Posts by AndyS 943 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2009
> DO tell us HOW... :)
On my phone (Wileyfox Swift running Cyanogen OS), go to settings, Wifi, advanced, and turn off "Network Notification (Notify whenever a public network is available)". This stops it trying to connect. This, or something similar, has worked on my previous phones too (Moto G & others).
As above, you can also manually disconnect each time it happens.
>Or is caused by the obsession of marketing droids to capture every activity that we make so that they can apply bad "Data Science" in order to try and sell us shit that we don't need?
My current one is wire clips. I needed some, so I went to Amazon and bought some.
Now, obviously, the data analyst wombles have discovered my nefarious plan to fill a warehouse with the things.
For all their claimed intelligence, I would have thought it would be relatively easy to work out which things are typically one-off purchases (wire clips, home router, things like that) and to say "you bought an A, so you probably don't want another," versus things like, I don't know, cabbages, which one might buy on a reasonably frequent basis.
Just stop your phone from trying to connect to any open wifi network? That's what I've done. I want to connect to known networks by default, but I certainly don't want my phone surfing whatever random pay-per-use open-but-passworded flaky, unreliable connection it stumbles across, especially since, as you point out, this can break the connection it is reliably using.
Also, does it follow that one minute of down-time costing £X automatically means that 100 minutes costs £100*X?
Let's think of an analogy. If I'm 1 minute late to catch my train, I'm half an hour late for work. Therefore if I'm 10 minutes late I'll obviously be 5 hours late for work, right?
We don't have a licence, as we don't have or want live TV in the house. This makes us more selective in what we watch, and prevents us leaving the telly on blaring background noise, dumbing down the kids.
However, I've always been aware the iplayer is a loophole. For the cost of it (a fraction of what the likes of Sky charge), you get an enormous amount. Not only that but the commercial channels STILL shovel adverts down your neck, even after you've directly paid them. I don't know why people put up with that.
So, we'll pay. No issues.
I'm actually pretty excited about this. I carry around a heck of a lot of computing power in my pocket, but spend all day sitting at another computer which can't talk to it. Then I go home, where I have a NAS which can be accessed by all sorts of things, but also a desktop and a couple of laptops, all of which have their own storage, and setting them up to talk seamlessly to each other isn't trivial.
In a few years, I can see the phone being powerful enough to do everything all the other computers I currently use can do. For consumer stuff it's already there. I'm looking for a new tablet just now, and very tempted by a Ubuntu one.
Sadly, there are fewer real benefits than you'd imagine once you try and scale up. Firstly, you still need terminal buildings, with all associated air bridges, lounges, customs, baggage handling etc. Look at a typical large airport and you've probably several miles of external walls along which aircraft dock. Every point of that needs luggage and people moved to/from it constantly.
Then there's security - how do you propose to effectively secure a large area of open ocean?
Finally, there's weather. Large aircraft need remarkably smooth landing surfaces, whether at sea or on land. Waves of any size at all would close the air.
The alternative phone suggested by Amazon, called "Beat The Boss" (where the Boss is, from the reviews, apparently the name of the metal detector used on entrance to Her Majesty's facilities) appears to be a more, well, comfortable shape. Almost deliberately so.
The reviews and Q&As are hilarious, in an enlightening way, and actually don't appear to be jokes:
> Q: Would this phone set off the metal detector at a federal courthouse?
> A: I would think it is very unlikely, it has only a tiny amount of metal in it's construction, far less than the amount of metal I have as bridge-work on my teeth and I don't set of metal detectors. I do know that it is not detected by the "Boss" chair, designed to find metal contraband in UK prisons.
Review (5*, 9 of 10 found helpful):
>...this phone will indeed "beat the the boss". This coupled with how easy and painless it is to hide, has led to the order of two more for friends.
See my comment below - I agree entirely, but suspect this is aimed at the manufacturers not the consumers. Vehicle OEMs tend to have standard lists of requirements for built-in equipment (temperature, vibration, life span etc), so having a card which meets these off-the-shelf will give SanDisk a foot in the door.
Aren't SD cards already pretty common in cars (eg my built-in Sat Nav has one buried under the dash somewhere), and extremely common in things in cars (after market Sat Navs, along with pretty much any portable electronic device?
Is there a big problem with them failing regularly?
This makes me assume that this isn't driven by a consumer requirement/demand, but is in response to a standard list of requirements from an auto maker. Particularly the temperature range looks like it's been lifted straight from the "suppliers' equipment must do this" document. Which will presumably give SanDisk a foot in the door with an off-the-shelf product, with no additional development costs.
>anti-terror legislation was introduced in the UK was that a council famously used it almost immediately, but to investigate the seriously nefarious crime of allowing a dog to foul the pavement. QED.
You forgot the bit where they also used anti-terror legislation to investigate parents who were trying to get their children into the schools of neighbouring catchment areas. Because heaven forbid a parent should want the best education for their children! That's only one step from sending them to Syria to fight for ISIS!
@AC:
> Protesters lined the windows of the Apple store at 5pm while two police officers stood nearby
>don't these people have lives? Or jobs? Or... school to go to on this finy, wet, by the looks of it, morning?
Obviously you didn't go to school either, or you'd have been able to read the article.
Equally obviously, by your own standard, you also don't have anything currently worthwhile to do, as, at 10 am, you have no better occupation than to post on an internet news site.
Alternatively, does it really stretch you so much to imagine that a handful of people who care deeply about an issue might be able to make themselves free at 5pm on week day?
Very clear response, and straight to the point. Thanks for the link.
Essentially they are saying that if they do this once, and it becomes public how it is done, it can be replicated by anyone, on any phone.
