I would rather not have net neutrality and be given the option of buying from my provider "a la carte" channel packages which do NOT count against my data usage. You just want unlimited data for downloading warez.
Just hope you never plan on using any content provider outside of your ISP's sphere of control, in that case. Cuz they will make competing services unusable on their networks without net neutrality. You do know that, right? Can't see that hole you're digging? Get the hell out of it then.
Your tech support call would go something this: Me: I'm having trouble getting netflix to work. Them: Sorry sir, it must be a problem with netflix, we can't help you. We can however sell you a new subscription to our guaranteed to work streaming service that's not as good as netflix, but it'll stream very good for you, because we're throttling netflix into the dirt so everyone uses our services instead! You could try another internet provider, oh, sorry, we're the only one in this area cuz we bought all our competitors.
They are probably going after people who can't quite imagine not having TV channels and only watching on demand. People not quite ready to cut the cord, and who will thus pay 4x the going rate.
Yeah, that makes about as much sense as selling horses and wagons when we're all driving cars. It's bad business, targeting a type of consumer that is dying off or moving on to the modern world of streaming programming, on demand.
This is just silliness. The trend is very much toward being able to pick and choose what shows we want to watch, when we want to watch them. Preferably commercial-free. (I pay don't even mind paying for commercial-free content, I already pay Hulu the extra $4/mo.)
The idea of 'channels', 'stations', 'broadcasters', and someone else picking out the programming we might be interested in going the way of the floppy drive. Telling someone like me you're offering 100 channels is nonsense and useless information. I'm more interested in what programming/content there will be to choose from, and if I can't choose, not going to subscribe, end of story.
Bad business choice on AT&T's part. Will never make money. Will definitely not lure 'cable cutters.' We're a whole new breed of content consumer, unlike the cable-television junkie of old.
Gift cards use such a bad hash algorithm that you can guess the numbers to rewrite them with, and have them actually work? Seems like 99% of the time you'd be guessing a number that had never been activated or had already been used up, unless these things are much stupider than I think they are.
If I was designing gift cards, I'd just encode a GUID onto each one. The chances for a duplicate are rather astronomical.
Why? That's like saying nuclear weapons on the battlefield was a given once our tech started to support it. But, thankfully, more rational heads have prevailed and they are not commonplace on the battlefield. I actually think that drones are just as dangerous on the battlefield as nuclear weapons launched from missile silos. The "boom" isn't as terrifying to see but, the effect is the same on a smaller scale: Armchair warfare. War without risk of causalities to both sides isn't war. In fact, it's basically terrorism.
Sorry to reply twice, but also wanted to bring up the point, that through out human history, every technology we seem to come up with tends to get used in warfare. Just some more recent examples: Automobiles -> Tanks. Rocketry -> Missiles. Flight -> Fighter Planes, Bombers. Naval building -> Larger, better warships, submarines.
Hell the moment we figured out how to sharpen something into a weapon, we started killing with it.
Why? That's like saying nuclear weapons on the battlefield was a given once our tech started to support it. But, thankfully, more rational heads have prevailed and they are not commonplace on the battlefield. I actually think that drones are just as dangerous on the battlefield as nuclear weapons launched from missile silos. The "boom" isn't as terrifying to see but, the effect is the same on a smaller scale: Armchair warfare. War without risk of causalities to both sides isn't war. In fact, it's basically terrorism.
And in fact, nuclear weapons were used the moment they were viable weapons. Twice in fact. Did you forget about that? We stopped using them because we decided they are too destructive. They're not really a viable weapon because they're too powerful, and leave nuclear fallout. Not very useful if you're hoping to capture enemy cities, infrastructure and resources.
Robotics on the other hand doesn't seem to raise to the level of horrific that nuclear weapons do. They also don't leave fallout.
In short, comparing nuclear weapons to weaponized remote controlled robotics isn't really quite a fair comparison.
Robotics on the battlefield was a given once our tech started to support it.
I mean look at that show BattleBots on ABC. And these weaponized remote control 'bots' had rules about what sorts of weaponry was allowed, weight limits.
Cool show by the way.
