BTW, my iPhone friends say that there is a thriving jail break community on the iPhone and supposedly you can do things on a jail broken phone that can't be done on a locked iPhone. One being installing GPL licensed software as binaries from a third party software provider. I remember seeing him use his jail broken phone as a WiFi hotspot before it was sanctioned on both iOS and Android.
Honestly you could Google the iPhone jail break community and know about as much as I do, since I don't know much myself.
There's a HUGE difference between the iPhone "jailbreak community" and the Android custom ROM community. Yes I assumed you knew the Android option existed but if you think jailbreaking an iPhone and loading custom apps is any comparison then I guess we're not speaking the same language.
I'm sure someone has managed to get some open source OS running on the iPhone but it's nowhere near the community or user base of CM and other custom ROMs. And I know that CM running on my Nexus S (or even stock Nexus S ROM for that matter) isn't running CarrierIQ because all of the relevant user-land apps are open source.
I'd say yes. Only because the iPhone is the most scrutinized (and vilified) device on the web and it hasn't been discovered so far. Also if you RTFA you'd see that the author reported that it's off by default.
Yes I did RTFA and it's peppered with words like "may only be active when the iPhone is in diagnostic mode" and "does not appear to actually send any information" and "the local logs on iOS seem to store much less information". So no the author isn't sure of anything either since he's just getting started and the fact that this was just discovered on iPhone and the scope of what it does is just now coming to light (custom Android ROM devs first discovered CIQ about a year ago) means you can't say with any certainty that it's not doing anything nefarious.
Option 3 wasn't really that appealing of an option. I had the opportunity to by a Google phone when I upgraded. Google dropped the ball and couldn't decide if they would really support it. I really don't know if I could depend on Google to support their current Nexus phone for long. My reasoning being that if I had to pay full unsubsidized price for a phone then the manufacturer could at least humor me and pretend that they would support the phone.
You do raise good points about Google's less-than-ideal support so I can't really argue with that statement except to say again it's a matter of priorities. I bought an unsubsidized Nexus S with over a year left on my Epic 4G contract and a big part of that decision was the discovery of Carrier IQ by the Epic custom ROM devs. I decided then and there I'd never buy any device that wasn't a pure "Google Experience" device. I'm not faulting anyone for having different priorities than I do, but I'm really glad that Google has given me that choice by the way of a first class open source mobile operating system. So yes the "android is open mantra" is a pretty big deal to myself and many others, it's not just lip service.
I don't have an iPhone but if I did I could easily say I can do [insert special neat trick] with my iPhone after jail breaking it. There really isn't much of a real difference for people with the initiative. Especially if you depend on other people to do the real work for you.
Um, please define "special neat trick". If you think there "isn't much of a real difference for people with the initiative" then you obviously haven't participated in the Android custom ROM community. iPhone has nothing like it, and the reason for that is that Android is open-source.
Is it a perfect, fully open community driven hacker's utopia? No, but I blame the carriers for that much more than Google. Sure they keep their crown jewels (Gmail, Maps etc.) closed and proprietary but they've certainly raised the bar for openness on mass-market consumer devices and they deserve credit for that.
Now take a deep breath and rationally think this through. Which is easier (for anyone)?
1. Turning off the settings using the menus within the iPhone, or
2. Downloading a rom image from CynamodGen, rooting your Android phone, and reinstalling Google binaries and reseting all your user settings.
Can you tell me with any certainty that Option 1 absolutely prevents any such data from being sent to the carriers or CarrierIQ?
And you forgot Option 3, which is to vote with your wallet and buy a Nexus device, which doesn't have Carrier IQ, which Google releases the source code for (including all binary drivers where source isn't available) as soon as, or (with 4.0) before the device launches, and is the most open, hacker friendly mass-market consumer mobile device in the US today.
Why does someone--in this case "nashv"--care what product I use ("Ok , ok, I couldn't resist showing my distaste for those infernal locked down devices.")? Why does he care what type of cord a product he doesn't like uses? It's just mere human tribalism and partisanship. It's an "if you're not with me, you're against me" mentality. Beyond my that, just how unbelievably minor and petty, that so many people seem to need to come online and bash somebody's choice of cell phone or music device.
