Re:Symbian is good enough for lots of people...
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Why Nokia Is Toast
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Any of the modern smart phones can be used as very simple, easy to use "dumb phones" if you like.
That's a good idea. Let's pay 10x as much as a phone that just makes phone calls, and get significantly lower battery life too.
Also, some of us aren't allowed to have 'smart phones' at work; finding phones without cameras for secure environments is already getting close to impossible.
Only to people who don't understand SI units or the meaning of the word "approximation."
No, to anyone other than SI fanatics. Metric megabytes are hopelessly painful in the IT world where everything is measured in powers of two: saying my laptop has 6 binary gigabytes of RAM is far more useful than saying it has 6.442450944 metric gigabytes.
I love how with some people, everything MS does has to be bad, no matter what. Give users more choice? Booo!!!!
Users don't care whether the video is H.264, they just want to play it. Web sites put up video in a format that users want to play.
If Windows users can play H.264 in their web browser and Linux users can't because it's patented to hell, then this clearly has the intentional or unintentional side-effect of encouraging web sites to use a format which Linux users can't view.
I mean, seriously: why do you think that Microsoft would be releasing 'improvements' to other browsers out of kindness?
With MS's push towards BPOS, private cloud hosting, and applications as a service, why would they put ANY effort into making local storage management easier for the "end user"? There is no profit incentive for them in maintaining extender for WHS.
If the future is 'renting software' in 'the cloud', why would anyone rent Microsoft software?
Microsoft live and die by sales of Windows. If they have to compete on application sales when those applications don't have a lock-in to Windows, they're doomed.
Why is it OK to block innovation and commerce with environmental laws, racial preference laws, licensing laws, union preference laws, unreasonable liability laws, international trade laws, and thousands upon thousands of regulations?
Who said that's OK?
And it's worth noting that those regulations have resulted in a huge amount of business moving out of those highly-regulated nations to places like China which couldn't care less about them.
Of course, without strong ip laws there's no reason to innovate.
LOL.
The 'reason to innovate' is to make money by making better stuff than your competitors.
Or do you really think our ancestors sat around in a cave saying 'you know, I'd really like to invent the wheel, but since I couldn't patent it, what's the point?'
I'm not sure why some people think it's fair that corporations get to cheat on their taxes, when I don't
While I wouldn't condone tax evasion, corporations don't pay taxes, their customers do. Every penny Amazon has to pay out in new taxes will be added to the price that their customers pay for their products.
Obviously Amazon is within their legal rights to seek out favorable tax havens to operate within the United States, but hardball tactics like this make them appear to be quite evil.
To who, exactly? Most of Amazon's actual customers buy from them when it's convenient and cheap, and don't see paying lower prices there as 'quite evil'.
Obviously Amazon will just pass these taxes along to their customers, but at least they'll finally be competing (tax-wise) on even footing as WalMart and other brick-and-mortar stores.
But I thought Walmart was evil? That's what I've been hearing from the anti-business left for about the last decade.
The ultimate effect of this action if Amazon are forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the Texas government is that they will leave Texas for another state which wants them there and a bunch of Texans will lose their jobs. You'd almost think that the left would be opposing actions that would cost jobs for people who probably aren't on high salaries in the first place.
/. has been taking more and more of a swerve to the right as, i'm guessing, its readers age and get bogged down in middle-management.
That's odd, because I was just thinking that/. has been taking more and more of a swerve to the left over the last decade. So much so that I don't bother to read it much anymore.
Either way, the idea that the most important thing the US government could be doing right now is paying people to install new cellphone towers so more people can watch youtube on their phone is ludicrous. It's the same old Keynsian nonsense which has brought the economy to the mess it's currently in.
Considering that poverty generally seems to be defined as having less than X% of the average income, that's easy: just pass a law requiring that everyone is paid the same amount.
Of course the economy will collapse, but at least no-one will 'have poverty' anymore.
Except for the fact that it is more practical in most places. If you are in a windy part of the country, of course wind farms make some sense.
