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...I was thinking about this - how one's mind can confuse itself - when I was helping my daughter with her "computer science" studies homework tonight. She's writing her first computer program - it's in Python 3, with which I was not familiar.
I was having to learn the rules and syntax by implication, as she didn't have a reference manual and was just using an online Python code editor/interpreter on a trial-and-error basis. So it was edit, run, stop on error. It would spit out the errors progressively, incrementally and individually (one at a time), stopping at each error and waiting for you to correct that (edit) before it moved on to the next error (run again from the beginning), and so on. Painfully tedious and confusing, but potentially instructive if one understood the need to to focus on being pedantic and trying to understand the hidden/implicit logic (grammar) of the language being parsed. ...
____________________________-IainB (April 05, 2017, 12:53 PM)
With shock appeals ruling, the United States has effectively outlawed file encryption
PRIVACY UNITED STATES POSTED ON MARCH 28, 2017 • UPDATED MARCH 21, 2017 • BY RICK FALKVINGE 68 3
Digital key
An appeals court has denied the appeal of a person who is jailed indefinitely for refusing to decrypt files. The man has not been charged with anything, but was ordered to hand over the unencrypted contents on police assertion of what the contents were. When this can result in lifetime imprisonment under “contempt of court”, the United States has effectively outlawed file-level encryption – without even going through Congress.
Last week, a US Appeals Court ruled against the person now detained for almost 18 months for refusing to decrypt a hard drive. The man has not been charged with anything, but authorities assert that the drive contains child pornography, and they want to charge him for it. As this is a toxic subject that easily spins off into threads of its own, for the sake of argument here and for sticking to the 10,000-foot principles, let’s say the authorities instead claim there are documents showing tax evasion on the drive. The principles would be the same.
Authorities are justifying the continued detention of this person – this uncharged person – with two arguments that are seemingly contradictory: First, they say they already know in detail what documents are on the drive, so the person’s guilt is a “foregone conclusion”, and second, they refuse to charge him until they have said documents decrypted. This does not make sense: either they have enough evidence to charge, in which case they should, or they don’t have enough evidence, in which case there’s also not enough evidence to claim with this kind of certainty there are illegal documents on the drive.
In any case, this loss in the Appeals Court effectively means that file- and volume-level encryption is now illegal in the United States.
Without going through Congress, without public debate, without anything, the fuzzy “contempt of court” has been used to outlaw encryption of files. When authorities can jail you indefinitely – indefinitely! – for encrypting files out of their reach, the net effect of this is that file level encryption has been outlawed.
So were there illegal documents on the drive? We don’t know. That’s the whole point. But we do know that you can be sent to prison on a mere assertion of what’s on your drive, without even a charge – effectively for life, even worse than the UK law which will jail you for up to five years for refusing to decrypt and which at least has some semblance of due process.
The point here isn’t that the man “was probably a monster”. The point is that the authorities claimed that there was something on his encrypted drive, and used that assertion as justification to send him to prison for life (unless he complies), with no charges filed. There’s absolutely nothing saying the same US authorities won’t claim the same thing about your drive tomorrow. Falsely, most likely. The point is that, with this ruling, it doesn’t matter.
Syndicated Article
This article has previously appeared at Private Internet Access.
...There are many bad things to be said about TempleOS, many aspects of it that seem poorly constructed or wouldn't work in the "real world". I'm going to ignore them here. It's very easy to be negative, but you will never learn anything new by doing so.
Many might consider TempleOS a waste of time, compared to more fully-featured OSs such as Linux, because it will never have the same success. Plan 9, developed by Bell Labs, was a research OS designed to be a successor to Unix. Despite some big names and big ideas, it was never any kind of commercial success. Was Plan 9 therefore a waste of time? Many would argue not, as some of its ideas have since found their way into other products.
Perhaps we should instead look at TempleOS as a research operating system: what can be accomplished if you're not locked into established thinking, backwards compatibility, and market demands.
What can we learn if we are only willing to listen? ...
"Nearly all done now, we are just setting up our free software that you will be using to give you signals when to make transactions in your account. We'll tell you how to do that, don't worry.Phew! I needn't worry. They will hold my hand and the software will do all the complex stuff for me. How nice of them to do all this for me so that I can become rich!
The last thing we need is to open a secure broker account in your name. For this we will need your credit card to make a deposit (USD250), which is how you open and enable the account. Our software will not work without your having a broker account.Bingo! The screen appeared for me to enter my credit card details.
Windows Update MiniTool: Alternative To Windows Update In Windows 10
admin Published on Sep 26th, 2016
In Windows 10, Microsoft has removed the classic Windows Update section from Control Panel, making it a lot more difficult for users to control Windows Update.
The Windows Update section in Settings app offers little to no control over how updates are download and installed, particularly in Home edition of Windows 10.
While this will indirectly force Windows 10 users to automatically upgrade to the latest Windows 10 build and keep their system up-to-date, most users prefer to have control on Windows Update.
There are have been ways out there to completely disable Windows Update and pause Windows Update download but there is no concrete solution out there for Windows 10 Home users.
Windows update minitool for Windows 10
Windows Update MiniTool is an alternative to Windows Update in Windows 10 Home and Pro editions. The Windows Update MiniTool helps you check for updates and install updates only that you want.
Additionally, you can view all installed updates, hidden updates and there is an option to view full update history as well.
