Encoding voice more efficiently has implications far exceeding the amount of storage space required to save it. There's a reason why the article is comparing the new codec to single sideband. When transmitting digital data over radio, it pretty much invariably (nowadays) means some sort of spread spectrum transmission. The fewer bits required per second means the less spectrum you are having to spread your signal over, this the more concentrated your signal is. A radio transmitter has a fixed power output, so if you are smearing that power over less band, then you have a stronger signal.
It is a testament to the amateur radio pioneers of the past that an analog radio transmission mode invented over a hundred years ago is, just now, being possibly rivaled in its efficiency.
Apple isn't courageous. Apple is stupid. Problem is, Apple customers (hipsters) are just slightly stupider, and Apple knows this. They know their customer base will continue to buy what Apple feeds them long after it has become manure. HTC will soon learn there are actual choices among Android devices and leaving vital bits off their phone is not a way to endear itself to the masses.
More likely than that is that it's now a defense/NSA (depending on whether the surveillance is foreign or domestic) project for surveillance drones with unlimited on-station time. Really, that's what they were anyway. The announcement of them as internet-for-the-poor was just a public advertising campaign to get the word out to those in procurement.
I see you've been modded to oblivion, but it's actually useful to reply, so I will.
They don't control every aspect. That's hyperbolic bullshit trolling.
They have the ability to push mandatory updates and can change any aspect of the OS they choose with no recourse. There is nothing they could not cause to run on a computer with Windows 10. If this is not controlling every aspect, what is?
Even if they were, they can! It's their software.
I take it from this that you actually meant to say "Even if they could control every aspect that's ok because it's their software". Does this mean that it's ok for every software provider to have unlimited and arbitrary control of your computer because, as you say, it's their software?
*crude allegory*
Thank-you no.
...or get down and dirty with the FOSS hobos
Ahh, but FOSS is still software, and "their"" software to boot. I mean, it belongs to someone. Someone wrote it, and holds the copyright. So, shouldn't it be ok, by your logic, for them to insert code to control every aspect of our computer too?
Tired of assholes like you crying about it.
I write and protest as I can to try and get a change in attitude back to the time when Microsoft wouldn't have just been criticized for something like this, but crucified. Five years ago even there was no way they could have done this. But people are becoming more resigned to this, and that is what we need to change.
I also use a combination of methods to take control back, where I can. Windows Update Mini Tool gives me control back of my updates. An encrypted virtual OS gives me a place to put sensitive files that is a (slightly) harder target for outside interference, and yes, doing anything of actual import on FOSS operating systems that I trust, where I can.
It's assholes crying about things like British taxation without representation that gave you the country you live in. If you think there is any less of a conflict going on now than there was then for the freedoms most of us hold dear, then you are hopelessly naive.
We know we want people to be running Windows 10 from a security perspective
Translation: We want everyone to be running Windows 10 from a we-now-control-every-aspect-of-your-(our)-computer perspective. We can't actually force updates on other versions, but we'll do our level best to force the version on you that we can do that with. We regret the negative publicity that the lengths we went to to make this happen caused.
I support strong consumer protection laws. These are simply a group of people getting together and saying, collectively, if you want to do business with us, then these are the overall guiding terms by which you need to do that business. This is, essentially, just an umbrella contract. Steam didn't look at the umbrella contract for the group of customers it was dealing with, and now has to pay the penalty specified in that contract. How is this anti free market? Every market has rules. Look at the insider trading laws, or anti competition laws in your own country - they are almost incomprehensibly complex. They exist because left to itself, business (which exists solely to line the pockets of its shareholders) left to its own devices is an amoral entity that will literally do anything to make money.
The fact is, it was Valve's choice to do business with Australian customers. They could have chosen not to. Doing business in Australia is not Valve's right.
I don't think game means what you think it means..net isn't cross platform yet, at least not enough to do anything grown-up with. There is nothing you can do with it today you can't do faster with native code. So either your game shop's valuation is based on a series of bubblegum free-to-play games that are splashed around annoying advertising popups everywhere, or your developers are handicapped. Or both.
And claims like "my software company is worth millions" have exactly zero weight without a name behind it - otherwise it wasn't worth the time you spent to type it.
