And look at the wording "...would delete facebook...". Who is going to go through the trouble? What will really happen is they will stay off it for a few weeks, Facebook will ramp up their "we miss you" emails. You know, the ones like "So and so has messaged you ten times and you haven't responded. Click here to see their messages", and "Hey look at the ten single girls who would probably respond to a friend request, click here to see them". After a few of those they'll go back on and it will be business as usual.
I will be more impressed when I see "nearly a third of tech workers HAVE deleted Facebook". Then I'll think the movement is working.
While the way that was expressed was moderately reprehensible, the underlying facts aren't wrong. You can't hold self-driving vehicle technology to a higher standard than human drivers yet. Now, how visible Ms. Herzberg was to a human eye is a matter of debate. A human eye can discern far more contrast differences than a camera does, so whether she was visible to a human eye while in the shadow is questionable. There can be no real dispute, though, that she was careless, didn't watch where she was going, and would have been difficult to avoid even if she was visible in the shadow. In short, her death may not have been preventable with an alert human driver at any skill level.
If that is the case, then any amount of added safety by a self driving vehicle is just gravy.
As for Google's statements, they are not necessarily wrong either. They are essentially saying "If Uber hadn't stolen our tech then misapplied it then Ms. Herzberg would be alive today", and that is totally fair game. If someone stole my invention, then because not inventing it they didn't understand the tech well enough to use it properly or to its potential and that got someone killed, I'd be angry too. And rightfully so.
It's not reasonable as a test set if it's chosen to be stuff that's easy to translate. I just tried some Chinese assembly instructions, and it's terrible. And I don't mean the technical stuff, I mean the introduction:
Original: (SNIP - the chinese characters won't work here. Alas for unicode.)
Microsoft: Structure assembly, according to a certain order, the relevance of parts to subcontract; a total of eight subcontracts, from A1 to A8, the same package of parts are related, after assembly will constitute a machine components; in order to improve efficiency, to avoid confusion, please do not mix the different packages of parts all open after mixing together!!!!
Actual: The structure is assembled in a certain order with parts relevant to each subsystem. There are a total of eight parts packages, from A1 to A8, each package related to a particular subsystem. In order to assist assembly and avoid confusion, please do not mix parts from the different packages.
This isn't particularly technical writing. About the most complex word is subsystem, and even if you give them that as a mulligan, their translation is still almost incomprehensible. Definitely not natural english as they claim.
If Siri's purpose was as an assistant app, and not (as it actually is) a surveillance proof of concept, it wouldn't have these problems. You can't convince me that Apple, or any of the voice recognition players, are dedicating more processing power in their central servers on a per usage-basis than the mobile devices have natively inside them. Apple phones are a multi-gigahertz computing devices with more DSP power inside them than your PC has. The "record-voice and phone home with it so servers can process it" architecture is a not-even-thinly veiled surveillance tactic. Security experts, reputable ones, have been warning people about this for years. Siri was nothing more than a proof of concept for this.
It's really no surprise that the infrastructure couldn't handle it. It's the wrong solution for the problem. The correct solution, though, wouldn't advance their goal.
The problem is they got into the situation where no solution is a short-term win for the cable companies. The unfortunate truth is that top executives are all about the short term. Their pay packages are all about year over year growth, and winning back customer loyalty is going to cost in the short term. The executives, with this latest charade, are trying to minimize the year-over-year hit by slowly reducing commercial content. Fox is reducing commercial time to 2 minutes per hour, but not until 2020. Of course, they are announcing it today, though. They want the benefit of goodwill generated by reducing commercial time without actually taking the hit for doing it now. They are treating customers like they are stupid, and this isn't 1980 any more.
Boards and shareholders should be stringing the cable execs up by their gonads, because they are the ones who are selling out the companies they work for. Everything they have done for the last 15 years has been to maximize short term profit at the expense of long term customer good will.
If they want to dig themselves out they need to change, with immediate effect, all top executive compensation packages to either reflect profit gains over a five year period, or better yet, base them not on profit but on a formula that combines profit and subscriber numbers.
That's only half right. "Engaging" is the user spying. "Powerful" is the other half of the coin, improving Microsoft's ability to remotely control our computers.
S is supposed to be for Secure. Microsoft's walled garden mode. They think it'll be a big hit. The funny part...
