Posts by fidodogbreath 1600 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Sep 2009
ensuring that we have robust safeguards in place, such as industry standard encryption and security measures
That's fine for protecting data from hackers. The only ways to protect your data from Facebook itself and its advertising customers are (a) don't use FB, and (b) run ad blockers on all devices to filter out all FB-related cookies and domains.
There is the 800kg gorilla in the mists - Illustrator - and, rather than attempt to duplicate the workflow to the best of their ability in order to ease adoption...no.
I agree with your underlying point, but I feel the need to say in boldface that I really dislike Illustrator.
I'm a tech writer. My job is to learn complicated software and then describe it to others, both procedurally and conceptually. Over the years I've used many, many text editors, word processors, photo and vector editors, page layout programs, etc.
I use PhotoShop daily, but InDesign and Illustrator only occasionally. I can fire up InDesign after not using it for months and at least get something done with minimal fuss. Ditto for FrameMaker.
When I try to do something in Illustrator after a few weeks hiatus, though, I'm completely baffled by it...every damn time. That UI has never made sense to me, so I struggle to relate its quirky tool behaviors and editing actions to the underlying concepts. Honestly, I would rather use Visio (gasp!).
I will be trying Inkscape again very soon. Being different from Illustrator is a feature, not a bug. IMHO
Amazon has several huge facilities in CA to which it would apply. Of course, any worker who dares to mention it -- even in a 'private' chat group -- would likely be fired on the spot.
So you are taking a mission-critical system and hosting it in the cloud? Why?
Several reasons.
You have distributed resources that cover a large geographic area, but which need to be centrally managed and monitored.
You need both local and op center users to be able to monitor and manage your plant(s).
You are in the middle of a pandemic, and you need at least some of your operators and managers to be able to work remotely.
You are rapidly expanding, and you need your control infrastructure to be highly scalable on demand.
Just a few scenarios.
I work for a company that develops cloud-based SCADA for utilities (no involvement with this project though). There are ways to address these issues.
1. In our system, equipment control (PLC) and alarm processing run at the site, not in the cloud. The cloud HMI sends control requests and receives status responses, alarms, performance data etc. If the cloud HMI goes down, the site will continue to do the last thing it was told, and record alarms and historical data values.
2. Communication from the HMI to the site is completely separate from communication between the HMI and the users. Also, site comms automatically fail over between multiple connections. Typically, at least one of these does not entail tunneling over the public internet.
3. If the HMI is down hard due to hack, crash, DOS, or whatever, there is a local HMI running at the site that a customer can either lay hands on (if at the site) or remote into (if not), which can also issue control requests to the PLC.
4. Since point data is recorded in an onsite SQL DB, when HMI comms come back up the operator has a complete picture of everything that took place during the comm outage.
We have other protections and redundancies in place as well. The point is, we're not idiots and we're not making $15 IOT light bulbs. We know that this is critical infrastructure, and we don't want it to be fragile or vulnerable.
No security is perfect, obviously. Natanz and Russia's attacks on Ukraine's grid are just two examples of how even air-gapped, non-cloudy SCADA can be vulnerable to a well-resourced attacker.
+1 for Lockdown. It revealed to me several apps that still ping Facebook and/or Google on launch and periodically thereafter -- even though I've bought the ad-free "premium" versions. (This activity is not related to "sign in with Googface" integration, as none of the apps in question require an account of any kind.)
Even when you pay for apps, you're still the @#$% product.
Well, now their greed is about to bite them in the arse.
Probably not. IT will push back that they can't support software that is not backed by a support organization. Parents will push back that they're not paying all this tuition money for their precious to learn software that will not get them a job. Trustees and wealthy alumni with stock in Adobe will push back out of self-interest.
Universities will just jack up tuition or add "lab fees" for digital-arts courses to cover the cost.
An Adobe Tax, if you will.
The problem is that they kind of need to do both. Like it or not, Creative Suite is the industry standard and is deeply integrated into many corporate workflows. Almost all graphic-arts job postings require Creative Suite experience and proficiency.
