It was better when it was left for dead. At least then it was left alone. Everything that Mozilla has touched since 2012 has turned to ashes. Actually, it was 2011 when they adopted Google's rapid release and versioning methodology on a project that it was neither technically nor culturally suited for. They broke extensions by the truck load with that little gem, and instead of slowing down and letting the extension system catch up, their solution was to write a script that automatically scanned their extensions and just disabled the ones which hadn't caught up yet. Now they are set to do it again with Thunderbird. They are just hell bent on shedding any technical merit or usability they have in favour of cramming UI changes and
The've been doing this since 2011. Mozilla has been quite content to shed any technical merit they had for almost any reason at all. It all started when they saw Chrome beginning to become successful, and immediately decided to emulate Google's development environment. They adopted Google's rapid release and versioning method on a project that was neither technically nor culturally suited for it. They broke extensions by the truck load with that little gem, and instead of slowing down and letting the extension system catch up, their solution was to write a script that automatically scanned their extensions and just disabled the ones which hadn't caught up yet. Then they went all hell bent on adopting major UI changes that were demonstrably unpopular by the majority of its user base. And if alienating the extensions authors wasn't enough, many of the UI changes destroyed themes on back-to-back-to-back releases. It reminds me of one of my country's more famous (and intensely divisive) prime ministers who, when he realized he'd alienated half my country, proceeded to give them the finger from his seat on a train as he was passing through their area. That's Mozilla. They go out of their way to alienate users, and then the ones who have stayed loyal they give the finger to with decisions like this.
All of this was in an attempt at emulating Chrome's burgeoning success. The problem is, they never figured out... you simply cannot surpass someone else by playing copycat on their methods. This is important so I'm going to say it again. Mozilla cannot copy Google and be better than Google. All they did with Firefox was alienate their existing user base in favour of a product that could never be quite as good at being Chrome as Chrome was. And now they are running headlong into inevitability again. See here for details.
The PaleMoon project has done for the browser what Mozilla should have done. It was originally a patch on an earlier FF ESR, they have since essentially departed from Firefox, though they still borrow some bits when it makes sense to do so. It's what Firefox should have been if they hadn't taken the detour into crazy six years ago. Maybe they can be convinced to do the same for Thunderbird.
Plus, like many devices, vendors tend to consider smart watches as the "gift that keeps on giving" them money. Everything requires you to send your data to them, and then depend on getting it back from them on their web site in their way, all the while being inundated with their offers and their promotions. The old school MP4 watches had more features - could watch a video on them, listen to music, read a book, or even record audio discreetly. You can still find them on Chinese web sites every so often. Recording audio, I can't tell you how many times I've been in a situation where I've wanted to record something where I couldn't get my phone out.
Back on track, though, we lost the first part of the war to keep our data. People are now getting fed up with it, and vendors aren't cluing in that for something to sell, it needs to offer discreet features that aren't just "opportunities" to give them ongoing service fees.
There's a coming war for my dinner plate? No, there really isn't. I'm from Alberta. I like my beef slapped on the ass and tossed on my plate, preferably still mooing. If it's cow farts that are going to destroy the earth, just let the end come. I'll be sitting down to my seasoned and seared pound and a half prime rib dinner when it arrives.
Gmail retrieves all remote content whether the email is opened or not, and then caches the resultant images (which isn't hard since they are all the same image with different filenames). When you open the email you are only seeing the cached image. Since all images are retrieved at the time Google's servers receive the email, there is no information the sender can get from that image retrieval.
Bitcoin, with the limitation is has on the final number which can be issued, has no real future. Governments are reluctant to legislate it right now for several reasons. One reason is because of the lobby of exchanges who are currently making a killing off it. The other is that legislators, as stiff and out of touch as they may seem on the outside, are quite well aware of the ability of this to go underground and they don't want that. However, once bitcoin's ability to increase is exhausted, it has no real future. Legislators will have no choice but to step in and either modify it, or ban it.
To see this, look at the best case scenario for bitcoin. Let's say that it is 100% successful and becomes the de facto world currency. Can you really have a world currency where a few individuals control a set percentage of the world wealth? Owning even one bitcoin in that scenario means you own one 21 millionth of the entire wealth of the world. Now think of those individuals and institutions that own chunks of this.
