One of the things I've wondered about is that Apple said the iPhone 4 does drop more calls than the 3GS. However, the iPhone 4 gets reception in locations the 3GS doesn't,
I work on the edge of a 3G cell. Iphone 3G(S)'s don't get a signal here at all yet a HTC Dream, Motorola Milestone and Nokia E72 almost always get about 1 bar (plus this cell gets congested around 10 AM to 5 PM). Iphone's have always had really badly designed/placed aerials. Saying the Iphone4 is better then it's predicessors is like saying the DDR (West Germany) was better then the Soviet Union. Technically it's true but that doesn't make the DDR a nice place to live.
Is iTunes another company? NO? So they already have my address.
Are you required to put your home address in to install Itunes? Or just to purchase. Then it's your choice.
And they would do that for millions of users, why exactly?
So they can sell this information to companies that want to sell you things. It's called targeted advertising.
Personally identifiable ad's popping up everywhere. If you cant understand why this is a bad thing, post your last month of activities and I'll sell it to someone who will show you.
I watched that whole event develop in utter disbelief. How in the hell did they get away with that? Forgive me, but it's one thing when Uncle Sam invades middle eastern countries to look for "terrorists", or "WMD's" (READ: oil) but a north european country? Are Sweden not part of Nato and the UN? How did this even come to pass?
Sweden is a fairly neutral nation in foreign conflicts as others have pointed out but in the Afghan and Iraq wars, anyone who didn't co-operate was threatened with economic sanctions and European lapdog (UK, Germany) were happy to go along with this. I'm also ashamed to admit my nation (Australia) also fits the description of "lapdog". We've had two prime ministers since Bush's best buddy John Howard sent us head first into the ME wars but the first one to grow any balls on the subject is a woman.
All of these phones CAN drop calls and lose service, it all depends on the starting signal strength.
Other phones do not lose 20+ dBm when you hold them. Most lose under 10 dBm with 5 dBm being the average. When you're minimal signal loss is four times that of the average signal loss then there is a problem with your design.
Do you actually know anybody who is having this "problem" with their iPhone 4 such that they can't use it?
Yes, everyone who has an Iphone4 and almost everyone who has updated to IOS4.
Half refuse to acknowledge there is a problem despite it being painfully evident in casual observation ("hello, bill, are you still there", I guess he must of accidentally hung up) and the other half have spoken to me about Android.
And that's what you do, right? Because it's just that easy. Grab your passport, get some plane tickets, fly your way to Myanmar, buy your way into the inner circle of government, then fly back to Los Angeles and write your exposé on corruption in the Myanmar dictatorship and sell it to the Los Angeles Times for, oh, let's say $1,000. Rinse and repeat. Right?
Compared this to:
Buy a DSLR and decent lens for $1000. Follow a celebrity around for a week, take photo's of them in everyday life. Make up a completely out of context story and sell it to a tabloid about $15,000.
In the end can you blame the reporter? Hell no, if you want someone to blame you need look no further then the nearest mirror, if people weren't buying tabloids they wouldn't be buying pictures of Lindsey Lolife for #$20K a piece.
This paves the way for government (through the dominant political parties) to own the ISPs.
This is a BAD THING,
Not really, the laws surrounding this thing are bad. If a political party sets up it's own ISP there needs to be a law as to how much of that money can go back to the party and how much adveritising that ISP can do politically (in addition to existing laws for ISPs). Besides, parties don't own anything, the individuals that comprise the party make up the board/shareholders. It's already perfectly legal for a political entity to own a media outlet, see: Fox News.
The problem you envisage with this already exist in America, 1. no restrictions on political advertising. 2. no punishment for deliberately misleading advertising (I.E. the death panels on Fox News) 3. nearly unlimited campaign contributions and 4. nearly unlimited campaign contributions. I know 3 and 4 are the same but it's that big of a point. If you reduced the maximum campaign contribution to 10,000 for Individuals and 5,000 for organisations as well as punishment for both parties if this is ever violated then much of the lobbying problem will go away.
and I bet the Pirate Party and the network engineers and system administrators that they hire will be at least smart enough to straight filter, either at the packet level at the border, or application level on the mail servers, any traffic coming from IP ranges known to belong to the RIAA, MPAA, or constituent organizations.
