I think Windows and *n*x are both sufficiently protected against simple network sniffing to make that a non-issue. So I think this adapter does more than just snooping on what comes by - it must change the behavior of the OS in some way.
If you're sending in the clear and trusting every member of a huge network of random actors between you and your destination, you're stupid.
This is exactly what Microsoft is enabling today in 2016 with "integrated authentication".... Apparently a sufficient number of people have not taken the opportunity to tell them how stupid they are.
There are some small caveats but none of them matter. The passwords aren't set in the clear but might as well be given the ease of deriving them from challenge material.
Another alternative is to use proper cryptography between your machine and the necessary server.
The alternative is using authentication algorithms that don't suck. If Microsoft used a PAKE none of this would be possible. It's almost as if they are trying to get everyone hacked.
The Unix equivalent would be to setup LDAPS for the credential validation instead of plain LDAP, with properly signed certificate. The rogue credential server running inside the USB would fail the certificate validation and the worsktation will refuse to use it.
LDAP is used for backend authentication of incoming authentication and authorization requests. A client connecting to another UNIX server is not connecting to LDAP it is connecting to that server using whatever authentication mechanism is offered by the protocol associated with the connection.
Regardless sending credentials in the clear over a wire whether that wire is "encrypted" or not is an unnecessary completely avoidable risk.
Depending on organizations to properly deploy PKI is a fools errand.
Windows doesn't provide the USB dongle with a password at any point, as implied by the article. It 'auto-installs' signed drivers already on the PC or if configured, downloads them from the internet... SIGNED DRIVERS... SIGNED BY MICROSOFT. Not just any random driver on the USB device.
Windows does not do 'auto-run'
OS X doesn't do anything implied in this article either. If it doesn't have a driver for your USB device already, it just doesn't work, with the exception of printers there isn't a magic way that it reads drivers from the USB device or random internet sites.
This story is simply bullshit.
Yea TFA is worthless and does not disclose anything of relevance. This isn't about USB or device drivers. It is about getting windows to automatically do stupid crap over a network like trying to login to something. The IE Advanced option for example "Enabled Integrated Windows Authentication" is I believe enabled by default in at least Windows 7.
If you can get a browser or some internal service to attempt login by initial DHCP/WPAD/whatever you can make short work of the authentication attempt to derive most passwords because Microsoft insists on using completely worthless CHAP based authentication protocols (e.g. Kerberos, MSCHAPv2) which subject users to at the very least offline dictionary simply for trying to logon... and by default it tries automatically... which is just awesome.
2) apple has given us the 3.5 inch floppy, then removed it.
Floppy disks always sucked.
It gave us the first easy to use networking (Appletalk over LocalTalk, or more likely PhoneNet) then removed it
Your history is wrong but more importantly all of these things sucked ass compared with IP.
It has essentially removed all CDs from it's devices, so it gave us iTunes to rip CDs, now no CD player to rip from.
The problem with removing CDs nothing better came along to replace them. If you want to give someone a hard copy they can physically keep optical media is still king even though flash memory is cheap.
It dropped the Motorola 68000, then dropped PowerPC.
Because they sucked/couldn't keep up with the rest of the industry (e.g. Intel/AMD)
The headphone jack is long, the headphone jack is thick, and the headphone jack makes it harder to waterproof. Why is everyone complaining?
I'm a fan of change even extremely disruptive change when and only when it correlates with useful benefit commensurate with the change. For example new phones with USB-C connectors rather than micro usb provide value to bumbling idiots like myself who always manage to end up with USB cables with no discernible marking telling me which way to plug the shit in... so buying an adaptor if it means never having to screw with it... I don't care.
What headphone jacks are is something different. Conformational changes by themselves don't mean anything to the user. Whining about engineering challenges doesn't mean anything to the end user. People don't give a flying fuck how hard something was to design they only care about results. There is no additional value provisioned to the user by taking away headphone jacks. In fact it can only make life more difficult by having to manage/lose/break one more breakout box that didn't previously need to exist. It doesn't enhance anyone's life in any way it just makes things more difficult for them with nothing... no BENEFIT in return to show for it. It is a step backwards in every way that matters and in my opinion no way representative of the examples you previous provided to justify change.
