We had people say similar things in the late 1990s when there was the suggestion of having a computer only download/run stuff from a single repository with everything locked out... a la NGTCB/Palladium. Now, on most devices, this is the norm and not the exception.
Similar with the concept of having locations sent to ad services 24/7/365 when the cellphone in common use was a Motorola RAZR.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the future that showers were limited and toilets had inbuilt tests for illegal substances, and the only result would be some grumbling.
The "boil the frog" strategy has worked extremely well so far.
It is happening. In the past several years, corn production has mainly changed from food to ethanol, which has spiked the price of it. It sounds humorous, but pork prices are spiking (thus the mention of a bacon shortage.) Milk prices have gone up sharply.
Quality of food is a lot worse than it was in the past.
As for petrochemicals, we have hit peak oil... and there is only so much to go around, so when it comes to burning it in a car versus using it for fertilizer, one can guess which will win out.
Most civilized countries, being a waitperson is a profession to itself. That is why most of Europe has a "gratuity included" sign for their cafes and restaurants.
I'd like to see that in the US. Charge the 20% extra on food, and pay the waitstaff a living salary. That way, tips actually would be for good service, as opposed to something one has to do as a social norm.
Here in Texas, we have "Knox boxes" which are sturdy steel lockboxes which are attached to fences or embedded in cement. They use a Medeco lock, and are keyed to what the local PD or fire recommends. In the box is a key to whatever is relevant.
If there is an issue, the response people just fish the keys out of the Knox Box, open the gate, and be on their way.
Having a good SHA algorithm is a good thing. Yes, hash collisions may not seem to be something that can happen often, but if there is a chance that one can make a document saying "hell no" be changed to "yes, definitely", that can bankrupt a company.
Hashes also have other uses, especially as "bit blenders", so if one is able to figure out a way to decrease entropy, then keys generated from a device like/dev/random can be significantly less secure.
Each crypto algorithm is important. I just wish NIST would not just pick one candidate, but perhaps 2-3 at a time [1]. The reason for this is that if something happened that made the algorithm insecure, the standard libraries would have a backup. It also means that embedded controllers that are made to the standard wouldn't have to be chucked and replaced should one algorithm be cracked.
[1]: Not just hashing, but encryption as well. I wish NIST went wish not just Rijndael, but Serpent and Twofish for a standard. Similar with not just going with just RSA, but RSA, Merkel, DSA, ElGamel, and elliptic encryption. That way, should an attack like TWIRL or quantum computers make RSA pointless, people can switch over to Merkel or another algorithm without needing a hardware upgrade. Plus, for high security work, multiple algorithms can be cascaded [2] to ensure that one weak link won't compromise everything.
[2]: No, three 256-bit algorithms will not get you 768 bits. In reality, you end up with 258 bits of security. However, if one of the algos ends up being broken and only offering 32 bits of unique keys, the other two would continue to keep at least 256 bits of keylength.
Windows Server 2012 has this as a feature. Caveats:
1: It has to be a NTFS volume. No ReFS, FAT32, or other filesystems.
2: The deduplication does not happen in real time. Store 500 of the same one gig files, and it will initially take up 500 gigs until the background task gets around to replacing redundant blocks with links.
On one hand, device security is a must on two levels:
First, it is to keep code belonging to one program from affecting another in a malicious manner, be it tampering with data, or in some cases, merely reading it and then sending a copy to a place upstream.
Second, some protection against the "dancing bunnies" attack by Trojan horses. This is something Apple has excelled at -- since virtually all app installs go through the App Store, a malicious site trying to get someone to install a detrimental app is unheard of in the iOS ecosystem. This keeps users who are not highly tech savvy safe because Apple guards the gateway completely.
On the other hand, by only allowing the iOS device to only be used in "an approved manner" locks out a myraid of opportunities for making cool stuff that was never thought of. For example, being able to use a device as a full BSD computer in a pinch, similar to how one can pull up a decently working, lightweight Ubuntu distribution on the Motorola Atrix series of phones.
In your opinion, where does the balance lie between protecting users from themselves, to minimize the Dancing Bunnies security hole, but still allow new, creative, and innovative uses for the device without having to have people have to jailbreak the device?