But my question goes something like this: Does the evolution of robotics in warfare, does it lead to using robotics to kill human enemies, or does it evolve to where we start using robotic warfare in a mutual type thing and take humans completely out of it? I mean look at the US aerial drones, we've taken the human partially out of this robotic form of warfare. The pilot is in no danger of harm, and is becoming less and less needed as AI gets better to the point we going to be able to say, punch in coordinates and time and tell our drone to launch a missile at that coordinate and at that time.
Need to start investing on developing a serious MMI for VR to go ANYWHERE.
In it's current state, it's at best a novelty.
When I can put on a VR headsit and my body just lounges in a chair while I explore some virtual world, then I'll be interested. This business of hooking up sensors and crap to your hands and feet and flailing about in a room like some fool? No.
When putting on VR headseat makes you appear to go into a coma to everyone around you while you have a grand time, then we're there.
I bought this Dell XPS 8300 about 4 or 5 years ago... and it still does everything I ask of it, without issue. I upgraded to SSD, and have gone through a couple GPU's, but the system itself is a rock. Of course you're going to see a decline in sales when systems you buy today aren't really any better than ones we were getting 5 years ago. Feels like we've hit a ceiling or something for desktops. And currently, it's not an issue, cuz what we have is running what we want without issue. Age old saying: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Throw smartphones into this mix, which provides a pretty impressive computer in a very small package, and many 'commoners' find the smartphone does everything they need, in terms of a personal computing device. These people not only don't want desktops, they don't need them. My phone runs some stuff just as fast as my desktop computer does!
There is an important distinction that needs to be made. One place it was monitor and another it says TV. Which is it?
These days, it really doesn't matter. Pretty much every TV has HDMI input and appropriate resolution for a monitor. TV just has extra bits for a remote and tuner. Both my 'monitors' are TV's, as in they have remote and tuner, but I just use HDMI input for my PC. Occasionally I'll watch TV on one of them.
I don't like that approach, because of the high risk of collateral damage. What if some of the "things" were things like traffic sign controllers or great-grandmother's heating blanket, or also regulated the propane flow in a barbecue grill? Unless you can only take out the bad part and leave the good part intact, I see risks.
Given our history with new technology going mainstream, it'll take a few front page level incidents involving these gadgets before people take their security (or lack there of) seriously.
Better solution: forbid the same company to be a connectivity provider and a content seller.
This is what really needs to happen. When ISP's are regulated into a neutral position, unable to financially gain from non-neutral policies, the internet will be better for it.
Forbid ISP's from diversifying entirely. You're an ISP and only an ISP, or you're not an ISP.
As annoying as regulation can be, it's definitely needed here. Give these jokers an inch, and they'll run it a mile.
Network Cookies allow users to choose which home or mobile traffic should get favored delivery, while putting network operators and content providers on a level playing field in catering to such user-signaled preferences.
This is not what network operators and content providers want. They want control over what users can do and see. Also, they don't want a level playing field. That's why we're seeing all this dancing on the line of 'net neutrality', folks are testing what they can get away with. It's a novel idea, but I personally doubt it'll ever leave the 'drawing board.'
You're talking about end users. Something pops up they just click whatever makes it go away. You think they pay attention to that?
They would if Microsoft hadn't spent 10 years training them otherwise.
Confirmation dialogs are a good thing that has been destroyed by overexposure.
I think ads have contributed heavily to this training, too. People see something pop up they just want it to go away. As much as some of us would love to blame Microsoft for all our woes, the ads themselves bear a heavy responsibility for that training.
Good luck with that, just hope you never get targeted by the cops. Note that you need not do anything wrong or illegal to be a target of civil forfeiture. Just carry around cash...
I have no sympathy for idiots transporting large sums of cash. You're just an idiot if you do this. If you need to make a large transaction, get a frickin' cashiers check. Frankly, you're lucky if the cops are the ones who seize the moolah and let you walk. A criminal would shoot you dead, take your cash, your car and your phone.
In my experience, Windows 10 has been a good operating system. It's only real drawback is all the negative PR it's been getting, some of it deserved, some of it not. The OS feels and runs pretty much the same as Windows 7, beneath the 'new start menu', all the familiar things are in there. The Anniversary update make the new 'Settings' a bit more useful, but I still feel like the old control panel is still the best way to tweak things. I run a myriad of programs on my Windows box, including Visual Studio, cygwin and cygwin's X server, VMware, Steam and a plethora of games. All of these Windows 10 has run without any issues.
