It's not. On Linux/BSD/whatever I'd just go hit/etc/shadow for the equivalent of the Windows SAM; it's easier to get at, in fact. This whole "article" is bullshit aside from providing yet more evidence that "the cloud" is a bad idea for anything sensitive.
A slightly better option would be to use Encrypting File System (EFS) plus a *really* strong password (something you can't break with a rainbow table, since they can dump the password hashes). That doesn't require any boot-time stuff, and if the attacker resets the accounts password, all those files are gone forever (unless you can crack AES).
Of course, a clever attacker could instead insert spyware that catches the login credentials and/or the decrypted files and sends you those instead, at which point you are, once again, fucked.
Oh, and none of this is Windows-specific in the lest except for the specific tool this idiot (or, perhaps, "tool") used.
Too bad the author of TFA is a flaming idiot, and this has nothing to do with Windows at all. It's a total non-story.
He just "discovered" that if you download a cloud machine disk volume - which is completely OS-agnostic, you could do it BeOS if you wanted to - you can mount it on your own machine and go to town on the data. Unix-like OS? Cool, go read/etc/shadow and get the password hashes (or change/add your own password and re-mount it, as he suggests doing with Windows). There's absolutely nothing here Windows-specific at all except that the idiot only *just* discovered that password resetting by modifying the user login data is possible.
Easy "root" (Admin) shells and file management (and even scripting, which is a form of legacy compatilbiity that it does support). Multiple user support. Multiple monitor support. Hardware peripheral support. Windows networking (Homegroups, printers, etc. out of the box). Syncing stuff with your home PC and/or workstation (files, settings, purchased apps, and even app data). Office. Flashplayer (full, desktop-equivalent version). A browser with full dev tools (less than Firefox plus a full load of extensions on a PC, but more than any other tablet OS's built-in browser). Multitasking apps. Built-in and familiar tools for complex tasks like file system permissions management, certificate management, partition editing, etc. Live tiles (some people honestly don't hate the Start screen, believe it or not). Write software using familiar tools and APIs (mostly familiar APIs, at least, to anybody who does either Win32 or.NET development).
That's all without even considering jailbreaking, at which point it will happily run legacy apps if they are in a.NET language, are recompiled to ARM, or are able to be run through a dynamic recompilation layer (works much better than trying to run Windows apps on, say, Android because you can thunk the Win32 / NT calls to native code through small and fast parameter translation shims; no need to emulate an entire operating system. There's already a program that does this for jailbroken RT tablets.)
I actually know a guy who worked on the NT port (back when it was called "Windows NT", and this was shortly before he left MS for good) for Alpha. He still has the email from when his team supplied it to the test team, which had until that time been working mostly on x86, which said (of Windows on Alpha) "what kind of rocket fuel are you running these things on?" in reference to their speed.
DEC screwed the pooch on that one, no doubt; they priced it as a high-end workstation chip, and lower-priced commodity PC hardware running x86 ate their lunch.
Oh, I don't doubt that MS fucked up RT pretty hard, though whether that was intentional or not I really can't say (I doubt it was; too much damn money down the drain). However, your list is so wrong it's hilarious.
Confusing name: The Surface Pro came out months after the Surface RT, the Surface RT has RT right in the name, and everywhere I saw that was selling them the salespeople were very cautious about making sure the customer knew the difference. The bigger "confusing name" problem is probably Windows RT vs. WinRT which not even slightly the same thing; one is an OS (desktop/tablet build of Windows NT 6.2 on ARM architecture) and the other is an API set (the APIs used for writing "Windows Store" apps, A.K.A. Modern or Metro apps, on either Windows RT, Windows 8 (any edition, including server if you want it there), and Windows Phone 8 (though only a subset of full WinRT is usable there).
Windows 8 - it was explicitly designed for use on tablets; what the hell were they going to use? It works pretty well on a smallish touchscreen; much better than Win7 does.
Missing Start menu / "replaced by Start Button": First of all, see previous point. Second, I don't know what the hell you mean about "replaced by" unless you're talking about 8.1; one of the complaints with 8.0 was the lack of a Start button (it's present but auto-hidden).
No initial boot to desktop: on the assumption that what the user really wants to do, when they boot up their tablet (not resume it from whatever they were doing last, but boot from cold), is run a program instead of stare at the wallpaper? More-so because the Start screen has the "at a glance" view of the live tiles. Even less of an issue for RT than on x86 because of the restriction on "desktop" software anyhow...
App store / minimum $1.50: Most scripts and such work fine, as do both HTML5 and Flash websites. With that said, I fully agree that they shouldn't have locked it to "Windows Store" apps. As for the cost, yes the minimum for a paid app is $1.49; good thing (if you're an RT user) that there are tons of apps that are free instead...
