Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions

[JorgeA]

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act starts to threaten more than just the freedom to distribute the books and music that other people wrote:

Phony copyright claims exploit holes in U.S. Internet law

Ecuador, having bargained away virtually all its oil production to China in return for low-interest loans to finance President Rafael Correa’s spendthrift populism, is in dire need of a new export. And the president seems to have found one: tyrannical censorship of his critics.

Correa’s increasingly novel inventions for suppressing free speech in his own country are doubtless the subject of much envious chatter whenever Iran, North Korea and the rest of the fellows get together for meetings of Despots R Us. His latest wrinkle: a proposed law that would criminalize wisecracks on Facebook, enforced by placing video cameras in every cybercafe in Ecuador.

But now Correa has gone international. He’s using phony copyright claims to force American companies such as YouTube and Google to remove videos and documents that criticize his government.

[...]

Using a U.S. law known as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, Ares has claimed it owns everything from a mock wanted poster for the father of a Correa cabinet member accused of raping a child to a left-wing documentary criticizing the government for granting mining concessions to foreign companies.

(We pause here for a government-mandated warning that too much irony may be bad for your blood. Irony No. 1: Among the many documents Ecuador has tried to get kicked off the Internet is a series of reports from the country’s intelligence agency about its spying on, yes, the Internet. Which leads us to Irony No. 2: WikiLeaker-in-Chief Julian Assange is holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, seeking political asylum for leaking U.S. government documents on, yes, the Internet.)

A lot of people may find it difficult to get worked up about Correa pushing around a multinational corporation like Chevron, which is certainly big enough to defend itself.

But that misses the point. If Correa is willing to mess with a $200 billion corporation on the Internet, then he’s certainly not going to hesitate to mess with you.

Rosie Gray, a reporter for Buzzfeed.com, learned that when she published a story based on leaked government documents that revealed Correa is trying to buy surveillance drones and telecommunications devices that would allow his spies to monkey with people’s cellphones.

Ecuador promptly filed a copyright-infringement notice that got the documents supporting her story removed from the Internet. Gray posted them on a different site, and Ecuador got them yanked again.

Thanks, Hollywood. But then there's no shortage of One Percenters on Rodeo Drive full of admiration for "populist" Latin thugs, so doubtless they view this as a fringe benefit of their nice little law.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

I read this story yesterday but I'm sure Charlotte or JorgeA will be able to find more information dealing with it. Nothing is safe anywhere, even if you live in the "back woods" minding your own business ... thinking "just me and my Wi-Fi" !

NSA Can Hack WiFi Devices From Eight Miles Away

http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/30/nsa-can-hack-wifi-devices-from-eight-miles-away/

The NSA may have the ability to intercept data from around the world, but we now know that it has some impressive (and intimidating) equipment for snooping on nearby targets. Security guru Jacob Appelbaum told those at the Chaos Communications Congress this weekend that the NSA's big box of tools includes Nightstand, a custom device that can compromise WiFi networks for the sake of inserting spy software. The Linux-powered device can exploit Windows systems from up to eight miles away; it's unlikely that you'll catch agents wardriving in the parking lot. Nightstand may not see significant use today given that it dates back to 2008, but its existence suggests that the NSA also has newer, more advanced WiFi surveillance gear at its disposal.

.... there isn't too much more on the subject, if it's true. Maybe our crack spy news team can find more. They find many links to everything.

Thank you for posting this!

An article from The Verge, linked to at the end of the Engadget piece, has a ton more links for anyone who wants the ugly details. Engadget also links to a one-hour YouTube presenation by the guy who disclosed this stuff.

Meanwhile, there's an enormous range of responses (some highly technical) in the comments section. The funniest is the one who replies to the suggestion to flood the spooks' keyword detectors:

My job is a real pressure cooker. Sometimes I feel like I'm skating on ball bearings. My head could explode at any minute. My new boss likes to terrorize people.

My friend Mohammed in Alaska sent me an email the other day. He just turned 47 so he signed it "AK 47" Whenever we get together we have a blast. Especially when our good pal Al Kyda flies in on his own airliner wearing his trademark "skyscraper" footwear.

Al Kyda designs children's toys. His new idea of an all-plastic Obama doll is going to explode onto the market. Al has some killer ideas. He figures Washington DC is a good target for big sales. He expects sales to start off with a bang and them mushroom.

Gotta go now. Somebody's banging on the front door.

--JorgeA

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act starts to threaten more than just the freedom to distribute the books and music that other people wrote:

[...]