I refurbish old laptops at my place of employment. I find that Windows 10 is more responsive and runs generally faster on older hardware, such as 2GB RAM Intel Core2 laptops. Windows 7 really seems to crawl on such machines, where 10 seems to deal with the limited system better.
Hands down, the Update mechanism for Windows 10 is much much faster than Windows 7, but that's easily attributed to the fact 10 hasn't gotten several years of updates slapped onto it. It's not without flaw in this area, I've encountered some issues with the forced update in Windows 10. In particular one model of laptop I had many duplicates of has video hardware that the latest drivers for cause it to malfunction, requiring me to use a tool to prohibit an update from being installed, and that was a bit of a bear because the timing of getting the update removed, and firing up the tool to 'hide' it had to be just right or Windows would just reinstall the update. I found that annoying.
I can easily understand the justification for the 'forced update' mechanism, and while I might find it a little annoying, I think it's a good thing. We've for too long allowed clueless users to control this stuff and we as IT professionals have to deal with the fallout. Malware getting into machines that should have been patched, but the user postponed updates, or turned them off all together. This was the right direction to take, updates are mandatory, for everyones protection. Malware not only hurts machines it's on, in many cases, it hurts everyone when botnets are used to attack other services and servers, or send out unwanted spam mail. I think Microsoft did the right thing here.
As for the telemetry and 'strongly encouraged update to Windows 10 campaign', I think Microsoft really shot themselves in the foot with that. It's definitely a MUCH better OS than Windows 8/8.1, and I often have people tell me they heard 'Windows 10 is bad.' It's not really bad, Microsoft just made it look bad with their upgrade campaign. I think if Microsoft hadn't pushed that campaign so aggressively, this OS would be heralded much like Windows 7 was. Back to telemetry, this is a place where I think the tech industry's commentators have cast an unfairly bad limelight on Windows 10. Android does just as much telemetry if not more and no one seems to mind. It's just the progression of our technology that most applications and now operating systems like to collect data. People freak out their information is being stolen, but I think that's silly, the data is most likely anonymized and shoved into databases with billions of other data points from other computers. Ultimately I think it's not being use nefariously, rather it's being used to help engineers and developers understand better how their software is operating in a myriad of environments, and what people are commonly using it for.
As a developer, networking specialist, and computer refurbisher, I overall give Windows 10 a thumbs-up. It does what I need it to do, and doesn't get in my way. That's my experience.
The point of signing the extensions is so that some compromised or malicious developer doesn't put malware into an extension's update stream; which can be (and has been) a huge problem, since by default extensions auto-update. So, disallowing unsigned extensions is a security feature. If it turns out Mozilla will be nefarious about it, then you can always recompile Firefox from source with the mandatory signing thing cut out, or go to some fork. Right now I don't think it's a bad move.
I find it a bit hypocritical that people are "ooh ahhh, nice!" for mandatory signing of Firefox addons, but scream bloody murder when Windows 10 requires mandatory signing for drivers. WTF computer people? Why is it ok for one vendor to behave like this, and not for another?
Personally I don't care either way, but I'm just sitting here thinking, "WTF? Make up your minds, is mandatory signing good or bad?"
I doubt they needed some Random Commenter on Slashdot, or even game studio co-founder, to suggest outlandish subversions of law. High level management seems to at times revel in coming up with stupid ways to screw over others, rather than focus on just making a better product everyone begs to use. If you've thought of it, you can pretty much be sure they already thought of it too.
Ultimately, at least from my perspective, it seems like a bad idea for Microsoft to break someone elses stuff. Wouldn't that further promote SteamOS and migration of games away from Windows? That seems like shooting yourself in the foot to spite competition. Not saying Microsoft isn't short-sighted enough to do this, but you'd think they'd learn by now, their OS is already teetering on the edge of irrelevance, breaking other people's stuff to 'promote' using their stuff seems like really bad business at this point. Android is very well poised to jump into the desktop arena, Microsoft needs to be very careful right now, IMHO.
Android now has something Windows has enjoyed for the past two decades: Most people can operate a Windows computer. And now, most people can operate an Android phone or tablet. It's not a very big jump for Android to invade desktop space.
