After trying several different hand-me-downs over the years including a 486, original iMacs (Lemon-lime), and a recent desktop Apple, I've concluded that the next machine will be the iPad with the largest display that I can find.
Consuming content - check App in the same place as it was before - check buttons and menus not moved around even inadvertently - check
My mom loves seasonal wallpapers and screensavers - fuck you mom. Check.
Those are pretty poor examples. Almost any optical drive, barcode scanner or digital camera that will work without drivers on windows would do the same on OSX.
What? That was some twist to the conversation, look at this again:
Surface Pro at $100 less has no ethernet port
Neither do Macbook Air
or usb port
Yes it does.
or real keyboard?
Reviewers actually rate it as quite good, I haven't tried, have you? And you can of course add any external keyboard you want
Can't plug in an optical drive or barcode reader or digital camera?
Yes you can, all of that. As external (but that would also be the case with the Macbook Air
What is it, some kind of expensive toy?
Less so than Macbook Air it seems.
So? Google can hardly be held responsible for search engines being hard to build. And anti trust is meant to protect customers and consumers - not competition.
Bottom line - if customers don't like what Google is doing, they can move away at the click of a button. What more is there to be said about this?
I wasn't really arguing anti trust or not. Just pointing out that there is a problem with the "move away at a click of a button" argument if there is nothing to move to. I do believe people very seriously underestimate the insane table stake investments needed to build a competitor, even if Google did slack of and deserve competition. Again, not saying this alone is reason for anti trust regulation.
Microsoft was making it difficult for a customer to purchase a PC without Windows installed. It was also making life difficult for third party browsers. All of which limited customer choice.
In the search market, customers have all the choice in the world. No lock in. No costs of switching. Nothing.
All the choice in the world? How many full-functional general purpose search engines do you know that don't get data from either Google or Bing?
The barrier to competition on search is not the cost of switching to users, but the insane cost of building something that competes with Google. This is today a really hard problem, and Microsoft is spending billions of dollars per quarter on it.
Not according to DuckDuckGo itself. If you have citations to offer, I'd be curious to see them.
The first listed source on that page is Yahoo, which is Bing.
That sounds just as bad as what Nokia is doing here, and should be treated the same.
Agree! My point exactyly with pointing this out is that this is a very broad issue that needs broader attention than just the fuck Nokia circle jerk happening here, based on a very uninformed blog post.
The difference is that Opera Mini is explicitly advertised as a "proxy browser". If you choose to use it, you know what it is about, and what the implied security risks are.
Here, we're talking about a stock browser in a smartphone, doing this by default with no warnings given to the user. I don't care why they thing it's a good idea, it's a major compromise of security.
Opera Mini is pre-installed on a number of models from Samsung, Motorola, LG and others. I had a phone a few years ago that came with Opera Mini, I can not remember it giving any special warnings. http://tech2.in.com/news/mobile-phones/samsung-feature-phones-come-preinstalled-with-opera-mini/284642
Then the network operators in these cases are as responsible as Nokia is here.
Network operators, Samsung (the linked article lists a number of phones where Samsung pre-installs Opera Mini), etc. Which is exactly my point, this is something you can get from most phone makers (except Apple), for a long time, and as I agree education and information on this is needed that should be part of the story and discussion.
No. They didn't tell us. This isn't merely a proxy. A proxy can be used with SSL without decrypting the user's data.
This is Nokia _pretending_ to be whoever you're SSLing to, pre-configuring the browser to accept the ruse, DECRYPTING YOUR DATA, "compressing" it, sending it along their pipe, recrypting it, recompressing it, and then _pretending_ to be you to whoever you're trying to contact. This could only be more of a violation of your privacy (and potentially the law, somebody look into this) if they were blatantly reading your data and issued a press release saying "Yup, we're reading your emails. Go fuck youself."
Interestingly, this is as fraudulent to the recipient as it is to the user. Somebody might want to poke the higher-ups at Google or any common HTTPS destination and let them know that Nokia phones are fraudulently impersonating non-compromised users of their services. _That_ will be fun to watch.