It is yet unknown if Microsoft will make "S Mode" available for free, or users will have to pay a fee before being able to switch their current OS into "S Mode."
...is that they are considering charging extra. That's right, you will need to pay them for the privelege of locking your computer up to use only their walled garden software.
They are consistently out of touch with people actually want their computers to do. That's just Microsoft. It's why they have to strong arm everyone into buying their product, because they have never really quite figured out how to actually innovate. This, however, surprised me with the depth of just how deeply ignorant they really are. My concern is that they will reverse this. They will claim that "S" mode is wildly popular and requested and will "relent" and give it by default to everyone, and make you pay to use anything else on your computer.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp could make great partners in our drive toward a securely connected future, and we continue to hold this door open to them.
In who's drive?
I wouldn't particularly care if Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were all litigated out of existance, but that is a bit rich.
I have, unfortunately, met people like you before. People like you are the reason why it costs a gigabyte of RAM and requires a VM being spun up just to plop "Hello World" on a screen. Why am I upset when your inefficient program eats my RAM? I am upset because my computer's resources are not yours to waste. Read that again to yourself a few times for emphasis please.
Good code is efficient with memory, CPU, and any other resource it makes use of. This is just simply programming best practice. Wasting resources because you have them to waste makes for programs that don't play well with others and it leads to a lackadaisical attitude in more than just resource usage. Plus, as much as you might think you've invented hard AI, or the software cure for cancer, people are going to want to run more than just your precious little brain child. In response to the Amiga, Bill Gates famously said "who will ever want to run more than one program at a time?". You seem to have that mentality. I like to use my RAM for my purposes. I load up huge images to photo edit while a kernel compiles in a virtualbox session and while I re-encode a video with a codex that works with my BlurRay player. I am also someone that likes to have 30+ tabs open as I work, and a browser built with an efficient compiler is appreciated.
Let's assume that 100% of all phones track you for one government for another. All other things being equal, I'd rather have Huawei or Xiaomi than Apple or Samsung. At least they don't roll over for the NSA as easily.
The Chinese aren't going to give a wet snap what I'm doing on a daily basis. And I don't particularly care if they know.
People are getting smarter about purchases. Unfortunately, smartphones aren't getting smarter. I haven't bought a new phone since my S5, though the OLED (what a terrible technology) screen is suffering and I will need to replace it soon. People don't want 12 megapixels over 10 or 5. At a certain point, shooting in higher resolution just makes for ungainly file sizes for no real benefit. No one really uses voice control serioiusly, and all we get with each generation is more midle-of-the-bell-curve junk and bloatware. Since my S5 Samsung deleted infrared, HDMI, and FM radio - they tried even deleting the SD slot, and they give what bac in return? An OLED screen with even more density that degrades even faster. Great work!
Nearly all of the other half of 2017's cryptocurrencies should fail.
The currency cryptocopia needs draining. They are almost universally used primarily for investment rather than actual trading. That makes them worthless. Something that is inherently valueless (like bits in a virtual wallet) is only valuable insomuch as it is agreed upon that it can represent actual value. Saying a cryptocurrency is valuable because it means something according to this other thing that is also inherently valueless (regular currency) but which we interpret as being valuable is just an exercise in meta-thinking and hurting brains. Cryptocurrency is valuable because it can trade for currency which is valuable because we can trade it for something real. When you actually put it to words it sounds pretty dumb.
Let them fail. Take their bits and slow roast them over a spit so no other bits will get it in their heads that they want to be part of cryptocurrencies too. Then let's all enjoy five years of not having to worry about growing the world's electrical grid because of all the lovely extra headroom in capacity that we suddenly have.
You would have a point if not for the fact that China's level of authoritarianism is enough to make even the most security paranoid republican blush
Really, you want to go there? Ok, let's talk about that. If I lived in the United States, I would have about a ten percent chance of being incarcerated in state or federal prison in my lifetime. If I was black, it would be closer to 30%. Either it's a country full to the brim with criminals, or state and federal "justice" is a pretty lose term. Every time I drive down to visit my brother, I actually get nervous. Crossing the border is a stressful event. The airports, where the recorded announcements of "don't set something down or you will be seen as a terrorist" playing on a constant loop don't serve help the "Welcome to America!" ambiance any. This was all pre-Trump too. I won't bother to link anything on that, I will leave a search engine query of "USA racism since Trump" an an exercise for the reader. The result is pretty telling though, unfortunately, not surprising.
