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Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions

JorgeA

By JorgeA
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JorgeA

JorgeA

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Just read this article, didn't see any mention of it ... possible back doors in hardware and software.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0054adb2-1709-11e3-9ec2-00144feabdc0.html

Yeah, that's pretty bad. :no:

These new NSA revelations are making a case for going back to my Pentium II box and, for good measure, maybe even replacing the Win98 on it with Linux.

--JorgeA

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JorgeA

JorgeA

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Meanwhile, over at Minimsft, comments are being moderated and the last comment (by anonymous) says:

There will be no Microsoft Spring.

Winter is coming.

I think Who da'Punk (aka Mini) has given up hope.

In a running comparison there of working at Microsoft vs. working at Boeing (also based in the Seattle area), there was this commenter:

Making massive machines fly? Booooooring.

But spending your day making animated tiles, now that's cool.

--JorgeA

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JorgeA

JorgeA

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Some days you wake up and feel like you are on another planet. Yesterday was one of them for me. It just suddenly dawned on me all the contortions that the tech companies are going through in order to shoehorn the Idiocracy interface down our throats ...

HP Envy Recline All-in-One PC Invites You to Kick Back ( Maximum PC 2013-09-05 )

hp_envy_recline.jpg

Funny you should mention these. I was going to post and link to the following article:

Is touch contributing to the death of the PC?

...Mike Nash, vice president, Product Management, Consumer PCs and Consumer Solutions, HP said: "Customers have told us that they want touch on their PCs", but do they? Really? Because the list of bestselling PCs on Amazon tells a different story. That suggests customers don’t want touch on their PCs.

According to the latest figures from NetMarketShare, just under eight percent of PC users are on Windows 8. What percentage of those use touch? I don’t know, but I could hazard a guess of no more than around 30 percent.

[...]

I read the press release, I looked at the pictures, and I failed utterly to understand who would want one. It’s like HP realized that sticking touch on a standard desktop PC has limited appeal to the average consumer -- occasionally swiping your screen is fine, doing it all the time is just uncomfortable -- so set out to solve the problem. A problem it had created by adding touch in the first place. And its solution was to let users lie the screen down.

[...]

I’ve compared touch on computers with 3D in movies before and I still view it that way. Avatar was a great 3D movie, but many of the 3D films that followed it -- which were essentially 2D movies with depth bolted on so the cinemas could charge more -- were bloody awful. It’s the same thing with touchscreen. Touch on tablets is essential. Touch on laptops can be useful. Touch on desktops is usually nothing more than a silly gimmick.

[...]

In a quest to get people to go and see films at the cinema, movie studios put out 3D films and charged more. But people preferred to go see the 2D versions. In a similar quest to get people to buy new PCs, manufacturers are adding touch where it’s not needed, and pricing those products way beyond what people want to pay.

Asking people to pay an inflated price for a feature they don’t actually want? Well, that’s not going to stop the decline of the PC now is it?

--JorgeA

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CharlotteTheHarlot

CharlotteTheHarlot

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Meanwhile, over at Minimsft, comments are being moderated and the last comment (by anonymous) says:

There will be no Microsoft Spring.

Winter is coming.

I think Who da'Punk (aka Mini) has given up hope.

Elaborate advertising for sure. If this actually shows real people then this ruse is Orson Welles caliber hoaxing!

Just for the record, the idea is not entirely "new" (prank with displays):

http://reboot.pro/topic/17676-elevator-prank/

jaclaz

... Elaborate advertising for sure. If this actually shows real people then this ruse is Orson Welles caliber hoaxing!

YouTube video

That was funny, but staged ;) .

Definitely funny and elaborate. It's a shame if all the people were acting though. I guess they just couldn't find anyone who believed it? Not a selling point for their TV! :no:

Check this out ...

The Saga of King Ballmer ( The Motley Fool 2013-09-05 )

Someone at NeoWin linked to this extremely well written novelette about the outgoing chair-thrower-in-chief ...

Two thumbs up! :thumbup

EDIT: typo

Edited by CharlotteTheHarlot
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CharlotteTheHarlot

CharlotteTheHarlot

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Security News ... read 'em and weep ... again

Exposed: NSA's War on Encryption ( Maximum PC 2013-09-07 )

The documents accessed by the two media outlets reveal that, at the turn of the century, the NSA began pouring in billions of dollars into a furtive program codenamed Bullrun. Aimed at defeating online encryption, it stumbled on a major breakthrough 10 years later, in 2010, when the agency acquired the ability to decrypt vast amounts of Internet data that had been considered unexploitable up until that point. The fact that the agency has made great strides in its war against encryption is clear from an internal GCHQ memo which describes those briefed about the the NSAs eavesdropping repertoire for the very time as feeling gobsmacked.

The most worrying bit, though, is that the agency owes a lot of its eavesdropping capabilities to its success in secretively influencing tech companies to alter their product designs, "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems and weaken security standards. All these activities are part of the SIGINT (signals intelligence) Enabling Project, a program the NSA has spent around $800 million on since 2011.

Truth is, we knew even before 9/11 that most of the encryption ciphers were already being attacked through multiple methods. It is simply irresistible for mathematicians to NOT try to solve any problem that stands before them. Add in the bottomless money pit of a federal government and like peanut butter and jelly an institution is born. These articles really are about the alternate means to the ends, back doors and other things. I have no doubt that they are all compromised, every cipher, every protocol. What I want to hear from Snowden but so far I haven't is what has NOT been compromised. For example, has WinRar been coerced to build a back door? WinZip, 7zip? NTFS encryption?