I'd like to know what evidence there is to support this, rather than words on a page ranting about perception. Not that I don't agree caution, it's one thing to make big noise and proclaim persecution when none exists. Show the evidence and remove doubt about Microsoft's intention.
This. It's a pretty big accusation, and as a regular gamer who uses Steam pretty much every day, I haven't seen any brokenness. Microsoft does have a history of doing that sort of thing to competitors, but I haven't seen anything yet.
You can't trust anybody, not even Tor. I'm afraid this one looks like a lost cause. I wouldn't use the damn thing.
Which is precisely the goal of tampering and interfering with TOR network operations. To cast doubt upon it, to make it less attractive. I really don't think it has much to do with wanting to snoop, as it is to make people think they're being snooped on and to destablize the service entirely. Seems like it's fairly effective so far too!
This is a beautiful piece of social engineering by those who want TOR to go away. Well played.
Make it so that the person placing the call potentially pays to call me. I get to set the price. I agree to split that price with the phone company. The phone company agrees to play an automated message to the original caller informing them of the price and giving the caller the option to to complete the call or not. When my phone actually rings I get the option to press a key to waive the charge. Fun and entertainment ensue.
This is almost a good idea. What we actually need is a 'white list' on phone contacts who are allowed to call. Anyone not on the white list goes to voice mail without disturbing you. Could possibly offer the caller the option to pay $1 to get through. Seems like this could easily be implemented on the handset, no need to bother the phone company. Can Android apps intercept phone calls and route them? App idea for someone to exploit if they have the know how and if the capabilities are there.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously not, since you can't record Netflix either.
I don't need to 'record' Netflix because -
a) There are already no commercials (so don't need to skip over them)
b) I can already watch what / when I want, so no need to time-shift.
And despite all that, I heard Netflix has something in the works to permit downloading content onto your device so you can watch offline.
I would rather not have net neutrality and be given the option of buying from my provider "a la carte" channel packages which do NOT count against my data usage. You just want unlimited data for downloading warez.
Just hope you never plan on using any content provider outside of your ISP's sphere of control, in that case. Cuz they will make competing services unusable on their networks without net neutrality. You do know that, right? Can't see that hole you're digging? Get the hell out of it then.
Your tech support call would go something this:
Me: I'm having trouble getting netflix to work.
Them: Sorry sir, it must be a problem with netflix, we can't help you. We can however sell you a new subscription to our guaranteed to work streaming service that's not as good as netflix, but it'll stream very good for you, because we're throttling netflix into the dirt so everyone uses our services instead! You could try another internet provider, oh, sorry, we're the only one in this area cuz we bought all our competitors.
Welcome to the world of no net neutrality.
They are probably going after people who can't quite imagine not having TV channels and only watching on demand. People not quite ready to cut the cord, and who will thus pay 4x the going rate.
Yeah, that makes about as much sense as selling horses and wagons when we're all driving cars. It's bad business, targeting a type of consumer that is dying off or moving on to the modern world of streaming programming, on demand.
This is just silliness. The trend is very much toward being able to pick and choose what shows we want to watch, when we want to watch them. Preferably commercial-free. (I pay don't even mind paying for commercial-free content, I already pay Hulu the extra $4/mo.)
The idea of 'channels', 'stations', 'broadcasters', and someone else picking out the programming we might be interested in going the way of the floppy drive. Telling someone like me you're offering 100 channels is nonsense and useless information. I'm more interested in what programming/content there will be to choose from, and if I can't choose, not going to subscribe, end of story.
Bad business choice on AT&T's part. Will never make money. Will definitely not lure 'cable cutters.' We're a whole new breed of content consumer, unlike the cable-television junkie of old.
Gift cards use such a bad hash algorithm that you can guess the numbers to rewrite them with, and have them actually work? Seems like 99% of the time you'd be guessing a number that had never been activated or had already been used up, unless these things are much stupider than I think they are.
If I was designing gift cards, I'd just encode a GUID onto each one. The chances for a duplicate are rather astronomical.
