He's not. He's implying that when stories come down that involve (R) doing something shitty, it's next to their name, and when (D) do something shitty, it's usually not. You don't have to believe that the parties are different- just that the reporting / summary / writing / whatever is slanted when you see that shit.
Fireball in Dungeons and Dragons is a particular spell with particular rules, and it has ABSOLUTELY BEEN COPIED STRAIGHT in many cases since then.
If you are disputing that Chainmail took "fire ball" from this guy, read the article- the rules specifics are way too much to be a coincidence (including the specifics of saving throws for heroes, and how they interact with Dragons).
If you are disputing that most of the modern gaming fireballs descend from Dungeons and Dragons / Chainmail / This guy, I don't know what to tell you, other than this is very unlikely. The idea of fire being used to attack is universal in human culture and mythology, but the specific visualization in question has some pretty clear pedigree. They aren't talking about the generic idea of an attack with fire, after all.
> It's actually the only sane approach to the modern web. The web can't be "free"
Let me disagree with both of those.
First, more fucking ads is not particularly sane. Ads suck. They hurt people.
Second, the web can be free. It would be a much smaller web, but it could absolutely exist. Plenty of people run websites that aren't profitable, and that's always been the case. What you can't have is a giant industry built on something without a way to monetize (literally: "turn into money") that thing.
But a lot of things aren't monetized, and they exist. They just aren't the subject of an industry.
It's ok for any given something to not support an industry. The ad industry has no particular right to an income stream, any more than I can start charging you for oxygen.
> Think about it: if you go subscription-based for everything you are MUCH more trackable than an ad-based web.
I hope I've demolished your false dichotomy well enough to move on. If not, consider that you have several options: a profitless web, an ad supported web, a web controlled by an agency that rewards contributors in some way (socialistweb?), or simply not a giant shitbag of ads and not profitable... plus whatever I couldn't think of in 30 seconds, which is probably a lot.
So lets move on to one of the MANY MANY things you could do instead of ads (not the "only other thing"), that you bring up, and that is a subscription model.
Whenever ad apologists squeal, part of it is about how expensive and hassley it is to have a subscription. Sometimes they also bring up the fact that it's a privacy problem.
The first argument- expense- is not true. A model where I pay every website some trivial amount on pageview, via some unspecified method is inherently more efficient than the model where the website is paid by an advertising industry that in turn gets its money from clients. If a website gets X dollars (where X is obviously much less than 1/100th of a dollar) for every single page view I give them because of an ad company paying them for each view, that means that I, the viewer, am ultimately paying much MORE than X. Maybe not that second, but somehow. There's a whole industry as this middleman- it is assuredly the LEAST efficient solution we could come up with.
As for the hassle, much like there's no way to actually end up with me paying X per pageview, this is only true from a technical perspective- it assumes everything exists exactly as it does and won't change. If you had to log in everywhere and give every website 30 cents per month or whatever, that would obviously not be a very clever way of doing things (and this lack of a solid solution is a big part of why advertisement has moved so solidly into online stuff).
It's not a problem in principle: it's a problem in practice, but just for now.
Finally, privacy. Certainly if everything I went to had to get some login and therefore my whole web cycle was tracked, that WOULD be bad, right? Well, first, advertisers have been trying VERY VERY hard to do exactly this, ignoring laws, brutally exploiting issues in browers and OSes, uses every available piece of obfuscated javascript, backdoor deal, flash cookie, whatever they can. Whatever they can. They've done more to fuck with online privacy than any government thus far. So clearly they are not the good guys.
Is it IMPOSSIBLE to browse in a way that doesn't identify you under the "subscribe to the web" theme? Not really. The most naive implementations, sure. But an ISP middleman could obfuscate this, standards that don't permit the source could be written, and laws could even be written to ensure that metadata is destroyed promptly.
Just because the most naive subscription model you could think of wouldn't be cheap, private, or easy doesn't mean that one could not exist.
Ads are fucked up. Making a browser that is clever enough to spot ads, and evil enough to paste over them with OTHER ads is hella more fucked up. And remember, this will greatly encourage an advertiser to slip his ads in other ways- way more than an adblocker will ever do, because this approach actually takes away your views from the subset of viewers that are NOT hostile to seeing ads.
The whole "lets dick around in space" thing is one of the best uses of technology. We learn stuff and see cool real things. Russia is pretty much the gateway to the heavens right now, so it makes a lot of sense for Iran to partner with them.
Don't get me wrong, Rah Rah USA and all, and I hope we start doing all the cool stuff we used to with shuttles and rockets and what-not, but at this point I don't feel that it's a massive competition- I'd just like to see multiple space vehicles doing cool things.
I envy the combination of your low user ID and your until-now ignorance of tentacle hentai. This sort of shit was a go-to shock link in college (not because it was the most shocking, which it isn't, but because it combines "someone worked hard on this" with "why on earth" pretty solidly- other topics would actually have a victim or something sad).
