And as always, who suffers? Regular property owners and renters. Middle class people who are priced out of the rental market because $2500 or more per month for a 1 bedroom apartment is obscene.
It could be argued that any house which isn't owner-occupied is a threat to the middle class, especially those just entering it. Investment properties introduce volatility into the housing market. During upswings, they compete for inventory, driving prices up. During downswings, they can flood markets as investors go under. Renters cause more frequent quality of life issues for neighbors than homeowners. Vacant shadow homes can cause blight.
If voters wanted to reduce that volatility, a tax on non-owner-occupied housing would go a long way. It would discourage both short-term and long-term rental properties, as well as vacant shadow properties. That might help keep both corporate and foreign investors from using the housing market as a place to park wealth.
A race to the bottom in prices is... bad for product quality.
You get what you pay for. I noticed that Target has quietly replaced many national brands with their own cheaper brands. They're not as good. I find myself buying more products from Kroger, Costco, and Amazon as a result. If Wal-Mart follows the same path, I imagine that they'll turn off many middle-class shoppers who shop there today.
Or from HP's printer division. Both companies have repeatedly shown over the decades that they are hostile towards their customers. There are plenty of other printer manufacturers out there to choose from.
To be fair, they were selling service so low it really was cheaper than it should have been. It was only a matter of time before a rate hike of some sort would happen.
It seems as if T-Mobile USA is following the lead of other major US carriers in that they only want to directly sell to power users. Customers who aren't as profitable are being steered to their own discount brand (MetroPCS is owned by T-Mobile; likewise, Boost and Virgin Mobile are owned by Sprint while Cingular is owned by AT&T) or third party MVNO resellers like Page Plus, Straight Talk, Pure Talk, Ting, and the like.
If you want to continue to use the T-Mobile network but with a cheaper plan, there are plenty of ways to do it.
That sounds like Obama's misstatement that "you can keep your current health plan.
You could keep your insurance plan. The problem was that health care insurers tend to retire plans every couple years. So eventually you'd have to get a new one.
Cell phone companies have historically left grandfathered plans alone so long as the customer paid out of pocket for their phones. It was when you wanted to use their free phone upgrades that they made you dump your old plan.
As example, I kept my AT&T Wireless plan through both the Cingular and AT&T Mobility change-overs. I even kept my plan through the D-AMPS to GSM migration. I just had to buy my own phones. It wasn't until they started degrading service for users with old SIM cards did I finally change plans.
I've heard similar stories with T-Mobile and Verizon. It takes several years before they make it really uncomfortable for old plan subscribers.
when it comes to darkness/dim lights, OLEDs are miles better. I'd have deeper blacks over higher brightness/wider gamut any time, please.
Same here. While the clarity and resolution of those Samsung SUHD QD panels were fantastic up close, it wasn't such a big deal when I moved as far back as I sit from my current TV. But even from that distance, I could tell the difference in black levels and color between it and the late model Panasonic VT60-series plasma I have at home and the LG OLED at my friend's house. For every scene that the Samsung looked better, there were two or three where the plasma and OLED look better.
I doubt that using 64 bit or 128 bit addresses would have increased the complexity for users that much. It just would have been a couple of extra characters to type in. IPX used 12 byte protocol addresses and it wasn't that big of a deal.
For developers, the biggest hassle would have been switching from a single dword to an array of some sort to hold the protocol address on 32 bit systems. No more simple register compares. But next to the logic for handling fragmentation/reassembly and IP options, it still would have been simple.
It would have been nice to have had something like IPSec transport mode from the start, but only if it were an optional component and if it didn't hard-code encryption or integrity algorithms. Also, for lightweight and low-end systems during the '80s and '90s, mandatory encryption support in the stack would have been overkill. Hobbyists would have preferred a smaller memory footprint.
I kinda wish that IPv4 would have made IP options a separate header, as they are in IPv6. Variable length IP headers are a little bit of a pain to work with.
"The audio connector is more than 100 years old," Joswiak says. "It had its last big innovation about 50 years ago. You know what that was? They made it smaller. It hasn't been touched since then.
Not true. The 2.5mm plug was released, as were the OMTP and CTIA 4-ring jack standards.
I would have been fine with Apple moving from a 3.5mm to 2.5mm plug. Adapters are cheap and the plug is an industry standard.
