Apple obviously wants iCloud and your ITMS credentials to be the iGateway to your life and all your devices and whatnot. They also emphasize security, elegance, and ease of use in their advertising, and cater to a relatively upmarket audience, for the most part.

Why, then, can you not even buy any serious security? Yes, they have 'two factor authentication', of the kind where you have a username, password, and they send you a temporary PIN to one of your devices; but money simply cannot buy a certificate authentication mechanism. Nor an RSA-fob or equivalent. Hell, your WoW character can be protected by a hardware auth fob; but your entire iLife can't?

In the end(while it may well be true) Apple's insistence that the hack was based on guessing/gaining user credentials, rather than attacking Apple code, just doesn't matter. User credentials are always fairly vulnerable. If they want people to put their life 'in the cloud', they are going to have to do better than that(especially if they want celebrity users, since that's a userbase that more or less automatically includes insane stalkers).

Password 'managers' make me nervous(unless based on proper crypto/key storage ICs with actual vetting by people who actually care, which is rare indeed, if it exists at all, since the people who care that much don't use passwords, just proper cryptographic authentication); but they do have the advantage of allowing those of us without eidetic memories to use passwords that might actually be strong enough to resist casual attack, and force the casual attacker to use the ultra-weak password reset process instead...

It's not that they are lemons, it's that amidst the vast sea of cheap and minimally known devices, you don't know which are or aren't lemons.

That's the lemon market effect: It doesn't mean that all devices are lemons(many aren't), it's that if you have no particularly good way of determining which are or aren't lemons, you are forced to be more cautious than would otherwise be good even of devices that are not lemons.

As much as I think Yelp are a bunch of abhuman bottom feeders who would do the world a favor if they caught fire, I am pleased by this one.

Section 230 is a vital defense against a truly hellish legal climate on the internet, and I'd hate to see it be chipped away during a fight against an unsympathetic defendant.

It's also a matter of diversification. Google has done well enough in online advertising that pushing much harder will just lead to an antitrust shitstorm.

Given that, they basically have three options:

1. Sit back, relax, and move as much profit as possible through the company until somebody eventually 'disrupts' them. This is pretty much risk free in the short term, and probably popular with some shareholders; but it's pretty fatalistic in the long term, and fatalism isn't a personality trait that Silicon Valley tends to cultivate.

2. Sit back, take profits from advertising business and invest them in a diversified portfolio and gradually morph into some sort of fund as amount invested grows and, sooner or later, advertising business suffers a setback and/or withers. Basically a variation on #1; but with the money remaining inside under management rather than being passed through. Similarly fatalistic and similarly culturally unlikely.

3. Take profits from core business, attempt to invent the future before somebody else does, and crushes you. Not necessarily a better strategy than #1 or #2 (it might be; but it is a high risk/high reward type of thing); but a far better cultural fit than just sitting back and stashing the profits and accepting that eventually things change.

"Google Quantum AI Team" sounds less like a job title and more like a section of the datacenter with atypically touchy cooling needs...

I'm not certain what the category is called(there must be a term for it; but I don't move in linguistics circles); but 'book desert' is an example of a specific class of made up term, the one that is novel; but is an explicit extension of an earlier and better recognized term(the best known example I can think of is, at least in the US, the ability to add "-gate" to almost anything to imply that it is a scandal. The result is always a made up word; but it creates a direct connection to 'Watergate').

In this case, the 'root' is 'Food Desert', a term describing the areas (mostly poor urban neighborhoods, and likely some rural ones as well) where grocery stores are effectively nonexistent and the population subsists on a mixture of convenience store fare and fast food, with a variety of types of food either atypically expensive or simply unavailable. By extension, a '[something] desert' is a region where local conditions make some good that you might expect to be available based on the overall development level of a country scarce or unavailable.

Anyone know what this type of coinage is called? It isn't merely a neologism; but I don't know what the subcategory is called.

It's a real pity that the 'lemon market' effect is so strong on the dodgy end of the a variety of categories of electronic devices...

In terms of specs, such devices are obviously inferior to their more expensive counterparts; but you often don't need as much power as the expensive stuff offers. In terms of quality and niceties like warranty support, it can be iffy; but solid-state gear can be pretty durable once the infant mortality period is over, and if it costs little enough you can 'self insure' rather than depend on a warranty.

However, the software/firmware/localization is usually utterly dire, and the branding and details of the internal hardware are so volatile that it's hard to consistently get your hands on a given set of components reliably, and it's hard to build an OpenWRT-style 3rd-party community around them.

If the absurdly low cost of mystery-OEM pacific rim gear could be combined with the localization support and non-awfulness of 3rd-party firmware, you'd have some killer devices; but bringing the two together seems to be tricky.

How is the modability of the Kindle firmware these days? I know earlier versions are relatively tamed at this point; but any time I see 'with offers' my loathing gland swells.