In any event, welcome to one of the sillier dark punctuation points for humor on the net. And remember- anything you find in that search category has been fapped to by at least several dozen dudes somewhere, at some time! I'm so sorry!
I am absolutely certain that Chinese companies will not be able to pierce the top-end design area for probably at least two decades. The Chinese are famous for imitation and cheap knock offs, but are obviously capable of top end anything- the problem seems to be that almost no Chinese products has NEW DESIGN. It's like their engineers can't their pointy haired bosses to invest in design as a concept. They copy an existing design, or they have some flat brutalist approach.
Samsung? Yea, Samsung could compete over overcome Apple. I don't think that they necessarily will, but it's definitely conceivable.
I completely agree here. There are so many things that can go wrong with the advertising model.
First and foremost, people are slowly developing a resistance to advertisements. Ads have gotten vastly more intrusive and hostile, on all dimensions (meaning you're likely to see an advertisement that wiggles [hostile by exploiting the neurons that detect movement, instead of offering a compelling sell], you're likely to see an advertisement that tries to make you feel bad [a mainstay of advertising is pretending you have a defect and convincing you they have a fix, we are seeing more extreme stuff on the psychological axis], you're likely to see an advertisement where there didn't used to be one [novelty from climbing on the "ubiquitous hostile noise" axis] ), but this can only really ramp so far. The attitude of "I'm not affected by ads" is false, but the AMOUNT that you are affected by ads is absolutely shrinking. There's a concern that advertising clients will in some cases realize this and, if enough do at the same time, crash the industry.
Remember, it is MUCH MORE LIKELY for advertising to crash suddenly than decrease in ANY OTHER WAY. Regardless of your view on whether ads will be profitable in the future or not, in the CASE where they are less profitable, the industry itself will be able to mask this for much longer than any other industry (because their job is literally making you believe shit). So if it DOES go down, traditional predictors may not apply until it is way too late.
Second, people are becoming hostile to advertisements in unusual numbers, and making efforts to avoid them. Every Netflix user is explicitly dodging ads with his wallet and time. If Netflix were to put ads in shit, they'd be in serious trouble, and they know it. Every Netflix tells content providers that they have other ways to make money, and reminds people that they don't have to spend their whole life being attacked by jackanapes. Adblocking will win the technical fight, and while users of adblock software (I recommend ublock origin, and I think we know what apk host engine guy recommends!) are small in number, it is becoming MUCH easier to help non-technical people use these products, and they are becoming more popular. Every person who watches ad-free shows and views the ad-free web is someone who is much less likely to want to see ads in the future.
It all sums to advertisers having to jump through higher and higher hoops for lower and lower returns. If you throw ANYTHING to jostle the house of cards- an economic downturn, a religion recruiting heavily, any of the many political orientations that are ad-hostile gaining adherents, a series of studies that show a shitty ROI on ads- you could see a massive crash.
And here's all these tech giants that are really just about ads ads ads ads ads. It's not a very diverse position at all.
Seriously though, he's off by a few orders of magnitude. He should have said something more like 5,000 times safer, if we broadly go by number of cannabis cigarettes versus alcoholic drinks.
Or if we go by weight, like 1500 pounds of cannabis versus less than 2 pounds of alcohol?
> Every single one of those exploits is mitigated by whitelisting the incoming ip blocks authorized to connect.
In the affected 32674 routers, yes. But remember, if the router is compromised, the technical limitation of that particular exploit shouldn't be something you use to judge other exploits or risks.
Yes, the IP whitelist would have saved you there. But if the device you are trusting to enforce the whitelist is ITSELF compromised (as in this case!), why would you trust the backdoored device to defend you?
All the next vulnerability has to do is have a hook into the firewall rules to special case its "secret knock", and then no firewall rule can save you.
> Nice bundling of independent unrelated items together to form what appears to be a cohesive argument.
My argument is as follows: You obviously understand the virtue of not being tracked, because you chose to post- TWICE- in a way to deny everyone your post history. This means that your argument is such swill that you don't even believe it for a fucking second, as evidenced by your OWN actions.
> Have you had a look at what google is tracking based on your location history on your Android device?
I can selectively choose which apps can access that in Ios, and I'm pretty sure Android is close to that capability. I can also turn it off trivially in Android or Ios. MOST importantly, if I CHOOSE to leave this on, for any app, at any time, it's because I have a REASON- I perceive convenience and functionality for ME out of allowing the phone or an app to keep that.
What we are discussing in this article is QUITE different: wifi nodes you go past being able to track who is going where. This is a much bigger concern, because my phone shouldn't be ratting me out to whichever corporate interests have a shitty router somewhere. In addition to using it NOW to spy on people, it has a big future proofing issue- the moment someone decides that they can get a lot of benefit from tracking MAC addresses it becomes incentivized, and suddenly the world becomes full of dummy wifi nodes just sitting there shitting up your list, each harvesting bullshit. Hell, I already suspect some places of advertising with network IDs.
> In any case, a "real" physical MAC address doesn't really identify a person.
