magic_haze

Google doesn't offer its computing as a product (well, yes, there's App Engine, but it's pretty tiny). Amazon, OTOH, has a huge, dominant, and very profitable service dedicated for just these sort of things, and it would be good if it got some competition.

Argument-level filtering would be awesome, but I don't know, the existing app+function level filtering seems to be working fine for me so far. The only real complaint I have with xprivacy now is the atrocious UI, and I'd really like some way for it to automatically fetch filters from somewhere so I don't have to bother with the permissions every time an app updates.

That is what I thought as well, but details on the Target hack suggests they managed to get hold of the cards' entire track data (I'm on my phone so can't link to the article directly, but it's on the same website as OP's link) I'm guessing NM has the same data policy.

Is there any reason why these stores need to store the full magnetic stipe details of the card in the first place?

I might be wrong, but wasn't skype's p2p system used mostly for udp hole punching? (i.e., the supernodes were used to initiate the connection and then the clients communicated directly with each other.) With the centralized system, do the call contents go through microsoft's servers now? (this should be pretty easy to prove, doesn't it? Just check the addresses where your UDP packets are being sent to and received from.) It just seems to me that if anyone wanted to spy on you, forcing someone else to migrate to an entirely new system would be massive overkill: Applebaum's talk shows there are _plenty_ of better tools available to get to your packets.

EDIT: This really seems like an interesting question: _are_ there any advantages an attacker would have with skype's centralized system that they wouldn't with their previous p2p system? From what we've seen so far, I think the differences (from an attacker's perspective) are trivial.

xprivacy does the same thing, and seems to be actively developed. The only problem is that it has an atrocious UX, but again, that seems to be on par for most android utils.

I think I should set up wireshark on my network asap. I never used my TV's "smart" features, and the only reason I even have it connected to the network is for its youtube app (because building a youtube app for roku apparently takes longer than building a rocket that can land itself...)

Also, I'm fairly sure my roku is sniffing my netflix usage as well: I recently started seeing ads on the roku start page for TV shows and movies that I'd just watched on netflix: has anyone else seen this behavior?

OTOH, subreddits like IAMA, AskScience and ELI5 are fairly significant parts of reddit. In fact, most of the top items in /all are memes that refer back to things that happen within Reddit, so I'm not sure the links to external websites are nearly as important as the community these days.

It's been blurred out now (http://imgur.com/1GcROpY).

Also, the new maps interface is very unintuitive. I remember there used to be an option to create a shortlink to an exact coordinate: I can't figure out where that is now. There is a 'Save' button, but I think that just saves it to my local machine. How do I share a location?

Just curious, is that image really what printscreen on a mac produces?

The biggest advantage is cross compatibility. Setting up a http server in any mainstream language is very easy, when compared to the task of creating native UIs for each OS. Look at how much hate Swing, GTK and even Mozilla's XUL got before they went to great efforts to use the native UIs.

This was a zero day in the jvm. It could very well have been a zero day in the browser or the OS, if someone was determined enough. I'm not sure the problem can be solved purely with technology.

I thought that article said they used a zero day jvm bug, but your point stands: why would you execute something unknown, especially from a greeting card site? (Then again, it's a honey pot... I'm not sure I would be thinking straight in that situation either.)

I wouldn't say 'exiled': it seems more like 'distributed', but still feeding off the same pool of legal/editorial/technical expertise. What Bill Keller seems to be advocating for is a central system that tries to be objective; Greenwald's system is more like a cacophony of different prejudices that users can pick and choose individually. Theoretically, the central system is better, but in practice, it has clearly been compromised. Worse is better.

Edit: isn't there a sociological theory that basically says that an organization tends to be controlled by the people who care about the continuity of the organization, instead of the goals it represents? Like any bureaucracy, or unions. Omidyar's common pool of expertise will not have the same goals and incentives as the journalists. I'm curious how they're planning to address that issue.

I find it difficult to believe the captcha served over the last year or so were actually scanned from books: they were so completely illegible and nonsensical. I usually had to click refresh about half a dozen times before I could even find a sample that I could read correctly.

To play the devil's advocate, how is this any different morally from what Gmail (and Outlook, and Yahoo) do with their external emails feature? In each case, you give them the credentials for your other account, they pull the mail and display it in their interface (which, presumably, adds some new features that doesn't exist in the other account. Like conversations and tags.) LinkedIn is doing pretty much the same thing.

Yes, I was hoping the article actually shared some of the research Tesla must undoubtedly have done about the feasibility of fuel cells. Yes, they have limited range, but so do batteries. But while it takes _hours_ to recharge a battery, refueling hydrogen takes a couple of minutes, same as petrol.

