It is starting to appear in the US as well. I'm seeing "fix your iPhone" places pop up in the small corner stores that the old pager shops, title loans, and other dodgy places tend to inhabit.
Of course, one thing that gets discussed is how many stolen smartphones get taken apart and wind up at places like that. Of course, the motherboard of the phone isn't usable because of activation and IMEI blacklists, but screens, batteries, speakers, and other small parts are always in demand, especially for newer phones that may not have parts available yet.
They are still using, AFIAK, with the latest gen iPhones, as they mentioned "ion strengthened" glass, which is what Corning's product is.
I think the iWatch will be the first product with the sapphire glass research, since it is better with smaller screens. Plus, there is a difference between scratch resistance and shatter resistance. A watch can use a lot more scratch resistance than shatter resistance, so a harder, more brittle glass like sapphire glass would be more useful as opposed to something a bit less hard, but more resilient (less shatter prone) that would be needed on phones and tablets.
AFIAK, it is more like "tribute", like an Elvis tribute band.
The ironic thing is that tinkerers are the people that started the computer industry. If it were not for MIT's model railroad club and hobbyists from the two Jobs to Linus and Jolitz making basic operating systems, the world would look completely different. (Most likely we would be using Compuserve like forums with TV set top boxes for "internet" access, paying by the kilobyte, more if we actually stepped up to a 2400 bps modem.)
Because of this disposable mentality, the aspect of tinkering has all but vanished from the American psyche. The "cool" teenager who manages to modify the carb to shave a few milliseconds from his 0-60 score has been replaced by someone using Instagram to take a photo of their food before uploading to FB. Maybe the tinkering mentality might come back.
All and all, the tinkering mentality is what made the US what it was. If/when China gets the free-thinking, inventive mentality that has been a hallmark of the West, there is no stopping them, whatsoever. It also is a shame that it is lost, because the questioning, tinkering mentality separates people from drones.
I don't like having to re-buy goods due to planned obsolesce. Take TVs, for example. I have a Sears TV in storage from the '80s. The manual has circuit schematics, where to get replacements for the channel buttons, how to replace switches, what pots are used where. It was made so someone with basic soldering skills could at least maintain it. A new LED TV just gets chucked and you buy a new one, even though the problem could be a membrane contact that costs a penny.
The economy is getting shittier in general. In the past, we could afford to replace things when something small broke. I had a collegue who bought a new car every 2-3 years, once when the relay controlling the heated seat failed. These days, it is commonplace to see people nursing their old Saturns and Honda Civics to keep them on the roads. That is why headlight polishing kits are so common. In the past, vehicles got replaced before the glass or Lexan dulled (or used sealed beam headlights.)
One reason why companies have chosen to go with products that cannot be repaired is simple -- it gets rid of the used market. In the past, if someone had a broken lawn mower, someone else could give it a carb rebuild and get it perfectly functional. A lot of goods, once broken, can't be recycled, much less salvaged for anything whatsoever, which means no real secondhand market.
This is going to backfire. Will a company make more money in the long run if they sell parts to fix their gizmos, or more gizmos in a good economy, and almost none when the economy goes bad and stays bad? For long term thinking, having repairable items brings in a long tail due to the parts sales.
We already have this tech already. Pixelmags does exactly this with magazines in their DRM-ed format. Adobe Flash can do this as well, and has been doing so since the VideoWorks days.
So, I'm guessing Apple is going to be making something similar to a password-protected HyperCard stack I made in 1989 that had the menubar hidden, with a special extension to tell what tracks/sectors the file takes up and automatically exit if the file resides somewhere different?
Encryption transforms are computationally cheap. A MC68000 could do DES-48 with FDE [1] without a noticeable slowdown, so an ARM chip which is several decades ahead would have zero problems with the array shifting of AES.
[1]: As per a program called Access Managed Environment by Casady & Greene, which would DES encrypt the entire hard disk. It was arguably the most thorough encryption program I've seen, offering encryption for removable media, folders, files, even tape, with various methods of recovery (master password, floppy disk, etc.)