Irrelevant and not as true as it should be. If MAC addresses weren't randomized, you could guess with a high degree of certainty that the same one represented the same person. Stick a few wifi hotspots around and suddenly you are tracking people over a large enough area. If any of them are actually logged into and used, now you CAN make that correlation.
Randomizing it takes away the advertising incentive, takes away the snooping incentive, takes away the tracking incentive.
> It like saying that IP addresses identify people
If anywhere you walked got a copy of your home PC's current IP address, we'd live in a more privacy-unfriendly world. This isn't much difference. Both are bad ideas for the same reasons.
> just inconvenient for a lot of system services
Again, this isn't full randomization. NO FUCKING SERVICES ARE MESSED UP. Only tracker assholes!
It would be nice if you could optionally set the MAC to be randomized even on networks you connect to, but we probably won't see that because it actually WOULD break a lot of things.
But if someone runs a wifi spot that I don't need to connect to, they don't need my MAC address. And there's no fucking "system service" that's getting dicked up. I don't even know what the fuck you are talking about there anyway. Are Windows users complaining? Iphone users? This will work just as seamlessly for Linux and Android.
I think it really depends on the application in question.
Pretend you had set up a firewall correctly a few years ago, but the firewall was set up before the port 32764 backdoor had been discovered. Uh oh, your properly configured firewall has a backdoor! There goes the IP block monitoring too (either the check is on the firewall, and the backdoor disables it, or its beyond the firewall and the firewall spoofs it, or both). Your certs are set up, but heartbleed exists (and you don't know about it, but your attackers do), and FREAK is live too (but hasn't been discovered yet) and the RNG that made them was compromised but no one knew that yet either.
So you did everything right, BUT your network can be totally taken apart remotely... because it's on the internet.
Maybe you need it to be on the net. If so, you'll do that. But maybe you could possibly, at higher cost, make do with it not on the net. Maybe that should be considered.
No, it's not at all useless. It may not be exactly as useful as YOU want, but it's absolutely useful.
Pretend your MAC address is some number, that I'll call Larry. Without this, just walking through an area can result in your machine saying "Larry here, what networks are around?" With this, every time he asks, he'll say "$RANDOM_NAME here, what networks are around?" This is good design, because you shouldn't have to leak information like a MAC just to see what's going on.
Now pretend you want to connect, and you connect as Larry. That's fine for most people, but you want more- you want your address to connect differently each time. This is much more niche, but you CAN do it- there are hardware MAC address changers, after all, and you could automate one in Linux. Not quite sure in Windows how to do it automatically, but I'm sure you could.
I think your idea is good too, btw- but it's nowhere near as important as the one that gives your info away to networks you aren't even trying to connect to.
> > their customers don't want to be fucking tracked? > Except, that's not really true is it?
Apparently it is, because you posted AC, presumably because you don't want to be tracked.
And yes it is true, and no, the odds that anyone wants to be tracked by accidentally persistent MAC address are slim to none. Just because you put up 20 wifis and try to track me doesn't help me in any way. I'm not a user, I'm walking through an area without telling my phone to not use wifi. This is basic security.
And again, just like you don't want to be tracked, nobody does.
> My company is building tools that help businesses understand their customers through WiFi.
No, your company is building a tracker program by trying to make use of an oversight in the spec. In fact, shit like that is why this needs to happen, and why the lifespan of announced MACs needs to be short enough to render any information you may gather useless.
Did you pay for all those phones that the businesses customers are using? Like, do you own them? Or do they belong to people who don't know you and barely know the businesses you serve, and wouldn't help you if given the chance, just as you would not help them? They aren't YOUR customers, after all. They are cattle and you are getting pissed that you won't be able to herd them as easily.
This is a good thing, and I'm sad it has taken this long. Hope this gets pushed up to Android fast enough so your company can instead do something besides trying to track people who don't owe you shit and who you don't help in any way.
This is practically boring by Trump standards. It's not even insane- it's protectionism. This has a long history, and in some industries is generally tolerated or even desired (by more than just fringe groups), in some amount. What Trump is describing isn't of the normal sort, of course- it's extreme and would cause havok in a number of industries.
Like much of Trump's rhetoric, it assumes powers that presidents don't have. Trump presumably knows this, and is undeterred, because he wants to be elected, and his track is populist screed, so off he goes.
The only thing he says on this that has some merit is his brief rant about Boeing. A Boeing plant will give China access to seriously new tools and methods that they currently haven't been able to copy from the shortsighted companies that make factories in China and have them duplicated by a Chinese company a few years later. I don't know if this is worth some federal action, however, and certainly a president isn't the one to make the call.
To answer the question, if you listen to Trump, he wouldn't stop with Apple, he'd go on a rampage of magically teleporting factories around and tossing out tariffs that are likely banned by treaty for decades.
It's not surprising for a populist to promise protectionism, and it's the least scary thing on his agenda. Destroying a few dozen industries is nothing compared to what he's promised internationally or for civil rights lol
So, lets go into this a bit. First, do they know what you do inside apps?