No, bitcoin cannot continue without an extension. The split that was going to happen was averted when greed got the better of common sense of those who were going to expand it. They think if they can just hold on, if they can just get it accepted by enough people, that they will have a shot at becoming fabulously nouveau riche - as in world-class monetary controlling rich. Not going to happen. The existing money structure will kill it from behind the scenes before this happens. You'll see a sudden spate of exchange breaches financial manipulations (or both) that make it volatile and end up tanking the value, then legislators will step in to protect the market from the failed experiment.
So your solution is that rather than using libraries in a project, that each project should rewrite support for that feature from scratch? And you think this is going to increase security? Dozens of implementations of feature X that are only tested as much as the single project that uses that code. Reimplementation after reimplementation, no one in one project looking at the code in a different project because they don't share any - it's all uniquely written.
Some code hasn't been looked at in a long time. Correct. There could be back doors. Correct. There could be vulnerabilities (intentional or not). Correct.
Every software project, open source included, will have vulnerabilities discovered. There will be scares and exploits of open source like any other software. But yes, you can expect open source to be better. Because:
1) Very few major open source projects have any contributions that occur in a vacuum. Multiple eyes see every patch and for the most part, those multiple eyes are most often from people in multiple organizations with multiple day jobs and multiple personal goals/agendas. Aligning enough people's agendas to get a back door in would be difficult for any major open source project. Intentional vulnerabilities would be easier, but still not trivial. This isn't 20 years ago, people actively look at each patch with an eye towards whether it is introducing a vulnerability. This model is diametrically opposite of any closed source offering, where contributions are by one organization and at the sole control of whomever holds the purse strings.
2) If a vulnerability is suspected anywhere, you (and literally everyone else on the planet) have the option and ability to examine the source at any time. When you do want to investigate any particular piece of open source software, you don't need to decompile or reverse engineer something to do it. You don't have to fight the software in order to test it.
There have been (and will continue to be) vulnerabilities exposed from older open source code written when there was less oversight and less strenuous security testing, but if you want to compare this to the number of exploits (and in some cases intentional back doors) that have come to light in, say, Windows, from ancient code that has thunked it's way down from Windows 3.1, the score isn't even close. And it's not like Microsoft is performing strenuous reviews of their old code - these vulnerabilities have come to light often only from outside researchers performing painstaking and arduous external testing and reverse engineering.
So while you are correct in that open source will never be free of bugs or exploits - it's still written by people, as much as the nut jobs still decry that hard AI is just around the corner. But yes, in this it is just plain better than closed source.
JJ Treks are good movies, but terrible Star Trek. He took the original series, movies, animated series, and a few books put them in a blender and hit Frappe. What pops out is Star Trek for people with no attention span - it's like Star Trek Anime. The action sequences are ok, and as a turn off your brain light sci fi, I have to admit they are enjoyable. But they aren't Star Trek. JJ did the same with Star Wars, just took the original stories and recycled them with little innovation and nothing new. It's sad to see Trek raped that way.
A smart phone isn't generally listening and broadcasting everything it hears for a few reasons. For one, you have to install an app and give it access to the microphone for that to happen. For another there are battery and network usage constraints. But yes, our phones are physically capable of it and we have only Google and Apple's assurance that they wouldn't record things to rely on.
Having a device which by its nature and intent is designed to listen to everything you say and broadcast it to an off-site server for "interpretation" is another quantum leap forward for invasiveness, and just because people have nibbled at the bait doesn't mean they need to take the whole hook line and sinker too.
I particularly am troubled by the whole usage of an offsite computer to interpret the voice data. Why can't the device do it? The popular misconception is that it's because of processing power. This is unlikely. The idea that Google is dedicating more server processing power to each device that is in use at any one moment than each of those individual devices could affordably themselves have? This isn't a processing power consideration. This is a design feature intended to get your microphone data in their control. I find it astounding that anyone would even consider this topology.
Because if it is extraterrestrial in origin, and it collected on the hull of the ISS after its (in geological/evolutionary time scales) incredibly brief sojourn in orbit, then the likelihood is almost certain that life on Earth was seeded this way. Which means terrestrial life is using DNA because the seeds use DNA.