Windows Update MiniTool features
As you can see in pictures, you can control how updates are downloaded and installed. You can choose either automatic, disable updates, notification mode (alerts when updates are available), download only (downloads but doesn’t install), scheduled and managed by administrator option to control how updates are downloaded and installed on your PC.
Windows update minitool for Windows 10 pic2
Besides that, like Windows Update in Settings app, it also allows you stop automatic update of device drivers in Windows 10. There is an offline mode, which you can use to install updates on a PC not connected to the internet.
Windows update minitool for Windows 10 pic1
Do you want to download Windows Update to install on another PC? You can do so using Windows Update MiniTool as it gives direct links to .cab, .exe and .psf update files. Select an update, click Copy link to clipboard button and then paste the URL in the address bar of a web browser to download the update.
For those who might be wondering, Windows Update MiniTool downloads updates right from Microsoft servers and saves them in C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\ Download directory.
Overall, Windows Update MiniTool provides all Windows Update controls in an easy-to-understand interface. The program is standalone, meaning no installation is required.
Finally, if you like Windows Update MiniTool, there is another utility called Windows Update Integrator which makes it possible to catch Windows Update notification popup, meaning when you click on Windows Update desktop notification it opens up Windows Update MiniTool instead of Windows Update section of Settings app.
A word of caution. Windows Update MiniTool requires Windows Update service to download updates from Microsoft. So if you have disabled Windows Update, please enable it.
Download Windows Update MiniTool
HP Launched Delayed DRM Time Bomb To Disable Competing Printer Cartridges
from the innovation! dept
For decades now, consumers have been lured into a sour deal: pay for a relatively inexpensive printer, then spend a lifetime paying an arm and a leg for viciously overpriced printer cartridges. As most have learned first-hand, any attempt to disrupt this obnoxious paradigm via third-party printer cartridges has been met with a swift DRM roundhouse kick to the solar plexus. In fact if there's an area where the printer industry actually innovates, it's most frequently in finding new, creative and obnoxious methods of preventing cartridge competition.
Hoping to bring this parade of awfulness to its customers at scale, HP this week unearthed the atomic bomb of printer cartridge shenanigans. HP Printer owners collectively discovered on September 13 that their printers would no longer even accept budget cartridges. Why? A firmware update pushed by the company effectively prevented HP printers from even detecting alternative cartridges, resulting in HP printer owners getting messages about a "cartridge problem," or errors stating "one or more cartridges are missing or damaged," or that the user was using an "older generation cartridge."
As Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing notes, this behavior is simply par for the course, with Lexmark engaging in similar behavior back in 2003. By embedding an "I am empty" bit in their cartridges, they were similarly able to ensure that users couldn't use third-party cartridges or they'd be told the cartridge lacked ink. Lexmark leaned heavily on Section 1201 of the DMCA to support its behavior, a tactic HP is likely to mirror but evolve:
"Lexmark invoked Section 1201 of the DMCA, which makes it a criminal and civil offense to bypass an "effective means of access control" for a copyrighted work. The DC Circuit court asked Lexmark which copyrighted work was being protected by its access control, and it argued that the checking routine itself was copyrighted, as well as the "Empty" bit. The court found that the DMCA could only be invoked where there was a copyrighted work apart from the access control, and that a single bit didn't qualify as a copyrightable work. Lexmark lost."
In this case, HP's DRM time bomb firmware update was apparently deployed back in March, but HP didn't activate the "improvement" until this month. And as is usually the case in this space, HP isn't saying much outside of a misleading quote proclaiming the company was simply protecting its "innovations" and intellectual property:
"HP said such updates were rolled out "periodically" but did not comment on the timing of the last instalment.
"The purpose of this update is to protect HP's innovations and intellectual property," it said in a statement."
But rejoice! HP claims that users can still refill cartridges, as long as those cartridges contain an HP-approved security chip:
"These printers will continue to work with refilled or remanufactured cartridges with an original HP security chip. Other cartridges may not function."
Well, at least until HP figures out a way to DRM the printer fluid itself, which surely can't be too far along on the horizon.
Next, we've got a small but important anonymous observation about HP disabling third-party ink cartridges with a firmware update:
There is a serious and long-term unintended consequence that MS, HP, et al are not considering here: they are teaching users that *installing security updates is bad.*
Just thought I'd revive this thread to say that I've been using HashTab (v5.1.23) for a while now and am finding it very useful in my file management tasks - e.g., when I am wanting to determine whether two files of the same or different names are in fact the same (duplicated) file.
However, I might dispense with using it on those occasions when the xplorer² Checksum column is likely to be more useful (see below).
Also:
- HashCheck Shell Extension: Thanks to @PhilB66's mention of it in this thread (above), I am about to trial this.
- WinMD5sum: I have been using this on occasion.
- xplorer² Checksum column:: is a column you can invoke in xplorer² to give you a checksum of files in (say) a directory listing. The manual warns that invoking the Checksum column could be a resource hog:
x² extracts certain information from each file and displays it in different columns of the folder pane (e.g. checksum).(A very handy feature.)
However, this additional consumes CPU resources and slows down other operations.
To make the operation more efficient, x² has a provision that it will display the information only if the file-size is below a [settable] threshold value.-IainB (April 23, 2014, 01:45 AM)