"The data we collect depends on the services and features you use, and includes the following........Interests and favorites. We collect data about your interests and favorites, such as the teams you follow in a sports app, the stocks you track in a finance app, or the favorite cities you add to a weather app. In addition to those you explicitly provide, your interests and favorites may also be inferred or derived from other data we collect. "
Ok, so AS EXAMPLES, they mention how they monitor and track what you do inside apps. THE STOCKS YOU FUCKING TRACK IN A FINANCE APP. That's their goddamned EXAMPLE! Like that's the least offensive thing they could come up with, or something.
It is unambiguous that they know what you do inside apps.
Ok, next point, and this one is harder. Do they "touch your personal files"? Lets look:
Well, if you don't turn off "Input Personalization", then we KNOW it grabs everything you type, write, and say. But lets assume you DO turn that off.
Under Telemetry, we find this (it's pretty big):
---" Usage and connectivity data. Microsoft regularly collects basic information about your Windows device including usage data, app compatibility data, and network and connectivity information. This data is transmitted to Microsoft and stored with one or more unique identifiers that can help us recognize an individual user on an individual device and understand the device's service issues and use patterns. The data we collect includes:
Configuration data, including the manufacturer of your device, model, number of processors, display size and resolution, date, region and language settings, and other data about the capabilities of the device.
The software (including drivers and firmware supplied by device manufacturers), installed on the device.
Performance and reliability data, such as how quickly programs respond to input, how many problems you experience with an app or device, or how quickly information is sent or received over a network connection.
App use data for apps that run on Windows (including Microsoft and third party apps), such as how frequently and for how long you use apps, which app features you use most often, how often you use Windows Help and Support, which services you use to sign into apps, and how many folders you typically create on your desktop.
Network and connection data, such as the device's IP address, number of network connections in use, and data about the networks you connect to, such as mobile networks, Bluetooth, and identifiers (BSSID and SSID), connection requirements and speed of Wi-Fi networks you connect to.
Other hardware devices connected to the device. "---
Hrm, that sounds like some personal files would be in there, but it's not quite clear.
There's this part:
---" Finally, we will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails in Outlook.com, or files in private folders on OneDrive), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to:
- comply with applicable law or respond to valid legal process, including from law enforcement or other government agencies;
- protect our customers, for example to prev
First, you had to choose to update to that. Unlike Microsoft, where you can't turn the update OFF.
Second, you could easily turn that off. Unlike Microsoft, where you can not (and even if you THINK you can, can you really? Can't be proved, right?)
Third, Ubuntu is just one of many many Linuxes, and the others didn't have that problem, and it made a BUNCH of noise in the community.
Fourth, sending searches that sort of expected to be local to Amazon is the sort of thing we really see a bunch of similar desktop OSes do- that doesn't make it right, but you could argue that this behavior AS A DEFAULT is confusingly tolerated by less technical users, so devs might think it's an ok idea. The fact that Microsoft does similar things (the default settings for Cortana), and Apple does similar thing (Siri will to) might have let them think that it's ok. Much like Apple, you can turn it off easily enough, and it's NOT ok, but, like, Microsoft doesn't get shit about this. Because you can turn it off.
Fifth, Ubuntu Unity 8 will no longer do this. Maybe they were persuaded not to have this setting by Stallman, who derided them for it. Maybe by their users, some of whom switched instead of support them further. Or maybe they were just fucking tired, so very very tired, of seeing shills pretend that a small fraction of the Linux ecosystem having an easily togglable default setting about one search bar, is somehow equivalent to sending everyone you know, everything you do, anything you write, and anything you say, to Microsoft.
Where's the EULA that says no? Where's the simple guide to be sure that it doesn't happen? People have observed data flying out of the box with all the settings set to minimum, and only a giant nests of scripts (that toggles registry values and deletes services) seems to offer any real security.
Windows 10 has a keylogger. How much it logs and when it logs is not currently understood or documented, nor has there been any attempt to address this on the part of Microsoft.
I give you props for not denying the existence of the keylogger, at least. I just don't think we can trust the settings on this. Windows 10 is so goddamned scary man.
> that actually runs all the programs and games I presently enjoy
You get that Windows doesn't run your games, right? Microsoft doesn't support your programs? What actually happens is, the devs only build those programs and games for Windows. Windows didn't support them, THEY SUPPORTED WINDOWS.
I'm pretty sure this doesn't change your opinion, which is fine. But at least say the right thing- "Until the programs and games I enjoy are written for Linux, blah blah".
It's not Linux's job to run a Windows binary. The fact that it CAN run many of them is extraordinary- you're fucked if you try the reverse.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, given that we're discussing a case where Android has a vulnerability, then the speed of the update is pretty relevant.
He's not. He's implying that when stories come down that involve (R) doing something shitty, it's next to their name, and when (D) do something shitty, it's usually not. You don't have to believe that the parties are different- just that the reporting / summary / writing / whatever is slanted when you see that shit.
> Pretty soon you won't be able to buy anything in California.
