It took only a few minutes for me to upgrade my 'Legacy' 2016 model Lenovo laptop to WiFi-6 and BT 5.1 using a US$25 intel AX200 kit. It was just a matter of disconnecting the old WiFi card and installing the new one. The replaced M.2 card actually does connect at 2400 Mbps to my WiFi-6 router, though actual speeds are certainly slower. Other notebook PCs might be harder (or impossible to upgrade), but Lenovos are pretty easy to work on.

Before you try this on your own machine, make sure you research any BIOS blacklists / whitelists from your PC's manufacturer, to determine if they prevent you from upgrading hardware.

So, we're just going to keep doing this I guess?

Exactly

I haven't posted here in years, but I signed in to tell you how absolutely ridiculous your opinion is. ANYTHING can be used for evil. All of the vulnerability scanning tools are just as popular with criminals as they are IT professionals. Your opinion isn't just flat wrong; it's dangerous. It's the kind of clueless hysterical fear-mongering that you see when politicians say we need to ban encryption to stop crimes.

I agree, and I am a big proponent of service architectures, and yes, I force myself to use the term "microservices" because it seems to be the popular one these days.

There isn't anything new about service architecture. You put a network call in between two pieces of code and suddenly you need a queue for the interface to be robust. Once you put a queue in front of code, you're handling messages, and in particular, you're handling messages that can arrive more than once. So you need to ensure your handlers are idempotent. Then you need to stitch together a reporting database of some kind to serve queries that supply the data for the UI. Which should mean that your services publish events -- pub sub is another pattern that has been around for a while. All of that work wins you the ability to compose a large, complex system out of very loosely coupled, autonomous pieces. When it works, it's great. It usually doesn't, however, because teams don't have the maturity, habits, or expertise on hand to see such a project through to completion.

Nothing about it is "new," except to the inexperienced web programmers I coach who don't really understand service architecture -- who also usually believe that you can achieve microservices just by taking parts of your existing system and putting a web interface around them. Sigh.

All that to say, there are some definite benefits to service architecture that shouldn't be discounted just because "microservices" is yet another tech trend to have been fed through the meme machine.

The spirit of the Nobel Prize can be extracted from Alfred Nobel's will:
"The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind."

Economic forces are probably one of the major ones that modify the quality of life of every human being in this planet, and have a definite impact on poverty, hunger, health and global peace. I'm a mathematician myself; I know what a "hard" science is and by that logic, mathematics should have its Nobel Prize as well. And I agree, Economics is less hard than most economists pretend it to be. But in any case, that's not what is in question. The fact that Economics is a major agent in the way we understand "human laws" and its effect on humankind, it warrants its place in the Nobel Prizes, I firmly believe.

Crazy, isn't it?

Evidently, there is some unwritten law that states that Geolocation by IP address shall override any and all set preferences by the user on their device, and ignore any possibility that barring or redirecting the user makes no sense.

I get a version of this periodically on Spotify, where I'm informed that the particular album or single I'm looking at can't be played because it isn't licensed to my region. And of course there's the small matter of my being IP-blocked from Pandora Radio for the same reason.

I ran into a particularly nasty geolocation issue back in late 2012, when I was informed that I couldn't access my National Lottery account because they no longer believed that I was accessing it from the UK. Went back and forth between them and my ISP (VirginMedia), with each blaming the other for the problem.

I've also heard of situations where people have found the books on their Kindles vanishing because they're holidaying in an area where said books aren't licensed.

Glad to hear you survived! ^^;

Alerting you to login attempts from new locations or devices, and offer two-factor authentication, will slow down the hackers for a time.

But the answer, for most service providers, is to tell the user that it's their problem now.

Consider yourself lucky, then - SMS spam seems to be pretty common here in the UK. Even my parents occasionally get hit.

I've been fortunate so far - I don't have any fellow iPhone users that I regularly communicate with via said device. I've now turned off iMessage, so hopefully all texts should go out as SMS.

My personal bugbear with my iPhone is the number of steps required to block a number from Messages. As I use my mobile number as a contact for business, my number is public, and as a result I've started getting SMS spam and telemarketer calls. You would think that Apple, of all people, would make it easier to tell the iPhone "block this number from calling me again."

Hello there! :)

The value of something isn't tied to it's ease of duplication, at all. Property is not the only lens by which to view value. For example, property rights are not in play if I hire someone to clean my garage.