Recent Comments

You should see the Australian evoting system. No. Wait. You can't. Not even the government can see that.

I don't see Logitech on that list. Nor does it tell me which are rebadged and made by whom.

Seems to me there should be a simple utility folks can use to determine vulernability.

It's only news to you. This kind of thing has been going on for a very long time. Law enforcement has at least gotten much better at tracking down the criminals involved. There are innumerable people who have refused such demands.

It's so common there are even specific terms for this kind of criminal activity. Do a search on "internet extortion and cyber stalking" for a short list of just a few thousand incidents, or even the friendly portmanteau: "Sextortion". There's even a wikipedia page on the subject, dating to 2009.

This is the next segment of an ongoing saga as this situation gets worse. Expect more of these to crop up. Yes, it is news that someone stood up to these bullies.

What are you talking about?? It's not the phone provider at fault here, it's the extremely poor practices of the clowns that coded the app. For example, "The request for the old password was just for show, like a door lock with the deadbolt missing. It gave the appearance of security, but it didn't offer real protection against a malicious user".

That's not the phone provider's fault, that's the programmers sucking wind at what they do.

Ah hah! I'm betting Comcast got wind of this change, because that would explain why they just increased their cap to 1TB as well:

http://stopthecap.com/2016/07/27/comcast-still-telling-funny-stories-wall-street-usage-capsusage-based-billing/

Working fine on my desktop and mobile browsers.

The https version of the url didn't work for me

seriously, how long will it be before someone sues a phone provider due to this? phone users do not control the computer they purchased. at best they have User level access. install a firewall? nope. configure setting to prevent unauthorised use if hardware, such as the camera while the phone is locked? nope. do we need someone to die for android and iphone to open these consumer devices to consumer control?

So we can look forward to border security taking photos of people's eyes now. Time to switch to contacts.

62 deg F all the time. That's the coldest I can stand for long periods with just a sweater, wool socks and a blanket to cover my lap. Any colder and my face / hands freeze. I can't ware gloves while using my PC and have no desire to spend 8 months of the year wearing a face mask/scarf.

You should try a much heavier sweater... I know you're concerned about your face and hands, but keeping your core warmer will keep your extremities warmer, too.

in the summer you kept the AC on and never left your house because it was over 100 deg F and you'd get heat stroke,

Millions of people live and work (outside) in areas where temperatures vastly exceed 100F. See: #1NA1N... If you're healthy, and dressed properly, it's no problem. Humans and horses are better suited to high temperatures than any other mammals.

I mostly agree with you. I'd be happy to keep the temp around 62 deg F all the time. That's the coldest I can stand for long periods with just a sweater, wool socks and a blanket to cover my lap. Any colder and my face / hands freeze. I can't ware gloves while using my PC and have no desire to spend 8 months of the year wearing a face mask/scarf.

The compromise I made with the wife is having the heat on in the evening, when we're pretty much home for the night, and Saturday and Sunday. The programmables are just to make sure that she's not leaving the temperature up after we go to bed. I actually like being snuggled up in a warm bed and have the room colder, I sleep like a rock in the winter, but then when summer rolls around and we have those two or three weeks of 80+ deg F heat I can't sleep at all. We don't have an AC, it's only a few weeks out of the year it's ever that hot here. We're currently in the middle of the yearly heat wave here, it was 78 deg F last night when we went to bed. I use to live in North Carolina when I was a kid where it was way worse. It was almost the opposite, in the summer you kept the AC on and never left your house because it was over 100 deg F and you'd get heat stroke, in the winter you spent most of your time outside because the coldest it normally was for a few weeks out of the year was 40-50 degs F, nothing a decent jacket and long johns can't handle.

Story In Coming:

I remember one, shortly after we moved to NC from Canada, I got up late and had breakfast then went out to wait for the Bus. When the bus didn't come I walked to school thinking I'd missed it. The school was all locked up and I eventually went home. Turns out school had been canceled because of ice on the roads. All I saw was a few puddles, but no actual ice. I still get a chuckle thinking about it. Coming from Canada, it felt like school wasn't canceled here until you were up to your shoulders in snow.

My preference is only to keep a house as minimally warm/cool as mechanical concerns allow... i.e. Heating is always set at 50F (10C) so that pipes don't freeze, and cooling is always set at 85F (30C) so that electronic equipment doesn't overheat (goes for pets, too). With that methodology, there's no benefit to even basic programmable thermostats.

I don't see the benefit in maintaining a temperature closer to 70F (21C) for human comfort, as it's necessary to dress appropriately for outside temperatures, anyhow. Going inside/outside repeatedly, with a huge temperature differential, is very uncomfortable. Instead such a "comfortable temperature" tends to just cause headaches, hot flashes, etc., and causes a more time-consuming burden of dressing/undressing when entering/exiting.