You'll be able to buy them little stickers that say something is known to cause cancer to the state of california.
Failing by less than 5 sometimes lets you try again...?
Maybe read the article?
Fireball in Dungeons and Dragons is a particular spell with particular rules, and it has ABSOLUTELY BEEN COPIED STRAIGHT in many cases since then.
If you are disputing that Chainmail took "fire ball" from this guy, read the article- the rules specifics are way too much to be a coincidence (including the specifics of saving throws for heroes, and how they interact with Dragons).
If you are disputing that most of the modern gaming fireballs descend from Dungeons and Dragons / Chainmail / This guy, I don't know what to tell you, other than this is very unlikely. The idea of fire being used to attack is universal in human culture and mythology, but the specific visualization in question has some pretty clear pedigree. They aren't talking about the generic idea of an attack with fire, after all.
> It's actually the only sane approach to the modern web. The web can't be "free"
Let me disagree with both of those.
First, more fucking ads is not particularly sane. Ads suck. They hurt people.
Second, the web can be free. It would be a much smaller web, but it could absolutely exist. Plenty of people run websites that aren't profitable, and that's always been the case. What you can't have is a giant industry built on something without a way to monetize (literally: "turn into money") that thing.
But a lot of things aren't monetized, and they exist. They just aren't the subject of an industry.
It's ok for any given something to not support an industry. The ad industry has no particular right to an income stream, any more than I can start charging you for oxygen.
> Think about it: if you go subscription-based for everything you are MUCH more trackable than an ad-based web.
I hope I've demolished your false dichotomy well enough to move on. If not, consider that you have several options: a profitless web, an ad supported web, a web controlled by an agency that rewards contributors in some way (socialistweb?), or simply not a giant shitbag of ads and not profitable... plus whatever I couldn't think of in 30 seconds, which is probably a lot.
So lets move on to one of the MANY MANY things you could do instead of ads (not the "only other thing"), that you bring up, and that is a subscription model.
Whenever ad apologists squeal, part of it is about how expensive and hassley it is to have a subscription. Sometimes they also bring up the fact that it's a privacy problem.
The first argument- expense- is not true. A model where I pay every website some trivial amount on pageview, via some unspecified method is inherently more efficient than the model where the website is paid by an advertising industry that in turn gets its money from clients. If a website gets X dollars (where X is obviously much less than 1/100th of a dollar) for every single page view I give them because of an ad company paying them for each view, that means that I, the viewer, am ultimately paying much MORE than X. Maybe not that second, but somehow. There's a whole industry as this middleman- it is assuredly the LEAST efficient solution we could come up with.
As for the hassle, much like there's no way to actually end up with me paying X per pageview, this is only true from a technical perspective- it assumes everything exists exactly as it does and won't change. If you had to log in everywhere and give every website 30 cents per month or whatever, that would obviously not be a very clever way of doing things (and this lack of a solid solution is a big part of why advertisement has moved so solidly into online stuff).
It's not a problem in principle: it's a problem in practice, but just for now.
Finally, privacy. Certainly if everything I went to had to get some login and therefore my whole web cycle was tracked, that WOULD be bad, right? Well, first, advertisers have been trying VERY VERY hard to do exactly this, ignoring laws, brutally exploiting issues in browers and OSes, uses every available piece of obfuscated javascript, backdoor deal, flash cookie, whatever they can. Whatever they can. They've done more to fuck with online privacy than any government thus far. So clearly they are not the good guys.
Is it IMPOSSIBLE to browse in a way that doesn't identify you under the "subscribe to the web" theme? Not really. The most naive implementations, sure. But an ISP middleman could obfuscate this, standards that don't permit the source could be written, and laws could even be written to ensure that metadata is destroyed promptly.
Just because the most naive subscription model you could think of wouldn't be cheap, private, or easy doesn't mean that one could not exist.
Ads are fucked up. Making a browser that is clever enough to spot ads, and evil enough to paste over them with OTHER ads is hella more fucked up. And remember, this will greatly encourage an advertiser to slip his ads in other ways- way more than an adblocker will ever do, because this approach actually takes away your views from the subset of viewers that are NOT hostile to seeing ads.
The whole "lets dick around in space" thing is one of the best uses of technology. We learn stuff and see cool real things. Russia is pretty much the gateway to the heavens right now, so it makes a lot of sense for Iran to partner with them.
Don't get me wrong, Rah Rah USA and all, and I hope we start doing all the cool stuff we used to with shuttles and rockets and what-not, but at this point I don't feel that it's a massive competition- I'd just like to see multiple space vehicles doing cool things.
I envy the combination of your low user ID and your until-now ignorance of tentacle hentai. This sort of shit was a go-to shock link in college (not because it was the most shocking, which it isn't, but because it combines "someone worked hard on this" with "why on earth" pretty solidly- other topics would actually have a victim or something sad).
In any event, welcome to one of the sillier dark punctuation points for humor on the net. And remember- anything you find in that search category has been fapped to by at least several dozen dudes somewhere, at some time! I'm so sorry!