On Android, you can use dm-crypt to encrypt your/data partition with a passphrase of a real length, which is separate from your screen unlock PIN/password.
You do need to root it, and type in a command similar to this:
vdc cryptfs changepw newpass
or to enable encryption via the command line:
vdc cryptfs enablecrypto inplace
With/data encrypted, it will prompt for the long passphrase at boot, then from there on, just need the short screen locker password.
I like this part of Android -- you can easily pack your own parachute when it comes to encryption.
One can easily set a longer passcode. Just tell it to do longer than four digits, use numbers only in the password, and once set, the iDevice will prompt you with a numeric keypad and an OK button. If you use letters in your password, it will use the usual full alphanumeric setup.
This way, one can have a longer PIN (I prefer at least 12-16 characters.) Not one in 10,000 anymore, but far higher.
Of course, the attacks will then go to the rubber hose decryption (xkcd.com/538), but it does raise the bar.
Treating them as their own "special" category of evil people only strengthens their cause. If they are just another convict up for murder in max lockup in either a civilian prison or Leavenworth, all their "magic" is gone, compared to being stashed in a special offshore prison, called a "terrorist", and not given a trial.
Who will get more recruits. Someone on Lockup showing their gang signs, or someone stashed in a special prison because they are "terrorists". Lets be real here. The murderers locked in max in most places are just as dangerous as "terrorists" if not more, so why give them special treatment? In fact, let the general prison population decide their rank in their society.
As for the death penalty, I used to be for it, but it brings we who live in the USA down to their level. We need to take a page from Europe and Israel, lock them up for life. Killing them only makes them martyrs.
I hope their home offering isn't like the TV remotes, where to get it to work, I had to create an account with them (with demands for a lot of personal info), go through their relatively awkward website to find the televisionI was using, have that downloaded to the device via USB, and then add some configuring after that before the remote could be used as a remote.
Heck with that. If a remote can't offer an interface to locate stuff on the device itself, it should at least not require an Internet connection (the application should handle this, perhaps downloading codes for newer items), and definitely not require registration on a website to be used.
That is a valid complaint. Adding functionality so startup is parallel is one thing. Having one's own binary log format [1] is a big downside. To boot, rsyslog uses cryptographically signed logs. That means that I lose protection on systemd's logs because in theory an attacker could tamper with those. Should the logs go to rsyslog, the files either will show tampering or be missing.
This also prevents logging to a remote machine as well.
I'm not a fan of binary logs. Even AIX will log stuff from the errpt command if you turn on the right syslog settings. Binary logs make a program like Splunk a necessity, and that is not a cheap tool once you start talking about gigs a day hitting your index servers.
[1]: I don't like the "pro" for it saying that journalctl can give you just the info that you need. For the info I need, I have grep, egrep, and many other tools.
Religious sentiments aside, systemd scratches a number of itches that eventually needed to be addressed. The main one is parallel startup of daemons. On a SSD based machine (and note, these are anecdotal runs), CentOS 6.5 takes about a minute to fully boot to a login prompt. On CentOS 7.0 with systemd starting anything that isn't relying on another process at the same time, well under ten seconds. Similar with a shutdown.
The second item is being able to place processes in containers and set limits before they start. This can be done with SVR4 startup with wrapper scripts, but systemd makes it easier.
The main thing I see against systemd is that it is new. I remember pushback in the early 1990s when Linux distros went to the SVR4 way of starting up from having everything in a big/etc/rc file with branches to other/etc/rc.whatever files, and finally a rc.local file.
The second downside is that systemd has more moving parts. However, it will only be a matter of time before the bugs get eradicated. Heck, sendmail used to be the hair-puller for sysadmins and even that beast is now a long since solved problem.
If one wants to gripe about something, gripe about firewallD. For bringing Windows type abstraction to Linux, it is great. Anything else, it is just another questionable layer that is of dubious value at best, a potential vulnerability at worst.
