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Comment Anti-stalking is not just for airtags (Score 1) 42

I moved to a new location. On the second evening at my new place, I got alert about unknown airpods following me.
My phone put its location every now and then to my old apartment. I guess it was due to the wifi hotspot(s) it detected. My router has 3 hotspots. Then on other times the phone put its location to where it actually was (GPS? other means?). So even though it was actually on my table, the phone thought it was travelling between my old location and new location every now and then. While doing this, it constantly detected neighbourgs airpods and made the assumption those were also "travelling" -> Stalk alert!!

Comment Re:Just buy your own domain and forward it... (Score 3, Informative) 55

Yeah, catchall is nice. Up to the point where a spammer tries bruteforce all valid email addresses. I still recall when that happened to me. Spammer started from aaaa@mydomain.tld, several threads (bots) .By the time I became aware of it, I saw messages destined for xaaxa, xaaxb, etc.
Since then, I've never used catchall.

Comment Re:Still not competitive for me (Score 1) 73

My only complaint is that none of the major cloud backup services, including Backblaze, have command-line Linux clients. Setting up an isolated Windows machine though that can only talk to the Internet and deny UDP and TCP SYN packets to the internal network is easy enough to do. And for the truly paranoid and/or sneaky, there's VirtualBox.

There is gazillion of backup solutions available for linux. There is no need for provider specific tool. One step-by-step example here on how to make encrypted backups to the cloud. It uses ibm cloud as example because you get 25 gigs free. I rather use backblaze as they are checper. https://fedoramagazine.org/mak...

If you are not happy with that one, you can for example use rclone to mount the cloud storage as a drive volume and use some other backup tool of your choice.

Comment Re:The What Now? (Score 1) 67

I wasn't expecting, but I was hoping for one.
I have nvidia shield from 2014 and I've been amazed on the continued support (OS Updates). Initially I bought it with gaming in the mind, but actually I haven't played games with it that much. The HDMI out is excellent and I would expect such a feature in all tables for the value add it gives. Unfortunately my shield has dropped one too many times and it has big crack across the screen, lost the stylus pen plus few scratches. I'd consider purchasing a new one if one would be available. The Nintendo Switch is a gaming tablet, not an android tablet, so it will not be an option.
I addition to regular browsing the web, the most common use is pluggin the table to TV via HDMI and watching content from the web from different providers (android apps) or optionally movies saved to the tablet. Can't do that with swtich based on my quick research.

And to top it, this tablet doesn't feel under powered though it's very old in internet terms...

Comment Save the oceans - stop recycling plastic (Score 2) 183

Much of the plastic collected for recycling in europe ends up to shady places in china and other less developed countries. In which the process of handling the waste is less than perfect.

http://www.thegwpf.org/new-rep...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
"It is feared that an increasing proportion of waste set aside for recycling is now being thrown into the sea."

I doubt the operators receiveing the waste make much difference with European waste and American waste. That is to say, most likely both will end to the environment. Shipping trash for recycling to some 3rd world country is a fraud. They may have cheap labor there, but I doubt they have the high tech and proper processes to handle everything cleanly and enviromental friendly way.

Comment Re:Not even enforceable (Score 3) 152

In Finland the taxman has sent letters to persons asking them to declare their income from bitcoin. Be it mining or just a trading wins, the taxman want's his share (30%) of the profit.
How do they know? Oh the joys of modern and organized society: They ask companies who do bitcoin business (sell/buy) for their ledgers and identify persons from there and then contact those persons. In modern western society, every transaction leaves a trace. Just a matter of getting the data from the right place. Thus as soon as you want to convert your (semi)anonymous virtual currency to real world currency, you create a trace which can be picked up.

EU is very hard on money laundering, all bank transfers are more or less monitored. For example, a person made a 65€ bank transfer and wrote to recipient as "isi" (That's "daddy" in Finnish). The person was contacted by the bank tp clarify the transaction, just incase the person was attempting to give money to embargoed recipient (Isis?)(*). One might laugh on this stupid false positive, but it does give out the fact that even the smallest money transfers are monitored.

(*) https://translate.google.com/t...

Comment Cowards as affiliates (Score 5, Interesting) 53

You appear dedicated on continuing reporting on cybercrime, even though it may result to harm you (swatting etc). How often have you come into situation where someone you work with states they don't want to work with you any longer as association to you may result them to being target for criminals or some such?

Comment It's all about planned obsolescence! (Score 1) 944

Funny how most of the anti-bulb people are using bulb vs LED lifetime as one of the reasons why bulbs are bad. The problem is, that bulbs are made on purpose to expire at about 1000 hours. Have a look at a documentary on the issue: Pyramids of waste. Or if you don't have the time or interest, read this nice article Planned Obsolescence: The Light Bulb Conspiracy. If you don't have time for that, I'll write in couple of the key points: There is Centennial Light in Livermore, California – an incandescent light bulb manufactured back in the 19th century. The world’s longest lasting light bulb still shines today uninterrupted after a century of use.
The industry standard for light bulb is 1000h, it used to be 2500h, but the manufactures lowered the limit to increase the consumption. that happened in 1940s. My guess is that with modern manufacturing methods it would not take much to be able to have the standard at 10000h for light bulbs. Just that there is no money to be made on that, the bulbs would be too cheap and they would last too long.