No sideloading of apps: blatantly false. Sideloading is officially supported and free. It's not where anybody will stumble across it by accident, but it is documented. Powershell (as Admin) -> Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration (show-w + TAB will autocomplete) -> follow instructions to unlock, then sideloading is just "run the PS1 script that Visual Studio automatically generates along with every.APPX package".
No backwards compatibility: Mostly true (officially). Batch/CMD scripts, most Powershell scripts, and many Windows Script Host (.js,.vbs, etc.) scripts all work fine, as do.REG files.
No ability to load... approved by Microsoft: TOTAL bullshit. Even leaving *aside* the points about sideloading and backward compatibility above, there's Company apps (which is to say, private app stores).
Poor CPU choice: Tegra 3 wasn't the best choice by the time of market release, but even at that time, it wasn't a *bad* one. It's what a lot of tablets, including some very big-deal Android ones, were using / coming out with.
Not enough RAM: 2 GB?!? That's more than any other contemporary tablet I know of; it's far more than enough. As specs go, RAM is probably the *least* of Surface RT's problems.
Poor heat management: You are talking about the Surface RT, right? The one with passive cooling? It's never been a problem for me, even when running x86 games running in a homebrewed emulation layer that I had to jailbreak to install. Or running 3D games that stress its GPU to keep up. This one might be even less of an issue than the RAM thing...
Price: It was priced higher than the market was willing to bear for the features it had and the way it was advertised, yes. It was competitive with the iPad on a price/specs basis, though.
Domain joining: True (hacks aside; it is actually technically possible). Would certai
That would be true - and a huge advantage for RT - if Microsoft hadn't tried to lock it down so goddamn hard. Now the only userbase for apps like that are the people who jailbreak their tablets, a market niche so small that we've had to recompile practically all of the software we use on them ourselves. The main exception is.NET apps, many of which (anything that targets a recent.NET version and doesn't require third-party native libraries) work flawlessly. ISVs have not, by and large, bothered with the (often fairly trivial) recompile-to-ARM needed for RT compatibility.
On the other hand, if you were talking about Windows x86 tablets, then yeah, you're spot on. That's their crushing advantage, although having a good OS (that supports things like multiple foreground apps and multiple user logins and the ability to run software as Admin out of the box) is also a nice feature.
From a purely technical standpoint; this makes a lot of sense. Backward compatibility, fewer architectures that devs must target, lower dev and maintenance costs for OS vendors, and so on.
However, I can't say I'm really happy about the idea of Intel gaining even more dominance in the market. AMD is still holding on, but their answer to "low power" is "we can do better graphics than Intel in less power than Intel + dedicated graphics" which is a nice perk but also addresses neither the high end of the PC market (where they can compete on price, but not really on performance) nor the tablet/smartphone/ultrabook end (where they would need at least one and ideally two steps up in manufacturing process to match Intel).
ARM reaching into the tablet/netbook market seemed like a viable competitor; less powerful at its top end than even a mid-range Intel chip, it could operate comfortably in power ranges that Intel had no answer to. Now... not so much, and with the possible exception of legacy devices and really cheap/underpowered computers (RaPis, smartwatches, etc.) ARM risks becoming irrelevant to the "daily computer-using world". I don't care one way or another about ARM in particular, but there should be *something* out there (in reasonable usage) other than x86/x64.
(She?) has always been pretty active, and used to be fairly insightful even if occasionally oversensitive about certain subjects and sometimes misinformed (but not usually to the point of repeatedly stating a false claim). No big deal; we all have our buttons and we all make mistakes. Overall, her posts were a definite benefit to the community.
That was, oh, up until a couple years ago. I couldn't give you a precise point, but these days it sadly does seem more like a troll account. Sad, because the points are still sometimes interesting (such as yes, the Apple app store does sometimes let malware through; no surprise to anybody clued in about this stuff, but Apple explicitly targets the non-clued-in). The way places and times of their presentation, however, leave a lot to be desired. As I said, it's sad.
No, I've boycotted Sony since they put remotely exploitable rootkits on music CDs. I figure a person would get at least 25 years for that; I won't buy anything of theirs for at least that long.
If for some reason I'd acquired a PS3, I certainly would have put Linux on it, though.
