andreasley

The official website of the "Openbaar Ministerie" (Dutch Public Prosecution Service) contains a press release, including some animations and intercepted calls [1] as well as a page with documents from the presentation [2].

[1] https://www.om.nl/onderwerpen/mh17-crash/@96068/jit-flight-m...

[2] https://www.om.nl/onderwerpen/mh17-vliegramp/presentaties/pr...

While the previous aircraft were downed by MANPADS or AA, the AN-26 in question was flying at an altitude only reachable by a SAM. At the bottom of this article [1] is a good overview of the shot-down aircraft over east Ukraine in 2014.

[1] http://airheadsfly.com/2014/07/15/ukraine-latest-an-26-downi...

On July 14th 2014, just three days before the MH17 incident, an Antonov AN-26 Ukrainian military transport plane was hit at 21 000 feet altitude, so there was a strong indication that SAMs were available to the seperatists. According to the Dutch Safety Board, the airspace should have been closed [1].

[1] http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/dutch-safety-board-u...

DE-CIX, the world's largest internet exchange point, has had a (forced) cooperation with BND, the german federal intelligence service, for several years. The BND also cooperates with the NSA every once in a while. Digital privacy is over everywhere.

While the swiss men did vote for it in 1971 and allowed women to vote on a federal basis, the men in the canton (state) of "Appenzell Innerrhoden" voted against it until 1990. Then the federal court stepped in and forced them to allow women to vote, too. "Appenzell Innerrhoden" has about 16 000 citizens.

Switzerland is small but diverse. The states have significant freedom in making their laws. This usually works well, but sometimes leads to situations like this.

Documents were collected for up to 700 000 people (about 10% of the population), but saying they were "under surveillance" is stretching it. Basically everyone who was politically "left" was considered a potential threat and random snippets of information about them were collected – sometimes absurdly trivial stuff and quite a lot of it wrong.

In 1994, a digital equivalent was born: A database called "ISIS". In 2010, a review showed that more than 230 000 people and organizations were registered once again. NDB, the federal intelligence service, collected data without checking if it is relevant. After a mandatory cleanup, this database is now said to only contain about 30 000 entities. The outcry was much smaller that time.

Now, my fellow citizens voted to be properly surveilled. And this time, we'll do it right and probably collect everything, including looking at any traffic flowing through Switzerland. That will be easy, since a recently passed law called "BÜPF" forces every swiss provider to retain metadata for six months, make realtime surveillance possible, decrypt data if they helped encrypt it and pay themselves for the necessary surveillance equipment (they will be reimbursed for every surveillance case).

I voted against it, but the writing was on the wall. Well-propagated irrational fear beats common sense. Maybe the checks and balances will be properly implemented this time, but I'm not counting on it.

Because it serves their interest to say so, regardless if it's actually true. Russia is a welcome target and it's basically impossible to prove who's reponsible for a hack like this (the korean symbols in the Fancy Bear's website's [1] source code are cute though).

Also, that's how media works these days. One press release to Reuters, and all the newspapers publish the same "facts".

That being said, I think it's fairly plausible that some actor with relations to Russia would publish documents like these.

[1] http://fancybear.net

According to this article [1], the compromised app was indeed signed – but with a different Developer ID than usual.

Anyone with a credit card can sign up for Apple's developer program and start signing apps.

[1] http://www.welivesecurity.com/2016/08/30/osxkeydnap-spreads-...

I believe you're talking about "Axel Springer AG" (the publisher of "Bild" that loves to fight against AdBlockers). The free books are from "Springer Science+Business Media", a completely different company.

http://www.springer.com/us/about-springer/company-informatio...

Exactly: It's important that they don't get lost in the noise.

Excellent summary.

I'm really happy that Apple open-sourced Swift in this way. However, most of the ~400 pull requests are fixes for single typos. I hope that managing the GitHub issues won't become too much of a burden for the main developers (those with write access to the repository).

If that were so, the statistics for Upstream and Downstream would be identical. All upstream is downstream for someone else. Very few packets get lost. :) The question is: What is meant by "traffic" in this report? Is it the amount of bytes? The number of packets? The number of requests? It's not entirely clear.

In Switzerland, there is a service called "Mobility" where you can basically rent a car by the hour. You have to set up an account and provide them with a copy of your drivers license once, but after that, a car can easily and instantly be booked on their website or by using their mobile app. In larger cities, there's always a few cars nearby, ready to roll. They take care of all the maintenance stuff, repairs and insurance; you just pay a fixed amount per km you drive and for the duration of your use.

It's remarkably convenient and cheaper than owning a car if you don't drive that much. I can totally see this as the future – especially with self-driving vehicles.

The initial budget for the Gotthard Base Tunnel was CHF 8 billion; the actual costs are now up to about CHF 12 billion. So not exactly on budget either. :) The increased costs were because of geology (4.5%), changed requirements (6.3%), environmental enhancements (1.3%) and upgrades for rail technology and safety (8.5%).

