Posts by User4574

Re: CzechMate

I thought it was pronounced "Low Brow"

Re: Ha ha

Would not be near as bad law forced them to allow you to use your own modems. All some of us want is a 'dumb' bridge so we can use our own firewall/router instead of the junk ISPs generally give you. It never ceases to amaze me how the US is one of the few places that has such a law.

Re: Verizon: Just sell yourself off, go bankrupt or give up and let's start again

We could always sell it back to AT&T

Re: Off-topic (almost)

"...NoScript. It'll turn off 80% of HTML5 and break 99% of websites, and it's not exactly easy to selectively unblock scripts. Yep, it's 1999 all over again."

If you have to unblock Javascript just to view the page content, then they're doing it wrong. The good thing about 1999-2009 was that a good website just needed HTML for markup and CSS for styling, everything worked in virtually all browsers and building sites that adapted to different displays was simple.

Then some hipster had the idea of using Javascript to turn websites into ~applications~ so you get served a blank page if you don't enable JS. The trouble with that is you go all-or-nothing and enabling it on example.com allows scripts loaded from example.com to pull in everything from spyware to malvertising.

I'm not convinced that Angular.JS is all that much different from Angler Exploit Kit, these days a modern website has all the hallmarks of a malware slinger with obfuscated JS included.

Re: Who knew ?

"The stupidity is domains with SCRIPTS", there FTFY

We spend time trying to educate users into not installing every little piece of software they encounter and then we turn around and tell these users it is ~perfectly safe~ to allow every website they visit run [obfuscated] third party code that in itself is an attack vector as well as malware conduit.

We finally started extricating Flash off of our systems. We consigned Silverlight to /dev/null. We don't have to keep Java [plugin] around. But yet we don't want to address the elephant in the room: JavaScript.

Many browsers only allow you to disable Javascript entirely, with per-domain exceptions which would be fine except whole classes of developers have decided that we should use (obfuscated) JavaScript to generate the page content so if you disable JS you get served an inappropriately blank page.

Besides being a real inconvenience, even whitelisting sites like these (or even the nicer ones just to get the menus to work) still allows the embedded scripts to call home to a third party domain, downloading code and injecting it into a dynamically added SCRIPT tag on the page.

Supposedly this is just the risk we take for browsing the modern web, but for me the risk of some piece of third party code leading to a malware infection is an unacceptable risk and I castigate the modern web developers that enable this bad behaviour.

One fly in the ointment, it's still owned and sold by Oracle.

Re: Trying to relate this to the UK

Traditionally the satellite pay-tv market was far more open so if you wanted to subscribe to Sky Multichannels you just needed a cheap 80-100cm dish pointed at 19.2E. Any receiver-decoder that supported VideoCrypt, of which there were dozens of suppliers available, just worked.

Subscribe to Sky today and you can only get a box sold by them, even though you own it, many of the features depend upon an active subscription and you simply can't use a third party box.

Cable services here are equally hobbled, you rent the box and modem for your TV and broadband and using a third party box is even illegal in some cases, so for us this has been par for the course for nearly twenty years.

Our friends in the US are not forced to rent a cable box, they do have the option to use CableCARD which just slots into a third party receiver, or TV, and decrypts the channels you've paid for. Likewise you can pop into Target and buy your own cable modem, and often a better one.

Only in the US could you buy an HD HomeRun, get a CableCARD and then velcro a Raspberry Pi to the back of every TV in the house to watch whatever channels you desired.

For as long as they can blame the evil hackers every time they get caught with their pants down because they leave the door open.

No one expects these companies to have air-tight security, clever people will find new attacks. We do expect them to learn from mistakes and not keep repeating them ad nauseam.

Re: Ever heard of Netflix?

Ever heard of "The content is not available in your region" ?

When there is near-universal availability of content on Netflix, Google Play, iTunes et al, then I would agree that there are no excuses.

Re: Windows 7?

"This was doubly true for PC gaming which was an especially lucrative segment of the market back in the day. Gamers would spend vast sums on ever more powerful rigs to run the latest games which always seemed to need vastly more powerful hardware with each release. And while all this was happening more and more first time buyers were also joining this upgrade treadmill. They were halcyon days for PC makers that will never be seen again."

I believe this is what really drove the evolution in the PC market, your average corporate-targeted desktop could expect a 5-7 year lifespan before being replaced and with PCs being rather expensive in the Windows 95-98 days, I would expect average home users to hang onto theirs for about the same amount of time.

"In 2013 most people who can afford a computer already have one, and those that can't have access to older, second hand options, or bypass the PC altogether. The goldrush of first time buyers in the PC market is over. It's all about replacements these days."

In the 90s PCs were expensive and for those that could afford one there was "the family computer", internet access was (at least outside the US) expensive and slow pay-per-minute dial-up, forget about mobile.

In the early 00s PC prices dropped and laptops started becoming more affordable to the consumer, as was faster internet access and WiFi. Now it became much more convenient to have a smaller and portable laptop that didn't need to be tethered to the nearest telephone socket.

Mobile data services were still expensive, smartphones were geared to the corporate market (Symbian, Blackberry) and consumers by and large found them fiddly and complicated (power users are in a minority), in 2007 Apple launches the iPhone and in spite of the critics and cries from the power-user community about it's lack of features (some still absent) it was a huge hit with consumers.

Now where people would have to wait until they got home to update their Social Networks, look something up online, check their bank balance etc, suddenly they could have the internet in their pocket literally at their fingertips.

Is it really any surprise that the PC market is in decline and more to the point, is anyone really surprised given the direction things have been going up to this point?

"...For years they and their partners slopped out the uninspired and comparitvely [consumer] hostile Windows Mobile smartphone platform... with the only people showing any interest being large corporate [and power] users..."

And personally, I preferred a WinMo 6 device over the iPhone; I liked being able to chop and change things under the hood.

"Now we have reached the point that your typical household, who 5 years ago could be expected to have 2,3 or even 4 [computers], all loaded with MS software are now happy to reduce that down to a single PC and a fleet of phones and tablets, and none of them sporting Microsoft software."

And Apple saw this and acted on it aggressively leaving everyone else to play catch-up.

"Microsoft are suffering the consequences of their own success. I think they should consider the option of downsizing their business and expectations and focus on providing corporate and enterprise products into that market and cede the consumer market to those more able to succeed in it."

Microsoft don't need to cede the consumer market, there will always be a place for the Windows PC both for die-hard gamers, power users and even Mr Average who just wants to get some serious work done.

Re: Google Talk

I'd rather Google focused on making the rest of their services available to all and sundry and not just the US.

Re: We don't mind bugs.

Anecdotal evidence holds this to be quite true, consider that tablets and smartphones have been available for years but never gained wide acceptance until the iPhone epoch. Apple for all their faults were successful because they gave the masses what they wanted.

I am not one of those consumers but the reality of it is I am in a minority.