Pre OS-X, you could get a true virus (WDEF/CDEF) by merely inserting a floppy into a drive.
OS X, there are no viruses. There are trojans, and some crafted Javascript exploits for scareware, but there are no true viruses as in the sense of the word. Rootkits are extremely rare.
It doesn't mean a Mac can get compromised, but I have yet to see a compromised Mac that wasn't due to an overt Trojan. In fact, the last Mac compromised I've seen was due to someone trying to install a pirated copy of iWork '09. Contrast this to almost anyone nontechnical getting stung by compromised Windows systems, and even taking in account the smaller Mac market share, it shows that OS X is more secure in this regard.
That is similar to how the ZTIC system from IBM works. The only weakness in that is the fact that a blackhat can capture your authentication token (the cookie the bank uses, SSL state, etc.) Then while you are looking at your statements, the Web browser is actually making some bank transfers to Elbonia without showing you.
With the ZTIC, as it has a completely separate, secure connection to the bank, it will show you the transactions before allowing approving, so someone trying to pull money from the account would be stopped in their tracks, unless they are good enough with social engineering to get someone to ignore what their little keyfob says.
I would say that app security on phones is light years ahead of security on general computers.
For example, Android. A malicious app can install with a lot of permissions, but if it wants to get into the banking app's files, it will require breaking out of the Dalvik VM, rooting the phone, then trying to find a way to pull the data encryption key from the context of the other application.
iOS has similar security. A malicious app would have to figure out how to get out of the BSD jail, get root, find the encryption keys used for storing the data in the context of the bank app.
Because apps are very isolated from each other on phones, it is a lot harder to make undetectable malware as it is on PCs.
Plus, smartphones are a lot more resistant to drive-by browser attacks, which install the majority of malware on PCs.
To boot, since smartphones take some doing to root/jailbreak, a dumb user will be protected from an app that tries to su to root on Android.
So, smartphones are not perfect, but dual factor authentication is better than the username/password, or username/password/"show user if this is the right goat" stuff we have now.
Bingo. Someone manages to get ahold of someone's "internet credentials" can go to town, and the owner of the creds would be nailed, both civilly and criminally for this.
Remember, we have people who are unable to tell the difference between an IP address and a person. Think about the havoc someone can reach with forged credentials.
Of course, this would make the AV company fear campaigns be able to go up a notch by telling people the consequences of someone stealing their "internet passport", and how consumers need their CPU-hogging, OS-crashing, I/O intercepting, expensive [1] crap, when in reality, something like AdBlock is what actually will get the job done.
[1]: $30 to $50 per computer per year. There is just no real point to paying that, unless you have a business, and if you have a business, you should use ForeFront or SEP which doesn't care about subscriptions.
The smart phone's task is to be a separate authentication device. A SecurID card also works, or a ZTIC-like device can handle authentication and confirmations.
The reason I was mentioning a smart phone is that they are becoming quite common, and have the functionality as a computer. So, having the ability to use that device as opposed to having a dedicated dongle for access would save money and hassle for most people.
You are right, lose the device, and lose access to the account. However, places like eBay and PayPal support multiple phones or authentication tokens.
No, this isn't a perfect solution, but in this case, something is better than nothing, and for the most part, it should be considered as preferred (though still optional) for the user. No phone, no need to set phone based authentication up. Heck, just a scratch off TAN system that they have in Europe is far better than keeping the status quo.
Or even worse, the dictators would have a monitoring service that just would scan for keywords. If one of their subjects states too much stuff or passes a threshold, the program sends a memo to a secret police to make the person disappear, perhaps if the threshold of "revolution speech" is high enough, the person's family disappears too.
Can you picture someone like Stalin or Pol Pot with this ability to monitor technology in their nation? Even outside their nation, they can find who dislikes their country the most and send some goons to take care of the problem.
Of course, this will do jack shit to stop hackers. They will find a way to "borrow" someone else's identity to do their dirty work.
This is how the IBM ZTIC works, although it essentially shows up a confirmation "you seriously want to move $25,000 of your cash from checking to Elbonia?"
Realistically, the best solution may be an app for the phone. You get a one time key from the app on the phone, use that to log in on the PC, then use the phone to confirm transactions. For a blackhat to get access to the account fully, they would need to compromise both the PC (so they can log in), as well as the cellphone (to approve and generate cards) at the same time.