Of course, piracy of apps is an issue, but having it handled by a separate mechanism that is not tied to the presence/absence of jails would be an answer. Android does this well, with both LVL, and on-device encryption of packages.
Is there a way to both have one's cake and eat it too?
If people are riding bicycles to work, a room that uses an employee badge to enter [1], and allows people to either have bike lockers (where the complete bike can be wheeled in and locked up, or at least a good bike rack and normal lockers for securing both their ride as well as their helmet and other gear. Bonus points for mens/woman's locker rooms and showers.
Of course, some other items for a building:
1: Generator, properly sized. Should go without saying.
2: Secured parking. A fence around things with limited access (perhaps locking all but one gate come nighttime) means better security overall.
3: Painted marks separating parking spaces, similar to what is done at Costcos to allow shopping carts near vehicles. It means fewer cars able to park in the lot, but it means far fewer door dings. It also makes people who deliberately take up two spaces more obvious.
4: Parking space locks. There are items like "That's My Spot" so a reserved space stays open until the right person with the remote hits the switch. This keeps the reserved places reserved, and keeps Mr. "I was just parking here for a second" away.
5: A proper loading dock that can handle all truck rigs, even the long haul ones, and handle it where a truck can get in and out without insane backing up and jack-knifing gymnastics.
6: Fuel tanks, both gasoline and diesel (if there is space.)
7: Plenty of storage space/cages. What you think you need for storage, take the values, and double it. Valuable stuff that isn't in use, stick in a cage.
8: Some form of cafeteria or deli. Even if it is an area outsourced to Aramark or some other place. It sucks having to choose between packing a lunch or having to drive a couple miles to find somewhere decent, so having this helps save a lot of time, especially when you can grab something to eat in minutes, not hours.
9: This sounds crazy, but some place one can use to crash overnight. You never know when you might need to grind out a major project beyond the 9-5 workday.
[1]: One of the best setups I've seen is that badge entry is required... and the door will open regardless if someone badges out... however a valid badge just means a siren doesn't sound for 10-15 seconds when the door opens.
btrfs is coming along, but most distros still tend to have ext4 as a default. The one thing that btrfs really and desperately needs is filesystem deduplication. Even Windows now has that in place (although it is of a delayed variety where a background task searches for identical blocks and replaces the copies with pointers.)
Bingo. I have been wanting to get people interested in a keysigning party. First, if done right, no computers need to be brought -- just a piece of paper with everyone's key IDs and fingerprints and a writing instrument to sign off.
It really is a combination of factors. The first is that E-mail for anything other than formal communications has essentially been replaced by texts, iMessages, and FB messages. No SMS client supports PGP [1]. iMessages, neither. I have read that FB sometimes flags encrypted PGP messages as spam and won't deliver. Copying/pasting text is no big deal, but on devices like the iPhone which only allow an app at a time, it does interrupt the workflow.
There is the attitude as well that security should be as simple as clicking a picture of a padlock, without people worrying about webs of trust, trusted introducers, recovation certs, ADKs, etc. However, without that knowledge, we get people having to trust CAs completely... and we all know where that has gotten us (the discussions about DigiNotar for example.)
Of course, there is the fact that PGP seems to have faded away from platforms. It is difficult to get GNU's Privacy Guard to build on non-mainstream operating systems due to the sheer amount of dependencies involved.
There is no iOS app that one can use to generate, store, sign keys, copy keys in and out, export keys, import keys, and so on, unless one jailbreaks their device and uses GNU's Privacy Guard and a shell prompt. Android fares a tad better in this department.
PGP is one of the very few tools that people have that is widespread and usable for protection, and it is almost impossible to get people to use it, even when they know about the constant invasions of privacy.
[1]: In this context, PGP means PGP (TM) by Symantec, GNU Privacy Guard, or other utilities that work with the OpenPGP standard.
I've had great luck with ATT's navigation app which uses Telenav for maps. Turn by turn, ATT's offering has done quite well, especially finding places in deep banjo country with the offline maps loaded and dealing with spotty signal quality.
I moved to RedHat because the revising of the package manager (rpm) made life a lot easier, especially with GPG signing.