That being said, the likelihood that this is extraterrestrial approaches zero based on:
Whatever the cosmonaut in question said about it "definitely not being there" before launch, there is no way this can be assured. Even if the outside of the module was (successfully) medically sterilized, was the inside of the vehicle it was transported in medically sterilized? Was it loaded in a clean room? Most ISS modules were orbited in a space shuttle - the payload bay of the space shuttle is not perfectly air tight. In fact, there was air venting to and from the payload bay (which was unfiltered) before, and during launch. The Proton-M payload bay (the PLF-BR-13305 and PLF-BR-15255 payload farings) were also not sterilized inside prior to launch.
There have been numerous spacewalks. Were all space suits sterilized before use? How about every tool ever used? How about every replacement part? Space suits use adiabatic cooling, are the (sweaty astronaut-stew of internal suit) gasses which are released from the inside of a space suit filtered for particulates of bacterial spore size?
There have been numerous incidents of internal air venting (for spacewalks and many other reasons) of unfiltered air.
There have been innumerable other satellite launches that have released micro debris and gasses into orbits the ISS crosses
The fact there are bacterial and/or their spores that have survived on the exterior of the ISS is very interesting, since that itself would tend to support the idea of panspermia. But even a hint this this might have extraterrestrial origins is little more than sensationalism and of such low probability as to be essentially zero.
The've been doing this since 2011. Mozilla has been quite content to shed any technical merit they had for almost any reason at all. It all started when they saw Chrome beginning to become successful, and immediately decided to emulate Google's development environment. They adopted Google's rapid release and versioning method on a project that was neither technically nor culturally suited for it. They broke extensions by the truck load with that little gem, and instead of slowing down and letting the extension system catch up, their solution was to write a script that automatically scanned their extensions and just disabled the ones which hadn't caught up yet. Then they went all hell bent on adopting major UI changes that were demonstrably unpopular by the majority of its user base. And if alienating the extensions authors wasn't enough, many of the UI changes destroyed themes on back-to-back-to-back releases. It reminds me of one of my country's more famous prime ministers who, when he realized he'd alienated half my country, proceeded to give them the finger from his seat on a train. That's Mozilla. They alienate users, and then the ones who have stayed loyal they give the finger to.
All of this was in an attempt at emulating Chrome's burgeoning success. The problem is, they never figured out... you simply cannot surpass someone else by playing copycat on their methods. All they did was alienate their existing user base in favour of a product that could never be quite as good at being Chrome as Chrome was.
Mozilla had a great browser, and a great community. Someone spooked at Chrome's early success and decided that change for change's sake was necessary, and they have resisted every indication that they have made a mistake.
I recommend PaleMoon for a fantastic experience that is the best of what Firefox was in combination with innovation that makes sense and which takes into account its user base. It was originally a patch on an earlier FF ESR, they have since essentially departed from Firefox, though they still borrow some bits when it makes sense to do so. It's what Firefox should have been if they hadn't taken the detour into crazy six years ago.
Private companies should share more data with the U.S. government to prevent breaches, ha said.
Sharing data with the US government is going to PREVENT breaches?!?
This is akin to saying a gang raped woman should then go out and buy a pack of condoms to prevent an STI. The US government has been the source of more breaches than any other agency. Have we forgotten that it's a non-disclosed zero day vulnerability that the US government found, weaponized, and then let out into the wild that caused the single largest series of ransomeware attacks in history? The idea that the US government is in any way interested in preventing breaches is laughable. Sorry, folks are on their own.
Better yet, why don't we just call it Darwinism when people who don't do a weekly backup fall prey to ransomeware.
How expensive is it if, at the time you order your computer, you also order a duplicate of the hard drive. That way you don't even have to do a file backup, you can image your drive directly onto a duplicate weekly. This has worked well for me for years.
This is nothing new. This has been very doable for a long time. I love how they pitch it... they are going to let it. This is just them trying to remove the incentive for rooting the devices. Appeal to the nerds who won't take no for an answer by tossing them enough of what they want to de-incentivize them. Samsung used to be the champion for letting you unlock and root your own device. Sad.
So they tried something, and it didn't work out for them. What's the big deal? I don't see people lining up to bash Apple over the Newton.
The Newton was discontinued twenty years ago. For the first five years after it was discontinued, Apple took a beating over it. It was actual innovation that took Apple out of the pit it was in. I see no evidence of impending innovation at Microsoft.
How many people even knew Microsoft was in the music business?
We all did. We just also knew that they didn't have the big stick to ram it down people's throats like they did with their OS, so nobody cared to jump on that bandwagon long enough to give them the stick. Fool me once and all that.
