IE is pretty much a zombie browser outside the corporate environment.
I run a couple online games and other sites. My browser stats: Chrome Firefox Safari (unknown) Opera Android browser IE Mozilla BlackBerry other
IE makes up 0.4% of my visitors. I am honestly surprised every time I learn that someone is actually using it. (and no, it's not because I run some freakish Linux-fanpage or something, 75% of my visitors use windows, 17% OS X, just 1% Linux, the rest is mostly mobile).
Someone said it very well recently: Isn't it the most hostile-to-women thing you can imagine to treat them all the time as if they are not sexual creatures, too? To claim that every time women and sex meet, there has to be something evil going on?
Advertisers need to STFU as they are the reason all this happened.
+100
Anyone who listens to the people who brought all this about is either stupid or corrupt or both. The entire discussion should happen with the advertisers excluded.
I want DNT. I want it to be enabled by default on all browsers. And I want ignoring DNT to carry a fine large enough that intentionally doing it large-scale will bancrupt your company. And I want that kind of intentionally ignoring it carry criminal penalties for the C-level executives.
Because that's the only way short of shooting them that they'll learn to behave like responsible members of a community instead of psychopathic parasites.
We've been trying to train users for over 20 years. If there were even the slightest bit of merit to user security trainings (aside from selling courses and consulting hours, of course) don't you think something would've come out of it by now?
People already write passwords down, and re-use passwords.
I know. Less than a year ago I've given a keynote on this topic.
But do you want to push this undesired behaviour even more, or blame the user, or realize that humans behave in certain ways for certain reasons, and eliminate the root cause (free buzzword to sell this idea to management included).
Of course it matters what my system allows. Just because there is a theoretical possibility of a different attack vector does not mean I should leave the front door unlocked.
If it solely relies on passwords, it is insecure.
Nonsense, like all blanket statements in IT Security. It depends on your thread model, the required protection level and the external factors.
Password length matters to brute force attacks - and if your application allows a brute force attack to happen, it is broken already, insecure by design.
Enforcing longer passwords will not improve security for real-life cases. Enforcing more cryptic passwords will actually reduce security for real-life cases. Why? Because people will need to type slower, making shoulder-surfing easier. People will start to write passwords down, and they will re-use passwords more often.
You can't solve this issue with simple solutions like "use longer passwords". The only thing that will do is make "password1234" the new standard instead of just "password".
Whether she's doing a good job has relatively little to do with any titles she might now not hold any more.
Oh yes, it does. She's the minister for education and science.
I could accept someone in that position who doesn't have an academic title. It would be a bit odd, but hey, we've had defense ministers who didn't go to the army (back when military service was still compulsory).
But one who had acquired an undeserved academic title through intentional deceit? Sorry, that's a slap in the face for everyone who worked hard on their titles, and such a person can not be the one in charge of the educational system and academia.
No, if you actually follow the university announcement and the evidence, it turns out that her actions are considerably worse than Guttenbergs.
He was lousy even in his plagiarism. She intentionally rephrased and covered up where the copied from. Guttenberg did a copy&paste job - Schavan copied and then rephrased so if you would put the phrase into a search engine, it would come up empty. But she only changed words, she didn't add any original thoughts.
That's plagiarism at its worst - intentional and deceitful.
Ok, so basically the reviews are ripping it to shreds. Just re-read the last few sentences of the summary. That's the nice way of saying "This is total trash, stay away from it. I don't know who would want one, because either you need a tablet, or a notebook, and this one tries to be both and fails at both."
The real-world problem with the simple solutions is that a corporation will spend a few millions on lawyers and other professionals to find a perfectly legal loophole.
No problem, you say, we'll close it.
They will find the next one. We will close it. Repeat a few hundred times. And then you end up with the exact kind of complicated stuff that you wanted to do away with with your simple solution.
I know what I'm talking about, I've spent 6 years of my life negotiating and writing contracts for partners with opposed interests. You end up discussing individual words for ten minutes.
I would be very, very surprised if Surface really works the easy way you hint at. Nothing MS manufactured has ever really worked that way, despite them advertising same for 20+ years. The real world doesn't. Not that the decision makers care, for them it's simply something the IT department has to solve, they'll be handed a device that has already been configured and set up.
Apple's game is a different one. If they allow an exception for MS, the next 10 tech giants will be knocking on their door before the first office apps is sold. Now look at Apple's revenue breakdown and you realize that iTunes sales are a pretty impressive part of it. In fact, iTunes revenue alone dwarves most other tech companies.
As for hacks and apps. Let me sum up with a simple fact. I happen to be the CEO of a small company. The CRM and ERP software my company uses does have an iOS app.