Right, because of the two "hardcore" gaming console manufacturers, it's always been MS who retroactively shafted their customer base with forced updates, right?... wait, what do you mean that it was Sony who did that last time? That can't be right! Sony gave us Linux on our consoles!... until they removed it? Crazy talk, right? I mean, that was an advertised feature on the box! They would never retroactively remove an advertised feature!... really? They did it anyway, huh. Wow, damn. Oh well, I'm sure a bunch of hackers got together and put it back on anyhow, so no harm done.... now you're telling me Sony filed a lawsuit against the people who put an advertised feature back into the hardware they purchased? What a bunch of dicks!
Well, fine, so maybe Sony fucked over its customers via forced updates (and lawsuits) last time, but you know it'll be MS this time. I mean, they've got a history of that kind of shit, right? I mean, I'm *sure* that there's a time before the whole PS3 OtherOS thing when MS crippled their own product with a forced update too!... not really, huh. I guess that was kind of Sony's big "innovation" of the last few years, then.
Smartphones, laptops, no few desktops, and so on. Yeah... if the NSA wants to monitor you, they can (much more easily) do it from whatever device you posted this message to Slashdot using.
... but you'll buy from Sony, the company that spent the last console generation smearing *your* head with shit and shoving it up their ass? Seriously?
I mean, I can understand if you want to ignore all the anti-consumer stuff Sony said before the console launch. Most people were reasonably pissed off by it, but it's not like they actually forced you to go get a second job, they just heavily implied that anybody who thought $600 was a lot for a console was too poor to have one, etc. It's a bit of a double standard to ignore all that from back then, and then slather MS as evil for something that they said, and then went back on, before the console even launched... but whatever.
But to buy a console from the company that just a few years ago went and retroactively removed advertised features from their previous console via forced update? Especially after they then sued the people who worked to restore those features? That's anti-consumer right there. If you support a company that would do that, and has shown no sign of remorse for it, *you* are part of the problem. You are what enables companies to keep screwing over their customers, because you're too much of a "FanBoy" (your term, not mine) to hit them where it hurts in punishment for what they've done.
Because retroactively removing advertised features from purchased products is very consumer-friendly, right? I can't believe how short memories here on Slashdot are. Yes, 15 years ago MS was "evil" for bundling a web browser with an OS at no extra charge (the horrors!) but three years ago Sony crippled their own products *after you had already bought them* and you call them *less* hostile? You're either insane or very, very biased. Sony are playing you for a fool, and you're lapping it up.
Mind you, I have no intention of purchasing either console, but seriously, you sound like an idiot, and Sony has a *lot* to answer for. Seeing somebody call them *less* hostile than... pretty much *any* other consumer-oriented company is absurd.
The bright thing in front of you is called a computer monitor. It displays information from your computer. Your computer is a machine which can execute instructions, called "programs", to compute or manipulate data. The output of these programs is typically displayed on the monitor. The inputs to these programs, and most of the programs themselves, come from a variety of sources outside of your computer. These sources include yourself, other computers which your computer is connected to, and data storage devices which can be written to by one computer, moved to your computer, and then read from. Let's start with the first source, yourself. You interact with the computer via various mechanisms, typically called "input devices". The most common input devices are the mouse (usually fits in one hand, has a few buttons on one end) and the keyboard (typically placed directly in front of you, it is wide and has many buttons, most of which are labeled with letters or numbers).
... I could go on like this for a week without getting to bookmarklets, much less Mega.co.nz. You're on the Internet. Try acting like it (the "my web browser can access a search engine" part, not the "I am a blithering idiot, and need to share that fact with anybody who can read my drivel" part). I'd give you step by step instructions, but we haven't even gotten to the concept of the mouse controlling a little arrow (called the "pointer") on the screen (the stuff displayed by the monitor) yet; working all the way up to telling you how to perform a web search is well beyond the scope of this post.
If you want to store encrypted files, then [you must] encrypt them locally before uploading them.
Emphasis and clarification added. The problem isn't that the files aren't getting encrypted before upload, it's that *you* aren't doing it. Your browser, executing JS code from mega.co.nz, is doing it. You aren't even running the encryption program yourself; it's all automatic. You are handing Mega an un-encrypted file, and trusting them to securely encrypt it against themselves. Does this sound stupid yet? Let me be a little clearer: what does it matter whose actual CPU executes the crypto code, when Mega owns (and can change at any time) that code?
While Mega's approach is very convenient, it also throws all security guarantees out the window. From the user's perspective, they are giving an untrusted site ("untrusted" here is used in the security sense, as in "we are not absolutely sure that this site will not attempt to rat us out, so we are never going to let it see the unencrypted data") access to... unencrypted data. See the problem here? Yes, the version of the site's JS that you downloaded on this visit probably doesn't contain anything that leaks your decryption key to Mega, but there's no guarantee of that unless you audited the code yourself. Even then, it could be different next time...
