* Posts by asdf

6570 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Apr 2007

Silent but violent: Foul Google Play flaw lets hackers emit smelly apps

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Cyanogenmod ftw

More reinforcement that my experiment to run Cyanogenmod without Gapps was the way to go. You can get virtually everything you would ever need (at least I was able too) with F-Droid and if need be Amazon app store. I did it mostly to avoid Google's 24/7 spying but security is just an extra bonus. It is nice to go under settings>account and not see one single account.

'Camera-shy' Raspberry Pi 2 suffers strange 'XENON DEATH FLASH' glitch

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Re: Amazing...

What's the over/under on how long Slackware can resist the freedesktop.borg (systemd, etc)?

Hacker hijack 'threat': Your car's security is Adobe Flash-grade BAD

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Re: Anyone else get the feeling...

Here stateside in many states they already allow the insurance companies access to the mandatory blackbox built into every car the last five years.

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Mushroom

>and one manufacturer said it felt consumers shouldn’t even be told records was being kept, Markey's report states.

And somewhere a millennial reading this is disgusted that they would hide this instead of integrating it with their foursquare profile. That is if it is one of the rare ones that even has a driver's license.

We'll ask GCHQ to DELETE records of 'MILLIONS' of people – Privacy International

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Re: Catch-22

>You mean like the existing and most heinous RIPA

Finally a draconian law that doesn't apply to Americans. Of course don't use your fingerprints as your login on any device here stateside as a court can force you to provide those or go to jail.

SWELLING moons of ice dwarf Pluto snapped by NASA spy-probe

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Re: Its a planet.

Honestly as a Yank I couldn't give a shit about Pluto and Eris either really. Sedna and its orbit going 900 AU away from the sun on the other hand is very interesting. That one is unlike all the others (so far) and it will probably tell us more about what's in the immediate neighborhood of our solar system and about its history than all the other planetoids (or whatever) combined.

RIP Windows RT: Microsoft murders ARM Surface, Nokia tablets

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hmm

Microsoft trying to succeed outside x86 = a zebra trying to change its stripes.

Yes technically they can do it and have in the past as well but usually just as a negotiation tactic or as business strategy to kill off a competitor never as a way to actually make any kind of profit.

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Re: Surface 2 with Win 8 RT-edition

Not sure about blocking ads on YouTube but to block ads in most other places run privoxy on your router or some other computer on your network and then just enter that as the proxy on the Win RT machine. That is how I get ad blocking on an unrooted iPhone. There are also outside adblock proxy services such as Auto proxy URL: http://ipad.speedmeup.net (which will work with any OS) but then they get to see obviously a lot of your browsing habits and info. Privoxy works reasonably well with SSL as well in that it will filter/block source and destination domains but obviously it won't be able to filter the content itself.

Avast there: MEELLIONS of Androiders scuttled by 'adware' game app

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Re: Scrabble babble

Another reason why EA gives Comcast a run for its money for worst corporation in existence every year. The missus really loves Classic Words Plus a lot more as far as playing scrabble against the computer/phone.

Five years of Sun software under Oracle: Were the critics right?

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Re: Solaris is long gone.....

Yes yes I will agree my wording was poor and for the record I am hardly some Linux fanboi. I actually think much less of it than Solaris especially what with Linux having cancer these days (systemd). Still this article pretty much says it all about Solaris under Oracle from Mr Java himself.

James Gosling slams Oracle’s over Solaris

One big fail Mr Ellison

14 Jan 2014

"Four years after Oracle bought Sun, Java founder James Gosling has waded into the outfit’s handling of his former workplace’s key assets.

Writing in Infoworld, Gosling scolded Oracle on its handling of Sun’s products and was particularly nasty about Larry Ellison’s handling of Solaris.

Giving Oracle an F- for the way it treated Solaris, Gosling said that it was now “totally dead” and it was hard to think of anyone actually using it. “Hardware systems from Oracle make no sense at all. I had to convert all my Solaris boxes to Linux, it made me weep.”

http://news.techeye.net/software/james-gosling-slams-oracles-over-solaris

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Re: wait a minute

Wasn't there when I posted originally but yeah some things are predictable.

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wait a minute

A SUN/Oracle article and no posts by everyone's favorite self appointed expert Matty B?

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systemd exists solely so Red Hat can get as much OSS to be linux only as possible for their bottom line. That and to get around the GPL.