So yeah, there are other tools out there; but the hiring manager does not care how good you are with Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus, et al. Companies that hire independent graphics professionals on a contract basis will often require that the deliverables be provided in CS file formats.
Adobe's business model is a master class in creating and protecting a monopoly.
"Despite this, we constantly find that customers visit the Azure Status page to determine the health of services on Azure," [...] it is not much use since "more than 95 per cent of our incidents" do not appear there, according to Kubba.
Some less-advanced companies might show the status of a service on that service's status page. But that's not the Microsoft Way.
What should happen is when they caught with their hands in the cookie jar and lose the case, they are supposed to stop putting their hands in the cookie jar. Not find other ways of getting the cookies out of the jar until caught again.
If laws applied to wealthy people and corporations, sure. The US has chosen a different path.
At least Mozilla's creepy-slurpies can be shut off or disabled. Assuming you're willing and able to wade through eleventy-million settings in Options and about:config, that is.
Eddie Lampert has done more to kill Sears than Jeff Bezos.
Similarly, JC Penney blew itself up by hiring an Apple Store exec who did not understand JCP's business or customers, who then set himself to the task of alienating the latter from the former. JCP wasn't healthy when Ron Johnson got there, but he put it into a full-on death spiral.
Amazon has definnitely blown up plenty of brick & mortar; but in these specific cases, Bezos is more of a scavenger than a hunter.
Apple continues to provide security patches for older OS versions for several years after a new version comes out. So Macs still have a supported OS for something like three years after they drop off the support list for the latest-greatest.
After that ends, there are still other options. I have a 2009 Mini that had to get off the MacOS train somewhere around El Capitan, and is now happily running Ubuntu desktop. If the full-fat GUI gets too pokey, it can be a headless non-GUI server.
Also: unlike you-know-who in Redmond, Apple doesn't force you to install OS updates. If you rely on 32-bit apps or drivers in the Age of Catalina, stay on Mojave. If you don't like Mojave, stay on High Sierra. Your choice.
I use and like Ubiquiti gear, but any longtime user will tell you that all of their Unifi "stable" releases are betas. Unless a new version contains a specific fix that I need urgently, I let their releases soak for a month or two before installing on production equipment.
Fortunately, their forums and r/ubiquiti are filled with masochists super-conscientious admins who install every release as soon as it's published and post about the aftermath result.
"<CORPNAME> believes the security of our customers' accounts is of paramount importance," a spokesperson told us.
"Haha, just kidding. We can't be bothered even put a simple password on that crap," the spokesperson continued. "Since we got caught and called out, we'll make a show of locking stuff down for while. But that's inconvenient as hell, so once you lot move on to the next breach we'll be back to business as usual."
I think it varies by device and charger. Fast charging will heat up the battery, and excessive heat will shorten its life. That said -- my understanding is that the specific fast charging method, battery controller, ambient temperature while charging, and thermal design of the device itself can all influence the amount of actual harm to the battery.
"It is blind to the fact that as millions of us march in the streets [...] we've never been more dependent on secure communications and devices."
The bill is not blind to that particular fact at all. The government's primary security goal is not to protect the people; it is to protect itself from the people.
Back in the 90s I worked for a company that published books and magazines for farmers. Our subscription department had assiduously collected fax numbers in our subs database (running on AS/400 IIRC) and thought it would be brilliant to save on postage and send out solicitations by fax. Further brilliance ensued when someone realized that calling rates were cheaper in the wee hours, and the die was cast.
The first broadcast fax went out, and the next morning our inbound lines were flooded with complaints. In all the above-mentioned brilliance, no one had ever stopped to think that our customers were mostly small growers whose "office" was their house -- y'know, the place where they needed to SLEEP AT NIGHT so they could get up early to grow stuff. Many (most) also didn't have a dedicated fax line...so basically we were calling the shit out of their home phones in the middle of the night to offer them a $5 discount on a magazine that they already received.