Let me reiterate those points one more time: 1) You are handing Mega access to your plain-text data. It doesn't matter whose CPU modifies the data; Mega controls the code that runs on the CPU. 2) Because of item #1, all of Mega's guarantees are bullshit. The next time you visit their site, they could steal your keys and decrypt all your data; you can't stop them. 3) The only way to do this securely is, as amicusNYCL points out, encrypt them yourself. That means *not* using Mega's code, or the code of anybody else you are attempting to encrypt *against*.
If you actually read the link, what he means is "Windows is already great for gaming, but Games for Windows Live was a travesty. Just keep the OS system demands low, and if you want to be *really* awesome, publish some of those cool console franchises on the PC." Win8 has lower demands than Win7, which was lower than Vista, while any consumer OS pre-Vista can't even use the amount of RAM found in a budget POS these days. Between Steam, Humble Bundles, and GOG, there's really no need for a new game distribution mechanism at the moment (although the Windows Store arguably qualifies as one anyhow).
He's not saying "we want gaming on Windows to go away", he's saying "stop fucking with it; it works and you'd probably just make it worse." While this is a policy I'm not generally a fan of - down that road lies the risk of stagnation - he has a valid point: the gaming world is generally happy with Windows just doing what Windows does (right now, and in recent years); nothing more is needed or desired at this time. Aside from DirectX, every time Microsoft has tried to have some significant influence on PC gaming, it has generally gone poorly.
Your family and friends are people, presumably. They think that Win8 is bad (or they wouldn't want to get rid of it). They also are technologically somewhat incompetent, or they wouldn't have to call you for help. That pretty much rules out any option that they know how good the OS actually is; "I don't like it" doesn't make software bad, even though it may make it unsuccessful.
Strip away the UI, and you've got an OS with lower RAM usage, faster startup and resume times, better security features (new exploit mitigations, AppContainer sandboxes, etc.), the ability to share users with other machines (as opposed to user "bob" on machine A being completely different from user "bob" on machine B, even if it's the same person), better task management, support for tracking data usage (and limiting it, on per-usage connections), and both a built-in store (regardless of whether you like the store or not, it's an advantage when you consider the following...) and the ability to install your own software, even old software.
The UI is a mixed bag. Better multi-monitor support and some cool theme stuff, but also lots of downsides. The Start screen doesn't bother me - I don't launch my programs via hunt-and-peck any more than I type that way - but I get that many people do; fortunately there's no lack of ways to put back the classic Start menu for those who insist on launching programs the same inefficient way they've done since 95. They aren't baked into the OS, no, but at least some of them are free downloads.
It may surprise you to know that for several years, Microsoft had one of the most popular distributions of Unix... ever heard of Xenix? Hell, there are probably still systems running it somewhere out there.
NT, not DOS/9x, was Microsoft's answer to the Unix world; a multi-user OS with advanced networking and security features, remote access, a portable architecture, preemptive multitasking, and so on. NT is 20 years old (just barely younger than Linux, if you count from kernel 0.0.1 vs. the initial NT retail release).
Precisely. What we *might* see is what (I think) should have been done from the beginning: RT is "unlocked" for use basically as a standard Windows OS. Yes, native applications will need to be recompiled (.NET apps work fine), but that isn't too hard; the dev tools (Visual Studio and friends) already support doing that. They could sell desktop software through the Windows Store (just like they do on x86 Windows!) and, if they wanted to be really daring, could even create (or have created/ported) a compatibility layer for running Android apps. Bluestacks for Surface Pro is pretty popular. Something similar for RT could easily make it "the OS that has the advantages of both Android and Windows" - solving the app ecosystem problem, the "usable as either a tablet or laptop, but not good as either" problem, and the "can't replace my old laptop *or* my Android / iOS tablet" problem.
It really is the same code, though. Jailbreak it (which is done using standard Windows debugging and scripting tools) and it's just Windows 8 with a few legacy features removed, recompiled for ARM, and with wholly unneeded lockdown.
Exactly. If you don't like it, just don't use it. Tons of hardware doesn't even have the option of a TPM; in most of the rest, it's possible to remove, disable, or simply never install one.
The same way he "hasn't" been all along. When the lies are coming from the highest levels of the government, they can brand anybody they want as anything they like. One can only hope that the EFF is large and influential enough to cope with any fallout from this.
Looks like it might be time to donate again. There's something ridiculous about the need to buy decent government by donating to a charitable organization, but hey, they're doing better than most, and most of "us" (Slashdot readers) can probably afford it. Normally I'd suggest the option of doing it by way of the Humble Bundle, but currently they don't include that option...