And set up an auto response that says:
"Thank you for your notification.
Your request is number x in our queue. You will be notified if we find any validity with your claim.
Sincerly,
Pirate ISP
BTW: Add some big JPG ads for the ISP in here will you Jorg."
Abuse of abuse notifications can be returned, quite legally.
Remember when it was discovered that iTunes was sending anonymized playlist data back to Apple for market-research purposes? Everyone on/. (or nearly so) cried "Big Brother!". But, here we are five years later, and I defy you to find anyone who has had their ACTUAL privacy or identity compromised by that policy.
No
But I stopped using Itunes a long time ago for many reasons.
Secondly this does not contain any location data. Perhaps your country but nothing specific, like 231 Main St, Maddington.
Traffic patterns are studied by the Carriers. Whats next? HTC monitoring, Motorola monitoring, Opera monitoring?
First off, it's not the monitoring that scares me, it's the selling that scares me. HTC, Moto or Apple can monitor all they like so long as all that data will do is sit in an ever expanding, expensive storage consuming database. But we cannot trust companies to do that, just keeping our credit card info safe is hard enough.
Secondly, you're right. If Apple gets away with this we'll have everyone doing it. Telco's, manufacturers, ISV's, absolutely everyone. Eventually the data will become so redundant and easily available that it becomes worthless but still, I'd rather not see this kind of future.
If i take the phone serial number, and append a few random digits to it, is this considered random? Not in my book, but i doubt that this "privacy policy" contains wording on that.
Even if they give you a completely random UID it will do nothing to anonymise the data.
UID 4773453: 10:00 PM, bobs fried chicken, lake St.
UID 4773453: 10:01 PM, End of file
UID 6234877: 10:15 PM, bobs fried chicken, lake St.
Do you see now, they don't need a permanent UID on you to create an effective map of your life. All you need to do is search for the same place in the end and beginning of a UID (a simple SQL query). Next thing you know, your world is full of ad's for KFC and weight watchers.
Um, they already know where I live. That would be the address where my phone bill arrives
Legally, they aren't permitted to sell that information. AT&T cant even give it to Apple without your express consent. Apple are barely permitted to even look at your billing information, especially from another company.
However capturing your "location data" is perfectly fine and sellable to.
As the parent said, even if you get a random UID each morning at about oh, 4 AM you will likely be in the same place as you were at 4 AM the previous morning making chaining a bunch of semi-randomised UID's in to a cohesive order a simple matter of SQL scripts that any retard could write.
If you read the article, the 90% drop is after requiring registration for the free service.
Paywall, registration. Meh, it's the same difference to most users. They want the news and not to screw around with logins or credit cards.
Most people will just say "Screw it, I'll check out the Beeb" (which Murdoch has a serious vendetta against) and the only users left are the ones that specifically want to insulate themselves from the Beeb (in other words, find comfort in the opinions of Murdoch/the Times and discomfort from opposing viewpoints).
For USians this is quite confusing - I assumed the submitter speaking of the New York Times.
For everyone else, its not confusing at all. We know that the Slimes is a tabloid rag owned by Murdoch in England and that it is not fit to line a bird cage.
I know Yanks are used to doing many things backwards but when referring to addresses you put them in order of size. London is smaller the Britain which is smaller then the UK. I this is as bad a listing Washington, EARTH, DC.
It might have something to do with whatever encryption package. But a better question is why is your ATM password limited to 4?!
Because of legacy ATM's. You might not think that there are that many old ATM's but there really are. These machines are not replaced as often as computers and the old ones are sold to smaller banks/poorer nations. Some banks offer 6 number PIN's but that doesn't fix the problem, Chip and PIN was halfway to fixing the ease with which ATM card were copies but isn't a true 2 factor authentication system.
I haven't encountered a system that had a (small) upper limit on password lengths although my banks mobile site will stop displaying stars after about 8 characters (although it accepts my 14 character password). The only upper limit I've encountered recently is WPA, which only accepts 63 character passwords.
