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And on a semi-related note, presidential candidate Donald Trump said in January he'd like to make Apple "start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of other countries."

Because these are the kinds of working conditions people like Trump and Sanders want for Americans. Will the suicide nets be tax deductible for American factories?

At least we can all sigh in relief that the people assembling these devices will have free college education. Thank you, Trump/Sanders! You only want the best for America!

Make the 81M come of the VP's bonus.

That $10 switch seems alot of like some cost reduction yahoo is calling the shots and does not want to pay for the needed costs to due it right.

I dunno... reading through the hacking team break-in (by which I mean, reading the hacker's first-person description, it's unclear to me how *anyone* could be considered responsible for these sorts of things.

The hacked system should encrypt passwords, use a salt, have offsite backups that are regularly tested... all that "of course" stuff applies.

But I'm not at all sure how having a modem or router hacked could be the responsibility of the system.

How can you tell? Is there an exploit for your high-end Juniper firewall?

The hacking-team narrative suggests that the person who did it replaced the [router?] firmware with a custom one with his own backdoor. A single 0day exploit on an internet-facing appliance.

Did someone intentionally weaken the PRNG in your Intel CPU at the mask level? Did someone replace the firmware on your hard drive? Is your BIOS compromised?

I read where someone put malware into the firmware of an intelligent *battery*.

Welcome to the future: everything has firmware, and all firmware can be reflashed by the factory.

(The update service installed when you install our product will automatically upgrade the system as needed. Just download and execute! This fixes the rendering issue in the Tagalog language pack, it's a *must have* upgrade!)

I'm not sure how anyone can guarantee their systems are secure any more.

If the State department can't secure their computers, what hope is there for regular mortals?

...a Musk bus meets a Google car?

It's a lightfield display. It's not so much that they project onto your retina (like single-lens optics do), but that they use a microlens array to project light from multiple angles & focal lengths, allowing your eyes to refocus naturally and eliminating the accommodation-vergence conflict issue. It also helps the virtual image to blend much more naturally into the real world.

Downsides are decreased resolution (though they seem to have that under control), and greatly increased computation requirements. I don't expect their consumer offering to be untethered any time soon, but it's quite possible they've been spending all that seed capital on dedicated ASICs to help with that.

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/n... Here's a snippet: So who are these guys? Despite the fact that the group works out of Johnson, under the auspices of NASA, Eagleworks still only runs on $50,000 a year in funding. “That’s not enough to conduct a high-quality experimental research program,” says Davis. “They’d need $1.5 million, $2 million for five, six, seven years.” Research into breakthrough propulsion physics—even when it had its own lab at Glenn, under Millis—has never been particularly well-funded. So “the way that this really happens is people dabble in addition to their day job,” says Millis. According to him, Eagleworks started with White working on concepts in his free time, not officially supported or sanctioned by NASA, and then eventually got a little money to run his lab out of Johnson. But the NASA banner doesn’t legitimize the work—if anything, NASA seems to want to keep the project under the radar.

economic realities

Yes, the economic realities of kickbacks... how to make a monopoly not look like a monopoly...

AI beating a top human player at Go
http://www.wired.com/2016/01/i...

The Senate's Draft Bill is "Ludicrous, Dangerous, Technically Illiterate": http://www.wired.com/2016/04/s... This bill will certainly stop terrorists in their tracks. After all, terrorists know nothing about computers. And no one outside U.S. jurisdiction knows nothing about computer programming. And no such person or company can produce a program that encrypts data that is "communicated" or "stored." And computer programs cannot be transferred across U.S. borders without approval by the U.S. authorities. And know one knows how to install a computer program without outside assistance by the company or person who produced it. And U.S. Senators and their staffs are not idiots. And/or fascists. And/or certainly not both.

"...what kind of information Facebook is collecting when the headset is not being used..."

Well yo will have to ask them about that but I do know what is possible, http://www.wired.com/2014/08/g...

For ages and generations an artist (writer, composer, singer, dancer, painter, what have you) had to be either independently wealthy or have a rich sponsor to create.