Because as you already described, if enough people choose to use a closed, proprietary product it can become a de facto standard and that does affect all of us. When 90-something percent of web surfers used IE6, I still had a choice to use any browser I wanted, but because IE6 was the de facto standard, it made it pretty unusable.
And now we're seeing the exact same thing: the iDock is becoming a de facto standard and those of us who don't want to use Apple are being relegated to second-class status. So that's why we care what type of device others use. Sounds like you're pretty set in your choice but I have actually swayed people from using Apple products based on these arguments so I'll keep right on making them.
Remember, Dalvik bytecode is not Java bytecode. Android only uses the Java language, not its virtual machine, which is why Oracle mistakenly believes they can sue Google over its use. Changing the source language removes the perceived violation without breaking existing software.
Mistakenly? I'm pretty sure they *are* suing Google over its use.
No. Most likely Samsung knows exactly what they're dealing with, decided it would be more expensive to fight in court and they'd probably lose anyway, so they made a deal.
How can you say that when you have no clue what the terms of the deal were? Maybe the monetary aspect is negligible and it's a cross-license deal that keeps Samsung from also suing Microsoft as they're doing with Apple. Samsung's patent portfolio is also very formidable. Maybe MS is more interested in the PR victory this represents as a boost to WinMo at Android's expense.
With this in mind, one thing that would be nice to have are offline apps. This way, a glitch in Internet connectivity would not mean a corrupted term paper.
I just have one concern though -- the fact that everything you do is stored in the cloud.
If you want offline apps and data that isn't stored in the cloud, you're sorta missing the point of ChromeOS. You should probably stick with traditional laptops or netbooks.
I think it was also modded troll because it is a fallacy.
You don't train a computer, you program it to do extremely specific commands. It is not *learning* anything. Even AI programs where you supposedly "train" the computer to do what you want is still not quite accurate in my eyes.
According to the dictionary I just looked up, intelligence is "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills."
But your fallacy is that you presume intelligence is the only factor in trainability. If I "trained" two people how to jump off a cliff ("you need to get a really good running start, like this..."), and one of them did it but the other refused, is the one who jumped more intelligent?
Maybe cats can't be trained because they don't find it in their best interest. (And I say this as a dog lover who can't stand cats.)
Some distros may be better than Windows, but not Ubuntu. It's a bloated buggy hog of a thing that is overkill on netbooks, and Windows will beat it everytime.
Nice way to take your single anecdotal data point and extrapolate it to the entire universe. I've had the opposite experience. Go figure.
Have you looked into the netbooks from System76 or ZaReason? Not only do they test all the hardware with stock Ubuntu (so things like power management and multitouch work correctly), but you can also rest easy knowing that your money went to supporting Linux instead of the MS Tax.
With this, Mac OS X users get all their OS updates automatically from one place. Too bad Microsoft & the various BSD & Linux vendors are not able to do this too.
Wow. Just... wow. You have obviously never actually used a Linux distro, or at least not in the last ten years. Modern Linux distros have package-management utilities that run circles around anything on Mac or Windows. The best part is that they allow third-party sites to plug in to them with their own repositories so that *all* software updates are performed by a single program, as opposed to other OSes where every damn program checks for updates on its own.
Mac has a LOT of catching up to do before their package management is as nice as that of Ubuntu et al. Granted, it's better than the one on Windows, but that's not saying much.
It seems if you manually migrate to their DNSSEC servers, Domain Helper goes away, as according to the FAQs the two are incompatible.
Wait, you mean to say that DNSSEC prevents man-in-the-middle servers from intercepting and modifying the traffic? Sounds like a pretty big flaw in this new "standard", they obviously weren't thinking of long-term monetization opportunities...
But they're re-encoding from one lossy format to another. Of course the second will look worse, it can't possibly look better. I don't know why they didn't take a lossless format and encode to both formats; maybe then they'd be accused of cherry-picking.
Come on... you really expect us to believe that if a single company is able to tightly control the means by which most people access the internet for an extended period of time, that innovation on the intenet in general will suffer?