China's record isn't any better. But they aren't really that much worse either. They are industrializing, modernizing, and (slowly) liberalizing country. They are trying to govern more people in more varied circumstances than any other government in the world. The people there (including the people in government) aren't better, or worse, they are just different. In any case, human rights changes won't come from Apple keeping the crypto keys here. They won't happen by outside pressure. They never do. They will happen when the Chinese people demand it. Apartheid fell not from sanctions but from the demands of those within. Imposing change from the outside never works. Imposing democracy on Afghanistan and Iraq sure worked great, didn't it?
If I'm a Chinese citizen, am I more paranoid about the NSA reading my email, or the Chinese government reading my email?
This was from a different poster, but I don't wont to write two replies - Slashdot is sluggish and error prone right now.
This is fair enough. In fact, it was something I brought up in a post I made on the Slashdot story about the US government warning not to buy Huwei phones. In that post I pointed out as a normal user, a Huwei phone might actually seem great to me. If it's tapped by the Chinese, what do I care? At least they won't be sharing my data with the NSA. However, from China's perspective, moving the keys over there makes sense since it is not just the normal joe citizen that might use Apple's technology. These are people who may be high enough in business dealings or even low level government officials that having those keys on their own nation's property could be quite highly in their best interests. However, that certainly is a fair point you made.
Another way they optimize revenue is by making sure that any shared files are credited to each user that is subscribed as if the whole file was stored for each user. When my brother shared a folder of family history photos and documents, there went my personal space. Which seems rather self defeating when you think of it - discouraging the reuse of files.
Dropbox is great until you actually try and use it. That little shared file gem, coupled with the fact that their client self-updates with no ability to stop it meant that dropbox was uninstalled. I got myself a Linux virtual server - 20GB of space and a dedicated KVM CPU (the company I use, CACloud, doesn't oversubscribe their physical cores) for $5 Canadian a month. With Syncthing being trivial to install, available for almost all platforms, and a fantastic (and effficient) way to share files, this gave me private cloud storage on a server I control. I trust a hosting provider in Canada far more than I trust Dropbox.
What we really need is a specialized cloud services Linux distribution. Cloud server in a box. Webmail, Syncthing, maybe even Wordpress if you want it. Plug in your domain name (or make money by setting it up so sell them on setup), and your average user can have their data entirely on infrastructure they control. I was able to set all this up, and I'm sure it's no great stretch for most users here to do the same. But it would be nice if it was plug-and-play easy for anyone to do this. Start putting a dent in people trusting their data to places that don't have any vested interest in it besides monetizing it.
Or, alternatively, how about "Keys for Chinese Accounts Moving to China - Easing Fears NSA Can Tap Communications"
Imagine this from their perspective. Keys for communications that are increasingly being used in official capacities have been held in a country that is antagonistic to you. A country with hugely funded security apparatus that has demonstrably and repeatedly used government sponsored back doors in computing equipment and undisclosed zero day vulnerabilities in operating systems to get access to your communications and industrial infrastructure.
I find it amusing that every time China takes a step in this direction the news outlets decry fears of human rights abuses. Like, say, Guantanamo Bay, the Collateral Murder, and every Snowden revelation have never happened. It's no surprise that China is creating rules to require cryptographic keys be held there. The surprise is that it took them this long.
Umm, I think not. The Windows 10 laptop I have now has not a trace of Facebook on it. As I type this, I have Facebook open in a browser tab in Palemoon. I had to dig my password out of keepass since I haven't logged in in three years, but it works just fine without a lick of Facebook code on my computer.
Seriously, though, I just recommend dumping it. I made the transition to a Facebook free life a few years back, and I'm quite the happier for it. Facebook is more of a sewer than craigslist. I still can't believe people actually go there for news. RSS has been around for a decade, every legitimate news outlet has one. Every browser in the world will make a live bookmark out of one. Your friends will get used to using good old fashioned e-mail.
I never understood Facebook. It always seemed to me to be a solution looking for a problem.
Of course intelligence agencies knew about it. While I'm not a huge fan (or detractor though) of Assange, he made a good case for Google being essentially an arm of the State Department. Why do you think that China has such an issue with Google? The US now warns about Chinese cell phone manufacturers and that their products are possibly unsafe, but this is very much a case of the fire pit calling the kettle black.
