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Comment Re:ummm (Score 1) 591

Airplane mode turns off (stops sending power to) all the wireless communications chips in the device: cell, gps, wifi, and bluetooth. You can't get location information while in airplane mode.

You can turn wifi back on while in airplane mode, but the BCM4750 will still be off, and you will still get no location information.

If Apple don't really disable the chips in airplane mode in order to keep tabs on where you are, they'll likely lose their accreditation for it, so I'm pretty sure they really do disable the chips.

Comment Here's the real article (Score 1) 406

Since neither subby nor the self-serving linkfarm reblog site they submitted bothered to either link to the Arbor Networks article, or read it beyond the first few paragraphs, here it is.

A better summary might be that native IPv6 usage has "more than doubled" in the past six months, while tunneled IPv6 has declined. This is exactly what we'd hope to see, but maybe not as catchy a headline?

Comment Re:NAT to the rescue... NOT (Score 1) 321

The other big issue with NATs is traversal. You can't run bittorrent at all unless most hosts on the internet can be directly reached; it relies on peers being directly addressable.

When the NAT is on your home gateway, you (or your software) can instruct it to forward certain ports to certain hosts inside the NAT. When the NAT is run by the ISP, shared by hundreds of users, you can't do that - contention for the well known ports makes it impossible.

But clever people have realised that a NAT will often redirect all connections on a particular port back to you if you open up just one connection on that port. So if you can find a willing host to report back what port you've just connected from, you can tell others to use that.

Which breaks if you try to be clever about using the full (host, port, port, host) tuple to identify each connection.

You also have a scalability issue if you try to shove thousands of users onto a single address; storing and searching the state table for hundreds of thousands of mappings requires hardware that hasn't been built yet.

Comment Re:RTFA (Score 1) 98

The two things that jumped out at me were that Moxie has made a faulty assumption on the trust model of DNSSEC, and that Moxie has made a faulty assumption on the trust model of web certification.

Web certification is for relying parties to determine that a host is authorised to act on behalf of a domain holder.

DNSSEC is for relying parties to eliminate the need to trust the distributed database of DNS.

The question at the bottom of the article would lead to this if it were actually answered. Who do I need to trust, and for how long?

For the current model, I need to trust the hierarchical DNS authority system, because they hold the fundamental truth of the DNS data. I need to trust the distributed DNS database system, because I have no way to check that the answer I got is the answer the domain holder published. I also need to trust the entire CA set, because they're the ones who provide a bridge from the domain holder to me.

For the DANE model, I need to trust the hierarchical DNS authority system, because they still hold the fundamental truth of the DNS data.

In both cases, "for how long" gives the useless answer of "forever."

TL;DR: Moxie has pointed out that we place an awful lot of trust in the DNS operators, but failed to demonstrate that DANE or DNSSEC is a poor substitute for the current CA system.

Comment Re:Inflammatory headline (Score 1) 519

If a restaurant could sell the same burger an infinite number of times, you ... still would have a bad comparison, since off the shelf software is a product, not a service.

The value of a thing asymptotically approaches the cost of duplication of that thing. Things with material costs have a fixed cost of duplication, as well as an amortised cost of creation and capital investment in copying equipment. Things with no material costs only have an amortised cost, and amortised costs asymptotically approach zero. The value of software is, thus, zero. The notion that I could double the value of my assets simply by making a copy of an application is absurd.

There are business models which are not founded on that absurdity, and they're working. Value-add services like iTunes offer syndication and convenience; you pay 99c for the ease of using the iTunes interface to find and download a track, not because the track itself is worth 99c. Hosted software services offer value in the management and in the indivisible unit of a system with software, not in the software itself. Software to support a product, like iOS or onboard software for cars, works very well.

But this is only a brief blip in history in which people can get away with using legislation to force value onto a valueless product.

Comment Re:Pfft (Score 3, Insightful) 417

People who believe that ignorance is a synonym of stupidity are ignorant.

This holds true even if you have a stunted vocabulary and believe just that. It holds true also if you ignorantly mistake stunted vocabularies for semantic drift.

I am happy to be disagreeing with you!

Troll thread is fun.

Comment Re:Resolution? (Score 1) 1118

Would be good.

Quartz drawing primitives are vector based, and Cocoa [Touch] interface layouts use resize masks to provide resolution and orientation independence, but all graphics contexts and supported image formats on IOS are bitmap only. The resource loading system will let you support all current resolutions by creating three versions of your image - image.png, image@2x.png, image-ipad.png - but that doesn't future-proof you.

You could use the Fiasco fractal library to compress your ultra high rez original copy, then decompress it into a bitmap appropriate to whatever resolution you detect at run-time; couple that with the other technologies that already make resolution independence easy and you're pretty future-proof. Not sure where you can get the original Fiasco, but it's part of the netpbm source distribution, and under a GPL license.

But the App Store is not compatible with the GPL. :-)

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