
If you can connect over the internet, so can the bad guys. If you want to risk a major security breach at your place for the convenience of not having to wait 2 hours for the temperature to get comfortable, your priorities are ass backwards.
> It's not ideal, but the most potent response isn't damage control ("only fucking shitlords say SJW")
> or arm-waving, loudly announced corrections ("ACTUALLY, hacker means...") it is to relabel.
> Premature relabeling is futile and will probably make society miscategorize your subgroups further
> (eg the tumblrs) but if your entire group is clearly stuck under old stereotypes it's probably best to
> pack up and leave behind an empty shell for continued scapegoating, despite being uninhabited.
Blacks have "re-labelled" multiple times, but it hasn't helped their unerlying problems. E.g.
* "Colored People" as in NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).
* "Negroes" as in United Negro College Fund and also Negro League Baseball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
* "Afro-Americans"
* "Blacks"
> It's still marked as a beta right now. Hope they push hard and get
> into general availability this year. It's useful. Running unmodified
> console mode apps from the Ubuntu user space is a useful thing.
Have a look at Cygwin. http://cygwin.com/ It's a free linux environment running under Windows. It's published by Redhat, who know a thing or two about linux. And not just console apps, it's got X and the associated graphical appslications.
> Why are we limiting ourselves to just skin colors and ethnic background. Are other
> species really being represented in high tech? I mean why are we not hiring Chimpanzees.
> Studies have actually shown the Chimp mind actually has better problem solving
> abilities than the Human brain. Sure they are 7 times as strong as we are and
> can easily rip a human into shreds. That's not the point: it's all about the diversity.
I'm glad you asked. Consider "Primate Programming Inc". http://www.newtechusa.com/PPI/...
> One of the flaws in Microsoft's strategy is that if you're going to force business
> to retrain all there computer users every couple years because the user
> interface in the latest incarnation of Windows is so different from the
> previous version... then it's really a lot cheaper to switch to Linux and
> only have to retrain your users once!
+10
Before I retired, it seemed that every few years, with every new version of Windows, you had to learn Windows all over again. Indeed, my employer had training sessions for the "new and improved" version. And don't get me started on how MS-Access ODBC queries against our Oracle database had to be painfully copy+pasted over to the new version each time MS Office was updated.
This is not about grumpy old farts resisting change. This is about employees trying to do their job, having the rug pulled out from under their feet every couple of years, and competent users being reduced to newbies. At home I use linux. I switched to ICEWM in early 2010, and I'm still using it. I use my computer to do stuff, not to explore "new and improved interfaces" every year or so.
And fer-cryin-out-loud, please stop pushing a stinking smartphone touch-based interface on desktops. One only has to look at how Firefox's market share has cratered since they forced the Atrocious^H^H^H^H^H Australis smartphone-oriented interface onto their desktop product. That's what drove me to Pale Moon.
How long do you expect it to be before Windows 10 will no longer install/run on non-UEFI machines, and refuse to boot if you toggle UEFI off?
> Where I live, more cinemas than not have full bars, prepared food, and comfy, reclining seats.
A lot of people have that too... it's called being at home.
November 2002
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
January 2003
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
> This is huge news - this is first aerial circumnavigation of the globe that hasn't involved fossil fuels.
B U L L S H I T
http://gizmodo.com/flying-a-so...
* There's a 28-person Mission Control Centre in Monaco (60 people to provide round-the-clock coverage)
* It needs a Russian Ilyushin IL-76 strategic airlifter, a four-engine jet originally designed to carry machinery and military supplies into remote parts of the USSR. Yes, a fossil-fuel-burning 4-engine jet.
* The Ilyushin IL-76 carries a ground crew. You see, the Solar Impulse needs people on the runway to grab its wings when it lands. This results in shutting down a regular airport for 20 minutes, and regular passenger flights being delayed for these special snowflakes.
* Oh yeah, the wingspan is so honking big that it won't fit in a regular hangar. And it's rather fragile, so you don't want it sitting out in the open. So the Ilyushin IL-76 also carries around an inflatable hangar.
* The plane *MUST AVOID CLOUDS*. That includes cirrus overcast above it, because then its solar cells don't work.
In short, it's an expensive publicity stunt. And since they needed an Ilyushin IL-76 jet to circumnavigate the globe with them, I repeat... the bit about "fossil fuel free" is absolute bullshit.
https://www.cygwin.com/
> What is it?
>
> Cygwin is:
>
> a large collection of GNU and Open Source tools which provide functionality similar to a Linux distribution on Windows.
>
> a DLL (cygwin1.dll) which provides substantial POSIX API functionality.
No need to accept Microsoft's half-assed implementation. With Cygwin, you get the whole kit+kaboodle. bash and various other shells. X Window client and server, Firefox, mutt, sendmail, whatever. Even gcc, so you can build from source. And it's free. If the PHBs at work insist, you can buy support from Redhat, who publishes it.
THEN...
"Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod.
And never put anything in an e-mail."
NOW...
"Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod.
And never put anything in an e-mail, or on your smartphone."