I'd expect public outcry to be over more mundane issues, like noise, privacy, and operator trespass. Imagine living near a celeb and having to deal with the paparazzi flying drones. Or professional photographers flying drones over residential tourist attractions, like Lombard Street in SF. It would get incredibly annoying very quickly.
That works for ransomware programs that simply encrypt and then immediately extort, but there are others that will silently encrypt for weeks before issuing a ransom. So unless you validate your backups with another clean computer, you might not know.
There are a couple of cellular resellers who have basic plans with either no data or with very cheap data. The AT&T reseller I use has a $10/mo plan that includes 300 minutes, 50MB of data, and 50 MMS texts and a $15/mo plan that doubles it to 600/100MB/100MMS.
Look around. All four of the major providers in the U.S. resell their service. I believe that the big 4 in Canada do the same.
If you have older hardware, you might have difficulties getting the drivers to work.
One issue of note is the loss of the XDDM video driver subsystem that allowed video drivers from XP to be used on Vista and W7. Microsoft removed it from W8 and later OSes. So if a WDDM video driver was never released for your graphics chipset, you will be stuck with VESA SVGA video under W8 and W10.
There are still a number of Pentium 4M and Pentium M laptops in use where this is an issue. I have an older Thinkpad that I use when on vacation and that the kids use at home that has the i855GME chipset. I have a friend that still uses her Inspiron 5100 that has an AMD Radeon 7500M chip. Neither will ever see a Microsoft OS newer than W7.
I have the same problem as you. The emergency call button is too easy to activate and the power menu can be activated without unlocking the screen. Both are design faults. Some third party Android editions remedy the second problem, but not the first.
My ancient Nokia brick phones had a screen lock. They also had a bypass for emergency calls. But instead of automatically dialing 911/999, it brought you to the dialer screen. The only number you could enter was 911/999. Anything else would prompt for the unlock code.
I've seen people argue that dialing emergency services should be as simple as possible, that a catastrophic injury might make navigating menus and dialers difficult. For every scenario like that, how many times have emergency call centers run out of free operators, with a butt dialer or two being enough to push them to capacity?
Have you considered not connecting your critical infrastructure directly to the Internet. The fact that the 'Cyber attackers' can even see your computers shows extreme complacency by whoever is in charge of your 'computers'.
For all we know, their network wasn't attached to the Internet and that there was an air gap between it and the outside. Problem is, it isn't terribly difficult to insert your own back door. In many cases, you just need a wireless adapter and the proper software. Even if they're not running an IP network, you can encapsulate their traffic and send it through your eavesdropping device.
The problem with the article is that it is very light on details. How is an attack defined? Does it include a simple port scan or does it require something more targeted and defined? Of systems that were compromised, how many of them were non-sensitive public web servers in a DMZ/TZ and how many of them were internal servers containing sensitive data?
Using the weakest metrics, my employer's external facing network is attacked thousands of times a day. It isn't a matter of if we're being hit by a traffic flood at any given time, but by how many clients and at what rate.
Would be nice if they actually tallied the incidents by severity and general attack type.
It doesn't; it's capable of picking out an address that doesn't conflict with anything else on the same segment. But then you don't know which address is Bob's phone and which is Fred's, so you can't tell who to fire for downloading cat videos.
Sure you do. You can enable logging of neighbor discovery protocol (NDP) packets and logging on dynamic host registration. It isn't as simple as a DHCP lease, but it can be done. And given that IPv6 addresses tend to be fairly static, Bob and Fred will probably have the same address day after day.
I'm also curious if this runs afoul of HIPAA privacy rules. They may only be able to sell it using an opt-in clause. Also, the penalty for not opting-in cannot be significant because it could be seen as coercion by a judge.
This is just one more reason why this country needs a privacy amendment in the constitution. Corporations should not be allowed to sell private personal data to other corporations or to the government without prior approval. It is sad that the EU is so far ahead of the US on this issue.
Yes and no. Some carriers like T-Mobile made deals with companies like Pandora where data from Pandora did not count towards your monthly high-speed quota. That's probably not allowed anymore.
In the case of Sprint, it sounds as if this has more to do with truth in advertising. If they were throttling high-volume users at arbitrary points, that could result in a violation.