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Re: Solaris is long gone.....

What a bunch of garbage. Solaris especially on SPARC is nearly dead just like virtually every other proprietary Unix and all you have to do is compare sales numbers from the companies themselves to five and ten years ago to see this true. Yes it might hum along in basically maintenance mode for many years to come but its in the old folks home at this point with virtually no chance of major growth again.

Trouble comes in threes: Yet ANOTHER Flash 0-day vuln patch looming

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Re: Death to FLASH!

>Adobe Management and to look down from the ramparts wondering what all the fuss is about.

Even they have agreed flash is garbage and HTML5 is the way of the future. The HMS Legacy can be a very very large and slow ship that even its captain can't control sadly.

Google, Amazon 'n' pals fork out for AdBlock Plus 'unblock' – report

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Re: Sigh

>>You answered you own question, use Firefox. "

>I would if it wasn't such a memory pig.

Actually today FF is a lot better and if you don't run adblock plus and flash you might be amazed. Sadly FF picked up IE like bloat in the 2.0 to 3.5 days and really turned off a lot of people. Once FF had its ass handed to it by Chrome the devs have been pushed to make a fairly decent browser these days.

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Re: Begun the Ad Wars have

>No need to use something like Ad Block on IE. Ad blocking is built in:

>Open IE11 in Modern or Desktop mode

And right there your plan falls apart for probably %80+ of the people visiting this site. Open IE for anything but the intranet? Haha good one.

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Re: Begun the Ad Wars have

Privoxy also has the advantage of using less memory and cpu than adblock plus as well. If you use an open source router OS like OpenWRT and derivatives you can run it on your router instead of having to put it on each computer plus you can then adblock effectively on unrooted Android and IOS with no fuss as well.

Privacy alert: Outlook for iOS does security STUPIDLY, says dev

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/agree

Yep the app was pretty nice and made email easier to read than the iOS mail native app imho. That said it will be quite some time before I put back it on my phone. Would have become my daily email client too. Microsoft's incompetence these days is breathtaking.

Tearful boffins confirm grav wave tsunami NOT caused by Big Bang

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Re: Competition

Yeah and unfortunately it feeds ammo to the various truthers who don't understand anything but pseudo science are looking to trash the real thing any time they can.

Microsoft Outlook comes to Android, iOS: MS email now a bit less painful on mobile

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Re: What's wrong with the built-in mail client on WP8.x?

Just to further step on the thread. So far I do like the new Outlook app for iPhone more than the native mail client. For one thing it doesn't display text two small for me to see for more a second or two before auto zooming to good size with a good looking font imho.

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Re: What's wrong with the built-in mail client on WP8.x?

My biggest complaint with the standard mail client is on a long email chain on the iPhone 6 regular you have to turn the phone sideways to be able to read the text. The pinch zoom in portrait mode on the client is atrocious too imho.

Oh WP8 well couldn't tell you. Only ever seen one in the wild and the person using it hasn't needed to worry about corporate email for a few decades.

Kill Facebook's creepy on-by-default Yelp 'killer' Place Tips – your guide

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>Gladder than ever that the first thing to go once I root a new phone, is the facebook app.

Yep but for me its usually second as here stateside the Verizon garbage apps get the boot first. Probably because even the icons are annoying and of course they are all made system apps.

NXP flings sueball at Marvell over Xbox NFC chips

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woohoo

Oh look another case we will hear the results of in about 5 years with the only ones usually coming out ahead being the lawyers.

IBM jobs axe: 'The cuts have STARTED and are spreading' sigh staff

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Mushroom

well duh

When your business model is buying up your own stock so your executives can cash out before the whole shit house goes up in flames you sure don't need over 400k employees. You especially need to start laying off when you start smelling smoke like now so the last of the good ole boys can make it to the exits.

FTC to Internet of Stuff: Security, motherf****r, do you speak it?

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Re: Security? Embedded systems? Ada.

Reliable like the Ada software on Ariane 5 Flight 501?

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Re: Because trusting the corporation always works, right?

> Disabling the connection will become a crime.

Kind of like Orwell wrote about two generations ago with the TVs that see you as well and you can't fug with (if I remember right). As an aside the main thing Orwell got wrong about the future was assuming the power structure was not mildly retarded ala shades of Idiocracy which seems to be the case.