I doubt we'll get a single response from a person on the cutting edge of cryptanalysis who can give you a meaningful answer on the relative strength of Diffe-Hellman vs AES, which is what your question comes down to. Realistically, it makes no difference. Both mechanisms are highly secure, cutting edge cryptographic systems. I doubt that either have been broken by anyone.
That's a good point, but if you do decide to stay logged in after you leave, it's probably best to be doubly sure and turn off your monitor.
Ideally, you would to verify that fingerprint with a version you get through alternate, presumably secure, means. E.g. an over-the-phone conversation with an administrator
So what if this administrator you're having such a secure conversation with has someone holding a gun to his head! Guess you're not so secure now, huh?
Pah! I saw Tom Baker Dr. Who episode years ago, where he reprograms a security camera to make it look like he's in the hallway, when really the Doctor is about to...
I knew Oceans 11 with George Clooney had to get that idea from someplace!
Dr. Who? Ocean's 11?! Don't you whippersnappers know that the idea originally came from Motley Crue?
I know I'm an old fashioned luddite (I code with nedit, gcc and Makefiles), but does anyone use MonoDevelop?
Why do you think it's under such active development? Open source projects that no one uses tend to die on the vine.
Personally, I am very impressed with the ASP.NET MVC framework and plan to write several new websites using it and deploy them on Linux boxes running Apache and mod_mono. I'm still using VS 2008 (running inside VirtualBox) at the moment but now that MonoDevelop is becoming more full-featured I hope to switch over completely soon.
Not just against Microsoft, this guy just seems to be full of piss and vinegar in general. Every entry in his blog is a rant against something, whether it's Microsoft, the world economy, the Western Hemisphere, or those stealthy, mysterious corporate hacker ninjas who spend every waking hour trying to take down his ironclad website due to the obvious danger he poses to The Man.
Even the software's FAQ takes cheap shots at the objects of his vast paranoia. Stay far, far away from anyone with that big a chip on their shoulder.
This is the warning I got when trying to activate my Sprint phone for this feature: https://www.google.com/voice/voice/sprint
They say Sprint will drop the charge in "mid-November 2009". So, um, real soon now.
There are indeed a lack of external programs to lock down the desktop. That's because that kind of thing is built into Linux.
Haha... this reminds me of a coworker in our security department who was arguing to me that Internet Explorer is more secure than Firefox, because IE "works with all of our malware scanners, attack detection proxies, javascript lockdown tools etc." In other words, IE has spawned an entire cottage industry of add-on tools to try to make it secure, whereas those third party tools aren't available for Firefox, so it "can't be secured" as well.
WOW! I used Red Hat Network back when they had a free option (and before Fedora or CentOS existed). Great to see something like that exists now (again), I had no idea. This will make me and my CentOS boxen very happy!
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There's a HUGE difference between the iPhone "jailbreak community" and the Android custom ROM community. Yes I assumed you knew the Android option existed but if you think jailbreaking an iPhone and loading custom apps is any comparison then I guess we're not speaking the same language.
I'm sure someone has managed to get some open source OS running on the iPhone but it's nowhere near the community or user base of CM and other custom ROMs. And I know that CM running on my Nexus S (or even stock Nexus S ROM for that matter) isn't running CarrierIQ because all of the relevant user-land apps are open source.
Yes I did RTFA and it's peppered with words like "may only be active when the iPhone is in diagnostic mode" and "does not appear to actually send any information" and "the local logs on iOS seem to store much less information". So no the author isn't sure of anything either since he's just getting started and the fact that this was just discovered on iPhone and the scope of what it does is just now coming to light (custom Android ROM devs first discovered CIQ about a year ago) means you can't say with any certainty that it's not doing anything nefarious.
You do raise good points about Google's less-than-ideal support so I can't really argue with that statement except to say again it's a matter of priorities. I bought an unsubsidized Nexus S with over a year left on my Epic 4G contract and a big part of that decision was the discovery of Carrier IQ by the Epic custom ROM devs. I decided then and there I'd never buy any device that wasn't a pure "Google Experience" device. I'm not faulting anyone for having different priorities than I do, but I'm really glad that Google has given me that choice by the way of a first class open source mobile operating system. So yes the "android is open mantra" is a pretty big deal to myself and many others, it's not just lip service.