You appear to refer to Bug 405155 in bugzilla.mozilla.org, which hasn't had significant activity in the past five years. The biggest issue they found is that TLS-SRP still sends the username in the clear where the MITM can snoop it, and if username is an email address, that could leak personally identifying information.
This is as unavoidable as clients belching SNI and servers belching subject name in the clear when you connect to a secure site. And lets not forget each and every time I connect anywhere on the Internet the same old IP address I've had for years gets tagged right along with my communications.
This seems like quite an arbitrary excuse for inaction because the alternative is (what exists right now) is in fact much worse.
You can provision pseudonyms if leaking "admin" is a big deal. I don't see why it would be given for the overwhelming majority of these devices "admin" is the only account that will ever be used.
You can also use PKI in conjunction with TLS-SRP to protect identity. You can create an anonymous association and then do TLS-SRP (no guarantee of identity protection in an active attack). The protocol supports that. It's your choice. Not giving people a choice at all by pointing out inherent unavoidable properties of technology does nobody any good.
I've seen this across numerous companies and network device vendors.
Too many operators who manage these things don't even have a basic grasp of PKI.
Device vendors don't bother providing even basic operations to manage certificates - generating key pairs and CSRs. They expect the operators to handle it themselves OOB.
The result is "test" and "demo" certs the engineers who created them know full well are worthless get put into production because device vendor support doesn't want to deal with the support headache or the operator doesn't want to run a bunch of exotic bullshit from the CLI when they can just use what is already there and works.
Ultimately none of these devices actually require PKI for security. Usable trust already exists in the form of username/password... why not just use it? All that is really necessary is for browser vendors to get off their collective asses and apply the TLS-SRP patches wasting away in their ticketing systems... then you can do secure authentication to these devices without having to provision any PKI. Excuse for failure is reduced from... wahhh PKI is too hard... to... WTF dude can't even change a default password?
Short of this inclusion of "test" and "demo" certificates needs to be straight out banned yet there is no mechanism other than shame to enforce such a ban.
Better technology (which is readily available but sits unused) to make it easier for people to do the right thing is a much more productive approach than betting against human nature.
Spying is what governments do. Domestic spying by the intelligence services is a good thing.
Domestic spying breeds corruption and isn't a legitimate activity. Hence the reason it's illegal.
Spying has stopped acts of terrorism on US soil.
Meanwhile a 9/11 load of people are murdered in the US each and every quarter like clockwork.
If you are a Muslim, you especially want the government spying on Muslim activities. The last time the US government did not do it's job and spy on Muslims was 911.
60 9/11's worth of murders have occurred since then in this country. Why exactly should everyone give up their rights and privacy in the name of a single outlier event given they are more likely to be murdered by a non-terrorist, killed in a car accident or falling in their own homes?
As a result of that mistake the US government with the support of the U.S. populace destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United States (we went bankrupt fighting a war on a tactic) The USA overreacts when bad things happen on USAian soil, and we go after people who had nothing to do with the act.
LOL the terrorists made us do it. The terrorists made Bush invade Iraq and the terrorists made the "Intelligence" community make up a bunch of bullshit it's own people with intimate domain knowledge didn't even believe themselves as a pretext for war.
I do not want to get in any more wars. This is why I support the NSA / CIA / whatever spying on and killing anyone who would want to commit an act of terrorism.
The terrorists made us do it... kill them all and then we won't do stupid shit anymore. I promise. Never mind bush already looking for whatever pretext he could to get revenge for the attempt on his daddy. The terrorists MADE US DO IT.
But if you really think Snowden is some kind of hero, you should move to some country where they support heros and never spy.