Thanks, Hollywood. But then there's no shortage of One Percenters on Rodeo Drive full of admiration for "populist" Latin thugs, so doubtless they view this as a fringe benefit of their nice little law.

These things are going to be forever stifling innovation and severely threaten everyone except for the favored few who lobbied to get these special positions in the first place. We could start by having all patents expire in one year, implementing use-it-or-lose-it rules, and perhaps even rotating licensing of public airwaves and channels to stop the consolidation of IP in the hands of conglomerate empires like ABC/NBC/CBS/Fox/etc ( whatever your poison ) who then exploit it by buying up and sitting on music and TV entertainment ( at the expense of the artists and actors who actually did the performance ) and then parcel it back out to Cable/Satellite/etc at extortion prices and double dip by also extorting advertisers ( and that's where we really pay the bill ). It's quite a mess we have here indeed.

Great you have you back, Charlotte!

that was a very cool image you posted there, with the cycling headlines. B) How'd you do that?

Well that was pretty easy. It is a basic animated GIF. The one picture of a Surface is static in all the frames, the NYT screencaps are real and from the website. They are cropped and dropped in as layers which are resized using Trapezoid/Parallelogram transforms ( I always forget which is which ), that option depending on your editor will appear when you hold the pointer over a handle and pressing CTRL or ALT or SHIFT keys. Once the layers all match the shape of the target area on that Surface screen I then exported a single frame for each one ( I think that was just 6 bitmaps ) and then glued them together in an animated GIF program ( this time was Jasc Animation Shop ), set a few options and rendered it. This time I used "optimized" encoding rather than plain static, which means it actually only saves the "changes" from frame to frame ( rather than like a standard movie which is a sequence of complete frames ), the result is a much smaller file size but at the expense of some compatibility with older viewers and browsers I believe. It is also by definition lossy so you cannot extract out the source images which depending on your goal may be an advantage or disadvantage. But since going from BMP to GIF is already radically lossy it really is a moot point.

Meanwhile, there's an enormous range of responses (some highly technical) in the comments section. The funniest is the one who replies to the suggestion to flood the spooks' keyword detectors

Love it. From time to time people do these tricks, but for it to be real effective each participant needs to alter the text slightly and/or add some other bits. It is way too trivial for a computer to deduplicate plaintext. The difference to the spooks of sniffing and capturing 1 million identical texts versus 1 million different texts is night and day. For one thing the latter will exponentially multiply the storage and processing used. I believe there are some webpage javascript random keyword generators but I don't really want to drop that into Google or Bing at the moment to find them. What they should do is just make a form based randomizer that adjusts a seed text ever so slightly. The idea is sound nonetheless.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Windows XP use drops fast; Windows 8.1 moves ahead of Vista in December's OS data ( NeoWin 2014-01-01 )

NeoWin seemingly gets to gloat as Microsoft Tiles posts a minor gain of 1.19% while classic Windows versions fall 1.32%.

The detailed numbers follow ...

First the obvious caveat that combining those percentages as I did is not scientific because there is definite overlap ( any system that was updated 8 to 8.1 or even XP to 7 will quite possibly be double counted ). This problem is exacerbated by the act of adding already smoothed averages ( the statistics total rarely add up to 100% ). Finally, we really don't have any explanation of Net Marketshare methodology at all. It is already quite suspect for obvious reasons considering several adjustments made previously that render comparisons between different reporting periods ridiculous and useless.

Having said that, it looks like the MetroTard versions gained approximately 1 percentage point in Q4, while classic Windows lost approximately 1/2 a percentage point ( that's from a quick eyeballing, I'll return after the storm with better quarterly details ).

One other footnote. NeoWin had this story hours before the actual statistics were available on the website. I did check, multiple times but only the November numbers were posted, yet NeoWin had already ran the article with a screenshot included. This means that NeoWin has some different access to this commercial company's data which indicates something is amiss.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Court Rules No Suspicion Needed for Laptop Searches at Border ( ACLU 2013-12-31 )

U.S. Government: We can take your laptop and phone at the border ( NeoWin 2014-01-01 )

BROOKLYN A federal court today dismissed a lawsuit arguing that the government should not be able to search and copy peoples laptops, cell phones, and other devices at border checkpoints without reasonable suspicion. An appeal is being considered. Government documents show that thousands of innocent American citizens are searched when they return from trips abroad.

Another day, another enabling of the police state by government courts. What a system we got going here. It's almost as if everything is rigged. Wake up sheeple!