Um, please define "special neat trick". If you think there "isn't much of a real difference for people with the initiative" then you obviously haven't participated in the Android custom ROM community. iPhone has nothing like it, and the reason for that is that Android is open-source.
Is it a perfect, fully open community driven hacker's utopia? No, but I blame the carriers for that much more than Google. Sure they keep their crown jewels (Gmail, Maps etc.) closed and proprietary but they've certainly raised the bar for openness on mass-market consumer devices and they deserve credit for that.
Can you tell me with any certainty that Option 1 absolutely prevents any such data from being sent to the carriers or CarrierIQ?
And you forgot Option 3, which is to vote with your wallet and buy a Nexus device, which doesn't have Carrier IQ, which Google releases the source code for (including all binary drivers where source isn't available) as soon as, or (with 4.0) before the device launches, and is the most open, hacker friendly mass-market consumer mobile device in the US today.
Why does someone--in this case "nashv"--care what product I use ("Ok , ok, I couldn't resist showing my distaste for those infernal locked down devices.")? Why does he care what type of cord a product he doesn't like uses? It's just mere human tribalism and partisanship. It's an "if you're not with me, you're against me" mentality. Beyond my that, just how unbelievably minor and petty, that so many people seem to need to come online and bash somebody's choice of cell phone or music device.
Because as you already described, if enough people choose to use a closed, proprietary product it can become a de facto standard and that does affect all of us. When 90-something percent of web surfers used IE6, I still had a choice to use any browser I wanted, but because IE6 was the de facto standard, it made it pretty unusable.
And now we're seeing the exact same thing: the iDock is becoming a de facto standard and those of us who don't want to use Apple are being relegated to second-class status. So that's why we care what type of device others use. Sounds like you're pretty set in your choice but I have actually swayed people from using Apple products based on these arguments so I'll keep right on making them.
Remember, Dalvik bytecode is not Java bytecode. Android only uses the Java language, not its virtual machine, which is why Oracle mistakenly believes they can sue Google over its use. Changing the source language removes the perceived violation without breaking existing software.
Mistakenly? I'm pretty sure they *are* suing Google over its use.
No. Most likely Samsung knows exactly what they're dealing with, decided it would be more expensive to fight in court and they'd probably lose anyway, so they made a deal.
How can you say that when you have no clue what the terms of the deal were? Maybe the monetary aspect is negligible and it's a cross-license deal that keeps Samsung from also suing Microsoft as they're doing with Apple. Samsung's patent portfolio is also very formidable. Maybe MS is more interested in the PR victory this represents as a boost to WinMo at Android's expense.
If that's not ironic, I don't know what it is.
10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.
*whoosh*
*double whoosh*
With this in mind, one thing that would be nice to have are offline apps. This way, a glitch in Internet connectivity would not mean a corrupted term paper.
I just have one concern though -- the fact that everything you do is stored in the cloud.
If you want offline apps and data that isn't stored in the cloud, you're sorta missing the point of ChromeOS. You should probably stick with traditional laptops or netbooks.
I think it was also modded troll because it is a fallacy. You don't train a computer, you program it to do extremely specific commands. It is not *learning* anything. Even AI programs where you supposedly "train" the computer to do what you want is still not quite accurate in my eyes. According to the dictionary I just looked up, intelligence is "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills."
But your fallacy is that you presume intelligence is the only factor in trainability. If I "trained" two people how to jump off a cliff ("you need to get a really good running start, like this..."), and one of them did it but the other refused, is the one who jumped more intelligent?
Maybe cats can't be trained because they don't find it in their best interest. (And I say this as a dog lover who can't stand cats.)
Some distros may be better than Windows, but not Ubuntu. It's a bloated buggy hog of a thing that is overkill on netbooks, and Windows will beat it everytime.
Nice way to take your single anecdotal data point and extrapolate it to the entire universe. I've had the opposite experience. Go figure.
Have you looked into the netbooks from System76 or ZaReason? Not only do they test all the hardware with stock Ubuntu (so things like power management and multitouch work correctly), but you can also rest easy knowing that your money went to supporting Linux instead of the MS Tax.