What Snowden did was expose/confirm illegal activities conducted against everyone who has ever used a phone in this country. I'd be willing to entertain your bullshit about the NSA for a few milliseconds at least when someone from NSA goes to jail.
The government should be spending those dollars on trying to catch the pricks who mean to do it harm, and not drag netting all over our inherent rights. Things have clearly gotten out of hand.
I would tend to agree but government is just way too busy giving money and munitions to the Saudi's to fund Madrassas and conduct indiscriminate bombing operations within Yemen.
It's not the same energy density, it's about half. This is workable for a car - although it wouldn't have Tesla like range or handling, but you'd get 600k miles before the batteries were under 80% capacity - but impractical for a competitive phone.
I think people are confusing weight with density. Yes the battery itself would weigh twice as much but wouldn't necessarily be any bigger.
Lithium iron phosphate batteries have about the same energy density and yet they won't randomly explode or catch fire. You can shoot them, use them as bowling balls and Intentionally destroy them by massively over charging or pulling current down yet they are not going to explode or catch fire.
There is obvious still risk with stored energy. You could short a conductor and start a fire by resistive heating yet the assertion this is unavoidable "cuz energy density" is BS. Food in your fridge has a much higher energy density than lithium ion batteries.
Re-read. I wrote little demand for Win7 in the future not BYO in the future.
I just don't see the connection between upgrading hardware and upgrading software.
If someone who builds their own system elects to upgrade or replace existing hardware this action is separate from shelling out $100 or whatever it is for Windows 10 isn't it? Why do you think one would be linked to the other? It isn't about demand for Windows 7 because they would already have it at that point. Or are your remarks limited to only people who didn't have PCs before building their own for the first time? That wouldn't make much sense.
Next months gen 7 hardware that only supports Win10 will be largely indistinguishable from currently available gen 6 hardware that supports Win7. This gen 6 hardware will be available for many years to come.
Doubt people really want to go out and spend their money on old technology.
The declining minority that wants Win7 will not lack hardware options.
Win7 has twice the market share of the next popular PC operating system on the planet.
Win7's current popularity is largely an artifact of PCs having useful lives two to three times what they used to be. Most are using Win7 merely because its what is on the computer, if their next computer has Win10 they will most likely be perfectly happy. This is no sizeable Win7-forever camp even among the BYO let alone consumers at large.
Microsoft did just run an all out campaign for a whole year in which they did everything they could including resorting to dirty tricks to cow people into upgrading. At the end of it there are twice the number of Windows 7 PCs than Windows 10.
My remarks are not about "forever" it is about what happens in the near future when people buy new hardware and want to use it with software they already have.
Nice... everyone thinks everyone else is shallow stupid and vain.
You make the mistake of translating people to equal everyone else. That's not the case. People here is a generic term for the vast majority of the population who use a product.
Thanks for clarifying that people isn't everyone people is just almost everyone who uses cell phones.
Given the company has hundreds of projects running many of which have well and truly withstood the test of time, why all the hate against Google? What have you done with your life recently?
Google has earned a reputation for pulling the plug on services that people used and relied on with no recourse.. on commercial side not just freebies.
When you repeatedly behave this way there is a cost you incur in people not wanting to invest in your solutions due to demonstrated elevated probability they will wake up tomorrow and find themselves out of luck.
It is only a natural and completely understandable reaction. Google is free to make whatever calculations it wants but there are consequences.
The entire project has always been stupid. People aren't interested in upgrading hardware of their phone around a standard frame. People are interested in upgrading the shiny factor, the new screen with the curved edge, the shiny yellow golden sides, the curved displays.
Nice... everyone thinks everyone else is shallow stupid and vain.
I was surprised from the beginning Google would spend any time on modular phones. Love the idea but having a company like Google work on it went against my world view of what Google is.
More generally given the increasing failure of the market to be driven by consumers rather than advertisers and stalkers the cesspool of evil overall industry is becoming would seem to preclude practical expectation of anything useful.