The NSA certainly knew of, and have likely been exploiting this for years. The only positive in this is that, unlike the last time, at least time time they didn't let their exploit out in the wild. That little gem, not telling the public about zero day vulnerabilities they failed to disclose, which they subsequently weaponized, then lost control of the code for, cost more billions in ransomeware attacks than any other single source.
I remember that behaviour. It irked me too since it meant if it got the word wrong that you had to manually cursor back or tap on the wrong word before you could select a different one. I just checked and it's different now. Normally the cursor is left directly after the last word you type. It does leave a space, interestingly, if you correct a word, when it erases and rewrites the word it then leaves a space. IF you have to correct the final word in a sentence then you'll need to backspace to put in a period, otherwise it should be ok. I'm giving it another shot.
Swiftkey has better swiping recognition, but Swype has those awesome clipboard shortcuts. Basically ^A, ^C, ^X, ^V for select all, copy, cut, and paste. Have you ever been typing and get a text and need to respond to it before continuing what you're doing? A quit ^A, ^X, type your new text, send, then ^V to paste the old text and send. It's amazingly convenient. Trying to use clipboard functions without that is frustrating.
Maybe they couldn't find an under-the-table market for all the tracking data they had. Swype is notorious for activating your GPS and calling home with it, ostensibly to determine if it should load "regional words" into the dictionary, however the frequency it did it was staggeringly more often than required for the stated reason. It was obvious they were doing something with that data, because they switched from a pay-for-the-app to a free app where you just paid for the keyboard skins. No one is shelling out real money for a keyboard skin, so it's pretty clear their funding was from elsewhere.
No idea why this was modded into obscurity, because it's right on the money. Who cares about Windows on ARM? Ok, maybe ARM isn't exactly something I'd only relegate to my toaster, but I can't think of a single ARM device I'd want Windows on. We have successfully stuck Microsoft in its own little chroot jail - it has a niche as a necessary evil for the desktop (and by that I mean laptop desktop), but everything else Microsoft has tried to do has failed miserably for the reason that consumers are for the most part sane and no one wants to let them into any other market. No one willingly gives Microsoft money for anything else, because they have repeatedly demonstrated they simply cannot be trusted.
So, seriously, why would anyone even know of or care about Windows for ARM?
Slashdot Mirror
And look at the wording "...would delete facebook...". Who is going to go through the trouble? What will really happen is they will stay off it for a few weeks, Facebook will ramp up their "we miss you" emails. You know, the ones like "So and so has messaged you ten times and you haven't responded. Click here to see their messages", and "Hey look at the ten single girls who would probably respond to a friend request, click here to see them". After a few of those they'll go back on and it will be business as usual.
I will be more impressed when I see "nearly a third of tech workers HAVE deleted Facebook". Then I'll think the movement is working.
While the way that was expressed was moderately reprehensible, the underlying facts aren't wrong. You can't hold self-driving vehicle technology to a higher standard than human drivers yet. Now, how visible Ms. Herzberg was to a human eye is a matter of debate. A human eye can discern far more contrast differences than a camera does, so whether she was visible to a human eye while in the shadow is questionable. There can be no real dispute, though, that she was careless, didn't watch where she was going, and would have been difficult to avoid even if she was visible in the shadow. In short, her death may not have been preventable with an alert human driver at any skill level.
If that is the case, then any amount of added safety by a self driving vehicle is just gravy.
As for Google's statements, they are not necessarily wrong either. They are essentially saying "If Uber hadn't stolen our tech then misapplied it then Ms. Herzberg would be alive today", and that is totally fair game. If someone stole my invention, then because not inventing it they didn't understand the tech well enough to use it properly or to its potential and that got someone killed, I'd be angry too. And rightfully so.
Yes.
Holy frak guys, just start the second civil war already. The rest of the world knows it's coming, might as well just get down to it.
It's not reasonable as a test set if it's chosen to be stuff that's easy to translate. I just tried some Chinese assembly instructions, and it's terrible. And I don't mean the technical stuff, I mean the introduction:
Original:
(SNIP - the chinese characters won't work here. Alas for unicode.)
Microsoft:
Structure assembly, according to a certain order, the relevance of parts to subcontract; a total of eight subcontracts, from A1 to A8, the same package of parts are related, after assembly will constitute a machine components; in order to improve efficiency, to avoid confusion, please do not mix the different packages of parts all open after mixing together!!!!
