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Comment Re:If you pay... (Score 2) 15

Yes. I put in $100, and I am asking other people to put in money to sponsor these programs so that everyone, including people who did not put in any money at all, can see them for free. If you look at the 150+ videos, you can see that Gary's pretty good at this (and he brought a really professional-seeming cameraman to Hamvention, too) and the programs are interesting. Even if at least four of them feature yours truly :-) He filmed every one of the talks at the TAPR DCC last year (and has filmed for the past 5 years) and it costs him about $8000 to drive there from North Carolina to Austin, Texas; to bring his equipment and to keep it maintained, to stay in a motel, to run a multi-camera shoot for every talk in the conference, and to get some fair compensation for his time in editing (and he does a really good job at that).

Submission + - Open Hardware and Digital Communications conference on free video, if you help (kickstarter.com)

Bruce Perens writes: The TAPR Digital Communications Conference has been covered twice here and is a great meeting on leading-edge wireless technology, mostly done as Open Hardware and Open Source software. Free videos of the September 2014 presentations will be made available if you help via Kickstarter. For an idea of what's in them, see the Dayton Hamvention interviews covering Whitebox, our Open Hardware handheld software-defined radio transceiver, and Michael Ossman's HackRF, a programmable Open Hardware transceiver for wireless security exploration and other wireless research. Last year's TAPR DCC presentations are at the Ham Radio Now channel on Youtube.

Comment Re:Garbage In (Score 1) 231

Unfortunately, not supported by AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile here in the US.

Sorry, 0.facebook.com is only supported by select mobile carriers and is not available from your mobile carrier.
If you are contacting your mobile carrier, mention that your IP address 99.16.210.3 is not supported.
Go to m.facebook.com (Standard data charges may apply) Report a Problem.

Comment Re:Garbage In (Score 1) 231

You may have uninstalled the app, but did you also freeze the in-ROM Facebook SNS service? Not likely, and it will bridge (eg: phone home) to other apps that integrate with and talk to Facebook.

Get Titanium Backup and freeze SNS, or use Root App Delete (for rooted Android phones) and get rid of that bugger. It eats data, leaks your location every 60s, and does all sorts of things you don't need or want it doing.

Comment Re:TSA logic (Score 1) 702

And what if that outlet, with the "TSA-approved Cable(tm)" is doing more than just powering on your device?

This is why USB Condoms exist (no, this is not a joke)

http://int3.cc/collections/fro...

"Have you ever plugged your phone into a strange USB port because you really needed a charge and thought: "Gee who could be stealing my data?". We all have needs and sometimes you just need to charge your phone. "Any port in a storm." as the saying goes. Well now you can be a bit safer. "USB Condoms" prevent accidental data exchange when your device is plugged in to another device with a USB cable. USB Condoms achieve this by cutting off the data pins in the USB cable and allowing only the power pins to connect through.Thus, these "USB Condoms" prevent attacks like "juice jacking".

Comment Migration AWAY from the iCloud (Score 1) 214

Despite Apple and other corporate plans to move everything and everyone to "The Cloud", the masses are doing quite the opposite, moving everything away from the cloud and hosted resources.

There's already a growing exodus to use personally-controlled storage, cloud and other environments, or heavily encrypted storage platforms to hold their data, making apps that expect "iCloud(tm)" and other in-the-clear, branded solutions from being all but useless.

So as long as these "replacement" versions work primarily, and with full functionality without feature-reduction 100% locally and by default, then they'll be fine. If they require the iCloud/cloud to function, they're going to suffer from diminished adoption.

The same is happening with digital currency v. analog/paper currency, resulting from increased eroding confidence in the system (eg: Target failures, identity theft, and hundreds of other examples in the news, nearly weekly).

If these features aren't being demanded by users (and there's plenty of evidence they're not), then why the big push to store everything you have and own, off-premises?

Comment Re:Mostly Illegal (Score 1) 184

On my side, every single packet across the wireless side of the router, goes through a local Squid instance. Not only can I inspect the logs, but I have Squid filtering out tens of thousands of sites, domains, ad spamming pages and other things, so if there were any abuses coming, I could just block those too, or turn on other block index files and filter off even more.

Easey peasey.
 

Comment Does it just kill the CELL portion? Or brick it? (Score 1) 137

Here's the real Occum's Razor here:

Does the "kill switch" remotely disable the mobile/cellular capabilities of the phone? Or does it completely disable the device, thus bricking it?

These are smartphones, and they're used by many people for more than just a phone. I'd even argue that the function used the least on these devices, is the actual phone itself.

I rarely see someone having an actual voice conversation on a phone these, days, but people spend hours and hours doing everything else with them.

So if there's a civil uprising, martial law, and the .gov decides to shunt an entire city (Boston Bombers anyone? Greece? Turkey last year?, we've seen this many times already), then they also render these devices inert for much more than just communications devices.

- My ex-wife can no longer monitor her blood sugar (Type 1 diabetic, 100% digitally monitored via iPhone)
- Digital locks on your home no longer are able to be unlocked (keyless entry with NFS, etc.)
- Credit card information, details, photos, videos, other data is now unavailable

The chilling effect of this alone, should cause hundreds of thousands of people to step up and march on their congressperson's front door.

The potential abuses of this are so far reaching, far superseding the cost of replacing a phone handset that happens to get stolen.

I'd rather see the funding go into a user-driven device locating capability, with remote wipe/reporting on the other end instead of a remote kill switch controlled by corporations and the .gov.

Very scary stuff happening here. Verrrrry scary.

Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 224

It actually is a bit different for the Republicans, in that they are caught in an internal party schism of a scale we've not seen on either side since desegregation, if even then. It's difficult for the less right to look good to the more right, undirected pushing against the Democrats is one of the few ways they have to do it.

Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 224

Do not forget that ObamaCare was rammed through without a single Republican vote in the House or Senate.

It's the unfortunate case that Republicans don't generally support Democratic bills. Witness the recent student loan bill. There is not much question that a better educated populance means a better economy and a stronger nation. It's a truism that we could just pay for college education in a number of fields and reap economic benefits of many times the spending. Indeed, we used to do more of that and the country was stronger when we did.

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