Posts by tekHedd 562 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Aug 2011
"Heavy government regulation just would not work: they would always be playing catch-up or impose blanket rules..."
And that's a best-case scenario. In the US's "lobbyist first" congress, I would fully expect "heavy government regulation" to first make it impossible for small players to compete, and second make it illegal for individuals to control their own data in any way (ie reverse engineer server protocols to save your own data locally, make it illegal to subvert health monitoring...think of the worst thing you can imagine and then just wait 5 years basically).
"Gracefully?" Approximately 0%. 65% of the time I can turn on scripts from the originating site and "originating site.static-content" it's good to go. Some sites, typically stores, are out of control and too much trouble to figure out, with a third-party cart, multiple behavior trackers, customer relations engine, multiple advertising vendors, edge networking cache drivers, etc, it's a chore to figure out which scripts are part of the site and which are behavior-analyticals garbage. So I end up turning on temporary permissions to buy a toothbrush.
Sadly, the ads always break. It is a tragedy.
Let Sidecar be a lesson to you: if you have a great product idea, don't bother; a big company will just copy it. And theirs will be the "official" version...maybe yours will even become a violation of their ToS...
Guess I'll still need Duet for my "ancient" 4 year old OS macbook though.
Dark grey is better when trying to grab those single-pixel-wide window edges that are popular only with very old window managers and very new OS versions. Or a very dark navy blue, but that doesn't seem to display consistently across systems, making it a poor choice for remoting (as very dark indigo or very dark ocean blue is not at all acceptable.)
We may assume this is currently deployed and in use by some elite groups.
Because of the nature of research, the military always has the most cutting edge technology. When the first machine intelligences surpass humans and take over, it will certainly be military machines. Hmm, we really are doomed.
The solution to this and all problems is to better track you: to more accurately know when/if your friend died, to know how you feel about that friend, and so on. Every problem in the world can be solved with...well, we don't know...but we plan to track you more.
To be fair, the article does not really do a good job of focusing on the unwanted part of the bias issue.
Obviously the system is doing its job really well: it detects who is reacting to the ad and serves the ad to them. The fact that it's completely impossible to make it do what you actually want when your goals are not just "maximizing profit" may be a problem, true, but that's a problem with every modern system. Try to browse for a specific movie on Netflix, search for a specific spelling of a word on Google, filter Amazon search results for a specific product, see the most recent item in your Facebook timeline...none of these things are really possible any more because the algorithms are designed to steer you towards buying product, and have no other purpose.
This is now the norm. Facebook's ad system is highly optimized to do one thing and it does it well. The fact that this optimization also inflexibly reinforces existing biases is a problem, but solving that problem will never be a goal. You can force them to add a second mode that bypasses the optimizatino, but the prejudice-reinforcing algorithm will always be used for normal operation, because there's more money, and to a corporation there is no greater good.
Sure, not all gamers are tech savvy geeks! Some just like to play games.
Razer is a "gaming" company that preys on these people by selling a mix of average and substandard products that look cool to people who just want to enjoy playing games. At least everything I've bought from them was, well, mediocre at best, and all had some sort of annoying flaw.
Conspiracy theories aside, a good rule of thumb is that if you hear the military is "considering research into something", they've long since completed the research, and either have the results ready to go or have decided it's not worth the trouble. Translating "physics experiments" into useful technology can be pretty difficult, but if there is any way at all to break public key encryption with current technology, brute force or otherwise, it has already been done and is in use. If you ran a major government, what would /you/ do? So, you should probably start with the assumption that asymmetric encryption is at least somewhat transparent to certain agencies, if you are important enough to warrant the expense, regardless of the published state of quantum computing or any other research.
And don't forget about time travel. We're all traveling forward in time at the speed of /normal time/. So, with the magic of archiving, your internet traffic can *travel through time to the future* and be decrypted using what, by then, will be cheap technology. The only thing protecting you is that archiving it is a pain, and it's really not worth the trouble. And of course you're not doing anything important enough to attract attention, right?