These days, I stick with either RedHat for production stuff with subscriptions or CentOS (with an occassional donation to their cause) for non-production.
I also keep a Knoppix CD around for recovering data, or when travelling.
Where this technology is needed is RV and trailer tires. If a car tire blows, usually one has a time where it runs flat. A travel trailer or a fifth wheel, you don't feel the blown tire until it has blown off the rim and caused significant amounts of damage to the rig. Having something like this wouldn't just save 1-2 MPG, it might save a $50,000 trailer or more if it keeps a tire on the rim.
Depending on how big the accelerator has to be, I wonder if this could be used for making smaller reactors, perhaps using thorium instead of uranium as fuel. With the permanent moratorium in place since Carter, this would allow nuclear energy to be useful in the US, and since the reactors are smaller and can be QA-ed at a factory before hitting a site, it means that problems have a greater chance of being caught before the thing goes live.
Subcritical fission isn't just useful for getting rid of fuel, it would allow for reactor arrays to be built when it would be impossible to build the larger type.
Of course, there is always Sandboxie which does help with limiting what access a program has. I don't know how well it can deal with a determined 0-day exploit that has ways of getting Admin rights from a user context, but it does redirect all writes from the filesystem and Registry into a safe location [1].
[1]: From personal experience, keep the Sandboxie sandbox on a different partition than normal stuff. That way, should something try something malicious or just keep writing 0 byte files in the filesystem, cleaning it is just a format command away.
The trick with cellphones is less encryption than authentication. With the very small keyspace most people chose for a PIN, a device maker wants to have the PIN checking done on a hardened chip before the true 128 or 256 bit key is released. That way an intruder either has to guess through the chip (and be stopped/slowed down after a number of tries), or has to physically uncap the chip and go at it with an electron microscope (good luck.)
Of course, with a chip being the gatekeeper, it can easily be backdoored, so that is the downside of that type of security measure.
One of the primary causes of malware is drive-by intrusion via compromised or unmaintained ad servers. Instead of worrying about free antivirus (which by definition rarely catches real 0-day threats), I'd get an ad blocker, or a utility like the paid version of Malwarebytes which blocks malicious website IPs.
Block the IPs and what spits out the malware, don't bother playing whack-a-mole against the latest polymorphic stuff.
As for antivirus, just go with MSE. It usually is in the middle of the pack, is lightweight, and the price is right.
On one hand, dumping the contacts, text messages, and other items from a phone would be a vast boon for exposing a crime ring for investigators. However, on the other hand, any forensic device that can be used by LEOs can be used by criminals for gain as well.
If one separates a corporate officer from their phone and is able to completely dump the contents, it would mean a gold mine. Competitors would buy contact lists, spreadsheets (accounts payable/receivable), unannounced product sheets, etc. Employee payroll info can be sold to ID thieves, and the fact that these employees are at work at this time can be sold to local gangs for burglaries/home invasions. If the employee has any military employment, that info and their family info can be sold to foreign intel agencies, etc.
The trick is defense in depth. Yes, iPhones and some Android devices have device encryption, but the best thing is having encryption on the app level. To get around that, the blackhats would have to find a way to stick a keylogger on the device, as opposed to just a single snatch of the device and a dump.
Here in Austin, there are charging stations, but they are scattered around in odd places. A credit union has one, a local Wally World has a couple.
However, the problem is that one doesn't know if that charging station is in use or not, and with the limited range of an EV, keeping the batteries charged up and keeping track of every mile is the difference between an easy ride home versus having to get a tow [1].
This isn't to say EV technology is bad, it is just the fact that there isn't much being done to make batteries with better energy per volume [2]. Get that within an order of magnitude of gasoline, and the entire transportation industry will change.
What might be a better answer might be fuel cells which turn on and stay on until the battery is fully charged if there is no shore power. EFOY has methanol based fuel cells, however, it might be nice to have propane or pure ethanol because of how toxic methanol is.
[1]: Acquaintance of mine who has a LEAF has one solution -- if he does not know if there is enough power available to make it back, out comes the Honda eu2000is. 120VAC charging is slow, but it is better than nothing.