Good job, you found where the money is. They make more money in a month selling licenses for Windows Server than they likely ever made in music.
Well, that's relative since they continue to hemorrhage business. Did you ever drop one of those hard rubber super balls down a set of basement steps? It bounces back almost as high as you drop it from, sort of like Windows 10 did, but each bounce is lower than the previous one. That's the pattern we're seeing with Windows releases.
You're simply wrong on the notion of it not being as essential. The vast overwhelming majority of all PCs sold at retail come with Windows on them...
Oh puhlease. I did an actual doubletake at this one. You obviously tried to rub two thoughts together when penning your reply, so you can't be ignorant of how the PC market as a whole has taken a beating over phones and tablets. It doesn't matter that most laptops still have Windows when most people for their day-to-day interactions want nothing to do with laptops, and desktops are essentially non-existant outside the corporate environment where they survive only because they are easier to chain to a desk. It's for the very reason that Microsoft has been high-handedly trying to extinguish anything like true innovation for decades that people are moving away from the platform entirely. Microsoft's attempts at marrying tablet with the desktop have been received with derision for two reasons. One, every attempt has been universally terrible. And two, no one wants Microsoft foisting their embrace/enhance/extinguish mentatlity on that format, so everything they do there is viewed with suspicion. The number one Windows 10 install is still a classic start menu.
Basically people have put Microsoft in its own jail. We have reluctantly accepted they remain a necessary evil for certain things, but no one will let them into any other market or paradigm because, quite frankly, they have repeatedly demonstrated they simply cannot be trusted. So people in their heads have adopted an attitude of containment. We have to use Windows still for certain things, but no one wants to let that expand. Just as the internet moves to heal censorship, the computing world naturally moves to contain Microsoft. Their short and medium term strategies that were antagonistic to their consumers just can't create long term goodwill.
Agreed. Tesla cars have just gone from desired items to never buy. I had profound respect for that company, and it's gone in a flash. I will not buy from a company that charges more for access to hardware I've already purchased, nor will I support the "Windows 10" mentality of the manufacturer being able to push out any changes they want to something I own. I had even considered buying some of Tesla's latest issue of bonds simply to support the company. I'm glad this came up now.
It's no wonder all the manufacturers and governments have hard ons for electric cars. It has nothing to do with the environment, they haven't cared about that past providing lip service any time in the last century. It's because of the level of control they afford.
If P was equal to NP then it would refer to its own proof as much as to anything else. In short, proving that P = NP would be just as easy as verifying that proof.
Since proving that P = (or !=) NP is obviously hard, and since anyone working on the problem has been discredited inside a week, then that clearly shows that the proof is hard to calculate and easy to discredit. Ergo P != NP.
There is no single hack that should work to cause an accident like this. It doesn't matter if GPS is hacked or even off. It doesn't matter if your navigation system is faulty or given the wrong information. It doesn't matter if your radars are down. The fact of the matter is, ships have been navigating in congested waters at night for hundreds of years and there is no hack that should serve to cause a collision.
Bridge watchkeepers are supposed to be trained in heads up visual navigation. GPS, ECPINS, AIS, navigation radars - they are all useful tools, but a watchkeeper is supposed to be trained to know when those tools are lying to to them. Because it really isn't a matter of if, but when something will happen to cause one or more of those tools to lie to you. This is especially true of warship watchkeepers who are supposed to be trained to operate in places where there may be denial of service for GPS or where AIS is being spoofed.
I wrote about something like this before - almost two years ago. American warships have a reputation in NATO as being driven by amateurs. During fleet manoeuvers, the rest of us actively plot wider safety bubbles around American ships because they are erratic and have a tendency to simply go the wrong direction and just not care.
This isn't a cyber attack. There is no attack on anything on the American ship that should have defeated the watchkeeper's mark 1 eyeball, and hacking a container ship to hit a warship with is like hacking a semi truck and thinking you are going to use it to ram a dirt bike on an open field. It's simply not possible to hit a warship with a container vessel if the warship has a watchkeeper that is awake.
What's wrong with KeePass? I sync the password database with Syncthing. I don't need or want my password manager automatically interfacing with my browser. I wouldn't trust my browser with the ability to interface with my password manager, and you shouldn't either. In fact, on Windows I keep my password manager and database inside a Linux VM to make interfering with it more difficult. Looking up and bringing a password into the clipboard is a 3 second procedure.
