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User: ArcCoyote

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Comments · 213

  1. Re:I would be more worried... on Ten Cops Can't Recover Police Chief's Son's iPhone · · Score: 1

    WiFi isn't going to be any more accurate than the radius of your AP's coverage, which could be 100 meters or more.
    GPS can be accurate to 1 meter with a good view of the satellites.

  2. These kind of stories always draw half-cocked comments, spewed (along with flecks of Doritos) from the basements of parent-owned houses.

    You can talk big, but you're not going to stick it to Comcast when you don't even pay the bill.

    The rest of us just get on with our lives, using BitTorrent to grab an episode or two of a show the DVR missed. Occasionally we suck down entire seasons and don't worry too much about it. We leave a wireless "guest network" open and shut down torrents when we hit a 1.0 ratio. We have encryption and auto-updated blocklists.

    We're smart geeks and we know the risks. We know it might piss someone off. Just like keeping up with highway traffic: technically we're speeding, but the chances of getting pulled over are slim to none. If we get caught and our ISP send us a nastygram, we knock it off for a while.

  3. Re:Too Often, Killed His Dog on Antivirus Pioneer John McAfee Arrested In Belize · · Score: 1

    You hear about it because the media knows it's going to get people like you who care about animals (not necessarily PETA types, just people who care) to tune in or give them page views.

    Around the world? Well, killing someone's pets as intimidation is nothing new. Horse head in the bed and all that.

    What about raids, arrests, etc... where no shots are fired and no one gets hurt? Happen every day, they just don't make the news.

  4. Re:dangerous idea on San Francisco Enlists Bus Cameras For Traffic Law Enforcement · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Revenge? For what, a parking ticket?

    If nothing else, I'm more OK with these cameras because there is a human behind them. This isn't an automated system, just an easier way for the bus driver to report offenders (much like that new flag button...)

    The driver could always snap a picture with his phone if the bus didn't have a camera.

  5. Or let the bus drivers handle it. on San Francisco Enlists Bus Cameras For Traffic Law Enforcement · · Score: 3, Informative

    I might be mistaken, but I do believe in Baltimore, bus drivers have the authority to issue citations. I once parked in a bus stop and didn't realize it, I'm pretty sure the ticket was written by the driver.

  6. Re:Both Parties are at fault. on Proposed Law Would Give DHS Power Over Privately Owned IT Infrastructure · · Score: 1

    "Shut down internet sites that oppose your viewpoint, call anyone who disagrees with you a terrorist and lock them away without any rights, and threaten the livelihood of anyone else who may be bold enough to get around your restrictions."

    If that statement was anywhere close to reality, Slashdot would have been gone a long ago. So would Digg and Reddit. Not to mention Prison Planet and all the other truly crackpot sites that exist solely to promote or oppose an extreme point of view. For that matter, Alex Jones would be in GITMO along with many of the submitters and commenters here given their extreme viewpoints and supposed "knowledge of the REAL TRUTH"

    Sorry, but you just seem overdramatic and undermedicated.

  7. Re:Mac Mini with EyeTV on DigiTimes Lends Credence To Apple-Branded TVs For 2012 · · Score: 1

    There is. It's called Windows Media Center. Or TiVo. Or your cable/satellite box.

    Point is there's not a lot of room for innovation in the DVR market. If Apple's TV is somehow different from the Apple TV we have now, it will be via something like Google TV... it will interact with whatever content is coming from your TV provider.

  8. Re:Why so small? on DigiTimes Lends Credence To Apple-Branded TVs For 2012 · · Score: 1

    I disagree about the 60"+ market. If Apple is making a TV, they are smart to focus on the mid-sized sets.

    People who buy big screens care a lot about picture quality and stuff like 120Hz, 3D, etc... more than they do about apps and such. They probably have home theater components and don't really care about an iOS device built into a TV set. To them that kind of functionality belongs in a box, not in the display.

    Not to mention large displays have the whole plasma vs. CCFL LCD vs LED LCD debate ... each has distinct pluses and minuses and Apple isn't going to go there. Apple would pick one type of display, probably LED LCD as it is the most green, and lose at least half the potential market in doing so.

    Apple has the potential to do something really different with TV if they stick to sizes where the consumers aren't going to be too picky about the display part of it.

  9. Re:And the thing that surprises the Chinese on China's Parallel Online Universe · · Score: 2

    Do not confuse lack of interest with censorship. Was your search language English? Google may have simply been excluding results that were in Chinese.