I didn't remember who said it, but it is an excellent piece of wisdom:
All the simple solutions have been found.
If someone comes up with a solution to a current-world problem that can be explained in a few sentences, I tend to become very, very sceptical. The world largely isn't that simple anymore, and we have entire professions whose jobs basically is to find loopholes.
but I will never get passed the fact it was consumer based tech they have thrived on and not enterprise./quote
Exactly.
MS has risen on three factors: Games, Office and OEM lock-in. People bought windows PCs because there wasn't really anything else available unless you were a geek, they wanted to play games and it was what they were used to from work.
Apple thinks the world will shortly work the other way around. Almost everyone in the west now grows up with a computer in the home, and a smartphone and maybe a tablet. Games are on mobile now. The next generation will enter the business world being used to smartphones and tablets - Android and iOS. And they will notice just how much windows sucks and demand something better.
It's not going to be a quick change. But I do agree with the idea that whatever the enterprise runs won't be running the market anymore. It'll be many years until the corporate behemoths shift, but Apple has enough money in the bank to simply wait, keeping up the soft but persistent pushing.
And Google never wanted to displace windows, just make it a commodity. Sure, MS might go on making an OS and selling it, for all Google cares. They just want the revenue coming from elsewhere - that they are giving away Android is a clear message saying: We think the market value of an OS is roughly zero.
If I were MS, that would have me a lot more afraid than Apple, which is still selling its OS.
Windows 8 has a real chance at beating iOS/Android in the enterprise,
Bwuahahahaha.... that was... oh... wait... you are serious?
Windows 8 will succeed not because it's any good, but because it has to - MS has a lot riding on this one, more than on ME or Vista or the other dogs. They will spend billions to make it successful, but it doesn't stand a chance at beating competition that is actually somewhat good.
You can buy market share. But you can't buy being good.
Another US problem I don't understand. Over here in Germany, it's not a problem and never has been. The only calls of this kind I sometimes get are for surveys, and by "sometimes" I mean on the order of one or two a year.
So, just an idea, maybe look at what you guys do differently from everyone else in the world and then, just this once, drop the "not invented here" blinders and do what works?
Btw I don't like copywright but this is just wrong
Complain to the US, they broke the rules first.
You see, this is how a legal and punishment system actually works. If I break your arm, the punishment will be a fine and/or jail time - neither of which have anything to do with broken arms. My wallet didn't do anything to you and neither did my bank account.
Same thing on the country level. The punishment is not identical to the crime. It's been like that in civilized societies ever since we grew old enough to realize that "an eye for an eye", even though it might have been a step forward at its time, is still pretty damn stupid.
Some more background info for us non-US readers, please?
I don't see the issue here. I've bought my iPhone and then got a cell phone contract for them that didn't include a phone, so no subsidies and no unlocking required.
If the carrier pays the phone for you (and you pay him back over time) then they seem to have a legit interest that you don't say "thanks" and take your business elsewhere before the refinancing time is up.
Because it's digital, and common sense has been thrown out for digital goods.
You see, copyright used to come into play when you copied something. As long as you only used it, it didn't matter. The book you bought, you could do with as you pleased, read or not, write comments into the margins, rip out pages and re-arrange them in an order you prefer, whatever.
Only when you made copies of your Romeo & Juliet where the death scene is at the beginning and the rest follows with the word "Zombie" inserted here and there would you be in violation of copyright (well, not really due to that one having expired, but you get the point).
You'd assume it would be the same for a digital book, but it's not. Someone who should be in an asylum instead of a court room decided that in order to read a digital, you have to load it from storage into memory, which is making a copy and thus copyright applies which means the author can dictate terms.
That's why you don't own the firmware, and you don't even own the copy of the firmware on your phone, but if the manufacturer were to, say, distribute the firmware as a print copy the way very very early computer magazines once included software you could transcribe into your computer, then you could do whatever you want with the paper copy, including changing it.
Since 1980 people have pretty much consistently voted for more government benefits, bigger government programs and whatever else the government says it needs to increase payments to people. We have gotten ourselves into a financial mess with a president promoting lower taxes and a Congress that spends as much as possible to keep the gravy train going.
What a surprise. Politicians all for making more things political, the government being pro big-government. Who'd have thought?
The primary purpose of any administration is self-perpetuation. The government is no different. Their primary purpose is to pile up more stuff into their "mine" pile. After all, who would put themselves out of their job? These people are just humans, too. And not necessarily the best kind (because the good ones won't survive internal party politics).
