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Comment Re:Apple needs to relent (Score 1) 213

this is clearly a play to prevent any competitor from offering the service-unifying technology Google is offering. the suspicious "duplication of functionality" clause on the EULA is practically an admission of this. taken together with the huge number of "approved" apps that do duplicate functionality shipped with the base OS, it's clear that Apple wants to pick and choose who is allowed to duplicate what functionality -- specifically, they will permit apps that violate this EULA clause only as long as they don't interfere with Apple/AT&T's ability to restrain trade. sure, AT&T Unified Messaging is not exactly the same thing as Google Voice, but you'd have to try pretty hard to convince yourself that this isn't a brazen attempt to protect that service against competition. these actions are federal felonies under the sherman act.

Comment Apple needs to relent (Score 0, Flamebait) 213

apple are very obviously engaging in illegal anticompetitive behavior here. i need them to relent on this and permit google to distribute this application, or i am going to flee immediately into the waiting arms of t-mobile the moment my contract is up. apple's management of the app store can only be described, honestly, as mentally ill.

Comment Re:A user's perspective (Score 1) 374

the basic interface of the GUI web browser has not changed appreciably since NCSA Mosaic, for crying out loud. you have a URL bar with some buttons on the left and maybe some buttons on the right, and a display pane for the page itself below that. i can't even begin to guess what you think is so different between MSIE 6 and MSIE 7/8 and Firefox and Chrome and Safari. they're all the same basic interface. and in the details where MSIE differs, it's easily the worst of the bunch.

Comment Re:What about other keyboard manufacturers? (Score 1) 275

the aluminum apple keyboard is absolutely horrific to type on. it is the single worst keyboard i have ever used, and nothing else even comes close. it is too low to the desk, it has crappy rubber mush switches, and the keycaps are rounded at the edges so your fingers get lost. my fingers start to hurt after about 20 minutes of typing on one of these nasty little keyboards. they're just awful.

now, the apple extended keyboard ii, that's a good keyboard.

Comment Re:YOU BEST BE TROLLIN' (Score 1) 275

most keyboards don't have microprocessors and memory. he didn't pick an apple keyboard for attention out of a field of identically vulnerable keyboards. he picked it because it was a special example with odd specifications that enable this attack.

there are a few logictech keyboards he could have picked (the programmable ones with the LCD and all that), but no, this is not some widespread problem. this is an apple keyboard issue.

Security

Apple Keyboard Firmware Hack Demonstrated 275

Anonymouse writes with this excerpt from SemiAccurate: "Apple keyboards are vulnerable to a hack that puts keyloggers and malware directly into the device's firmware. This could be a serious problem, and now that the presentation and code (PDF) is out there, the bad guys will surely be exploiting it. The vulnerability was discovered by K. Chen, and he gave a talk on it at Black Hat this year (PDF). The concept is simple: a modern Apple keyboard has about 8K of flash memory, and 256 bytes of working RAM. For the intelligent, this is more than enough space to have a field day. ... The new firmware can do anything you want it to. Chen demonstrated code which, when you put in a password and hit return, starts playing back the last five characters typed in, LIFO. It is a rudimentary keylogger; a proof of concept more than anything else. Since there is about 1K of flash free in the keyboard itself, you can log quite a few keystrokes totally transparently."

Comment Re:Should I? (Score 3, Interesting) 909

Once we camped out near a river, in known bear territory somewhere in central California. We hadn't seen any bear tracks, but put our food up in a nearby tree anyway (because that's just what you do in bear territory).

At around 2 AM that night, we awoke to hear the sound of large animals moving in our campsite, accompanied by the rustling of what sounded very much like our bear bag. Getting a fire going as quickly as possible (meaning, a liter of white gas poured onto the nearest thing that looked like wood and then set ablaze), we didn't find a bear. We found a team of TWO bears attacking our bear bag.

The big one climbed up the trunk of the tree, just under the branch from which we'd hung the bag. The little one, presumably a cub of the big one, had climbed out on the branch, and in a series of small steps, had pulled the bag along the branch with one arm toward the larger bear, who could now reach it from her spot on the trunk, and who was shredding the bag to bits as all our food dropped out. The fire, of course, chased the thieving duo away after a couple of minutes, and they thankfully only got away with some sausages and most of a bottle of pancake syrup.

Of course, what we hadn't noticed was that this tree had basically no leaves or branches or bark on it anywhere. Based on the number of large scratches and claw marks all over the tree, we surmised that we weren't the first ones to try to hang our food from this tree, which was essentially a food collection station operated by the bears to tax any humans foolish enough to camp there.

The damn bears are smarter than you'd think.

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