In reality, the next step up on Internet services is moving to 2FA everywhere. Passwords are easily gotten, but 2FA, though doable, raises the barrier immensely. It means that someone would have to know the user's password and have control of one of their devices. This is far harder than just sifting through a pile of passwords found on a bittorrent dump and trying them on various accounts, or guessing a user's grandma's last name.
I'm sure that if the users that had the pictured compromised had their phones secure and had 2FA on, we wouldn't be inundated about these stories.
Of course, 2FA isn't a perfect solution. Lose access to one's phone number that is used for texting codes, and lose access to the recovery key... and one is hosed big time, be it if they are on Google, Dropbox, Apple, even Yahoo. The ideal would be a vendor neutral keyfob that can be used with everyone's 2FA systems, either as the main means of authentication, or as a tool for recovery, where the keyfob can be stashed somewhere physically secure if there is no other way into an account.
There is a point where phones are "good enough". If it can run basic apps (usual popular ones, and a large game or two), for a lot of people, why buy something else?
For example, my HTC One X Plus and my HTC One M8 both have NFC, decent CPUs. The biggest difference is the M8 has a MicroSD card slot that can go up to 128 gigs, but if I had to go back to the HOX, it is doable.
The mobile industry is running into the same issue that the PC industry has about a decade ago -- what is out is good enough for most tasks, so why bother running the upgrade treadmill?
A $100 phone would still be a decent unit. Not with all the bells and whistles, but still fine for daily use by a lot of people.
There is one tool I've found that has come in handy: A dash cam. If we get more people using these, some texter denying their actions would be proven wrong (assuming the camera has a good shot and the footage is detailed enough) in both civil and criminal courts.
Put the fear of $DEITY into people that if they cause a wreck... someone has a dash cam of the situation and will be more than happy to put that video on YouTube for a DA, opposing lawyers, insurance company, and cow-orkers to see, it might just stop a behavior when no amount of laws or nanny tech inventions would.
One thing though: I wish there were a company that made GOOD dash cams. GoPros are great general cameras, but something that can be mounted under the rearview mirror, hold about 8 hours of high-res footage, and perhaps even offer some facility for detecting tampering.
That is the only reason why last year I went to the 5S. I was thinking Apple would let apps use it as an authentication tool.
That way, I could have an app that groks OpenPGP packets, and can allow the private key to be unlocked at the start of the session, while the fingerprint is used to validate that a request for signing/decrypting with the key is one that has some authorization with it. Since the passphrase is cached, the weakened security during that session isn't that great, and it would stop someone who grabbed the phone from being able to do subsequent signatures/decryptions with the stored keys.
It would also be useful for apps like PayPal which could require a fingerprint scan to confirm a payment or other financial transaction. An attacker who grabs the phone would be hard-pressed be able to dump PayPal's RAM structure out to grab keys, so it would be "good enough" to keep a phone that didn't lock its screen from being a juicy target.
I was wrong on those counts, although the fingerprint scanner is a nice shortcut, so I can access the phone without someone shoulder-surfing my PIN.
I would probably think a judge will rule about NDAs, and tend to rule in favor of businesses. Trade secrets have centuries of precedent behind them. Even if a jury is involved (as this is a civil issue), it would end up being appealed.
There is one concern of mine about this law: Shills for place "A" who post scads of bad reviews about spot "B" that are not in themselves defamatory, but a lot of one-star reviews add up. At the extreme, a place could try to pay people to visit review sites that are in other cities (and where they don't ever plan to visit) just to make one-star reviews.
Problem is that it can be stomped out in the US and Europe with some quick fearmongering. "Home bio-terror labs" is a phrase some politician would throw around, that would get laws passed banning biohacking almost immediately.
Of course, this this type of thing can be very useful. For example, the article about bacteria being able to make propane. If someone was able to make bacteria that could, given sunlight, split water, it would spark a hydrogen economy revolution. Similar with critters that could filter heavy metals out of water, where said critters could be easily picked up and disposed of.