And never mind that "Fulfilled by Amazon", assuming you're not on Prime, generally takes 1-3 days longer to arrive than third party sellers, and you can't rate the seller, because obviously Amazon doesn't need to be rated, because they're perfect. All their profit margin apparently comes from including half the amount of air-bags required to adequately cushion the product.
Really, they used to be pretty good, and we mocked them for excessive packaging, but now it's gone the other way, and not in a good way.
"Oh, it's Windows. I haven't touched one of those for years, sorry,"
This also works for the most painful Linux problems, especially when they're driver or audio related. "Oh, that's probably pulseaudio...is this the new Ubuntu UI? Sorry, I use ALSA and Jack on Devuan, have you tried searching Google?"
No really, I don't see what you're getting so worked up about. The only groups that can get all the information to use this attack are big players like the state and organized crime, and of course Google. So we are completely safe, because history shows that the state and organized crime have never abused their power. As for Google et al, well, come on, I trust them utterly, don't you?
Hah, my current desktop system (Thermaltake case), the power button is next to and shaped exactly like a USB port. I've stopped using the front panel USB ports.
See also: laptops with a headphone jack directly next to the USB port, where if you're fumbling around the side and insert your headphone plug into the UB and short out the 5V supply, it kills the power supply and hard resets the system.
"The *idea* is a reasonable one - for an OS that uses system libraries that are not compatible with some application, make it possible for the application developer to publish, at will, a blob that contains all the required dependencies, and isolate it from the host OS to limit opportunities for compromise."
Too bad we don't have any other technology like that. *cough*AppImage*cough*
They used ArcGIS as the main mapping tool? My sympathies. I took it for a test drive and was supremely frustrated and disappointed, but they still send me huge full color magazines every couple of weeks. Goodness knows how much of our government's money they... well I rant but anyway, my sympathies.
Great, so what I'm hearing is that I should also be disabling UEFI? Even though it really can provide some useful support features, ie for suspend/resume support etc? Great.
As usual, anyone outside the 80% is shafted. (On the bright side, 99% of the exploits expect a windows OS, so there's that.)
"Nobody is forcing you to use the municipal water supply, this is not the only source of water. You are incorrectly conflating piped water with the entire food supply ecosystem. I can drink whatever liquid from whatever vendor I choose, so long as it is purchased legally."
Yeah, but when I need to boil some eggs, I go to the sink and turn on the tap.
As a user of a phone without any google apps whatsoever, I always appreciate when a company makes the APK directly available. (When it's a company I trust, anyway.) If Google Play is the only way to get an app, I have to violate Google's terms of service to get it. And yes I know there are handy tools that offer an easy, convenient way to violate the ToS and get the apps. :/
Offering an APK download from a "Google Play" button, yeah, that's shady. Offering an APK download, that's just how I like it.
I've always used standalone readers; I don't even know what the built-in reader looks like in FF. RSS is the awesome (or Atom, sure, I don't care, it's a protocol.)
At this point, RSS is the only way I can really handle El Reg, as it's just too much effort to scan through the news now that it is algorithmically sorted in order of... I honestly have no idea how the editors decide what I will be interested in but it's hit-and-miss and I now really can't be bothered to read past the top headlines on the official web site.
... Surface isn't making ALL THE MONEY so you should just cut it. Never mind the halo effect, any future possibilities as Microsoft refines their hardware production savvy. Forget the high end--rich people don't have money, and their opinion of your company doesn't matter. What matters is that this other division has a bigger upside this quarter and we want to see your FPE increase for the next 2 quarters.
I keep meeting people who absolutely love their Windows Phones and protect them like human babies, terrified because there are no replacements.
It must be good business to establish a brand, acquire and develop hardware/software expertise to support it, restructure your bread-and-butter OS to include this product as part of your core strategy, spend millions on marketing, establish a loyal core fan base, and then kill the product. Microsoft does it over and over, and look how successful they are.
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