Now, if I had the opportunity to design my own home, I'd spec it with insulated pipes (among many other things) so that they wouldn't freeze even in very low interior temperatures. Then maybe I'd have incentives and a practical case study to find the lower limits of human comfort and this concept. But until that time, those high/low temperatures are the limits whether the building is occupied or not, eliminating the need for any changes throughout the day (or week).

I am sympathetic to the wife/girlfriend factor, as well as the need to manage humidity (condensation, mildew and mold) in some areas, and with some (usually, poorly-insulated) homes, but I can still usually make this concept work well-enough.

Ideally you use an iris (or fingerprint) scan as one part of two-factor authentication.

Somebody who finds-out your password isn't likely to have your iris handy, and somebody who can borrow your iris or finger isn't going to also know your password.

The one place a connected thermostat comes in handy is with vacation or rental property. I have a place in Florida and believe me, you want that place cooled down when you arrive. But you also don't want to run the A/C for 20 days when it is unoccupied. A connected thermostat is perfect for this. Also the system can monitor the temperature and send notifications if the current temperature goes outside of set boundaries (handy for avoiding frozen pipes or other extreme temperature disasters). As for securing it against outside unwanted control, so far sticking the entire system behind a VPN has worked good. So the thermostat (which has pretty lousy security) is not exposed directly to the internet; it sits behind a firewall and can only be accessed via VPN.

I'm partly with you. I live in Canada and I have programmable thermostats. In the winter there's no reason to have the house at a human comfortable temperature all the time. The thermostats are set to 62 deg in the winter. We suffer the cold in the morning because we're only in the house long enough to have breakfast then we're out the door for the day, but the thermostats all kick in about 30 minutes before we get home to heat the house to 70 deg. Then they shut off about an hour before bed.

The reason this works well for us is because my wife loves to crank the heat to 75 degs, then never remembers to turn it off, which has costs us a fortune in the past. With the programmables she can still occasionally crank the heat, but the thermostat always readjusts automatically when the next trigger time kicks in. They're also easy enough to set to a constant temperature if we're going on vacation and then we can just hit the "run" button to put them back on their regular schedule when we get back.

Where I agree with you is, it's just a convenience. We could survive perfectly fine with the analog mercury thermostat. These are just easier so we don't always have to remember if they're on or off and the house is warm when we get home in the winter. In the summer I just flip the switches and turn them off altogether.

they unlock my phone with my eye at the border because taking a picture in public is legal?

Apparently you live in a very forgiving climate, have a small house, or are not very sensitive to temperature (or any combination thereof). Good for you!

something that may be awkward to do in a moving vehicle

Hopefully, one doesn't try to unlock their phone via iris scanner while driving... Sounds even worse than trying to text while driving.

As for thermostat settings, I prefer the simplest option: a single fixed temperature that the system maintains +/- a degree or two.

The house itself should be efficient and have enough thermal mass to prevent large temperature fluctuations throughout the day anyway. If you feel the need to "adjust" the heat/cooling at different times of the day, perhaps you should invest in more insulation or higher efficiency windows instead of a fancy internet connected thermostat.

The benefits of a connected thermostat are few compared to a programmable, but the cost is much greater. Not really worth it.

That's my feeling as well. It *might* be handy to be able to be able to preheat the house if I'm going to be getting home early or something, but in reality that a) almost never happens, and b) isn't a big deal.
I could actually do this almost 20 years ago with some custom X-10 stuff I had rigged up, but I never used it then so I doubt I'd use it now.

We just finished a replacement of a 40 year old gas furnace for our basement and first floor. Our second floor has separate heating and cooling, only about 10 years old. My wife and I remodelled the 120 year old "worker's cottage" ( http://moss-design.com/worker-cottage/ ) style home in the mid 1990's. We kept our original furnace at the time. in 2001 we hired a crew to dormer the roof and finish the second floor (we had more money at this time and didn't have to do the work ourselves). At that time we installed separate heating and cooling in the second floor. We used a programmable, but non-connected thermostat.

Just this summer we replaced the old furnace for the first floor and basement. The furnace dated from the late 1970's and was not too efficient. We had central air added as well, along with some duct work changes.

I worked with the HVAC contractor to choose the best thermostat. We looked at all the options and the clear choice was a standard programmable thermostat. The benefits of a smart, connected thermostat were negligible. Once programmed, the standard thermostat adjusts and maintains the temperature perfectly on your schedule. It works well, costs less and is not vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

The benefits of a connected thermostat are few compared to a programmable, but the cost is much greater. Not really worth it.

And what "authority" will the FAA have to "play traffic cop" with other nations' satellites?

The drawbacks of using a pentium 586 in the real world

But they impacted at 42,120 km/h, creating thousands of new pieces of space debris, of which 364 are still being tracked. They were calculated to miss each other by 584 meters. Oops?

LOL, I was thinking the same. It seems like there are updates to something daily. Sometimes it feels like I just do updates and a few minutes later there are more.

