Comparing it to hiring a hitman is actually the best analogy I've seen in all this mess.
If you hire a hitman, you are guilty of the murder. So is the hitman. You are BOTH guilty. In the same vein, both the *spits* prankster AND the officer who fired the killing shot are guilty.
No, this is not a good analogy. Swatting was recognized as a prank before this incident. And intent matters. With the amount of people texting while driving, there's gonna be a lot of murderers out there if we start changing the mentality towards the definition of murder.
It would also be one hell of a which hunt to get rid of all the celebrity murderers too.
"Prankster"? That doesn't even begin to describe the act of getting armed police to think a life-or-death situation is going on, and that the perpetrators are your target. Even the best police occasionally make mistakes, and anyone who sets someone else up to be at the receiving end of a situation where deadly force is authorized has a reasonable chance of getting his target killed.
Speaking of being rather dismissive, an "occasional mistake" ended a mans life. I hope that the hype surrounding the concept of swatting doesn't bury the fact that a family deserves some answers for that fuck-up. Society has grown tired of finding the "occasional" happening perhaps more than necessary.
The caller was the murderer and the police were his weapon, just as if he had hired a hit man.
OK, enough with the ignorance already. Every US military leader would not take kindly to being labeled a mass murderer, and they certainly have engaged vast armies of "weapons" authorized to use deadly force. Also intent matters, which is exactly why he's being charged with involuntary manslaughter and not murder.
To be clear, I'm not defending his actions one bit, and punishment should be served. That's not an excuse to escape reasoned thought and common sense.
It's still obviously much more the police's fault than his. They straight up murdered someone without even giving him time to react. A judgement was made based on incomplete information and a person was executed. Police being willing to murder someone over mere suspicions is the real issue. This idiot prankster should be punished but the murder of this man is a symptom of the way police are trained/operate. Now, they are trying to displace responsibility and clean their hands. In the end, the prankster didn't pull the trigger and there is no reasonable world in which one should expect to be killed by police over a prank phone call.
Absolutely agree. Putting the spotlight 100% on the prankster is creating the perfect storm in which to simply bury the actions of SWAT behind the hype of a swatting story. I sure as hell hope not, as the family DESERVES a fair investigation of ALL parties involved. The prankster certainly had a part in this and earned his punishment, but he wasn't the one who pulled the trigger and ended an innocent mans life.
Oh, so concentration of wealth is a stability concern with cryptocurrencies? Warren Buffet is one of the top eight people who hold as much wealth as the bottom half of the human population. Didn't seem to stop him from becoming a billionaire, which is a level of wealth concentration that serves nothing more than Bigger Dick syndrome.
All of this doesn't really matter anyway. Obscene Greed will continue to drive automation and AI to replace the concept of human employment. The justification of higher education will erode. UBI will become the worlds most popular form of income, which will create the global welfare state. Probably won't take long before unrest sets in, and the concept of Eat The Rich comes to fruition.
Unless we find a cure for the disease of greed, we won't have to worry about the crypto-toys used in the economy game.
If I were to describe the "personality" of a self driving car, imagine a super chilled-out Mr. Rodgers paitent type, but he's also double-dosed on adderall and hyper alert for pedestrians, got 9 hours of sleep last night, good blood sugar, and his cell phone is on silent, locked in the trunk. And he has an IQ of 175 and can see in all directions and does not blink, and has a third eye that can see through shrubs and around cars.
You conveniently forgot to describe just how much that personality changes when it's hacked.
THAT is the larger concern here. My computer getting hacked probably has a 0.00001% of threatening my life. A 3,500-pound block of steel traveling at 80MPH can become a weapon of mass destruction. DDoS has a whole new meaning when that steering wheel/gas pedal/brake pedal autonomous control network is under the control of an evil mind.
The only way they put these things on the road is with blanket complete liability protects from the GOV saying they are not responsible for anything bad that happens.
Cite?
Google has stated that it will take liability for cars using its self-driving systems. Several other companies working on them have said the same.
You know what that liability will look like? It'll be a 74-page EULA that will change without notice or consent, and will come with more loopholes than a sweater knitted by a one-armed gorilla.