I am absolutely certain that Chinese companies will not be able to pierce the top-end design area for probably at least two decades. The Chinese are famous for imitation and cheap knock offs, but are obviously capable of top end anything- the problem seems to be that almost no Chinese products has NEW DESIGN. It's like their engineers can't their pointy haired bosses to invest in design as a concept. They copy an existing design, or they have some flat brutalist approach.
Samsung? Yea, Samsung could compete over overcome Apple. I don't think that they necessarily will, but it's definitely conceivable.
I completely agree here. There are so many things that can go wrong with the advertising model.
First and foremost, people are slowly developing a resistance to advertisements. Ads have gotten vastly more intrusive and hostile, on all dimensions (meaning you're likely to see an advertisement that wiggles [hostile by exploiting the neurons that detect movement, instead of offering a compelling sell], you're likely to see an advertisement that tries to make you feel bad [a mainstay of advertising is pretending you have a defect and convincing you they have a fix, we are seeing more extreme stuff on the psychological axis], you're likely to see an advertisement where there didn't used to be one [novelty from climbing on the "ubiquitous hostile noise" axis] ), but this can only really ramp so far. The attitude of "I'm not affected by ads" is false, but the AMOUNT that you are affected by ads is absolutely shrinking. There's a concern that advertising clients will in some cases realize this and, if enough do at the same time, crash the industry.
Remember, it is MUCH MORE LIKELY for advertising to crash suddenly than decrease in ANY OTHER WAY. Regardless of your view on whether ads will be profitable in the future or not, in the CASE where they are less profitable, the industry itself will be able to mask this for much longer than any other industry (because their job is literally making you believe shit). So if it DOES go down, traditional predictors may not apply until it is way too late.
Second, people are becoming hostile to advertisements in unusual numbers, and making efforts to avoid them. Every Netflix user is explicitly dodging ads with his wallet and time. If Netflix were to put ads in shit, they'd be in serious trouble, and they know it. Every Netflix tells content providers that they have other ways to make money, and reminds people that they don't have to spend their whole life being attacked by jackanapes. Adblocking will win the technical fight, and while users of adblock software (I recommend ublock origin, and I think we know what apk host engine guy recommends!) are small in number, it is becoming MUCH easier to help non-technical people use these products, and they are becoming more popular. Every person who watches ad-free shows and views the ad-free web is someone who is much less likely to want to see ads in the future.
It all sums to advertisers having to jump through higher and higher hoops for lower and lower returns. If you throw ANYTHING to jostle the house of cards- an economic downturn, a religion recruiting heavily, any of the many political orientations that are ad-hostile gaining adherents, a series of studies that show a shitty ROI on ads- you could see a massive crash.
And here's all these tech giants that are really just about ads ads ads ads ads. It's not a very diverse position at all.
Well, printing it in binary would be 74,207,280 numeral "1"s, so if you go that way it would be pretty big!
No no no, some Americans spawn as teenagers, the rest are born as babies.
Heh.
Seriously though, he's off by a few orders of magnitude. He should have said something more like 5,000 times safer, if we broadly go by number of cannabis cigarettes versus alcoholic drinks.
Or if we go by weight, like 1500 pounds of cannabis versus less than 2 pounds of alcohol?
Good grief this melodrama was appropriate before you could just move to Colorado. Denver Tech Center needs YOU!
> Every single one of those exploits is mitigated by whitelisting the incoming ip blocks authorized to connect.
In the affected 32674 routers, yes. But remember, if the router is compromised, the technical limitation of that particular exploit shouldn't be something you use to judge other exploits or risks.
Yes, the IP whitelist would have saved you there. But if the device you are trusting to enforce the whitelist is ITSELF compromised (as in this case!), why would you trust the backdoored device to defend you?
All the next vulnerability has to do is have a hook into the firewall rules to special case its "secret knock", and then no firewall rule can save you.
> Nice bundling of independent unrelated items together to form what appears to be a cohesive argument.
My argument is as follows: You obviously understand the virtue of not being tracked, because you chose to post- TWICE- in a way to deny everyone your post history. This means that your argument is such swill that you don't even believe it for a fucking second, as evidenced by your OWN actions.
> Have you had a look at what google is tracking based on your location history on your Android device?
I can selectively choose which apps can access that in Ios, and I'm pretty sure Android is close to that capability. I can also turn it off trivially in Android or Ios. MOST importantly, if I CHOOSE to leave this on, for any app, at any time, it's because I have a REASON- I perceive convenience and functionality for ME out of allowing the phone or an app to keep that.
What we are discussing in this article is QUITE different: wifi nodes you go past being able to track who is going where. This is a much bigger concern, because my phone shouldn't be ratting me out to whichever corporate interests have a shitty router somewhere. In addition to using it NOW to spy on people, it has a big future proofing issue- the moment someone decides that they can get a lot of benefit from tracking MAC addresses it becomes incentivized, and suddenly the world becomes full of dummy wifi nodes just sitting there shitting up your list, each harvesting bullshit. Hell, I already suspect some places of advertising with network IDs.
