I've been on the internet long enough to not fall for this "big company bad" clickbait. The guy at arstechnica is trying to get you to read something on a site that is chocked full of ads. The irony is probably lost on most but not me. Just because the media is on the internet doesn't mean its not media.

Anyways this is basically a service where is your neighbors internet is cut their ring camera could hop on yours. We all know wifi can be spotty etc. This is not some guy walking down the street and needs a little extra juice on his phone.

Going to point of calling Amazon a ISP. Bringing the fact that Amazon has your shopping history. Just piling on for the "I'm scared of big tech" crowd to have a "see...I was right! I was right!" moment. You are not special, they don't care about you, there are 100s of millions of us...get over yourself.

Should it be opt-in? Probably, or at least advertised, but its not exactly doomsday here people.

Facebook shouldn't have a star rating. Anymore than McDonalds or Subways needs a Yelp review. All are known quanties that serve 10s of millions every day.

Once an app has reach 100 million downloads or some threshold like that we should just turn off comments. It seems like a waste of Apple resources and just provides yet another place for toxicity and nothing else.

None of this would be an issue if Apple would allow for alternative stores. Even these could be filtered to some point.

Apple can run their store however they want, but having to jailbreak my phone to install a competitor to iTunes seems like anti competitive behavior.

My problem with school is it always felt like teaching too abstractly. A certain level is good and I do want people to learn to innovative, but I do not think there is enough application.

Don't teach calculus, teach engineering. I feel like i spent months doing super complex math that I wouldn't even use as a rocket scientist. I would have loved to predict planetary motion than solving random math problems for hours and hours only to never use those skills.

The real world is generally open book. If I forget how to solve an equation I look up a solution on the internet or even my old math text books. I think if kids learn how to solve problems vs solving problems we'd be in a better place. I'd rather just give kids a problem and help them solve it vs give them a predefined example and make them solve it correctly the first time or get an F.

I don't really feel like the open source community is "ready" to talk about what security means.

It's nice that communities found these issues, but if I was in organized crime I'd be not only following this, but looking for exploits. Which should be a lot easier given the code. Looking for lesser projects vs even the big boys and going after that.

Do a search for "QA" in open source and the results are a little eye opening...in that you won't see much. I think in general open source projects need to actively find help and have their code scanned and analyzed more.

I believe open source can be far more secure and possibly already is, but just flat out denials of any issues in our communities is just being complacent.

Open source has security issues does not equal go back to closed source, but it does mean we have work to do to get better.

Two form authentication is the real solution. Given enough time and computing people will break your hashed password. Heck with the oncoming quantum computers who knows if they will be secure at all.

Oh and heres an idea. Why don't we do a much better job of protecting the hashes in the first place. Encrypted the hash so a simple sql inject only returns even harder to see data. Put the data in another table. Use a stored procedures ( I know *GASP* ) to only allow one password hash to be retrieved at once. Use database schema permissions ( if available ) to make select password_hashed from hashes not allowed by the front end server.

I think honestly we hashed the password and then rubbed our hands together and patted each other on the back.

I often wonder why the community does not create more tools that abstract away the differences as much as possible.

Every distro has it's package manager and with it different syntax. Imaging if you had a tool like "install-it mysql" which on Ubuntu goes to apt-get install, or pacman's syntax, or yum or whatever.

The thing I mostly worry about is packages. Say what you will about Windows and Mac, but developing an app for them generally has a limited set of ways. There is only one way to do services in Windows, etc.

It is hard to get say Webcam apps to get ported to Linux because the poor devs have to figure out webcams in 10 different distros. Everyone in the boards say "ubuntu 14 +1", .... no no Arch first!!! and so on. Should it matter as much app to app? Shouldn't distros at least have some level of uniformity...a layer of it.

If slashdot allowed for +1ing I would.

I would go further and say that both Apple and MS have some standard libraries at their core. Imagine trying to write a WebCam based app for Linux. For OSX or Windows you'd do a search and get pretty standard answer. For linux you'd get a ton of links to different libraries at different levels.

In general developing an app for OSX is way easier than for X. Yah most things are just webapss these days, but not everything. Which is why Chromebooks haven't totally take off. If Chromebooks had MS Office, Photoshop and a few other installed apps ( free or otherwise ) I think it would have more success. I mean why can't I installed Eclipse, Sublimetext, a Shell on a Chromebook....if I could we would have a Linux desktop technically.

At this point I think you would need to manage the device from start to finish.

Basically put out limited line like Apple. Use high quality and standard chipset. I mean like a good ethernet chip, a good sound card, etc. With a standard build it is way easier to test your OS and make sure everything functions on your various models.

