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Comment Bug hunters slam pisspoor code (Score 1) 67

Some of it seems to be just sloppiness, honestly, that they haven't patched things, they haven't upgraded.

A recent article in The Register stated described many pieces of Huawei equipment as being very insecure.

For example, Finite State found 79 different OpenSSL versions, the oldest of which dates back to 1999. The company said it found no evidence that Huawei backports security patches into older binaries, as security-conscious vendors do.

source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/...

Submission + - Librem production delayed by manufacturing fault at NXP

Keith_Beef writes: A recent post on the Purism site announces that delivery of the Librem 5 phone will be delayed due to manufacturing problems.

The page points to a document released by NXP, the maker of the CPU used in the Librem5; this document announces that mask 0N14W used for ten of NXP's m8 chips was found to contain errors. According to Prism, these errors would have led to excessive power consumption and so faster discharging of the phone's battery.

Comment Re:How is this fraud? (Score 1) 86

No, fraud is "wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain", according to Google, and that matches my own undertanding of the term.

The fraud is, for example, a bar is getting the stream of a Liga football match without paying the licensing fee to the Liga, and is then showing that stream on a big screen to bring in more customers who buy drinks.

I'll play Liga's Advocate for a a minute, here...

The Liga's argument is that this deprives the Liga of revenue, and assuming that some of this revenue is returned to the clubs whose matches are being streamed this in turn means that the clubs are deprived of revenue. The clubs therefore have less money to pay for stadia and star players, meaning that the matches in the future will be less enjoyable for spectators that they would have been in the full potential revenue had been received by the Liga.

Comment Re:needs to go to criminal court (Score 3, Interesting) 124

Yes.

The state prosecutor needs to look at this and decide if there is a case of criminal negligence, wilful blindness, or whatever Arizona law has.

It would also be a good idea for Arizona's voters to look at their Governor's cosy relations with Uber, and how he encouraged slack requirements for driverless vehicles at a time when California was enacting stricter requirements for them.

A tranche of emails published through a document request from The Guardian reveals that governor Doug Ducey went to some lengths to encourage Uber to move its program from California to Arizona, including allowing it to test self-driving cars in Phoenix back in August 2016 without letting the public know.

The close relationship between Uber and Ducey paid off when California forced Uber to shut down its self-driving program after their cars were spotted running several red lights in San Francisco and it was discovered the company had never applied for autonomous vehicle testing permits.

Ducey embraced their arrival, putting out a statement that read: "Arizona welcomes Uber self-driving cars with open arms and wide open roads. While California puts the brakes on innovation and change with more bureaucracy and more regulation, Arizona is paving the way for new technology and new businesses." It is notable that he did not mention that his office knew Uber had been secretly testing its cars for months in his state.

Source:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/28/uber_selfdriving_death_may_have_been_due_to_lidar_blind_spot/

Hey, Arizona! Do you want your kids to be killed by Uber's experiments? Or do you want Uber to make cars safer before unleashing them on public roads?

A start, might be to go back to multiple LIDAR sensors around the car, instead of the cheaper single sensor on the roof.

Comment Re:In the US Ambulances are billed differently (Score 1) 334

The hospital won't come after you for that $100k. Not with any real force. Ambulance companies are billed out of a completely different bucket and they _will_ get their money. Ambulance companies have notoriously bad debt collection practices that most poor people are well aware of.

By "bad debt collection practices" do you mean ineffectual, or cruel and persistent?

Comment Snapdragon 845 or Exynos 910? Why? (Score 1) 137

I was wondering this, too. Why build the US version with one SoC and the rest of the world version with another SoC? Moreover, why would Samsung build a version for the US with Qualcomm's chip, and for the rest of the world version with its own chip?

Android Authority has an article comparing those two with the Kirin 970. https://www.androidauthority.c...

"There actually won’t be any divergence in 4G LTE speeds. All three of the chips feature integrated Category 18 LTE modems, boasting up to 1.2 Gbps down and 150 Mbps upload speeds on compatible networks. Importantly, these chips’ modems support global network compatibility, so we can see them in multiple regions."

"Support for HDR-10 and 4K video recording is common, although Samsung [Exynos 910] boasts up to 120 fps video recording at this resolution, Qualcomm [Snapdragon 845] has just moved on to 60 fps, and the Kirin 970 only offers 30 fps 4K encoding. All of these are still boons for high quality video enthusiasts though. Similarly, Huawei and Qualcomm have packed in a 32-bit 384 kHz capable DAC into their latest products for HiFi audio, but those numbers have little meaning on their own."

