jbg_

It does not turn off signature checking. It allows selective, whitelisted system apps to impersonate other apps after a permission is granted by the user.

Specifically, it allows the open-source, auditable microG apps to impersonate the closed-source, unauditable Google Play Services apps.

I actually tested this a little on a Nexus 5X a while back. With a clean install of a LineageOS build manually patched to include microG (before I knew about this fork), I unplugged it from the charger at 100% and left it for 8 hours without using it, at which point the battery read 98%. The same device with a clean install of stock Android from Google read 87% after 8 hours of standby after a full charge. In both cases it had good LTE signal and had no modifications from a clean install other than signing into a Google account.

Just to provide some context for the "very important security feature" that is disabled. The change adds a permission that allows (after explicit whitelisting by the user) an app to impersonate another app.

Specifically, it allows microG apps (which are open-source and auditable) to impersonate Google Play Services apps (which are closed-source and not auditable) and thus provide their functionality.

Another option is roaming on a foreign SIM card - this usually bypasses the GFW quite effectively; roaming is effectively a VPN back to the home provider, and there seems to be some whitelist for these roaming tunnels. The providers probably provide surveillance access to the Chinese govt, but you will not have trouble accessing Google and other blocked sites, and any VPN you like should work fine through a roaming SIM.

Whether you can find one with reasonable data rates in China is probably the main question.

Two that I have used with great success are Kyivstar from Ukraine and China Unicom HK (note it must be HK, not mainland China). Others may be listed at [0].

[0] http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/

Also Italy: I've never signed when paying with my card, whether chip or contactless. Always PIN, except if it's contactless and the amount is low, in which case no PIN. This is also what I see when I see others pay for things in shops with their card. Not sure how to match this up with your experience...

uMatrix.

The parent of my comment was claiming that it is a solved problem everywhere outside of the US. My claim is simply that it is far from solved, and if someone thinks homelessness is "solved" in the EU, I can only assume they haven't been there.

You're saying it's worse in SF/Berkeley, and no doubt it is. But it's not "solved" in the EU.

I can only assume you haven't spent a lot of time in the EU... Switzerland (which is not in the EU) is the only European country I've been to that does not have a very visible population of homeless people.

There are various companies online that give you remote access to a macOS VM running on Apple hardware, reasonably inexpensively. I use one for Mac & iOS builds. The one I use says in the contract that I am actually buying fractional ownership of the computer, along with hosting. I guess this gets around some Apple terms somehow.

Whatever "dynamically load some JS that loads some more JS that loads the content" thing this page uses doesn't work at all for me on Firefox nightly. Just a blank page with the blog header at the top, even with my blocker disabled.

If it's Nespresso (or a compatible system) that you were shown an ad for, the "unrecyclable" line that seems to often get repeated is actually false.

The pods _are_ recyclable, but whether they actually _get_ recycled is a legitimate concern. In Switzerland and Germany, currently about 50% of used pods are recycled, and this is growing rapidly.

Additionally, Nestle claims that the proportion of recycled aluminium (from all sources, not just used pods) in all manufactured pods now approaches 80%.

Could you expand on "all the unicode crap"?

A: Around the time that a simple blog post required JS from four separate domains in order to display anything other than a blank page.

(Genuine question, haven't used it in the last few years.) Does Gmail support exporting email, other than using IMAP which I understand Proton also has in beta?

Meanwhile, the average transaction value is approaching $40,000. $5 suddenly doesn't sound so terrible.

Both of those figures are pulled high by exceptionally valuable and exceptionally large transactions, respectively, of course. Medians might be a better statistic, for which the figures are around $700 (median transaction value) and $1.50 (median transaction fee).

The FBI seems to have gone further than usual (in my limited understanding of what is usual) here with "assisting" the man to incriminate himself. To me (not a lawyer) it sounds a little like entrapment.

  ... an undercover FBI agent posed as a person who could assist him.
  According to the complaint, Varnell took a series of actions to
  advance his plot. He identified BancFirst as the target, prepared a
  statement to be posted on social media after the explosion, helped
  assemble the device, helped load it into what he believed was a
  stolen van, drove the van by himself from El Reno to BancFirst in
  downtown Oklahoma City, and dialed a number on a cellular telephone
  that he believed would trigger the explosion.
  
  Varnell is charged with attempting to use explosives to destroy a
  building in interstate commerce.

I built https://dtmf.io/ using Rust. The first prototype was using the Iron framework but then after fighting some parts of Iron, I pared it back to just using async hyper & handlebars-rs directly for the HTTP and templating. The glue to put them together is really minimal. Overall, I've been really impressed with Rust.

1/2 Hz is one oscillation every 2 seconds. That would be 30 per minute.

I can only assume you are trolling given the factual inaccuracy of your first sentence (which you presumably know if your ex-job title is true) and the patent ridiculousness of saying "cars are risk free".

The Caledonian Sleeper is quite good, and has a great restaurant car, but it's generally considerably more expensive than flying unless you book very far in advance, and they do some shunting of carriages at one of the stops during the night that generally interrupts your sleep. It's still a good choice between those two cities, especially if you can replace a hotel night with the train, or can book very far in advance.

You cut off the end of parent's sentence. It is "something nobody could give a crap about in the article."

This appears to no longer be the case in Python 3:

    $ python2
    Python 2.7.13 (default, Jul 21 2017, 03:24:34) 
    >>> () = []
      File "<stdin>", line 1
    SyntaxError: can't assign to ()
    >>>

    $ python3
    Python 3.6.2 (default, Jul 20 2017, 03:52:27) 
    >>> () = []
    >>>

ILS is separate from the radar system mentioned by parent. ILS uses directional radio signals from each end of the runway to provide a glideslope and lateral guidance, not radar.

The signals are transmitted from the ground and used for guidance by the aircraft. No part of ILS could alert ATC to anything since the ground stations are only transmitters.

The A320 can land itself, but pilots regularly approach and land manually to keep their manual flying skills current (as the automated systems -- both the ground components and aircraft components as well as the communications channels between them -- can fail).

I gave up on the Slack desktop client after regularly finding it using 3GB of RAM for no obvious reason. Switched to the browser client but found it buggier and needed to be refreshed periodically due to becoming so slow that there was a noticeable delay on keypresses. Now I'm using Slack via XMPP using Pidgin and things are much, much better.

> This is not to say that they cannot fail in some novel ways.

So, then, they do not "completely eliminate" the possibility of failure. Your last sentence seems to contradict the "No." at the beginning of your reply.

I do it pretty regularly. It's fine with a good content blocker, almost unusable without.

There are many typos, in fact. I personally find it really distracting and wish authors of articles with interesting content would get someone to proofread before publishing them.

The link to the immutable, ordered map that "Java provides" seems to be a link to a third-party library created by Google.

If that's enough for you to consider that a language provides a feature, just wrap the immutable ordered map implementation in your blog post in a library, publish it, and now Go provides that functionality too.

Yeah, my passwords are encrypted to two private keys. One is on the Yubikey, the other is printed and stored securely.