Whatever. You get the idea. All you have to remember is the sentence.
Patterns are better.
What I tell my users is, pick a three, four or five letter word. Capitalise the first letter and put a number and special character between the two. For example the word is Bob and the number is 6 the easiest to remember password is:
Bob6^Bob.
All the user needs to remember is Bob6 and essentially to double it. Even if the number and special character are the same physical key it creates a strong password which is easy to remember and not in a dictionary. Otherwise most users go with Robert6, which is more vulnerable to brute force cracking as after a dictionary attack the first thing a cracker would do is run through that dictionary with a number attached to the end of common words.
But as a few/.ers have pointed out, keylogers and password sharing has created more security breaches and brute force attacks are less common for breaking passwords.
I do the same thing with PIN's, I use a square of four numbers and commit a pattern to muscle memory, that way I can use the same pattern to generate four separate PIN's. I.E.:
5 6
2 3
Will generate 2563 and:
7 8
4 5
Will generate 4785 with the same pattern.
Laser beams AND rail guns. The USN is on the verge of becoming a very "SciFi" weapons platform. If everything takes twice as long as planned then by 2020 you're going to see USN ships equipped with both weapons systems. Rail Guns firing projectiles at OTH targets at 5600MPH and handling close in threats with Phalanx CIWS upgraded with LASERS.
This IS the future.
But completely useless against low tech diver and C4.
I love sci fi weapons as much as the next geek but seriously. I wouldn't say "This IS the future" as it's a well known fact that navies are always gearing up to fight the last war (and I'm not singling out the USN, how much did the US, British, Nazi German and Japanese navy spend on battleships in the 30's only to have them rendered obsolete by cheaper carriers and land based aircraft, all navies are really guilty of thinking in the past).
Stealth ships and UAV's are the immediate future, by 2020 most navies will field stealth destroyers or frigates (Singapore and the Finns already are). I'm not making any bets on 2040.
Steam never logs in on the first go, Impulse also takes forever (same story as above, authentication is done on a server in the US) but it at least logs in on the first try. My internet connection is actually quite good I can get 1 GB off local servers in less then 45 minutes.
I have the same problem in Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and the Philippines. For the most part I just put Steam into offline mode but it still wants to connect every few weeks.
The presentation and drawing programs are also not anything I use.
I'll concede here, these are crap. But the world really could use less powerpoint.
OO.o's failure to take any marketshare is primarily a failure of marketing. The software is good enough for 90% of users, specialised users like accountants and engineers who have massive equations with many dependencies may still need something else but they aren't the bulk of the MS Office market.
Absolutely. I understand why certain people rag on Steam, it is DRM in the most literal sense
/waits for steam to start up.
Whilst DRM is a big issue with me.
/still waiting for steam to start up.
Steams DRM is relatively benign compared to that of Securom and co.
/Steam's finally started up. Oh crap now it's checking for updates.
Steam does deliver a great deal of extra value.
/No updates found, gah now it's verifying my game.
Which is why we put up with the DRM.
/still verifying the game I want to play.
There are a lot of idiosyncrasies and annoyances with the platform.
/finally finished verification, nothing is wrong. Why did steam have to verify the install.
That make me check to see if there the same game is available from Impulse or as a boxed copy even if it's A$10 more expensive, it's worth the hassle. Steam isn't even that much cheaper then buying online for Australians. ARMA II: Operation Arrowhead costs A$39.95 on Steam whilst JB HiFi sold it for A$43.95. Often it's cheaper as I can order from Play-Asia and pay Hong Kong prices where as Steam enforces (is forced to enforce, I insist on being fair) regional pricing, so if a Steam copy is A$80, from Play-Asia.com the boxed copy is A$50-60 depending on the exch rate (About US$45 for most releases). If I buy two, shipping drops to about A$7 per game.
An iPhone is essentially a mobile computing platform, but people wouldn't call it a "computer" in the conventional sense of the word because "computing" is an activity that has moved so far into the background,
Most people wouldn't call it a computer because compared to other hand held computing devices it's quite deficient.