    It could also be China is preventing non-Chinese search engines from indexing Chinese sites with so-called "bad news". Interesting form of censorship, but not something you can blame the search engines for.

  10. Re:Comment Censored on China's Parallel Online Universe · · Score: 1

    This. Mod parent up.

    Corporations can and do abuse the legal system to censor free speech, but it is not strictly censorship as it is not the policy of the government, and if it is a found to be a SLAPP there are severe penalties in a lot of courts.

  11. Re:Set-top boxes on TV Isn't Broken, So Why Fix It? · · Score: 1

    Apple TV already has no reason to support CableCARD - They are already on the a la carte model. You can buy/rent episodes and season passes for current shows from iTunes.

    Try this:
    add up the cost of even just renting every episode of every show you watch now from iTunes.
    Now compare that to your current cable TV package.
    Now imagine your cable company went straight a la carte and allowed you to drop all but the "lifeline" channels (OTA feeds and probably some public-access type stuff), bringing your bill down to $20/mo or so, then you watch everything not on the OTA networks by either paying extra per channel or for on-demand.

    Which of the three is really cheaper? If you follow a handful of shows religiously, you might be better off with OTA or lifeline + iTunes. If you only watch a handful of cable channels, you might save with the a la carte option a lot of people seem to want. But if you record a lot of different stuff so you have a variety of stuff to watch, you're probably better off with a cable package.

    Where I am, the basic HD service doesn't have a whole lot of junk. I hear FIOS is even better. Getting a 4-tuner Ceton greatly increased the value of basic cable, and Comcast doesn't charge me for the CableCARD. Adding an extra TV means buying a used Xbox 360. That's it.

    I personally would like to do package+a la carte. To get a few more channels I want (Science Channel, Nat Geo, BBC America) I need the "preferred" tier, which means I would also be paying for a lot of Encore/Flix-type movie channels that are made worthless by Netflix.

    Hear that Comcast? I don't mind paying for cable, and I WANT to give you more money, but I want to only pay for the "preferred" channels I'll watch.

  12. Re:It's good, and I'd like it for Linux on Apple To Require Sandboxing For Mac App Store Apps · · Score: 1

    The only quibble I see is that you have to do it as root.

    If this kind of disclosure was enforced for Linux, it would be safe to let users install apps that didn't need anything privileged (like write to /usr/share/Music)

    Where the app would live is another question... I'd say under ~/bin and ~/lib

    and why can't we have per-user package management? apt-get should not have to run sudo or setuid to read the system's package DB and read/write the user DB.

    User DB overlays system DB, so if a user tried to install a package that was already system-wide, they couldn't.

    If a user went to install an app that needs to be system-wide, apt-get could sudo launch a helper provided the user is in sudoers.

    User installed apps exist solely in the user's profile and are sandboxed from writing outside of it via something like chroot with a read-only mount of the root filesystem somewhere inside it.

  13. More proof opt-in is the ONLY way to do it right. on Carbonite Privacy Breach Leads To Spam · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you RTFA, you'll quickly realize what Carbonite did was provide a 'do-not-spam' list to, well, a spammer... and then, surprise, surprise, the spammer misues or abuses it.

    The list was Carbonite customers AND people who previously clicked the opt-out link in past Carbonite spam... So strictly speaking, this wasn't a straight list of Carbonite customers. Spam might be annoying, but there is a bigger issue here: If you wanted to phish Carbonite logins, you'd have a pretty good start.

    Scrubbing the list in-house won't happen... Carbonite doesn't have huge lists, the spammers do. And the spammers are not going to give Carbonite their whole list to scrub, those things are money. So Carbonite has to give an opt-out list to the spammers and trust them not to spam it. Sure...

    The article's suggestion of address hashes is kinda bogus, and especially dangerous if the hashed addresses are known to be customers. Assuming a spammer/phisher already has eleventy billion addresses, this is a hash collision attack. All the spammer has to do is hash their list and look for matches. Instant customer list.

  14. Enough with all this pi nonsense... on Pi Computed To 10 Trillion Digits · · Score: 1

    I know all about not reinventing the wheel, but what kind of idiot invented the wheel using a silly number you can never get to the end of? I say we just make it so pi=3. Going around the pi is three times across the pi. Not "3 and a bit," just 3.

    an' I've got this here wheel to show you can do it...

  15. And with Siri... on Apple's Siri As Revolutionary As the Mac? · · Score: 1

    ...a bold new direction in robotics was born - the Genuine People Personality. Without a personality, people would become frustrated with their inability to relate to robots. With a personality, robots could be more than just machines. The could be friends and companions or, as the Marketing Department of the Corporation preferred to describe them in early advertising slogans, ‘your plastic pals that are fun to be with’.