Sears Canada is under bankruptcy protection. I have thought for a while what a fantastic marriage that would make. Sears' regional distribution, parts, and warehouse system and Amazon's online footprint. If Amazon is already moving that way in the US, this could let them duplicate that move in Canada in one swell foop.
Depends on how to look at it. It could also be looked at as "we will update your OS whether you want us to or not, and you can't even fill your phone with other stuff to prevent it". Sort of like Windows 10 and its forced updates.
Slashdot Mirror
It was better when it was left for dead. At least then it was left alone. Everything that Mozilla has touched since 2012 has turned to ashes. Actually, it was 2011 when they adopted Google's rapid release and versioning methodology on a project that it was neither technically nor culturally suited for. They broke extensions by the truck load with that little gem, and instead of slowing down and letting the extension system catch up, their solution was to write a script that automatically scanned their extensions and just disabled the ones which hadn't caught up yet. Now they are set to do it again with Thunderbird. They are just hell bent on shedding any technical merit or usability they have in favour of cramming UI changes and
The've been doing this since 2011. Mozilla has been quite content to shed any technical merit they had for almost any reason at all. It all started when they saw Chrome beginning to become successful, and immediately decided to emulate Google's development environment. They adopted Google's rapid release and versioning method on a project that was neither technically nor culturally suited for it. They broke extensions by the truck load with that little gem, and instead of slowing down and letting the extension system catch up, their solution was to write a script that automatically scanned their extensions and just disabled the ones which hadn't caught up yet. Then they went all hell bent on adopting major UI changes that were demonstrably unpopular by the majority of its user base. And if alienating the extensions authors wasn't enough, many of the UI changes destroyed themes on back-to-back-to-back releases. It reminds me of one of my country's more famous (and intensely divisive) prime ministers who, when he realized he'd alienated half my country, proceeded to give them the finger from his seat on a train as he was passing through their area. That's Mozilla. They go out of their way to alienate users, and then the ones who have stayed loyal they give the finger to with decisions like this.
All of this was in an attempt at emulating Chrome's burgeoning success. The problem is, they never figured out... you simply cannot surpass someone else by playing copycat on their methods. This is important so I'm going to say it again. Mozilla cannot copy Google and be better than Google. All they did with Firefox was alienate their existing user base in favour of a product that could never be quite as good at being Chrome as Chrome was. And now they are running headlong into inevitability again. See here for details.
The PaleMoon project has done for the browser what Mozilla should have done. It was originally a patch on an earlier FF ESR, they have since essentially departed from Firefox, though they still borrow some bits when it makes sense to do so. It's what Firefox should have been if they hadn't taken the detour into crazy six years ago. Maybe they can be convinced to do the same for Thunderbird.
Plus, like many devices, vendors tend to consider smart watches as the "gift that keeps on giving" them money. Everything requires you to send your data to them, and then depend on getting it back from them on their web site in their way, all the while being inundated with their offers and their promotions. The old school MP4 watches had more features - could watch a video on them, listen to music, read a book, or even record audio discreetly. You can still find them on Chinese web sites every so often. Recording audio, I can't tell you how many times I've been in a situation where I've wanted to record something where I couldn't get my phone out.
Back on track, though, we lost the first part of the war to keep our data. People are now getting fed up with it, and vendors aren't cluing in that for something to sell, it needs to offer discreet features that aren't just "opportunities" to give them ongoing service fees.
There's a coming war for my dinner plate?
No, there really isn't. I'm from Alberta. I like my beef slapped on the ass and tossed on my plate, preferably still mooing. If it's cow farts that are going to destroy the earth, just let the end come. I'll be sitting down to my seasoned and seared pound and a half prime rib dinner when it arrives.
Gmail retrieves all remote content whether the email is opened or not, and then caches the resultant images (which isn't hard since they are all the same image with different filenames). When you open the email you are only seeing the cached image. Since all images are retrieved at the time Google's servers receive the email, there is no information the sender can get from that image retrieval.
Bitcoin, with the limitation is has on the final number which can be issued, has no real future. Governments are reluctant to legislate it right now for several reasons. One reason is because of the lobby of exchanges who are currently making a killing off it. The other is that legislators, as stiff and out of touch as they may seem on the outside, are quite well aware of the ability of this to go underground and they don't want that. However, once bitcoin's ability to increase is exhausted, it has no real future. Legislators will have no choice but to step in and either modify it, or ban it.
