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Comment Re:I assume you are joking, but ... (Score 1) 155

We are only a year out from the murder of a health-insurance executive, so the police are more on edge than usual.

Then we need to threaten such things much more often, so that the cops will eventually get used to it, and relax. ;-)

Debian never tried to kill me through my computer. I'd appreciate it if my car manufacturer made their car as safe as my computer.

Fuck it, I just want a Debian car. Then I won't need to extract bloody vengeance from beyond the grave, as my zombie revenant tracks down the CEO of Subaru, and the rotting flesh of my hands tightens around his throat as payment for the time a popup distracted me.

Comment There's no consensus definition of E2E encryption (Score 1) 89

Some people are busting out "definitions" of "End to End Encryption" but people were already using that as in informal descriptive term long before your formalized technical jargon was made up. Nobody should be surprised if there are mismatches. Have faith in our faithlessness.

I personally view the term as an attempt to call semi-bullshit on SMTP and IMAP over SSL/TLS. In the "old" (though not very old) days, if you sent a plaintext email (no PGP!), some people would say "oh, it's encrypted anyway, because the connection is encrypted between your workstation and the SMTP server, the connection from there to some SMTP relay is encrypted, the connection from there to the final SMTP server is encrypted, and the recipient's connection to the IMAP server is encrypted."

To which plenty of people, like me, complained "But it's still plaintext at every stop where it's stored along the way! You should use PGP, because then, regardless of the connection security, or lack of security on all the connections, it is encrypted end to end. Never trust the network, baby!"

Keep in mind that even when I say that, this is without any regard for key security! When I say E2E encrypted, it is implied that the key exchange may have been done poorly/incorrectly, mainly because few people really get to be sure they're not being MitMed when they use PGP. You can exchange keys correctly, but it's enough of a PITA that, in the wild, you rarely get to. You usually just look up their key on some keyserver and hope for the best. Ahem. And I say "usually" as if even that happens often. [eyeroll]

Indeed, every time I hear about some new secure messaging app/protocol, the first thing I wonder is "how do they do key exchange?" and I'm generally mistrusting of it, by default. And sometimes, I'm unpleasantly unsurprised, err I mean, cynically confirmed.

But anyway, if my E2E definition matches yours, great! And if it doesn't, well, that's ok and it's why we descend into the dorky details, so that we can be sure we're both talking about the same thing.

Comment Re:AV1 lacks hardware support compared with H.264 (Score 1) 36

> Meanwhile, H.264 has dedicated hardware decoders in world+dog devices, including ancient ones.

Ancient ones, yes, but most devices sold in the past five years have AV1 *decode* support.

Hardware with AV1 *encode* is still pretty rare but a fair number of up-market chips from the past few years have it.

What we mostly care about here is the $20 amtel or mediatek devices sold today, and those are fine.

Netflix can support the older devices with H.264 as long as it makes more sense to pay the patent license fees than to drop support for old devices.

It won't be long before there are no devices that the manufacturer still supports that can't decode AV1 in hardware. Not that most end-users even know their device went EOL and now a potential liability.

Given that Netflix has native apps on most of these systems it should be straightforward to serve the non-patented stream to any device that can play it well.

Comment Re:backups (Score 5, Insightful) 52

> They don't do backups at those outfits?

We really need Federal government backups to be centralized at the National Archives.

Both so one expert team can make sure it's done right, instead of hundreds of teams with questionable experience and track records attempting to do it right.

And /also/ so when one agency goes, "whoopise, I guess we deleted the evidence of our crimes!" there is recourse.

Right now, the prosecutor just goes, "shucks, I guess we don't have a case then. Better fire some leaf-node IT contractor."

Comment Re:Here we go (Score 1) 50

The M.E. has a way of driving everyone crazy; you are damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Put HAZMAT tape around the area and warn everybody away. Leave them on their own, giving them no food nor weapons; if they bonk each other to oblivion, it's their problem, not ours. I think it's God's Insane Asylum.

Non-nuts have migrated somewhere quieter, leaving mostly nuts in place, a Sanity Filter. I'm just the messenger.

Comment I have similar problem on my GMC! (Score 4, Insightful) 155

It started 3 years ago. I contacted Sirius two years in a row. The first time they walked me through the menus to turn it off, and it worked. The second year they said it couldn't be turned off and that I'd have to wait for the promotional period to end (see below), so I filed a formal safety notice at nhtsa.gov, but never received feedback.

The alert pop-ups keep blocking part of the navigation map until I press the damned Dismiss button while driving in order to see the full map. Repeatedly pushing the Dismiss button distracts from driving, and so is a safety hazard.

I was told that every November Sirius gave out a few weeks of free service to help promote the service. But that caused the useless and repetitious wind alerts. I live in a naturally windy place such that wind alerts are superfluous; it would be comparable a North Pole freeze alert.

It happened again this year, but I was fortunately able to switch it off via settings menus. I don't know why deactivation is different per year. I suspect they do it to get people to poke around in the menus and see the different genres of music & talk channels they have, hoping to entice sales. It's probably stealth advertising disguised as a defect, or a defect they leave in place that happened to improve sales, so is ignored.

F$CK YOU SIRIUS!

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