Today we are trying to follow a "You broke it, you own it" philosophy and it is taking time - because the countries are far less stable than either Germany or Japan were at the end of WWII where we had to follow a similar course.
Nonsense. Stability has nothing to do with it.
Both Germany and Japan had two other important things in common that places like Iraq or Afghanistan don't: a) They were highly industrialized countries. This has all sorts of economic and social effects, but most importantly makes rebuilding them easier, faster and more easily managed. b) They were western (Germany) or west-oriented (Japan) countries. Rebuilding them did not subject them to an entirely foreign culture they rejected and considered evil.
this grand standing and attempt to use "secret" information to extract concession is at best juvenile, at worst a power game. Neither of which serves to advance justice and equality.
The problem is that the other side in this conflict is equally juvenile and power-gamey, namely the government. The whole "War on Whatever We Dislike This Decade" is so pubescent, it makes sane people sick to watch. The executive's approach of making life hell for people they have an axe to grind with, instead of following justice is straight from the school yard.
If they didn't have tanks, we'd be laughing at them.
Always these purely theoretical "we can destroy them" delusions. *sigh*
First of all, I don't know where you get the 90% figure from, a quick Google shows other numbers. Wikipedia has a detailed article putting the figure at around 60% GDP and 50% of the jobs. But those are very old numbers. But it's all tourism, not just US tourism.
Second, the US is quick at hurting other nations, but not so quick at hurting potential voters. Quick, name three sanctions or other non-military attacks on foreign nations that the US has conducted in, say, the past 20 years that the voters have even noticed.
Third, the US has already gambled away most of the good will it had accumulated in WW1, WW2 and the Cold War. Smashing down a tiny country would do a lot of reputation damage. Contrary to what rednecks believe and the public propaganda tells you, the US is extremely dependent on the rest of the world. Luckily, it goes both ways for most powerful nations on the globe, so there's no real danger of escalation, but if you insist on these "we could kill them" delusions, do keep in mind that if the rest of the world would ever band together and cut all trade to the US, you would have lights out within a month.
Slashdot Mirror
IE is pretty much a zombie browser outside the corporate environment.
I run a couple online games and other sites. My browser stats:
Chrome
Firefox
Safari
(unknown)
Opera
Android browser
IE
Mozilla
BlackBerry
other
IE makes up 0.4% of my visitors. I am honestly surprised every time I learn that someone is actually using it. (and no, it's not because I run some freakish Linux-fanpage or something, 75% of my visitors use windows, 17% OS X, just 1% Linux, the rest is mostly mobile).
Someone said it very well recently: Isn't it the most hostile-to-women thing you can imagine to treat them all the time as if they are not sexual creatures, too? To claim that every time women and sex meet, there has to be something evil going on?
Advertisers need to STFU as they are the reason all this happened.
+100
Anyone who listens to the people who brought all this about is either stupid or corrupt or both. The entire discussion should happen with the advertisers excluded.
I want DNT. I want it to be enabled by default on all browsers. And I want ignoring DNT to carry a fine large enough that intentionally doing it large-scale will bancrupt your company. And I want that kind of intentionally ignoring it carry criminal penalties for the C-level executives.
Because that's the only way short of shooting them that they'll learn to behave like responsible members of a community instead of psychopathic parasites.
train them
ROFL.
We've been trying to train users for over 20 years. If there were even the slightest bit of merit to user security trainings (aside from selling courses and consulting hours, of course) don't you think something would've come out of it by now?
People already write passwords down, and re-use passwords.
I know. Less than a year ago I've given a keynote on this topic.
But do you want to push this undesired behaviour even more, or blame the user, or realize that humans behave in certain ways for certain reasons, and eliminate the root cause (free buzzword to sell this idea to management included).
Of course it matters what my system allows. Just because there is a theoretical possibility of a different attack vector does not mean I should leave the front door unlocked.
If it solely relies on passwords, it is insecure.
Nonsense, like all blanket statements in IT Security. It depends on your thread model, the required protection level and the external factors.
Password length matters to brute force attacks - and if your application allows a brute force attack to happen, it is broken already, insecure by design.
Enforcing longer passwords will not improve security for real-life cases. Enforcing more cryptic passwords will actually reduce security for real-life cases. Why? Because people will need to type slower, making shoulder-surfing easier. People will start to write passwords down, and they will re-use passwords more often.
You can't solve this issue with simple solutions like "use longer passwords". The only thing that will do is make "password1234" the new standard instead of just "password".
Whether she's doing a good job has relatively little to do with any titles she might now not hold any more.
Oh yes, it does. She's the minister for education and science.