Slashdot Mirror
It's not. On Linux/BSD/whatever I'd just go hit /etc/shadow for the equivalent of the Windows SAM; it's easier to get at, in fact. This whole "article" is bullshit aside from providing yet more evidence that "the cloud" is a bad idea for anything sensitive.
A slightly better option would be to use Encrypting File System (EFS) plus a *really* strong password (something you can't break with a rainbow table, since they can dump the password hashes). That doesn't require any boot-time stuff, and if the attacker resets the accounts password, all those files are gone forever (unless you can crack AES).
Of course, a clever attacker could instead insert spyware that catches the login credentials and/or the decrypted files and sends you those instead, at which point you are, once again, fucked.
Oh, and none of this is Windows-specific in the lest except for the specific tool this idiot (or, perhaps, "tool") used.
Too bad the author of TFA is a flaming idiot, and this has nothing to do with Windows at all. It's a total non-story.
He just "discovered" that if you download a cloud machine disk volume - which is completely OS-agnostic, you could do it BeOS if you wanted to - you can mount it on your own machine and go to town on the data. Unix-like OS? Cool, go read /etc/shadow and get the password hashes (or change/add your own password and re-mount it, as he suggests doing with Windows). There's absolutely nothing here Windows-specific at all except that the idiot only *just* discovered that password resetting by modifying the user login data is possible.
Easy "root" (Admin) shells and file management (and even scripting, which is a form of legacy compatilbiity that it does support). Multiple user support. Multiple monitor support. Hardware peripheral support. Windows networking (Homegroups, printers, etc. out of the box). Syncing stuff with your home PC and/or workstation (files, settings, purchased apps, and even app data). Office. Flashplayer (full, desktop-equivalent version). A browser with full dev tools (less than Firefox plus a full load of extensions on a PC, but more than any other tablet OS's built-in browser). Multitasking apps. Built-in and familiar tools for complex tasks like file system permissions management, certificate management, partition editing, etc. Live tiles (some people honestly don't hate the Start screen, believe it or not). Write software using familiar tools and APIs (mostly familiar APIs, at least, to anybody who does either Win32 or .NET development).
That's all without even considering jailbreaking, at which point it will happily run legacy apps if they are in a .NET language, are recompiled to ARM, or are able to be run through a dynamic recompilation layer (works much better than trying to run Windows apps on, say, Android because you can thunk the Win32 / NT calls to native code through small and fast parameter translation shims; no need to emulate an entire operating system. There's already a program that does this for jailbroken RT tablets.)
I actually know a guy who worked on the NT port (back when it was called "Windows NT", and this was shortly before he left MS for good) for Alpha. He still has the email from when his team supplied it to the test team, which had until that time been working mostly on x86, which said (of Windows on Alpha) "what kind of rocket fuel are you running these things on?" in reference to their speed.
DEC screwed the pooch on that one, no doubt; they priced it as a high-end workstation chip, and lower-priced commodity PC hardware running x86 ate their lunch.
Oh, I don't doubt that MS fucked up RT pretty hard, though whether that was intentional or not I really can't say (I doubt it was; too much damn money down the drain). However, your list is so wrong it's hilarious.
Confusing name: The Surface Pro came out months after the Surface RT, the Surface RT has RT right in the name, and everywhere I saw that was selling them the salespeople were very cautious about making sure the customer knew the difference. The bigger "confusing name" problem is probably Windows RT vs. WinRT which not even slightly the same thing; one is an OS (desktop/tablet build of Windows NT 6.2 on ARM architecture) and the other is an API set (the APIs used for writing "Windows Store" apps, A.K.A. Modern or Metro apps, on either Windows RT, Windows 8 (any edition, including server if you want it there), and Windows Phone 8 (though only a subset of full WinRT is usable there).
Windows 8 - it was explicitly designed for use on tablets; what the hell were they going to use? It works pretty well on a smallish touchscreen; much better than Win7 does.
Missing Start menu / "replaced by Start Button": First of all, see previous point. Second, I don't know what the hell you mean about "replaced by" unless you're talking about 8.1; one of the complaints with 8.0 was the lack of a Start button (it's present but auto-hidden).
No initial boot to desktop: on the assumption that what the user really wants to do, when they boot up their tablet (not resume it from whatever they were doing last, but boot from cold), is run a program instead of stare at the wallpaper? More-so because the Start screen has the "at a glance" view of the live tiles. Even less of an issue for RT than on x86 because of the restriction on "desktop" software anyhow...
