Consumers are the top plastic polluters on the planet. These products aren't without demand.
Readit Newsbuildzr commented on Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and PepsiCo are the Top Plastic Polluters onegreenplanet.org/enviro... · Posted by u/elorant
buildzr commented on Deep Sleep May Help the Brain Clear Alzheimer's Toxins npr.org/sections/health-s... · Posted by u/spking
buildzr commented on New 'unremovable' xHelper malware has infected 45,000 Android devices zdnet.com/article/new-unr... · Posted by u/tzm
Is side loading the only way that code requiring root can easily get on a phone though? What about USB debugging?
True, just disabling it via PackageInstaller by default would do the trick, the root community could re-enable it easily and those who only needed to sideload the occasional app could do so via USB debugging.
It seems like every time I hope for a reasonable solution like this I get let down substantially though.
buildzr commented on New 'unremovable' xHelper malware has infected 45,000 Android devices zdnet.com/article/new-unr... · Posted by u/tzm
Wonder if it's written itself into recovery. Or the SIM card/baseband - SIM card in particular usually includes functionality for triggering a sideload of apps (eg for carrier apps), sending notifications, etc into the main SOC so it fits. Maybe the second instance of SIM card malware ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31D94QOo2gY
There are only so many places it can be hiding if it's surviving a factory reset.
--Guy who is undoubtedly vastly underestimating the problem given that it's resisted AV vendors for a while
All they'd have to do in order to survive a factory reset is to write to the /system partition, which contains the main OS. A factory reset only wipes /data and a few caches.
Writing to /system requires it to be mounted read/write and permissions to do so, so they'd need a root exploit in order to pull it off, but there's quite a few to choose from especially as devices age and given that they're doing this outside Play Store where Google won't pick them up.
I'm just crossing my fingers advanced users don't lose the ability to side-load apps over bad publicity like this, maybe they should make it harder to enable though.
buildzr commented on U.S. widens trade blacklist to include some of China’s top AI startups reuters.com/article/us-us... · Posted by u/nwrk
Wow, interesting to see Hikvision on this list, I own several of their cameras (and keep them isolated on a separate VLAN), but once you know them, you see them everywhere, they have a huge hold in the video surveillance market. Wonder if their main Chinese competitor, Dahua will pick up their market share in the US or if there's a more local competitor.
Huawei's HiSilicon fab makes purpose built ICs for these things, I've dumped the firmware for some whitebox ones done by a local tech retailer, but they were still heavily reliant on those ICs. Will be very interesting to see what happens in that market if this persists for long.
buildzr commented on Mozilla announces PGP Support in Thunderbird, coming 2020 blog.mozilla.org/thunderb... · Posted by u/exabrial
It’s a feature I prefer. Anything I leave open all the time but only click rarely (like messaging apps) I prefer in the tray. This separates “apps I’m actively using” in the main area of the taskbar and “apps that are technically open but I’m not really using”
It’s also worth nothing there’s an option to disable hiding everything in the popout menu thing, a setting i usually change. Saves a click and that space is otherwise unused in the taskbar anyway
I think the philosophy here has sort of changed with newer versions of Windows, this is why the taskbar now has quicklaunch icons and regular app icons the same size and place. I keep all my "stuff that just stays open" like thunderbird, spotify, mumble and firefox to the left.
buildzr commented on Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond backblaze.com/blog/backbl... · Posted by u/mrchucklepants
For me the restore experience was painful.
I attempted to restore about 1TB of data (on macOS). Since I have 500mbit internet I assumed I'd be able to download it through the app, but that didn't prove easy. Even when split into smaller zip archives, the download would go terribly slow. Often, the archives would be corrupted and I'd have to re-download them.
In the end I had to order a drive to Europe (and pay the tariffs), which is a pain in the ass. (But they did return the deposit even though I missed the 30 day window.)
Edit:
Oh yea, and when you loose your data you have only 30 days to get it back before Backblaze deletes it as well! That's what happened to me right before a multi-week trip, so I was pretty unhappy that I wasn't able to download my backup in the 5-or-so days I had at my disposal, thus having to order the physical drive.
> when you loose your data you have only 30 days to get it back before Backblaze deletes it as well!
Uhhh... this one could be a significant issue for me right now. I've got a laptop that's been offline for about 2 months now due to a motherboard failure due to liquid damage. I haven't bothered dumping the drive yet because I figured even if it's got issues Backblaze has a copy.
You're telling me that if I login to my account right now, the data is gone? If so, they really need to make that one more obvious.
EDIT: Just checked Backblaze, still looks like the data is there after 70+ days. Has this policy changed at some point?
The issue w bogus undisclosed batteries was causing problems for apples brand rep. Many of the bulging / exploding batteries were not in the end apple.
The lie you are spreading, that you can’t use non apple batteries is false. The phone will work fine, but apple will let you know it can’t model the batteries health.
Having the phone recognize if the battery key has changed is a simple and effective way to manage this.
For MANY people, being able to rely on the apple battery health check is far more important than allowing scammers to do a cheap battery swap, sell phone with a “near new” battery, and then have customer in apple store complaining a few weeks later only to be told they were ripped off
> Many of the bulging / exploding batteries were not in the end apple.
This is incorrect. Apple issued a recall due to known issues with their own batteries! These are not 3rd party replacements.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/15-inch-macbook-pro-battery-...
As I pointed out there's fairly simple ways for them to resolve this without these practices. No where did I suggest that the batteries don't work at all. The extents people go to on this site to defend Apple's shitty anti-consumer behavior is utter insanity.
The ic is not part of battery chemistry- in case this comment isn’t a joke a common workaround would be to grab ic from dead batteries and put them on fakes.
You're right, keeping keys in SRAM and other trivial anti-tamper measures are way too expensive. Cutoffs are performed by the same IC. Should be trivial.
This was a business decision for sure. Apple doesn't want anyone but Apple to work on their devices. Now maybe you can say that alone is good for resale, but it's extremely shitty for customers, especially when their attitude is to tell people they need a new board and all their data is gone when a repair, often even a simple one is entirely possible.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/expert-disputes-apple-on...
The same reason you call someone an idiot if they click an ad that looks like an error message, login to their bank on mybank.com.sketchysite.info, respond to a Nigerian scam or open that .pdf.scr file attached to an email. This stuff seems dead flat basic to people who are exposed to scams regularly. We don't call the scammers idiots for making millions on ransomware, most of us just delete their messages without a second thought - instead we call their victims idiots for falling for it in ways that seem obvious to us. Heck, even in much of the general public these are used as punchlines on occasion. Victim blaming and just expecting people to recognize these things as sketchy seems to be quite common for these sorts of technical issues.