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Comment Haven't really noticed a slowdown (Score 3, Informative) 488

I haven't really noticed a slowdown on either my iPhone 4S or iPad 2. It gets a little choppy occasionally on my iPad 2, but that happened with iOS 6 at times as well. The biggest issue I've seen is decreased battery life because of all the background tasks being done. That and the constantly reloading of apps do to more memory being used by iOS 7.

I did have another issue on both devices, where somehow all my music (iTunes Match downloads), somehow got flagged as "Other Data" and couldn't be removed. I fixed this on my iPad 2 by turning off iTunes Match and doing a hard reset. For my iPhone 4S, nothing short of a restore fixed it. Both devices updated from iOS 6.1.3 OTA.

Comment And this is why BlackBerry will go out of business (Score 5, Insightful) 564

BlackBerry seems incapable of judging where there market is going. That's why they were blindsided when the iPhone came out. They still had a chance to adapt, but they pretty much pretended like the iPhone didn't exist. Even after Android came out they had their heads in the sand. By the time they finally woke up, it was too late.

Comment Re: Please stop (Score 1) 77

It was called a Superstorm partially for insurance reasons. Most if not all insurance companies have higher deductibles for a hurricane than for a regular storm. As it wasn't a hurricane when if made landfall, people decided to call it a Superstorm rather than a hurricane to prevent insurance companies from charging the hurricane deductible.

The other reason is that it was actually made up of three different storms by the time it hit land, of which Hurricane Sandy was one. That's why some areas got blizzard conditions.

Comment Poorly implemented for multiple Apple IDs (Score 1) 63

Since Apple refuses to allow merging of Apple IDs, I have multiple IDs: iCloud, iTunes and other. The way Apple implemented this, you have to use the Find My IPhone app or SMS. The Find My iPhone app is tied to iCloud so it can only be used with an iCloud account, making it useless for a separate iTunes account which is where my devices are registered. That leaves SMS, which also has issues since the same phone number can't be used for different accounts. Plus many people, myself included, don't pay for SMS so it costs them 20 cents per validation.

So Apple's whole 2 steps authentication fails as it has for most companies. Some, like Yahoo, can't even get it to work at all. I've never received a single verification SMS from Yahoo, no matter how many I request. Yahoo simply refuses to send it to me, despite my carrier being on their approved list. Yahoo's 2-factor implementation is rock bottom.

On the other end of the spectrum is Google, who is among only a handful of companies who have got 2-factor authentication right. With Google's one app, I can verify any number of Google and even Dropbox accounts. Other companies like Blizzard and Paypal (Verisign) use the same method.

Personally, I think all companies should use Google's authentication app of something similar. Implementing 2-factor authentication requiring SMS or an active Internet connection is simply a fail.

Comment Re:Non story (Score 5, Interesting) 126

If a standard currency exchange was robbed for $12,000 we would not even read the story. This is a trivial crime and of little interest. It serves more as a warning rather than as a bank robbery story. I hope that those that are concerned learn from this but if this is the crime of the century in the Bitcoin world then they are doing really well.

No, the Bitcoin crime of the century was last year when the same server was hacked twice, to a tune of several hundred thousand dollars, as mentioned in TFA. Bitcoin hacks are becoming more and more common, so it's only a matter of time before that amount is surpassed.

Personally I don't see the point of bitcoins. I don't pay for everything in cash in the real world because it lacks the protections that other payment methods have. I don't see a reason to use a digital equivalent of cash in the online world. Bitcoins' anonymity might be it's biggest strength, but it's also it's biggest weakness.

Comment Re:Interesting theory (Score 2) 207

If you want not retarded internet, your single only option is to move out off the continent.

Or get your municipality to run their own fiber as a public utility.

I want common carrier broadband. AT&T doesn't offer it, nor does Comcast. So there's no issue of public entities competing with private business here.

Then your municipality would get sued by the Telco/CableCo for being anti-competitive (of all things):

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/09/12/2326251/telco-sues-municipality-for-laying-their-own-fiber
http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/09/telco-to-town-were-suing-you-because-we-care/

Comment Does Amazon know the tax laws for each state? (Score 1) 330

Certain items aren't taxable in certain states. For example, clothes aren't taxable in New Jersey, where Amazon will start collecting tax in 2013.

If Amazon is collecting tax inappropriately, then it should have passed the money on to the state. It would be up to the customer to request a refund on his/her state return. The inappropriate tax could offset tax that wasn't collected, but should have been.

Comment Inform the users (Score 3, Interesting) 168

Back in the days of dial up, I used a dial-up ISP that offered free scripting (CGI, ASP, you name it) on a Windows server. While teaching myself scripting, I discovered that files I wrote as part of scripts ended up in the c:\windows\system32 directory of the server instead of my user folder. Worse still cgi scripts allowed running executables. Needless to say that is bad as it allowed me to get remote shell access to the box. Finally to complete the incompetence, I found that the ISP was storing the customer records on the server as an access database. When I mean records, I mean everything: names, addresses, credit cards, etc.

I informed the ISP of the problem. They responded, but said it was a "windows" problem and couldn't be fixed so I posted on a message board for customers about the problem (but not the details on how to do it), wiped my own customer records from their database (yes I could read and write) and canceled service. I don't know what ever happened to them, but I'm assuming they went out of business like most other dial up ISPs.

Comment Re:Sony did this to themselves (Score 1) 284

Not just Sony, but game developers as well. Last time the PS3 was hacked, rampant cheating occurred in many online games from developers that relied solely on client side protections so no server checks were done.

Here's hoping those developers learned from their mistakes and that won't be a problem this time. Let's also hope Sony has learned and protected the PSN and store from client side attacks since decrypting PSN traffic will be possible. I believe they did bolster PSN security after the PSN hacking, but we'll see if it holds.

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