Cheap replication (coupled with strong copyrights and intellectual property laws) have helped, but it still requires a strong business acumen in addition to artistic talent for an artist to prosper.

If, indeed, computers and robots take up more of the drudgery in the next industrial revolution, the creative jobs may proliferate... And I don't mean simply people majoring in Arts, who then "sell out" to earn more — the actual artists. People, who want to be musicians today, but are (mediocre) programmers instead, because music does not pay... Maybe, it will?

Supposedly, AIs will be able to create art too, but I suspect, people will eventually treat such creations — deservingly or not — the way art-reproductions are treated today.

(To spoil the impression this post may have created in your mind, I'll point out, that this all may happen just as the people pushed to STEM by government enter the workforce...)

Third party keys are never safe, here's two real-world examples:

The $8 key that can open New York City to terrorists

Lockpickers 3-D Print TSA Master Luggage Keys From Leaked Photos

For digital keys all that needs to happen is the bad guys to identify who has access to them then kidnap their family members - "give us the keys or your daughter dies".

Signals intelligence, voice prints and cell phone data they can.
New FOIA Documents Confirm FBI Used Dirtboxes on Planes Without Any Policies or Legal Guidance (MARCH 9, 2016)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
Related background info on the methods "Feds gather phone data from the sky with aircraft mimicking cell towers" (Nov 14, 2014)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
The Feds Are Now Using ‘Stingrays’ in Planes to Spy on Our Phone Calls (11.14.14)
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/f...
Dirtbox (cell phone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
ie mapping out all cell users in vast areas of the US in a domestic collect it all database without needing to ask any court or request tech help via traditional telco staff.

It doesn't matter if they can get these pie in the sky sci-fi daydreams to work, they just need to sell it to the people who set their budget. Or just not bother to tell them about it.

In the seven years of Obama, things aren't any better.

Of course! Because he was lying to get elected, whereas the other party was honest, even if it caused them to lose the election.

The changes you posit are window dressing to the real issues underneath.

Reading is not really your thing, is it?

...They say that Stuxnet got deployed like this. Awesome hack, Stuxnet....

Staff secretly dropped computer discs and USB thumb drives in the parking lots of government buildings and private contractors. Of those who picked them up, 60 percent plugged the devices into office computers, curious to see what they contained. If the drive or CD case had an official logo, 90 percent were installed....

The video channel was not encrypted, it now is, but the control channel always has been.

Popcorn time ...

I'm waiting for the "Leap Year" bug in self driving cars. (example 2 example 1 more)

I thought this was interesting so I searched around a bit and it seems this idea has been dis proven. Wired had a piece also. Some interesting tidbits in there like "For example, women’s speech includes more personal pronouns (I, you, she), while men’s uses more quantifiers (one, two, some more). If someone listening to a voice interface hears a male using feminine phrasing, they are likely to be distracted and distrustful. "

3D printers is a huge category. There are a wide range of 3D printers from sub-$500 glorified hot glue guns to multi$100K laser-sintering printers. To me, the low end printers are a toy as they have many issue that only hobbyists could love. The high end ones are definitely not toys considering the awesome stiff they can make. Sometimes it is the implementation and not the technology that makes it a toy. For example, the standard household oven is not a toy but the Easybake Oven is.

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us by Bill Joy (on the unabomber's list)

Because there was no sufficient demand for it in the first place. Economics 101.

Yes, all the places that had to start their own municipal ISP's after begging their incumbent providers to sell them service repeatedly fell on deaf ears was not "sufficient demand". "Sufficient demand" is code for "profitable demand". For some services, like medicines or utilities, the needs of the people to access those products trumps the need for quick and easy profits.

Of course, they want to make profit, what's wrong with that?

Nice deflection there. First you say corporations "make the world better" and rather than defend that statement which is so obviously wrong a 4 year old can poke holes in it, you ask why is making a profit wrong. In and of itself, profit isn't wrong, as long as the methods and means to create that profit do no public harm.