Russia is probably owed as much for the defeat of the Nazis as the Americans.
what do you mean by "probably" and how did the Americans do as much as Russia.
The Nazi war machine was bought down by two forces, none of them British or American.
1. Hitler. Nazi Germany's biggest enemy. Hitler made mistake after mistake and then turned on his own commanders, executing them out of paranoia.
2. The Russians. The majority of the Nazi forces fought on the eastern front, most German tank loses were due to Russian guns.
Whilst we are on the subject, we should thank the people who fought the majority of the Japanese in WWII, the Indians and the Chinese.
If you wanted to knock terrorism into last century
Actually just leaving Iraq would be enough. The Arabs, if left alone will fight amongst themselves like they have for the last several thousand years. It's not just Islam, that's the latest excuse. It's about land, power, resources and power (I know I mentioned it twice but it really is that big of a reason). Most places on earth were divided into these kinds of conflicts (Europe's history is full of it, as is Asia's, the Mayans and Incas were always going to war), only in the last 50 years have we as people truly started working together.
Because multiple people never watch pornography together, right?
This does not make it art any more then going to a restaurant is art.
Don't get me wrong, art can be pornographic, there are many examples from explicit sex scenes in novels to naked paintings (read some ancient Greek stuff, the half naked nymphs that line the temple walls at Angkor) but pornography is not automatically art.
I think it can be argued that pornography produced with the express intent of titillation should not be considered art. I live in a land that considers sex to be a natural and healthy thing that everybody does but most commercially produced pornography cannot be considered art. When I think of eroticism in art, I think of the European movies that get shown after 9 PM at night.
Slashdot Mirror
I work on the edge of a 3G cell. Iphone 3G(S)'s don't get a signal here at all yet a HTC Dream, Motorola Milestone and Nokia E72 almost always get about 1 bar (plus this cell gets congested around 10 AM to 5 PM). Iphone's have always had really badly designed/placed aerials. Saying the Iphone4 is better then it's predicessors is like saying the DDR (West Germany) was better then the Soviet Union. Technically it's true but that doesn't make the DDR a nice place to live.
Are you required to put your home address in to install Itunes? Or just to purchase. Then it's your choice.
So they can sell this information to companies that want to sell you things. It's called targeted advertising.
Personally identifiable ad's popping up everywhere. If you cant understand why this is a bad thing, post your last month of activities and I'll sell it to someone who will show you.
Sweden is a fairly neutral nation in foreign conflicts as others have pointed out but in the Afghan and Iraq wars, anyone who didn't co-operate was threatened with economic sanctions and European lapdog (UK, Germany) were happy to go along with this. I'm also ashamed to admit my nation (Australia) also fits the description of "lapdog". We've had two prime ministers since Bush's best buddy John Howard sent us head first into the ME wars but the first one to grow any balls on the subject is a woman.
Other phones do not lose 20+ dBm when you hold them. Most lose under 10 dBm with 5 dBm being the average. When you're minimal signal loss is four times that of the average signal loss then there is a problem with your design.
Yes, everyone who has an Iphone4 and almost everyone who has updated to IOS4.
Half refuse to acknowledge there is a problem despite it being painfully evident in casual observation ("hello, bill, are you still there", I guess he must of accidentally hung up) and the other half have spoken to me about Android.
Compared this to:
Buy a DSLR and decent lens for $1000. Follow a celebrity around for a week, take photo's of them in everyday life. Make up a completely out of context story and sell it to a tabloid about $15,000.
In the end can you blame the reporter? Hell no, if you want someone to blame you need look no further then the nearest mirror, if people weren't buying tabloids they wouldn't be buying pictures of Lindsey Lolife for #$20K a piece.
Why not, it's been done quite a bit in the past. It's not like US corporations respect national borders and local laws.
Not really, the laws surrounding this thing are bad. If a political party sets up it's own ISP there needs to be a law as to how much of that money can go back to the party and how much adveritising that ISP can do politically (in addition to existing laws for ISPs). Besides, parties don't own anything, the individuals that comprise the party make up the board/shareholders. It's already perfectly legal for a political entity to own a media outlet, see: Fox News.
