It did potentially have one very important effect... to persuade Intel that they power consumption of their chips are pants and needs to be improved. Intel needs competition to keep them honest, and Windows-on-ARM is probably why we have such frugal x86 now.
There's one big wildcard in there though, if you buy an Android phone then the firmware can be replaced (ease depends on the model...) with open source variant that has more protections. Depending on your view of these firmwares, that might catapult it from the bottom of the pile to the top.
> Unfortunately, that won't help. Your phone number(s) and your home address are already on many of your friend's devices under your real name. Apple, Google & Co already have your details [...]
While it's important to keep that in mind, the "this won't help" mindset is a classical fallacy: someone gotta start, and if (and when) it's widespread enough, it'l help all of us. Like higiene.
You don't spit on the roads, do you? Or do you shit out your window?
So if you implement that -- have a talk with your friends about it too.
Well not really, because *everybody* has to do it or it's useless, and since your phone number could easily be in 100 phonebooks that's alot of poisoning to do. And As soon as people start doing it in numbers you can imagine a malicious Google (or whatever) would implement anti-poisoning analysis.
I believe the only real solution, which is unpopular on this largely libertarian site, is to have stronger protections in law, making data about you your property and controlled as such, and penalties for misuse the same seriousness as theft. That's a long way from where we are now though.
Microsoft says it supports DVB-T, DVB-T2 and DVB-C television channels, which I hope means something to my European readers; Wikipedia tells me these are European over-the-air cable standards.
...Christ...
Is your argument that encryption is hard so people should just keep sending sensitive information over email and expecting privacy?
I think we basically have to, since encryption actually *is* that hard. You *and* the other person need to both use encryption and there are no turnkey solutions, just really inconvenient and complicated ones.
When we start treating data as personal property, that would be a start.
Don't forget that you mustn't communicate with anyone with a GMail address either, then you would still be exposed. Great that you understand encryption, but lots of people do other things with their life and don't have time (or sometimes in the case of the young or old, capability) to learn the technical details of every system that they interact with. Not to mention that you don't know what your email provider does with your data, because they won't tell you, so how the hell you are supposed to make an informed better choice I can't imagine. Or do you expect every grannie to run her own email server?
"Entitled wanker" vs "elitist tosspot"
If you don't have the technical knowledge to make curtains or the money to buy curtains, is it not naive to expect privacy in your house?
I know this might be hard to imagine - but bear with it because I know empathy is not a typical trait of the techie (and perhaps understanding that will help understand that not everyone is technical, nor wishes to be) - but the blocking of visible light is somewhat easier to understand than the intricacies of encrypted communications.
Given that there is no straightforward way to purchase said security, and there are lots of curtain shops, I don't really know what your point is.
Don't have the ability to understand how to encrypt your emails and want someone to manage it for you because technology is all so hard but you still want to use it? Suck it up and learn, or pay someone to do it for you and stop whining about your own ignorance.
So as far as your concerned, the right to privacy only exists for those technical enough to defend themselves? Fuck everyone else, right? The swathes of the population that aren't programmers / IT professionals that quite reasonably have no idea how to do something that is still niche & a pain in the arse even for those who do understand it, they don't matter?
Different tools for different jobs. It's a peculiarity of computing that we seem to believe that there is only one way to do things, and that all tasks must be handled by the same solution. Oh no, desktops have dropped to 4th place, clearly we can extrapolate that they will be nonexistant soon! Sometimes things are obsoleted, sometimes they are added to. There's a bunch of tasks where the lack of hover or multi-button, or the lack of accuracy of a touchscreen is a significant disadvantage.
It would be refreshing if we didn't always try to use a hammer when sometimes you need a screwdriver.
That's a very narrow niche app for a desktop, non-touchscreen computer,
Systems without a touchscreen or a digitizer shouldn't exist.
Wait, what? I feel like I must be misunderstanding, but why the hell shouldn't a non-touchscreen computer exist? How suddenly did the mouse&keyboard become such inferior tech... I think I have never seen a touchscreen laptop used practically. A tablet is one thing, the device is already in your hands. A device with a raised screen and dedicated input devices, the touchscreen is at best an option and at worst a distracting pain to interact with.
Yeah, me too. Currently using Todo.txt for Android, which is alright, while writing my own based on the Palm staple...
Well that depends on what they bought. Google bought the patents and the name. Microsoft did not.
Hollow out Nokia until its just a shell valuable only for its IP, transfer everything else worth keeping into Microsoft proper and discard the rest. Wouldn't be surprised if the "Nokia" brand gets sold onto to some Asian / Indian outfit in a few years hence.
They only bought the phone business, not the name and not the IP. They have a licence for them for a while, but certainly not something they can actually sell.
Code recycling is one thing, but not understanding what that code does when you put it into a production app or not following best practices is another.
No developer completely understands everything that happens on a system, that's impossible. You do your best and you verify as well as you can that it's acting as you expect. Because where else do you stop..? You can't verify every library that you use, otherwise why bother using them, you might as well write your own. You can't verify the system itself because it's far too big.
Not that I'm saying things couldn't be written better, but programming is not a "correct / incorrect" binary choice, any nontrivial system has problems.
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach
