Full disk encryption is great. It protects your data from being read by others.

The armed guard is great. He makes sure that you get to keep your data and someone else doesn't just take it away (granted they can't read it, but you probably wanted it to arrive at its destination).

Both things are useful and they solve different problems.

I hope they can succeed at unwinding the years and years of exclusive content local contracts that the industry has. For example company "A" has the exclusive rights to show "1" in say Spain, while company "B" has the exclusive rights to show "1" in say France. It is a morass. Clearly Netflix hates the existing setup - they have to negotiate rights to the same title with multiple, regional rights holders. And of course if the commission issues rules without taking the existing landscape into account (say a rule that says "streaming titles must be the same across the EU" without anything to force a central rights clearing house or the like) the result becomes that the titles will be reduced greatly to whatever set can easily be done across the whole EU. Netflix can't afford to go license the rights in every locality that the titles are currently locked up in. The situation as it is sucks. If the EU can get it unwound, that would be great.

I would be interested in if Valve can snag a commission on the transfer of games from one person to another? For example, in France, if you buy a painting from an artist then sell it - the artist gets a commission. You don't need his permission. But you do need to give him more money. I know that is art and not games - but I'd think Valve could argue using this as one precedent and also add in that they need to develop and maintain code and infrastructure to facilitate "used" (like that has any meaning here) sales and so should certainly get a commission. Does the EU already have rules like this with electronic books? If so, this should play out the same way. I know I wish they did here in the US where we aren't allowed to transfer our "license" for an eBook to someone else.

has disappointed wireless carriers that used the data as part of their decision-making process on where to extend or upgrade their coverage.

I'm sorry, but we had AT&T for 3 years in a suburban area in CA that has next to zero service. We had to get a pico-cell (AT&T calls them micro-cells because they think their customers are stupid) to have service in our own house. This is a large subdivision with several hundred homes right off the highway in a very densely populated area. And no service unless you walked down to the corner and held your phone a certain way and didn't move. On sites like Nextdoor.com people are complaining about it constantly. A bunch of us have Android phones. So did AT&T do anything? No. Lots of people called them and even wrote to them to complain. Google apparently provided this service that would help to prove what people were saying. We finally gave up after giving them 3 years and ditched their service and went with Google Fi and now we have coverage. I know this is an anecdote. But this type of thing calls into question what these carriers actually used the data for. It isn't likely it was to improve their service.

So this isn't new. If these scammers are creating pages good enough to fool Google and other search providers then the pages themselves would fool people too. No need to bring voice assistants into it. If the person went to Google or Bing or Ecosia, or whatever they would get this same search result and would still use the number. So voice assistants aren't really the story. The story is that scammers are getting search engines themselves to show numbers that aren't actually affiliated with the company you are searching for. Some pretty good black hat SEO there.

Sleep mode uses very little that you wouldn't already lose with just the power supply plugged in. We did some tests on sleep mode with some more advanced versions of the Kill-o-Watt meter a few years ago and you would be surprised at how low the draw is and how close it is to just the vampire drain of the power supply being connected.

Already made the jump - 2 years ago for me, 1 year ago for my wife. Range anxiety goes away pretty quickly once you have a few trips under your belt. SF Bay area to Crescent City, then SF Bay area to San Diego, and just recently SF Bay area to Seattle. No problem at all. Charge while you eat or stop to pee. The Tesla Supercharger network has this covered really well. BTW, the AC doesn't cut the range by anything you will notice. The heater on the other hand cuts it a lot. Use the seat heater and wear a jacket - don't use the car heater if you need the range. Oh, you mention hours charging. It is more like 25 minutes per stop depending on how you do it. It is more efficient to charge to say 75% or 80% and then go on then it is to wait for a full battery as the charging rate slows a lot the closer to full you get. It doesn't take long to get the hang of when to move on - the car will even tell you if you use the navigation.

Fitbit pay from my Ionic watch. Used it twice just last weekend. Tokenized payments are more secure than swiping a card. Supposedly can be better than our current Chip and nothing in the US too.