The problem you envisage with this already exist in America, 1. no restrictions on political advertising. 2. no punishment for deliberately misleading advertising (I.E. the death panels on Fox News) 3. nearly unlimited campaign contributions and 4. nearly unlimited campaign contributions. I know 3 and 4 are the same but it's that big of a point. If you reduced the maximum campaign contribution to 10,000 for Individuals and 5,000 for organisations as well as punishment for both parties if this is ever violated then much of the lobbying problem will go away.
And set up an auto response that says:
"Thank you for your notification.
Your request is number x in our queue. You will be notified if we find any validity with your claim.
Sincerly,
Pirate ISP
BTW: Add some big JPG ads for the ISP in here will you Jorg."
Abuse of abuse notifications can be returned, quite legally.
No
But I stopped using Itunes a long time ago for many reasons.
Secondly this does not contain any location data. Perhaps your country but nothing specific, like 231 Main St, Maddington.
First off, it's not the monitoring that scares me, it's the selling that scares me. HTC, Moto or Apple can monitor all they like so long as all that data will do is sit in an ever expanding, expensive storage consuming database. But we cannot trust companies to do that, just keeping our credit card info safe is hard enough.
Secondly, you're right. If Apple gets away with this we'll have everyone doing it. Telco's, manufacturers, ISV's, absolutely everyone. Eventually the data will become so redundant and easily available that it becomes worthless but still, I'd rather not see this kind of future.
Even if they give you a completely random UID it will do nothing to anonymise the data.
UID 4773453: 10:00 PM, bobs fried chicken, lake St.
UID 4773453: 10:01 PM, End of file
UID 6234877: 10:15 PM, bobs fried chicken, lake St.
Do you see now, they don't need a permanent UID on you to create an effective map of your life. All you need to do is search for the same place in the end and beginning of a UID (a simple SQL query). Next thing you know, your world is full of ad's for KFC and weight watchers.
Legally, they aren't permitted to sell that information. AT&T cant even give it to Apple without your express consent. Apple are barely permitted to even look at your billing information, especially from another company.
However capturing your "location data" is perfectly fine and sellable to.
As the parent said, even if you get a random UID each morning at about oh, 4 AM you will likely be in the same place as you were at 4 AM the previous morning making chaining a bunch of semi-randomised UID's in to a cohesive order a simple matter of SQL scripts that any retard could write.
Paywall, registration. Meh, it's the same difference to most users. They want the news and not to screw around with logins or credit cards.
Most people will just say "Screw it, I'll check out the Beeb" (which Murdoch has a serious vendetta against) and the only users left are the ones that specifically want to insulate themselves from the Beeb (in other words, find comfort in the opinions of Murdoch/the Times and discomfort from opposing viewpoints).
For everyone else, its not confusing at all. We know that the Slimes is a tabloid rag owned by Murdoch in England and that it is not fit to line a bird cage.
I know Yanks are used to doing many things backwards but when referring to addresses you put them in order of size. London is smaller the Britain which is smaller then the UK. I this is as bad a listing Washington, EARTH, DC.
Thank you.
Because of legacy ATM's. You might not think that there are that many old ATM's but there really are. These machines are not replaced as often as computers and the old ones are sold to smaller banks/poorer nations. Some banks offer 6 number PIN's but that doesn't fix the problem, Chip and PIN was halfway to fixing the ease with which ATM card were copies but isn't a true 2 factor authentication system.
I haven't encountered a system that had a (small) upper limit on password lengths although my banks mobile site will stop displaying stars after about 8 characters (although it accepts my 14 character password). The only upper limit I've encountered recently is WPA, which only accepts 63 character passwords.
Patterns are better. What I tell my users is, pick a three, four or five letter word. Capitalise the first letter and put a number and special character between the two. For example the word is Bob and the number is 6 the easiest to remember password is:
/.ers have pointed out, keylogers and password sharing has created more security breaches and brute force attacks are less common for breaking passwords.
Bob6^Bob.