Of course, there will be ways around this, but it is a heck of a lot harder to get a rogue app onto an Android or iOS device, make the app get in sync with the user's compromised PC in order to do an account theft. Not impossible, but it would make the average user's bank records attackable via malware, other than the fact that malware sitting passively with screenshots may be able to send off what lies in the account to a remote site.
Even without UAC priv escalation, there is a lot malicious software can do in a user context without having to get administrative rights. Just a mass file slurp of documents to an offshore blackhat site can cause a lot of damage.
Depends on vehicle. If the light is a maintenance minder like most Hondas and other cars have, that is one thing.
If the light is a low oil pressure warning, that is completely different... I know people who have done this, and end up buying new cars every 2-3 years while bitching how cars don't have as good engines as they used to.
Doesn't Apple have a prohibition of using a framework other than Objective C for their iOS apps? I know some tools get around this by making Objective C source code.
The problem is defining who is an asshole in terms a machine can understand and react to.
A heuristic system might work:
Points rack up if someone uses choice phrases (and variations of those replacing characters.)
Points rack up for bad syntax.
The game detects a lot of kills by someone near a spawn point (racking up points slowly, but surely)
etc.
The question is making this stuff work. Do points decay over time, or stay permanent, so after a while, after so many curse words, someone's account goes to the next tier of charges?
Of course, there is the civil liability of branded a griefer by the higher bill. Can a game company deal with a high-power law firm making a class-action libel case stating that the higher tier means someone is known as an asshole, thus causing reputation damage? I'm sure some law firm out there would be readying a motion of discovery in order to find something juicy along these lines.
If I were running a MMO, I'd concern myself with other things. Griefers can be handled by account suspensions, tarpits (if someone is spamming chat, each message is delayed longer and longer by the server. If someone is sending the same message, or similar except with a random value via/tells to people not guilded/grouped, their/tells start taking longer to be received, and the user eventually gets disconnected), and the usual MMO methods. I wouldn't bother paying for the devs to have a tiered payment mechanism. Instead, I'd have the GMs manually recognize the top notch players and give them free play.
The fake accounts can always use bogus credit cards. Yes, it seems like money coming in, but a lot of that will be yanked back out when charge-backs start occurring, or people wonder why they got double-billed.
One reason why gold spammers on MMOs are common is that when people hand the sleazier ones their credit cards, the cards are charged multiple times, usually to provide 1-2 extra accounts ready for botting. Now multiply that by how many people on a MMO pay for gold. It is easy to understand that even though a MMO company may swing the banhammer like a lawnmower like in Dead Alive, it doesn't seem to have that much effect.
If a botter decides to make all their bots put in a complaint about someone, most GMs seeing that pop up will almost certainly boot if not suspend the victim's account just to see what is up.
Also, any system can be exploited. If done wrong, you will find a game/MMO where the griefers get free monthly costs, while anyone who isn't in the clique gets penalized as undesirable.
A system of assigning who is friend versus troll really only would work if it was manually done with one of the game employees doing the flagging as good versus troll. Even this can be abused.
If it were up to me, I'd see about notable community members getting a discount (or if they are good enough, such as one person on Everquest 2 Test who is the backbone of the server when it comes to tradeskills), hand them a permanent free sub because of their dedication. I wouldn't put in an automated mechanism just because people will find how it works and abuse it.
1: It offers to save both a printed copy of the key and a key file.
2: It can save it in Active Directory.
3: It can use the Data Recovery Agent specified in a policy.
4: You can specify what 128 or 256 key pleases you. All zeroes? Step right up.
I really wish some other OS had the ability to use the TPM for hard disk encryption functionality. TrouSerS tries, but we need an actual initiative for other operating systems. It wouldn't be that hard to accomplish -- boot into a RAMdisk, pass checks to the TPM along the way, if the TPM wouldn't cough up the key to mount "/" and other filesystems, prompt the user for a keyfile or a passphrase.
There is one use where Windows Server 2008 R2 + Hyper-V is the only game in town:
Encrypting a remote server, while still letting it boot, using BitLocker with a TPM.
