Posts by DrXym

Re: I wish they'd fix the trust model

Yes there are problems but look at how it is now.

If I run a site and want secure communication I have to apply for and usually pay some nonentity to issue me with a "signed" cert. Not just once but every year. I don't gain anything from this process and neither do my visitors. It's just a tax on security to make a scary popup go away and to deter casual evil doers.

I should be able to roll my own cert. I could register the fingerprint with a lighthouse site if I wanted some protection from MITM attacks. Or I could get other sites to sign my key. e.g. maybe Amazon offers a key signing service for affiliates. Or I might know some other site owners and have a key signing party. Or I could pay a CA. Or all of those things according to my needs.

The more signatories the better of course but even none is protection from eavesdroppers.

Re: Preposterous

"Why should connected cars be discriminated against on the information highway? "

They're not. It's a stupid analogy by some bigwig attempting to justify why net neutrality is somehow evil. They might as well have complained asking why factory safety systems have to contend with Netflix services. The answer of course is they don't and they never have. Safety critical stuff can run on a closed network or a network separate from other networks where its performance can be guaranteed. And if cars are ever automated then I assume that someone will buy out a chunk of radio spectrum or launch a bunch of satellites to ensure exactly that.

"Hopefully it collects itself and deletes....Java is horrible, bloated and insecure mess."

Java in a browser is (or has been insecure). Java running from a service or command line is no more or less secure than any other compiled or interpreted language / runtime.

Re: Should have made Android handsets in the first place

"Perhaps BB have already investigated and decided that Android just can't be hardened to BB standards. I would believe that."

I wouldn't because it's nonsense. If that were their opinion then why put an android layer in there at all?

Anyway Samsung has KNOX for Android so its clearly feasible to security harden Linux. In fact BB is already very chummy with Samsung to the point that I could see the things ending up in a buyout and BB becoming a brand of Samsung running over Android anyway.

Re: Let's see how testing goes before coming to any conclusions

"Let's think about loading. With hyperloop the passengers will have to strap in, so that takes, what, ten minutes at least? Think how long it takes to load a 737... So that's one departure every ten minutes at best. I think they're planning something like 20 passengers per vehicle, so it's 120 people per hour."

Theme parks manage to process thousands of people on rides with more stringent passenger safety measures than this shuttle is likely to require.

So I don't see it follows that it's going to be slower, particularly since they could scale with parallel tracks and scheduling to put people with the same destination on the same shuttle. They could even scale the service according to demand, adding more shuttles in at peak periods. It's like one glorified bin pack - it could designed to ensure an efficient throughput according to the expected demands on the system.

It doesn't mean it's going to be queueless and it's entirely hypothetical how it would work in a developed system. I imagine the first hyperloop systems will be fairly rudimentary with a limited number of destinations and many of the problems will require a real system to manifest themselves.

I'd add that boarding is just one of many delays encountered with air travel - slogging to the airport, checkin, security, boarding and the disembarkation and more slogging at the other side. A hyperloop could potentially deliver people to or close to the actual centre of a city. Look at the Eurostar as an example of this - the train is slower than a plane but it actually to where people want to go and so is faster and more convenient than a plane.

Re: Once again

This is LinkedIn you're talking about here.

It started off as a neat thing to keep track of people you worked with or went to school with. Then it was monetized and now it's just a cattle market. You're the cattle to be poked, prodded and inspected by anyone who pays LinkedIn to look at your info. Job agents, sales people, you name it.

I'm plagued by job agents to the extent I've unlinked the lot of them and restricted my privacy settings as much as I can. They think nothing of doing a skill search and indiscriminately spamming everyone who matches. The same job might result in multiple spams, none of which I've solicited. At least by unlinking they have to use one of their precious InMails if they want to contact me.

Re: It was a stupid idea to begin with

Well that's a pretty lame analogy. I don't recall from history books about the Wright brothers testing their aircraft over populated urban centres.

Secondly we're not talking of just one drone, or two or even 10. Potentially there could be hundreds or thousands of flights per day buzzing around at relatively low altitude. It is quite obvious and inevitable that they would be smashing into buildings, hitting birds, becoming entangled with phone / electric wires, hitting masts, getting tipped by wind / rain, getting shot down, getting hacked / jammed, operator error and suffering more mundane technical issues.

I could see the benefit of unmanned drones distributing tonnes of cargo between centres over mostly unpopulated areas (or areas they could route around). Basically small jets with no pilot. But not smaller drones over urban centres.

A fingerprint would be broken down into a biometric description which would then be hashed. Assuming there was enough uniqueness in this description the hash would no more or less secure than a strong password. Both would depend on the database properly salting the hash though to make it difficult to reverse lookup.