Of course, the fearmongering isn't all conjecture. Someone in theory could make a bug that could eat a vital building material or resins crucial to electronics could make a civilization failure similar to what was described in the Ringworld series with their room temperature superconductors.
I wouldn't be surprised to see countries such as BRIC members, EU members, or other countries start trying to woo the best and brightest for economic gains.
It may not be profitable to do R&D in the next quarter, but governments will greatly profit in a longer interval. For example, Paraguay's stake in their hydroelectric dam might not have meant much in the next quarter when they went in with Brazil on building it... but it has guaranteed the country completely energy independence for now and the near future.
Government funding will still be around. It just won't be the US who hands over currency.
Once a good form factor is established, Apple can go one of a few directions:
1: Make it thinner. 2: Add more features to it. For example, using the MagSafe cable that attaches to it as a USB data transfer cable so the watch can be used as a USB flash drive. 3: Change the form factor.
The problem that Apple is going to face is that watches, for the most part, are something someone buys once and keeps forever. Antique Rolex watches for example.
People have been "trained" to toss their phone annually. Same with their tablet. However, watches are something that tend to be keepsakes and just not thrown away. This is where Apple may run into issues. For a few years, the market will expand, but once it hits saturation, it will be a lot harder to get people to replace their iWatch than the other iDevices.
People said similar about cell phones when the iPhone showed up and changed the form factor of preference from a flip phone to a smartphone. Before that, smartphones were for corporate execs or geeks. Further back, MP3 players were considered geek stuff, too esoteric to use by the mainstream person who was content with a CD Walkman. Apple changed that.
I will be genuinely surprised if I don't see a resurgence of watch wearing due to the iWatch. The Android watches are made out of cheap plastic, while Apple's offering is made out of decent materials and has a better fit/finish. It will attract the bling conscious, and once a rapper starts wearing one, everyone will.
The thing is that watches are pure luxury items now. If someone needs to keep time, even the cheapest burner phone has a clock on it. So, I wouldn't be surprised that they will wind up a status symbol.
Disclaimer: I own zero Apple stock. Just knowing that people are trendy, and Apple has already lead at least three major changes in devices so far, the most recent was the killing of the entire netbook market for iPads.
Of course, I may be entirely wrong about this, but IMHO, I think the iWatch will have a market.
Sybase is exactly the same. You can license it for development by the number of users, or production by the number of cores.
It can get so expensive due to the licensing model they use, that buying a POWER or SPARC machine actually saves money compared to putting it in a VM environment, just because of whatever the DB -can- touch for CPU cores has to be licensed.
I'm not sure about MS SQL server, but from what I read, it is pretty similar.
Of course, tossing in virtualization in the mix is fun as well. For example, if I'm sitting on two boxes with 36 cores, and run a relatively small Oracle instance for VMWare vCenter with one vCPU in fault-tolerant mode, I'm on the hook for 72 cores for the Oracle license. With the cost being around $60,000 per core for the enterprise tier, this can add up. Add to this something like vMotion HA where the license has to include every machine that -could- run the DB, and it can get painful even in the enterprise.
Oracle and Sybase as well have this type of licensing, unless something has changed.
IBM addressed this with POWER7 and newer in a fairly innovative way. They have an option called TurboCore mode which turns off half the cores. The ones still running can use the disabled core's caches, and because of the space available for heat dissipation, clock speed could be bumped up. The result was half the cores, but almost the same performance due to the faster clock and cache available.
I don't know a single cloud provider that would provide that contract. In other lines of work, there would be a third party escrow company. However, with a cloud provider, since decryption would be needed, the only way to provide any assurance is to have some backend appliances that do encryption and are rented, with a paid deposit that once the rental ceases, all keys are wiped. That way, a bankrupt provider would have all their servers sold, but the encryption appliances would be owned by another party. Of course, this may not mean much as it might be a fight wresting the leased items from the bankruptcy trustee, but in theory, it helps put at least a layer in place of protection.
However, I don't know any cloud provider who would spend the time and effort to do this, just because the current system of assuring people that "passwords", "encryption", and "firewalls" is good enough.