If that's true, does it not imply that the security of the encryption keys is "security through obscurity?"
@John, the issue then is that the maximum penalty for refusing to comply is often very significantly under the likely penalty for the crime being investigated - as was the case with the cyclist and the Volvo. Don't talk? Slap on the wrist. Talk? Go directly to jail.
I guess one alternative would be to make refusing to cooperate carry the same penalty as the crime being investigated, but that sounds pretty draconian, and would doubtless lead to much larger problems.
Did you see my bit about audits, and penalties for people who abuse the system? Maybe not, as it was only about half of the words I typed.
I'm not describing a Reddit (or even Reg) style voting system, but a "report this post as Trolling" system, where users would be under no illusion that reports are serious, and false reports will penalise them, not the person they are reporting.
Surely this should be pretty easy, through giving feedback system to users. Allow users to tag tweets as trolling / spam etc. Apply random audits, particularly of contentious feedback. Use the feedback, and the results of the random audits, to give a weighting to tweeters.
By default, only tweets from users with a >0 rating would be shown, but users (particularly for example high profile users) could set their feeds to only receive/display tweets from users with a higher rating.
On top of ratings, if your tweet is reported by enough people, it would get flagged, you would be notified, and it wouldn't be shown any more. You could appeal this, which would send it into some sort of audit system (presumably this could largely be automated).
Obviously there would be false troll reports, but a combination of clever algorithms and a small percentage of manual auditing should be able to sort that out, and false reporting could either lower the reporter's own rating, or remove their future ability to report.
>Let's just remind ourselves that this is people's livelihoods we're talking about, and people can't grow faster than companies unless management hires people it later doesn't need or hires the wrong people.
Well said. The canned bullshit sounds suspiciously like they are trying to blame the people for being there. At least have a bit of respect and gravity if you're letting people go.
It starts off coherently enough, talking about an interesting approach to encryption.
Then it jumps to something about neural networks examining photos of hand-written notes.
Then it says they managed to process these notes with a 99% accuracy.
I may be missing something, but what were they processing, what was the "correct" answer, what is the 99% figure all about in relation to data processing, and how does this relate to encryption?
Having read this article, I honestly have no idea what has been achieved, and if it's impressive or not.
>A dangerous file system delete that I can think of no use for other than fun
Of course it's dangerous - it deletes things! That's what it's for. That's what it does.
Let's take an analogy. I've got a spade. There are some places I shouldn't dig (Bessy's grave, the high voltage cable etc), but that's not the spade's fault.
There are whole chunks of the linux filesystem that aren't on the hard-disk.
The entire /cat directory for one, and the entire /sys for another. Deleting these is... bad.
I'm surprised this bricks the machine, but as you say, with root access a user can do all sorts of things. And as pointed out in the article, it's a flaw in the firmware, not checking for variables being present, not a flaw in the implementation of the filesystem (which Windows also does).
>If it is a case of "Works as designed".. someone was not thinking.
Yes - as the article points out, the firmware designer who decided not to check if variables were present. A simple IF in the BIOS would fix this: if variables aren't present, set to default values.
The Linux programmers are now attempting various workarounds to solve the firmware problem.
>99% of remaining XP installs will be warez
And corporates that havne't yet updated (NHS, banks, large multinationals). And very large chunks of the world where if something still works, spending hundreds of pounds to replace it isn't an option. And niche operations where upgrade isn't an option. And other large chunks of the world (cough China cough), where nobody wants to pay for new software when the previous pirated version still works just fine.
xenny's right here, in fact any non-vertical portion of the winglet is normally going to be producing a down-force, reducing total lift from the wing. This is what cancels out the wing-tip votex: Although across the vast majority of the wing the pressure is greater on the lower surface, at the tip it is reversed, to stop air from "slipping" round the tip to cause a vortex. This is called "wash out," and in a winglet design, the washed-out section is bent to near vertical so that the force produced is horizontally away from the aircraft, not towards the ground.
Putting one up and one down cancels out this horizontal force to some extent (the lower one will push in, the upper one out). However the winglet will not be generating lift - just because it's a surface attached to the wing doesn't mean it's lifting the aircraft.
While Amazon was founded as a shopping empire, Google was founded as an information one.
So, Google provides communication, location services, file storage etc. Which covers the fundamental tasks of a smartphone.
Amazon... doesn't. OK, they provide some excellent content, but they don't control the base layer of apps that a smartphone is primarily used for. An Android phone without the Google apps on it just isn't very useful.
It's odd, engaging with the "enemy" would bring a lot of benefit to the table. The ad-peddlers are losing this war, and as soon as adblocking becomes simple on Android (it currently requires root to do properly), another massive chunk of their revenue will disappear.
Presumably burying their heads and ignoring the problem allows the people running the ship to pretend everything is OK, the iceburg actually hasn't done that much damage, we'll be in New York soon. So please carry on spending your money.
I always thought lifting the opponent up and holding them there was the best method (and one that at least two of the house robots used). Since there is a weight limit it would be difficult to do this "in front" but why not build a U-shaped robot (you could even hinge it like a giant pincer) to get around a lift up the opponent. Then you can take your time with a drill, and angle grinder, a hydraulic cutter, or whatever you feel like.
I think the outcome will be the pragmatic fact that everyone else is, to some extent, doing the same or similar. If max fines are applied, the levels will quickly be beyond ludicrous. Much like the fines proposed by the music "industry" for pirating, which seem to imply that "lost income" exceeds the GDP of the entire world.
A compromise will need to be made. It will undoubtedly still hurt VW pretty badly, but not in the ballpark of what is being suggested.
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