I actually had my physical plate stolen. This was 4 years ago - so fairly recent - in California. CA is a two plate (one front, one rear) state and they only stole the rear plate. They REPLACED the rear plate with one from the car they stole. I actually only noticed it at first because the orange sticker (that year the expiration date sticker on the plate was orange) had been partially removed. I saw that when approaching the car at my work parking lot. People sometimes steal the sticker to make it look like their license is still current. So I looked closer at the plate expecting to see that someone had tried to steal the sticker. On closer inspection I saw that it wasn't my plate number. I checked the front, and that one was still the correct plate number. I had to call the police and report it AND surrender the plate that wasn't mine to the police and my old front plate to the DMV and get completely new plates and numbers. It turns out the criminals had stolen a car like mine (Toyota Camry at the time) and stole my plate to make it look like they were not in a stolen car (and of course make it look like I WAS in a stolen car). So it does happen.

I go to movies too. Probably 8 times a year or so. There are some loud and rude people. But most of the folks aren't. I've had to give a shout and a death stare to one ass that kept kicking my chair. But normally it is pretty much OK. I still think movies should be available "day and date" (on streaming and theaters in the same day). I don't care if they tier the pricing over time. On day one, rental streaming $25, theaters their normal too high price. 30 days in, $8.99 for streaming and it goes to the bargain theaters. 90 days in and it goes to Netflix and others (free streaming with paid monthly account). Something like that. Work out the prices and set them to something that makes sense - that was just a broad strokes idea or pricing. There should also be global release and no region locking. It is proven that if you make access available people pay for it. Sure, there are you inveterate, never going to pay for anything people. But they aren't and won't ever be your customers. Make it available everywhere at the same time and you will get customers.

So, this is an improvement because it is just one step of the process. If it fails (due to the no data connection issue you mention), you just click to use another method and it fails back to the previous text message option. So no real downside on that count. The biggest drawback I have hit with it is that Google won't let you use both this new method and a hardware security key (I was using a Yubikey). You have to remove the hardware security key from your account in order to add this new method. That's really a bummer because the hardware keys didn't rely on your phone at all. You just have a small USB key that you pop into the computer and press a button when prompted.

This is interesting; the configuration on a device like this should be highly controlled. I have no experience with medical devices, but I know that process control equipment generally has vendor approved configuration (and often they only certify one AV vendor so even if our corporate contract is with vendor A, we have to use vendor B for the process control stuff because that is what is certified by the control system vendor. They also have very specific settings you have to use. Failure to follow the settings could result in lack of process control at a critical time. It seems medical stuff must be under similar (if not even more restrictive) configuration control. Having AV do a "scan" every hour is very stupid since any competent AV is doing on-access scanning anyway. I would expect the vendor for the software has specified folders / files / etc. that must be exempted from the scan as well (vendors for process stuff such as Yokogawa, etc. specify that). Seems to be a configuration failure on the part of the facility.

You know, it sort of made sense in the pre-internet days where you had only terrestrial broadcast and cable (and then eventually satellite). There, you had people with infrastructure, etc. in a country and you licensed your content to those entities to broadcast. Now it is a holdover. But, those broadcast entities still exist. They haven't been driven out of business yet. So they still license the content. And they complain like crazy if a streaming service based in another country is allowing that same content to be shown in "their" area (where their physical broadcasts can be seen). They say, "you'll put us out of business as nobody will pay us for our connections or broadcasts if you show the content we licensed over the internet". To which I say - Exactly.

It is time for channel based content to go. Who cares what channel or network the content they want to watch is on or even from? They just want to watch say Big Bang Theory or Orange is the New Black or whatever. It no longer needs to be on at a "time" on a "channel". But the old way of distribution is still pretty well entrenched at least for a little while longer.

Although it is very true that it is how windows was designed from the early days, modern versions of windows do have protections against loading DLLs from network locations that applications simply have to opt in to. For those that are designed to be locally installed to have NOT adopted those defenses is just like not bothering to enable ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization), or other security measures. These applications should be updated to use the protections. Here's info on how to make the updates to applications: https://msdn.microsoft.com/lib...

You wouldn't NEED to hack into it (although it is certainly a legitimate vector). Less technical "terrorists" could simply use enough force to take over a tower or control center and send commands from an authorized terminal (likely with an authorized ID gotten by the "rubber hose" method). You would then be able to proceed to down any planes in the control area of that tower. I think I would rather have the smarts controlling the plane (whether it be computer or pilot controlled) on the plane with outside access limited to when it is requested by at least a couple of members of the flight crew.