Why? That's like saying nuclear weapons on the battlefield was a given once our tech started to support it. But, thankfully, more rational heads have prevailed and they are not commonplace on the battlefield. I actually think that drones are just as dangerous on the battlefield as nuclear weapons launched from missile silos. The "boom" isn't as terrifying to see but, the effect is the same on a smaller scale: Armchair warfare. War without risk of causalities to both sides isn't war. In fact, it's basically terrorism.
Sorry to reply twice, but also wanted to bring up the point, that through out human history, every technology we seem to come up with tends to get used in warfare. Just some more recent examples: Automobiles -> Tanks. Rocketry -> Missiles. Flight -> Fighter Planes, Bombers. Naval building -> Larger, better warships, submarines.
Hell the moment we figured out how to sharpen something into a weapon, we started killing with it.
Why? That's like saying nuclear weapons on the battlefield was a given once our tech started to support it. But, thankfully, more rational heads have prevailed and they are not commonplace on the battlefield. I actually think that drones are just as dangerous on the battlefield as nuclear weapons launched from missile silos. The "boom" isn't as terrifying to see but, the effect is the same on a smaller scale: Armchair warfare. War without risk of causalities to both sides isn't war. In fact, it's basically terrorism.
And in fact, nuclear weapons were used the moment they were viable weapons. Twice in fact. Did you forget about that? We stopped using them because we decided they are too destructive. They're not really a viable weapon because they're too powerful, and leave nuclear fallout. Not very useful if you're hoping to capture enemy cities, infrastructure and resources.
Robotics on the other hand doesn't seem to raise to the level of horrific that nuclear weapons do. They also don't leave fallout.
In short, comparing nuclear weapons to weaponized remote controlled robotics isn't really quite a fair comparison.
Robotics on the battlefield was a given once our tech started to support it.
I mean look at that show BattleBots on ABC. And these weaponized remote control 'bots' had rules about what sorts of weaponry was allowed, weight limits.
Cool show by the way.
But my question goes something like this: Does the evolution of robotics in warfare, does it lead to using robotics to kill human enemies, or does it evolve to where we start using robotic warfare in a mutual type thing and take humans completely out of it? I mean look at the US aerial drones, we've taken the human partially out of this robotic form of warfare. The pilot is in no danger of harm, and is becoming less and less needed as AI gets better to the point we going to be able to say, punch in coordinates and time and tell our drone to launch a missile at that coordinate and at that time.
I wonder how long until we get to something like A Taste of Armageddon.
Need to start investing on developing a serious MMI for VR to go ANYWHERE.
In it's current state, it's at best a novelty.
When I can put on a VR headsit and my body just lounges in a chair while I explore some virtual world, then I'll be interested. This business of hooking up sensors and crap to your hands and feet and flailing about in a room like some fool? No.
When putting on VR headseat makes you appear to go into a coma to everyone around you while you have a grand time, then we're there.
I bought this Dell XPS 8300 about 4 or 5 years ago... and it still does everything I ask of it, without issue. I upgraded to SSD, and have gone through a couple GPU's, but the system itself is a rock. Of course you're going to see a decline in sales when systems you buy today aren't really any better than ones we were getting 5 years ago. Feels like we've hit a ceiling or something for desktops. And currently, it's not an issue, cuz what we have is running what we want without issue. Age old saying: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Throw smartphones into this mix, which provides a pretty impressive computer in a very small package, and many 'commoners' find the smartphone does everything they need, in terms of a personal computing device. These people not only don't want desktops, they don't need them. My phone runs some stuff just as fast as my desktop computer does!
There is an important distinction that needs to be made. One place it was monitor and another it says TV. Which is it?
These days, it really doesn't matter. Pretty much every TV has HDMI input and appropriate resolution for a monitor. TV just has extra bits for a remote and tuner. Both my 'monitors' are TV's, as in they have remote and tuner, but I just use HDMI input for my PC. Occasionally I'll watch TV on one of them.
"Do unto others before they do it to you."
I don't like that approach, because of the high risk of collateral damage. What if some of the "things" were things like traffic sign controllers or great-grandmother's heating blanket, or also regulated the propane flow in a barbecue grill? Unless you can only take out the bad part and leave the good part intact, I see risks.
Given our history with new technology going mainstream, it'll take a few front page level incidents involving these gadgets before people take their security (or lack there of) seriously.