OFF-TOPIC ...Well, this is probably my last post until the latest snowstorm passes and God forbid any power blackout. Batten down the hatches everyone, if you are almost anywhere in the middle to east USA there is a major storm incoming. For us, we are expecting about 24 hours and at a foot of new snow. Unfortunately that's the easy part. It will be followed up with the coldest day of winter so far ... 10 degrees to -10 degrees high/low ( and yes, that is Fahrenheit where zero is actually cold ).

This kind of storm really sucks because it leaves a tiny window of opportunity to shovel all the white sh stuff before it freezes into solid Arctic ice sheets. Hours and days worth of time is pre-scripted in advance, and there is nothing you can do about it but accept it. Kinda like hurricane Irene when it was just sprinkling days before but you knew you had 10 inches of rain and flooding incoming on a timeline and you could do nothing about it. I hate winter!

Stay safe and see you on the other side of this thing, I hope.

( Image Sources: 1,2,3 )

[JorgeA]

Windows XP use drops fast; Windows 8.1 moves ahead of Vista in December's OS data ( NeoWin 2014-01-01 )

NeoWin seemingly gets to gloat as Microsoft Tiles posts a minor gain of 1.19% while classic Windows versions fall 1.32%.

The detailed numbers follow ...

Well, I was going to boast that I belong to an increasingly select group (Vista users), until I saw that according to the chart Vista usage actually increased from November to December!

XP EOL refugees?? But Microsoft isn't even selling Vista licenses anymore, so how does this happen? (Maybe a statistical "margin of error" effect.)

One other footnote. NeoWin had this story hours before the actual statistics were available on the website. I did check, multiple times but only the November numbers were posted, yet NeoWin had already ran the article with a screenshot included. This means that NeoWin has some different access to this commercial company's data which indicates something is amiss.

Yeah, that looks a little weird. Maybe they paid for access to the data ahead of its public release.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

OFF-TOPIC ...Well, this is probably my last post until the latest snowstorm passes and God forbid any power blackout. Batten down the hatches everyone, if you are almost anywhere in the middle to east USA there is a major storm incoming. For us, we are expecting about 24 hours and at a foot of new snow. Unfortunately that's the easy part. It will be followed up with the coldest day of winter so far ... 10 degrees to -10 degrees high/low ( and yes, that is Fahrenheit where zero is actually cold ).

This kind of storm really sucks because it leaves a tiny window of opportunity to shovel all the white sh stuff before it freezes into solid Arctic ice sheets. Hours and days worth of time is pre-scripted in advance, and there is nothing you can do about it but accept it. Kinda like hurricane Irene when it was just sprinkling days before but you knew you had 10 inches of rain and flooding incoming on a timeline and you could do nothing about it. I hate winter!

Stay safe and see you on the other side of this thing, I hope.

( Image Sources: 1,2,3 )

I feel for you. We're due for 4-8 inches from the same storm, but that doesn't compare to a foot.

Good luck!

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Already mentioned by Jorge, this stuff is very important IMHO ...

Shopping for Spy Gear: Catalog Advertises NSA Toolbox ( Der Spiegel 2013-12-29 )

NSA intercepting PC shipments to install spyware ( NeoWin 2013-12-29 )

The NSA Has An Elite Team Of Hackers Nationwide ( Tom's Hardware 2013-12-30 )

Leaked NSA document claims covert program grants complete access to the iPhone ( TechSpot 2013-12-31 )

NSA Reportedly Hijacks PCs to Install Spyware, Has Backdoor Access to iPhones ( maximum PC 2013-12-31 )

Here's a a printed excerpt from the conference presentation that set off this latest storm, with commentary:

How The NSA Hacks Your iPhone (Presenting DROPOUT JEEP)

What is perhaps just as disturbing is the following rhetorical sequence from Applebaum:

"Do you think Apple helped them build that? I don't know. I hope Apple will clarify that. Here's the problem: I don't really believe that Apple didn't help them, I can't really prove it but [the NSA] literally claim that anytime they target an iOS device that it will succeed for implantation. Either they have a huge collection of exploits that work against Apple products, meaning that they are hoarding information about critical systems that American companies produce and sabotaging them, or Apple sabotaged it themselves. Not sure which one it is. I'd like to believe that since Apple didn't join the PRISM program until after Steve Jobs died, that maybe it's just that they write sh*tty software. We know that's true."

Or, Apple's software is hardly "sh*tty" even if it seems like that to the vast majority of experts (kinda like the Fed's various programs), and in fact it achieves precisely what it is meant to achieve.