Modular phones are a gateway to sanity. Operating systems and hardware would necessarily have to be more like PC ending this insane crap of cooking specific roms for each and every device and providing more choice and diversity. With that the whole house of cards begins to collapse.
Carriers and manufacturers have less ability to load their malwares or impose planned obsolesce by refusing to maintain software. Consumers get more choices and more options from more providers who can now afford to produce and specialize in specific modules rather than needing to build out entire devices. Modules could be updated or replaced by users without having to throw the whole device in the trash.
Every single one of these things translates into current players losing out so why would they do it? How would they benefit? In my view the answer is clear they can't so they won't.
I'm saying there will probably be very little demand for Windows 7 support from consumers buying the latest and greatest motherboards in the future and building their own system.
If there is so little demand and nobody builds their own systems why is there such a huge selection of motherboards, cases, processors and peripherals to chose from? Not just online but local retail? Why do vendors bother printing skulls and overclocking shit and gimmicky doohickeys on their motherboards?
You can make arguments on a percentage basis yet given numbers involved even a few percentage points easily represent millions of paying customers.
To be clear, you understand that this move by Intel and AMD does not change Windows 7 support on any existing motherboards, that their decision only applies to future motherboard designs? No existing chip designs are losing support.
Nobody is confused about this. What Intel is actually doing is refusing to support the most popular and widely used PC operating system in the whole wide world on their new hardware. A frisking brilliant move I'm sure their shareholders are just thrilled about.
I suspect in the background that is what has happened here. Microsoft has probably been paying Intel and AMD to write chipset drivers for Windows for the last two decades, and has decided they don't want to pay them to write drivers for old OS's anymore. So AMD and Intel simply aren't going to do it without getting paid.
It's not collusion, they've been doing that for years, this is planned obsolescence. People aren't buying new hardware because they don't need it. Newer processors aren't any faster overall and haven't been for years now. You have to go back almost 5 generations to get a significant difference between mainstream Intel CPU's (single thread performance) that would be enough to justify buying a new processor. The focus on power efficiency has essentially stalled all growth in processor power.
In what way is any part of this relevant? Everyone knows about the diminishing returns. How does this establish a rational justification of Intel's behavior that is not based in collusion?
So they are doing what they can, you want new hardware you need a new OS.
Windows 7 has half of the global PC market share. If your in the business to make money and sell product you don't leave some fraction of half of the global market on the table because you are too lazy to port and test some chipset drivers. This isn't a rational position.
They think it's a win win for both of them though i think it will delay the upgrade cycle even more and will end up hurting them.
How so? What precisely does Intel have to gain from this? How much are they being paid by Microsoft?
As long as people keep spewing nonsense about hash algorithms and salts and key stretching schemes being a solution when they are not nothing will change.
If you want to keep your password databases out of the hands of those who find it trivial to hack into your hopelessly insecure infrastructure use dedicated authenticators whose one and only job is authentication. You get to keep your password databases wherever you want. The only thing you don't get to do is store encryption keys for those passwords in a general purpose system.
2 decades and continued growth demonstrate languages like Java and Javascript do indeed have that. What precisely is it about Java that you're having so much difficulty with?
What I have difficulty with is understanding what software of any significance in my life is actually written in Java. The last time I installed from scratch didn't even bother installing a java runtime. Didn't see the point.
People keep talking about how these languages are so great and so much better yet the one thing that has always been missing was the translation of that fanboyism into anything useful.
Where are the operating systems and non-trivial games and browsers and codecs and network stacks and relational databases and shit written in these languages? Where are the outcomes commensurate with the claims? Isn't "two decades of continued growth"... long enough?
Slashdot Mirror
I think Windows and *n*x are both sufficiently protected against simple network sniffing to make that a non-issue. So I think this adapter does more than just snooping on what comes by - it must change the behavior of the OS in some way.
This made my day. Thanks for the laugh.
If you're sending in the clear and trusting every member of a huge network of random actors between you and your destination, you're stupid.