Why is this important? A couple years ago, I did a gig for a some research project that had a remote server that went unmanned for months at a time. It had a Net connection via satellite. This server had a couple Linux VMs (unsupported [1] but worked perfectly.)
Bitlocker is the only game in town for not just providing hard disk encryption, but allowing a server to boot without intervention via remote. Of course, in theory, someone can dump the RAM or plug an IEE1394 dongle in, but the people that would be going for a remote, unprotected server almost completely would be low-tech thieves looking for hardware, or perhaps medium-tech, looking for stuff on the machine's image to sell on the ID theft market.
[1]: I advised the client that it was unsupported, but they went with this anyway.
Where the rubber will meet the road is if I can trade a bunch of Bitcoins and have delivered, by registered mail, their value in gold, silver, barrels of crude oil, or another commodity. Unless there is an easy way I can buy stuff with Bitcoins with a fast, painless way to change things out, this will be a novelty, along the lines of beenz and flooz.
Until I can actually buy things with this currency, this is more of a sideshow than anything else.
If one wants an anonymous cash currency, Tim C. May, whom used to be a prolific writer on the cypherpunks list had a far better system than BitCoin in a lot of respects.
I have never interacted with BB/GS except to fix a machine they "repaired".
A real PC repair professional will do the following:
1: Provide a detailed description of what they did. If a tech removes the power supply to hose it out with canned air, and reinstalls this, it should be noted, just in case a wire got loose.
2: Discretion. Being asked to repair a PC doesn't mean one gets carte blanche to do a forensics investigation and look at any picture present. Neither does it mean that the info the client has is fair game to stick on the site of chance.
3: Basic honesty. For almost all home users, MSE is good enough. Getting a commercial AV solution is pointless because most infections end up being 0-day variants that AV products will not catch. Instead, educating the end user on Adblock and sandboxie will go a lot further to prevent calls in the future about infected machines. The $50-$100 that a user would spend on an AV solution can go for an external hard drive (which actually has a tangible benefit to the user) for nightly backups.
4: Common sense. The average security schlock states to use AV software, don't run executables. However, few of these guys actually put any emphasis on something actually important, and that are backups. Most users' needs can be met by an external hard disk, a relevant backup utility [1], and Mozy/Carbonite/Blackblaze for documents. It almost is a mind-blower why users are not taught backup 101. With a decent backup utility, one's RTO is the time it takes to put in a recovery CD, partition the drive, click "restore volume", the backup program restore, and the reboot back into the restore system. If one has a real time copy utility, one's RPO is almost real time with documents.
The problem is that most "computer repairmen" have no clue what professionalism is. I know people who just can't find anyone they trust, so if they start getting computer problems, they just throw away their old machine and buy something new, rather than pay some guy hundreds of dollars to do nothing, except perhaps try some half-ass job of installing Norton Antivirus.
[1]: It would be nice if MS had a standardized utility like NTbackup (which was the main OS utility up to XP/2003). However, Vista and W7 ship with widely varying features in their OS backup utilities depending on edition. So, I get people to get a third party utility like Retrospect, TrueImage, or NetBackup if using Windows. Most needs for backups on Macs can be met by Time Machine, and UNIX has a slew of useful utilities.
I would say that the CP aspect is being used because "for the children" is one of the root passwords (perhaps the toor password) to the Constitution, and the justice "system" [1].
[1]: I call it a "system", but in reality, it is more like a human centipede than anything else if you really think about it.
If this is the case, one can run the employer's E-mail using an app like Nitrodesk's TouchDown. This way, the work stuff is under the restrictions of the Exchange policies (encrypted, etc.) However, that just affects the app. Plus, it keeps work's GAL from getting confused with one's personal GAL, if they have a personal Exchange account for mail.
It is pretty hard to brick an Android phone. Plus, if Joe Sixpack has his device rooted, he has already jumped through a lot of hoops already, even if it is a "one click root".
The ironic thing is that Android is easier to back up once rooted than before. Rooted, I have nandroid (complete copy of the ROM), and Titanium Backup (complete copy of all apps backed up, and stored encrypted on Dropbox.) Without root, there isn't any real way to back Android up.
To boot, editing build.prop isn't my idea of a good time, but a lot of people do this for other reasons.