[2]: There just seems to be no interest in better batteries in the US. This is a crying shame because of how this would cure a lot of problems.
There is a difference between audiophile stuff that has capabilities difficult to measure versus studio equipment.
For example, if given the choice between a set of high quality monitors with a flat response suitable for 5.1 mixing versus "audiophile" speakers that sit on a specially polished granite surface with some rare earth pixie dust, shined with faerie butter, I'll take the studio monitors, and if I wanted a "fat bass", I could EQ it in.
Studio grade stuff, I understanding paying the premium for. "Audiophile" stuff which seems to be more about looks and "experience" such as a $500 wooden knob as opposed to something that can be measured objectively.
[1]: Monitors in this context being speakers, not the lizard on top of the LCD.
The one unique thing they did is their backend Web stuff where individual computers, racks, or even entire datacenters could drop offline, but their stuff would stay up. They put redundancy at the top of the stack as opposed to the conventional way of having redundant, quality hardware and having the backend being fairly thin and simple.
It reminds me of the push to high voltage DC electricity. Yes, the current standards are not as efficient as they should be, but it would cost a pretty penny to rip our racks out, and either adapt or buy new hardware.
We have enough standards already -- a lot of data centers have both 19" racks and 22" racks. It would be like asking that the power company went to 360 Hz for the AC power -- it would be better, but since so much is used to the standard, it likely won't happen.
That is a lesson that seems to have been lost in history. The cross-pollination between countries that reduced the hatred among different Europeans to a managable level in the late 1940s is REALLY needed in the US.
For the sake of the country's future, we really need exchange programs between countries like Japan, China, Russia, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia. That way, we don't fall into that "We good, they are the evil demon legion whose only purpose is to be killed" trap that Europe fell into.
I wouldn't mind seeing more culture in the US than what is in the bottom of my yogurt cup either.
It would be nice to have what was once deadly hatreds turned into soccer rivalries come World Cup season.
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We had people say similar things in the late 1990s when there was the suggestion of having a computer only download/run stuff from a single repository with everything locked out... a la NGTCB/Palladium. Now, on most devices, this is the norm and not the exception.
Similar with the concept of having locations sent to ad services 24/7/365 when the cellphone in common use was a Motorola RAZR.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the future that showers were limited and toilets had inbuilt tests for illegal substances, and the only result would be some grumbling.
The "boil the frog" strategy has worked extremely well so far.
It is happening. In the past several years, corn production has mainly changed from food to ethanol, which has spiked the price of it. It sounds humorous, but pork prices are spiking (thus the mention of a bacon shortage.) Milk prices have gone up sharply.
Quality of food is a lot worse than it was in the past.
As for petrochemicals, we have hit peak oil... and there is only so much to go around, so when it comes to burning it in a car versus using it for fertilizer, one can guess which will win out.
Malthus can never be deterred; only delayed.
Most civilized countries, being a waitperson is a profession to itself. That is why most of Europe has a "gratuity included" sign for their cafes and restaurants.
I'd like to see that in the US. Charge the 20% extra on food, and pay the waitstaff a living salary. That way, tips actually would be for good service, as opposed to something one has to do as a social norm.
We here in the US are one 9/11-like incident from that happening.
Here in Texas, we have "Knox boxes" which are sturdy steel lockboxes which are attached to fences or embedded in cement. They use a Medeco lock, and are keyed to what the local PD or fire recommends. In the box is a key to whatever is relevant.
If there is an issue, the response people just fish the keys out of the Knox Box, open the gate, and be on their way.
Having a good SHA algorithm is a good thing. Yes, hash collisions may not seem to be something that can happen often, but if there is a chance that one can make a document saying "hell no" be changed to "yes, definitely", that can bankrupt a company.
Hashes also have other uses, especially as "bit blenders", so if one is able to figure out a way to decrease entropy, then keys generated from a device like /dev/random can be significantly less secure.
Each crypto algorithm is important. I just wish NIST would not just pick one candidate, but perhaps 2-3 at a time [1]. The reason for this is that if something happened that made the algorithm insecure, the standard libraries would have a backup. It also means that embedded controllers that are made to the standard wouldn't have to be chucked and replaced should one algorithm be cracked.