Recommendations are shown now for me, too. Not really movies that I liked, but at least it's working. The "Something wrong?" link at the bottom right is still a 404 though. :(

If only it worked. After rating 50 movies, the "recommended" section still is empty. Also, lots of GUI issues, dead links etc.

What most people don't realize is that GUI and command line aren't mutually exclusive. There's nothing preventing developers from creating apps that have a beautiful and informative GUI while providing a way to use text-based, specific commands. Use the best from both worlds.

It would be great if there was a system-wide, standardized way to do this in every app, but until an OS with this ability exists, we'll just have to do it ourselves.

It's not about Verizon. Of course they know where their users connect to. But by injecting a special HTTP header field, they make it possible for third parties to track the user – for example an ad network that serves ads on sites the user visits. Regular cookies are limited to certain domains, but this header is added to every request, making it cross-domain. HTTPS would prevent Verizon from injecting it.

They could encourage developers to support and prefer HTTPS – which is exactly what they are doing: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/technotes...

Aren't there better ways to ensure "desktop protection" than relying on conscious actions of employees?

For the company in question, security seems to be very important as shown by the fact that each computer sits on its own VLAN. Maybe they should consider using something like wireless tokens that lock the workstation if the token is too far away (e.g. http://www.gkchain.com).

I've also worked in companies where lots of doors require a key card, which also unlocks the computer (by means of a card reader at the workstation). So if you leave the room, you take the card with you anyway and the computer gets locked automatically.

You're absolutely right. My bad.

On the desktop: Nvidia added full hardware acceleration support for HEVC and VP9 in their GM206 GPU only this year. Intel has partial hardware acceleration for both codecs since this year as well, as does AMD. But: Only for decoding.

On mobile, there are some SoCs that can do HEVC and VP9 decoding in 4K in hardware (like Nvidia's Tegra X1), but the large majority of smartphones does not yet have this capability. Encoding is a different story altogether. And iPhones will only do H.264 anyway for the foreseeable future.

I'm a strong proponent of open standards and I'm really looking forward to VP9 and HEVC, but it will be a while before they'll have good hardware acceleration on all platforms.

It's good to see that libvpx and x265 are moving forward.

However, not mentioned is that a higher bitrate doesn't necessarily correlate with higher perceptual quality.

Additionally, part of H.264's appeal is its widespread hardware support, which enables features like smartphones with 4K video recording.

I seem to remember the web of 1999 very differently: Java applets for navigation trees, stuff that requires ActiveX and only works in IE on Windows, HTML tables with background images in cells for layout, almost nobody used SSL, almost no server could max out a reasonably fast connection (if you were lucky enough to live/work where broadband was available). Barely any audio/video.

Yes, some things were better and easier then, but it wasn't all great.

In my opinion, most technological problems have been solved: Broadband is widely available, we have fairly good standards for HTML/CSS/JavaScript, reliance on plugins and stuff like ActiveX and Java is at an all time low. The question is now what we do with our newly-gained freedom – and as usual, this one is trickier than the technical stuff.

Andrew Miklas wrote in a comment: The attacker gained unauthorized access to an administrative panel provided by one of our hosting providers.

There have been several breaches in the last months where this was the main cause and it's something almost impossible to defend against – unless you're running your own datacenter hardware, which is very hard to get right.

Few providers properly secure their control panels with 2FA, even though these admin panels are an attractive target and almost always provide full access to the system.

Note that these tests were conducted on a MacBook – presumably running OS X. Apple invested a lot of time optimizing Safari and OS X for low power usage, so it's not exactly surprising that Safari wins in most cases. It would be very interesting the see a comparison with Windows and Linux (if possible on the same hardware).

That certainly looks like it was inspired by mine: https://www.andreasley.ch/en/costcalculator/

I take that as a compliment. :)

As a developer, I hope for a replacement for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. A solid, fast, safe framework collection for both iOS and OS X based on Swift. It sounds like "Core OS" could be just that.

While Apple did a remarkable job by making all the Cocoa stuff available in Swift, a lot of Swift's strength only shines when used with frameworks that are built for it.

This is the same file as provided by cryptome.org (H.264 1280x720 HD, Main profile, 4Mbps, Audio English AAC 300Kbps):

  magnet:?xt=urn:btih:77e1a18941186c1e6441721df91183d2a339d103&dn=Citizenfour+%28Edward+Snowden+story%2C+by+Laura+Poitras%29+%5B720p%2C+h264%5D+%5BIsohunt.to%5D&xl=3636600806&dl=3636600806&tr=udp://9.rarbg.com:2710/announce&tr=http://announce.torrentsmd.com:8080/announce.php

Here are a few alternatives that I've discovered – after I've written my own version, of course...

http://www.kinvey.com/app-cost-estimator

http://howmuchtomakeanapp.com

http://freeappestimate.com