> In any case, a "real" physical MAC address doesn't really identify a person.
Irrelevant and not as true as it should be. If MAC addresses weren't randomized, you could guess with a high degree of certainty that the same one represented the same person. Stick a few wifi hotspots around and suddenly you are tracking people over a large enough area. If any of them are actually logged into and used, now you CAN make that correlation.
Randomizing it takes away the advertising incentive, takes away the snooping incentive, takes away the tracking incentive.
> It like saying that IP addresses identify people
If anywhere you walked got a copy of your home PC's current IP address, we'd live in a more privacy-unfriendly world. This isn't much difference. Both are bad ideas for the same reasons.
> just inconvenient for a lot of system services
Again, this isn't full randomization. NO FUCKING SERVICES ARE MESSED UP. Only tracker assholes!
It would be nice if you could optionally set the MAC to be randomized even on networks you connect to, but we probably won't see that because it actually WOULD break a lot of things.
But if someone runs a wifi spot that I don't need to connect to, they don't need my MAC address. And there's no fucking "system service" that's getting dicked up. I don't even know what the fuck you are talking about there anyway. Are Windows users complaining? Iphone users? This will work just as seamlessly for Linux and Android.
I think it really depends on the application in question.
Pretend you had set up a firewall correctly a few years ago, but the firewall was set up before the port 32764 backdoor had been discovered. Uh oh, your properly configured firewall has a backdoor! There goes the IP block monitoring too (either the check is on the firewall, and the backdoor disables it, or its beyond the firewall and the firewall spoofs it, or both). Your certs are set up, but heartbleed exists (and you don't know about it, but your attackers do), and FREAK is live too (but hasn't been discovered yet) and the RNG that made them was compromised but no one knew that yet either.
So you did everything right, BUT your network can be totally taken apart remotely... because it's on the internet.
Maybe you need it to be on the net. If so, you'll do that. But maybe you could possibly, at higher cost, make do with it not on the net. Maybe that should be considered.
No, it's not at all useless. It may not be exactly as useful as YOU want, but it's absolutely useful.
Pretend your MAC address is some number, that I'll call Larry. Without this, just walking through an area can result in your machine saying "Larry here, what networks are around?" With this, every time he asks, he'll say "$RANDOM_NAME here, what networks are around?" This is good design, because you shouldn't have to leak information like a MAC just to see what's going on.
Now pretend you want to connect, and you connect as Larry. That's fine for most people, but you want more- you want your address to connect differently each time. This is much more niche, but you CAN do it- there are hardware MAC address changers, after all, and you could automate one in Linux. Not quite sure in Windows how to do it automatically, but I'm sure you could.
I think your idea is good too, btw- but it's nowhere near as important as the one that gives your info away to networks you aren't even trying to connect to.
> > their customers don't want to be fucking tracked?
> Except, that's not really true is it?
Apparently it is, because you posted AC, presumably because you don't want to be tracked.
And yes it is true, and no, the odds that anyone wants to be tracked by accidentally persistent MAC address are slim to none. Just because you put up 20 wifis and try to track me doesn't help me in any way. I'm not a user, I'm walking through an area without telling my phone to not use wifi. This is basic security.
And again, just like you don't want to be tracked, nobody does.
Don't listen to murnues, above.
> My company is building tools that help businesses understand their customers through WiFi.
No, your company is building a tracker program by trying to make use of an oversight in the spec. In fact, shit like that is why this needs to happen, and why the lifespan of announced MACs needs to be short enough to render any information you may gather useless.
Did you pay for all those phones that the businesses customers are using? Like, do you own them? Or do they belong to people who don't know you and barely know the businesses you serve, and wouldn't help you if given the chance, just as you would not help them? They aren't YOUR customers, after all. They are cattle and you are getting pissed that you won't be able to herd them as easily.
This is a good thing, and I'm sad it has taken this long. Hope this gets pushed up to Android fast enough so your company can instead do something besides trying to track people who don't owe you shit and who you don't help in any way.
This is practically boring by Trump standards. It's not even insane- it's protectionism. This has a long history, and in some industries is generally tolerated or even desired (by more than just fringe groups), in some amount. What Trump is describing isn't of the normal sort, of course- it's extreme and would cause havok in a number of industries.
Like much of Trump's rhetoric, it assumes powers that presidents don't have. Trump presumably knows this, and is undeterred, because he wants to be elected, and his track is populist screed, so off he goes.
The only thing he says on this that has some merit is his brief rant about Boeing. A Boeing plant will give China access to seriously new tools and methods that they currently haven't been able to copy from the shortsighted companies that make factories in China and have them duplicated by a Chinese company a few years later. I don't know if this is worth some federal action, however, and certainly a president isn't the one to make the call.
To answer the question, if you listen to Trump, he wouldn't stop with Apple, he'd go on a rampage of magically teleporting factories around and tossing out tariffs that are likely banned by treaty for decades.
