Posts by JohnFen

Re: Time gentlemen

I think that you're a bit too dismissive about the importance of speed, but that likely depends on the sort of applications you're developing.

"it's fast but you have to be super careful"

I agree. But you have to be super careful in all the code you write anyway. Or you should be. Using a more protected function may be safer, but if you think that means you don't have to be as vigilant or cautious in your coding, then I think you're making a big mistake.

Re: Time gentlemen

"it would also mean that old insecure legacy code wouldn't link without much needed maintenance."

Just because code is old, or just because it uses strcpy(), doesn't mean that it's insecure or in need of maintenance.

Re: cynic

"What people don't do is get a decent case or even a screen protector"

I know that I don't. I hate both of those things. However, I've had my current phone for about 6 years and the screen remains fully intact and unscratched.

Re: cynic

As a counterexample, a few years back I used to see cracked screens regularly. Now they're infrequent. Among my friends, only one has broken or cracked their screen.

Re: Can we please

DAB is of zero interest to me, but there's no reason we can't have both!

Re: Yeah I can see it

"I'm not only going to wait for v1.1, but possibly v2.0"

The old rule-of-thumb might apply here: never rely on anything until it reaches at least version 3.

Re: Con Man's Delight

" No - all changed with the UKs implementation of the EU money laundering regulations."

Oh, that sucks horribly!

Re: Con Man's Delight

"cheques have to be paid into a bank account"

You don't have check-cashing businesses?

Re: I use SMS...

"There are usually usage charges for SMS unless you're on an already-too-expensive plan that makes them unlimited."

Not so much, in the US, anyway. I use a cheap national prepaid plan and don't get usage charges for SMS.

"Google should throw money at Apple to cooperate with RCS."

No!! RCS is a Bad Thing.

Re: iMessage

"I think you have to enable the ability for senders to know if you've read a message."

If this is true, then that's OK. I'll even give Apple kudos for (correctly) making it opt-in rather than opt-out!

Re: "https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/"

"Yes, they write:

"Social software needs a social graph""

Holy shit. That rules Signal out for me right there.

Re: You Can Phone Me Or SMS me; Period

"they don't send the list to the servers; they hash the numbers and send the hashes to the server."

That's not as bad as it could be, but it's still not good.

Re: Or you can just phone me.

"any more than the old un*x talk."

I really miss the old unix talk. It was very useful to me!

So the EU's position is not only that insecurity should be mandated, but also that people without cell phones should not be able to complete online transactions above a certain amount?

Re: i believe it was a mistake..

Your alarm company is probably much more trustworthy than Google.

Re: i believe it was a mistake..

I think that Google has used up any "benefit of the doubt" they may have been due years ago. At this point, it seems that if you assume nefarious intent from them by default, you're more likely to be right than wrong.

Re: Don't be........

Huh? I don't see where anyone was even slightly mean to you in that thread, let alone "lynching" you.

Re: Don't be........

That's not relevant to what I was mentioning, though. Google was wardriving, collecting all of the WiFi data that it could see. The emails and other personal information they collected was because people were using unsecured WiFi. In other words, Google collected data in transit, not data at rest.

Those people should not have been using unencrypted Wifi, of course -- in doing so, you're literally broadcasting all of your data over the radio where anybody can receive it in the clear without effort. At the same time, Google should not have been paying any attention to payload data if all they wanted was a map of SSIDs.

Re: Don't be........

I made no comment on whether collecting the SSID and such was justifiable or not, only that it is collecting personal data.

That said, it's also true that Google collected a lot more than that -- they also collected all unsecured payload data, which included emails, etc.

Exactly. That malice/incompetence line gets trotted out all the time to defend the indefensible, but it's a bit of a straw man. The reality is that it simply doesn't matter if an action is the result of malice or incompetence. The action happens anyway, and that the problem.

Re: No, google is not a government.

*shrug* I think that depends on your point of view.

Re: Economic warfare

"So the fact that we don't know of any means there aren't any?"

This exact same thing is true of equipment from every other nation as well. Why is there no outcry about them? Since the US is refusing to actually show why China deserves to be singled out, the only reasonable thing to think is that there isn't a justifiable reason.

Re: Browser developers hate users

As the saying goes, the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference.

Re: Why bother?

"I've stuck with Firefox for many years, but it's not without it's problems"

True. I've been using Firefox since the very beginning. Unlike your experience, though, mine is that post-Quantum, Firefox has become a browser that I prefer to avoid (for many of the same reasons as I prefer to avoid Chrome). I switched to Waterfox instead.

Re: It's a fold up 2K tablet

"That and the spec and the ability to put a more than 7" tablet with better specs than most tablets and some low end laptops makes it not so insane."

It still seems pretty insane to me.

Re: re: The cheaper model has the fingerprint reader mounted on the side of the phone

The real question is -- what does Samsung consider to be a reasonable lifespan? Cell phone manufacturers seem to be of the opinion that a phone should be discarded after a couple of years.

Re: re: The cheaper model has the fingerprint reader mounted on the side of the phone

"Which will obviously be the wrong side for a good percentage of the population."

Could be. But it's irrelevant to another good percentage of the population who won't be using the fingerprint scanner anyway.

Re: Works fine...

"it should be no more irksome than pre-CSS HTML "

That depends on exactly what you're doing. I think that CSS has pretty much utterly failed at being able to replace using the table tag for doing grid formatting, for example. Functionality was lost, and that lost functionality made websites worse.

There are advantages to CSS, of course, but on the whole, I'm not convinced that the adopting of CSS was a good thing. At best, it was neutral, simply trading one set of problems for another.

Re: Self lacing?

I've been commuting to/from work on a bike for years now, and this is not a problem I've encountered even once. I'm not saying that nobody else has that problem but, again, there's already been a good solution for those people for a very long time now.