Around 1990-1991, Adobe had a CD stuffed chock full of Type 1 Acrobat fonts. You could buy the entire CD unlocked, or get the CD for free, and call Adobe to unlock what fonts one wanted at the time.
From reading the patent, this seems very close to prior art, as it uses the word "system", and at the time, calling an 800 number and putting in an unlock code could be considered just as much a system as an in-app purchase under iOS.
The *only* way anonymous could ever have the ability for people to prove ranks is if they had a PGP web of trust in place, with people knowing and trusting at least some people. This way, if someone claims that Alice is the Grand Poobah of Anonymous and signs the key, this can be verified, especially if multiple people sign Alice's key.
Pseudo-anonymity where people can't match the real person to the ID is very useful, provided someone doesn't link their anonymous ID with real life info [1].
[1]: With PGP or gpg, with anonymous IDs, I'd recommend not just keeping those keys on a separate keyring, but perhaps on a completely different system (or VM), just to make sure the IDs never are linkable with each other.
Compared to the imbeciles on the road, I'll take a self driving car any day. One in 100,000 miles is pretty good compared to encountering someone who is likely to make a mistake every mile because they are texting, yapping on a cellphone, pouring a beer from a spout on the dashboard [1], or otherwise incapable of critical life safety judgement calls.
[1]: Yes, on a daily commute I saw someone actually pouring a beer (either that, or they liked bubbly apple juice) from a tap on the dashboard.
Trusting that the Dev Team will have a jailbreak isn't a good idea to bet a business on. It took about three months for a good JB to be out for the iPhone 4, and subsequent JBs used a hardware security hole that has definitely been fixed. Right now, there is no JB in sight for the iPad 2, and if there is a security hole, I'm sure it will not be blown until the next iPhone is released.
If devices start being able to resist being jailbroken for a year or more, it would absolutely extinguish prospects for having a company based on selling products through Cydia.
Slashdot Mirror
I think people confuse Mac with OS X.
Pre OS-X, you could get a true virus (WDEF/CDEF) by merely inserting a floppy into a drive.
OS X, there are no viruses. There are trojans, and some crafted Javascript exploits for scareware, but there are no true viruses as in the sense of the word. Rootkits are extremely rare.
It doesn't mean a Mac can get compromised, but I have yet to see a compromised Mac that wasn't due to an overt Trojan. In fact, the last Mac compromised I've seen was due to someone trying to install a pirated copy of iWork '09. Contrast this to almost anyone nontechnical getting stung by compromised Windows systems, and even taking in account the smaller Mac market share, it shows that OS X is more secure in this regard.
It is better than trusting packages from random sources.
Debian's OpenSSL fiasco was fixed.
RedHat issued kill strings for the signed ssh package, and it was dealt with in hours.
Not sure on the UnreallRCD item.
Nothing is 100% secure, and I would daresay that if there are only three examples of crap getting through the repo system, those odds are really good.
That is similar to how the ZTIC system from IBM works. The only weakness in that is the fact that a blackhat can capture your authentication token (the cookie the bank uses, SSL state, etc.) Then while you are looking at your statements, the Web browser is actually making some bank transfers to Elbonia without showing you.
With the ZTIC, as it has a completely separate, secure connection to the bank, it will show you the transactions before allowing approving, so someone trying to pull money from the account would be stopped in their tracks, unless they are good enough with social engineering to get someone to ignore what their little keyfob says.
I would say that app security on phones is light years ahead of security on general computers.
For example, Android. A malicious app can install with a lot of permissions, but if it wants to get into the banking app's files, it will require breaking out of the Dalvik VM, rooting the phone, then trying to find a way to pull the data encryption key from the context of the other application.
iOS has similar security. A malicious app would have to figure out how to get out of the BSD jail, get root, find the encryption keys used for storing the data in the context of the bank app.
Because apps are very isolated from each other on phones, it is a lot harder to make undetectable malware as it is on PCs.
Plus, smartphones are a lot more resistant to drive-by browser attacks, which install the majority of malware on PCs.
To boot, since smartphones take some doing to root/jailbreak, a dumb user will be protected from an app that tries to su to root on Android.
So, smartphones are not perfect, but dual factor authentication is better than the username/password, or username/password/"show user if this is the right goat" stuff we have now.