This was about the Bill Clinton / Monica Lewinsky scandal...
http://www.spectacle.org/398/h...
The scandal was two-sided...
* Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky (did she inhale?)
* Newsweek spiked a well-researched story about Clinton/Lewinsky
Hillary is quoted as saying...
> As exciting as these new developments are.... there are a number of serious
> issues without any kind of editing function or gate-keeping function. What does it mean
> to have the right to defend your reputation, or to respond to what someone says?
From the other side of the political spectrum...
> During a 2012 speech to online activists and citizen journalists, former
> Alaska Governor Sarah Palin reminded them that "the new media rose up
> precisely because the old media failed to tell the truth." And she also
> discussed how much Drudge, who was fast becoming a de facto assignment
> editor, upset the legacy press that ridiculed him and tried to diminish his
> influence even though they were obsessively refreshing his home page.
>
> "That very first new media breakthrough was about 15 years ago when this
> lowly little store clerk in a lowly little apartment equipped with his computer
> and a modem broke one of the biggest stories of the decade. His name was
> Matt Drudge and the rest is history," Palin said in 2012. "And in hindsight, we
> see that the story he broke was more than just a president having an affair.
> To me it was much, much more than that. It was about a major
> old media publication that had spiked the story eleven times."
>
> She reminded today's citizen journalists that the mainstream press did not
> spike the Lewinsky story to "check their facts" but "because as charter
> members of that Democrat Media Complex they were protecting their guy."
I'm old enough to remember the JFK "Camelot era". Back then the public didn't know, but Kennedy was screwing everything in a skirt. Bill Clinton was a choir boy in comparison. But the MSM suppressed the story, and JFK was the "all-American boy".
The American lib-left love the MSM, because they control most of it, with the notable exception of Fox. Back in the JFK era, a president could do all sorts of wrongs, and get it hushed up, because the elite controlled the MSM. Today, not so much. Give me a wide-open internet, with different people pushing their different interpretations. I'll sort it out for myself. No thanks, I don't want Hillary editing/gatekeeping the news.
Yeah, out in the boonies, it works. But wait a few years, until you take a bus with a bunch of kids with iToys. You know how difficult it is to get a clear WiFi channel in a crowded environment? Well, the same thing will happen with Bluetooth. Your device will be fighting it out with a whole bunch of other devices over limited radio spectrum. The resulting fiasco is completely predictable.
This may sound like tinfoil-hat territory, but consider the following possibility. Software is allowed to cross borders... if a $100,000 annual licence fee is paid for "inspection". The big outfits like Microsoft and the big anti-virus companies like Symantec/Norton would have no problems finding $100,000 between the cushions of their sofas. It's loose change for them. But consider iptables, pfsense, tripwire, openssl, openssh etc, etc.
This would be impossible for a few volunteers to do for their pet projects. Patches are submitted by developers from all over the planet... export. Mailing list archives are accessable from all over the planet.. export. Github and Sourceforge are accessable from all over the planet...export. A strict interpretation could shut down any open source effort that peripherally touches security. A *REALLY* strict interpretation could include any security fixes to Firefox or Pale Mooon or any other Open Source program.
* People were fed up with carrier-crap on their phones
* People were fed up with Google-crap on their phones
* CyanogenMod offered a crap-free phone OS
The "Cyanogen Inc" outfit tried to cash on the popularity of CyanogenMod. But they turned around, sold out, and baked their own crap into the OS. https://techcrunch.com/2016/01... Yes, MS Cortana. If I wanted a smartphone run by MS, I'd buy an MS smartphone already. This was a major betrayal of why people use CyanogenMod. And "Cyanogen Inc" is paying the price.
GM can shut down any Onstar-equipped vehicle anywhere. Currently, it's being heralded as a good thing http://www.autobytel.com/auto-...
But, as Aldredge Ames and Jonathon Pollard proved, there will always be turncoats willing to sell extremely sensitive info. So you're Al Qaeda or ISIS, with connections to Saudi oil money. Or China or Russia or whoever. You need to buy, or blackmail, the info on how it's done. Here's a doomsday scenario...
The date is a December or January in the next few years. The forecast calls for major snowstorm in the US Northeast, followed by a brutal cold front. 6-to-10 hours before the storm is due to hit, the bad guys throw the switch in the middle of afternoon rush hour. The roads are clogged with stalled cars. There are so many stalled cars, that any "immune" vehicles wouldn't be able to get anywhere anyways. The smart drivers get out and try to find shelter in stores/hotels/wherever. The slower thinkers freeze to death in their cars.
Because the roads are clogged with dead cars, and the US is heavily into JIT (Just-In-Time) supply chains, grocery stores, supermarkets, convenience stores, etc, are soon running out of goods. Minor issues in the power grid go unfixed, because utility workers can't get from home to the dispatch site to the problem area. More and more of the US Northeast loses electricity, and people start freezing and starving to death. The president declares martial law, but thousands, if not millions, of people die in the ensuing chaos before order is restored.