This is exactly what Microsoft is enabling today in 2016 with "integrated authentication".... Apparently a sufficient number of people have not taken the opportunity to tell them how stupid they are.
There are some small caveats but none of them matter. The passwords aren't set in the clear but might as well be given the ease of deriving them from challenge material.
Another alternative is to use proper cryptography between your machine and the necessary server.
The alternative is using authentication algorithms that don't suck. If Microsoft used a PAKE none of this would be possible. It's almost as if they are trying to get everyone hacked.
The Unix equivalent would be to setup LDAPS for the credential validation instead of plain LDAP, with properly signed certificate. The rogue credential server running inside the USB would fail the certificate validation and the worsktation will refuse to use it.
LDAP is used for backend authentication of incoming authentication and authorization requests. A client connecting to another UNIX server is not connecting to LDAP it is connecting to that server using whatever authentication mechanism is offered by the protocol associated with the connection.
Regardless sending credentials in the clear over a wire whether that wire is "encrypted" or not is an unnecessary completely avoidable risk.
Depending on organizations to properly deploy PKI is a fools errand.
Windows doesn't provide the USB dongle with a password at any point, as implied by the article. It 'auto-installs' signed drivers already on the PC or if configured, downloads them from the internet ... SIGNED DRIVERS ... SIGNED BY MICROSOFT. Not just any random driver on the USB device.
Windows does not do 'auto-run'
OS X doesn't do anything implied in this article either. If it doesn't have a driver for your USB device already, it just doesn't work, with the exception of printers there isn't a magic way that it reads drivers from the USB device or random internet sites.
This story is simply bullshit.
Yea TFA is worthless and does not disclose anything of relevance. This isn't about USB or device drivers. It is about getting windows to automatically do stupid crap over a network like trying to login to something. The IE Advanced option for example "Enabled Integrated Windows Authentication" is I believe enabled by default in at least Windows 7.
If you can get a browser or some internal service to attempt login by initial DHCP/WPAD/whatever you can make short work of the authentication attempt to derive most passwords because Microsoft insists on using completely worthless CHAP based authentication protocols (e.g. Kerberos, MSCHAPv2) which subject users to at the very least offline dictionary simply for trying to logon... and by default it tries automatically... which is just awesome.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Obviously not being a militant Apple fanboy is a serious mental disorder.
When was the last time Apple added DRM to anything they weren't mandated to by law?
What law mandates use of DRM?
2) apple has given us the 3.5 inch floppy, then removed it.
Floppy disks always sucked.
It gave us the first easy to use networking (Appletalk over LocalTalk, or more likely PhoneNet) then removed it
Your history is wrong but more importantly all of these things sucked ass compared with IP.
It has essentially removed all CDs from it's devices, so it gave us iTunes to rip CDs, now no CD player to rip from.
The problem with removing CDs nothing better came along to replace them. If you want to give someone a hard copy they can physically keep optical media is still king even though flash memory is cheap.
It dropped the Motorola 68000, then dropped PowerPC.
Because they sucked/couldn't keep up with the rest of the industry (e.g. Intel/AMD)
The headphone jack is long, the headphone jack is thick, and the headphone jack makes it harder to waterproof. Why is everyone complaining?
I'm a fan of change even extremely disruptive change when and only when it correlates with useful benefit commensurate with the change. For example new phones with USB-C connectors rather than micro usb provide value to bumbling idiots like myself who always manage to end up with USB cables with no discernible marking telling me which way to plug the shit in... so buying an adaptor if it means never having to screw with it... I don't care.
What headphone jacks are is something different. Conformational changes by themselves don't mean anything to the user. Whining about engineering challenges doesn't mean anything to the end user. People don't give a flying fuck how hard something was to design they only care about results. There is no additional value provisioned to the user by taking away headphone jacks. In fact it can only make life more difficult by having to manage/lose/break one more breakout box that didn't previously need to exist. It doesn't enhance anyone's life in any way it just makes things more difficult for them with nothing ... no BENEFIT in return to show for it. It is a step backwards in every way that matters and in my opinion no way representative of the examples you previous provided to justify change.