While agree they are scummy, I'm fuzzy on what's actually illegal? They owned the copyrights, correct? If it's the uploading part, I don't think that's illegal. For example, I could purposefully bend over and place a $100 bill on the floor of a busy mall and walk away and if someone came up and took it they are still, as far as the law is concerned, guilty of theft and liable for criminal prosecution and civil damages. The lawyers were being what lawyers are, but I'm not sure how they actually broke the law.
Concur. Inexpensive virtual server hosting companies abound. For $10 a month, I have a Linux virtual server with a guaranteed dedicated CPU core and with SSD space far in excess of a free Dropbox account. It hosts my own domain names, Wordpress site, multi-domain email (with webmail) - in short, anything I need, I have on my own server. I can post anything I want and it will stay on my server as long as I want it to. My download links do not disappear. Software like Syncthing takes care of the synchronization features that Dropbox would give. My server. My data!
I am like you, I have been puzzled from the beginning in the allure of trusting data to outside sources. If it's free, then you are the product. If they are storing your data for free, then your data is the product.
A big benefit for those who aren't as technically inclined is a cloud services Linux distro. Domain, email/webmail, file sync, bookmark sharing in a box.
Photo journalists do already have their devices seized. All the time. And they are often stripped of their memory card before before having it given back to them (if it is given back). The problem encryption is meant to solve is not to prevent the device from being seized, it's to prevent the seizing agency from having access to what you've been photographing. Photo journalists going behind enemy lines, taking pictures of rebels groups or doing interviews with people who want their faces blurred later. Losing the photographs altogether is not as bad as having the photographs fall into the hands of an adversary. They are already going to lose them if the device is seized. They just want the photographs to be safe if that happens.
Unfortunately, seeing encryption applied to new classes of devices is a controversial topic now. Not for the end user, who would support that. But governments across the world - across the (ironically named) "free" world - are aiming at encryption and labeling it as evil and helping the cause of terrorists and child molesters. The first time a camera comes out with encryption and is involved in child pornography will be huge. It will be splashed by law enforcement across every newspaper as showing how encryption is evil, how it's enabling criminals and terrorists, and how it's good that government should legislate back doors into every piece of encryption on the market. For that reason, until we settle the fight that is brewing about encryption and openly legislated (as opposed to the private ones the NSA strong arms into products already) encryption back doors are firmly rejected, I would like to see cameras remain free of encryption. I don't want to see another class of device used as propaganda and leveraged as a way of taking away more of our rights and privacy.
Is the new trick for appearing authentic to try to use as much disjointed, rambling, misspelled, awful slang as possible? It's like when a father falsely pretends in a sort of campy supercilious way to imitate his kid's speaking. It's just painful to watch. Eliza did it better over thirty years ago.
The scary part is this. Sure, someone wrote that chatbot. People write all sorts of stuff. Roger out. But then someone else, presumably someone with some sort of authority, had to interact with it and say "Yes.... yes, releasing this to the public with Microsoft's name on it will be a good thing." That's what I find unfathomable.
Stores seem to be tripping over themselves to spend money on automated systems to make it easy just to walk in and walk out with what you want. No extra fees, no hassle. People need to remember that any time.... any time they spend money it's with the expectation of getting twice as much back. The motivation can't be to get people in, because once more than one place has it it's no longer a novelty and they don't get increased business. So it's just a straight cost. So if it's just a straight cost, where is the recap? It's in selling out your privacy, shopping habits, brand choices, and movements. In short, we, again, are the commodity being traded.
No thanks. Minority Report holds no appeal for me, and no government seems to want to put any checks on violations of privacy.
This is human superiority. Watson isn't hard AI. It's not even soft AI. It's an expert system. It's a tool, like an x-ray or an MRI. Feed in genomic sequence, out pops matches with different strains of leukemia. It's a tool that will be excellent for fringe cases - when a doctor sees fifty cases that fit inside the bell curve, every case looks like one that should fit inside the bell curve. Especially if it requires actually doing something to investigate.