Similar scenarios apply to anything that can be shut down "from the cloud". Imagine if Microsoft's authentication systems suddenly decided that your copy of Windows, and everybody else's, was bogus. The US shuts down. Taking over Nest thermostats durning a cold spell or a heat wave could also cause many thousands of casualties, and major chaos. It's eff-ing stupid to allow any one authority that much power, because they *WILL* get hacked, and the power *WILL* be used for evil. It's only a matter of time.
Howsabout forking out $60 K to Amercicans, rather than to foreigners?
> They even decided to break compatibility
> with regular Firefox addons... all for you!
Correction... Mozilla broke compatibility with regular Firefox addons, i.e. XUL in order to switch to the same model used by Chrome https://blog.mozilla.org/addon... If I wanted effing Chrome, I'd use effing Chrome already. Firefox's problem is that it's a Chrome wannabee.
Today's situation... ATT has to pay through the nose to Cisco/Juniper etal for network switches, and beg and plead for the specs ATT wants.
ATT's goal... ATT gets to slap the code with the specs they want, into a glorified Raspberry Pi or Nvidia GPU, maybe as firmware. And Cisco/Juniper/etal stocks are going to collapse. ATT is not in the network switch/router business. But it is a major capital cost for them. If they can roll-their-own, or get Foxconn to build to their specs, ATT stands to save a bundle of money. Imagine you're a taxi company. You're not in the car manufacturing business. But if you could get Foxconn to custom-build taxis for you at a fraction of the cost of what Ford or GM charges, you'd jump on the deal right away.
Are you proud of being a "citizen" and do you "brown bag" your lunch to avoid unhealthy fast-food joints? According to the City of Seattle, you're racist. http://dailycaller.com/2013/08...
And if your "brown bag lunch" contains a peanut-butter-sandwich, you're potentially in trouble in Portland. http://www.dailykos.com/story/... So yeah, I agree with parent post. If I wwere a white guy in the vicinity of a minority employee, I'd STFU and keep ineteraction to a minimum to minimize my risk of being hauled before some "Civil Rights Tribunal" for an off-the-cuff remark.
See http://thenextweb.com/facebook... Facebook is the ultimate "cloud service", and it too can delete your account and data... just because.
tldr; backup all your Facebook friends' (OK, maybe just the real friends) contact info offline. Ditto for calendars. Beware of syncing any device with facebook.
> Editorâ(TM)s note: This is a guest post by Chris Leydon, a freelance videographer
> and former startup founder. He organises the Tomorrow's Web series of
> meetups and documents London's tech community with his video production
> company Keyone Productions.
The "reason" he got for his Facebook account being disabled was...
> Upon investigation, we have determined that you are ineligible to use Facebook.
> Unfortunately, for safety and security reasons, we cannot provide additional
> information as to why your account was disabled. This decision is final.
He got onto Twiiter and actually managed to get the attention of a live person at Facebook UK, not some script-reader in Mumbai...
> I got a reply within an hour, saying that my query was being looked into,
> but no guarantees on finding out why my account has been disabled or
> reinstating it. The following day I received a further reply saying that
> unfortunately, due to a shared personal connection, he was unable to
> help or assist me in my situation because of a "user protection policy".
The consequences...
> Earlier on that day there had been an update to the Facebook page for the event
> I was attending, a change of location. Instinctively I logged into Facebook and
> saw that "Your account has been disabled message" again. I didn't know
> where I was supposed to go and I couldn't check Facebook to find out either.
> No worries, I have the event stored in a calendar on my Windows Phone.
> I flicked open to my calendar and looked for the appointment and it wasn't
> there. The calendar was syncing with Facebook and when my account
> became disabled, for security reasons, all of my Facebook events were
> removed from my calendar. Shit.
> Not a problem, I'll phone Russell, he was organising the event so could tell
> me where to go. I searched for Russell's number in my contacts andâ¦
> no results, he'd vanished. James? He was there as an email address and a
> Twitter handle but no phone number. Sean? Same again. My phone's contacts
> had been syncing with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but not actually
> saving any data to the phone or Exchange. All of the numbers were being
> pulled in from Facebook and without a Facebook account, I didn't have
> any Facebook friends and no numbers to pull in. Fuck.
> Luckily my text messages were still safe, I wasn't completely lost. I found
> an old text thread with Russell, phoned him and added the number as a
> new contact to my phone. I was saved for the evening and it turned out
> not to be quite the disaster I feared, but it started to dawn on me just how
> much Iâ(TM)d grown to rely on one platform.
1) Share out the Windows drive to a BSD/Linux/Mac server, or allow the backup server to ssh or rsync into the Windows machine. Do *NOT* give the Windows machine write access to the backup server. If it's infected, it's not trustable. It might overwrite previous good good backups.
2) Use a *VERSIONING* backup system, so that you don't over-write January's good backup with February's encrypted backup.
3) Put in a few innocent-looking "canary" files that never change. If they do change or disappear, alarm bells go off. Start looking for ransomware *NOW*.
Alert: if you don't select within 10 seconds, we'll install Windows 10 on your PC... oh wait.
Spread the new meme. Maybe this will affect the idiots in HR who refuse to hire job applicants without facebook accounts.