Except 'wind farms' shut down when there's too much wind, or not enough wind, and tend to fall over when there's way, way too much wind. The UK has been building 'wind farms' like crazy over the last couple of decades and has had a number of days in recent years where they were generating no power whatsoever.
If the keys are in the device and visible to software, then anyone with root access can get the keys. Otherwise you need some kind of secure key storage which would require an attacker to dismantle the phone and take the key storage chip apart, or the user has to enter it every time.
Is there really any unbreakable way to encrypt your data?
Uh, yes. It's called a one-time pad.
And just encrypting your list of passwords with a decent master password would take a lot more than six minutes to crack.
But I'm guessing iThing users don't want to be entering a sixteen character random password on a touchscreen 'keyboard' each time they need to log in somewhere.
After the recent AutoRun on Linux scare, will this mean patched XP boxes are more secure than Linux? The mind BOGGLES!
The 'autorun on Linux scare' appears to be primarily due to automatically displaying thumbnails of corrupted files which exploit holes in image and video rendering libraries; so Windows is at least as insecure. Windows was far more insecure when it would also happily load a DLL from the USB drive in order to perform that rendering because '.' was first in the DLL search path.
Plus Ubuntu, at least, now seem to be wrapping the thumbnail generators in Apparmor which makes it far more difficult to exploit.
Um, no, it's a butt-numbingly extended remake of 'Pocahontas: dancing with smurfs'. 3D is about the only thing I can imagine it might have had going for it.
Cardboard characters, nonsensical plot, stupid technology and blatant CGI hardly make what I'd call a good movie. If Cameron had cut out two hours it might have been a watchable movie.
Once you find out that's what's in play, do you not see value in being able to direct the carrier to shut down the tower they're using?
So, uh, call the phone company and say 'please can you shut down the tower they're using'.
Only a retard would shut down the entire country's telephone system and even if you're not that stupid you still have to live with the unintended consequences of shutting down phones in that area; imagine, for example, that someone has managed to hide out and is passing information the police about what the bad guys are doing... well, tough luck now you've cut off their cell phone.
As for shutting down the Internet in America, the entire economy is so heavily reliant on it now that the consequences would be far more devastating than any likely terrorist attack. In fact, if such a 'switch' existed then bin Laden and friends would be working on ways to get the US government to use it for that very reason.
Airplanes (commercial and private) utilize GPS for navigation -- and according to TFA, one such device experienced "Loss of Fix in Open Sky" 5.6 miles from the transmitter.
Lots of systems use GPS for accurate timing. Servers synced to NTP from a GPS receiver, for example.
Ah, of course you can take the password and the salt and then hash them to check whether the password and salt are correct. But then you're still stuck with trying all possible passwords until you find the correct one instead of using tables to speed up your brute force attack.
I agree then, encrypting the salt with the password doesn't provide any real benefit. But you won't be performing a separate attack on the salt and then the password, you'd just decrypt the salt with each possible password, hash it along with the password and see if that password matches the stored hash.
The whole point of salt is to mitigate a dictionary attack. With your approach it would only take one dictionary attack to obtain the salt, and then another one (using the obtained salt) to obtain the password.
How are you going to perform a dictionary attack when the salt is just a random number? For a brute-force attack you need to know that the value you've decrypted is the correct one, and if the value is just a random number you have absolutely no information to tell you whether it's valid.
By comparison, collaborative governance is a consensus system intended to be used on all issues affecting a community, with the implicit understanding that anyone not participating on a particular issue consents to allow others to decide the issue.
So three of my neighbours get together at two o'clock one morning and decide to steal my stuff and rape my dog, and it's all legal because I didn't participate in deciding the issue.
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Any of the modern smart phones can be used as very simple, easy to use "dumb phones" if you like.
That's a good idea. Let's pay 10x as much as a phone that just makes phone calls, and get significantly lower battery life too.
Also, some of us aren't allowed to have 'smart phones' at work; finding phones without cameras for secure environments is already getting close to impossible.
Only to people who don't understand SI units or the meaning of the word "approximation."
No, to anyone other than SI fanatics. Metric megabytes are hopelessly painful in the IT world where everything is measured in powers of two: saying my laptop has 6 binary gigabytes of RAM is far more useful than saying it has 6.442450944 metric gigabytes.