[1]: Not just hashing, but encryption as well. I wish NIST went wish not just Rijndael, but Serpent and Twofish for a standard. Similar with not just going with just RSA, but RSA, Merkel, DSA, ElGamel, and elliptic encryption. That way, should an attack like TWIRL or quantum computers make RSA pointless, people can switch over to Merkel or another algorithm without needing a hardware upgrade. Plus, for high security work, multiple algorithms can be cascaded [2] to ensure that one weak link won't compromise everything.
[2]: No, three 256-bit algorithms will not get you 768 bits. In reality, you end up with 258 bits of security. However, if one of the algos ends up being broken and only offering 32 bits of unique keys, the other two would continue to keep at least 256 bits of keylength.
Windows Server 2012 has this as a feature. Caveats:
1: It has to be a NTFS volume. No ReFS, FAT32, or other filesystems.
2: The deduplication does not happen in real time. Store 500 of the same one gig files, and it will initially take up 500 gigs until the background task gets around to replacing redundant blocks with links.
Here is my question:
On one hand, device security is a must on two levels:
First, it is to keep code belonging to one program from affecting another in a malicious manner, be it tampering with data, or in some cases, merely reading it and then sending a copy to a place upstream.
Second, some protection against the "dancing bunnies" attack by Trojan horses. This is something Apple has excelled at -- since virtually all app installs go through the App Store, a malicious site trying to get someone to install a detrimental app is unheard of in the iOS ecosystem. This keeps users who are not highly tech savvy safe because Apple guards the gateway completely.
On the other hand, by only allowing the iOS device to only be used in "an approved manner" locks out a myraid of opportunities for making cool stuff that was never thought of. For example, being able to use a device as a full BSD computer in a pinch, similar to how one can pull up a decently working, lightweight Ubuntu distribution on the Motorola Atrix series of phones.
In your opinion, where does the balance lie between protecting users from themselves, to minimize the Dancing Bunnies security hole, but still allow new, creative, and innovative uses for the device without having to have people have to jailbreak the device?
Of course, piracy of apps is an issue, but having it handled by a separate mechanism that is not tied to the presence/absence of jails would be an answer. Android does this well, with both LVL, and on-device encryption of packages.
Is there a way to both have one's cake and eat it too?
If people are riding bicycles to work, a room that uses an employee badge to enter [1], and allows people to either have bike lockers (where the complete bike can be wheeled in and locked up, or at least a good bike rack and normal lockers for securing both their ride as well as their helmet and other gear. Bonus points for mens/woman's locker rooms and showers.
Of course, some other items for a building:
1: Generator, properly sized. Should go without saying.
2: Secured parking. A fence around things with limited access (perhaps locking all but one gate come nighttime) means better security overall.
3: Painted marks separating parking spaces, similar to what is done at Costcos to allow shopping carts near vehicles. It means fewer cars able to park in the lot, but it means far fewer door dings. It also makes people who deliberately take up two spaces more obvious.
4: Parking space locks. There are items like "That's My Spot" so a reserved space stays open until the right person with the remote hits the switch. This keeps the reserved places reserved, and keeps Mr. "I was just parking here for a second" away.
5: A proper loading dock that can handle all truck rigs, even the long haul ones, and handle it where a truck can get in and out without insane backing up and jack-knifing gymnastics.
6: Fuel tanks, both gasoline and diesel (if there is space.)
7: Plenty of storage space/cages. What you think you need for storage, take the values, and double it. Valuable stuff that isn't in use, stick in a cage.
8: Some form of cafeteria or deli. Even if it is an area outsourced to Aramark or some other place. It sucks having to choose between packing a lunch or having to drive a couple miles to find somewhere decent, so having this helps save a lot of time, especially when you can grab something to eat in minutes, not hours.
9: This sounds crazy, but some place one can use to crash overnight. You never know when you might need to grind out a major project beyond the 9-5 workday.
[1]: One of the best setups I've seen is that badge entry is required... and the door will open regardless if someone badges out... however a valid badge just means a siren doesn't sound for 10-15 seconds when the door opens.
btrfs is coming along, but most distros still tend to have ext4 as a default. The one thing that btrfs really and desperately needs is filesystem deduplication. Even Windows now has that in place (although it is of a delayed variety where a background task searches for identical blocks and replaces the copies with pointers.)