Are people here really so unfamiliar with how server-based "browsers" (they are not real web browsers) work? They are basically fancy terminals to a server based browsing session. Of course SSL needs to be terminated at the server in such a setup because it is the server doing all the rendering and javascript processing. This has been common for a long time. Opera Mini operates exactly the same as this Nokia browser, also for SSL, and is pre-installed on a ton of phones from Samsung, Motorola, LG and others.
so, why can't they keep their fingers off httpS, then?
proxy thru the plaintext. fine. no one cares.
but my banking?
sheesh, keep your damned fingers off my bits! that's creepy that they'd feel JUSTIFIED in decrypting ssl.
ssl also is not usually bulk traffic. is it? I don't see graphics and movies coming thru in ssl. ssl is there FOR privacy.
why proxy this stuff when you can proxy the bulk-only stuff and everyone wins with no loss of privacy?
this is not rocket science.
Because the phone doesn't have a full web browser. The server is doing the rendering, you are basically surfing as a server session through a terminal. Exactly same as Opera Mini does (also pre-installed on a ton of phones, from Samsung, Motorola, LG and others)
It is a Nokia issue. Nokia gives you a cell phone with a MITM exploit preinstalled from factory. Opera allows you to download and install their MITM Opera Mini suit, if you so wish and trust them, or:
If you need full end-to-end encryption, you should use a full web browser such as Opera Mobile.
A ton of devices have come pre-installed with Opera Mini, from Samsung, Motorola, LG, Sony-Ericsson, etc., depending on network operator. http://tech2.in.com/news/mobile-phones/samsung-feature-phones-come-preinstalled-with-opera-mini/284642
As I said before, what Opera Mini is doing is the same thing. Though, I am not sure Opera Mini is doing it for https (maybe it does I just don't know). But Opera Mini tells you all the traffic is routed through them. Nokia Xpress Browser does not appear to tell the user (since some users are surprised of the behavior)
Opera Mini does it for https too. As for difference in information between the two.. I couldn't say, it is mentioned for both in Wikipedia, but this storm seems to be mainly wipped up from an inflammatory blog post from someone who clearly has very little insight on mobile browsers, posted to a site that currently hate all things Nokia..
I agree that there are concerns about this type of browsers to discuss, but making it a Nokia issue isn't helping that.
It doesn't matter what his credentials are, if he's right, which he appears to be based on Nokia's response.
Of course he is "right", in that he through incompetence has "discovered" that there is a class of mobile browser "front-ends" (not really full web browsers) that do server based rendering and compression to save bandwith and increase speed on slow connection. Which has been well known (at least for people interested in mobile browsers) for years, fx all Opera Mini browsers do this, on all platforms, with millions of users.
They are not really full web browsers but fancy terminals, you use a server to browse is another way to look at it, and of course the secure connection has to be terminated at the server in this scenario. There are really good questions to discuss about information and education around this, but to suddenly jump on Nokia is just obscuring the reality of this.
Windows hat upwards from 90% of the desktop market. Google has, what, 50-70%, depending on country/region?
Depending on whose numbers you use, Google has 70-80% share in US (Comscore being the lowest, with just below 70%, NetApps and other measurement services pegging it higher), 80%-90% WW, and in Europe 90+% (as high as 95+% in many markets). And that is if you are measuring searches, their share is significantly higher on revenue, because they are the only actor in the market with enough critical mass in the ad auction system
Latest US ComScore: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2232359/Google-Takes-67-Search-Engine-Market-Share One by country list: http://returnonnow.com/2012/06/search-engine-market-share-country/
Not arguing that Windows doesn't have a high marketshare (at least on traditional PCs, there was a story recently that the true market share on computing devices - including tablets and smartphones etc - was around 20%). But Google has a stronger dominance than many think. As for arguing monopoly or not, that is a different discussion, just jumping in on the numbers here.
Why do people just make things up as you've done here?
Using the built in browser, browsing to maps.google.com redirected to just the generic search page. Google was refusing to serve up the webpage to windows phone users. This has nothing to do with APIs accessing google maps. They blocked the phones' browsers entirely.
To his defense, he just seems to be confusing together two separate recent episodes of Google blocking access to their service for Microsoft platforms.
One was WP8 phones being redirected away from mobile Google maps, just based on browser UA string (if WP8 users faked their UA, the service worked perfectly, so the mobile IE10 browser is fully capable of rendering the code). The other was that Microsoft is not getting the same rich API access to Youtube for WP8 Youtube app as Android and iOS Youtube apps are using, so lacking much of the functionality.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/05/calling-shenanigans-on-googles-windows-phone-8-maps-narrative/ http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/microsoft-fuming-over-google-block-of-youtube-windows-app-102979
Function reject.
