Minor correction: "We might even wind up getting hit with something like OPEC's oil embargo." One never knows what might happen on the international stage, and being able to not worry on the whims of other nations can contribute a lot to national stability.
I get nervous when people say that oil supplies are something not to worry about. All it will take is Iran deciding to mine the strait of Hormuz, some terrorists blowing up a refinery, or some well publicized happening to the oil/gasoline infrastructure. We will be back to 2008 gas prices in no time, if not far worse. We might even something like OPEC's oil embargo.
Which is why even though oil seems stable, being able to rely on energy that isn't dependent on countries that don't like us is a good thing.
Plus, there are research items which will benefit multiple sectors. Say some company is able to make a battery with 1/10 the energy density of gasoline by volume, have a useful battery life of decades, and do it in a manner that is so idiot resistant, even Techrax gets bored with crushing or mutilating batteries. This doesn't just mean one's latest iPhone will have weeks for battery life. It also means that most vehicles can toss the IC engines and go with electric motors that are far more efficient. Of course, batteries with this storage would allow solar plants to provide electricity 24/7. This is stuff we need to be researching and developing, regardless if people prefer oil or solar, as it benefits everyone.
I like the idea of nuclear plants for a core source... but the beauty of solar is its innate idiot resistance. Pretty much, panels are put on assemblies, the panels are wired to inverters, inverters are wired to the grid... done. For offline panels, add a battery bank, charger, and inverter. Yes, one can add things like multi axis trackers, but there isn't much that solar panels really need, except perhaps blowing the snow off of them in winter. Upkeep costs are very minimal because there are no moving parts (assuming a fixed axis system.) Contrast this to most other energy generation methods which require periodic upkeep due to parts wearing out.
Because solar is so easy to put up almost anywhere, it becomes a "why not?" item, especially because it provides so many benefits. Almost all new RVs are being sold with 100+ watts of panels on them, just because they are a passive way to keep the batteries charged. Developments like Tesla's solar roof will only make it more common to have solar panels of some form being the status quo on buildings.
I made the same exact mistake on another forum. I didn't see the "if the friends paid up" bit either.
Long term, I do wonder if this might become an actual infection vector, where people try to get others to run software just to get them infected in order for them to get a decryption key, as opposed to paying ever-higher currency costs for BitCoins.
On Android, the ROM decides what updates it is getting, be it carrier or manufacturer. If the device came with an AT&T ROM, the ROM pulls down what AT&T wants for updates, if any. If the phone is shipped unlocked, it will be pulling down the manufacturer's ROMs. If I take a HTC 10 bought on AT&T, unlock it, and put it on T-Mobile, it will still continue to fetch updates from AT&T.
iOS is slightly different. Apple controls the vertical regardless of carrier, so an iOS ROM comes from Apple no matter what.
I wish they offered a Blu-Ray with that for that price. I can't tell if they do or not. In any case, for $50, I can go to the Alamo Drafthouse, buy a ticket, get a decent meal, and still be ahead.
There is no movie I'd spend $50 for to see at home, not to mention the cost of a heavily DRM-ed box that is not mentioned.
Personally, I want the ability to unplug and physically remove the antenna, and a little clear window on the device showing its absence on a quick visual inspection. Just one of these laptops can mean a complete and udder compromise of a company network on a massive scale. Even worse, an IDS/IPS internally wouldn't see the cellular traffic.
Even better, I'd like makers to have some extension in the model name showing this feature is present, so I know what models to avoid.
There are very few things I can think of worse than a business computer with 24/7 cell access.
This. You have your internal network nice and secure, and then a blackhat uses the cell interface to enable IP forwarding and turn a PC into an open gateway to the Internet for all and sundry to get on the subnet.
I wouldn't mind something better than A2DP to play high quality audio, with the ability to downshift if there are connectivity issues. I also wouldn't mind some sort of block transfer protocol, perhaps upshifting to Wi-Fi (without needing to join a SSID or use an AP) when needed. Wi-Fi Direct tries to do this, but it needs an AP, so it isn't really that useful for allowing a drive to communicate to a laptop while the laptop is already using an AP, and one doesn't want to connect their hard drive to a public hotspot.
Printers have been a good harbinger of what is to come in the IoT world, especially ones made in the past decade. Basically they are vulnerable devices that will never see an update. I won't be surprised to see other planned obsolescence things like I encountered on one printer -- a sensor that watched a paper path gear, and when the gear wore out past a certain threshold, would stop the printer from printing completely, with the solution being to replace the entire printer. My fix was to 3D print another gear.
