So it is ok that the attacker cracked your password, just because he can only use it for a few weeks? That is an odd idea of security.

Actually, the basic argument is flawed.

Brute force password cracking is a guessing exercise. So a password can be cracked in 25 years - that sounds not too bad, right?

But actually there is 4% chance the password can be cracked within 1 year, a 1% chance it can be cracked in 3 months, a 0.03% chance it can be cracked in a day.

And these probabilities are the same whether you change your password or not!

So you need a better mitigation against password cracking. Not losing your hashes would be a good start, limiting retries is another, monitoring activity a third.

If somebody is spending 25 years of their life to crack your password, you may have other problems...

Yes, but non-US citizens have no legal. So under US law, US entities always beat non-US entities.

Unfortunately the railway industry has quite a strange mindset, and is heavily opposed to any kind of innovation. Often this is hiding behind a veil of safety concerns: a new technology will not be adopted unless it can be shown to be perfect. And of course new technology is never perfect, even if it is a lot better than existing solutions.

PTC is a great example of a system at huge expense with rather small benefits. Should it have been adopted? Probably yes - the rest of the world did similar things decades ago. Is it worth adopting now in the age of GPS, geodata and connectivity? Maybe not.

Exactly my thoughts. Both do it against the users interests.

But at least Google is nominally in control of the page, so they have a certain right to do it. Superfish would argue that the user installed it, and so they have a right, too, but the way that it prevents removal indicates otherwise.

> Yeah, I can't wait for Windows to change the print subsystem in an update that causes my excessively complex multifunction printer driver suite to put my computer into a reboot loop.

I think Microsoft is on top of that now. With both data collection and a restore function, Windows will just set up again from an installation image, and advise the user that the printer is no longer support (or only in basic mode). The blame goes where it belongs, and the consumer will buy a new printer. Hopefully not from the same manufacturer...

I do. I want an app to work on different form factors - phone, tablet, laptop, desktop. I want the same app, but suitably displayed on each device. Of course this only applies to lightweight apps, are maybe games.

Heavyweight apps will remain on the desktop, but that's not what this is about. This is about a new API, and additional API. And that should be different from what we have today.

> This stuff is perfectly legal to own in the blocked areas. The content owners just want to make sure someone viewing their content in Germany must pay the German price for it, instead of say the French price.

Yes, there are two parts to it. The article says that content once bought should be available in the whole of the EU. So far, if you are on holiday in France, you can't use your existing streaming account, Kindle downloads or MP3s. Clearly that is wrong, because nobody would buy content again just for a holiday (apart from the fact that you would need a credit card registered at a local address).

The problem of separate markets is a different one. It is also on the European agenda, but the issue will be much more contentious. But that is not a geoblocking issue.

I completely agree. Nobody seems to work as a team any more, and at the slightest notion of disagreement things get forked. How many distros do we have now, certainly more than 10 important ones? How many do we need? Most people just want one, and then maybe a bit of choice, but most distros already provide more than enough choice within them.

I have to agree, and this is nowhere more obvious than in the mobile sphere. Android cannot compete with iOS on quality or Windows on pretty much everything but the number of apps. And it is getting more buggy with every release :-(

Meanwhile Microsoft is invading the cloud space, has a competitive mobile offering, and works on pretty much every device now (Google doesn't).

The driverless car may actually be the only useful innovation coming out of Google recently.

Yes, they could update the core services, and they could fix bugs quickly, but they don't.

There are quite a few battery drain bugs still in the core services, especially in the location service. It is embarrassing.

But not surprising. Core services were never about faster upgrades or better Android, but about control. Once apps rely on core services, they can no longer run on a plain Android device with the Google apps. Android is getting more and more closed.

Yes, the system as it is at the moment is just asking for trouble.

Google tends to host a lot of the ads themselves, which makes it slightly more reliable. But they have had their fair share of trouble, too.

Actually the EU has done that, for example with the eco label.

However, it turned out that typical white goods with an eco label below A would not sell in Germany, so they are no longer available. No consumer choice there. In other countries, consumer standards are different, and therefore it may be very difficult to sell or to find a highly efficient device. Again, little consumer choice.

So the result was that different countries would informally set different standard - exactly what the common market was trying to avoid. Regulation would be more efficient and provide better consumer choice (everybody can get the same efficient devices).

They have a specific problem (NOx and PM), but they address it with broad measures. It may work to some degree, but the costs are significant. (And I still remember car being completely banned on a Sunday... that was even broader, but it also carried a sense of purpose and community.)

But my main issue is that these measures are very late. Surely they should be taken before pollution reaches unacceptable level, to prevent that from happening.