Bingo. Someone manages to get ahold of someone's "internet credentials" can go to town, and the owner of the creds would be nailed, both civilly and criminally for this.
Remember, we have people who are unable to tell the difference between an IP address and a person. Think about the havoc someone can reach with forged credentials.
Of course, this would make the AV company fear campaigns be able to go up a notch by telling people the consequences of someone stealing their "internet passport", and how consumers need their CPU-hogging, OS-crashing, I/O intercepting, expensive [1] crap, when in reality, something like AdBlock is what actually will get the job done.
[1]: $30 to $50 per computer per year. There is just no real point to paying that, unless you have a business, and if you have a business, you should use ForeFront or SEP which doesn't care about subscriptions.
The smart phone's task is to be a separate authentication device. A SecurID card also works, or a ZTIC-like device can handle authentication and confirmations.
The reason I was mentioning a smart phone is that they are becoming quite common, and have the functionality as a computer. So, having the ability to use that device as opposed to having a dedicated dongle for access would save money and hassle for most people.
You are right, lose the device, and lose access to the account. However, places like eBay and PayPal support multiple phones or authentication tokens.
No, this isn't a perfect solution, but in this case, something is better than nothing, and for the most part, it should be considered as preferred (though still optional) for the user. No phone, no need to set phone based authentication up. Heck, just a scratch off TAN system that they have in Europe is far better than keeping the status quo.
Or even worse, the dictators would have a monitoring service that just would scan for keywords. If one of their subjects states too much stuff or passes a threshold, the program sends a memo to a secret police to make the person disappear, perhaps if the threshold of "revolution speech" is high enough, the person's family disappears too.
Can you picture someone like Stalin or Pol Pot with this ability to monitor technology in their nation? Even outside their nation, they can find who dislikes their country the most and send some goons to take care of the problem.
Of course, this will do jack shit to stop hackers. They will find a way to "borrow" someone else's identity to do their dirty work.
Nail, head hit:
This is how the IBM ZTIC works, although it essentially shows up a confirmation "you seriously want to move $25,000 of your cash from checking to Elbonia?"
Realistically, the best solution may be an app for the phone. You get a one time key from the app on the phone, use that to log in on the PC, then use the phone to confirm transactions. For a blackhat to get access to the account fully, they would need to compromise both the PC (so they can log in), as well as the cellphone (to approve and generate cards) at the same time.
Of course, there will be ways around this, but it is a heck of a lot harder to get a rogue app onto an Android or iOS device, make the app get in sync with the user's compromised PC in order to do an account theft. Not impossible, but it would make the average user's bank records attackable via malware, other than the fact that malware sitting passively with screenshots may be able to send off what lies in the account to a remote site.
Even without UAC priv escalation, there is a lot malicious software can do in a user context without having to get administrative rights. Just a mass file slurp of documents to an offshore blackhat site can cause a lot of damage.
Depends on vehicle. If the light is a maintenance minder like most Hondas and other cars have, that is one thing.
If the light is a low oil pressure warning, that is completely different... I know people who have done this, and end up buying new cars every 2-3 years while bitching how cars don't have as good engines as they used to.
Doesn't Apple have a prohibition of using a framework other than Objective C for their iOS apps? I know some tools get around this by making Objective C source code.
The problem is defining who is an asshole in terms a machine can understand and react to.
A heuristic system might work:
Points rack up if someone uses choice phrases (and variations of those replacing characters.)
Points rack up for bad syntax.
The game detects a lot of kills by someone near a spawn point (racking up points slowly, but surely)
etc.
The question is making this stuff work. Do points decay over time, or stay permanent, so after a while, after so many curse words, someone's account goes to the next tier of charges?
Of course, there is the civil liability of branded a griefer by the higher bill. Can a game company deal with a high-power law firm making a class-action libel case stating that the higher tier means someone is known as an asshole, thus causing reputation damage? I'm sure some law firm out there would be readying a motion of discovery in order to find something juicy along these lines.