To see this, look at the best case scenario for bitcoin. Let's say that it is 100% successful and becomes the de facto world currency. Can you really have a world currency where a few individuals control a set percentage of the world wealth? Owning even one bitcoin in that scenario means you own one 21 millionth of the entire wealth of the world. Now think of those individuals and institutions that own chunks of this.
No, bitcoin cannot continue without an extension. The split that was going to happen was averted when greed got the better of common sense of those who were going to expand it. They think if they can just hold on, if they can just get it accepted by enough people, that they will have a shot at becoming fabulously nouveau riche - as in world-class monetary controlling rich. Not going to happen. The existing money structure will kill it from behind the scenes before this happens. You'll see a sudden spate of exchange breaches financial manipulations (or both) that make it volatile and end up tanking the value, then legislators will step in to protect the market from the failed experiment.
So your solution is that rather than using libraries in a project, that each project should rewrite support for that feature from scratch? And you think this is going to increase security? Dozens of implementations of feature X that are only tested as much as the single project that uses that code. Reimplementation after reimplementation, no one in one project looking at the code in a different project because they don't share any - it's all uniquely written.
Great idea. Dist that out now!
Some code hasn't been looked at in a long time. Correct. There could be back doors. Correct. There could be vulnerabilities (intentional or not). Correct.
Every software project, open source included, will have vulnerabilities discovered. There will be scares and exploits of open source like any other software. But yes, you can expect open source to be better. Because:
1) Very few major open source projects have any contributions that occur in a vacuum. Multiple eyes see every patch and for the most part, those multiple eyes are most often from people in multiple organizations with multiple day jobs and multiple personal goals/agendas. Aligning enough people's agendas to get a back door in would be difficult for any major open source project. Intentional vulnerabilities would be easier, but still not trivial. This isn't 20 years ago, people actively look at each patch with an eye towards whether it is introducing a vulnerability. This model is diametrically opposite of any closed source offering, where contributions are by one organization and at the sole control of whomever holds the purse strings.
2) If a vulnerability is suspected anywhere, you (and literally everyone else on the planet) have the option and ability to examine the source at any time. When you do want to investigate any particular piece of open source software, you don't need to decompile or reverse engineer something to do it. You don't have to fight the software in order to test it.
There have been (and will continue to be) vulnerabilities exposed from older open source code written when there was less oversight and less strenuous security testing, but if you want to compare this to the number of exploits (and in some cases intentional back doors) that have come to light in, say, Windows, from ancient code that has thunked it's way down from Windows 3.1, the score isn't even close. And it's not like Microsoft is performing strenuous reviews of their old code - these vulnerabilities have come to light often only from outside researchers performing painstaking and arduous external testing and reverse engineering.
So while you are correct in that open source will never be free of bugs or exploits - it's still written by people, as much as the nut jobs still decry that hard AI is just around the corner. But yes, in this it is just plain better than closed source.
JJ Treks are good movies, but terrible Star Trek. He took the original series, movies, animated series, and a few books put them in a blender and hit Frappe. What pops out is Star Trek for people with no attention span - it's like Star Trek Anime. The action sequences are ok, and as a turn off your brain light sci fi, I have to admit they are enjoyable. But they aren't Star Trek. JJ did the same with Star Wars, just took the original stories and recycled them with little innovation and nothing new. It's sad to see Trek raped that way.
Was the person posting this article new, or was there some compelling reason not to disclose the app in question?
A smart phone isn't generally listening and broadcasting everything it hears for a few reasons. For one, you have to install an app and give it access to the microphone for that to happen. For another there are battery and network usage constraints. But yes, our phones are physically capable of it and we have only Google and Apple's assurance that they wouldn't record things to rely on.
Having a device which by its nature and intent is designed to listen to everything you say and broadcast it to an off-site server for "interpretation" is another quantum leap forward for invasiveness, and just because people have nibbled at the bait doesn't mean they need to take the whole hook line and sinker too.
I particularly am troubled by the whole usage of an offsite computer to interpret the voice data. Why can't the device do it? The popular misconception is that it's because of processing power. This is unlikely. The idea that Google is dedicating more server processing power to each device that is in use at any one moment than each of those individual devices could affordably themselves have? This isn't a processing power consideration. This is a design feature intended to get your microphone data in their control. I find it astounding that anyone would even consider this topology.