Slashdot Mirror
It is starting to appear in the US as well. I'm seeing "fix your iPhone" places pop up in the small corner stores that the old pager shops, title loans, and other dodgy places tend to inhabit.
Of course, one thing that gets discussed is how many stolen smartphones get taken apart and wind up at places like that. Of course, the motherboard of the phone isn't usable because of activation and IMEI blacklists, but screens, batteries, speakers, and other small parts are always in demand, especially for newer phones that may not have parts available yet.
They are still using, AFIAK, with the latest gen iPhones, as they mentioned "ion strengthened" glass, which is what Corning's product is.
I think the iWatch will be the first product with the sapphire glass research, since it is better with smaller screens. Plus, there is a difference between scratch resistance and shatter resistance. A watch can use a lot more scratch resistance than shatter resistance, so a harder, more brittle glass like sapphire glass would be more useful as opposed to something a bit less hard, but more resilient (less shatter prone) that would be needed on phones and tablets.
AFIAK, it is more like "tribute", like an Elvis tribute band.
The ironic thing is that tinkerers are the people that started the computer industry. If it were not for MIT's model railroad club and hobbyists from the two Jobs to Linus and Jolitz making basic operating systems, the world would look completely different. (Most likely we would be using Compuserve like forums with TV set top boxes for "internet" access, paying by the kilobyte, more if we actually stepped up to a 2400 bps modem.)
Because of this disposable mentality, the aspect of tinkering has all but vanished from the American psyche. The "cool" teenager who manages to modify the carb to shave a few milliseconds from his 0-60 score has been replaced by someone using Instagram to take a photo of their food before uploading to FB. Maybe the tinkering mentality might come back.
All and all, the tinkering mentality is what made the US what it was. If/when China gets the free-thinking, inventive mentality that has been a hallmark of the West, there is no stopping them, whatsoever. It also is a shame that it is lost, because the questioning, tinkering mentality separates people from drones.
I don't like having to re-buy goods due to planned obsolesce. Take TVs, for example. I have a Sears TV in storage from the '80s. The manual has circuit schematics, where to get replacements for the channel buttons, how to replace switches, what pots are used where. It was made so someone with basic soldering skills could at least maintain it. A new LED TV just gets chucked and you buy a new one, even though the problem could be a membrane contact that costs a penny.
The economy is getting shittier in general. In the past, we could afford to replace things when something small broke. I had a collegue who bought a new car every 2-3 years, once when the relay controlling the heated seat failed. These days, it is commonplace to see people nursing their old Saturns and Honda Civics to keep them on the roads. That is why headlight polishing kits are so common. In the past, vehicles got replaced before the glass or Lexan dulled (or used sealed beam headlights.)
One reason why companies have chosen to go with products that cannot be repaired is simple -- it gets rid of the used market. In the past, if someone had a broken lawn mower, someone else could give it a carb rebuild and get it perfectly functional. A lot of goods, once broken, can't be recycled, much less salvaged for anything whatsoever, which means no real secondhand market.
This is going to backfire. Will a company make more money in the long run if they sell parts to fix their gizmos, or more gizmos in a good economy, and almost none when the economy goes bad and stays bad? For long term thinking, having repairable items brings in a long tail due to the parts sales.
We already have this tech already. Pixelmags does exactly this with magazines in their DRM-ed format. Adobe Flash can do this as well, and has been doing so since the VideoWorks days.
So, I'm guessing Apple is going to be making something similar to a password-protected HyperCard stack I made in 1989 that had the menubar hidden, with a special extension to tell what tracks/sectors the file takes up and automatically exit if the file resides somewhere different?
Encryption transforms are computationally cheap. A MC68000 could do DES-48 with FDE [1] without a noticeable slowdown, so an ARM chip which is several decades ahead would have zero problems with the array shifting of AES.
[1]: As per a program called Access Managed Environment by Casady & Greene, which would DES encrypt the entire hard disk. It was arguably the most thorough encryption program I've seen, offering encryption for removable media, folders, files, even tape, with various methods of recovery (master password, floppy disk, etc.)