Bingo. I have been wanting to get people interested in a keysigning party. First, if done right, no computers need to be brought -- just a piece of paper with everyone's key IDs and fingerprints and a writing instrument to sign off.
It really is a combination of factors. The first is that E-mail for anything other than formal communications has essentially been replaced by texts, iMessages, and FB messages. No SMS client supports PGP [1]. iMessages, neither. I have read that FB sometimes flags encrypted PGP messages as spam and won't deliver. Copying/pasting text is no big deal, but on devices like the iPhone which only allow an app at a time, it does interrupt the workflow.
There is the attitude as well that security should be as simple as clicking a picture of a padlock, without people worrying about webs of trust, trusted introducers, recovation certs, ADKs, etc. However, without that knowledge, we get people having to trust CAs completely... and we all know where that has gotten us (the discussions about DigiNotar for example.)
Of course, there is the fact that PGP seems to have faded away from platforms. It is difficult to get GNU's Privacy Guard to build on non-mainstream operating systems due to the sheer amount of dependencies involved.
There is no iOS app that one can use to generate, store, sign keys, copy keys in and out, export keys, import keys, and so on, unless one jailbreaks their device and uses GNU's Privacy Guard and a shell prompt. Android fares a tad better in this department.
PGP is one of the very few tools that people have that is widespread and usable for protection, and it is almost impossible to get people to use it, even when they know about the constant invasions of privacy.
[1]: In this context, PGP means PGP (TM) by Symantec, GNU Privacy Guard, or other utilities that work with the OpenPGP standard.
There are some decent mapping apps out there.
I've had great luck with ATT's navigation app which uses Telenav for maps. Turn by turn, ATT's offering has done quite well, especially finding places in deep banjo country with the offline maps loaded and dealing with spotty signal quality.
First distro was SLS. Then Slackware.
I moved to RedHat because the revising of the package manager (rpm) made life a lot easier, especially with GPG signing.
These days, I stick with either RedHat for production stuff with subscriptions or CentOS (with an occassional donation to their cause) for non-production.
I also keep a Knoppix CD around for recovering data, or when travelling.
Where this technology is needed is RV and trailer tires. If a car tire blows, usually one has a time where it runs flat. A travel trailer or a fifth wheel, you don't feel the blown tire until it has blown off the rim and caused significant amounts of damage to the rig. Having something like this wouldn't just save 1-2 MPG, it might save a $50,000 trailer or more if it keeps a tire on the rim.
Depending on how big the accelerator has to be, I wonder if this could be used for making smaller reactors, perhaps using thorium instead of uranium as fuel. With the permanent moratorium in place since Carter, this would allow nuclear energy to be useful in the US, and since the reactors are smaller and can be QA-ed at a factory before hitting a site, it means that problems have a greater chance of being caught before the thing goes live.
Subcritical fission isn't just useful for getting rid of fuel, it would allow for reactor arrays to be built when it would be impossible to build the larger type.
Spybot is a good choice as well.
Of course, there is always Sandboxie which does help with limiting what access a program has. I don't know how well it can deal with a determined 0-day exploit that has ways of getting Admin rights from a user context, but it does redirect all writes from the filesystem and Registry into a safe location [1].
[1]: From personal experience, keep the Sandboxie sandbox on a different partition than normal stuff. That way, should something try something malicious or just keep writing 0 byte files in the filesystem, cleaning it is just a format command away.
The trick with cellphones is less encryption than authentication. With the very small keyspace most people chose for a PIN, a device maker wants to have the PIN checking done on a hardened chip before the true 128 or 256 bit key is released. That way an intruder either has to guess through the chip (and be stopped/slowed down after a number of tries), or has to physically uncap the chip and go at it with an electron microscope (good luck.)
Of course, with a chip being the gatekeeper, it can easily be backdoored, so that is the downside of that type of security measure.
One of the primary causes of malware is drive-by intrusion via compromised or unmaintained ad servers. Instead of worrying about free antivirus (which by definition rarely catches real 0-day threats), I'd get an ad blocker, or a utility like the paid version of Malwarebytes which blocks malicious website IPs.