Actual:
The structure is assembled in a certain order with parts relevant to each subsystem. There are a total of eight parts packages, from A1 to A8, each package related to a particular subsystem. In order to assist assembly and avoid confusion, please do not mix parts from the different packages.
This isn't particularly technical writing. About the most complex word is subsystem, and even if you give them that as a mulligan, their translation is still almost incomprehensible. Definitely not natural english as they claim.
If Siri's purpose was as an assistant app, and not (as it actually is) a surveillance proof of concept, it wouldn't have these problems. You can't convince me that Apple, or any of the voice recognition players, are dedicating more processing power in their central servers on a per usage-basis than the mobile devices have natively inside them. Apple phones are a multi-gigahertz computing devices with more DSP power inside them than your PC has. The "record-voice and phone home with it so servers can process it" architecture is a not-even-thinly veiled surveillance tactic. Security experts, reputable ones, have been warning people about this for years. Siri was nothing more than a proof of concept for this.
It's really no surprise that the infrastructure couldn't handle it. It's the wrong solution for the problem. The correct solution, though, wouldn't advance their goal.
Not to mention OLED is pretty much a disposable technology. When it's normal non-degrading LED technology I'll be interested.
The problem is they got into the situation where no solution is a short-term win for the cable companies. The unfortunate truth is that top executives are all about the short term. Their pay packages are all about year over year growth, and winning back customer loyalty is going to cost in the short term. The executives, with this latest charade, are trying to minimize the year-over-year hit by slowly reducing commercial content. Fox is reducing commercial time to 2 minutes per hour, but not until 2020. Of course, they are announcing it today, though. They want the benefit of goodwill generated by reducing commercial time without actually taking the hit for doing it now. They are treating customers like they are stupid, and this isn't 1980 any more.
Boards and shareholders should be stringing the cable execs up by their gonads, because they are the ones who are selling out the companies they work for. Everything they have done for the last 15 years has been to maximize short term profit at the expense of long term customer good will.
If they want to dig themselves out they need to change, with immediate effect, all top executive compensation packages to either reflect profit gains over a five year period, or better yet, base them not on profit but on a formula that combines profit and subscriber numbers.
That's only half right. "Engaging" is the user spying. "Powerful" is the other half of the coin, improving Microsoft's ability to remotely control our computers.
S is supposed to be for Secure. Microsoft's walled garden mode. They think it'll be a big hit. The funny part...
They are consistently out of touch with people actually want their computers to do. That's just Microsoft. It's why they have to strong arm everyone into buying their product, because they have never really quite figured out how to actually innovate. This, however, surprised me with the depth of just how deeply ignorant they really are. My concern is that they will reverse this. They will claim that "S" mode is wildly popular and requested and will "relent" and give it by default to everyone, and make you pay to use anything else on your computer.
In who's drive?
I wouldn't particularly care if Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were all litigated out of existance, but that is a bit rich.
Why care? Because this is step 1 of 3.
Step 1: Embrace.
Just two more to go.
I recommend The Scorpion and the Frog for further reading.
I have, unfortunately, met people like you before. People like you are the reason why it costs a gigabyte of RAM and requires a VM being spun up just to plop "Hello World" on a screen. Why am I upset when your inefficient program eats my RAM? I am upset because my computer's resources are not yours to waste. Read that again to yourself a few times for emphasis please.
Good code is efficient with memory, CPU, and any other resource it makes use of. This is just simply programming best practice. Wasting resources because you have them to waste makes for programs that don't play well with others and it leads to a lackadaisical attitude in more than just resource usage. Plus, as much as you might think you've invented hard AI, or the software cure for cancer, people are going to want to run more than just your precious little brain child. In response to the Amiga, Bill Gates famously said "who will ever want to run more than one program at a time?". You seem to have that mentality. I like to use my RAM for my purposes. I load up huge images to photo edit while a kernel compiles in a virtualbox session and while I re-encode a video with a codex that works with my BlurRay player. I am also someone that likes to have 30+ tabs open as I work, and a browser built with an efficient compiler is appreciated.
Let's assume that 100% of all phones track you for one government for another. All other things being equal, I'd rather have Huawei or Xiaomi than Apple or Samsung. At least they don't roll over for the NSA as easily.
The Chinese aren't going to give a wet snap what I'm doing on a daily basis. And I don't particularly care if they know.