On Android, you can use dm-crypt to encrypt your /data partition with a passphrase of a real length, which is separate from your screen unlock PIN/password.
You do need to root it, and type in a command similar to this:
vdc cryptfs changepw newpass
or to enable encryption via the command line:
vdc cryptfs enablecrypto inplace
With /data encrypted, it will prompt for the long passphrase at boot, then from there on, just need the short screen locker password.
I like this part of Android -- you can easily pack your own parachute when it comes to encryption.
One can easily set a longer passcode. Just tell it to do longer than four digits, use numbers only in the password, and once set, the iDevice will prompt you with a numeric keypad and an OK button. If you use letters in your password, it will use the usual full alphanumeric setup.
This way, one can have a longer PIN (I prefer at least 12-16 characters.) Not one in 10,000 anymore, but far higher.
Of course, the attacks will then go to the rubber hose decryption (xkcd.com/538), but it does raise the bar.
Treating them as their own "special" category of evil people only strengthens their cause. If they are just another convict up for murder in max lockup in either a civilian prison or Leavenworth, all their "magic" is gone, compared to being stashed in a special offshore prison, called a "terrorist", and not given a trial.
Who will get more recruits. Someone on Lockup showing their gang signs, or someone stashed in a special prison because they are "terrorists". Lets be real here. The murderers locked in max in most places are just as dangerous as "terrorists" if not more, so why give them special treatment? In fact, let the general prison population decide their rank in their society.
As for the death penalty, I used to be for it, but it brings we who live in the USA down to their level. We need to take a page from Europe and Israel, lock them up for life. Killing them only makes them martyrs.
I hope their home offering isn't like the TV remotes, where to get it to work, I had to create an account with them (with demands for a lot of personal info), go through their relatively awkward website to find the televisionI was using, have that downloaded to the device via USB, and then add some configuring after that before the remote could be used as a remote.
Heck with that. If a remote can't offer an interface to locate stuff on the device itself, it should at least not require an Internet connection (the application should handle this, perhaps downloading codes for newer items), and definitely not require registration on a website to be used.
That is a valid complaint. Adding functionality so startup is parallel is one thing. Having one's own binary log format [1] is a big downside. To boot, rsyslog uses cryptographically signed logs. That means that I lose protection on systemd's logs because in theory an attacker could tamper with those. Should the logs go to rsyslog, the files either will show tampering or be missing.
This also prevents logging to a remote machine as well.
I'm not a fan of binary logs. Even AIX will log stuff from the errpt command if you turn on the right syslog settings. Binary logs make a program like Splunk a necessity, and that is not a cheap tool once you start talking about gigs a day hitting your index servers.
[1]: I don't like the "pro" for it saying that journalctl can give you just the info that you need. For the info I need, I have grep, egrep, and many other tools.
Religious sentiments aside, systemd scratches a number of itches that eventually needed to be addressed. The main one is parallel startup of daemons. On a SSD based machine (and note, these are anecdotal runs), CentOS 6.5 takes about a minute to fully boot to a login prompt. On CentOS 7.0 with systemd starting anything that isn't relying on another process at the same time, well under ten seconds. Similar with a shutdown.
The second item is being able to place processes in containers and set limits before they start. This can be done with SVR4 startup with wrapper scripts, but systemd makes it easier.
The main thing I see against systemd is that it is new. I remember pushback in the early 1990s when Linux distros went to the SVR4 way of starting up from having everything in a big /etc/rc file with branches to other /etc/rc.whatever files, and finally a rc.local file.
The second downside is that systemd has more moving parts. However, it will only be a matter of time before the bugs get eradicated. Heck, sendmail used to be the hair-puller for sysadmins and even that beast is now a long since solved problem.
If one wants to gripe about something, gripe about firewallD. For bringing Windows type abstraction to Linux, it is great. Anything else, it is just another questionable layer that is of dubious value at best, a potential vulnerability at worst.