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Re: On the right track, but . . .

>The second truth is that introducing regulation becomes harder the longer you leave it.

The FTC can ask the FCC about that firsthand with cable companies not having common carrier status and all.

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Re: Management protocol?

Great as if I don't dick with my home router enough now I will have to do so every time I buy a goddamn light bulb soon huh?

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Re: I would like to offically declare

Well after the hype of Big Data now they need new way to go get even more data from the sheep. Thus the need for my toaster to show me ads as it sends to the mothership god knows what (hidden mic listening for keywords, etc). No they don't give a shit about me personally but get a million people together buying the same toaster then they give a shit.

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f__k the IoT

A lot of people are saying well who cares I will not pay extra to buy IoT crap but I am afraid corporate America at least may well try and backdoor the consumer if they can. Already your car (if made in the last 5 to 10 years) has a black box recording driving data the insurance companies can use against you (some states have protections on it but most don't). Its not online yet but if you think that's not coming you are more optimistic that me. All thats needed is an open wifi nearby (or you drive past) or heck I can see them embedding cell phone chips eventually. This includes appliances in the home as well eventually. If caught they will just sell it by showing the supposed benefits including perhaps reduced upfront costs (ie the Google model) or added functionality and downplay the data collection.

IBM to cut '118k jobs worldwide' – report claims

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Re: Rubbish

How is updating your resume/CV going?

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Re: the key to success

But all these “shareholder friendly” maneuvers have been masking an ugly truth: IBM’s success in recent years has been tied more to financial engineering than actual performance.

That became readily apparent Monday morning when the company announced its earnings, missing analysts’ expectations by a wide margin. The stock fell more than 7 percent to $169.10 by the end of the day, below the average price Mr. Buffett paid since he started buying the stock in 2011.

The company’s revenue hasn’t grown in years. Indeed, IBM’s revenue is about the same as it was in 2008.

But all along, IBM has been buying up its own shares as if they were a hot item. Since 2000, IBM spent some $108 billion on its own shares, according to its most recent annual report. It also paid out $30 billion in dividends. To help finance this share-buying spree, IBM loaded up on debt.

While the company spent $138 billion on its shares and dividend payments, it spent just $59 billion on its own business through capital expenditures and $32 billion on acquisitions. (To be fair, Ms. Rometty has been following a goal set by her predecessor, Samuel J. Palmisano, to return $20 a share to stockholders by 2015. Ms. Rometty abandoned it only on Monday.)

All of which is to say that IBM has arguably been spending its money on the wrong things: shareholders, rather than building its own business.

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the key to success

Stock buybacks are the only thing that matters. Not growth, not profit, just artificially boosting shareholder value in the short to mid term.

Signed,

Ten years of clueless IBM executive management.

Facebook: Oi, Lizard Squad – we can take down our own site, ta

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Re: MySpace

was going to post the same thing along with everyone else i guess.

HMRC fails to plan for £10.4bn contract exit... because it's 'too risky'

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ah

So a true master of the game of bureaucracy where there is one rule. The first person to do anything loses.

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Re: £200 a head

>The UK tax code is at least 14,000 pages long

Holy crap and people in the US complain about ours and its "only" 2600 pages long and our population and GDP is more than 5 times greater.

Dark Fibre: Reg man plunges into London's sewers to see how pipe is laid

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Re: Too early

honor not hour, stupid 10 min only edit period.

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Re: Too early

Congrats guys. First article in awhile I won't read past the first comment thread. Usually it is an hour reserved for El Reg climate "science" articles.

FORCE Apple to support BlackBerry hardware, demands John Chen

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Re: People are misunderstanding ....

Ever taken a look at the amount of malware comparing iOS to Android? Sometimes the walled-app garden isn't a bad choice as long as the consumer does have choice (ie. can use a non walled garden OS if they so choose).

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Re: How about "no", Mr. Chen?

What by whining and making his company look even more pathetic and desperate publicly?

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Re: I think this is the wrong sort of burden

>that apps be developed by some universal standard and all OEM's can access them and run them on their Operating System.

Like Java? We all know how great those apps are compared to native on most platforms.

Nexus 6 would have had a fingerprint reader, but Apple RUINED IT ALL

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Re: Court ruling

Don't be so sure. They can already force you to provide bodily fluids (blood, etc) and or DNA via a court order so this may well stand.