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The impudence of Microsoft has reached new (criminal?) heights
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joeqsmith:

--- Quote from: Mr. Scram on July 05, 2020, 02:29:31 pm ---
--- Quote from: joeqsmith on June 20, 2020, 05:47:46 pm --- :-DD  Years ago I wrote how I was using Wireshark and saw were even pressing a number key on the MS calculator causes the OS to send the data up to MS.   

I'm still using a WRT router to block all MS traffic.   To install the BLE software for Dave's 121GW,  I had to pull it from the store.  I let my guard down just long enough for them to push a new update which had additional IPs that had to be accounted for.   I have not changed anything after that.   10 still tries to send data non-stop but at least the PC is usable.

I had been using an old version of Firefox but recently was forced to "upgrade".   I pitched FF and tried Opera for a day,  until I learned it was sold off to China.  Then I tried Vivaldi and ran into problems with it that I wasn't smart enough to sort out.  So now it's back to FF and setting the admin rights to block its updates.    Too bad really as I like Vivaldi.

--- End quote ---
What's wrong with the modern versions of Firefox?

--- End quote ---

Like MS, once they started to force updates, my perception is that they made me less productive.  For me, I want my software like like any other tool to be reliable and repeatable. 

In the case of MS, they blue screened my PC a few times and the endless full installs became a real pain.  I have PC connected to our TV and had left it open for all updates.  I may only have 30 minutes to watch something and many times, this was spent doing updates. When I go to turn off the PC, the last thing I want to do is wait a half hour while it updates to make sure they didn't fuck it up.     

FF with their constant patches at one point changed the way the data was presented on my tablet which I run with a touch screen.  That one change to the menus was pretty much the point where I rolled back to an early version that did not require the updates.   This worked fine until recently.   I now have the new version (locked) but  I would have switched to Vivaldi out of frustration, had it worked out of the box. 
NiHaoMike:
How much computing resources does it actually take to do a search that's not cached? My understanding is that it's a few orders of magnitude more than what it takes to make the simple query in the first place.

The English dictionary has about 470k words. Obviously, most of those are obscure terms that the majority has never heard of. For simplicity, let's pick 65536 of them to use for making search phrases, a nice binary number that lends itself nicely to efficient implementation. If we allocate 16 bytes per word (for CPU efficient access), that's 1MB of memory needed - it can even fit in the cache of many CPUs.

String just 4 of those words together and the number of possible combinations will be about 1.84 x 10^19 - completely impossible to fully cache. If that's not an impressive enough number for you, consider increasing that to 5 words or more. We can therefore conclude that the vast majority of searches will make actual database lookups and won't be fully cached.

The actual operation of stringing the words together with spaces in between takes so little time on a modern CPU that it's not worth thinking about. Turning that into a HTTP request is also trivial. Then you actually make the requests, something that can take advantage of parallelism.

All in all, it doesn't take much resources to make a lot of requests, I'd be interested to know how it can be possible to make the search itself use a lot less resources than I would expect it to.
cdev:
Chroimium is even worse.

All of the better known browsers are essentially spyware now.

joeqsmith:

--- Quote from: cdev on July 05, 2020, 09:06:02 pm ---Chroimium is even worse.

All of the better known browsers are essentially spyware now.

--- End quote ---

At least for the USA as I understand it, the provider is allowed to track and sell the data.  The fear of being tracked is less of a concern as I just assume they are.   I know MS would track everything they could.   It not my goal to address this so much as trying to keep the PC as a stable tool for engineering use.  The latest game simulator and background themes have no value to me.  If the PC is doing what I need it to,  I see no reason to upgrade.  If you are going to force it on me, I will most likely find a work around. 

Rather than trying to use old star trek clips as a fear motivation,  why not present some meaningful metrics?   I did a quick search:

https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/04/25/brave-will-pay-web-browsers-watch-ads-with-novel-digital-revenue-model
https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/67594/braves-browser-has-been-autocompleting-websites-with-referral-codes
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3292619/the-brave-browser-basics-what-it-does-how-it-differs-from-rivals.html
Mr. Scram:

--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on July 05, 2020, 08:36:43 pm ---How much computing resources does it actually take to do a search that's not cached? My understanding is that it's a few orders of magnitude more than what it takes to make the simple query in the first place.

The English dictionary has about 470k words. Obviously, most of those are obscure terms that the majority has never heard of. For simplicity, let's pick 65536 of them to use for making search phrases, a nice binary number that lends itself nicely to efficient implementation. If we allocate 16 bytes per word (for CPU efficient access), that's 1MB of memory needed - it can even fit in the cache of many CPUs.

String just 4 of those words together and the number of possible combinations will be about 1.84 x 10^19 - completely impossible to fully cache. If that's not an impressive enough number for you, consider increasing that to 5 words or more. We can therefore conclude that the vast majority of searches will make actual database lookups and won't be fully cached.

The actual operation of stringing the words together with spaces in between takes so little time on a modern CPU that it's not worth thinking about. Turning that into a HTTP request is also trivial. Then you actually make the requests, something that can take advantage of parallelism.

All in all, it doesn't take much resources to make a lot of requests, I'd be interested to know how it can be possible to make the search itself use a lot less resources than I would expect it to.

--- End quote ---
You're still trying to come up with a "solution" for a problem you don't remotely understand. What kind of capabilities do you think you are up against? Do some research and try ballparking it and then tell us how feasible gumming something like that up is by a blunt stress attack. This horse must be pulped by now but is obviously requires some more beating.  :horse:


--- Quote from: Mr. Scram on July 05, 2020, 05:35:38 pm ---Go run some back-of-the-envelope numbers and then explain to us why that's a silly idea.

--- End quote ---
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