With this, Mac OS X users get all their OS updates automatically from one place. Too bad Microsoft & the various BSD & Linux vendors are not able to do this too.
Wow. Just... wow. You have obviously never actually used a Linux distro, or at least not in the last ten years. Modern Linux distros have package-management utilities that run circles around anything on Mac or Windows. The best part is that they allow third-party sites to plug in to them with their own repositories so that *all* software updates are performed by a single program, as opposed to other OSes where every damn program checks for updates on its own.
Mac has a LOT of catching up to do before their package management is as nice as that of Ubuntu et al. Granted, it's better than the one on Windows, but that's not saying much.
It seems if you manually migrate to their DNSSEC servers, Domain Helper goes away, as according to the FAQs the two are incompatible.
Wait, you mean to say that DNSSEC prevents man-in-the-middle servers from intercepting and modifying the traffic? Sounds like a pretty big flaw in this new "standard", they obviously weren't thinking of long-term monetization opportunities...
Not Sauron, but the Witch-king of Angmar, who is the leader of the Nazgul. Interesting link though, thanks.
But they're re-encoding from one lossy format to another. Of course the second will look worse, it can't possibly look better. I don't know why they didn't take a lossless format and encode to both formats; maybe then they'd be accused of cherry-picking.
Come on... you really expect us to believe that if a single company is able to tightly control the means by which most people access the internet for an extended period of time, that innovation on the intenet in general will suffer?
Psssshhh... like that could ever happen.
I doubt we'll get a single response from a person on the cutting edge of cryptanalysis who can give you a meaningful answer on the relative strength of Diffe-Hellman vs AES, which is what your question comes down to. Realistically, it makes no difference. Both mechanisms are highly secure, cutting edge cryptographic systems. I doubt that either have been broken by anyone.
That's a good point, but if you do decide to stay logged in after you leave, it's probably best to be doubly sure and turn off your monitor.
Ideally, you would to verify that fingerprint with a version you get through alternate, presumably secure, means. E.g. an over-the-phone conversation with an administrator
So what if this administrator you're having such a secure conversation with has someone holding a gun to his head! Guess you're not so secure now, huh?
Pah! I saw Tom Baker Dr. Who episode years ago, where he reprograms a security camera to make it look like he's in the hallway, when really the Doctor is about to...
I knew Oceans 11 with George Clooney had to get that idea from someplace!
Dr. Who? Ocean's 11?! Don't you whippersnappers know that the idea originally came from Motley Crue?
I know I'm an old fashioned luddite (I code with nedit, gcc and Makefiles), but does anyone use MonoDevelop?
Why do you think it's under such active development? Open source projects that no one uses tend to die on the vine.
Personally, I am very impressed with the ASP.NET MVC framework and plan to write several new websites using it and deploy them on Linux boxes running Apache and mod_mono. I'm still using VS 2008 (running inside VirtualBox) at the moment but now that MonoDevelop is becoming more full-featured I hope to switch over completely soon.
Not just against Microsoft, this guy just seems to be full of piss and vinegar in general. Every entry in his blog is a rant against something, whether it's Microsoft, the world economy, the Western Hemisphere, or those stealthy, mysterious corporate hacker ninjas who spend every waking hour trying to take down his ironclad website due to the obvious danger he poses to The Man.
Even the software's FAQ takes cheap shots at the objects of his vast paranoia. Stay far, far away from anyone with that big a chip on their shoulder.
This is the warning I got when trying to activate my Sprint phone for this feature: https://www.google.com/voice/voice/sprint They say Sprint will drop the charge in "mid-November 2009". So, um, real soon now.
There are indeed a lack of external programs to lock down the desktop. That's because that kind of thing is built into Linux.
Haha... this reminds me of a coworker in our security department who was arguing to me that Internet Explorer is more secure than Firefox, because IE "works with all of our malware scanners, attack detection proxies, javascript lockdown tools etc." In other words, IE has spawned an entire cottage industry of add-on tools to try to make it secure, whereas those third party tools aren't available for Firefox, so it "can't be secured" as well.
WOW! I used Red Hat Network back when they had a free option (and before Fedora or CentOS existed). Great to see something like that exists now (again), I had no idea. This will make me and my CentOS boxen very happy!