If my eyes were on their way out, such a small screen would be truly brutal; but if smallish print isn't an issue small screens really aren't bad(for texts that reflow well, PDFs, technical documentation, images/diagrams, etc. are a total clusterfuck). Back in the day, I burned through a lot of Project Gutenberg stuff with my Visor Edge(mine was silver; but same 160x160 pixel screen) and Weasel Reader. Slim, light, good battery life, backlight was alien-abduction-green but perfectly functional, and zTXT format stored a small library even in the teeny sliver of storage that classic PalmOS devices offered.

Barring the (legitimate and serious; but only if you are one) case of the visually impaired and dealing with documents that reflow poorly, you can do surprisingly well with seriously lousy specs.

Only a verifiable head case would write about a school shooting 900 years in the future. I have it on good authority that the last 'chemical/kinetic homicide' was recorded in the waning days of the Transcend Uprising in 2234. By 2914, the most common spree killings, by method, are 'engineered retroviruses', 'covert antimatter decanting', and nanoassembler override.

Also, ever since Heuristic Neural Patterning became economically viable in the mid 24th century, 'school' exists as little more than a footnote in some of the low level neural patterning modules. I'm not sure why you'd expect to find enough people for a mass casualty incident visiting one.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I have no expectation that this rollout will go well, at all. Y'know all those cautionary tales about throwing technological solutions at human problems? Well, Nigeria has a hell of a lot of human problems and I doubt that the technological solutions will work better than usual.

My observation was narrower: overt violence, imprisonment, or other radical life disruptions among debtors are symptoms of an immaturesystem of credit and interest extraction. Now, since large parts of Nigeria have symptoms that suggest such a system(high levels of local corruption, massive inequality, minimal social infrastructure and documentation, etc.), it is likely that such relatively primitive debt mechanisms will persist, at least for a time.

However, the cards are unlikely to be the ideal mechanism: electronic transactions are traceable, to a degree, and the only greater enemy of corruption than an honest man is a dishonest man's boss who is wondering why he isn't getting his cut of the take. This(as much as any rule of law) helps discourage excessively overt bribe-taking. There's always a bigger fish you'll have to pay off if it becomes clear that you are worth targeting. Ground-level corruption will prefer to deal in cash, or some 'cash equivalent'(if I had to bet, it'd be a local cigarette or phone top-up card, or some other item that is both intrinsically useful and relatively nonperishable if purchased and returned to local vendors: people who need to pay bribes will buy this good, people receiving bribes will receive them 'in kind'; but be able to return, likely minus a small restocking fee, any excess that they don't need. All electronic transactions legitimate, works even if cash if phased out, still transfers value. Something like what happens in prisons with commissary goods).

As for the rest, I stand by the basic conclusion: brutalizing your debtors is inefficient unless there is no other way of keeping them from escaping, or they are so helotized that their value as slave labor is about as high as it could be. Maximum efficiency is somebody able to live a 'normal' productive life while desperately paying the minimum balance on their credit card every month. (Note, I don't say that this is a good thing, it bloody well isn't; but it's the ideal and most advanced form of interest extraction. All other methods, even if scarier or more theatrical, are less efficient and ultimately contrary to the interest of the lender, if they can achieve this one.)

If your needs differ substantially from the server or compute markets (as with buying a cheap printer, or having laptop power saving actually work properly) you may indeed be pretty doomed. To the degree that you can overlap with the needs of server/compute on one end and embedded on the other, though, the market share of desktop boards isn't wildly relevant.

Yes, the SKUs differ; but nobody is going to go out of their way to make their product line more expensive to design and support by adding pointless differences(assorted features enabled or disabled, definitely; but playing NIH between product lines is rather pointless), so it's not clear what desktop Linux has to fear from low market share. If anything, things are far worse in mobile, where the market share is higher; but a substantial percentage of the hardware will do little more than boot a kernel and talk to a TTY somewhere unless you are using an Android BSP and a giant heap of blobs.

32-bit Atoms on UEFI boards are also to be avoided, though I think that they are all also PowerVR. They can be booted; but any normal distro with UEFI support assumes 64 bits and anything with 32bit support tends to assume BIOS. Not impossible; but best avoided.

This is generally true, any Intel CPU using board is going to be mostly Intel silicon at the center, with other vendors twiddling around a bit with audio chipsets(unfortunately, as with AC 97 before it, there are...multiple creative ways...to be 'compatible' with Intel's "HD Audio" standard), NICs, extra USB or SATA controllers, and whatnot. Intel usually keeps it simple, stupid(barring the push for UEFI; but now that that's industry-wide you just pick your poison) and tends not to use really dire onboard junk on their midrange and up boards.

That said, you may or may not(mostly may not) be ready to go in Linux if you buy something on launch day. Intel will get it in-tree, probably reasonably quickly; but do yourself a favor and check, then check again with your distro of choice unless you feel like building your own kernels. If you are buying anything that isn't bleeding edge, this is unlikely to be a problem, with the sole exception of a couple of breeds of Atoms(the ones with 'GMA 500' graphics are totally fucked, and the ones with 32-bit UEFI that shipped in a few cheap Win8 tablets are just as fucked in the GPU department and about a factor of ten less fun to actually make boot...)