You appear to refer to Bug 405155 in bugzilla.mozilla.org, which hasn't had significant activity in the past five years. The biggest issue they found is that TLS-SRP still sends the username in the clear where the MITM can snoop it, and if username is an email address, that could leak personally identifying information.
This is as unavoidable as clients belching SNI and servers belching subject name in the clear when you connect to a secure site. And lets not forget each and every time I connect anywhere on the Internet the same old IP address I've had for years gets tagged right along with my communications.
This seems like quite an arbitrary excuse for inaction because the alternative is (what exists right now) is in fact much worse.
You can provision pseudonyms if leaking "admin" is a big deal. I don't see why it would be given for the overwhelming majority of these devices "admin" is the only account that will ever be used.
You can also use PKI in conjunction with TLS-SRP to protect identity. You can create an anonymous association and then do TLS-SRP (no guarantee of identity protection in an active attack). The protocol supports that. It's your choice. Not giving people a choice at all by pointing out inherent unavoidable properties of technology does nobody any good.
I've seen this across numerous companies and network device vendors.
Too many operators who manage these things don't even have a basic grasp of PKI.
Device vendors don't bother providing even basic operations to manage certificates - generating key pairs and CSRs. They expect the operators to handle it themselves OOB.
The result is "test" and "demo" certs the engineers who created them know full well are worthless get put into production because device vendor support doesn't want to deal with the support headache or the operator doesn't want to run a bunch of exotic bullshit from the CLI when they can just use what is already there and works.
Ultimately none of these devices actually require PKI for security. Usable trust already exists in the form of username/password... why not just use it? All that is really necessary is for browser vendors to get off their collective asses and apply the TLS-SRP patches wasting away in their ticketing systems... then you can do secure authentication to these devices without having to provision any PKI. Excuse for failure is reduced from ... wahhh PKI is too hard... to ... WTF dude can't even change a default password?
Short of this inclusion of "test" and "demo" certificates needs to be straight out banned yet there is no mechanism other than shame to enforce such a ban.
Better technology (which is readily available but sits unused) to make it easier for people to do the right thing is a much more productive approach than betting against human nature.
Spying is what governments do. Domestic spying by the intelligence services is a good thing.
Domestic spying breeds corruption and isn't a legitimate activity. Hence the reason it's illegal.
Spying has stopped acts of terrorism on US soil.
Meanwhile a 9/11 load of people are murdered in the US each and every quarter like clockwork.
If you are a Muslim, you especially want the government spying on Muslim activities. The last time the US government did not do it's job and spy on Muslims was 911.
60 9/11's worth of murders have occurred since then in this country. Why exactly should everyone give up their rights and privacy in the name of a single outlier event given they are more likely to be murdered by a non-terrorist, killed in a car accident or falling in their own homes?
As a result of that mistake the US government with the support of the U.S. populace destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United States (we went bankrupt fighting a war on a tactic) The USA overreacts when bad things happen on USAian soil, and we go after people who had nothing to do with the act.
LOL the terrorists made us do it. The terrorists made Bush invade Iraq and the terrorists made the "Intelligence" community make up a bunch of bullshit it's own people with intimate domain knowledge didn't even believe themselves as a pretext for war.
I do not want to get in any more wars. This is why I support the NSA / CIA / whatever spying on and killing anyone who would want to commit an act of terrorism.
The terrorists made us do it... kill them all and then we won't do stupid shit anymore. I promise. Never mind bush already looking for whatever pretext he could to get revenge for the attempt on his daddy. The terrorists MADE US DO IT.
But if you really think Snowden is some kind of hero, you should move to some country where they support heros and never spy.
What Snowden did was expose/confirm illegal activities conducted against everyone who has ever used a phone in this country. I'd be willing to entertain your bullshit about the NSA for a few milliseconds at least when someone from NSA goes to jail.