App store / minimum $1.50: Most scripts and such work fine, as do both HTML5 and Flash websites. With that said, I fully agree that they shouldn't have locked it to "Windows Store" apps. As for the cost, yes the minimum for a paid app is $1.49; good thing (if you're an RT user) that there are tons of apps that are free instead...
No sideloading of apps: blatantly false. Sideloading is officially supported and free. It's not where anybody will stumble across it by accident, but it is documented. Powershell (as Admin) -> Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration (show-w + TAB will autocomplete) -> follow instructions to unlock, then sideloading is just "run the PS1 script that Visual Studio automatically generates along with every .APPX package".
No backwards compatibility: Mostly true (officially). Batch/CMD scripts, most Powershell scripts, and many Windows Script Host (.js, .vbs, etc.) scripts all work fine, as do .REG files.
No ability to load... approved by Microsoft: TOTAL bullshit. Even leaving *aside* the points about sideloading and backward compatibility above, there's Company apps (which is to say, private app stores).
Poor CPU choice: Tegra 3 wasn't the best choice by the time of market release, but even at that time, it wasn't a *bad* one. It's what a lot of tablets, including some very big-deal Android ones, were using / coming out with.
Not enough RAM: 2 GB?!? That's more than any other contemporary tablet I know of; it's far more than enough. As specs go, RAM is probably the *least* of Surface RT's problems.
Poor heat management: You are talking about the Surface RT, right? The one with passive cooling? It's never been a problem for me, even when running x86 games running in a homebrewed emulation layer that I had to jailbreak to install. Or running 3D games that stress its GPU to keep up. This one might be even less of an issue than the RAM thing...
Price: It was priced higher than the market was willing to bear for the features it had and the way it was advertised, yes. It was competitive with the iPad on a price/specs basis, though.
Domain joining: True (hacks aside; it is actually technically possible). Would certai
That would be true - and a huge advantage for RT - if Microsoft hadn't tried to lock it down so goddamn hard. Now the only userbase for apps like that are the people who jailbreak their tablets, a market niche so small that we've had to recompile practically all of the software we use on them ourselves. The main exception is .NET apps, many of which (anything that targets a recent .NET version and doesn't require third-party native libraries) work flawlessly. ISVs have not, by and large, bothered with the (often fairly trivial) recompile-to-ARM needed for RT compatibility.
On the other hand, if you were talking about Windows x86 tablets, then yeah, you're spot on. That's their crushing advantage, although having a good OS (that supports things like multiple foreground apps and multiple user logins and the ability to run software as Admin out of the box) is also a nice feature.
From a purely technical standpoint; this makes a lot of sense. Backward compatibility, fewer architectures that devs must target, lower dev and maintenance costs for OS vendors, and so on.
However, I can't say I'm really happy about the idea of Intel gaining even more dominance in the market. AMD is still holding on, but their answer to "low power" is "we can do better graphics than Intel in less power than Intel + dedicated graphics" which is a nice perk but also addresses neither the high end of the PC market (where they can compete on price, but not really on performance) nor the tablet/smartphone/ultrabook end (where they would need at least one and ideally two steps up in manufacturing process to match Intel).
ARM reaching into the tablet/netbook market seemed like a viable competitor; less powerful at its top end than even a mid-range Intel chip, it could operate comfortably in power ranges that Intel had no answer to. Now... not so much, and with the possible exception of legacy devices and really cheap/underpowered computers (RaPis, smartwatches, etc.) ARM risks becoming irrelevant to the "daily computer-using world". I don't care one way or another about ARM in particular, but there should be *something* out there (in reasonable usage) other than x86/x64.
(She?) has always been pretty active, and used to be fairly insightful even if occasionally oversensitive about certain subjects and sometimes misinformed (but not usually to the point of repeatedly stating a false claim). No big deal; we all have our buttons and we all make mistakes. Overall, her posts were a definite benefit to the community.
That was, oh, up until a couple years ago. I couldn't give you a precise point, but these days it sadly does seem more like a troll account. Sad, because the points are still sometimes interesting (such as yes, the Apple app store does sometimes let malware through; no surprise to anybody clued in about this stuff, but Apple explicitly targets the non-clued-in). The way places and times of their presentation, however, leave a lot to be desired. As I said, it's sad.
No, I've boycotted Sony since they put remotely exploitable rootkits on music CDs. I figure a person would get at least 25 years for that; I won't buy anything of theirs for at least that long.
If for some reason I'd acquired a PS3, I certainly would have put Linux on it, though.
To be fair, Android isn't much better here... CarrierIQ, etc. But yes.