If I were running a MMO, I'd concern myself with other things. Griefers can be handled by account suspensions, tarpits (if someone is spamming chat, each message is delayed longer and longer by the server. If someone is sending the same message, or similar except with a random value via /tells to people not guilded/grouped, their /tells start taking longer to be received, and the user eventually gets disconnected), and the usual MMO methods. I wouldn't bother paying for the devs to have a tiered payment mechanism. Instead, I'd have the GMs manually recognize the top notch players and give them free play.
The fake accounts can always use bogus credit cards. Yes, it seems like money coming in, but a lot of that will be yanked back out when charge-backs start occurring, or people wonder why they got double-billed.
One reason why gold spammers on MMOs are common is that when people hand the sleazier ones their credit cards, the cards are charged multiple times, usually to provide 1-2 extra accounts ready for botting. Now multiply that by how many people on a MMO pay for gold. It is easy to understand that even though a MMO company may swing the banhammer like a lawnmower like in Dead Alive, it doesn't seem to have that much effect.
If a botter decides to make all their bots put in a complaint about someone, most GMs seeing that pop up will almost certainly boot if not suspend the victim's account just to see what is up.
Also, any system can be exploited. If done wrong, you will find a game/MMO where the griefers get free monthly costs, while anyone who isn't in the clique gets penalized as undesirable.
A system of assigning who is friend versus troll really only would work if it was manually done with one of the game employees doing the flagging as good versus troll. Even this can be abused.
If it were up to me, I'd see about notable community members getting a discount (or if they are good enough, such as one person on Everquest 2 Test who is the backbone of the server when it comes to tradeskills), hand them a permanent free sub because of their dedication. I wouldn't put in an automated mechanism just because people will find how it works and abuse it.
BitLocker has four ways to recover the key:
1: It offers to save both a printed copy of the key and a key file.
2: It can save it in Active Directory.
3: It can use the Data Recovery Agent specified in a policy.
4: You can specify what 128 or 256 key pleases you. All zeroes? Step right up.
I really wish some other OS had the ability to use the TPM for hard disk encryption functionality. TrouSerS tries, but we need an actual initiative for other operating systems. It wouldn't be that hard to accomplish -- boot into a RAMdisk, pass checks to the TPM along the way, if the TPM wouldn't cough up the key to mount "/" and other filesystems, prompt the user for a keyfile or a passphrase.
There is one use where Windows Server 2008 R2 + Hyper-V is the only game in town:
Encrypting a remote server, while still letting it boot, using BitLocker with a TPM.
Why is this important? A couple years ago, I did a gig for a some research project that had a remote server that went unmanned for months at a time. It had a Net connection via satellite. This server had a couple Linux VMs (unsupported [1] but worked perfectly.)
Bitlocker is the only game in town for not just providing hard disk encryption, but allowing a server to boot without intervention via remote. Of course, in theory, someone can dump the RAM or plug an IEE1394 dongle in, but the people that would be going for a remote, unprotected server almost completely would be low-tech thieves looking for hardware, or perhaps medium-tech, looking for stuff on the machine's image to sell on the ID theft market.
[1]: I advised the client that it was unsupported, but they went with this anyway.
Where the rubber will meet the road is if I can trade a bunch of Bitcoins and have delivered, by registered mail, their value in gold, silver, barrels of crude oil, or another commodity. Unless there is an easy way I can buy stuff with Bitcoins with a fast, painless way to change things out, this will be a novelty, along the lines of beenz and flooz.
Until I can actually buy things with this currency, this is more of a sideshow than anything else.
If one wants an anonymous cash currency, Tim C. May, whom used to be a prolific writer on the cypherpunks list had a far better system than BitCoin in a lot of respects.
I have never interacted with BB/GS except to fix a machine they "repaired".
A real PC repair professional will do the following:
1: Provide a detailed description of what they did. If a tech removes the power supply to hose it out with canned air, and reinstalls this, it should be noted, just in case a wire got loose.
2: Discretion. Being asked to repair a PC doesn't mean one gets carte blanche to do a forensics investigation and look at any picture present. Neither does it mean that the info the client has is fair game to stick on the site of chance.
3: Basic honesty. For almost all home users, MSE is good enough. Getting a commercial AV solution is pointless because most infections end up being 0-day variants that AV products will not catch. Instead, educating the end user on Adblock and sandboxie will go a lot further to prevent calls in the future about infected machines. The $50-$100 that a user would spend on an AV solution can go for an external hard drive (which actually has a tangible benefit to the user) for nightly backups.