I could accept someone in that position who doesn't have an academic title. It would be a bit odd, but hey, we've had defense ministers who didn't go to the army (back when military service was still compulsory).
But one who had acquired an undeserved academic title through intentional deceit? Sorry, that's a slap in the face for everyone who worked hard on their titles, and such a person can not be the one in charge of the educational system and academia.
No, if you actually follow the university announcement and the evidence, it turns out that her actions are considerably worse than Guttenbergs.
He was lousy even in his plagiarism. She intentionally rephrased and covered up where the copied from. Guttenberg did a copy&paste job - Schavan copied and then rephrased so if you would put the phrase into a search engine, it would come up empty. But she only changed words, she didn't add any original thoughts.
That's plagiarism at its worst - intentional and deceitful.
Ok, so basically the reviews are ripping it to shreds. Just re-read the last few sentences of the summary. That's the nice way of saying "This is total trash, stay away from it. I don't know who would want one, because either you need a tablet, or a notebook, and this one tries to be both and fails at both."
You also missed a 2nd part.
The real-world problem with the simple solutions is that a corporation will spend a few millions on lawyers and other professionals to find a perfectly legal loophole.
No problem, you say, we'll close it.
They will find the next one. We will close it. Repeat a few hundred times. And then you end up with the exact kind of complicated stuff that you wanted to do away with with your simple solution.
I know what I'm talking about, I've spent 6 years of my life negotiating and writing contracts for partners with opposed interests. You end up discussing individual words for ten minutes.
You seem to be living in a different world. :-)
I would be very, very surprised if Surface really works the easy way you hint at. Nothing MS manufactured has ever really worked that way, despite them advertising same for 20+ years. The real world doesn't. Not that the decision makers care, for them it's simply something the IT department has to solve, they'll be handed a device that has already been configured and set up.
Apple's game is a different one. If they allow an exception for MS, the next 10 tech giants will be knocking on their door before the first office apps is sold. Now look at Apple's revenue breakdown and you realize that iTunes sales are a pretty impressive part of it. In fact, iTunes revenue alone dwarves most other tech companies.
As for hacks and apps. Let me sum up with a simple fact. I happen to be the CEO of a small company. The CRM and ERP software my company uses does have an iOS app.
I didn't remember who said it, but it is an excellent piece of wisdom:
All the simple solutions have been found.
If someone comes up with a solution to a current-world problem that can be explained in a few sentences, I tend to become very, very sceptical. The world largely isn't that simple anymore, and we have entire professions whose jobs basically is to find loopholes.
but I will never get passed the fact it was consumer based tech they have thrived on and not enterprise./quote
Exactly.
MS has risen on three factors: Games, Office and OEM lock-in. People bought windows PCs because there wasn't really anything else available unless you were a geek, they wanted to play games and it was what they were used to from work.
Apple thinks the world will shortly work the other way around. Almost everyone in the west now grows up with a computer in the home, and a smartphone and maybe a tablet. Games are on mobile now. The next generation will enter the business world being used to smartphones and tablets - Android and iOS. And they will notice just how much windows sucks and demand something better.
It's not going to be a quick change. But I do agree with the idea that whatever the enterprise runs won't be running the market anymore. It'll be many years until the corporate behemoths shift, but Apple has enough money in the bank to simply wait, keeping up the soft but persistent pushing.
And Google never wanted to displace windows, just make it a commodity. Sure, MS might go on making an OS and selling it, for all Google cares. They just want the revenue coming from elsewhere - that they are giving away Android is a clear message saying: We think the market value of an OS is roughly zero.
If I were MS, that would have me a lot more afraid than Apple, which is still selling its OS.
Windows 8 has a real chance at beating iOS/Android in the enterprise,
Bwuahahahaha.... that was ... oh... wait... you are serious?
Windows 8 will succeed not because it's any good, but because it has to - MS has a lot riding on this one, more than on ME or Vista or the other dogs. They will spend billions to make it successful, but it doesn't stand a chance at beating competition that is actually somewhat good.
You can buy market share. But you can't buy being good.
Word 5.1 was highly regarded as the last "good version" of Word on the Mac for many years.
Not just Mac. I actually liked the DOS version a lot, and all the windows versions coming after it didn't compare.
Another US problem I don't understand. Over here in Germany, it's not a problem and never has been. The only calls of this kind I sometimes get are for surveys, and by "sometimes" I mean on the order of one or two a year.
So, just an idea, maybe look at what you guys do differently from everyone else in the world and then, just this once, drop the "not invented here" blinders and do what works?
Btw I don't like copywright but this is just wrong
Complain to the US, they broke the rules first.