Better solution: forbid the same company to be a connectivity provider and a content seller.
This is what really needs to happen. When ISP's are regulated into a neutral position, unable to financially gain from non-neutral policies, the internet will be better for it.
Forbid ISP's from diversifying entirely. You're an ISP and only an ISP, or you're not an ISP.
As annoying as regulation can be, it's definitely needed here. Give these jokers an inch, and they'll run it a mile.
Network Cookies allow users to choose which home or mobile traffic should get favored delivery, while putting network operators and content providers on a level playing field in catering to such user-signaled preferences.
This is not what network operators and content providers want. They want control over what users can do and see. Also, they don't want a level playing field. That's why we're seeing all this dancing on the line of 'net neutrality', folks are testing what they can get away with. It's a novel idea, but I personally doubt it'll ever leave the 'drawing board.'
You're talking about end users. Something pops up they just click whatever makes it go away. You think they pay attention to that?
They would if Microsoft hadn't spent 10 years training them otherwise.
Confirmation dialogs are a good thing that has been destroyed by overexposure.
I think ads have contributed heavily to this training, too. People see something pop up they just want it to go away. As much as some of us would love to blame Microsoft for all our woes, the ads themselves bear a heavy responsibility for that training.
"It then prompts users for administrative rights..."
Why would you give admin rights to something you didn't explicitly download?
You're talking about end users. Something pops up they just click whatever makes it go away. You think they pay attention to that?
Good luck with that, just hope you never get targeted by the cops. Note that you need not do anything wrong or illegal to be a target of civil forfeiture. Just carry around cash...
I have no sympathy for idiots transporting large sums of cash. You're just an idiot if you do this. If you need to make a large transaction, get a frickin' cashiers check. Frankly, you're lucky if the cops are the ones who seize the moolah and let you walk. A criminal would shoot you dead, take your cash, your car and your phone.
And once again, Ad Blocking is justified. Those darn ads can be outright dangerous, which computer people have been saying for years.
Simply put, if companies can't be bothered to vet the ads they're serving, we can't be bother viewing any ads at all. Clean it up, already.
Captain Obvious award for Alex Ionescu, the chief architect at cybersecurity company Crowdstrike. Congratulations!
In my experience, Windows 10 has been a good operating system. It's only real drawback is all the negative PR it's been getting, some of it deserved, some of it not. The OS feels and runs pretty much the same as Windows 7, beneath the 'new start menu', all the familiar things are in there. The Anniversary update make the new 'Settings' a bit more useful, but I still feel like the old control panel is still the best way to tweak things. I run a myriad of programs on my Windows box, including Visual Studio, cygwin and cygwin's X server, VMware, Steam and a plethora of games. All of these Windows 10 has run without any issues.
I refurbish old laptops at my place of employment. I find that Windows 10 is more responsive and runs generally faster on older hardware, such as 2GB RAM Intel Core2 laptops. Windows 7 really seems to crawl on such machines, where 10 seems to deal with the limited system better.
Hands down, the Update mechanism for Windows 10 is much much faster than Windows 7, but that's easily attributed to the fact 10 hasn't gotten several years of updates slapped onto it. It's not without flaw in this area, I've encountered some issues with the forced update in Windows 10. In particular one model of laptop I had many duplicates of has video hardware that the latest drivers for cause it to malfunction, requiring me to use a tool to prohibit an update from being installed, and that was a bit of a bear because the timing of getting the update removed, and firing up the tool to 'hide' it had to be just right or Windows would just reinstall the update. I found that annoying.
I can easily understand the justification for the 'forced update' mechanism, and while I might find it a little annoying, I think it's a good thing. We've for too long allowed clueless users to control this stuff and we as IT professionals have to deal with the fallout. Malware getting into machines that should have been patched, but the user postponed updates, or turned them off all together. This was the right direction to take, updates are mandatory, for everyones protection. Malware not only hurts machines it's on, in many cases, it hurts everyone when botnets are used to attack other services and servers, or send out unwanted spam mail. I think Microsoft did the right thing here.