I run a small WISP and I instituted monthly quotas. After a user's allotment is gone, that user's connection slows to 256kbps. But I make sure that the quota is listed prominently on any sales material, that they can check it on their status page and that an email is generated when they get down to 10%. Nobody can argue that they didn't know about it. And there are no exceptions to the traffic counter - traffic is traffic.
Third world standards? Add rooftop solar to every house in the sun belt, wind turbines off the coasts and micro nuclear reactors around population centers and the US could drop to pre-WWII emissions for less money than what we've sunk into the Middle East over the past 30 years.
Just add the.gov and.mil top-level domains to HSTS preload lists. That'll close the code injection vector on port 80 before the redirect to HTTPS takes place. It also acts as a fire under all government sites - implement TLS or else HSTS browsers won't be able to access your site any further.
Yup. Google has been getting around the fragmentation issue by slowly moving important parts of the API out of the kernel and into the Google Play Services module. In turn, newer versions of their apps rely on the updated Play service. The only thing left behind in the kernel.
Having said that, Google really needs to get aggressive with manufacturers are carriers regarding OS updates. The first step would be to require carriers to revoke bootloader locks upon request once contracts are up. Second, require manufacturers to support timely updates for at least three years. In turn, Google needs to support X.Y.z releases for at least three years. As example, end of support for Gingerbread should have been December 2013, not September 2011.
The problem with radio transmissions in the EHF band is that they are incredibly line of sight (LOS) restricted. Any structures or vegetation between the client and access point will block the transmission. It is also highly susceptible to rain fade. And while 73 GHz is above the atmospheric oxygen attenuation death zone (57–64 GHz), it is still highly affected by atmospheric absorption. Range for a point-to-point (PtP) system is a kilometer or two at most with sane ERP levels.
There are already a couple of manufacturers who make PtP wireless network devices for the 60–80 GHz band, but they're mainly used for short distance backhaul networks. They're less expensive substitutes for running fiber between buildings or across a campus. The idea is that you have your PtP backhaul running at 10, 24 or 60–80 GHz and then you communicate with your clients using a PtMP network in the UHF band using WiFi, WiMax or LTE.
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And as always, who suffers? Regular property owners and renters. Middle class people who are priced out of the rental market because $2500 or more per month for a 1 bedroom apartment is obscene.
It could be argued that any house which isn't owner-occupied is a threat to the middle class, especially those just entering it. Investment properties introduce volatility into the housing market. During upswings, they compete for inventory, driving prices up. During downswings, they can flood markets as investors go under. Renters cause more frequent quality of life issues for neighbors than homeowners. Vacant shadow homes can cause blight.
If voters wanted to reduce that volatility, a tax on non-owner-occupied housing would go a long way. It would discourage both short-term and long-term rental properties, as well as vacant shadow properties. That might help keep both corporate and foreign investors from using the housing market as a place to park wealth.
A race to the bottom in prices is ... bad for product quality.
You get what you pay for. I noticed that Target has quietly replaced many national brands with their own cheaper brands. They're not as good. I find myself buying more products from Kroger, Costco, and Amazon as a result. If Wal-Mart follows the same path, I imagine that they'll turn off many middle-class shoppers who shop there today.
never buy anything Lexmark.
Or from HP's printer division. Both companies have repeatedly shown over the decades that they are hostile towards their customers. There are plenty of other printer manufacturers out there to choose from.
To be fair, they were selling service so low it really was cheaper than it should have been. It was only a matter of time before a rate hike of some sort would happen.
It seems as if T-Mobile USA is following the lead of other major US carriers in that they only want to directly sell to power users. Customers who aren't as profitable are being steered to their own discount brand (MetroPCS is owned by T-Mobile; likewise, Boost and Virgin Mobile are owned by Sprint while Cingular is owned by AT&T) or third party MVNO resellers like Page Plus, Straight Talk, Pure Talk, Ting, and the like.
If you want to continue to use the T-Mobile network but with a cheaper plan, there are plenty of ways to do it.
That sounds like Obama's misstatement that "you can keep your current health plan.
You could keep your insurance plan. The problem was that health care insurers tend to retire plans every couple years. So eventually you'd have to get a new one.
Cell phone companies have historically left grandfathered plans alone so long as the customer paid out of pocket for their phones. It was when you wanted to use their free phone upgrades that they made you dump your old plan.
As example, I kept my AT&T Wireless plan through both the Cingular and AT&T Mobility change-overs. I even kept my plan through the D-AMPS to GSM migration. I just had to buy my own phones. It wasn't until they started degrading service for users with old SIM cards did I finally change plans.