You see, this is how a legal and punishment system actually works. If I break your arm, the punishment will be a fine and/or jail time - neither of which have anything to do with broken arms. My wallet didn't do anything to you and neither did my bank account.
Same thing on the country level. The punishment is not identical to the crime. It's been like that in civilized societies ever since we grew old enough to realize that "an eye for an eye", even though it might have been a step forward at its time, is still pretty damn stupid.
Some more background info for us non-US readers, please?
I don't see the issue here. I've bought my iPhone and then got a cell phone contract for them that didn't include a phone, so no subsidies and no unlocking required.
If the carrier pays the phone for you (and you pay him back over time) then they seem to have a legit interest that you don't say "thanks" and take your business elsewhere before the refinancing time is up.
So what's the issue here?
How is changing firmware different?
Because it's digital, and common sense has been thrown out for digital goods.
You see, copyright used to come into play when you copied something. As long as you only used it, it didn't matter. The book you bought, you could do with as you pleased, read or not, write comments into the margins, rip out pages and re-arrange them in an order you prefer, whatever.
Only when you made copies of your Romeo & Juliet where the death scene is at the beginning and the rest follows with the word "Zombie" inserted here and there would you be in violation of copyright (well, not really due to that one having expired, but you get the point).
You'd assume it would be the same for a digital book, but it's not. Someone who should be in an asylum instead of a court room decided that in order to read a digital, you have to load it from storage into memory, which is making a copy and thus copyright applies which means the author can dictate terms.
That's why you don't own the firmware, and you don't even own the copy of the firmware on your phone, but if the manufacturer were to, say, distribute the firmware as a print copy the way very very early computer magazines once included software you could transcribe into your computer, then you could do whatever you want with the paper copy, including changing it.
If you think that's crazy, conf. "asylum" above.
Is that typical of Anonymous, or of humans in general? Few people care about something until either someone convinces them or it affects them.
Since 1980 people have pretty much consistently voted for more government benefits, bigger government programs and whatever else the government says it needs to increase payments to people. We have gotten ourselves into a financial mess with a president promoting lower taxes and a Congress that spends as much as possible to keep the gravy train going.
What a surprise. Politicians all for making more things political, the government being pro big-government. Who'd have thought?
The primary purpose of any administration is self-perpetuation. The government is no different. Their primary purpose is to pile up more stuff into their "mine" pile. After all, who would put themselves out of their job? These people are just humans, too. And not necessarily the best kind (because the good ones won't survive internal party politics).
Today we are trying to follow a "You broke it, you own it" philosophy and it is taking time - because the countries are far less stable than either Germany or Japan were at the end of WWII where we had to follow a similar course.
Nonsense. Stability has nothing to do with it.
Both Germany and Japan had two other important things in common that places like Iraq or Afghanistan don't:
a) They were highly industrialized countries. This has all sorts of economic and social effects, but most importantly makes rebuilding them easier, faster and more easily managed.
b) They were western (Germany) or west-oriented (Japan) countries. Rebuilding them did not subject them to an entirely foreign culture they rejected and considered evil.
this grand standing and attempt to use "secret" information to extract concession is at best juvenile, at worst a power game. Neither of which serves to advance justice and equality.
The problem is that the other side in this conflict is equally juvenile and power-gamey, namely the government. The whole "War on Whatever We Dislike This Decade" is so pubescent, it makes sane people sick to watch. The executive's approach of making life hell for people they have an axe to grind with, instead of following justice is straight from the school yard.
If they didn't have tanks, we'd be laughing at them.
Always these purely theoretical "we can destroy them" delusions. *sigh*
First of all, I don't know where you get the 90% figure from, a quick Google shows other numbers. Wikipedia has a detailed article putting the figure at around 60% GDP and 50% of the jobs. But those are very old numbers. But it's all tourism, not just US tourism.
Second, the US is quick at hurting other nations, but not so quick at hurting potential voters. Quick, name three sanctions or other non-military attacks on foreign nations that the US has conducted in, say, the past 20 years that the voters have even noticed.
Third, the US has already gambled away most of the good will it had accumulated in WW1, WW2 and the Cold War. Smashing down a tiny country would do a lot of reputation damage. Contrary to what rednecks believe and the public propaganda tells you, the US is extremely dependent on the rest of the world. Luckily, it goes both ways for most powerful nations on the globe, so there's no real danger of escalation, but if you insist on these "we could kill them" delusions, do keep in mind that if the rest of the world would ever band together and cut all trade to the US, you would have lights out within a month.
Do that with an NK flag instead and over San Francisco and tell me how it went.