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The Future Has a Kill Switch
palegray.net writes "Bruce Schneier brings us his perspective on a future filled with kill switches; from OnStar-equipped automobiles and city buses that can be remotely disabled by police to Microsoft's patent-pending ideas regarding so-called Digital Manners Policies. In Schneier's view, these capabilities aren't exactly high points of our potential future. From the article: 'Once we go down this path — giving one device authority over other devices — the security problems start piling up. Who has the authority to limit functionality of my devices, and how do they get that authority? What prevents them from abusing that power? Do I get the ability to override their limitations? In what circumstances, and how? Can they override my override?' We recently discussed the Pentagon's interest in kill switches for airplanes. At what point does centralizing and/or delegating operational authority over so much of our lives become a dangerous practice of its own?"
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As long as the pilot doesn't nose down, the plane can glide to the ground. That is assuming the controls are still working. The only reason you need the engines is to remain at an altitude or climb. The plane can act as a glider for as long as it has enough forward air speed to produce the lift required.
I don't know that much about aerodynamics, but I suspect at 30,000FT that might result in an uncontrolled decent.
Clearly, you don't. An airplane will glide just fine, thank you. Here's an example of an A330 losing all power and covering 100 km in 19 minutes, to a successful dead-stick landing: http://www.iasa.com.au/folders/Safety_Issues/others/azoresdeadstick.html
This sort of training is among the most basic of fundamentals, and taught to every pilot before he first solos.
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
I don't know that much about aerodynamics, but I suspect at 30,000FT that might result in an uncontrolled decent.
That happens every day, but there's nothing "uncontrolled" about it. A standard descent from cruise in an airliner involves pulling the throttles to idle and letting the aircraft come down. Ideally (for greatest efficiency), the engines would stay at idle until you're lining up on final and the gear/flaps come out. Then you have to spool them back up to hold the proper airspeed and glidepath. Up till recently, however, the ATC system and the limitations of aircraft autopilots couldn't handle this, and there would be periods where you level off for a bit, then "step" down again, and so on. But FedEx, UPS, and others are now working on implementing this in the real world. Look up Continuous Descent Arrival.
As a pilot, I do not trust automated systems as far as I can throw them. Granted, I only fly small airplanes that don't have fancy autopilots and flight management systems... but I've also worked avionics development and test for airplanes that do (my day job is engineering). Autopilots do not replace thinking. They take some of the load off the pilots' hands so they can concentrate on other, more complicated things, such as planning a new course around thunderstorms or handling ATC and other traffic. There is no AI component to autopilots, they simply follow a programmed course.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Prevent the first five posts from being either Anonymous Cowards or user accounts registered within the last three days.
Not that it's exactly a "kill switch", per se, as that requires some entity with control, as opposed to an automated process doing its job.
I believe the airplane kill switches discussed previously are intended to force the plane to an autopilot mode programmed with a large number of no-fly zones, as opposed to simply immobilizing the controls.
That said, it's still up in the air on features for those; I wouldn't be surprised if the ultimate winner allows full remote control; that is somewhere the implementation (and operational) security needs to be bulletproof.
There should be legislation such that these "features" are ALWAYS optional, and can be turned off by the consumer.
As long as that is so, then individual consumers can give up control over their own lives on a purely voluntary basis. If they want to, then let them. Apparently some of them want to. Go figure.
Except those Scientology ones a while back...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
First of all, it would be
DELETE * FROM comments WHERE poster_name="Anonymous Coward";
Actually, no, it wouldn't. The DELETE command doesn't take field names. You'd either do an ALTER TABLE or an UPDATE to do what you want.
(yes, I checked against multiple SQL references, all for different products, before opening my big mouth.)
Well, the owners of the laptop have that capability, which seems to me to be just fine.
Circular reasoning. Ownership, by definition, is the right to control.
The question here is, who has ownership? The contractor here has the not unreasonable expectation that his laptop would continue to operate so he could get his own stuff (ie. stuff that he owned long term) off it, stuff that his contract required him to put there. There should have been some level of protocol before ownership of the laptop returned to the corp so that his own stuff could be disentangled from it. At a bare minimum they should have told him this was going to happen.
The problem with DRM like this is that it usually has only a tenuous relationship with the complexities of the real world. It often interferes with one set of ownership rights while claiming to protect another.
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You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
Uh, I work at Microsoft right now, and I can flat out say that there's nothing odd about this.
Active Directory has the ability to expire accounts at a certain date/time. Your account was set to expire when you left the company. One side effect of this is that you can't log in to your notebook.
You could have logged in as local administrator, had you known the password. I don't know the local admin password to my system at Microsoft. This is also not unusual.
When you join your machine to the AD domain, the company gets to take control. That's the way it has been in every company that I've worked for. That's why FTEs at Microsoft get company-provided hardware. I'm not sure what the policy is for contractors.
I had to give back my company-owned notebook at Agilent when I left. God forbid.