Of course the one disadvantage of a print is you can't change it. So if thieves did grab your print they could happily unlock all your devices and accounts that used it. Biometrics that capture more than the print, e.g. blood vessels are probably more secure. It would also be desirable to use 2-factor authentication so that to log on you must supply your print (something you have) and type a pin (something you know).

Re: "the Apple Watch will offer leading energy efficiency"

I doubt the Apple iWatch will be any different in terms of power draw to any other "smart" watch that insists on packing a CPU & OLED display into the form factor. People will be lucky if it lasts 30 hours between charges and probably less than that.

Re: Is this at all surprising?

"Bitrotten - not so sure. "

Smart TVs have been a thing for 5 or 6 years now. If you look at the ones which have been knocking around for 3 years (for example) and note how crap they are - that's your TV 3 years hence. And 3 years is generous because I expect most people keep their TV for as long as it works or a new standard appears. The lifecycle of apps and OSes doesn't fit the lifecycle of a television.

Services get discontinued (e.g. LoveFilm, Blockbuster) or functionality is added to other platforms but not yours, or your TV doesn't get popular new apps at all. Or support ceases and security holes (opened by all that smartness) go unpatched.

At least if the smartness was in a box then you could get rid of the box or move it to a bedroom. When it's baked into the TV, you're stuck with it.

Re: "We're not quite sure how that'll work"

Bitcoin is the ponzi. Buying contracts on a ponzi seems like a double dose of stupid.

Our school had this RML-380Z which was a hulking CPM thing with elephant disks. It must have cost a fortune and nobody knew how to use it or was very interested. One day someone turned up with a ZX81 and 3D monster maze and everyone was crowded around to see it.

It's amazing now to think how this primitive, crappy little computer sparked more interest than a "proper computer". I got a ZX Spectrum soon after and was hooked.

The school didn't learn though. They more some RML480s which were sans floppy and booted off the network somehow. Nobody was interested in them. They switched to BBC micros soon after which at least had some games, colour, sound and enough other things for kids to find them interesting. I still preferred my Spectrum though.

Re: We will tell them it's free - Muuhahahha

"This is more than a one-time upgrade: once a Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device – at no cost."

The problem with this should be obvious if you look at web sites which have introduced tiered service or paywalls. They begin gimping the free service to encourage people to pay for the ungimped service. LinkedIn for example started off free and then started crippling search and email to get people to pay.

Or look at game consoles - if you want multiplayer or a smattering of other features like cloud save on your console then you have to pay a subscription.

It's easy to envisage Windows going the same way. Maybe an ad tile starts appearing in your metro. Maybe backup/restore, antivirus, cloud storage, remote desktop etc. become "premium" features. Maybe the ability to have more than 4 users becomes a premium feature. Petty restrictions, adverts and limitations could peppered through the experience and only lifted for a low, low monthly price. Maybe they sweeten the deal by promising streaming music, apps or unlimited storage or whatnot but through a combination of carrot and stick they want your money.

Now I doubt any of this would be tolerated in the enterprise world where I expect we'll see a "pro" Windows which is the same as always. But it may well be what MS have in store for consumers, particularly the free download and whatever surprise updates you get in perpetuity.

I hope to be proven wrong, but Microsoft isn't a charity and it's clear from their statements where they see their money coming from.

Re: And the price will be?

"If it's £200-£250 I might be interested. Pointless spending more than that on a phone."

Get a OnePlus One. I have one and it's proven itself to be very reliable and is plenty fast for my needs.

Re: I bought one of these for Christmas@ DrXym

My argument is that you get a year's worth of Office 365 thrown in. Doesn't mean you have to use it but it's still better than a kick in the nuts especially in a £80 tablet.

Doesn't force you to use it in perpetuity.

Re: In the future

No there will be no such thing as a bug free browser.

The number of (new and existing) standards it must implement, the number of real world web sites it must work against, the performance it must deliver and the finite resources like time and money always means it will have bugs. There are also tradeoffs between keeping the user safe from harm and delivering the best browser experience, e.g. disabling JS by default would be a good security move but it would break virtually every site in the world.

The best you can hope for is that the development process does it's best to catch and fix bugs (preferably before they end up in the software) and mitigates the potential harm for those they don't already know about by providing sensible defaults.

I have a Corel Linux CD sitting in a cupboard somewhere which was handed out a Linux users group a long time ago. Must see if I can find it.

Anyway it certainly wasn't the first Linux dist by any stretch but it was perhaps the first dist pitched at consumers. The idea was that they'd slap it on cheap PCs for next to nothing and then make money selling bundled up versions of software (most of which were free to begin with). Xandros and Linspire took the idea over but it didn't catch on.

The problem with slippery slope arguments is they assume that some minor upset to the status quo will inevitably lead to the end of the world. If Microsoft had a fix and asked for extra 2 days (e.g. to align with some patch schedule) to roll it out then it is not unreasonable for Google to allow them that.