Aruba wireless (like many enterprise wireless vendors) has a mDNS proxying and filtering system which is essential for places like college campuses. Airplay and Miracast (infrastructure mode) both use mDNS for service discovery. In Aruba the system is called Airgroup. When seeing a new MAC address the wireless controllers queries the RADIUS server. The RADIUS server can return a configuration for that new MAC address which tells the controller what other devices can interact with this new device using mDNS.

I always assumed this vendor adds and removes Airgroup configuration to allow the phone and the TV to see mdns from each other while preventing this from other nearby devices on the same VLAN or SSID. This trick might be enough but also pushing a DACL to the wireless controller to properly packet filter all network traffic from unapproved devices would strengthen the solution.

I was VPN’ed into the US anyway.

It was quite slick.

Just copy Chrome and confine all modal dialog boxes such as HTTP basic auth and Javascript alert() to the individual browser tab. No individual tab should every be allowed to pop a modal that prevents interaction with any other tab, any other browser window.

This problem immediately goes away and you don't need to play rate limit wackamole games or do stupid things like have a dialog box that asks if you want to see another modal dialog box.

As someone who interacts with HTTP basic auth frequently Firefox's behavior here is maddening. Fix the bad UI.

Edit: Oh, and here is a 13 year old bug about the real issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377496

So, `alert()` was fixed about 10 years ago in Firefox.

I'm not sure why the "Authentication Required" dialog wasn't, but I'm willing to bet it's something that was blocked indirectly by the old extension infrastructure (the so-called XUL extensions): until Firefox ~57, huge chunks of the architecture of Firefox were impossible to touch without breaking XUL extensions at a fundamental level, and this included making many things non-blocking.

If I'm right, it's the kind of thing that can now be fixed.

If extensions were the problem an interface to actually let the extensions work would have been created. As it is you still can't implement a password manager natively.

In-browser treatment of HTTP auth is just shockingly bad. But Firefox seems to be somewhere you get rewarded for introducing new features rather than fixing bugs.

My biggest annoyance is that since the login modal blocks the rest of the UI, I can't use my password manager!

(At least, I can't use Bitwarden, but I can't imagine how any other browser-plugin-based password manager would get around this.)

At the time I thought that was cool, and was sad when it went away with the new plugin architecture, but looking back it does indicate quite how bad the situation was with that old plugin format.

>But Firefox seems to be somewhere you get rewarded for introducing new features rather than fixing bugs.

Something else they are copying from Google!

https://www.musicradio77.com/images/ing11-9-65blackout.mp3

Of course MDM is not required for any of this. Worst case is on Android you're forced to use Microsoft's Outlook app.

Outbound port filtering is incredibly common on public and guest wifi networks and I found three use cases in my first week where OpenVPN on 443/tcp would have worked fine. The inability to use Wireguard over TCP and bypass most outbound port filtering by using tcp 443/etal makes it unusable in my daily life. I can understand why TCP isn't performant but my choice isn't performance vs non-performant. It's works somewhat vs GFY.

And yes I've seen the udp over tcp forwarding hacks. They don't work on iOS and some look outright dangerous (hello open proxy).

Hopefully this can be addressed before Wireguard hits 1.0.

I use port 4500, which is typically used for ipsec nat traversal, and have found it available/worked on most networks where the default wireguard port was filtered.

At this point if I was designing a VPN for client devices I'd have a mode that looked at as close to HTTPS as possible. There is one tool to tunnel over websocket but this was already sucking up too much of my play time. :)

Cisco AnyConnect, while expensive and bloated, works great as it initially connects on 443/tcp and then tries to setup UDP. If UDP fails it just sticks with the TCP connection and "just works".

"Hardware companies"

Does that mean bundled by carriers and crappy Android phones? Lovely.

This was legit, too.

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-ride-ha...

"The company doesn't work directly with services such as Uber and Lyft, but a number of apps, such as Sherpashare (which is primarily used by ride-hailing drivers for services like Uber and Lyft), HopSkipDrive, eDriving and a variety of navigation apps use Zendrive's technology to monitor ride safety."

Hurray for malware. What other apps is this hiding in?

Oh no. Oh... no. follow link to dropbox.com Ugh. What happened?

I'm now under the impression Dropbox will go out of business and I need to explore alternatives.

Edit: I think I identified what makes me intensely dislike it. The color scheme and design screams "This is no longer for you, it's for hipsters."

I stopped looking at the keyboard every 10 seconds when I learned how to touch type.

The presenter spent most of his time looking at the keyboard and not the screen.