What I read from their predictions, especially the gig economy and getting more people into coding is that development work as a whole is commoditized, similar to meat packing, or textile making. It is done at the cheapest country worldwide, by the lowest bidders, for only the time it takes to write that module. This makes anything related to CS paying so little that it isn't worth getting into, with the earnings likely being less than working at a fast food joint.
This already is happening. Unless there is a specific industry like embedded programming or programming for a contract that the code can't be bought from the cheapest coding house in the world, the work goes offshore, and if someone has to do things in this country, it is contracted to a H-1B firm.
With this in mind, who in their right mind would want to go into development, unless they are in some niche that is very narrow and requires years of expertise. Even then, there is always the mindset of "it builds with stubs, ship it, fix after release" that is common in the industry.
What I don't get is that this is Samsung. This is a company that makes tanks and arguably produces some of the best conventional weaponry the world has seen.
They have engineers that know what they are doing. I know this sounds sarcastic, but Samsung has a very good rep in general. It makes me wonder how this happened, especially with a product that has so much visibility to the world. They would have been far better off making up the slight gap for battery tolerances by throwing in some expanded KNOX management features for the enterprise, or perhaps a model so people can have an unlocked bootloader to get more of the geek developers onboard.
This. I have my old HTC Wizard from over ten years ago in a drawer. It isn't thin... but it had a week's battery life, and that is with the TI OMAP CPU overclocked as fast as possible.
I'd rather have a fatter phone that has a better battery life, perhaps a slider phone, so I can use a real physical keyboard as opposed to typing and hoping autocorrect doesn't cause issues.
Why does every phone maker want to beat Apple at Apple's game? Instead, why can't they create their own games with their own rules? There is definitely room for slider phones shaped like the Droid.
If it came down to allowing someone from remote to lock the vehicle, preventing egress and disable the starter versus just making a claim to the insurance company, I'd rather forgo the remote locking and if the item is stolen, deal with the insurance company and see about a replacement vehicle, for a few reasons:
1: Usually a recovered vehicle is trashed big time, and you never know if sometime down the line you might have a dog search at a checkpoint (anyone travelling on I-10 knows about this) yield something the thieves put there in the way of illegal substances.
2: The vehicle can have a failure and lock someone in. At best, it means smashing a window to get out.
3: Most importantly, right now, it might just be a vehicle maker that can do this from remote... but it is only a matter of time before someone hacks that, and in a 104 degree day, someone decides to stall and double-lock all BMWs on the roads, forcing rescue teams to go vehicle by vehicle to get people out before they expire. Or, even more insidiously, during an evacuation, disable and lock all vehicles, ensuring nobody is able to exit a city before a hurricane strikes. The hacking team that manages to do this to OnStar will be forever immortalized.
And this already has happened on a smaller scale. Here in Austin a few years ago, a disgruntled employee logged into a used car dealership's system and disabled 100+ vehicles that were sold by that dealer, where they stalled in the road and started honking their horns. If a guy with a former employee username/PW can do that, imagine what a state sponsored group can do if/when they feel like that, especially with the mindset of most US companies being that security has no ROI.
tl;dr, keep the remote kill switches. It is only a matter of time before that stuff gets hacked, and perhaps used for ransom ("pay us 2 BTC, or else your car will be disabled and your engine's ECU fried in 12 hours.")
Beehive Forums has this feature. It has a "worm" mode function where if a user is flagged with that, they can see all their posts... but nobody else can. It is similar to Reddit's shadowban.
It works well, because instead of the troll creating yet another sock from a different IP, they will spew their nonsense all over the place, and nobody will be the wiser.
I've wanted a feature where an admin could post with a flag where only admins and the troll could see the reply, mainly to keep the troll interested in keeping the account that nobody else sees. Perhaps an ELIZA-esque bot can reply to the troll (again, where only the troll would see the reply) which keeps them busy.
I know for some devices, CM is the only way the device will ever see security patches and updates. I hope this doesn't mean that this project dies, just because it is so useful, especially for owners of devices that are not big hits (the HTC A9 comes to mind.)
Before Boot Camp came out, there was a contest to get Windows XP running directly on the Mac hardware. Vista ran without issue since it groks UEFI, but it took the Boot Camp release before XP could do the same. Every subsequent Windows version can run directly on the Mac hardware, although there are driver issues and oddball stuff. For example, the Apple-specific CD-ROM init sequence before their optical drive wakes up or the driver to enable the F-keys.