Right, because of the two "hardcore" gaming console manufacturers, it's always been MS who retroactively shafted their customer base with forced updates, right? ... wait, what do you mean that it was Sony who did that last time? That can't be right! Sony gave us Linux on our consoles! ... until they removed it? Crazy talk, right? I mean, that was an advertised feature on the box! They would never retroactively remove an advertised feature! ... really? They did it anyway, huh. Wow, damn. Oh well, I'm sure a bunch of hackers got together and put it back on anyhow, so no harm done. ... now you're telling me Sony filed a lawsuit against the people who put an advertised feature back into the hardware they purchased? What a bunch of dicks!
Well, fine, so maybe Sony fucked over its customers via forced updates (and lawsuits) last time, but you know it'll be MS this time. I mean, they've got a history of that kind of shit, right? I mean, I'm *sure* that there's a time before the whole PS3 OtherOS thing when MS crippled their own product with a forced update too! ... not really, huh. I guess that was kind of Sony's big "innovation" of the last few years, then.
Smartphones, laptops, no few desktops, and so on. Yeah... if the NSA wants to monitor you, they can (much more easily) do it from whatever device you posted this message to Slashdot using.
... but you'll buy from Sony, the company that spent the last console generation smearing *your* head with shit and shoving it up their ass? Seriously?
I mean, I can understand if you want to ignore all the anti-consumer stuff Sony said before the console launch. Most people were reasonably pissed off by it, but it's not like they actually forced you to go get a second job, they just heavily implied that anybody who thought $600 was a lot for a console was too poor to have one, etc. It's a bit of a double standard to ignore all that from back then, and then slather MS as evil for something that they said, and then went back on, before the console even launched... but whatever.
But to buy a console from the company that just a few years ago went and retroactively removed advertised features from their previous console via forced update? Especially after they then sued the people who worked to restore those features? That's anti-consumer right there. If you support a company that would do that, and has shown no sign of remorse for it, *you* are part of the problem. You are what enables companies to keep screwing over their customers, because you're too much of a "FanBoy" (your term, not mine) to hit them where it hurts in punishment for what they've done.
Because retroactively removing advertised features from purchased products is very consumer-friendly, right? I can't believe how short memories here on Slashdot are. Yes, 15 years ago MS was "evil" for bundling a web browser with an OS at no extra charge (the horrors!) but three years ago Sony crippled their own products *after you had already bought them* and you call them *less* hostile? You're either insane or very, very biased. Sony are playing you for a fool, and you're lapping it up.
Mind you, I have no intention of purchasing either console, but seriously, you sound like an idiot, and Sony has a *lot* to answer for. Seeing somebody call them *less* hostile than... pretty much *any* other consumer-oriented company is absurd.
The bright thing in front of you is called a computer monitor. It displays information from your computer. Your computer is a machine which can execute instructions, called "programs", to compute or manipulate data. The output of these programs is typically displayed on the monitor. The inputs to these programs, and most of the programs themselves, come from a variety of sources outside of your computer. These sources include yourself, other computers which your computer is connected to, and data storage devices which can be written to by one computer, moved to your computer, and then read from. Let's start with the first source, yourself. You interact with the computer via various mechanisms, typically called "input devices". The most common input devices are the mouse (usually fits in one hand, has a few buttons on one end) and the keyboard (typically placed directly in front of you, it is wide and has many buttons, most of which are labeled with letters or numbers).
Emphasis and clarification added. The problem isn't that the files aren't getting encrypted before upload, it's that *you* aren't doing it. Your browser, executing JS code from mega.co.nz, is doing it. You aren't even running the encryption program yourself; it's all automatic. You are handing Mega an un-encrypted file, and trusting them to securely encrypt it against themselves. Does this sound stupid yet? Let me be a little clearer: what does it matter whose actual CPU executes the crypto code, when Mega owns (and can change at any time) that code?
While Mega's approach is very convenient, it also throws all security guarantees out the window. From the user's perspective, they are giving an untrusted site ("untrusted" here is used in the security sense, as in "we are not absolutely sure that this site will not attempt to rat us out, so we are never going to let it see the unencrypted data") access to... unencrypted data. See the problem here? Yes, the version of the site's JS that you downloaded on this visit probably doesn't contain anything that leaks your decryption key to Mega, but there's no guarantee of that unless you audited the code yourself. Even then, it could be different next time...
Let me reiterate those points one more time:
1) You are handing Mega access to your plain-text data. It doesn't matter whose CPU modifies the data; Mega controls the code that runs on the CPU.
2) Because of item #1, all of Mega's guarantees are bullshit. The next time you visit their site, they could steal your keys and decrypt all your data; you can't stop them.
