Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
This effect is - in some ways I fear, almost inherent to tech.

The same reason you call someone an idiot if they click an ad that looks like an error message, login to their bank on mybank.com.sketchysite.info, respond to a Nigerian scam or open that .pdf.scr file attached to an email. This stuff seems dead flat basic to people who are exposed to scams regularly. We don't call the scammers idiots for making millions on ransomware, most of us just delete their messages without a second thought - instead we call their victims idiots for falling for it in ways that seem obvious to us. Heck, even in much of the general public these are used as punchlines on occasion. Victim blaming and just expecting people to recognize these things as sketchy seems to be quite common for these sorts of technical issues.

Comment · 7 years ago
Consumers are the top plastic polluters on the planet. These products aren't without demand.
Comment · 7 years ago
Yes, cannabis kills REM sleep pretty significantly.
Comment · 7 years ago
True, just disabling it via PackageInstaller by default would do the trick, the root community could re-enable it easily and those who only needed to sideload the occasional app could do so via USB debugging.

It seems like every time I hope for a reasonable solution like this I get let down substantially though.

Comment · 7 years ago
All they'd have to do in order to survive a factory reset is to write to the /system partition, which contains the main OS. A factory reset only wipes /data and a few caches.

Writing to /system requires it to be mounted read/write and permissions to do so, so they'd need a root exploit in order to pull it off, but there's quite a few to choose from especially as devices age and given that they're doing this outside Play Store where Google won't pick them up.

I'm just crossing my fingers advanced users don't lose the ability to side-load apps over bad publicity like this, maybe they should make it harder to enable though.

Comment · 7 years ago
Wow, interesting to see Hikvision on this list, I own several of their cameras (and keep them isolated on a separate VLAN), but once you know them, you see them everywhere, they have a huge hold in the video surveillance market. Wonder if their main Chinese competitor, Dahua will pick up their market share in the US or if there's a more local competitor.

Huawei's HiSilicon fab makes purpose built ICs for these things, I've dumped the firmware for some whitebox ones done by a local tech retailer, but they were still heavily reliant on those ICs. Will be very interesting to see what happens in that market if this persists for long.

Comment · 7 years ago
I think the philosophy here has sort of changed with newer versions of Windows, this is why the taskbar now has quicklaunch icons and regular app icons the same size and place. I keep all my "stuff that just stays open" like thunderbird, spotify, mumble and firefox to the left.
Comment · 7 years ago
> when you loose your data you have only 30 days to get it back before Backblaze deletes it as well!

Uhhh... this one could be a significant issue for me right now. I've got a laptop that's been offline for about 2 months now due to a motherboard failure due to liquid damage. I haven't bothered dumping the drive yet because I figured even if it's got issues Backblaze has a copy.

You're telling me that if I login to my account right now, the data is gone? If so, they really need to make that one more obvious.

EDIT: Just checked Backblaze, still looks like the data is there after 70+ days. Has this policy changed at some point?

Comment · 7 years ago
> Many of the bulging / exploding batteries were not in the end apple.

This is incorrect. Apple issued a recall due to known issues with their own batteries! These are not 3rd party replacements.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/15-inch-macbook-pro-battery-...

As I pointed out there's fairly simple ways for them to resolve this without these practices. No where did I suggest that the batteries don't work at all. The extents people go to on this site to defend Apple's shitty anti-consumer behavior is utter insanity.

Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago
Great, so why wouldn't they accept another battery IC with a valid Apple signature? Even swapping a brand new battery is enough to raise complaints.
Comment · 7 years ago
Google still ships Chrome and updated WebView for devices older than that even.

If Windows desktops have shown us anything, it's that (given NAT) few vulnerabilities are easier and more profitable to attack than a browser.

Comment · 7 years ago
I'm not even in their country, pretty sure I'm not going to get extradited for breaking the privacy laws of a jurisdiction in which I have no physical presence.
Comment · 7 years ago
Wrong link?

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