If you can't watch h.264 on your Linux box, you're doing it wrong
I can play H.264. I can't play H.264 in Firefox with HTML5 tags, because Firefox doesn't support it due to patent concerns.
Which part of 'play H.264 in your web browser' is proving so hard for you to understand?
I love how with some people, everything MS does has to be bad, no matter what. Give users more choice? Booo!!!!
Users don't care whether the video is H.264, they just want to play it. Web sites put up video in a format that users want to play.
If Windows users can play H.264 in their web browser and Linux users can't because it's patented to hell, then this clearly has the intentional or unintentional side-effect of encouraging web sites to use a format which Linux users can't view.
I mean, seriously: why do you think that Microsoft would be releasing 'improvements' to other browsers out of kindness?
With MS's push towards BPOS, private cloud hosting, and applications as a service, why would they put ANY effort into making local storage management easier for the "end user"? There is no profit incentive for them in maintaining extender for WHS.
If the future is 'renting software' in 'the cloud', why would anyone rent Microsoft software?
Microsoft live and die by sales of Windows. If they have to compete on application sales when those applications don't have a lock-in to Windows, they're doomed.
Why is it OK to block innovation and commerce with environmental laws, racial preference laws, licensing laws, union preference laws, unreasonable liability laws, international trade laws, and thousands upon thousands of regulations?
Who said that's OK?
And it's worth noting that those regulations have resulted in a huge amount of business moving out of those highly-regulated nations to places like China which couldn't care less about them.
Of course, without strong ip laws there's no reason to innovate.
LOL.
The 'reason to innovate' is to make money by making better stuff than your competitors.
Or do you really think our ancestors sat around in a cave saying 'you know, I'd really like to invent the wheel, but since I couldn't patent it, what's the point?'
I'm not sure why some people think it's fair that corporations get to cheat on their taxes, when I don't
While I wouldn't condone tax evasion, corporations don't pay taxes, their customers do. Every penny Amazon has to pay out in new taxes will be added to the price that their customers pay for their products.
Obviously Amazon is within their legal rights to seek out favorable tax havens to operate within the United States, but hardball tactics like this make them appear to be quite evil.
To who, exactly? Most of Amazon's actual customers buy from them when it's convenient and cheap, and don't see paying lower prices there as 'quite evil'.
Obviously Amazon will just pass these taxes along to their customers, but at least they'll finally be competing (tax-wise) on even footing as WalMart and other brick-and-mortar stores.
But I thought Walmart was evil? That's what I've been hearing from the anti-business left for about the last decade.
The ultimate effect of this action if Amazon are forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the Texas government is that they will leave Texas for another state which wants them there and a bunch of Texans will lose their jobs. You'd almost think that the left would be opposing actions that would cost jobs for people who probably aren't on high salaries in the first place.
Because of this they believe they don't have to pay sales tax, but its obvious they are running the facility and have employees in TX.
So you'd rather they didn't have employees in Texas? I'm sure there are plenty of other states who'd be more than happy to have those jobs there.
/. has been taking more and more of a swerve to the right as, i'm guessing, its readers age and get bogged down in middle-management.
That's odd, because I was just thinking that /. has been taking more and more of a swerve to the left over the last decade. So much so that I don't bother to read it much anymore.
Either way, the idea that the most important thing the US government could be doing right now is paying people to install new cellphone towers so more people can watch youtube on their phone is ludicrous. It's the same old Keynsian nonsense which has brought the economy to the mess it's currently in.
100% of US having no poverty.
Considering that poverty generally seems to be defined as having less than X% of the average income, that's easy: just pass a law requiring that everyone is paid the same amount.
Of course the economy will collapse, but at least no-one will 'have poverty' anymore.
Except for the fact that it is more practical in most places. If you are in a windy part of the country, of course wind farms make some sense.
Except 'wind farms' shut down when there's too much wind, or not enough wind, and tend to fall over when there's way, way too much wind. The UK has been building 'wind farms' like crazy over the last couple of decades and has had a number of days in recent years where they were generating no power whatsoever.