I've heard similar stories with T-Mobile and Verizon. It takes several years before they make it really uncomfortable for old plan subscribers.
Organic LEDs (OLEDs) are electroluminescent. Quantum dots are fluorescencent. They require a backlight of some sort to produce light.
when it comes to darkness/dim lights, OLEDs are miles better. I'd have deeper blacks over higher brightness/wider gamut any time, please.
Same here. While the clarity and resolution of those Samsung SUHD QD panels were fantastic up close, it wasn't such a big deal when I moved as far back as I sit from my current TV. But even from that distance, I could tell the difference in black levels and color between it and the late model Panasonic VT60-series plasma I have at home and the LG OLED at my friend's house. For every scene that the Samsung looked better, there were two or three where the plasma and OLED look better.
QLED = LCD screen using an LED backlight and quantum dot phosphors
I doubt that using 64 bit or 128 bit addresses would have increased the complexity for users that much. It just would have been a couple of extra characters to type in. IPX used 12 byte protocol addresses and it wasn't that big of a deal.
For developers, the biggest hassle would have been switching from a single dword to an array of some sort to hold the protocol address on 32 bit systems. No more simple register compares. But next to the logic for handling fragmentation/reassembly and IP options, it still would have been simple.
It would have been nice to have had something like IPSec transport mode from the start, but only if it were an optional component and if it didn't hard-code encryption or integrity algorithms. Also, for lightweight and low-end systems during the '80s and '90s, mandatory encryption support in the stack would have been overkill. Hobbyists would have preferred a smaller memory footprint.
I kinda wish that IPv4 would have made IP options a separate header, as they are in IPv6. Variable length IP headers are a little bit of a pain to work with.
"The audio connector is more than 100 years old," Joswiak says. "It had its last big innovation about 50 years ago. You know what that was? They made it smaller. It hasn't been touched since then.
Not true. The 2.5mm plug was released, as were the OMTP and CTIA 4-ring jack standards.
I would have been fine with Apple moving from a 3.5mm to 2.5mm plug. Adapters are cheap and the plug is an industry standard.
I'd expect public outcry to be over more mundane issues, like noise, privacy, and operator trespass. Imagine living near a celeb and having to deal with the paparazzi flying drones. Or professional photographers flying drones over residential tourist attractions, like Lombard Street in SF. It would get incredibly annoying very quickly.
That works for ransomware programs that simply encrypt and then immediately extort, but there are others that will silently encrypt for weeks before issuing a ransom. So unless you validate your backups with another clean computer, you might not know.
There are a couple of cellular resellers who have basic plans with either no data or with very cheap data. The AT&T reseller I use has a $10/mo plan that includes 300 minutes, 50MB of data, and 50 MMS texts and a $15/mo plan that doubles it to 600/100MB/100MMS.
Look around. All four of the major providers in the U.S. resell their service. I believe that the big 4 in Canada do the same.
If you have older hardware, you might have difficulties getting the drivers to work.
One issue of note is the loss of the XDDM video driver subsystem that allowed video drivers from XP to be used on Vista and W7. Microsoft removed it from W8 and later OSes. So if a WDDM video driver was never released for your graphics chipset, you will be stuck with VESA SVGA video under W8 and W10.
There are still a number of Pentium 4M and Pentium M laptops in use where this is an issue. I have an older Thinkpad that I use when on vacation and that the kids use at home that has the i855GME chipset. I have a friend that still uses her Inspiron 5100 that has an AMD Radeon 7500M chip. Neither will ever see a Microsoft OS newer than W7.
I have the same problem as you. The emergency call button is too easy to activate and the power menu can be activated without unlocking the screen. Both are design faults. Some third party Android editions remedy the second problem, but not the first.
My ancient Nokia brick phones had a screen lock. They also had a bypass for emergency calls. But instead of automatically dialing 911/999, it brought you to the dialer screen. The only number you could enter was 911/999. Anything else would prompt for the unlock code.
I've seen people argue that dialing emergency services should be as simple as possible, that a catastrophic injury might make navigating menus and dialers difficult. For every scenario like that, how many times have emergency call centers run out of free operators, with a butt dialer or two being enough to push them to capacity?