People are getting smarter about purchases. Unfortunately, smartphones aren't getting smarter. I haven't bought a new phone since my S5, though the OLED (what a terrible technology) screen is suffering and I will need to replace it soon. People don't want 12 megapixels over 10 or 5. At a certain point, shooting in higher resolution just makes for ungainly file sizes for no real benefit. No one really uses voice control serioiusly, and all we get with each generation is more midle-of-the-bell-curve junk and bloatware. Since my S5 Samsung deleted infrared, HDMI, and FM radio - they tried even deleting the SD slot, and they give what bac in return? An OLED screen with even more density that degrades even faster. Great work!
Nearly all of the other half of 2017's cryptocurrencies should fail.
The currency cryptocopia needs draining. They are almost universally used primarily for investment rather than actual trading. That makes them worthless. Something that is inherently valueless (like bits in a virtual wallet) is only valuable insomuch as it is agreed upon that it can represent actual value. Saying a cryptocurrency is valuable because it means something according to this other thing that is also inherently valueless (regular currency) but which we interpret as being valuable is just an exercise in meta-thinking and hurting brains. Cryptocurrency is valuable because it can trade for currency which is valuable because we can trade it for something real. When you actually put it to words it sounds pretty dumb.
Let them fail. Take their bits and slow roast them over a spit so no other bits will get it in their heads that they want to be part of cryptocurrencies too. Then let's all enjoy five years of not having to worry about growing the world's electrical grid because of all the lovely extra headroom in capacity that we suddenly have.
Really, you want to go there? Ok, let's talk about that. If I lived in the United States, I would have about a ten percent chance of being incarcerated in state or federal prison in my lifetime. If I was black, it would be closer to 30%. Either it's a country full to the brim with criminals, or state and federal "justice" is a pretty lose term. Every time I drive down to visit my brother, I actually get nervous. Crossing the border is a stressful event. The airports, where the recorded announcements of "don't set something down or you will be seen as a terrorist" playing on a constant loop don't serve help the "Welcome to America!" ambiance any. This was all pre-Trump too. I won't bother to link anything on that, I will leave a search engine query of "USA racism since Trump" an an exercise for the reader. The result is pretty telling though, unfortunately, not surprising.
China's record isn't any better. But they aren't really that much worse either. They are industrializing, modernizing, and (slowly) liberalizing country. They are trying to govern more people in more varied circumstances than any other government in the world. The people there (including the people in government) aren't better, or worse, they are just different. In any case, human rights changes won't come from Apple keeping the crypto keys here. They won't happen by outside pressure. They never do. They will happen when the Chinese people demand it. Apartheid fell not from sanctions but from the demands of those within. Imposing change from the outside never works. Imposing democracy on Afghanistan and Iraq sure worked great, didn't it?
This was from a different poster, but I don't wont to write two replies - Slashdot is sluggish and error prone right now.
This is fair enough. In fact, it was something I brought up in a post I made on the Slashdot story about the US government warning not to buy Huwei phones. In that post I pointed out as a normal user, a Huwei phone might actually seem great to me. If it's tapped by the Chinese, what do I care? At least they won't be sharing my data with the NSA. However, from China's perspective, moving the keys over there makes sense since it is not just the normal joe citizen that might use Apple's technology. These are people who may be high enough in business dealings or even low level government officials that having those keys on their own nation's property could be quite highly in their best interests. However, that certainly is a fair point you made.
Another way they optimize revenue is by making sure that any shared files are credited to each user that is subscribed as if the whole file was stored for each user. When my brother shared a folder of family history photos and documents, there went my personal space. Which seems rather self defeating when you think of it - discouraging the reuse of files.
Dropbox is great until you actually try and use it. That little shared file gem, coupled with the fact that their client self-updates with no ability to stop it meant that dropbox was uninstalled. I got myself a Linux virtual server - 20GB of space and a dedicated KVM CPU (the company I use, CACloud, doesn't oversubscribe their physical cores) for $5 Canadian a month. With Syncthing being trivial to install, available for almost all platforms, and a fantastic (and effficient) way to share files, this gave me private cloud storage on a server I control. I trust a hosting provider in Canada far more than I trust Dropbox.