3) The only way to do this securely is, as amicusNYCL points out, encrypt them yourself. That means *not* using Mega's code, or the code of anybody else you are attempting to encrypt *against*.
Uh, WP has already broken 4%. Living a few months in the past, are we?
If you actually read the link, what he means is "Windows is already great for gaming, but Games for Windows Live was a travesty. Just keep the OS system demands low, and if you want to be *really* awesome, publish some of those cool console franchises on the PC." Win8 has lower demands than Win7, which was lower than Vista, while any consumer OS pre-Vista can't even use the amount of RAM found in a budget POS these days. Between Steam, Humble Bundles, and GOG, there's really no need for a new game distribution mechanism at the moment (although the Windows Store arguably qualifies as one anyhow).
He's not saying "we want gaming on Windows to go away", he's saying "stop fucking with it; it works and you'd probably just make it worse." While this is a policy I'm not generally a fan of - down that road lies the risk of stagnation - he has a valid point: the gaming world is generally happy with Windows just doing what Windows does (right now, and in recent years); nothing more is needed or desired at this time. Aside from DirectX, every time Microsoft has tried to have some significant influence on PC gaming, it has generally gone poorly.
So... you are supporting the GP's point?
Your family and friends are people, presumably. They think that Win8 is bad (or they wouldn't want to get rid of it). They also are technologically somewhat incompetent, or they wouldn't have to call you for help. That pretty much rules out any option that they know how good the OS actually is; "I don't like it" doesn't make software bad, even though it may make it unsuccessful.
Strip away the UI, and you've got an OS with lower RAM usage, faster startup and resume times, better security features (new exploit mitigations, AppContainer sandboxes, etc.), the ability to share users with other machines (as opposed to user "bob" on machine A being completely different from user "bob" on machine B, even if it's the same person), better task management, support for tracking data usage (and limiting it, on per-usage connections), and both a built-in store (regardless of whether you like the store or not, it's an advantage when you consider the following...) and the ability to install your own software, even old software.
The UI is a mixed bag. Better multi-monitor support and some cool theme stuff, but also lots of downsides. The Start screen doesn't bother me - I don't launch my programs via hunt-and-peck any more than I type that way - but I get that many people do; fortunately there's no lack of ways to put back the classic Start menu for those who insist on launching programs the same inefficient way they've done since 95. They aren't baked into the OS, no, but at least some of them are free downloads.
It may surprise you to know that for several years, Microsoft had one of the most popular distributions of Unix... ever heard of Xenix? Hell, there are probably still systems running it somewhere out there.
NT, not DOS/9x, was Microsoft's answer to the Unix world; a multi-user OS with advanced networking and security features, remote access, a portable architecture, preemptive multitasking, and so on. NT is 20 years old (just barely younger than Linux, if you count from kernel 0.0.1 vs. the initial NT retail release).
Precisely. What we *might* see is what (I think) should have been done from the beginning: RT is "unlocked" for use basically as a standard Windows OS. Yes, native applications will need to be recompiled (.NET apps work fine), but that isn't too hard; the dev tools (Visual Studio and friends) already support doing that. They could sell desktop software through the Windows Store (just like they do on x86 Windows!) and, if they wanted to be really daring, could even create (or have created/ported) a compatibility layer for running Android apps. Bluestacks for Surface Pro is pretty popular. Something similar for RT could easily make it "the OS that has the advantages of both Android and Windows" - solving the app ecosystem problem, the "usable as either a tablet or laptop, but not good as either" problem, and the "can't replace my old laptop *or* my Android / iOS tablet" problem.
It really is the same code, though. Jailbreak it (which is done using standard Windows debugging and scripting tools) and it's just Windows 8 with a few legacy features removed, recompiled for ARM, and with wholly unneeded lockdown.
Exactly. If you don't like it, just don't use it. Tons of hardware doesn't even have the option of a TPM; in most of the rest, it's possible to remove, disable, or simply never install one.
Win8 runs just fine without any TPM installed.
So use hardware that doesn't even have it. My desktop (less than a year old) doesn't. Run Win8 just fine (and Linux, FreeBSD, and probably MS-DOS too)
The same way he "hasn't" been all along. When the lies are coming from the highest levels of the government, they can brand anybody they want as anything they like. One can only hope that the EFF is large and influential enough to cope with any fallout from this.
Looks like it might be time to donate again. There's something ridiculous about the need to buy decent government by donating to a charitable organization, but hey, they're doing better than most, and most of "us" (Slashdot readers) can probably afford it. Normally I'd suggest the option of doing it by way of the Humble Bundle, but currently they don't include that option...