It is nice to have all data in one place. What Apple needs to look at is some virtualization technology, either by licensing VirtualBox, VMWare or Parallels, or rolling their own hypervisor. Ideally, a tier 1 hypervisor like Hyper-V would be the best, but a tier 2 would be better than nothing.
In my experience, sending calendar invites is a must-have. That's how I obtained job interviews, sent notices to clients, and so on.
What would be nice is if iOS had the ability to only let a list of people or contact list group have the ability to send invites. Others, it would prompt, and if denied, would just leave the invite as an E-mail, without letting the sender know it was received. I can do this with Outlook, but I rather see this part of the native functionality of the E-mail client, since it is so commonly used.
More like CD rips and such downloaded and in iTunes because it used to do a decent job at song management, as well as Apple iTMS purchases. I would say these days, MediaMonkey would be a better utility for organizing music if one isn't purchasing through Apple's store.
Slap a case on it, get some insurance, and use a secure backpack to lock it up when out and about. Travelon and PacSafe make some decent secure backpacks. For security on the machine, FileVault Pro, and have the user that unlocks FV different from your usual user. That way, an attacker is confronted with the much longer FV boot password user if trying to turn the laptop on, while your day to day user can have a shorter PW.
I have fairly large sized collection. It isn't tough to copy the files to a SD card (rsync), but since I have a YouTube subscription, I just let the music application scan through the collection, then I can just download the songs from Google. Of course, there is the privacy aspect, but the advantage is that you can download what you want to listen to fairly easily when you are away from your music collection.
Of course, Android has some nice music players available, and depending on phone, there might be a utility to allow easier copying of files.
"Free Wi-Fi" is like a place offering "Free beer". TANSTAAFL. That "free" Wi-Fi is a reason I'm paying $12 for three tacos and a drink at a place near my work for lunch, or why a local RV campground costs $50/night when it was less than half that a few years ago.
I don't mind the insecure ones, or the ones that demand you click "accept" before using. My phone has a VPN that automatically fires up, so the worst that the Wi-Fi operator can do is block or slow down the connection.
Slashdot Mirror
Minor correction: "We might even wind up getting hit with something like OPEC's oil embargo." One never knows what might happen on the international stage, and being able to not worry on the whims of other nations can contribute a lot to national stability.
I get nervous when people say that oil supplies are something not to worry about. All it will take is Iran deciding to mine the strait of Hormuz, some terrorists blowing up a refinery, or some well publicized happening to the oil/gasoline infrastructure. We will be back to 2008 gas prices in no time, if not far worse. We might even something like OPEC's oil embargo.
Which is why even though oil seems stable, being able to rely on energy that isn't dependent on countries that don't like us is a good thing.
Plus, there are research items which will benefit multiple sectors. Say some company is able to make a battery with 1/10 the energy density of gasoline by volume, have a useful battery life of decades, and do it in a manner that is so idiot resistant, even Techrax gets bored with crushing or mutilating batteries. This doesn't just mean one's latest iPhone will have weeks for battery life. It also means that most vehicles can toss the IC engines and go with electric motors that are far more efficient. Of course, batteries with this storage would allow solar plants to provide electricity 24/7. This is stuff we need to be researching and developing, regardless if people prefer oil or solar, as it benefits everyone.
I like the idea of nuclear plants for a core source... but the beauty of solar is its innate idiot resistance. Pretty much, panels are put on assemblies, the panels are wired to inverters, inverters are wired to the grid... done. For offline panels, add a battery bank, charger, and inverter. Yes, one can add things like multi axis trackers, but there isn't much that solar panels really need, except perhaps blowing the snow off of them in winter. Upkeep costs are very minimal because there are no moving parts (assuming a fixed axis system.) Contrast this to most other energy generation methods which require periodic upkeep due to parts wearing out.
Because solar is so easy to put up almost anywhere, it becomes a "why not?" item, especially because it provides so many benefits. Almost all new RVs are being sold with 100+ watts of panels on them, just because they are a passive way to keep the batteries charged. Developments like Tesla's solar roof will only make it more common to have solar panels of some form being the status quo on buildings.
I made the same exact mistake on another forum. I didn't see the "if the friends paid up" bit either.
Long term, I do wonder if this might become an actual infection vector, where people try to get others to run software just to get them infected in order for them to get a decryption key, as opposed to paying ever-higher currency costs for BitCoins.