In reality, the next step up on Internet services is moving to 2FA everywhere. Passwords are easily gotten, but 2FA, though doable, raises the barrier immensely. It means that someone would have to know the user's password and have control of one of their devices. This is far harder than just sifting through a pile of passwords found on a bittorrent dump and trying them on various accounts, or guessing a user's grandma's last name.
I'm sure that if the users that had the pictured compromised had their phones secure and had 2FA on, we wouldn't be inundated about these stories.
Of course, 2FA isn't a perfect solution. Lose access to one's phone number that is used for texting codes, and lose access to the recovery key... and one is hosed big time, be it if they are on Google, Dropbox, Apple, even Yahoo. The ideal would be a vendor neutral keyfob that can be used with everyone's 2FA systems, either as the main means of authentication, or as a tool for recovery, where the keyfob can be stashed somewhere physically secure if there is no other way into an account.
There is a point where phones are "good enough". If it can run basic apps (usual popular ones, and a large game or two), for a lot of people, why buy something else?
For example, my HTC One X Plus and my HTC One M8 both have NFC, decent CPUs. The biggest difference is the M8 has a MicroSD card slot that can go up to 128 gigs, but if I had to go back to the HOX, it is doable.
The mobile industry is running into the same issue that the PC industry has about a decade ago -- what is out is good enough for most tasks, so why bother running the upgrade treadmill?
A $100 phone would still be a decent unit. Not with all the bells and whistles, but still fine for daily use by a lot of people.
There is one tool I've found that has come in handy: A dash cam. If we get more people using these, some texter denying their actions would be proven wrong (assuming the camera has a good shot and the footage is detailed enough) in both civil and criminal courts.
Put the fear of $DEITY into people that if they cause a wreck... someone has a dash cam of the situation and will be more than happy to put that video on YouTube for a DA, opposing lawyers, insurance company, and cow-orkers to see, it might just stop a behavior when no amount of laws or nanny tech inventions would.
One thing though: I wish there were a company that made GOOD dash cams. GoPros are great general cameras, but something that can be mounted under the rearview mirror, hold about 8 hours of high-res footage, and perhaps even offer some facility for detecting tampering.
That is the only reason why last year I went to the 5S. I was thinking Apple would let apps use it as an authentication tool.
That way, I could have an app that groks OpenPGP packets, and can allow the private key to be unlocked at the start of the session, while the fingerprint is used to validate that a request for signing/decrypting with the key is one that has some authorization with it. Since the passphrase is cached, the weakened security during that session isn't that great, and it would stop someone who grabbed the phone from being able to do subsequent signatures/decryptions with the stored keys.
It would also be useful for apps like PayPal which could require a fingerprint scan to confirm a payment or other financial transaction. An attacker who grabs the phone would be hard-pressed be able to dump PayPal's RAM structure out to grab keys, so it would be "good enough" to keep a phone that didn't lock its screen from being a juicy target.
I was wrong on those counts, although the fingerprint scanner is a nice shortcut, so I can access the phone without someone shoulder-surfing my PIN.
I would probably think a judge will rule about NDAs, and tend to rule in favor of businesses. Trade secrets have centuries of precedent behind them. Even if a jury is involved (as this is a civil issue), it would end up being appealed.
There is one concern of mine about this law: Shills for place "A" who post scads of bad reviews about spot "B" that are not in themselves defamatory, but a lot of one-star reviews add up. At the extreme, a place could try to pay people to visit review sites that are in other cities (and where they don't ever plan to visit) just to make one-star reviews.
Problem is that it can be stomped out in the US and Europe with some quick fearmongering. "Home bio-terror labs" is a phrase some politician would throw around, that would get laws passed banning biohacking almost immediately.
Of course, this this type of thing can be very useful. For example, the article about bacteria being able to make propane. If someone was able to make bacteria that could, given sunlight, split water, it would spark a hydrogen economy revolution. Similar with critters that could filter heavy metals out of water, where said critters could be easily picked up and disposed of.