4: Common sense. The average security schlock states to use AV software, don't run executables. However, few of these guys actually put any emphasis on something actually important, and that are backups. Most users' needs can be met by an external hard disk, a relevant backup utility [1], and Mozy/Carbonite/Blackblaze for documents. It almost is a mind-blower why users are not taught backup 101. With a decent backup utility, one's RTO is the time it takes to put in a recovery CD, partition the drive, click "restore volume", the backup program restore, and the reboot back into the restore system. If one has a real time copy utility, one's RPO is almost real time with documents.
The problem is that most "computer repairmen" have no clue what professionalism is. I know people who just can't find anyone they trust, so if they start getting computer problems, they just throw away their old machine and buy something new, rather than pay some guy hundreds of dollars to do nothing, except perhaps try some half-ass job of installing Norton Antivirus.
[1]: It would be nice if MS had a standardized utility like NTbackup (which was the main OS utility up to XP/2003). However, Vista and W7 ship with widely varying features in their OS backup utilities depending on edition. So, I get people to get a third party utility like Retrospect, TrueImage, or NetBackup if using Windows. Most needs for backups on Macs can be met by Time Machine, and UNIX has a slew of useful utilities.
I would say that the CP aspect is being used because "for the children" is one of the root passwords (perhaps the toor password) to the Constitution, and the justice "system" [1].
[1]: I call it a "system", but in reality, it is more like a human centipede than anything else if you really think about it.
If this is the case, one can run the employer's E-mail using an app like Nitrodesk's TouchDown. This way, the work stuff is under the restrictions of the Exchange policies (encrypted, etc.) However, that just affects the app. Plus, it keeps work's GAL from getting confused with one's personal GAL, if they have a personal Exchange account for mail.
It is pretty hard to brick an Android phone. Plus, if Joe Sixpack has his device rooted, he has already jumped through a lot of hoops already, even if it is a "one click root".
The ironic thing is that Android is easier to back up once rooted than before. Rooted, I have nandroid (complete copy of the ROM), and Titanium Backup (complete copy of all apps backed up, and stored encrypted on Dropbox.) Without root, there isn't any real way to back Android up.
To boot, editing build.prop isn't my idea of a good time, but a lot of people do this for other reasons.
Around 1990-1991, Adobe had a CD stuffed chock full of Type 1 Acrobat fonts. You could buy the entire CD unlocked, or get the CD for free, and call Adobe to unlock what fonts one wanted at the time.
From reading the patent, this seems very close to prior art, as it uses the word "system", and at the time, calling an 800 number and putting in an unlock code could be considered just as much a system as an in-app purchase under iOS.
The *only* way anonymous could ever have the ability for people to prove ranks is if they had a PGP web of trust in place, with people knowing and trusting at least some people. This way, if someone claims that Alice is the Grand Poobah of Anonymous and signs the key, this can be verified, especially if multiple people sign Alice's key.
Pseudo-anonymity where people can't match the real person to the ID is very useful, provided someone doesn't link their anonymous ID with real life info [1].
[1]: With PGP or gpg, with anonymous IDs, I'd recommend not just keeping those keys on a separate keyring, but perhaps on a completely different system (or VM), just to make sure the IDs never are linkable with each other.
Compared to the imbeciles on the road, I'll take a self driving car any day. One in 100,000 miles is pretty good compared to encountering someone who is likely to make a mistake every mile because they are texting, yapping on a cellphone, pouring a beer from a spout on the dashboard [1], or otherwise incapable of critical life safety judgement calls.
[1]: Yes, on a daily commute I saw someone actually pouring a beer (either that, or they liked bubbly apple juice) from a tap on the dashboard.
Trusting that the Dev Team will have a jailbreak isn't a good idea to bet a business on. It took about three months for a good JB to be out for the iPhone 4, and subsequent JBs used a hardware security hole that has definitely been fixed. Right now, there is no JB in sight for the iPad 2, and if there is a security hole, I'm sure it will not be blown until the next iPhone is released.
If devices start being able to resist being jailbroken for a year or more, it would absolutely extinguish prospects for having a company based on selling products through Cydia.