As for the telemetry and 'strongly encouraged update to Windows 10 campaign', I think Microsoft really shot themselves in the foot with that. It's definitely a MUCH better OS than Windows 8/8.1, and I often have people tell me they heard 'Windows 10 is bad.' It's not really bad, Microsoft just made it look bad with their upgrade campaign. I think if Microsoft hadn't pushed that campaign so aggressively, this OS would be heralded much like Windows 7 was. Back to telemetry, this is a place where I think the tech industry's commentators have cast an unfairly bad limelight on Windows 10. Android does just as much telemetry if not more and no one seems to mind. It's just the progression of our technology that most applications and now operating systems like to collect data. People freak out their information is being stolen, but I think that's silly, the data is most likely anonymized and shoved into databases with billions of other data points from other computers. Ultimately I think it's not being use nefariously, rather it's being used to help engineers and developers understand better how their software is operating in a myriad of environments, and what people are commonly using it for.
As a developer, networking specialist, and computer refurbisher, I overall give Windows 10 a thumbs-up. It does what I need it to do, and doesn't get in my way. That's my experience.
The point of signing the extensions is so that some compromised or malicious developer doesn't put malware into an extension's update stream; which can be (and has been) a huge problem, since by default extensions auto-update. So, disallowing unsigned extensions is a security feature. If it turns out Mozilla will be nefarious about it, then you can always recompile Firefox from source with the mandatory signing thing cut out, or go to some fork. Right now I don't think it's a bad move.
I find it a bit hypocritical that people are "ooh ahhh, nice!" for mandatory signing of Firefox addons, but scream bloody murder when Windows 10 requires mandatory signing for drivers. WTF computer people? Why is it ok for one vendor to behave like this, and not for another?
Personally I don't care either way, but I'm just sitting here thinking, "WTF? Make up your minds, is mandatory signing good or bad?"
I doubt they needed some Random Commenter on Slashdot, or even game studio co-founder, to suggest outlandish subversions of law. High level management seems to at times revel in coming up with stupid ways to screw over others, rather than focus on just making a better product everyone begs to use. If you've thought of it, you can pretty much be sure they already thought of it too.
Ultimately, at least from my perspective, it seems like a bad idea for Microsoft to break someone elses stuff. Wouldn't that further promote SteamOS and migration of games away from Windows? That seems like shooting yourself in the foot to spite competition. Not saying Microsoft isn't short-sighted enough to do this, but you'd think they'd learn by now, their OS is already teetering on the edge of irrelevance, breaking other people's stuff to 'promote' using their stuff seems like really bad business at this point. Android is very well poised to jump into the desktop arena, Microsoft needs to be very careful right now, IMHO.
Android now has something Windows has enjoyed for the past two decades: Most people can operate a Windows computer. And now, most people can operate an Android phone or tablet. It's not a very big jump for Android to invade desktop space.
I'd like to know what evidence there is to support this, rather than words on a page ranting about perception. Not that I don't agree caution, it's one thing to make big noise and proclaim persecution when none exists. Show the evidence and remove doubt about Microsoft's intention.
This. It's a pretty big accusation, and as a regular gamer who uses Steam pretty much every day, I haven't seen any brokenness. Microsoft does have a history of doing that sort of thing to competitors, but I haven't seen anything yet.
You can't trust anybody, not even Tor. I'm afraid this one looks like a lost cause. I wouldn't use the damn thing.
Which is precisely the goal of tampering and interfering with TOR network operations. To cast doubt upon it, to make it less attractive. I really don't think it has much to do with wanting to snoop, as it is to make people think they're being snooped on and to destablize the service entirely. Seems like it's fairly effective so far too!
This is a beautiful piece of social engineering by those who want TOR to go away. Well played.
Make it so that the person placing the call potentially pays to call me. I get to set the price. I agree to split that price with the phone company. The phone company agrees to play an automated message to the original caller informing them of the price and giving the caller the option to to complete the call or not. When my phone actually rings I get the option to press a key to waive the charge. Fun and entertainment ensue.
This is almost a good idea. What we actually need is a 'white list' on phone contacts who are allowed to call. Anyone not on the white list goes to voice mail without disturbing you. Could possibly offer the caller the option to pay $1 to get through. Seems like this could easily be implemented on the handset, no need to bother the phone company. Can Android apps intercept phone calls and route them? App idea for someone to exploit if they have the know how and if the capabilities are there.