This gimmick will disappear when Apple decides a touch screen is needed to complete the slow merge with iOS.

That's the wrong way to think of it.

It's not a keyboard, it's an adaptive toolbar. And it's close to what professionals in several industries pay handsomely for -- control surfaces, only this one is also adaptive.

>I stopped looking at the keyboard every 10 seconds when I learned how to touch type.

It's obviously NOT meant for typing heavy workloads. Secretaries and programmers coding will not use it when doing their thing.

Things are not the same just because they are instances of the same concept.

Lenovo's implementation was black and white, did not have controls such as slide, sweep, multitouch gestures, etc, and was just a novelty from a single Wintel vendor with not much third-party app support or OS support.

Apple's implementation adds deep OS support, will have software vendors onboard (judging from the adoption of older features Apple puts into its hardware/OS, it wont be more than a year when most apps people use will support this, from Photoshop which does already, to the Apple Pro/iLife apps (of course), to Pixelmator, Premiere, and tons of others. It also has color, multitouch/gestures, etc, which increase the utility much more, along with higher definition (for thumbnails and such which it also does).

Also Lenovo's other than that didn't sell much to the creatives market, where such a feature would be appreciated more (if it was done properly of course). Macbook Pro's already sell very well to creatives.

It's the same old story really: more thought out, more integrated, and more supported implementation beats "first to market this general idea" every time.

Some templates came pre-printed for specific packages, some were blanks for pencil-your-own. Rarely used, but at least those thingies were cheap and did not remove real keys.

Not exactly. Jazz and classically trained musicians, yes. Rock, pop, electronica, etc gigging keyboardists play non-weighted keyboards all the time.

>Even non weighted keys are despised by any musician. Your mind and body have lots of subtle cue sensors to perceive and react accordingly. Anything that contradicts this will fail for refined/industry use.

We have already been over this when the smartphones came out without actual keys.

True, but every time I've seen linear keys used, it was for "parody" accompaniment.

> We have already been over this when the smartphones came out without actual keys.

And I miss it every day.

Then you can't have been paying much attention.

For what use? Keyboard shortcuts? That's not even half of what this is about.

F9, F10 and F11 can't replace a slider, or a color picker, or dialing in e.g. audio filter resonance, or sliding through frames.

>I can use those blindly while looking at the code

It's NOT for typing/coding. Think pro apps instead (and also lots of non pro, but not text-based apps).

Every single shortcut shown in the cringe-worthy demos today is already mapped to a well-known keyboard shortcut in the app. And pro users can use those shortcuts without ever having to look down at the keyboard.

Final Cut demo claimed that "some of these shortcuts are hard to find in the menus of an advanced app" whereas: 1. the touchbar was displaying the simplest of shortcuts, many of which are already mapped to keyboard shortcuts that professionals use 2. menus in MacOS have a built in search which touchbar lacks, obviously 3. the very next demo of Photoshop showed touchbar shortcuts nested two layers deep and are basically undiscoverable.

What the hell is touchbar if not a totally useless gimmick for actual pro users of pro apps?

I'm a pro user (of NLEs) and I don't "use those shortcuts without having to look down at the keyboard". Only a few of them.

And it's not because I don't do shortcuts in general (I've used Vim for over 20 years in all its glory).

Profesionals use external interfaces all the time, e.g. for color correction, editing etc. While this doesn't fully replace this, it's more than adequate for a lot of what those do, and perfect for editing on the field.

It's also not about those "keyboard shortcuts". Flipping through movie frames with variable speed is not a shortcut. Applying filter resonance on a DAW is not done with a shortcut. Heck, this can even change several items together at the same time (e.g. 2 virtual sliders etc). There are literally tons of other things we now use sliders, dials, etc for in Pro programs, and which arbitrary speed and "jump to place" (not just "one click at a time" as shortcuts offer) will be great.

>What the hell is touchbar if not a totally useless gimmick for actual pro users of pro apps?

It also has no wifi and less space than a Nomad from what I heard. Lame.

Anyway, let's give it a year and we'll see how many pro's swear by it.

Hence the need for the touchbar is further greatly reduced

> It's also not about those "keyboard shortcuts"... There are literally tons of other things we now use sliders, dials, etc for in Pro programs, and which arbitrary speed and "jump to place"

Which are delegated to a tiny strip in an awkward location (notice how carefully everyone is holding their fingers at ~90 degrees to the keyboard) controlled by very imprecise finger movements

> Anyway, let's give it a year and we'll see how many pro's swear by it.