From there take Gnome or KDE and fork it. Go the Linux Mint Gnome route. If you are a company you can just decide how things work. Macs work one way, Windows another, but for the most part they work the way their company's wants to. That standard is what makes them popular, even amongst developer types and the kind of people that go to OSCon.

Then get a good testing community going. Make sure it works with printers. Make sure it works with projectors, make sure it works with dual monitors, make sure it works with the keyboards.

Come out with your own damn keyboards and mice.

Make the upgrade process simple, straightfoward, and automated. Certainly use a package manager, but hide it away.

The community might be able to take it and abstract, but given the linux community they would just tweak it to the point where it isn't as "beautiful".

Ubuntu tried and failed many of things. I think mostly because the people who generally run linux do so because they want to.

The difference here is that someone will walk into best buy, login to amazon, or your own site, maybe a dedicated store (think apple store) and walk out with a device that runs an OS which happens Linux...not buy some hardware and "try" to get linux working on it.

I don't think HP, Dell, etc have any interest in this and so someone needs to start it. Maybe we can leverage open hardware, maybe not, but I think we need to replicate the Apple model.

From there the hard part. Get the gaming community behind you, get Office to run on it...I mean the real Office, and keep going to get the world to treat your product with respect.

They hacked Chase, Amazon, and a few other apps as well.

This has very little do to with GMail and more to do with a novel way to attack GUI based apps on the Android platform. By chance GMail had one of the highest success rates.

This would be like getting keylogging malware installed on your computer and then getting your your slashdot password compromised by reading keystrokes...and then saying Slashdot got hacked. No you computer go hacked, not Slashdot.

It also seems as GMail app gets updated it's rate might vary since this has to do with "guessing" what an app is doing by looking at system metrics.

Am I the only one that thinks things have gotten a bit hyperbolic. I hear a lot of non technical people talking about how "bad" the architecture is.

This is a new product and has more users a few weeks in then most of the big boys had in over a year.

We are not selling a iPhone or a plane ticket here. This is a complex infrastructure with lots of back end interactions. The front end is fairly modern. They haven't gotten around to minimizing and consolidating the JS files, but that will come I'm sure.

I've gotten through the sign up process, they added some stuff to do some ad-hoc shopping. I've seen much more dragging of feet by supposed enterprise players. What are we 20 days into this enormous platform? Most of the people complaining don't even need the damn thing because they already have insurance.

At the end of the day the exchanges are not even selling insurance. Insurance companies are doing that. It's like using googles shopping feature. Ultimately the insurance company is Amazon.com. If you need the insurance you'll go directly to the person selling it. Hell we probably should have started with the exchanges being nothing more than a fancy craigslist.

People who need insurance because they are sick or scared will get it. They will get the subsidies etc. The vast majority of these so called "healthy young" are just declining insurance through there employers. They just have to fill out a bunch of paper work with their HR department.

At the end of the day healthcare.gov is something to help people get insurance. The subsides and the new rules are what will get it for them.

"Since Microsoft has a very vague idea of what users want" ... BS

Do you own a truck? If you don't and don't want one you wouldn't tell Ford and Ram(Dodge) what they should put in their trucks.

Excel is the Grep\AWK\Sed of the enterprise\business world. Not all of it, but a large percentage. The fact of the matter is there is a whole lot in your life that was built with the assistance of Word, Excel, and hell even PowerPoint. You think the construction company that built the building your in uses VIM to manage there shit.

Slashdot in general does not get this. I'm sure there are plenty of desktop support guys on here who do. Google docs is great an I use them all the time, but it's a tinker toy to some of the more advanced features in Excel that most people haven't even heard of.

Throw together a pivot table with a slicer and then see me in the morning. Take a look at stock symbol DATA for tableu...there is a world outside of compilers, web servers, and VIM people.

You can't tell me you haven't heard a iPad guy tell you he wishes he had Excel on there.

MS has done okay with the XBox. I think the phone and tablet is a catch 22 for them. If they don't do it people will wonder why. If they do people will wonder why.

I wouldn't be surprised if UPS would be interested. Trucker gets tired just hand off. No more potty breaks etc.

I'm interested in the security and reliability of the connection. Cloud cover, overpasses, etc etc. Although I suppose you could combine a little auto driving in there like auto breaking and dealing with being cutoff. I don't think you could react fast enough remotely...plus if you wrecked the impact is less for you so you might get lazy.

I know we all hate MS here, but doesn't it worry you that you can't have a product name with the word Sky in it.

I mean if MS renamed themselves to SkySoft or something maybe...and even then...

Seems like we just gave this company a bunch of free publicity that wasn't actually being harmed. Was anyone confused by the names?

Have they been asked? Do they keep a copy?