Comment Re:Tragedy, and Strange Days (Score 1) 379

Counterargument: what if you recorded the worst-case scenario? Accidentally viewing that video of your child being hit by a car could be devastating.

You mean something like this clip in russian car crash compilation? https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=P7q1eQzjQ28#t=286s Gory detail (=impact) is not shown, but you can see the horror inside the car as they realize crash is unavoidable.

covered in the quite decent mid-90's quasi-cyberpunk film 'Strange Days'.

Nice film, with interesting idea. If it was trueI would be totally addicted on repeating the nicest moments of my life again and again. Who wouldn't?

Comment Not just France (Score 1) 196

You can pretty much say the same about Finland as you wrote on France. Envy is renewing energy which never runs out. I recall the days when Nokia was in its glory. Oh the envious talks about persons earning lot of money from their Nokia options or dividents. How that was most unjust thing on the world. Now Nokia is almost gone, I've yet to see any public comments how now things are better as there are no longer persons getting dividents or other bonuses from Nokia success. I only see the misery of X amount of tax money no more coming in and Y amount of jobs lost because Nokia is no longer successfull.

Besides, increasing taxes has never been a road to success. Soviet union tried 100% and see where they are now. Yes, they aren't.

Comment Store maybe legit but you most likely break US law (Score 1) 166

Repeating what I originally read from http://falkvinge.net/2012/10/31/the-scary-spectre-of-perpetual-ipr/.

There is a separate provision of U.S. copyright law that prohibits the importation into the United States, “without the authority of the owner of copyright,” of copies of a work “acquired outside the United States.” – Slate

The law is unambiguous:

(1) Importation.—Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106, actionable under section 501. – Importation and Exportation, US Copyright Law

The case is still open, but basically one side is arguing that what ever you own, you don't own it once you take it to USA. After that point you are just a licencee. And it the US copyright owner does not approve you buying the stuff from abroad, you are violating the licence. I recommend you read the article linked at the top to get the picture.

Comment Re:Totally bogus (Score 1) 473

Germany relies on coal. It's replacing its nuclear generators with coal powered generators. .

The general public is a fraid of Fukushima and the radiation deaths. Nobody has mentioned the amount of deaths caused by the emissions from the coal power plants that are built to replace the nuclear power.

Coal contains trace quantities of the naturally-occurring radionuclides uranium and thorium, as well as their radioactive decay products, and potassium-40. While most of the ash is captured, tiny solid particles known as "fly ash," including some radionuclides, escape from the boiler into the atmosphere. One study estimated that 100 times more radioactivity is released from a coal-fired plant as compared to a nuclear power plant of a similar size (McBride et al., 1978) [quote from www.lung.org/assets/documents/healthy-air/coal-fired-plant-hazards.pdf ]

Still quoting the same document in regards to the effects of fine particle pollution generated by coal plants: For example, emissions from a single 1,230 MW facility in Wisconsin were estimated to account for 7 premature deaths, 100 emergency room visits, and 520 asthma attacks each year, with an annual cost of $42 million (MacIntosh et al., 2003).

Lets assume filtering technologies advance and the figures above can be halved, that's still 3.5 deaths per year. Considering nuclear power plant has some 50-60 year usage life, during that time comparable coal plant has caused some 200 deaths. Germany is replacing it's ~300TWh of nuclear power generated energy mainly to coal generated energy. Again, taking by conservative estimate as some will be replaced by non-coal sources over the time, the production would be 200 "wisconsin plants" for 50 years -> 10000 deaths.

That's safe coal power for you all...

Comment Time to thank the MEPS (Score 1) 142

Send your thank you in the form of flowers as suggested by mr. Falkvinge of Swedish pirate party

http://falkvinge.net/2012/07/04/send-flowers-to-the-european-parliament-for-rejecting-acta/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+Falkvinge-on-Infopolicy+%2528Falkvinge+on+Infopolicy%2529

I have already made order to be delivered on 9th June.

Privacy

Europe Agrees To Send Airline Passenger Data To US 403

Qedward writes "The European Parliament has approved the controversial data transfer agreement, the bilateral PNR (passenger name register), with the US which requires European airlines to pass on passenger information, including name, contact details, payment data, itinerary, email and phone numbers to the Department of Homeland Security. Under the new agreement, PNR data will be 'depersonalized' after six months and would be moved into a 'dormant database' after five years. However the information would still be held for a further 15 years before being fully 'anonymized.'"

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