I can agree on that :) We need more actual field experience

Yeah, it seems like it might have been more useful to put it on the side of the keyboard. And they wouldn't have even needed to get rid of escape and the F-keys then.

Why? When were coders big on the function keys? Aren't you supposed to not take your hands from the home row, even with Vim/Emacs?

As an occasional debugging user it would be a great addition to have this on the keyboard.

This is one feature on my Windows laptop I don't like and not excited for a new Mac with one.

[0] https://digg.com/2016/macbook-touch-bar-reviews-apple

- That's exactly what I understood as well.

I can see the touch bar being a boon for people who produce music through their macbooks to have a control surface.

All of the toolbar buttons and more were already on the main screen. If they had offered a touch screen instead, the user wouldn't have to take his/her eyes off the screen to perform the same functions. And that feature is already available on Windows machines with touch screens.

If they had "offered a touch screen instead", the users would have to hold their hand horizontally which would get tiring in about 5 minutes and unbearable after 10.

Not to mention that the on-screen tools were and will still be there anyway if one wants to use them with the traditional, and not challenging to the muscles, mouse and touchpad technology...

Why do so many Mac users think the presence of a touch screen all of a sudden means using it full time?

I got a Surface Pro when I was still a predominantly Mac user and I only used the touch screen when appropriate, which was for a fraction of a second every now and then. And it worked great.

Using a touchscreen is definitely better than a touchpad in a lot of scenarios because of the ability to directly manipulate content instead of having to navigate to it.

Who said full time? Full time it would be unbearable in 1 minute. I said unbearable in 10 minutes with casual use in mind: raising your hand now and then to click this or that button.

Just like the bigger screen iPhone, which was supposedly a usability disaster because you couldn't reach the whole screen with a single finger.

There's this idea that people will buy everything Apple does, or that people put down things until Apple does them.

First, Apple started from nearly bankrupt in 1997 and so. People clearly didn't just buy what Apple put out. What build Apple's fortune was not some hundreds of millions of "sheep" who magically bought everything Apple put out, but a steady stream of products that increasingly more people bought.

People didn't just buy everything Apple put out. People had to be convinced, from the first post-jobs stuff (Cube, iMac) to start buying them -- increasingly over time. The iPod took years to really take off, for example.

Along with this idea, there's this other idea that Apple 'fans' will put down a feature until Apple releases something that has it.

Those saying that seem to forget that the internet is full of people, and the people who said "the iPhone doesn't need a bigger screen" are not necessarily the ones who bought one after Apple released it.

Apple still sells tens of millions of non-plus iPhones, to people who don't really like the large screen, and even put out the old 4" model again (iPhone SE).

I got a Plus and it's still a usability disaster on that regard. One hand use (which is what I mostly used to do on the smaller models) is pretty much out. But I coped mostly because I appreciate the extra ~50mm camera lens, and for reading stuff while commuting etc (with two hands).

Part of the problem is that Apple / Steve Jobs sometimes helped perpetuate this idea.

Some examples:

* Steve Jobs saying video on an iPod type of device was pointless

* Steve Jobs saying that apps were pointless on the iPhone and that the web apps were good enough

* Apple putting out a TV ad emphasizing that the iPhone had the perfect screen size because your finger could go from end to end

Apple dislikers predictably misinterpret this as Apple taking an ideological position when all Apple is really doing is just trying to control the marketing message on what they think really matters with the current release of a particular product.

I just shift the phone around in my palm. Even with an oversized Otterbox like case I put it in from time to time I'm able to reach 80% of the screen with my thumb, and I reach around with my other 4 fingers to reach the rest of it.

Pretty similar to how I use/used my Nexus 6 one handed, and it was a little bigger than the Plus

Some of that is the price, but there's clearly a significant contingent of users who prefer smaller screens.

You would do well to try one out for a few minutes with a typical workflow of...well, whatever you do on a computer. I thought it was stupid at first and now I miss it when I use my MacBook.

That's my point exactly. A laptop with a touch screen is not convenient, unless it can be somehow turned into a tabled (Surface does it IIRC).

>You would do well to try one out for a few minutes with a typical workflow of...well, whatever you do on a computer.

Tried a few times to get a sense of how it would be during this thread. It doesn't work for me at all (at least when sitting on the desk with the laptop). I don't want to raise my heads and hold them to the screen, and I'm not that hot into touching the screen with my fingers either.

On a real touchscreen laptop or simulating on a non-touchscreen laptop?

I think it makes a real difference to sit down with an open mind and go through some real use cases on a laptop with a working touchscreen (and the software you'd actually use). You'll realize that you're only using when it is appropriate for only a few seconds at a time, if that. And there will probably be huge time gaps (hours, days even) where you might not use it. But in the odd time when you need it, you're often glad that it's there.