All the user needs to remember is Bob6 and essentially to double it. Even if the number and special character are the same physical key it creates a strong password which is easy to remember and not in a dictionary. Otherwise most users go with Robert6, which is more vulnerable to brute force cracking as after a dictionary attack the first thing a cracker would do is run through that dictionary with a number attached to the end of common words.
But as a few
I do the same thing with PIN's, I use a square of four numbers and commit a pattern to muscle memory, that way I can use the same pattern to generate four separate PIN's. I.E.:
5 6
2 3
Will generate 2563 and:
7 8
4 5
Will generate 4785 with the same pattern.
But completely useless against low tech diver and C4.
I love sci fi weapons as much as the next geek but seriously. I wouldn't say "This IS the future" as it's a well known fact that navies are always gearing up to fight the last war (and I'm not singling out the USN, how much did the US, British, Nazi German and Japanese navy spend on battleships in the 30's only to have them rendered obsolete by cheaper carriers and land based aircraft, all navies are really guilty of thinking in the past).
Stealth ships and UAV's are the immediate future, by 2020 most navies will field stealth destroyers or frigates (Singapore and the Finns already are). I'm not making any bets on 2040.
Live in Australia,
Steam servers are in America.
Steam never logs in on the first go, Impulse also takes forever (same story as above, authentication is done on a server in the US) but it at least logs in on the first try. My internet connection is actually quite good I can get 1 GB off local servers in less then 45 minutes.
I have the same problem in Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and the Philippines. For the most part I just put Steam into offline mode but it still wants to connect every few weeks.
I'll concede here, these are crap. But the world really could use less powerpoint.
OO.o's failure to take any marketshare is primarily a failure of marketing. The software is good enough for 90% of users, specialised users like accountants and engineers who have massive equations with many dependencies may still need something else but they aren't the bulk of the MS Office market.
Whilst DRM is a big issue with me.
Steams DRM is relatively benign compared to that of Securom and co.
Steam does deliver a great deal of extra value.
Which is why we put up with the DRM.
There are a lot of idiosyncrasies and annoyances with the platform.
That make me check to see if there the same game is available from Impulse or as a boxed copy even if it's A$10 more expensive, it's worth the hassle. Steam isn't even that much cheaper then buying online for Australians. ARMA II: Operation Arrowhead costs A$39.95 on Steam whilst JB HiFi sold it for A$43.95. Often it's cheaper as I can order from Play-Asia and pay Hong Kong prices where as Steam enforces (is forced to enforce, I insist on being fair) regional pricing, so if a Steam copy is A$80, from Play-Asia.com the boxed copy is A$50-60 depending on the exch rate (About US$45 for most releases). If I buy two, shipping drops to about A$7 per game.
Most people wouldn't call it a computer because compared to other hand held computing devices it's quite deficient.
what do you mean by "probably" and how did the Americans do as much as Russia.
The Nazi war machine was bought down by two forces, none of them British or American.
1. Hitler. Nazi Germany's biggest enemy. Hitler made mistake after mistake and then turned on his own commanders, executing them out of paranoia.
2. The Russians. The majority of the Nazi forces fought on the eastern front, most German tank loses were due to Russian guns.
Whilst we are on the subject, we should thank the people who fought the majority of the Japanese in WWII, the Indians and the Chinese.
Actually just leaving Iraq would be enough. The Arabs, if left alone will fight amongst themselves like they have for the last several thousand years. It's not just Islam, that's the latest excuse. It's about land, power, resources and power (I know I mentioned it twice but it really is that big of a reason). Most places on earth were divided into these kinds of conflicts (Europe's history is full of it, as is Asia's, the Mayans and Incas were always going to war), only in the last 50 years have we as people truly started working together.
This does not make it art any more then going to a restaurant is art.
Don't get me wrong, art can be pornographic, there are many examples from explicit sex scenes in novels to naked paintings (read some ancient Greek stuff, the half naked nymphs that line the temple walls at Angkor) but pornography is not automatically art.
I think it can be argued that pornography produced with the express intent of titillation should not be considered art. I live in a land that considers sex to be a natural and healthy thing that everybody does but most commercially produced pornography cannot be considered art. When I think of eroticism in art, I think of the European movies that get shown after 9 PM at night.