Of course, the fearmongering isn't all conjecture. Someone in theory could make a bug that could eat a vital building material or resins crucial to electronics could make a civilization failure similar to what was described in the Ringworld series with their room temperature superconductors.
I wouldn't be surprised to see countries such as BRIC members, EU members, or other countries start trying to woo the best and brightest for economic gains.
It may not be profitable to do R&D in the next quarter, but governments will greatly profit in a longer interval. For example, Paraguay's stake in their hydroelectric dam might not have meant much in the next quarter when they went in with Brazil on building it... but it has guaranteed the country completely energy independence for now and the near future.
Government funding will still be around. It just won't be the US who hands over currency.
Once a good form factor is established, Apple can go one of a few directions:
1: Make it thinner.
2: Add more features to it. For example, using the MagSafe cable that attaches to it as a USB data transfer cable so the watch can be used as a USB flash drive.
3: Change the form factor.
The problem that Apple is going to face is that watches, for the most part, are something someone buys once and keeps forever. Antique Rolex watches for example.
People have been "trained" to toss their phone annually. Same with their tablet. However, watches are something that tend to be keepsakes and just not thrown away. This is where Apple may run into issues. For a few years, the market will expand, but once it hits saturation, it will be a lot harder to get people to replace their iWatch than the other iDevices.
People said similar about cell phones when the iPhone showed up and changed the form factor of preference from a flip phone to a smartphone. Before that, smartphones were for corporate execs or geeks. Further back, MP3 players were considered geek stuff, too esoteric to use by the mainstream person who was content with a CD Walkman. Apple changed that.
I will be genuinely surprised if I don't see a resurgence of watch wearing due to the iWatch. The Android watches are made out of cheap plastic, while Apple's offering is made out of decent materials and has a better fit/finish. It will attract the bling conscious, and once a rapper starts wearing one, everyone will.
The thing is that watches are pure luxury items now. If someone needs to keep time, even the cheapest burner phone has a clock on it. So, I wouldn't be surprised that they will wind up a status symbol.
Disclaimer: I own zero Apple stock. Just knowing that people are trendy, and Apple has already lead at least three major changes in devices so far, the most recent was the killing of the entire netbook market for iPads.
Of course, I may be entirely wrong about this, but IMHO, I think the iWatch will have a market.
Sybase is exactly the same. You can license it for development by the number of users, or production by the number of cores.
It can get so expensive due to the licensing model they use, that buying a POWER or SPARC machine actually saves money compared to putting it in a VM environment, just because of whatever the DB -can- touch for CPU cores has to be licensed.
I'm not sure about MS SQL server, but from what I read, it is pretty similar.
Of course, tossing in virtualization in the mix is fun as well. For example, if I'm sitting on two boxes with 36 cores, and run a relatively small Oracle instance for VMWare vCenter with one vCPU in fault-tolerant mode, I'm on the hook for 72 cores for the Oracle license. With the cost being around $60,000 per core for the enterprise tier, this can add up. Add to this something like vMotion HA where the license has to include every machine that -could- run the DB, and it can get painful even in the enterprise.
Oracle and Sybase as well have this type of licensing, unless something has changed.
IBM addressed this with POWER7 and newer in a fairly innovative way. They have an option called TurboCore mode which turns off half the cores. The ones still running can use the disabled core's caches, and because of the space available for heat dissipation, clock speed could be bumped up. The result was half the cores, but almost the same performance due to the faster clock and cache available.
I don't know a single cloud provider that would provide that contract. In other lines of work, there would be a third party escrow company. However, with a cloud provider, since decryption would be needed, the only way to provide any assurance is to have some backend appliances that do encryption and are rented, with a paid deposit that once the rental ceases, all keys are wiped. That way, a bankrupt provider would have all their servers sold, but the encryption appliances would be owned by another party. Of course, this may not mean much as it might be a fight wresting the leased items from the bankruptcy trustee, but in theory, it helps put at least a layer in place of protection.
However, I don't know any cloud provider who would spend the time and effort to do this, just because the current system of assuring people that "passwords", "encryption", and "firewalls" is good enough.