It's not surprising for a populist to promise protectionism, and it's the least scary thing on his agenda. Destroying a few dozen industries is nothing compared to what he's promised internationally or for civil rights lol
> They don't touch your personal files and they don't know what you do inside apps.
Ok, so first of all, here's the Windows 10 Eula. It points you to the Microsoft Privacy Statement.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...
And here's the document it's talking about:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...
So, lets go into this a bit. First, do they know what you do inside apps?
"The data we collect depends on the services and features you use, and includes the following..... ...Interests and favorites. We collect data about your interests and favorites, such as the teams you follow in a sports app, the stocks you track in a finance app, or the favorite cities you add to a weather app. In addition to those you explicitly provide, your interests and favorites may also be inferred or derived from other data we collect. "
Ok, so AS EXAMPLES, they mention how they monitor and track what you do inside apps. THE STOCKS YOU FUCKING TRACK IN A FINANCE APP. That's their goddamned EXAMPLE! Like that's the least offensive thing they could come up with, or something.
It is unambiguous that they know what you do inside apps.
Ok, next point, and this one is harder. Do they "touch your personal files"? Lets look:
Well, if you don't turn off "Input Personalization", then we KNOW it grabs everything you type, write, and say. But lets assume you DO turn that off.
Under Telemetry, we find this (it's pretty big):
---"
Usage and connectivity data. Microsoft regularly collects basic information about your Windows device including usage data, app compatibility data, and network and connectivity information. This data is transmitted to Microsoft and stored with one or more unique identifiers that can help us recognize an individual user on an individual device and understand the device's service issues and use patterns. The data we collect includes:
Configuration data, including the manufacturer of your device, model, number of processors, display size and resolution, date, region and language settings, and other data about the capabilities of the device.
The software (including drivers and firmware supplied by device manufacturers), installed on the device.
Performance and reliability data, such as how quickly programs respond to input, how many problems you experience with an app or device, or how quickly information is sent or received over a network connection.
App use data for apps that run on Windows (including Microsoft and third party apps), such as how frequently and for how long you use apps, which app features you use most often, how often you use Windows Help and Support, which services you use to sign into apps, and how many folders you typically create on your desktop.
Network and connection data, such as the device's IP address, number of network connections in use, and data about the networks you connect to, such as mobile networks, Bluetooth, and identifiers (BSSID and SSID), connection requirements and speed of Wi-Fi networks you connect to.
Other hardware devices connected to the device.
"---
Hrm, that sounds like some personal files would be in there, but it's not quite clear.
There's this part:
---"
Finally, we will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails in Outlook.com, or files in private folders on OneDrive), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to:
- comply with applicable law or respond to valid legal process, including from law enforcement or other government agencies;
- protect our customers, for example to prev
First, you had to choose to update to that. Unlike Microsoft, where you can't turn the update OFF.
Second, you could easily turn that off. Unlike Microsoft, where you can not (and even if you THINK you can, can you really? Can't be proved, right?)
Third, Ubuntu is just one of many many Linuxes, and the others didn't have that problem, and it made a BUNCH of noise in the community.
Fourth, sending searches that sort of expected to be local to Amazon is the sort of thing we really see a bunch of similar desktop OSes do- that doesn't make it right, but you could argue that this behavior AS A DEFAULT is confusingly tolerated by less technical users, so devs might think it's an ok idea. The fact that Microsoft does similar things (the default settings for Cortana), and Apple does similar thing (Siri will to) might have let them think that it's ok. Much like Apple, you can turn it off easily enough, and it's NOT ok, but, like, Microsoft doesn't get shit about this. Because you can turn it off.
Fifth, Ubuntu Unity 8 will no longer do this. Maybe they were persuaded not to have this setting by Stallman, who derided them for it. Maybe by their users, some of whom switched instead of support them further. Or maybe they were just fucking tired, so very very tired, of seeing shills pretend that a small fraction of the Linux ecosystem having an easily togglable default setting about one search bar, is somehow equivalent to sending everyone you know, everything you do, anything you write, and anything you say, to Microsoft.
Where's the EULA that says no? Where's the simple guide to be sure that it doesn't happen? People have observed data flying out of the box with all the settings set to minimum, and only a giant nests of scripts (that toggles registry values and deletes services) seems to offer any real security.
Windows 10 has a keylogger. How much it logs and when it logs is not currently understood or documented, nor has there been any attempt to address this on the part of Microsoft.
I give you props for not denying the existence of the keylogger, at least. I just don't think we can trust the settings on this. Windows 10 is so goddamned scary man.
> that actually runs all the programs and games I presently enjoy
You get that Windows doesn't run your games, right? Microsoft doesn't support your programs? What actually happens is, the devs only build those programs and games for Windows. Windows didn't support them, THEY SUPPORTED WINDOWS.
I'm pretty sure this doesn't change your opinion, which is fine. But at least say the right thing- "Until the programs and games I enjoy are written for Linux, blah blah".
It's not Linux's job to run a Windows binary. The fact that it CAN run many of them is extraordinary- you're fucked if you try the reverse.