Because if it is extraterrestrial in origin, and it collected on the hull of the ISS after its (in geological/evolutionary time scales) incredibly brief sojourn in orbit, then the likelihood is almost certain that life on Earth was seeded this way. Which means terrestrial life is using DNA because the seeds use DNA.
That being said, the likelihood that this is extraterrestrial approaches zero based on:
The fact there are bacterial and/or their spores that have survived on the exterior of the ISS is very interesting, since that itself would tend to support the idea of panspermia. But even a hint this this might have extraterrestrial origins is little more than sensationalism and of such low probability as to be essentially zero.
Oh my God, iPhone twits can't type "it" and this is Slashdot news?
The've been doing this since 2011. Mozilla has been quite content to shed any technical merit they had for almost any reason at all. It all started when they saw Chrome beginning to become successful, and immediately decided to emulate Google's development environment. They adopted Google's rapid release and versioning method on a project that was neither technically nor culturally suited for it. They broke extensions by the truck load with that little gem, and instead of slowing down and letting the extension system catch up, their solution was to write a script that automatically scanned their extensions and just disabled the ones which hadn't caught up yet. Then they went all hell bent on adopting major UI changes that were demonstrably unpopular by the majority of its user base. And if alienating the extensions authors wasn't enough, many of the UI changes destroyed themes on back-to-back-to-back releases. It reminds me of one of my country's more famous prime ministers who, when he realized he'd alienated half my country, proceeded to give them the finger from his seat on a train. That's Mozilla. They alienate users, and then the ones who have stayed loyal they give the finger to.
All of this was in an attempt at emulating Chrome's burgeoning success. The problem is, they never figured out... you simply cannot surpass someone else by playing copycat on their methods. All they did was alienate their existing user base in favour of a product that could never be quite as good at being Chrome as Chrome was.
Mozilla had a great browser, and a great community. Someone spooked at Chrome's early success and decided that change for change's sake was necessary, and they have resisted every indication that they have made a mistake.
I recommend PaleMoon for a fantastic experience that is the best of what Firefox was in combination with innovation that makes sense and which takes into account its user base. It was originally a patch on an earlier FF ESR, they have since essentially departed from Firefox, though they still borrow some bits when it makes sense to do so. It's what Firefox should have been if they hadn't taken the detour into crazy six years ago.
Sharing data with the US government is going to PREVENT breaches?!?
This is akin to saying a gang raped woman should then go out and buy a pack of condoms to prevent an STI. The US government has been the source of more breaches than any other agency. Have we forgotten that it's a non-disclosed zero day vulnerability that the US government found, weaponized, and then let out into the wild that caused the single largest series of ransomeware attacks in history? The idea that the US government is in any way interested in preventing breaches is laughable. Sorry, folks are on their own.
It would be the wildest stroke of luck if only 200 million Facebook users are fake. They will be lucky if half of their users are real.
Better yet, why don't we just call it Darwinism when people who don't do a weekly backup fall prey to ransomeware.
How expensive is it if, at the time you order your computer, you also order a duplicate of the hard drive. That way you don't even have to do a file backup, you can image your drive directly onto a duplicate weekly. This has worked well for me for years.
This is nothing new. This has been very doable for a long time. I love how they pitch it... they are going to let it. This is just them trying to remove the incentive for rooting the devices. Appeal to the nerds who won't take no for an answer by tossing them enough of what they want to de-incentivize them. Samsung used to be the champion for letting you unlock and root your own device. Sad.
The Newton was discontinued twenty years ago. For the first five years after it was discontinued, Apple took a beating over it. It was actual innovation that took Apple out of the pit it was in. I see no evidence of impending innovation at Microsoft.
We all did. We just also knew that they didn't have the big stick to ram it down people's throats like they did with their OS, so nobody cared to jump on that bandwagon long enough to give them the stick. Fool me once and all that.
Well, that's relative since they continue to hemorrhage business. Did you ever drop one of those hard rubber super balls down a set of basement steps? It bounces back almost as high as you drop it from, sort of like Windows 10 did, but each bounce is lower than the previous one. That's the pattern we're seeing with Windows releases.