The government does that — when it picks the "winner" based on the sympathies and biases of the bureaucrat(s), who do not spend his own money and is not even planning to use the purchased service himself (and sometimes even take bribes). This — government picking the winner — is what kills the competition and allows the thus-picked winners to do all those nasty things you claim to be unhappy about.

You simply can't admit your own delusion. You fault government officials for taking bribes to rig the market BUT WON'T FAULT BUSINESSES FOR PAYING THE BRIBES!!! Where do you think the money comes from? Some secret government bureau that bribes itself??? If businesses weren't fronting the money, there wouldn't be corrupt government officials! The two things are not separate from each other.

Plus the government creating standards and the occasional monopoly can also CREATE a market. The only reason we have coast to coast telephone service today is because the government subsidized it, gave Bell a monopoly on it to pay for it all, and provided right-of-way for the lines. If they hadn't "picked the winner", we'd have the phone system of your average 3rd world country and Verizon's equipment wouldn't talk to AT&T's.

Damn you Libertardian's are thick sometimes. Government does more to help business than hinder it, especially when it comes to holding back the unrestrained greed and forcing standards which enable equal competition.

There is no law in the US, that provides for capital punishment over ethics violations. You would have to become above the law yourself to start killing people over it...

I was talking about "killing" corporations, which are only "people" in legalistic terms. Because a corporate death penalty for egregious corporate behavior would be a good thing.

Why did this service need to be provided by the government?

Because there was no sufficient demand for it in the first place. Economics 101.

Because corporations don't want to serve the public good, they only want to make as much profit as possible

Of course, they want to make profit, what's wrong with that?

They kill competition

The government does that — when it picks the "winner" based on the sympathies and biases of the bureaucrat(s), who do not spend his own money and is not even planning to use the purchased service himself (and sometimes even take bribes). This — government picking the winner — is what kills the competition and allows the thus-picked winners to do all those nasty things you claim to be unhappy about.

Then how about we 'execute' a couple, just to remind the rest that they're not above the law.

There is no law in the US, that provides for capital punishment over ethics violations. You would have to become above the law yourself to start killing people over it...

I fly a lot, and routinely notice that the body scanners take about 5x as long as the metal detectors (and probably cause cancer). I regularly watch the TSA agents clear their backed-up lines by opening the metal detector for 30 seconds, sending 10 people through, and then closing it again (making the value of the scanner clearly questionable).

If the scanners worked reliably (and there's evidence that they don't), there'd still be value in sending only 10% of people through the scanners.

If a criminal were facing a 1 in 10 chance that his scheme to sneak contraband past security would be thwarted and he'd be arrested in the attempt, that would still be a good deterrent.

FWIW I think it was an iPhone 5c running iOS 9.

Facebook doesn't use Cassandra much anymore:
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/d...

They have three database management systems, Hadoop, MySQL, and Cassandra. One thing they use Hadoop for is backups of their MySQL.

As a pedestrian; there is generally no hazard from texting, and all the danger is caused by the fact there are cars

Man 'walks off cliff and plummets 60 feet to his death on Christmas Day while distracted by his cell phone'

Girl Falls Into Manhole While Texting, Parents Sue

Bonnie Miller, Woman Who Fell Off Pier While Texting, Saved By Teen Rebecca Van Zant

Texting While Walking Causes More Accidents Than Texting and Driving

Want to rethink that stance?

There's a difference between driving a car and knowing where to go.

Currently, Google's self-driving car depends on creating a very detailed 3d map of the world. More detail here. I don't like to link to Wired, but they got an exclusive interview, and it confirms what I just wrote. So no, practically there isn't a difference.

So for a self-driving car to work, there are two choices: either figure out how to make better maps, or create a much smarter car than the one they have now. It has to work a lot better than the Google maps currently does.

Part of this involves designing and building their own servers.

Others do. Not so much for security, I think, as for cost management and optimizing data center operations.

This is why AGW pseudo-skeptics are like Creationists. No matter how many times you demonstrate some meme they brainlessly repeat was never true, they just turn around and make the same claim again. You simply cannot debate someone who is so divorced from reality that they think some slogan they picked up off a Heartland-funded website somehow falsifies an entire scientific discipline.

