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Comment Re: Application sandboxing (Score 2, Informative) 577

Except that "modern mobile devices" get messed up and bogged down exactly the same way - even if the apps are supposed to be sandboxed.
There is one million os wide settings , or system apps and services that can get screwed up and their internally stored data will start causing issues.
Is the battery drain on your android the same as it was after factory reset ? Didn't think so.

Android doesn't sandbox apps.

iOS does, and it doesn't suffer from this problem. All software is given a directory that they can read from/write to. There are a few places outside that which can be read, but virtually nothing has write access (except for a few cases where a system app will expose access to it's data via inter-app communication. Calendar for example has this).

When you uninstall the app, that directory is deleted. There is no trace at all that the app ever existed.

Comment Re: Here's the solution (Score 2) 577

When a program is UNinstalled, all traces of it should be gone. Apple took a different approach, which arguably works far better. Even if stuff is left behind, it just takes up a bit of disk space, and doesn't affect the system at all.

Apple took a different approach on iOS.

OS X suffers the same problems as Windows, although perhaps not as severe.

Comment Re:Bose is worried (Score 0) 162

Bose and Beats are both highly brand-focused. Bose targets the more mature quality-seeking crowd, while Beats targets the bass-hungry and fashion-conscious youth. There's some overlap, but generally I'd say their targets kept competition to a minimum, and they've pretty much cornered those targets

Apple has the best of both worlds being viewed both as high quality and a status symbol. If they start using their monster marketing teams to align peoples' view of Beats with that of Apple, Bose stands a chance of being pushed out of the market by a frightening direct competition. They've got good reason to try to stall the acquisition as much as possible

Bose also targets youth, although they do a terrible job of it and are getting their ass kicked by Beats.

And Beats also targets musicians with their "Pro" headphone which is not bass hungry at all and has higher quality than anything Bose has ever shipped. As far as I can tell, Beats Pro are some of the best studio headphones money can buy at the moment. If they weren't so expensive I would probably own a pair.

Comment Re:Typical (Score -1, Troll) 162

"Those who can't create, litigate" --- who does this remind you of over last 2-3 years? Funny to see Apple whine about plays outta their OWN playbook

Apple filed a patent lawsuit against HTC in 2010, and Samsung in 2011. According to Wikipedia, are the only two patent lawsuits Apple has ever filed in the entire history of the company.

Both those lawsuits only happened after Apple spent years trying to negotiate their disagreements without involving the legal system.

A company that has only filed two lawsuits hardly has a "playbook" for suing people for patent infringement.

Comment Re:Stronger than steel (Score 4, Interesting) 82

Stronger than steel is cool and all, but that doesn't necessarily mean "all the same properties of steel". Durability, heat tolerance, reaction to moisture and a host of other things are likely to mean it's not a drop-in replacement for fibreglass/plastic/metal.

Fibreglass is terrible at all of the things you just listed and we use it for all kinds of things. It just has to be coated with a thin protective layer.

Comment Re:Seems correct (Score 1) 53

Maybe Apple or the carriers will cut a deal... or maybe their marketing material will just start referring to "apple phones."

Apple is also a trademark, so they are not allowed to use that in advertising either.

I'm not familiar with Mexican law either but these laws are pretty well unified by international treaties. You cannot use another company's trademark in your advertising material unless you have permission. Any carrier who sells the iPhone to customers would have permission to use the trademark, so this tells me the carrier does not sell iPhones and therefore has no business using iPhone in their ads.

Comment Re:Welcome to your new walled garden (Score 1) 225

Chromium is open source so if you don't like it, fork you own copy and get whatever useless toolbars that install without permission that you want.

Darwin is open source too, so you can fork it and install whatever apps you want.

The fact is most people stick with the official release. Your platform is not "open" if your official release if third party extensions aren't allowed.

It's worth mentioning the (non-mobile) version of Safari does allow arbitrary third party extensions. There are some warnings to the user that it might be malware, but they don't block installation.

Comment Re:Encryption (Score 4, Informative) 220

Last I heard, it still supports unencrypted, but only if both the client and server ask for it. If either one asks for encryption, then the connection is encrypted, even if there's no authentication (i.e. certificate). With no certificate, it's still possible to pull an active(MitM) attack, which is much harder to pull off at a large scale without anyone noticing (i.e. you can just collect all data you see).

A server cannot ask for encryption.

Unless the client establishes a secure connection in the first place, the server has no way of knowing if the client is actually who they claim to be. If the client attempts to establish a secure connection and the server responds with "I can't give you a secure connection" then the client needs to assume there is a man in the middle attack going on and refuse to communicate with the server.

There is no way around it, security needs to be initiated on the client and the server cannot be allowed to refuse a secure connection.

HSTS is a partial solution for this problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security)

Comment Moving goal posts (Score 4, Insightful) 220

I don't think HTTP has any problems with security. All the real world problems with HTTP security are caused by:

  * dismally slow roll out of dnssec. It should have been finished years ago, but it has barely even started.
  * the high price of acquiring an SSL certificate (it's just bits!).
  * slow rollout of IPv6 (SSL certificates generally require a unique IP and we don't have enough to give every domain name a unique IP).
  * arguments in the industry about how to revoke a compromised SSL certificate, which has lead to revocation being almost useless.
  * SSL doesn't really work when there are thousands of certificate authorities, so some changes are needed to cope with the current situation (eg: dsnssec could be used to prevent two certificate authorities from signing the same domain name)

Comment Re:Auto switches (Score 1) 415

You sir, have obviously never encountered the problem. The message does one of two things: 1) Gets marked as delivered but is never delivered because the person has no iDevice or 2) Gets marked as undeliverable and is not resent as a text. I have a friend who has been trying to fix this for months and at first her messages disappeared into the abyss. Now they just fail to deliver and I have to manually resend it.

I have encountered the problem, and solved it for friends/family.

Since I'm an iOS developer, anybody who has any problem with their iPhone asks me how to fix it. And since I'm a tin-foil-hat-toting privacy advocate, I have studied various articles that reverse engineer how iMessage works. I know exactly what "delivered" means —it means some device somewhere decrypted the message. Apple's server cannot decrypt the message as they do not have the private key, so therefore they cannot possibly send a delivery confirmation.

Go ahead and try it out. Disable wifi and cellular data on an iPhone but leave the non-data cellular connection active, then send an iMessage to it.

The message will not change to "delivered" unless some other device is registered (and connected to the internet) to receive messages at that phone number. After some minutes, the blue message box on the sending device will change colour to green, signifying an SMS has been sent. Depending how good your cell carrier is, the SMS will be delivered instantly or after a few days (SMS is not a reliable messaging protocol...). This assumes you have not disabled SMS fallback on the sending device, which is the default.

I just did the test, and it proved my theory. Disconnecting my phone/ipad/mac caused a sending device to fail to show "delivered", and several minutes later my phone received an SMS message.

The system is overly complicated, mostly as a byproduct of Apple's end-to-end encryption system, which leads to a lot of customer confusion and miss-information when they try to diagnose one of the many things that can go wrong. But I know what I'm talking about, delivered means it was delivered to a device registered receive iMessages at that phone number.

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