So where are the keys stored?
If the keys are in the device and visible to software, then anyone with root access can get the keys. Otherwise you need some kind of secure key storage which would require an attacker to dismantle the phone and take the key storage chip apart, or the user has to enter it every time.
Is there really any unbreakable way to encrypt your data?
Uh, yes. It's called a one-time pad.
And just encrypting your list of passwords with a decent master password would take a lot more than six minutes to crack.
But I'm guessing iThing users don't want to be entering a sixteen character random password on a touchscreen 'keyboard' each time they need to log in somewhere.
As surprising as it may seem, some people have better things to do than play with a PC to understand how it all works.
If I may use a car analogy, those are the people who get eaten by inbred cannibal rednecks because they don't know how to change a flat tire.
On the mac it is opening a file not launching an unknown piece of software. It may not be to your taste but it's not quite the same thing.
It is when that's a PDF file exploiting the latest hole in Adobe's PDF viewer.
After the recent AutoRun on Linux scare, will this mean patched XP boxes are more secure than Linux? The mind BOGGLES!
The 'autorun on Linux scare' appears to be primarily due to automatically displaying thumbnails of corrupted files which exploit holes in image and video rendering libraries; so Windows is at least as insecure. Windows was far more insecure when it would also happily load a DLL from the USB drive in order to perform that rendering because '.' was first in the DLL search path.
Plus Ubuntu, at least, now seem to be wrapping the thumbnail generators in Apparmor which makes it far more difficult to exploit.
avatar is a good movie, well done.
Um, no, it's a butt-numbingly extended remake of 'Pocahontas: dancing with smurfs'. 3D is about the only thing I can imagine it might have had going for it.
Cardboard characters, nonsensical plot, stupid technology and blatant CGI hardly make what I'd call a good movie. If Cameron had cut out two hours it might have been a watchable movie.
Once you find out that's what's in play, do you not see value in being able to direct the carrier to shut down the tower they're using?
So, uh, call the phone company and say 'please can you shut down the tower they're using'.
Only a retard would shut down the entire country's telephone system and even if you're not that stupid you still have to live with the unintended consequences of shutting down phones in that area; imagine, for example, that someone has managed to hide out and is passing information the police about what the bad guys are doing... well, tough luck now you've cut off their cell phone.
As for shutting down the Internet in America, the entire economy is so heavily reliant on it now that the consequences would be far more devastating than any likely terrorist attack. In fact, if such a 'switch' existed then bin Laden and friends would be working on ways to get the US government to use it for that very reason.
Airplanes (commercial and private) utilize GPS for navigation -- and according to TFA, one such device experienced "Loss of Fix in Open Sky" 5.6 miles from the transmitter.
Lots of systems use GPS for accurate timing. Servers synced to NTP from a GPS receiver, for example.
Ah, of course you can take the password and the salt and then hash them to check whether the password and salt are correct. But then you're still stuck with trying all possible passwords until you find the correct one instead of using tables to speed up your brute force attack.
I agree then, encrypting the salt with the password doesn't provide any real benefit. But you won't be performing a separate attack on the salt and then the password, you'd just decrypt the salt with each possible password, hash it along with the password and see if that password matches the stored hash.
The whole point of salt is to mitigate a dictionary attack. With your approach it would only take one dictionary attack to obtain the salt, and then another one (using the obtained salt) to obtain the password.
How are you going to perform a dictionary attack when the salt is just a random number? For a brute-force attack you need to know that the value you've decrypted is the correct one, and if the value is just a random number you have absolutely no information to tell you whether it's valid.
Or ... get this, they can come up with 2 alternate solutions that is more appropriate to a larger number of people!
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the 50+1% just say 'we've got the votes so STFU'.
By comparison, collaborative governance is a consensus system intended to be used on all issues affecting a community, with the implicit understanding that anyone not participating on a particular issue consents to allow others to decide the issue.
So three of my neighbours get together at two o'clock one morning and decide to steal my stuff and rape my dog, and it's all legal because I didn't participate in deciding the issue.