Humans will never "compete" with a computer on its own turf. And people shouldn't feel like we have to try. Being less able to win at chess or come up with a fringe diagnosis than a computer is a win for human engineering and ingenuity. Feeling like humans have lost something by this is like feeling like we've lost something because we can't see into the x-ray bands to tell if someone's bones are broken.
We build tools to expand our abilities, and that is what this is. Don't make it to be more or less than it is. It is a feat of human engineering and a tribute to those that built it. It isn't a symbol that humans are less capable or diminished.
The on-board map will have only streets that Apple decides are in your (their) best interest listed. All other streets will simply, as far as your car is concerned, not exist. Any time your car is "in limbo" (moving from one mapped area to another) your car doors will lock and the windows will tint black to prevent any interaction with or observation of an area outside the knowable universe. Trying to attach a third party charging or fuelling device will cause your vehicle to immediately shut down. And yet, despite these facts, millions of people will develop panic attacks any time they are encouraged to actually leave their vehicle leading to a society that is forever commuting but never actually arriving anywhere useful.
It doesn't matter what * expands to, Microsoft's price inevitably ends up being too high Microsoft can fill in the blanks with hard AI or FTL and I'd still give it back to them unopened. Or, rather, since they prefer to shove everything down your throat now, regurgitated back up as soon as I can rest control back and left in a burning paper bag on their front doorstep.
NTP shouldn't have to smear it. All that will happen is that one second your computer will think it's on time, and a couple seconds later your computer will think that it's a second behind and correct itself against the NTP server. Computer clocks are inaccurate enough that it's expected they will drift by a few seconds in a day anyway and NTP corrects that quite handily already.
Instead of making NTP servers smear a second over twenty hours, here's an idea, how about just implementing support for it at the OS level? It's not like this phenomena is new. It's been around since 1972, longer than many countries have been implementing daylight savings, yet that little gem happens twice a year without a hitch. Despite this, proposals for abolishing leap seconds continue to abound, and claims that the next one will make the sky fall continue to waste people's attention. There have been 27 leap seconds since 1972, and not a single one of them has broken the world yet.
I suspect Google spent more time adjusting their NTP servers to wingle around it than it would have taken for them to, say, update Android to support it.
Trust has levels, just like risk does. On my new laptop that came with Windows 10, I trust Windows to be my platform for gaming and for doing quick work or to access emails from my use-this-address-for-forum-registrations accounts. There are just times when I'm playing a game and booted into Windows and can't be bothered to switch over to Linux for some relatively trivial other action. But I don't trust it with banking, personal files, or access to my real email server. I don't trust it to hold SSH private keys for logging into any of my Linux servers. And there is no way I'll give my Windows 10 access to my high security files like my KeePass key file or database. I'll put that on my phone before Windows 10 will get it.
That being said, regardless of the low trust I have in Windows 10, I will not just roll over and let Microsoft update my computer whenever they want to. My computer gets the updates that I choose. I also will not leave my Windows partitions without encryption that precedes Windows in the boot sequence. That will not happen, and no one else should do this either.
Is this really surprising? From the company that just made accepting every update they want to push mandatory? I didn't trust Microsoft before they did that, now it's just blatant in your face "we own your computer". The fact that anyone trusts BitLocker is what astounds me.
Your Windows 10 friends are: 1) Windows Update Mini Tool. Gives you back control of your windows update experience. 2) Windows updates details. A spreadsheet maintained with every patch and what it does. Microsoft gets more and more evasive with their explanations of what their patches do, this is a good site for info. And, for heaven's sake, please please please get... 3) VeraCrypt. Based on TrueCrypt 7.1, development was continued by the community. Security audits have been done on this code base and, while no non-trivial software can ever be proven completely safe, I trust this software far more than BitLocker (which I actively distrust).
My Windows 7 laptop was safe from the whole Windows 10 upgrade debacle and the "we are going to upgrade your OS unless you happen to catch this message in time and say no" nagware because I carefully and meticulously have always gone over every windows update that goes on my computer. It was with literal astonishment that I learned that update is mandatory in Windows 10. I can't believe people stand for it. I've managed to work around it, but that was really the last straw for me. I have finally migrated mostly to Linux. I have used it for my servers and personal cloud services since the days of SLS but never really adopted for my desktop. I kept it for stuff I couldn't do in Windows. Now I've reversed that, using Linux for everything I can and only using Windows for gaming or software I absolutely can't do in Linux.
