Re: An OZ blogger...
Naaa - subcontract it to a clanger.
3872 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009
Yea - I have it on good authority thats why no mobe operator with the possible exception of o2 has done it in the UK. I think but am not sure that O2 piggyback on Barclays license somehow.
Bank license means holding extra capital reserves and lots of onerous financial reporting.
The clue is in the name - embedded. Why embed something with a battery that will eventually die from leakage or need replacing.
If we take slightly naff example of light switches that another commentard mentioned - its bad enough having to change bulb's let alone batteries in the light switch.
1. Upper-Right
A mistake really??? Apple concentrating on short term profit (ie the high end) has made them almost immune from the general slump in PC and Laptop sales. Most people would call that genius. Arguably they learnt from trying to compete with the mass market severval times and decided never to do it again - which at the moment is paying them dividends - lunatic analysts who want ever increasing expansion excepted.
Depending on whose figures you believe Mac PC's current have ~11% of the US market. Not bad considering that is nearly all laptops in a category containing desktops as well.
Its not Icahn's money any more than its CalPERS. One is a reputable pension fund fronting for thousands of pensioners, the second is a Carpet Bagging front man for a lot of shallow and short term 'investors'.
FWIW I suspect she meant Icahn is small potatoes compared to the combined might of institutional investors such as CalPERS.
So assuming any aliens who can build a flying saucer capable of extra-solar travel must be at least 100 years more advanced than us today, and in the last 60 years "transistors" and their ilk operating in computer chips today are almost unrecognisable compared to those used in Baby what makes you think we could even get close to cracking 160 years more advanced tech in a mere year from1948?
Cant speak for anyone else but Project spring wouldnt have been necessary if they had continued the level of investment they had in their network 3-4 years ago.
They lost me as a customer the second 3's network coverage bettered theirs for my particular part of the world. Particularly as they somehow actively managed to reduce the coverage I enjoyed.
IOS 7 on my Iphone continues to run like a dog regardless of updates. Just ordered a Nexus 5 as a result. Seriously considering reloading v6 before I Ebay it. Ironically any App including the Ebay one - that lets say is less than effecient on how it uses data - starts like an arthritic snail. Evem day to day apps like contacts and calendar are appreciably more laggy than on IOS 6.
Unlike the french who either dont try hard enough when adopting a new word le computer or try too hard that nobody cares - l'ordinateur, you've got to hand(y) it to the Germans.
Handy has always raised a snigger from my inner Finbar Saunders. Handy-gate conjours full scale Fnnarrr Fnarrss from me.
I suspect they know it too. Its all linked to the same gene that makes them love Benny Hill.
And when they are stuck for a word - simply contatenate 10 descriptive words together - splendid!
Slightly tangential - Im looking forward to seeing the giant Facepalm our glorious leaders perform when they realise blocking something as fundamentally trivial as TPB actually educates the unwashed masses in avoiding blocks of all kinds, and the benefits of encrypted connections etc etc.
Hopefully before they realise it they'll have educated an entire generation in how to avoid the tools of state control of the internet. (Fingers crossed anyways)
I always find it amusing when our MP's critique something on moral grounds - when most of them must have demonstrated the morals of an alley cat on heat to get to parliament in the first place.
I do have a grudging respect for David Davis though who is the only MP who has ever demonstrated some awareness of the need for privacy against the surveillance state. Looks like he should stick to what he knows best.....
Or to put it another way. If you dont 100% trust the recipient of a message or are not 100% confident that the contents cant bite you on the ass dont send it.
To be fair that kinda missed the point. The point is not to have a 100% secure solution, its to raise the barrier of entry against passive attacks, an active attack against email whether by a single person (the recipient) or a state actor is always going to succeed.
Nice sentiment but you are somewhat missing the point. Name one purely FOSS product that actually user friendly enough for public consumption by the average joe. Im desperately trying to think of one but cant.
Fact is in lots of cases Corporates exist and make money by taking something fundamentally complex and implementing it in a way the average pleb can use.
Amazon's notorious 1-click button for instance - how many other websites have you wished for that on and not had it or an equivalent.
So you're saying a reasonable level of secured comms should only be available to the techo-elite who have the time, background and understanding to manage it all themselves?
Bravo Sir /slowhandclap.
The only valid point you have - and its somewhat oblique to your post - is that the accessability for ordinary users to the current state of encryption controls is piss-poor. If Virtru are taking steps to make it better - even if there are gotcha's that make it unsuitable for the truly paranoid - they deserve all the encouragement they can get.
Having said that it looks a little like a "me to" product thats only getting funded due to the current Snowdon debate to me. The fact that its US based also counts against it.
But if they can "do an apple" and make encryption easily accessable to the masses I would probably overlook some of their downsides.
It seems there are 2 areas of debate we should be having and only 1 is being pursued so far.
1. Robust End to End encryption including masking of metadata, origination and destination.
2. An encryption product that "just works" like an Apple product. Preferably without even mentioning the word "key" to the average joe user.
Infact if I runningin Blackberry, Apple or Google right now I would be beavering away on as many simplified encryption functions as I could get away with.
Especially BB as they have previous forn in this area and are completely failing to take advantage of it - think a global network of BES nodes all chosen at random at send time, and a peer to peer comms systems that means the decrypt key moves between nodes on a random basis or upon decryption request.
That was my thought too. Regardless of the asshattedness of King trademarking CANDY, hsu is obviously a complete chancer looking to cash in on searches for any similar game rather than coming up with a good name himself - even King managed to avoid using the word Jewel when they ripped off bejeweled.
In short both entities involved are tossers. King merely got there first and took it to a higher level of tossery-ness. Hsu is merely penny-ante third rate copy artist - King have the saving vice of being complete megalomaniacs and first rate copy artists.
Im sure these rumours can be put to bed fairly easily. It wouldnt be hard to put some traffic analysis on mid-senior level mgt's laptops and wait to see what happens.
Im pretty sure that the scale of it makes it difficult - why nobble a laptop when you can nobble a server, router or switch? Why nobble a router when you can nobble a firewall appliance. Why nobble a firewall when you are tapping the cables and network end points anyway.
Given that it would have to be at bios/component level on a laptop anyway - Im fairly confident that when state actors need to target a laptop they do it by actively attacking it instead of relying on some passive measure pre-installed.
After all if even 1 rootkit, backdoor is found soley in 1 manufacturers kit on an industrial scale - that manufacturers business instantly goes down the pan.
Sales may have declined recently due to the general slump in PC demand but I hardly think the US Govts buying decisions hurt Lenovo much as their PC sales have been on a general upward trajectory since the Thinkpad buy.
But never let the facts get in the way of a good Leftpondian view of the world.
Really - how many PC's in your office have been replaced by Chromebooks, Ipads or mobiles?
None? thought so. With the exception of the chromebook which is essentially a discounted Netbook/Ultrabook with an ad supported OS all of them are complementary devices to the PC rather than replacements.
In the consumer world they are Replacements - not in the enterprise.
Ironically MS have probably exacerbated a temporary slump in PC demand by producing such an abortion of a product.