The Indians and Chinese, apparently... Microsoft has started to move their major conferences there, as opposed to the US.
It is a bit more involved than that:
On Android, the ROM decides what updates it is getting, be it carrier or manufacturer. If the device came with an AT&T ROM, the ROM pulls down what AT&T wants for updates, if any. If the phone is shipped unlocked, it will be pulling down the manufacturer's ROMs. If I take a HTC 10 bought on AT&T, unlock it, and put it on T-Mobile, it will still continue to fetch updates from AT&T.
iOS is slightly different. Apple controls the vertical regardless of carrier, so an iOS ROM comes from Apple no matter what.
I wish they offered a Blu-Ray with that for that price. I can't tell if they do or not. In any case, for $50, I can go to the Alamo Drafthouse, buy a ticket, get a decent meal, and still be ahead.
There is no movie I'd spend $50 for to see at home, not to mention the cost of a heavily DRM-ed box that is not mentioned.
Personally, I want the ability to unplug and physically remove the antenna, and a little clear window on the device showing its absence on a quick visual inspection. Just one of these laptops can mean a complete and udder compromise of a company network on a massive scale. Even worse, an IDS/IPS internally wouldn't see the cellular traffic.
Even better, I'd like makers to have some extension in the model name showing this feature is present, so I know what models to avoid.
There are very few things I can think of worse than a business computer with 24/7 cell access.
This. You have your internal network nice and secure, and then a blackhat uses the cell interface to enable IP forwarding and turn a PC into an open gateway to the Internet for all and sundry to get on the subnet.
I wouldn't mind something better than A2DP to play high quality audio, with the ability to downshift if there are connectivity issues. I also wouldn't mind some sort of block transfer protocol, perhaps upshifting to Wi-Fi (without needing to join a SSID or use an AP) when needed. Wi-Fi Direct tries to do this, but it needs an AP, so it isn't really that useful for allowing a drive to communicate to a laptop while the laptop is already using an AP, and one doesn't want to connect their hard drive to a public hotspot.
Printers have been a good harbinger of what is to come in the IoT world, especially ones made in the past decade. Basically they are vulnerable devices that will never see an update. I won't be surprised to see other planned obsolescence things like I encountered on one printer -- a sensor that watched a paper path gear, and when the gear wore out past a certain threshold, would stop the printer from printing completely, with the solution being to replace the entire printer. My fix was to 3D print another gear.
What I read from their predictions, especially the gig economy and getting more people into coding is that development work as a whole is commoditized, similar to meat packing, or textile making. It is done at the cheapest country worldwide, by the lowest bidders, for only the time it takes to write that module. This makes anything related to CS paying so little that it isn't worth getting into, with the earnings likely being less than working at a fast food joint.
This already is happening. Unless there is a specific industry like embedded programming or programming for a contract that the code can't be bought from the cheapest coding house in the world, the work goes offshore, and if someone has to do things in this country, it is contracted to a H-1B firm.
With this in mind, who in their right mind would want to go into development, unless they are in some niche that is very narrow and requires years of expertise. Even then, there is always the mindset of "it builds with stubs, ship it, fix after release" that is common in the industry.
What I don't get is that this is Samsung. This is a company that makes tanks and arguably produces some of the best conventional weaponry the world has seen.
They have engineers that know what they are doing. I know this sounds sarcastic, but Samsung has a very good rep in general. It makes me wonder how this happened, especially with a product that has so much visibility to the world. They would have been far better off making up the slight gap for battery tolerances by throwing in some expanded KNOX management features for the enterprise, or perhaps a model so people can have an unlocked bootloader to get more of the geek developers onboard.
This. I have my old HTC Wizard from over ten years ago in a drawer. It isn't thin... but it had a week's battery life, and that is with the TI OMAP CPU overclocked as fast as possible.
I'd rather have a fatter phone that has a better battery life, perhaps a slider phone, so I can use a real physical keyboard as opposed to typing and hoping autocorrect doesn't cause issues.
Why does every phone maker want to beat Apple at Apple's game? Instead, why can't they create their own games with their own rules? There is definitely room for slider phones shaped like the Droid.
If it came down to allowing someone from remote to lock the vehicle, preventing egress and disable the starter versus just making a claim to the insurance company, I'd rather forgo the remote locking and if the item is stolen, deal with the insurance company and see about a replacement vehicle, for a few reasons:
1: Usually a recovered vehicle is trashed big time, and you never know if sometime down the line you might have a dog search at a checkpoint (anyone travelling on I-10 knows about this) yield something the thieves put there in the way of illegal substances.