What we really need is a specialized cloud services Linux distribution. Cloud server in a box. Webmail, Syncthing, maybe even Wordpress if you want it. Plug in your domain name (or make money by setting it up so sell them on setup), and your average user can have their data entirely on infrastructure they control. I was able to set all this up, and I'm sure it's no great stretch for most users here to do the same. But it would be nice if it was plug-and-play easy for anyone to do this. Start putting a dent in people trusting their data to places that don't have any vested interest in it besides monetizing it.
Or, alternatively, how about "Keys for Chinese Accounts Moving to China - Easing Fears NSA Can Tap Communications"
Imagine this from their perspective. Keys for communications that are increasingly being used in official capacities have been held in a country that is antagonistic to you. A country with hugely funded security apparatus that has demonstrably and repeatedly used government sponsored back doors in computing equipment and undisclosed zero day vulnerabilities in operating systems to get access to your communications and industrial infrastructure.
I find it amusing that every time China takes a step in this direction the news outlets decry fears of human rights abuses. Like, say, Guantanamo Bay, the Collateral Murder, and every Snowden revelation have never happened. It's no surprise that China is creating rules to require cryptographic keys be held there. The surprise is that it took them this long.
Umm, I think not. The Windows 10 laptop I have now has not a trace of Facebook on it. As I type this, I have Facebook open in a browser tab in Palemoon. I had to dig my password out of keepass since I haven't logged in in three years, but it works just fine without a lick of Facebook code on my computer.
Seriously, though, I just recommend dumping it. I made the transition to a Facebook free life a few years back, and I'm quite the happier for it. Facebook is more of a sewer than craigslist. I still can't believe people actually go there for news. RSS has been around for a decade, every legitimate news outlet has one. Every browser in the world will make a live bookmark out of one. Your friends will get used to using good old fashioned e-mail.
I never understood Facebook. It always seemed to me to be a solution looking for a problem.
Of course intelligence agencies knew about it. While I'm not a huge fan (or detractor though) of Assange, he made a good case for Google being essentially an arm of the State Department. Why do you think that China has such an issue with Google? The US now warns about Chinese cell phone manufacturers and that their products are possibly unsafe, but this is very much a case of the fire pit calling the kettle black.
The NSA certainly knew of, and have likely been exploiting this for years. The only positive in this is that, unlike the last time, at least time time they didn't let their exploit out in the wild. That little gem, not telling the public about zero day vulnerabilities they failed to disclose, which they subsequently weaponized, then lost control of the code for, cost more billions in ransomeware attacks than any other single source.
I remember that behaviour. It irked me too since it meant if it got the word wrong that you had to manually cursor back or tap on the wrong word before you could select a different one. I just checked and it's different now. Normally the cursor is left directly after the last word you type. It does leave a space, interestingly, if you correct a word, when it erases and rewrites the word it then leaves a space. IF you have to correct the final word in a sentence then you'll need to backspace to put in a period, otherwise it should be ok. I'm giving it another shot.
Swiftkey has better swiping recognition, but Swype has those awesome clipboard shortcuts. Basically ^A, ^C, ^X, ^V for select all, copy, cut, and paste. Have you ever been typing and get a text and need to respond to it before continuing what you're doing? A quit ^A, ^X, type your new text, send, then ^V to paste the old text and send. It's amazingly convenient. Trying to use clipboard functions without that is frustrating.
Maybe they couldn't find an under-the-table market for all the tracking data they had. Swype is notorious for activating your GPS and calling home with it, ostensibly to determine if it should load "regional words" into the dictionary, however the frequency it did it was staggeringly more often than required for the stated reason. It was obvious they were doing something with that data, because they switched from a pay-for-the-app to a free app where you just paid for the keyboard skins. No one is shelling out real money for a keyboard skin, so it's pretty clear their funding was from elsewhere.
No idea why this was modded into obscurity, because it's right on the money. Who cares about Windows on ARM? Ok, maybe ARM isn't exactly something I'd only relegate to my toaster, but I can't think of a single ARM device I'd want Windows on. We have successfully stuck Microsoft in its own little chroot jail - it has a niche as a necessary evil for the desktop (and by that I mean laptop desktop), but everything else Microsoft has tried to do has failed miserably for the reason that consumers are for the most part sane and no one wants to let them into any other market. No one willingly gives Microsoft money for anything else, because they have repeatedly demonstrated they simply cannot be trusted.
So, seriously, why would anyone even know of or care about Windows for ARM?