Have you considered not connecting your critical infrastructure directly to the Internet. The fact that the 'Cyber attackers' can even see your computers shows extreme complacency by whoever is in charge of your 'computers'.
For all we know, their network wasn't attached to the Internet and that there was an air gap between it and the outside. Problem is, it isn't terribly difficult to insert your own back door. In many cases, you just need a wireless adapter and the proper software. Even if they're not running an IP network, you can encapsulate their traffic and send it through your eavesdropping device.
The problem with the article is that it is very light on details. How is an attack defined? Does it include a simple port scan or does it require something more targeted and defined? Of systems that were compromised, how many of them were non-sensitive public web servers in a DMZ/TZ and how many of them were internal servers containing sensitive data?
Using the weakest metrics, my employer's external facing network is attacked thousands of times a day. It isn't a matter of if we're being hit by a traffic flood at any given time, but by how many clients and at what rate.
Would be nice if they actually tallied the incidents by severity and general attack type.
Time for a Firefox plugin that allows SSLv3 for local subnets/domains and any other whitelisted site but blocks it for everything else.
It doesn't; it's capable of picking out an address that doesn't conflict with anything else on the same segment. But then you don't know which address is Bob's phone and which is Fred's, so you can't tell who to fire for downloading cat videos.
Sure you do. You can enable logging of neighbor discovery protocol (NDP) packets and logging on dynamic host registration. It isn't as simple as a DHCP lease, but it can be done. And given that IPv6 addresses tend to be fairly static, Bob and Fred will probably have the same address day after day.
I'm also curious if this runs afoul of HIPAA privacy rules. They may only be able to sell it using an opt-in clause. Also, the penalty for not opting-in cannot be significant because it could be seen as coercion by a judge.
This is just one more reason why this country needs a privacy amendment in the constitution. Corporations should not be allowed to sell private personal data to other corporations or to the government without prior approval. It is sad that the EU is so far ahead of the US on this issue.
Yes and no. Some carriers like T-Mobile made deals with companies like Pandora where data from Pandora did not count towards your monthly high-speed quota. That's probably not allowed anymore.
In the case of Sprint, it sounds as if this has more to do with truth in advertising. If they were throttling high-volume users at arbitrary points, that could result in a violation.
I run a small WISP and I instituted monthly quotas. After a user's allotment is gone, that user's connection slows to 256kbps. But I make sure that the quota is listed prominently on any sales material, that they can check it on their status page and that an email is generated when they get down to 10%. Nobody can argue that they didn't know about it. And there are no exceptions to the traffic counter - traffic is traffic.
Third world standards? Add rooftop solar to every house in the sun belt, wind turbines off the coasts and micro nuclear reactors around population centers and the US could drop to pre-WWII emissions for less money than what we've sunk into the Middle East over the past 30 years.
Just add the .gov and .mil top-level domains to HSTS preload lists. That'll close the code injection vector on port 80 before the redirect to HTTPS takes place. It also acts as a fire under all government sites - implement TLS or else HSTS browsers won't be able to access your site any further.
Yup. Google has been getting around the fragmentation issue by slowly moving important parts of the API out of the kernel and into the Google Play Services module. In turn, newer versions of their apps rely on the updated Play service. The only thing left behind in the kernel.
Having said that, Google really needs to get aggressive with manufacturers are carriers regarding OS updates. The first step would be to require carriers to revoke bootloader locks upon request once contracts are up. Second, require manufacturers to support timely updates for at least three years. In turn, Google needs to support X.Y.z releases for at least three years. As example, end of support for Gingerbread should have been December 2013, not September 2011.
The problem with radio transmissions in the EHF band is that they are incredibly line of sight (LOS) restricted. Any structures or vegetation between the client and access point will block the transmission. It is also highly susceptible to rain fade. And while 73 GHz is above the atmospheric oxygen attenuation death zone (57–64 GHz), it is still highly affected by atmospheric absorption. Range for a point-to-point (PtP) system is a kilometer or two at most with sane ERP levels.
There are already a couple of manufacturers who make PtP wireless network devices for the 60–80 GHz band, but they're mainly used for short distance backhaul networks. They're less expensive substitutes for running fiber between buildings or across a campus. The idea is that you have your PtP backhaul running at 10, 24 or 60–80 GHz and then you communicate with your clients using a PtMP network in the UHF band using WiFi, WiMax or LTE.