As a deep-thinking creationist, I feel a bit written off. Is it not possible to be thoughtful and a creationist? Take this article.

I would love to have a step-by-step debate with an atheist, but every time I run into a discussion, it has already devolved into emotional mud-slinging, generally by the atheists.

Note: as always with TVs, not all HDR screens are equal. Last I checked, no one has full Rec.2020 support yet, but some sets are coming close.

And that is already possible... Why don't we see news about hackers taking cars of cliffs already?

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/h...

Well, maybe it did not drive off a cliff, but remotely turning off the engine on the highway is quite bad, just wonder what else would be possible.... just search around for a while and you will find many interesting instances where researches have found serious security-flaws on cars...

There are tons of easier, and harder to track, ways to kill someone than to hack a car and get it to drive off a cliff.. Especially if you want to know that that you are going after the correct person....

You say that like you're trying to make an Onion-style joke headline, but -- like the Onion often is -- it turns out to be more valid than you think.

However, I'd say the bigger threat in that case is copyright law and DRM, rather than the FBI.

DOJ are violating the First Amendment by attempting to force Apple to write malicious code

Ah, yes, a very novel legal strategy, I'll give you that. It would've been better, had you not misrepresented parts of it, but I shan't quibble. Most of the arguments so far have been around the 4th Amendment — protection against unreasonable searches....

Consider, for the sake of argument, government (backed by the Judiciary) wanting to search an otherwise impenetrable vault behind a coded lock. The vault-manufacturer can reveal the code. Do you believe, 1st Amendment is in any way applicable?

Before you say "yes", try to come up with a meaningful difference between a physical key, which the Amendment certainly does not protect, and a coded password...

The government has no more right to do this than it does to force political dissidents to write apologies to them.

You (and Apple) are on a shaky ground — in 2012, for example, a Federal judge has ordered a defendant to reveal her password. Maybe, she should've claimed the 1st, rather than the 5th Amendment — but that case remained inconclusive.

But in other cases, where people have succeeded resisting government's demand for passwords, they relied on the 5th Amendment, not the 1st.

Why wouldn't they use the 1st, if the password (or, indeed, computer code required to break it) were as obviously protected by it, as you and Apple imply?

And how did that work out for the CEO of LifeLock? Well maybe they finally protected him the 14th time...

VCs weren't claiming there was no bubble? O rly? I can find other links if you want.

To be fair, a large portion of a company's telco infrastructure was originally given to them through tax dollars, so its a little disingenuous to say company's are simply consumer paid. Plus as 'public utilities', these services are used universally by society, so if its paid for by government or companies, its essentially all taxpayers that are paying for it.

As for the idea of 'public utilities', the number of people who use internet access,
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/1...
15% is low and only likely to get lower as better internet access is provided to rural residents (and the very elderly that never bothered to learn).
At that rate, its chasing or has beaten USPS usage, and its almost entirely beaten land line based Telco ownership (though certainly not the combined landline/mobile phone penetration -yet-).

Speaking of USPS, why does the US have USPS and not shutter that as well and leave it to private enterprise? Actually, that's a bad/sad example because it almost certainly will be the outcome... We should liquidate the army and make everything private contractors. We should liquidate the free-way infrastructure and let private enterprise make better and more streamlined toll roads...

Lastly, unless government actively passes laws to cause advantage to themselves, how does government participation weaken free market commerce assuming its not a loss leading business unit?

went to great lengths to violate standing policy in order to be even less transparent while working in the administration

... after criticizing Republicans for using non-government e-mails for anything...

It's been known for decades that there are bacteria that break down the common plastics, you can even grab plastics buried in a dump and find them chomping away.

Even the kid in this article from 2008 didn't really discover something new:

http://www.wired.com/2008/05/t...

The TSA-approved luggage locks were never very high security devices to begin with. “I’m not sure anyone relied on these kinds of locks for serious security purposes,” he says. “I find it’s actually quicker to pick the TSA’s locks than to look for my key sometimes.”