I reached the end of my love affair with Google long before now. "Do No Evil" sounded sincere 20 years ago, but it's pretty hollow today. It doesn't matter whether this was an accident or not. Not owning my own data is just bad medicine by any account. I won't do it.
I've wondered, instead of funding the Googles/Microsofts/Dropboxes of the world, we need to work on easily deployable mini-personal-cloud-server-in-a-box distributions. Email/webmail, iCal, rsync, with your own blog thrown in for good measure on personally controlled virtual servers is eminently doable. I mean, sure, I'm savvy enough to do this all with Debian, I've been doing mine for years. But it's got to be able to be made far more push-button that it is now. Something where you pay your $20, feed in a domain name, and you get your own personally owned cloud services. It won't keep the NSA out of your business, but it will keep people's data more firmly in their control.
HDMI, USB, and SD cards are legacy? Seriously? ISA is legacy. PCMCIA is legacy. Apple is looking at a second year of declining profits if they continue the high-handed behaviour that just assumes the rest of the world will bend around them.
Or, better yet, use subaddressing, also known as plus addressing. I use a different subaddress for every merchant site I buy from and keep track of it all in keepass (along with unique random passwords for each). When I start getting spam to that address, I change my address on the site and move on. Some places, like AliExpress, don't allow plus signs in email addresses, so I configured my mail server to also use the underscore as a sub address delimiter. It's a good thing, since AliExpress is particularly bad for this. I'm up to address kurt_ali4 now there. Each time I happen to buy something from a bad apple vendor where I forget to check uncheck the "allow merchant to see email address" box for, I increment my subaddress suffix, redirect the previous one to my spam folder, and the flood of spam abuptly stops.
So, to summarize, subaddressing + keepass are your friends for dealing with <strike>state-sponsored terrorism</strike> merchant-supported spam.
Slashdot Mirror
Encoding voice more efficiently has implications far exceeding the amount of storage space required to save it. There's a reason why the article is comparing the new codec to single sideband. When transmitting digital data over radio, it pretty much invariably (nowadays) means some sort of spread spectrum transmission. The fewer bits required per second means the less spectrum you are having to spread your signal over, this the more concentrated your signal is. A radio transmitter has a fixed power output, so if you are smearing that power over less band, then you have a stronger signal.
It is a testament to the amateur radio pioneers of the past that an analog radio transmission mode invented over a hundred years ago is, just now, being possibly rivaled in its efficiency.
Apple isn't courageous. Apple is stupid. Problem is, Apple customers (hipsters) are just slightly stupider, and Apple knows this. They know their customer base will continue to buy what Apple feeds them long after it has become manure. HTC will soon learn there are actual choices among Android devices and leaving vital bits off their phone is not a way to endear itself to the masses.
More likely than that is that it's now a defense/NSA (depending on whether the surveillance is foreign or domestic) project for surveillance drones with unlimited on-station time. Really, that's what they were anyway. The announcement of them as internet-for-the-poor was just a public advertising campaign to get the word out to those in procurement.
Really this just demonstrates the only good use for a macbook.
I see you've been modded to oblivion, but it's actually useful to reply, so I will.
They have the ability to push mandatory updates and can change any aspect of the OS they choose with no recourse. There is nothing they could not cause to run on a computer with Windows 10. If this is not controlling every aspect, what is?
I take it from this that you actually meant to say "Even if they could control every aspect that's ok because it's their software". Does this mean that it's ok for every software provider to have unlimited and arbitrary control of your computer because, as you say, it's their software?
Thank-you no.
Ahh, but FOSS is still software, and "their"" software to boot. I mean, it belongs to someone. Someone wrote it, and holds the copyright. So, shouldn't it be ok, by your logic, for them to insert code to control every aspect of our computer too?
I write and protest as I can to try and get a change in attitude back to the time when Microsoft wouldn't have just been criticized for something like this, but crucified. Five years ago even there was no way they could have done this. But people are becoming more resigned to this, and that is what we need to change.