Dang, and here I was hoping for 50% less frequent.

Unfortunately the press release doesn't mention it, and even the official manual for the Barracuda Pro seems silent on that. However, their previous annoucements (from January and April 2016) about the 10TB line did specify that the upcoming 10TB disks were helium-based, but no mention of the barracuda at the time.

It's a bit weird that the information is not clearly stated anywhere (yet). The case for the Pro version of the Barracuda sure looks similar to the sealed ones used for other helium disks.

Lots more data to go poof in an instant when this heap of junk goes belly up.

Connery and Moore, in that order. None of the others should ever be mentioned, even in passing.

Same deal in Canada. Even if the US merchants get this sorted out, they will still be one full generation behind. There are also implications to things like Apple Pay. I used this once in the US and the cashier pulled off the receipt and asked me to sign it afterwards. Why the hell would I bother using Apple Pay if I also have to sign my signature as well? And this was for a small transaction (groceries).

The big ships... They turn slowly...

Let's just build a city that floats. That way we don't have to worry about individual responsibility.

The Anandtech article #1MSRJ claims that the new 10TB drives are based off of helium.

No tears were shed.

It wasn't easy to squeeze so much info down into a short summary, without either making it overly technical and incomprehensible to a general audience, or losing so much that the significance isn't obvious. So quite a bit was glossed over or only hinted at.

It should be said that the WebM project also had several large supporters, yet VP8/VP9 decoding only made it into a tiny amount of hardware, products and services. Google was also slow about making YouTube videos available as VP8/VP9. But they did make progressively more headway in software and standards, so it's a hopeful sign that so even more major organizations are interested this time around. Perhaps this dual standardization process, making it no longer just a Google's own codec, will lead to the wide adoption the WebM project was working and hoping for.

Oops, didn't read the last paragraph of the summary, ignore me :P

Isn't this going to be deprecated as soon as the planned AV1 codec is released?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Open_Media

Pot. Kettle. Black.

A few years ago, I believe Telecom (New Zealand) were convicted of setting their clocks several minutes slow, so they could charge people for phone calls made outside their "free calling" time.

Given that I'm not from the US, does this particular hearing mean that Time Warner and Charter will be forced to return the money, or will there need to be a prosecution and conviction first?

Don't forget the last bit of it :-)

Comcast claims Duck River is using their position as a monopoly to gouge customers with high rates.

The irony is not lost on this one ...

Comcast claims Duck River is using their position as a monopoly

now that's fucking funny!

Me: I'm paying way too much. Please let me pay less.
Her: Nah, it's fine. You wouldn't like it anyway.

Australia has had chip and pin for years. It recently changed to Tap and Go, with pin entry only required for large transactions

Kind of funny because Canadian Walmart stores are also starting to boycott Visa for high fees.

But I don't get why this chip+pin thing is an issue in the states. In Canada all of our cards are chip+pin now, and have been for awhile. We're actually on the verge of going to NFC from phones using the MintChip application developed by the Canadain Mint. (I don't trust NFC and likely won't be using MintChip until it's an absolute necessity because there's no other options.)

That's the catch-all term used when someone doesn't want to change something. People are accustomed to signing, so asking them to enter a pin is a change. Anyone who deals with the public knows there are a few who are unable to follow the simplest instructions, and will get frustrated when any routine in their life is changed.

It costs some money to include a flier in each monthly bill explaining the change. And any changes will cause a little bit of slow-down when phased-in, but it is actually the retailers who will bear the slow-down who are DEMANDING this change.

requiring PINs with credit card transactions could cause confusion for consumers

We've been using credit cards with PINs in EU for at least 10 years (country-dependent, some countries have been a bit slower) and I don't remember anyone being confused about it. What kind of confusion are they talking about? Maybe mixing up the various PINs we use (phone, debit card, eID, etc.)? or some other kind of confusion?

I remember that as well. There were quite a few MP3 players that would play all kinds of different formats that were actually better quality than the iPods as I recall.

If the garden doesn't also float what's the point ? And a house without a garden (and pets) is not a home !

I remember having a knockoff iPod back when mp3 players were still a thing. The device, produced by notorious cloner Meizu, actually worked better than a real iPod in that it was able to play Ogg Vorbis and other audio codecs that the real iPod couldn't.

I just never thought of it before, although that's how I use to do some mixed tapes. I'd connect one tape player to another over the mic-head jacks so I could play on one while recording on the other. I even suggested it once to a guy that ask me how he could record a song he wanted for his wedding from YouTube and I suggested getting a double ended cable to connect the headphone to the microphone jack on his PC.

Never occurred to me until that comment that I could have connected a tape player to the PC, but I guess that's because I never had reason to do it. It was such a short time from when we switched from tapes to CDs to when Napster became available, then YouTube and now we have all kinds for services for getting music without the hassle of waiting for it to be played on the radio. You can listen to anything you want now whenever you feel like it.