2: The vehicle can have a failure and lock someone in. At best, it means smashing a window to get out.
3: Most importantly, right now, it might just be a vehicle maker that can do this from remote... but it is only a matter of time before someone hacks that, and in a 104 degree day, someone decides to stall and double-lock all BMWs on the roads, forcing rescue teams to go vehicle by vehicle to get people out before they expire. Or, even more insidiously, during an evacuation, disable and lock all vehicles, ensuring nobody is able to exit a city before a hurricane strikes. The hacking team that manages to do this to OnStar will be forever immortalized.
And this already has happened on a smaller scale. Here in Austin a few years ago, a disgruntled employee logged into a used car dealership's system and disabled 100+ vehicles that were sold by that dealer, where they stalled in the road and started honking their horns. If a guy with a former employee username/PW can do that, imagine what a state sponsored group can do if/when they feel like that, especially with the mindset of most US companies being that security has no ROI.
tl;dr, keep the remote kill switches. It is only a matter of time before that stuff gets hacked, and perhaps used for ransom ("pay us 2 BTC, or else your car will be disabled and your engine's ECU fried in 12 hours.")
Beehive Forums has this feature. It has a "worm" mode function where if a user is flagged with that, they can see all their posts... but nobody else can. It is similar to Reddit's shadowban.
It works well, because instead of the troll creating yet another sock from a different IP, they will spew their nonsense all over the place, and nobody will be the wiser.
I've wanted a feature where an admin could post with a flag where only admins and the troll could see the reply, mainly to keep the troll interested in keeping the account that nobody else sees. Perhaps an ELIZA-esque bot can reply to the troll (again, where only the troll would see the reply) which keeps them busy.
I know for some devices, CM is the only way the device will ever see security patches and updates. I hope this doesn't mean that this project dies, just because it is so useful, especially for owners of devices that are not big hits (the HTC A9 comes to mind.)
Before Boot Camp came out, there was a contest to get Windows XP running directly on the Mac hardware. Vista ran without issue since it groks UEFI, but it took the Boot Camp release before XP could do the same. Every subsequent Windows version can run directly on the Mac hardware, although there are driver issues and oddball stuff. For example, the Apple-specific CD-ROM init sequence before their optical drive wakes up or the driver to enable the F-keys.
It is nice to have all data in one place. What Apple needs to look at is some virtualization technology, either by licensing VirtualBox, VMWare or Parallels, or rolling their own hypervisor. Ideally, a tier 1 hypervisor like Hyper-V would be the best, but a tier 2 would be better than nothing.
In my experience, sending calendar invites is a must-have. That's how I obtained job interviews, sent notices to clients, and so on.
What would be nice is if iOS had the ability to only let a list of people or contact list group have the ability to send invites. Others, it would prompt, and if denied, would just leave the invite as an E-mail, without letting the sender know it was received. I can do this with Outlook, but I rather see this part of the native functionality of the E-mail client, since it is so commonly used.
More like CD rips and such downloaded and in iTunes because it used to do a decent job at song management, as well as Apple iTMS purchases. I would say these days, MediaMonkey would be a better utility for organizing music if one isn't purchasing through Apple's store.
Slap a case on it, get some insurance, and use a secure backpack to lock it up when out and about. Travelon and PacSafe make some decent secure backpacks. For security on the machine, FileVault Pro, and have the user that unlocks FV different from your usual user. That way, an attacker is confronted with the much longer FV boot password user if trying to turn the laptop on, while your day to day user can have a shorter PW.
I have fairly large sized collection. It isn't tough to copy the files to a SD card (rsync), but since I have a YouTube subscription, I just let the music application scan through the collection, then I can just download the songs from Google. Of course, there is the privacy aspect, but the advantage is that you can download what you want to listen to fairly easily when you are away from your music collection.
Of course, Android has some nice music players available, and depending on phone, there might be a utility to allow easier copying of files.
"Free Wi-Fi" is like a place offering "Free beer". TANSTAAFL. That "free" Wi-Fi is a reason I'm paying $12 for three tacos and a drink at a place near my work for lunch, or why a local RV campground costs $50/night when it was less than half that a few years ago.
I don't mind the insecure ones, or the ones that demand you click "accept" before using. My phone has a VPN that automatically fires up, so the worst that the Wi-Fi operator can do is block or slow down the connection.