I also use a combination of methods to take control back, where I can. Windows Update Mini Tool gives me control back of my updates. An encrypted virtual OS gives me a place to put sensitive files that is a (slightly) harder target for outside interference, and yes, doing anything of actual import on FOSS operating systems that I trust, where I can.
It's assholes crying about things like British taxation without representation that gave you the country you live in. If you think there is any less of a conflict going on now than there was then for the freedoms most of us hold dear, then you are hopelessly naive.
Translation: We want everyone to be running Windows 10 from a we-now-control-every-aspect-of-your-(our)-computer perspective. We can't actually force updates on other versions, but we'll do our level best to force the version on you that we can do that with. We regret the negative publicity that the lengths we went to to make this happen caused.
I support strong consumer protection laws. These are simply a group of people getting together and saying, collectively, if you want to do business with us, then these are the overall guiding terms by which you need to do that business. This is, essentially, just an umbrella contract. Steam didn't look at the umbrella contract for the group of customers it was dealing with, and now has to pay the penalty specified in that contract. How is this anti free market? Every market has rules. Look at the insider trading laws, or anti competition laws in your own country - they are almost incomprehensibly complex. They exist because left to itself, business (which exists solely to line the pockets of its shareholders) left to its own devices is an amoral entity that will literally do anything to make money.
The fact is, it was Valve's choice to do business with Australian customers. They could have chosen not to. Doing business in Australia is not Valve's right.
I don't think game means what you think it means. .net isn't cross platform yet, at least not enough to do anything grown-up with. There is nothing you can do with it today you can't do faster with native code. So either your game shop's valuation is based on a series of bubblegum free-to-play games that are splashed around annoying advertising popups everywhere, or your developers are handicapped. Or both.
And claims like "my software company is worth millions" have exactly zero weight without a name behind it - otherwise it wasn't worth the time you spent to type it.
While agree they are scummy, I'm fuzzy on what's actually illegal? They owned the copyrights, correct? If it's the uploading part, I don't think that's illegal. For example, I could purposefully bend over and place a $100 bill on the floor of a busy mall and walk away and if someone came up and took it they are still, as far as the law is concerned, guilty of theft and liable for criminal prosecution and civil damages. The lawyers were being what lawyers are, but I'm not sure how they actually broke the law.
Concur. Inexpensive virtual server hosting companies abound. For $10 a month, I have a Linux virtual server with a guaranteed dedicated CPU core and with SSD space far in excess of a free Dropbox account. It hosts my own domain names, Wordpress site, multi-domain email (with webmail) - in short, anything I need, I have on my own server. I can post anything I want and it will stay on my server as long as I want it to. My download links do not disappear. Software like Syncthing takes care of the synchronization features that Dropbox would give. My server. My data!
I am like you, I have been puzzled from the beginning in the allure of trusting data to outside sources. If it's free, then you are the product. If they are storing your data for free, then your data is the product.
A big benefit for those who aren't as technically inclined is a cloud services Linux distro. Domain, email/webmail, file sync, bookmark sharing in a box.
Photo journalists do already have their devices seized. All the time. And they are often stripped of their memory card before before having it given back to them (if it is given back). The problem encryption is meant to solve is not to prevent the device from being seized, it's to prevent the seizing agency from having access to what you've been photographing. Photo journalists going behind enemy lines, taking pictures of rebels groups or doing interviews with people who want their faces blurred later. Losing the photographs altogether is not as bad as having the photographs fall into the hands of an adversary. They are already going to lose them if the device is seized. They just want the photographs to be safe if that happens.
Unfortunately, seeing encryption applied to new classes of devices is a controversial topic now. Not for the end user, who would support that. But governments across the world - across the (ironically named) "free" world - are aiming at encryption and labeling it as evil and helping the cause of terrorists and child molesters. The first time a camera comes out with encryption and is involved in child pornography will be huge. It will be splashed by law enforcement across every newspaper as showing how encryption is evil, how it's enabling criminals and terrorists, and how it's good that government should legislate back doors into every piece of encryption on the market. For that reason, until we settle the fight that is brewing about encryption and openly legislated (as opposed to the private ones the NSA strong arms into products already) encryption back doors are firmly rejected, I would like to see cameras remain free of encryption. I don't want to see another class of device used as propaganda and leveraged as a way of taking away more of our rights and privacy.