All his other arguments about infrastructure and safety apply equally well to petrol cars, and yet here we somehow managed to implement that efficiently. I don't see any inherent reason why we can't do the same for Hydrogen.

I can see how a curvature on the vertical axis (like what Samsung did) would help fit better with the shape of the thigh, but this phone is curving horizontally. It would just create a weird bulge in your pocket, wouldn't it?

I wasn't aware the museum technology culture was even a thing. It definitely seems... quirky, though: just look at the list of domains for the JFK museum:

    thesixthfloor.jfk.museum
    dallas.jfk.museum
    dealey.plaza.museum
    dealeyplaza.kennedy.assassination.museum
    dealey.plaza.assassination.museum
    dealey.plaza.jfk.museum

I set up the same system in Tasker: it is actually very surprising how well it works.

I've seen this advice floating around the internet before, and while I agree with the lower limit, who the hell charges their phone to just 80%? I just plug the phone in at night and let it charge to 100% while I sleep. Is there even an option on smartphones to do anything different?

The _only_ reason they provide the feature is so they can make money. Why is this so complicated to understand? Google isn't a charity. They are not obligated to provide anyone anything (unless you pay them. And you can get rid of the ads if you have a Google apps subscription AFAIK.) Do not equate government with a company: their aims are completely different.

Doesn't IE (and Firefox, Opera etc.) have an option to turn off tabs entirely? Using IE6 at this point on a machine that has direct access to the internet seems rather... masochistic.

It seems like they're either encrypting communication between each server or between each data center: the article is very vague. Either way, your data is still unencrypted inside a server (which is obvious: you can't search through your mail without knowing the plaintext.)

Agreed. The battery life was surprisingly short, given the epaper screen and the lack of any features. The UI was a product of a completely deranged mind. The only way to get to some really common settings is to press dozens of random buttons, like game cheat codes. It doesn't even have the ability to sync the clock from the phone network, so I constantly had to reset the clock (!). The idea is good, but the implementation sucks badly in every single dimension.

Theoretically, yes. But it's far more likely that there are bugs in the implementation (both in software and hardware.) It's just a matter of time and resources to find them.

Amusing, but after looking up on the actual reasons why they came up with this scheme, I'm very impressed by the amount of work that goes into backwards compatibility:

> Batch files ran programs from C:\Windows\System32 with the expectation that the resulting program would match the native OS. These expectations were not explicit, but they were implied by the nature of the activity. If the System32 directory were filled with 32-bit programs, then a batch file that ran the C:\Windows\System32\REG.EXE program to upset a system registry setting would be running the 32-bit version of REG.EXE, which means that it would be updating the 32-bit simulated version of the registry instead of the real 64-bit version. Other types of scripting files (such as REG files) have the same problem.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff955767.aspx

How did Linux handle this problem?

Exactly. Should we start waterboarding all suspects because, hey, it might save the cost of a trial?

And besides, doesn't the government have armies of lawyers on their payroll already? The only significant cost to the taxpayer here would be if they lose.

The arguments made for the plan (and NYT's reporting of it) seem extraordinarily stupid. Nowhere in this article does anyone question the initial premise of "monitor everything or nothing". What exactly is the need to monitor the entire freaking internet for malware? Why can't they just deploy their security, whatever that is, on high-value targets like, say, the government networks, power plants etc? (I'll be generous and assume their software is for protection against things like stuxnet... why would these networks need to be connected to the internet in the first place?) The argument of all-or-nothing seems like complete nonsense, to say the least.

> Senior agency officials concede that much of the technology needed to filter malicious software, known as malware, by searching incoming messages for signs of programs designed to steal data, or attack banks or energy firms, is strikingly similar to the technology the N.S.A. already uses for surveillance.

The mind boggles.

Joshua Topolsky's review on the Verge [http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/5/4588922/moto-x-review] seems to contradict the battery life claim:

> "Motorola could have built a monster of longevity like the RAZR Maxx — and it should have — but it didn’t. It definitely gets a full day of use: I used it heavily for 15 hours before it died, and if you use it like most people use their phones, you won’t need to charge it during the day. It lasted for 7 hours, 14 minutes on the Verge Battery Test, which loads popular websites and high-res images with brightness at 65 percent; that’s a very good score, far better than the HTC One and the GS4, but well below class leaders like the Maxx or the Galaxy Note II."

But personally, the biggest deal-breaker is this:

> "But there’s a catch. The touchless controls are rendered nearly useless if you have any kind of security lock on your phone. You can still use it to make calls, but everything else requires that you unlock your phone, which requires that you pick it up and interact with it… meaning you just defeated the whole idea of "touchless controls."

That said, I'm very curious about the sensors they've included, and can't wait for Anandtech's breakdown.