Given how the government does "security" for us (IRS, OPM hacks), I don't want them anywhere near access to my phone.

If we give the government a back door to our data, it's only a matter of months before criminals and other nation states have that key.

I'm not even concerned about that. If the US Government has the key, that alone is bad enough. This is the same government that has systematically attacked developers as a group. Not terrorists. Software developers. They've launched the digital equivalent of a drone strike on users of this very site. They've developed malware that looks like developer tools. Coincidently, just such malware showed up to attack Chinese developers.

I am just gob smacked that Obama can show up at SXSW for any other reason than to apologize to us. He wants us to dig our own mass graves. Here is your shovel developer. Start digging.

What can a site do? Run a script to detect an ad blocker? Suggest a monthly payment and block the page from that user or request the ad block is removed?

Wired http://www.wired.com/ has started doing that and I've started not visiting their site, even though I whitelisted them so I could do it for free. Screw them ...

On the other hand, Stack Overflow https://stackoverflow.com/ has stated publicly that they are fine with ad blockers. Their reasoning is that if you're running one, you don't want ads, and wouldn't click on any if you saw them.

You may find this article interesting. I think it explained India's dilemma well. http://www.wired.com/2015/11/c...

I have flown a A380, and the toilet had barely enough space to sit.

http://images.theage.com.au/ft...

(note: I was on a lufthansa, not qantas)

I actually need to spread my legs a little to pee while sitting.

However, there is a glimpse of hope, as there is supposed to be larger lavatories like these somewhere:
http://www.wired.com/images_bl...

What I am saying is that if there were any serious talk about quantum computers in 1972 then there's a good chance I'd have heard about it.

Sorry, not this time...

According to that esteemed, peer-reviewed (and CIA-owned) publication, Wired, David Deutsch is the father of Quantum Computing, and first postulated same "in the 1970s".

In all fairness, I never heard about Quantum Computing until the 1990s; so what do I know?

http://www.wired.com/2015/03/n...

Sounds like an interesting progression of the many-small-propellers concept.

Police Drone Can Be Commandeered From 2 Kilometres Away, Hacker Claims
Hacker Says He Can Hijack a $35K Police Drone a Mile Away

They needed a high level official report to figure this out?

Yes, because otherwise they wouldn't have created their own version of skynet, even calling it skynet.

I'm not really defending AT&T, but we should not be surprised by their negative reaction. They are a business and worry about their bottom-line, which is now threatened by a very serious competitor.

My point was, the problem is not AT&T, but the local governments. Why were the "speed bumps" mentioned in the write-up — or the "road block", as oh_my puts it above — on the books to begin with?

Every time a preacher on this site denounces America's "lagging behind" in high-speed Internet, the chorus responds with calls for government intervention — be it municipal WiFi, or municipal cabling, or FCC forcing existing ISPs to do this and that.

But in reality, government is the problem — laying down cables is the easy part. Getting the regulatory approvals is hard...

> Slave labor? No. The journalist who reported that was outed as a fraud. He essentially wished it would be true, and then made up the story. The Western press ate it up...the retraction didn't get much press for obvious reasons.

Just for clarity, you mean this?

http://www.wired.com/2012/03/n...

Louisville City Council should damn well be able to cite the authority that allows them to tell AT&T to put Google equipment on AT&T's poles.

The poles belong to the city, but they already have AT&T equipment installed. This crucial detail is omitted from the incendiary write-up, but is write at the beginning of TFA (emphasis mine):

AT&T said Louisville Metro does not have the authority to permit a third party like Google Fiber to remove, alter or move AT&T’s equipment on utility poles

Whether or not the authority is there, I can understand, why AT&T is pissed — they did have to comply with the "legacy bureaucratic speed bumps" themselves, but now a major competitor comes in and the city lays down the red carpet.

That said, the cities nation-wide better get on with removal of such speed bumps ahead of time — our lack of Internet-access choices is due to that first and foremost.