Is the new trick for appearing authentic to try to use as much disjointed, rambling, misspelled, awful slang as possible? It's like when a father falsely pretends in a sort of campy supercilious way to imitate his kid's speaking. It's just painful to watch. Eliza did it better over thirty years ago.
The scary part is this. Sure, someone wrote that chatbot. People write all sorts of stuff. Roger out. But then someone else, presumably someone with some sort of authority, had to interact with it and say "Yes.... yes, releasing this to the public with Microsoft's name on it will be a good thing." That's what I find unfathomable.
Stores seem to be tripping over themselves to spend money on automated systems to make it easy just to walk in and walk out with what you want. No extra fees, no hassle. People need to remember that any time.... any time they spend money it's with the expectation of getting twice as much back. The motivation can't be to get people in, because once more than one place has it it's no longer a novelty and they don't get increased business. So it's just a straight cost. So if it's just a straight cost, where is the recap? It's in selling out your privacy, shopping habits, brand choices, and movements. In short, we, again, are the commodity being traded.
No thanks. Minority Report holds no appeal for me, and no government seems to want to put any checks on violations of privacy.
This is human superiority. Watson isn't hard AI. It's not even soft AI. It's an expert system. It's a tool, like an x-ray or an MRI. Feed in genomic sequence, out pops matches with different strains of leukemia. It's a tool that will be excellent for fringe cases - when a doctor sees fifty cases that fit inside the bell curve, every case looks like one that should fit inside the bell curve. Especially if it requires actually doing something to investigate.
Humans will never "compete" with a computer on its own turf. And people shouldn't feel like we have to try. Being less able to win at chess or come up with a fringe diagnosis than a computer is a win for human engineering and ingenuity. Feeling like humans have lost something by this is like feeling like we've lost something because we can't see into the x-ray bands to tell if someone's bones are broken.
We build tools to expand our abilities, and that is what this is. Don't make it to be more or less than it is. It is a feat of human engineering and a tribute to those that built it. It isn't a symbol that humans are less capable or diminished.
The on-board map will have only streets that Apple decides are in your (their) best interest listed. All other streets will simply, as far as your car is concerned, not exist. Any time your car is "in limbo" (moving from one mapped area to another) your car doors will lock and the windows will tint black to prevent any interaction with or observation of an area outside the knowable universe. Trying to attach a third party charging or fuelling device will cause your vehicle to immediately shut down. And yet, despite these facts, millions of people will develop panic attacks any time they are encouraged to actually leave their vehicle leading to a society that is forever commuting but never actually arriving anywhere useful.
...
Please, someone help me out... I'm Canadian, I must not be getting the American humour here.
It doesn't matter what * expands to, Microsoft's price inevitably ends up being too high Microsoft can fill in the blanks with hard AI or FTL and I'd still give it back to them unopened. Or, rather, since they prefer to shove everything down your throat now, regurgitated back up as soon as I can rest control back and left in a burning paper bag on their front doorstep.
No thank-you.
If you're going to lie...
Any added security that Google has put in is to ensure they have a monopoly on selling you out to the highest bidder.
NTP shouldn't have to smear it. All that will happen is that one second your computer will think it's on time, and a couple seconds later your computer will think that it's a second behind and correct itself against the NTP server. Computer clocks are inaccurate enough that it's expected they will drift by a few seconds in a day anyway and NTP corrects that quite handily already.
Instead of making NTP servers smear a second over twenty hours, here's an idea, how about just implementing support for it at the OS level? It's not like this phenomena is new. It's been around since 1972, longer than many countries have been implementing daylight savings, yet that little gem happens twice a year without a hitch. Despite this, proposals for abolishing leap seconds continue to abound, and claims that the next one will make the sky fall continue to waste people's attention. There have been 27 leap seconds since 1972, and not a single one of them has broken the world yet.
I suspect Google spent more time adjusting their NTP servers to wingle around it than it would have taken for them to, say, update Android to support it.