And it's not as though you can't continue to use the keyboard, touchpad and/or mouse.

I'll admit, when the Surface Pro first came out, I mocked the touchscreen too. I thought it would create Gorilla Arm. Then I actually got one and used it for an extended period of time. You don't even notice that you're touching the screen.

It's about the orientation, not the touch screen itself. A tablet you normally hold horizontally or at an angle when you use it.

Now, if it was a detachable screen, like the Surface, that could work, but a laptop screen you have vertical to the keyboard.

I get that it might not be for everyone, but a LOT of keyboard cases have been sold to iPad and iPad Pro users (and many of these cases prop up the iPad screen vertically). And keep in mind that iOS pretty much necessitates use of the touch screen more than Windows 8/10 does. So there must be a LOT of people who would be OK with that mode of use.

With respect to the Surface, I use it with the keyboard attached 99% of the time so it's pretty much vertical all the time. It's not even remotely uncomfortable or tiring in normal use.

Yes, but those are for writing -- ie. using the iPad laptop style. Not for doing work e.g. graphics, etc with the iPad vertically held.

No, I wrote "E.g. graphics" as a parenthetical expression to give an example of the kind of work they dont use those cases for. That is, what I wrote amounts to:

"Yes, but those [cases] are for writing -- ie. using the iPad laptop style. [They are not using the cases] for doing work [like graphics] with the iPad vertically held".

>And why would Schiller make a point of mentioning the touch bar integration with Office and iWork?

Because Schiller made this point about a laptop, and even more so a laptop with a flat horizontal strip.

Whereas what I said is that it's tedious for people to do that (touch interaction) on a vertical screen. In Schiller's example there's Office and iWork but no vertical touch screen -- just the strip, and the regular screen you handle with the mouse/trackpad (that is, without having your hands in the air to touch the screen).

There's something to be said about being able to use two fingers to directly manipulate a window's contents to zoom an image or vector diagram in an app to get to the precise size versus futzing around with control + or control - using the app's preset increments.

One of the important things for me with something like the surface is when you finally dock it to use a full setup you don't lose any capability. What happens when you do this with the new mbp? Is a new apple keyboard in the works?

I was considering getting the new mbp this time around thinking this was going to be an enhanced media button bar. But now I'm definitely back on the sidelines

This is complete nonsense. I used to think this when I used a MacBook full time. I still do but buying a touchscreen PC has worked wonderfully and I never hover my hand long enough to do anything tiring. It's great for doing quick touches or scrolling / zooming in with precision. You wouldn't want to use it for everything because that's not its use case (this isn't a dedicated tablet this is a computer with a touch screen).

I never hover my hand period, so that's one better. Not that hot about touching the screen either...

>It's great for doing quick touches or scrolling / zooming in with precision.

With my hands on the keyboard and my thumbs close to the touchpad, I don't see the appeal of suddenly raising my hands to the screen, especially for general things like zooming, scrolling. It could make sense to manipulate something like an object directly, but to raise hands just for zooming or scrolling?

I think I figured it out. You're spoiled by the quality of the Apple touchpads. A few minutes with a crappy Windows touchpad and you'll be wishing you could touch the screen.

FWIW, I hate all touchpads. I just hate Apple touchpads the least.

Hmm, you might be on to something here. I'm so used to the Mac trackpads, than I almost never use a mouse with them (except for heavy illustrator/photoshop stuff), whereas with my Windows laptops I always use a mouse.

>FWIW, I hate all touchpads. I just hate Apple touchpads the least.

I hate the IBM's/Lenovo's red-nipple thing with the same passion!

Works fine for iPad users on the sofa.

All the keys will be virtual, and they will have haptic feedback. The shallow key travel now is to prepare people, similar to the coke <> new coke conspiracy.

Then they will make the keyboard half of the laptop an ipad. Then they will release two ipads that hinge together. Then they will figure out that ios/macos dichotomy is causing problems and finally go through with some hybridization.

You can hit a touch bar item faster than you can position a mouse cursor on a screen toolbar.

I've been holding off on updating my macbook pro, but I think I'm going to skip this generation and buy used. The lack of an nvidia gpu is a giant pita. You never get good cuda performance on a laptop, but it's nice to be able to test code on one.

If they expand up to 32g ram though I'm buying one the second they go live on the site.

Edit: Radio station downloading now seems to grab at least twice the amount it used to. Which puts it firmly in the "meh" category when it comes to usefulness.