Some of those who have been following the net neutrality debate may
remember a spoof poster that showed what might happen if ISPs were
allowed to charge you differently, based on which sites you were
allowed to visit.
Well, in Spain, which has no laws against this sort of thing, a
similar situation has actually happened: one ISP is selling you addons
to a basic broadband cap based, not on the amount of extra data you
want, but on what you want to use it for. Their “Vodafone Pass” product
offers tiers like €3/month extra for a “Social Pass”, or €5/month for a
“Music Pass”.
<https://pplware.sapo.pt/informacao/vodafone-portugal-pacotes-smartnet/>,
referenced from
<https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20171030/12364538513/portugal-shows-inter…>
Noticed your machine getting slow after visiting certain websites? They
could be running cryptocurrency miners in your browser.
<https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/a-surge-of-sites-and…>:
Coinhive's massive Web audience isn't lost on other companies.
Collin Mulliner, a security researcher and developer of TelStop,
said he recently received an e-mail from a startup called Medsweb
inviting him to integrate a Monero miner into his creation.
I got one of those e-mails too...
'Looking for information on the web has become something that we do
day in and day out. Whether it is support you are looking for, looking
for a product or news about a particular topic, all you have to do is
search on the web.
As a result, search engines have been designed so they can help us
sift through or the garbage in order to get the information we seek.
There are Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo just to mention a few. But what
do all these have in common, well, to use these you need a browser
such as Firefox or Chromium first. Well does no problem at all; except
when all you have is a terminal and no GUI and browser. Also, you may
have a GUI and a browser but you wish you did not have to leave the
terminal just for that quick search, and thus comes Googler. '
-- source: http://www.linuxandubuntu.com/home/googler-a-command-line-tool-to-search-go…
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
'For years, piracy persisted mainly in the realm of torrents, with
sites like The Pirate Bay and Demonoid connecting internet denizens to
premium content gratis. But a confluence of factors have sent torrent
usage plummeting from 23 percent of all North American daily internet
traffic in 2011 to under 5 percent last year. Legal crackdowns
shuttered prominent torrent sites. Paid alternatives like Netflix and
Hulu made it easier just to pay up. And then there were the "fully
loaded" Kodi boxes -- otherwise vanilla streaming devices that come
with, or make easily accessible, so-called addons that seek out
unlicensed content -- that deliver pirated movies and TV shows with
push-button ease. "Kodi and the plugin system and the people who made
these plugins have just dumbed down the process," says Dan Deeth,
spokesperson for network-equipment company Sandvine. "It's easy for
anyone to use. It's kind of set it and forget it. Like the Ron Popeil
turkey roaster." Kodi itself is just a media player; the majority of
addons aren't piracy focused, and lots of Kodi devices without illicit
software plug-ins are utterly uncontroversial. Still, that Kodi has
swallowed piracy may not surprise some of you; a full six percent of
North American households have a Kodi device configured to access
unlicensed content, according to a recent Sandvine study. But the
story of how a popular, open-source media player called XBMC became a
pirate's paradise might. And with a legal crackdown looming, the Kodi
ecosystem's present may matter less than its uncertain future.'
-- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/10/30/1931208
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
'Mozilla engineers have started work on a project named Lockbox that
they describe as "a work-in-progress extension [...] to improve upon
Firefox's built-in password management." Mozilla released the new
extension for employee-use only at first, but users can install it by
going to this or this links. Lockbox revamps Firefox's antiquated
password management utility with a new user interface (UI). A new
Firefox UI button is also included, in case users want to add a
shortcut in their browser's main interface to open Lockbox without
going through all the menu options. Support for a master password is
included, helping users secure their passwords from unauthorized
access by co-workers, family members, or others.'
-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/10/30/1245202
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
An opinion piece at Al Jazeera
<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/trust-kaspersky-trust-microsoft-17…>
considers:
A single malicious update pushed from Microsoft could cripple
almost every government worldwide. ...
That a small number of vendors have the capacity to remotely shut
down government infrastructure, or vacuum up secret documents, is
almost too scary to wrap your head around. And that's without
pondering how likely they are to be pressured by their governments.
In the face of future conflict, is the first step going to be
disabling auto-updates for software from that country?
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were the archetypal “two guys who started
a business in a garage” from 1938. When the company they founded moved
on to other things (computers, printers etc), the original
test-equipment business they created was spun off as part of a company
called Agilent, which in turn divested it as an outfit now known as
Keysight.
Now we hear that important historical paper archives from those early
days, which were in the care of Keysight Technologies, have been lost
in the recent deadly Santa Rosa wildfires.
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/29/hewlett_packard_history_lost_to_san…>