The government should be spending those dollars on trying to catch the pricks who mean to do it harm, and not drag netting all over our inherent rights. Things have clearly gotten out of hand.
I would tend to agree but government is just way too busy giving money and munitions to the Saudi's to fund Madrassas and conduct indiscriminate bombing operations within Yemen.
It's not the same energy density, it's about half. This is workable for a car - although it wouldn't have Tesla like range or handling, but you'd get 600k miles before the batteries were under 80% capacity - but impractical for a competitive phone.
I think people are confusing weight with density. Yes the battery itself would weigh twice as much but wouldn't necessarily be any bigger.
Lithium iron phosphate batteries have about the same energy density and yet they won't randomly explode or catch fire. You can shoot them, use them as bowling balls and Intentionally destroy them by massively over charging or pulling current down yet they are not going to explode or catch fire.
There is obvious still risk with stored energy. You could short a conductor and start a fire by resistive heating yet the assertion this is unavoidable "cuz energy density" is BS. Food in your fridge has a much higher energy density than lithium ion batteries.
It would be very useful for Facebook to stop announcing ASN 32934 for a few centuries as an experiment just to see what would happen.
Or permanently remove authority records for facebook.com.
You know just to see what would happen.
Re-read. I wrote little demand for Win7 in the future not BYO in the future.
I just don't see the connection between upgrading hardware and upgrading software.
If someone who builds their own system elects to upgrade or replace existing hardware this action is separate from shelling out $100 or whatever it is for Windows 10 isn't it? Why do you think one would be linked to the other? It isn't about demand for Windows 7 because they would already have it at that point. Or are your remarks limited to only people who didn't have PCs before building their own for the first time? That wouldn't make much sense.
Next months gen 7 hardware that only supports Win10 will be largely indistinguishable from currently available gen 6 hardware that supports Win7. This gen 6 hardware will be available for many years to come.
Doubt people really want to go out and spend their money on old technology.
The declining minority that wants Win7 will not lack hardware options.
Win7 has twice the market share of the next popular PC operating system on the planet.
Win7's current popularity is largely an artifact of PCs having useful lives two to three times what they used to be. Most are using Win7 merely because its what is on the computer, if their next computer has Win10 they will most likely be perfectly happy. This is no sizeable Win7-forever camp even among the BYO let alone consumers at large.
Microsoft did just run an all out campaign for a whole year in which they did everything they could including resorting to dirty tricks to cow people into upgrading. At the end of it there are twice the number of Windows 7 PCs than Windows 10.
My remarks are not about "forever" it is about what happens in the near future when people buy new hardware and want to use it with software they already have.
Nice... everyone thinks everyone else is shallow stupid and vain.
You make the mistake of translating people to equal everyone else. That's not the case. People here is a generic term for the vast majority of the population who use a product.
Thanks for clarifying that people isn't everyone people is just almost everyone who uses cell phones.
Given the company has hundreds of projects running many of which have well and truly withstood the test of time, why all the hate against Google? What have you done with your life recently?
Google has earned a reputation for pulling the plug on services that people used and relied on with no recourse.. on commercial side not just freebies.
When you repeatedly behave this way there is a cost you incur in people not wanting to invest in your solutions due to demonstrated elevated probability they will wake up tomorrow and find themselves out of luck.
It is only a natural and completely understandable reaction. Google is free to make whatever calculations it wants but there are consequences.
The entire project has always been stupid. People aren't interested in upgrading hardware of their phone around a standard frame. People are interested in upgrading the shiny factor, the new screen with the curved edge, the shiny yellow golden sides, the curved displays.
Nice... everyone thinks everyone else is shallow stupid and vain.
I was surprised from the beginning Google would spend any time on modular phones. Love the idea but having a company like Google work on it went against my world view of what Google is.
More generally given the increasing failure of the market to be driven by consumers rather than advertisers and stalkers the cesspool of evil overall industry is becoming would seem to preclude practical expectation of anything useful.