    - DNA

  16. Egg Freckles on Steve Jobs, Before the iPad, On Why Tablets Suck · · Score: 1

    Remember the Newton? Yeah, even Apple's own tablets sucked.

    IfYDGI: http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2008/04/eggfreckles.jpg

  17. Re:The TLAs and Corporate Lackeys on Warrantless Wiretapping Cases At the 9th Circuit · · Score: 2, Funny

    Sorry, your ID must be 1,2,or 6 digits for me to give a fsck what you say. There are approximately 99,899 kooks on ./, and I'm fairly sure where they are clustered.

    IF you have a 7+ digit ID, get off my lawn.

  18. Re:Driving users to the App Store on Download.com Now Wraps Downloads In Bloatware · · Score: 1

    apparently it is supposed to detect iLife/iWork when you sign into the App Store, and add them to your purchase history.

    Other sources say you only get credit if you enter the same Apple ID during the out-of-box setup.

  19. Re:Premium? on Download.com Now Wraps Downloads In Bloatware · · Score: 1

    Those premium options are for the people who put stuff on download.com. In other words, pay CNet more so they don't stick their crap on your product.

    But most "content providers" will probably be happy to let CNet wrap their installer, because it gives them reports on who actually installed the download, what else they have installed from download.com, and who knows what else. I'm surprised CNet isn't charging FOR the wrapper, given the amount of 'demographics' it could weasel out of end users' systems.

  20. Re:Driving users to the App Store on Download.com Now Wraps Downloads In Bloatware · · Score: 1

    Don't be so sure that isn't coming. Apple is planning to do that for music with iTunes Match. Why not apps too? FWIW, if you bought a boxed copy of iLife '11, or it was included on a new Mac, the App Store will let you download it for free.

  21. Re:DRM systems on NAND Flash Can Verify a Device's Identity · · Score: 1

    Not reliable ones. The only DRM/anti-tamper that can't be short-circuited in code is an encryption key. Put the key in a secure chip and make it really, really hard to get to the key from outside the secure hardware. And if you are willing to accept the karma of bricking devices, zeroize the key when tampering is detected.

    Using physical characteristics of flash to generate a key is a bad idea. First, you can't quickly destroy the key to prevent tampering. If the key can be extracted from the hardware, it can be emulated. Second, flash cells wear out and their characteristics are going to change, meaning your key is going to change. Third, you might find supposedly random characteristics are rather deterministic by manufacturer, chip type, and production run, reducing your key space significantly.

  22. Re:Few reasons on The Death of Booting Up · · Score: 1

    All the legacy crap in BIOS has nothing to do with it. Most servers have the BIOS tuned to that particular motherboard anyway, so it doesn't spend time looking for crap that isn't there. That's where option ROMs and embedded stuff on controllers come into play.

    EFI isn't much better. Have you ever seen how long it takes multi-brick SGI stuff to boot? Especially when you need it back up _now_?

  23. I do not want that going off in my pocket. on Jeff Bezos Wants To Put an Airbag In Your iPhone · · Score: 2

    But I do want that going off in a phone thief's trousers!
    Can we get the "iED" option added to Find My iPhone?

    (FYI: airbag cartridges are an "are you fscking kidding me" item for carry-on or checked baggage.)

    CAPTCHA: blister. Yeah, I bet it would.

  24. Re:Teacher friending student is inapprorpiate on Missouri Law Says Students, Teachers Can't Be Facebook Friends · · Score: 2

    Which is why (if you RTFA) you'll see the law does not ban student-teacher relationships on social networks, but ensures they can be supervised.

    A teacher can't personally friend students, but a teacher can create a Facebook group for the class and invite the students, just as long as the school administration and parents are also allowed to join.

  25. Re:DRM on Ubisoft Brings Back Always-Connected DRM For Driver: San Francisco · · Score: 2

    they DO want to do something like a trusted citizen program but you have to opt in.

    If you're in it, you're pre-screened and get on the plane quicker. If you're not in it, nothing changes, you go through the same thing you do now.

    but forget about the TSA... Presumed guilty is the attitude of the credit agencies.

    Try getting a good rate on a car loan when your last one has been paid off for 5 years, you rent your home, and you pay for everything with cash or debit card.

    It doesn't matter if your income shows you can easily afford it... (and the lending bank KNOWS this because you have your checking, savings, and credit card with them!) ... You're more of a risk with no credit than with a bad credit history.