Comment Re:Just one more nail in their coffin. (Score 1) 40

Seriously, how is this joke of a company still allowed to do business? An example should have been made, and considering how redundant they are (at least 4 other credit reporting companies I know of), they should be made an example to ensure the others get their act together.

Careful... Hit Equifax with a penalty enough to drive the company to the wall, and you concentrate the sector from 4 players down to three, reducing competition. Which is just the problem with the Big Auditors.

Comment Post-It notes... (Score 1) 146

I worked in a place with a security policy that included having somebody from IT walk through the offices looking for this kind of thing (e.g. Post-It notes under keyboards, on cube partitions, etc).

This, in a place that had been a division of another company until a week before my arrival there: so all the legacy systems of the previous corporation plus all the systems of the new corporation, many of them providing the same services.

And password policies like "you must change your password every six months, a password must contain at least one upper case letter, one lower case letter, one digit and one special character" of course, without telling us which special characters were allowed and which were not allowed. Oh, and you couldn't use a password that you had used in the previous 18 months.

So of course, remembering all these passwords was difficult. Some people resorted to Post-It notes, some to noting the passwords in a cellphone or a notebook. A notebook in a locked drawer, of course.

But if a Post-It note with a service name, login name and password was found during the security walk-through, it would be tried out... So guess what happened. People would write down spurious combinations of login name and password. Or write down a service name that didn't exist. The walk-through sometimes took a long time... so trying out the passwords was abandoned; the Post-It notes were simply confiscated and the person whose cube it was would get a new training requirement to follow, yet again, the IT Security Policy training course.

Comment Re:Wait just a minute... (Score 1) 175

Using automated scripts to access publicly available data is not "hacking," and neither is violating a website's terms of use .

If I'm reading this correctly, I'm not so sure I agree with that last bit, about "violating terms of use".

Or are they saying that an automated script that can bypass a Term of Use agreement isn't hacking?

I break down "using automated scripts to access publicly available data is not 'hacking,' and neither is violating a website's terms of use" into two clauses:

  • using automated scripts to access publicly available data is not "hacking"
  • violating a website's terms of use is not "hacking,"

The outcome being that neither the use of automated scripts to access publicly available data nor the violation of a website's terms of use should be prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Comment For a market problem, apply a market solution (Score 1) 372

A pure liberal market solution (and I'm using "liberal" here in its correct sense, not in the sense that far too many American think) would fix this.

OK, so janitors, restaurant workers, nurses, generally what you might term service sector workers, can't afford the rents in a certain area because their wages are too low.

Those people remove themselves from the labour market: they move away.

Businesses that provide services find themselves without staff.

What to do? Go out of business? Or offer higher wages, and pass on the charge to the customers, i.e. the highly paid employees of the Silicon Valley tech industries.

The problem is partly in the "stickiness" of people. They are reluctant to move away. Maybe they have family, or a spouse in a job whose income they can't afford to lose. It's one thing to be single and have no family, and be able to move a thousand miles away to another town where housing is affordable and jobs are plentiful (please inform me, if you know of such a place). It's quite another to forgo a spouse's salary and to forgo the help of your retired parents as short-notice (and free) child-care providers.

Comment Re:That explains it (Score 1) 75

This certainly seems to explain the number of really, really pointless "articles" that people post on LinkedIn.

I used to try reading them, really. But the vast majority of them are really piss-poor.

The ones about language, language-learning, cultural adaptation and sensitivity, etc. are usually so full of fallacies that I could quite literally spend all my waking hours writing rebuttals to them.

The ones about management and leadership are even worse.

It looks like academia, but without the intelligence. LinkedIn is a hot-house for the "publish drivel or perish" mentality.

Comment Re:Mushy, slightly herbal and as salty as affordab (Score 2) 197

And let's not forget that a good soft stew is about the ideal food when your teeth are half rotted out of your head.

Why would your teeth be all rotten? Tooth decay and the need for so much dental treatment is the result of all the sugary foods that you people eat today.

Go back to the 1700s, and sugar was still very expensive. Much of the sweetening in food would have come from natural fruits, whose varieties at that time were less sweet than modern varieties, or from honey, which would still be fairly expensive.

Cane sugar got going with the colonies in the Americas and West Indies, and the associated slave trade, making the price of sugar drop for a while and making consumption increase. Britain, for example, consumed five times as much sugar in 1770 as in 1710. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sugar).

Industrial scale extraction of sugar from beets got going in 1801.

Take away the sugar, increase the fibre in the diet. Barring accidental damage, the teeth of people in 1700 is nowhere near as dire as you seem to think.

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