Block the IPs and what spits out the malware, don't bother playing whack-a-mole against the latest polymorphic stuff.
As for antivirus, just go with MSE. It usually is in the middle of the pack, is lightweight, and the price is right.
This is one company that had 250 million invested in it of US tax dollars, which got handed to China on a silver platter.
I would love to be wrong about the disinterest in battery tech in the US, but money talks.
On one hand, dumping the contacts, text messages, and other items from a phone would be a vast boon for exposing a crime ring for investigators. However, on the other hand, any forensic device that can be used by LEOs can be used by criminals for gain as well.
If one separates a corporate officer from their phone and is able to completely dump the contents, it would mean a gold mine. Competitors would buy contact lists, spreadsheets (accounts payable/receivable), unannounced product sheets, etc. Employee payroll info can be sold to ID thieves, and the fact that these employees are at work at this time can be sold to local gangs for burglaries/home invasions. If the employee has any military employment, that info and their family info can be sold to foreign intel agencies, etc.
The trick is defense in depth. Yes, iPhones and some Android devices have device encryption, but the best thing is having encryption on the app level. To get around that, the blackhats would have to find a way to stick a keylogger on the device, as opposed to just a single snatch of the device and a dump.
Here in Austin, there are charging stations, but they are scattered around in odd places. A credit union has one, a local Wally World has a couple.
However, the problem is that one doesn't know if that charging station is in use or not, and with the limited range of an EV, keeping the batteries charged up and keeping track of every mile is the difference between an easy ride home versus having to get a tow [1].
This isn't to say EV technology is bad, it is just the fact that there isn't much being done to make batteries with better energy per volume [2]. Get that within an order of magnitude of gasoline, and the entire transportation industry will change.
What might be a better answer might be fuel cells which turn on and stay on until the battery is fully charged if there is no shore power. EFOY has methanol based fuel cells, however, it might be nice to have propane or pure ethanol because of how toxic methanol is.
[1]: Acquaintance of mine who has a LEAF has one solution -- if he does not know if there is enough power available to make it back, out comes the Honda eu2000is. 120VAC charging is slow, but it is better than nothing.
[2]: There just seems to be no interest in better batteries in the US. This is a crying shame because of how this would cure a lot of problems.
There is a difference between audiophile stuff that has capabilities difficult to measure versus studio equipment.
For example, if given the choice between a set of high quality monitors with a flat response suitable for 5.1 mixing versus "audiophile" speakers that sit on a specially polished granite surface with some rare earth pixie dust, shined with faerie butter, I'll take the studio monitors, and if I wanted a "fat bass", I could EQ it in.
Studio grade stuff, I understanding paying the premium for. "Audiophile" stuff which seems to be more about looks and "experience" such as a $500 wooden knob as opposed to something that can be measured objectively.
[1]: Monitors in this context being speakers, not the lizard on top of the LCD.
The one unique thing they did is their backend Web stuff where individual computers, racks, or even entire datacenters could drop offline, but their stuff would stay up. They put redundancy at the top of the stack as opposed to the conventional way of having redundant, quality hardware and having the backend being fairly thin and simple.
It reminds me of the push to high voltage DC electricity. Yes, the current standards are not as efficient as they should be, but it would cost a pretty penny to rip our racks out, and either adapt or buy new hardware.
We have enough standards already -- a lot of data centers have both 19" racks and 22" racks. It would be like asking that the power company went to 360 Hz for the AC power -- it would be better, but since so much is used to the standard, it likely won't happen.
That is a lesson that seems to have been lost in history. The cross-pollination between countries that reduced the hatred among different Europeans to a managable level in the late 1940s is REALLY needed in the US.
For the sake of the country's future, we really need exchange programs between countries like Japan, China, Russia, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia. That way, we don't fall into that "We good, they are the evil demon legion whose only purpose is to be killed" trap that Europe fell into.
I wouldn't mind seeing more culture in the US than what is in the bottom of my yogurt cup either.
It would be nice to have what was once deadly hatreds turned into soccer rivalries come World Cup season.