Oh puhlease. I did an actual doubletake at this one. You obviously tried to rub two thoughts together when penning your reply, so you can't be ignorant of how the PC market as a whole has taken a beating over phones and tablets. It doesn't matter that most laptops still have Windows when most people for their day-to-day interactions want nothing to do with laptops, and desktops are essentially non-existant outside the corporate environment where they survive only because they are easier to chain to a desk. It's for the very reason that Microsoft has been high-handedly trying to extinguish anything like true innovation for decades that people are moving away from the platform entirely. Microsoft's attempts at marrying tablet with the desktop have been received with derision for two reasons. One, every attempt has been universally terrible. And two, no one wants Microsoft foisting their embrace/enhance/extinguish mentatlity on that format, so everything they do there is viewed with suspicion. The number one Windows 10 install is still a classic start menu.
Basically people have put Microsoft in its own jail. We have reluctantly accepted they remain a necessary evil for certain things, but no one will let them into any other market or paradigm because, quite frankly, they have repeatedly demonstrated they simply cannot be trusted. So people in their heads have adopted an attitude of containment. We have to use Windows still for certain things, but no one wants to let that expand. Just as the internet moves to heal censorship, the computing world naturally moves to contain Microsoft. Their short and medium term strategies that were antagonistic to their consumers just can't create long term goodwill.
Agreed. Tesla cars have just gone from desired items to never buy. I had profound respect for that company, and it's gone in a flash. I will not buy from a company that charges more for access to hardware I've already purchased, nor will I support the "Windows 10" mentality of the manufacturer being able to push out any changes they want to something I own. I had even considered buying some of Tesla's latest issue of bonds simply to support the company. I'm glad this came up now.
It's no wonder all the manufacturers and governments have hard ons for electric cars. It has nothing to do with the environment, they haven't cared about that past providing lip service any time in the last century. It's because of the level of control they afford.
Better yet, a camera with 3d sensing technology that is always on and watching. That's not taking our invasion of privacy to a whole new level at all.
I have a much easier proof that P != NP.
If P was equal to NP then it would refer to its own proof as much as to anything else. In short, proving that P = NP would be just as easy as verifying that proof.
Since proving that P = (or !=) NP is obviously hard, and since anyone working on the problem has been discredited inside a week, then that clearly shows that the proof is hard to calculate and easy to discredit. Ergo P != NP.
I'll take that in cash please. Small bills.
There is no single hack that should work to cause an accident like this. It doesn't matter if GPS is hacked or even off. It doesn't matter if your navigation system is faulty or given the wrong information. It doesn't matter if your radars are down. The fact of the matter is, ships have been navigating in congested waters at night for hundreds of years and there is no hack that should serve to cause a collision.
Bridge watchkeepers are supposed to be trained in heads up visual navigation. GPS, ECPINS, AIS, navigation radars - they are all useful tools, but a watchkeeper is supposed to be trained to know when those tools are lying to to them. Because it really isn't a matter of if, but when something will happen to cause one or more of those tools to lie to you. This is especially true of warship watchkeepers who are supposed to be trained to operate in places where there may be denial of service for GPS or where AIS is being spoofed.
I wrote about something like this before - almost two years ago. American warships have a reputation in NATO as being driven by amateurs. During fleet manoeuvers, the rest of us actively plot wider safety bubbles around American ships because they are erratic and have a tendency to simply go the wrong direction and just not care.
This isn't a cyber attack. There is no attack on anything on the American ship that should have defeated the watchkeeper's mark 1 eyeball, and hacking a container ship to hit a warship with is like hacking a semi truck and thinking you are going to use it to ram a dirt bike on an open field. It's simply not possible to hit a warship with a container vessel if the warship has a watchkeeper that is awake.
What's wrong with KeePass? I sync the password database with Syncthing. I don't need or want my password manager automatically interfacing with my browser. I wouldn't trust my browser with the ability to interface with my password manager, and you shouldn't either. In fact, on Windows I keep my password manager and database inside a Linux VM to make interfering with it more difficult. Looking up and bringing a password into the clipboard is a 3 second procedure.
Sears Canada is under bankruptcy protection. I have thought for a while what a fantastic marriage that would make. Sears' regional distribution, parts, and warehouse system and Amazon's online footprint. If Amazon is already moving that way in the US, this could let them duplicate that move in Canada in one swell foop.
Depends on how to look at it. It could also be looked at as "we will update your OS whether you want us to or not, and you can't even fill your phone with other stuff to prevent it". Sort of like Windows 10 and its forced updates.
All your OS are belong to us!