Tor network vulnerable to NSA spying ( NeoWin 2013-09-07 )

Sure why not! Even if they can't do it from the outside we have seen from the other stories that they plant people on the inside. They've had 13 years to perfect their spy farm and get the agents inside. Even if they are found out the companies and non-agent employees would be banned from mentioning it. And since the government spends our money with impunity they could just buy their way in. The only thing that scares them is the potential now for new movement toward secure p2p comm and this is where the action is gonna be... someday.

Yahoo Dishes Out First Transparency Report ( Tom's Hardware 2013-09-07 )

Google Expedites Data Encryption ( Maximum PC 2013-09-07 )

I'm really beginning to think that there has been substantial erosion of customer base since the spy scandal has broke. Why else would all these companies be trying so hard to make it at least look like they are fighting for our privacy. It is definitely all window dressing though, and I'll bet the government(s) are okay with this show of alleged transparency and sometimes defiance.

Research paper: Windows 8 picture passwords can be cracked ( NeoWin 2013-09-07 )

Color me shocked, again! This is my shocked face --> :o <--- again!

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Formfiller

Formfiller

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Maybe it's because I have watched tons of X-Files, Millennium and Nowhere Man in the 90s, but strangely, I am not surprised in the least by all this spying. Not even the extend of it.

I think even prior 911 I wouldn't be surprised all that much by these revelations. Strange.

If one would be paranoid, one could almost think all these 90s conspiracy shows were a preparation for the things to come.

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JorgeA

JorgeA

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And the fun continues:

Privacy Scandal: NSA Can Spy on Smart Phone Data

The United States' National Security Agency intelligence-gathering operation is capable of accessing user data from smart phones from all leading manufacturers. Top secret NSA documents that SPIEGEL has seen explicitly note that the NSA can tap into such information on Apple iPhones, BlackBerry devices and Google's Android mobile operating system.

The documents state that it is possible for the NSA to tap most sensitive data held on these smart phones, including contact lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information about where a user has been.

The documents also indicate that the NSA has set up specific working groups to deal with each operating system, with the goal of gaining secret access to the data held on the phones.

Hmm, Windows Phone isn't specified. Maybe it doesn't qualify as a "leading" manufacturer... ;)

--JorgeA

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jaclaz

jaclaz

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Research paper: Windows 8 picture passwords can be cracked ( NeoWin 2013-09-07 )

Color me shocked, again! This is my shocked face --> :o <--- again!

Besides the fact that it can be cracked, the original idea is deeply flawed and the sheer numbers are pure bul*****.

How long is the sequence of gestures? 3 <- please understand how the mere fact that it is "fixed length" of 3 is already an useful info for "cracking".

How many different gestures can you make? According to the math, around 1050 :w00t:.

1050^3=1,157,625,000

How long a password needs to be to reach the same complexity?

ALL CAPS -> a 7 character password gives 8 time that 26^7=8,031,810,176

All alpha -> a 6 character password give 19 time that 52^6=19,770,609,664

Alphanumeric -> a 5 character password gives roughly the same 62^5=916,132,832

All printable -> a 5 character password gives 7 time that 95^5=7,737,809,375

Please notice the exclamation mark on the original article @Neowin:

http://www.neowin.net/news/the-math-behind-windows-8039s-picture-passwords

So how many passwords can you get out of taps, circles, and lines? Using mathematical assumptions, one can obtain 2,743,206 unique combinations from 3 taps, 4,509,567 combinations from 3 circles, and 412,096,718 combinations from 3 lines. Combine all three together, and you've got 1,155,509,083 passwords!

I mean, WOW! 1,155,509,083 passwords! We are free from all evil!

jaclaz

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ROTS

ROTS

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I do not care about icon designs, or resigns. When it comes to programming. All I care about if the **** thing could work on my

9x, and OS9 machines and still do the same **** job without invading my privacy.

Not to burst anybodys bubble, Being gitty over the new Windows ( whatever it is called ) is a complete waste of time. I do not see the reason to deal with these newer OSes at all. ( Until I get to the workplace and that one program will not read my painstaken glory ).

When I browse My documents, and etc folder my screen does not need to look like my Cable Box GUI. All I want to see is a list that is tight, readable and compact, so I can quickly browse through everything. I am not a five year old, clicking away at the music tones of the error Ding Ding Ding error sounds of 95. I am a big grown person who needs stuff to be done,

Remember Bob ? I am sure somebody here remember the many variants of Bob. Bob was a fun thing, when computers were private,

cool, and fun thing. But nowadays Newer OSes seems to be about collecting infromation on the end-user, creating a perminant record AKA a Criminal profile. Then using that information against people ( cough facebook, twitter, etc ).

See what they are doing is making it easier for morons to use the touch screen ( AKA mouse interface all over ). interface. So that everybody can get addicting to touching. No more real keyboard, you know the type hackers, and real programmers were into.

Everything is crap made for crap people. Remember the good days when you could zoom directly to a file, with a command,

or quickly open and close windows, while taking a snap shot ASAP, and then jumping into your mail, in a blink of an eye. No more.

Your going to have a whole new generation of slow minded computer users, who can't even think past the GUI.

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