Trust has levels, just like risk does. On my new laptop that came with Windows 10, I trust Windows to be my platform for gaming and for doing quick work or to access emails from my use-this-address-for-forum-registrations accounts. There are just times when I'm playing a game and booted into Windows and can't be bothered to switch over to Linux for some relatively trivial other action. But I don't trust it with banking, personal files, or access to my real email server. I don't trust it to hold SSH private keys for logging into any of my Linux servers. And there is no way I'll give my Windows 10 access to my high security files like my KeePass key file or database. I'll put that on my phone before Windows 10 will get it.
That being said, regardless of the low trust I have in Windows 10, I will not just roll over and let Microsoft update my computer whenever they want to. My computer gets the updates that I choose. I also will not leave my Windows partitions without encryption that precedes Windows in the boot sequence. That will not happen, and no one else should do this either.
Is this really surprising? From the company that just made accepting every update they want to push mandatory? I didn't trust Microsoft before they did that, now it's just blatant in your face "we own your computer". The fact that anyone trusts BitLocker is what astounds me.
Your Windows 10 friends are:
1) Windows Update Mini Tool. Gives you back control of your windows update experience.
2) Windows updates details. A spreadsheet maintained with every patch and what it does. Microsoft gets more and more evasive with their explanations of what their patches do, this is a good site for info. And, for heaven's sake, please please please get...
3) VeraCrypt. Based on TrueCrypt 7.1, development was continued by the community. Security audits have been done on this code base and, while no non-trivial software can ever be proven completely safe, I trust this software far more than BitLocker (which I actively distrust).
My Windows 7 laptop was safe from the whole Windows 10 upgrade debacle and the "we are going to upgrade your OS unless you happen to catch this message in time and say no" nagware because I carefully and meticulously have always gone over every windows update that goes on my computer. It was with literal astonishment that I learned that update is mandatory in Windows 10. I can't believe people stand for it. I've managed to work around it, but that was really the last straw for me. I have finally migrated mostly to Linux. I have used it for my servers and personal cloud services since the days of SLS but never really adopted for my desktop. I kept it for stuff I couldn't do in Windows. Now I've reversed that, using Linux for everything I can and only using Windows for gaming or software I absolutely can't do in Linux.
I reached the end of my love affair with Google long before now. "Do No Evil" sounded sincere 20 years ago, but it's pretty hollow today. It doesn't matter whether this was an accident or not. Not owning my own data is just bad medicine by any account. I won't do it.
I've wondered, instead of funding the Googles/Microsofts/Dropboxes of the world, we need to work on easily deployable mini-personal-cloud-server-in-a-box distributions. Email/webmail, iCal, rsync, with your own blog thrown in for good measure on personally controlled virtual servers is eminently doable. I mean, sure, I'm savvy enough to do this all with Debian, I've been doing mine for years. But it's got to be able to be made far more push-button that it is now. Something where you pay your $20, feed in a domain name, and you get your own personally owned cloud services. It won't keep the NSA out of your business, but it will keep people's data more firmly in their control.
This is nothing new. The NSA has been doing this for years.
HDMI, USB, and SD cards are legacy? Seriously? ISA is legacy. PCMCIA is legacy. Apple is looking at a second year of declining profits if they continue the high-handed behaviour that just assumes the rest of the world will bend around them.
Or, better yet, use subaddressing, also known as plus addressing. I use a different subaddress for every merchant site I buy from and keep track of it all in keepass (along with unique random passwords for each). When I start getting spam to that address, I change my address on the site and move on. Some places, like AliExpress, don't allow plus signs in email addresses, so I configured my mail server to also use the underscore as a sub address delimiter. It's a good thing, since AliExpress is particularly bad for this. I'm up to address kurt_ali4 now there. Each time I happen to buy something from a bad apple vendor where I forget to check uncheck the "allow merchant to see email address" box for, I increment my subaddress suffix, redirect the previous one to my spam folder, and the flood of spam abuptly stops.
So, to summarize, subaddressing + keepass are your friends for dealing with <strike>state-sponsored terrorism</strike> merchant-supported spam.