[emphasis in original]

--JorgeA

Edited January 2, 2014 by JorgeA

[TELVM]

Windows XP use drops fast; Windows 8.1 moves ahead of Vista in December's OS data ( NeoWin 2014-01-01 )

Quite interestingly, yesterday I managed to capture this image with slightly different numbers:

Even more interestingly , Neowin 'wrongly' uses the numbers in 'my' capture (6.65 + 3.5 = 10.15) :

"... Combined, the market share of Windows 8 and 8.1 is now at 10.15 percent, up from 9.3 percent in November ..."

Voluble things numbers are .

Edited January 2, 2014 by TELVM

[JorgeA]

Yeah, that IS interesting -- they quoted figures from a different reporting service's pie chart that shows smaller numbers for Win8.

Curiously, both pie charts put Linux usage at exactly 1.73%. So that must be the truth.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Another reason to have your own stuff on your own hard disk, or media:

Steam Removes a Defunct Game From User Libraries

We (along with several other news outlets) missed this when it first happened, but apparently Valve did something back in September that it has never done before. After shutting down the multiplayer servers for Square Enix's Order of War: Challenge due to low traffic, Valve then went and yanked the game from user libraries on Steam of those who had purchased a copy. To the best of our knowledge, it's the first and only time Valve has done such a thing.

[...]

"The game was multiplayer only and the developer is now no longer hosting servers. However user's are complaining that it was removed because they were still able to play the game using tunneling software, such as Hamachi etc., in order to create online LAN-like environments. Now this is no longer possible, since they instead just removed the game entirely," Reddit user 'tsstssk' points out.

It's a brave new cyberworld out there...

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Not sure if we caught this back when the news came out, but here goes: another Windows 8 annoyance --

New Windows 8.1 requirements strand some users on Windows 8

Windows 8.1 fixes many of Windows 8’s most glaring flaws, but not everyone is able to bask in the bountiful new features. Owners of some older PCs have found themselves stranded on Windows 8, trapped by a subtle tweak in Windows 8.1’s hardware requirements. And beyond the irritation factor, the issue could have troubling support implications for affected users, as Microsoft has told Windows 8 users they’ll need to upgrade to Windows 8.1 by 2015 to continue receiving critical system updates.

[...]

That issue is Windows 8.1’s sudden need for CMPXCHG16b support in the 64-bit version. CMPXCHG16b allows for atomic memory exchanges. While modern 64-bit processors support CMPXCHG16b, some older hardware does not—but the requirement wasn’t a must-have for the 64-bit version of Windows 8. Trying to upgrade to Windows 8.1 on newly non-compatible hardware results in a message that your “CPU does not support CompareExchange 128.”

[...]

“It’s frustrating that an older but robust machine—one that can play modern PC games and run Windows 8 flawlessly—can be left behind after what is essentially a service pack release,” Sudderth says. Other forum-goers echo the same irritation. “I hope that I’m a rare exception, but I’m also concerned that Windows developers will target Windows 8.1 and leave me behind just as Microsoft did.”

The newly released modern UI Facebook app, for example, only runs in Windows 8.1.

And a reply to some MicroTard down in the comments section:

...I've been trying to upgrade to 8.1 since it came out and MS has NOT been helpful. They seem to be hunkered down and ignoring the numerous users in their support sites while those users struggle to find answers that aren't there. Users are getting sick of beta testing.

--JorgeA

[jaclaz]

The detailed numbers follow ...

As always reading the data, even if already smoothed/adjusted/whatever, gives some insight.

Who can now negate the great success of the April 2013 "Run your NT" initiative?

Windows NT was in April 2013 a 0.11% (a dramatic 57% increase from March 2013 0.07%) and ramped up to an astounding 0.22% (please read it as a 300% increase) in May 2013!

BUT let's take Dec 2012 "ALL Windows data":

0.00+1.72+0.05+0.01+45.11+5.67+39.08+0.04+0.04+0.00+0.00+0.00+0.00=91.72%

vs. Dec 2013:

3.60+6.89+0.00+0.00+47.52+3.61+28.98+0.03+0.09+0.00+0.00+0.00+0.00=90.72%

I.e. in one year MS Operating System (according to those data which BTW place Linux going from 1.19 to 1.73%) lost globally 1.00 % of "share".

That is evidently a success of the MS marketing strategies, and a clear sign of the appreciation that customers have for their products .

jaclaz

[TELVM]

... I.e. in one year MS Operating System (according to those data which BTW place Linux going from 1.19 to 1.73%) lost globally 1.00 % of "share".

That is evidently a success of the MS marketing strategies, and a clear sign of the appreciation that customers have for their products .

^ :lol:

[jaclaz]

Yep, but with a more dragon-like face :

jaclaz