In our navel-gazing brilliance, we thought of everything; well, except for WHO THE #$%& IS OUR CUSTOMER?!? The response rate on that promo was one of our highest ever...if you counted all responses. The positive response rate, however...not so much.
"Most of the issues with GTP protocol relate to roaming networks because operators use a 'friendly' model – which assumes all of the users accessing their networks as legitimate and authorised and that attackers will not appear in their network," Novikov explained.
Since there are no threat actors looking to monitor or disrupt cellular comms, that seems like a perfectly reasonable security posture. Ditto for continuing to rely on SS7.
the cost of the setup was nudging $1,600. A mere snip as far as Apple fanbois are concerned.
Or Microsoft fanbois, for that matter. $1600 is the same price as the lowest-spec Surface Book 3 (i5, 8GB/256GB); the top-spec model is $3400.
The A12X Bionic (2018) and A12Z (2020) iPad Pro CPUs bring considerably more horsepower than a mobile i5, and stack up very well against the mobile i7 in the $3000+ Surface Books.
For more of a tablet-to-tablet comparison, a Surface Pro X 8GB/256GB runs $1300 -- sans keyboard & mouse, of course. However, the A12X Geekbench 4 scores are 50% higher (5030/17995 vs 3492/11493). Battery life is about the same.
Obviously iOS is not Windows; but you can do a hell of a lot with an iPad Pro, and for the money "iPad onna stick" compares pretty well to MS' "Windows onna stick" offerings.
Agree. I use the native iOS apps for my work and personal email & calendar. They're fine. Mail comes in, I read it; reminders work as expected. An added bonus is seeing my personal and work calendars on the same display.
I know there are better calendar solutions, but they involve spending money, having my private info data-mined, or (increasingly) both.
it can be made to do *almost anything* to varying degrees of success.
Many, many moons ago I was rental manager for a stage lighting company. The tech guy for the company liked Macs (we had even had a Lisa before that) and he bought a stonkin' expensive Mac IIx for the rental department "so we could keep track of our bookings." Problem was, there was NO rental tracking software for Mac at the time.
Enter Excel. I sat down with the printed manual (!) and figured out how to write macros that would subtract units from inventory over a selected time frame. Over a year, that evolved into a relatively mature and stable system with custom menu bar, dialog boxes, etc. that anyone in the department could use with minimal training. The company used it for years, even long after I left.
All done with Excel for Macintosh (1.0 & 1.1 IIRC), half a decade before Windows 95.
So yeah; I can see people being loyal to Excel. Sure, it makes everything numeric look like a nail; but you can accomplish a lot by hammering on things.
All Windows error messages have been reduced to "Oops we're sorry but something's gone wrong there. Please try again later or talk to your administrator who's somehow supposed to know what the fuck this vague message means."
Or my personal favorite: "Something happened."
Good to know; thanks for sharing.
I couldn't give a rat's ass about people hacking into, say, my commentard account on The Register
Shirley you're not suggesting that commenting on Reg articles is somehow unimportant? How else will randos know that a bunch of other randos don't trust Google / Facebook / *cloud* / MS / gubmint and that IoT is shit?
Users have a habit of using software in ways the designers never thought of.
Most devs test their code against how they know it's supposed to work. They then tell the test engineer how it's supposed to work; s/he tests that and also runs a regression suite against it.
I'm a tech writer working mostly on end-user docs. I treat every product as a black box and document the behavior I see in response to stimuli. If something is clickable, I click it; if it's not (supposed to be) clickable, I click it. If a field expects integers, I try to enter decimals / text / emoji / SQL / paste in a GIF / etc. If there are start date and end date fields, I enter a start date that's after the end date. If the intended action runs a long javascript that produces an output file, I hit Reload in the middle of it. Because some rando out there will do any or all those things (and more that I can't imagine); but when they do, the product should handle it or fail gracefully.
Let's just say I report a lot of bugs...
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