Modular phones are a gateway to sanity. Operating systems and hardware would necessarily have to be more like PC ending this insane crap of cooking specific roms for each and every device and providing more choice and diversity. With that the whole house of cards begins to collapse.
Carriers and manufacturers have less ability to load their malwares or impose planned obsolesce by refusing to maintain software. Consumers get more choices and more options from more providers who can now afford to produce and specialize in specific modules rather than needing to build out entire devices. Modules could be updated or replaced by users without having to throw the whole device in the trash.
Every single one of these things translates into current players losing out so why would they do it? How would they benefit? In my view the answer is clear they can't so they won't.
I'm saying there will probably be very little demand for Windows 7 support from consumers buying the latest and greatest motherboards in the future and building their own system.
If there is so little demand and nobody builds their own systems why is there such a huge selection of motherboards, cases, processors and peripherals to chose from? Not just online but local retail? Why do vendors bother printing skulls and overclocking shit and gimmicky doohickeys on their motherboards?
You can make arguments on a percentage basis yet given numbers involved even a few percentage points easily represent millions of paying customers.
To be clear, you understand that this move by Intel and AMD does not change Windows 7 support on any existing motherboards, that their decision only applies to future motherboard designs? No existing chip designs are losing support.
Nobody is confused about this. What Intel is actually doing is refusing to support the most popular and widely used PC operating system in the whole wide world on their new hardware. A frisking brilliant move I'm sure their shareholders are just thrilled about.
I suspect in the background that is what has happened here. Microsoft has probably been paying Intel and AMD to write chipset drivers for Windows for the last two decades, and has decided they don't want to pay them to write drivers for old OS's anymore. So AMD and Intel simply aren't going to do it without getting paid.
Feel free to continue to just make shit up.
It's not collusion, they've been doing that for years, this is planned obsolescence. People aren't buying new hardware because they don't need it. Newer processors aren't any faster overall and haven't been for years now. You have to go back almost 5 generations to get a significant difference between mainstream Intel CPU's (single thread performance) that would be enough to justify buying a new processor. The focus on power efficiency has essentially stalled all growth in processor power.
In what way is any part of this relevant? Everyone knows about the diminishing returns. How does this establish a rational justification of Intel's behavior that is not based in collusion?
So they are doing what they can, you want new hardware you need a new OS.
Windows 7 has half of the global PC market share. If your in the business to make money and sell product you don't leave some fraction of half of the global market on the table because you are too lazy to port and test some chipset drivers. This isn't a rational position.
They think it's a win win for both of them though i think it will delay the upgrade cycle even more and will end up hurting them.
How so? What precisely does Intel have to gain from this? How much are they being paid by Microsoft?
As long as people keep spewing nonsense about hash algorithms and salts and key stretching schemes being a solution when they are not nothing will change.
If you want to keep your password databases out of the hands of those who find it trivial to hack into your hopelessly insecure infrastructure use dedicated authenticators whose one and only job is authentication. You get to keep your password databases wherever you want. The only thing you don't get to do is store encryption keys for those passwords in a general purpose system.
But if confirmed, expect a flood stories on how "it will allow us to have true hoverboards in 10 years!".
I trust Mattel is taking notes.
2 decades and continued growth demonstrate languages like Java and Javascript do indeed have that. What precisely is it about Java that you're having so much difficulty with?
What I have difficulty with is understanding what software of any significance in my life is actually written in Java. The last time I installed from scratch didn't even bother installing a java runtime. Didn't see the point.
People keep talking about how these languages are so great and so much better yet the one thing that has always been missing was the translation of that fanboyism into anything useful.
Where are the operating systems and non-trivial games and browsers and codecs and network stacks and relational databases and shit written in these languages? Where are the outcomes commensurate with the claims? Isn't "two decades of continued growth" ... long enough?
Man you've got to be pretty bad to violate Chinese labor laws.