Let's see who takes full responsibility after an autonomous control network gets hacked, resulting in a mass steering wheel/gas pedal/brake pedal attack that kills thousands. Oh, that'll never happen? If you believe that, I have a unbreakable secure messaging app to sell you...
PLEASE folks.....vote for this subscription BS with you wallets.
Don't buy in....
So far, I'm not going with Adobe's rental model, for example. I can do just fine with the CS6 suite for example I bought....and there are now competitors for many of those tools (Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, OnOne....etc)......
Don't give into this bullshit of renting your software....vote with your wallet, keep it closed.
I wish there were enough people that agreed with this stance to make a real difference, and change the course we're on.
Unfortunately, you represent a mere fraction of consumer mentality out there, so SaaS infections will continue and be inevitable.
Read his comments with a huge grain of salt. Either he is so ignorant of crypto that he thinks that raising the number of iterations is genius rather than normal practice, or he is intentionally making outlandish statements that are calculated to sway public opinion. It seems obvious that it's the latter, and it will probably work.
Speaking of public opinion, if I were in Tim Cooks position, I would hold a YouTube live stream and call this FBI agent out personally.
Let the FBI stand up there and rant and rave about how unbreakable Apple security is. Let the FBI bitch and moan about hacking attempts on Apple hardware being very difficult.
Then Tim will stand up and ask one simple question; "Why is it hard for hackers to break into your encryption?"
The FBI will provide an obvious answer, to which Tim will reply in front of the world watching, "Thank you for confirming why the fuck Apple takes security seriously." *drops mic*
Because as an employer in the medical field who needs competent people, I will pick someone who came from a rigorous college, instead of an untested malpractice lawsuit waiting to happen.
That "rigorous" college cares more about getting more and more revenue in the door than ensuring the quality of the product being sold or the end-result is good. They're not students anymore. They're customers, and removing testing standards is just one way of catering to as many of them as you can. Everyone is welcome; just bring your wallet.
As a parent, I will send my child to a school that uses objective requirements for admission and grading, because life isn't fair, and only the competitive survive.
Given what TFS stated, good luck with that. Education standards are dropping lower than the attention span of a GenY/Z'er. You know, to ensure they maintain a good customer base.
Unless they are one of the top tier where their reputations depend on their alumnis having glittering careers, many colleges just want to have many students - as the fees will pay the bills. So accepting anyone who's father can afford to pay or who can raise a student loan is good: more students.
When students become catered to like customers, it tends to make you wonder what the fuck they're really selling, and why anyone would pay that much for it.
Maybe this is just me, but government/intelligence agencies repeating so many times the message "Apple is the most secure" makes me thing: they already have an pre-cracked encryption and are trying to enforce this devices between his "enemies".
When cases and prosecutions start moving forward instead of phones sitting around in evidence lockers waiting to be cracked to find the evidence they need, you'll probably have a good idea where their capabilities lie.
I cannot believe we actually hire allegedly educated individuals to work in the FBI who can't fucking grasp the concept that Apple didn't make good security because of the FBI. Apple made good security because of the actual evil in the world, and to protect their customers.
Wonder how the FBI would feel if we turned around and started asking them the same damn thing about their encryption. How dare they make it very difficult to brute-force. Of all the nerve...
The Always Connected PC is just another toll of the death knell of ownership.
Over exaggerating much? How is the idea of something being on, available and connected anything to do with ownership?
Currently my desktop PC at home is and Always Connected PC. It's always on, and always connected.
Is it such a disaster to get the same level of functionality on my laptop? Does not having to whip out my phone and enable the mobile hotspot suddenly mean that someone else owns my stuff?
Get a grip.
The Adobe Design suite of tools used to be a fairly expensive product that you paid a one-time license for. Now, it's a subscription model. You just pay monthly. Forever.
You used to be able to buy a cell phone at a reasonable price, and then sign up for service. Now smartphones are so expensive that you take out a 2-year loan on them, paying for the hardware with the service. Because smartphones barely last past that agreement, you now hold a perpetual lease for phone hardware. You just pay that cost forever now. It's just "normal" now for everyone to lease a phone. Wonder how long it will take for that "normal" mentality to bleed over into car ownership? Probably not long. Peer pressure still works at all ages.
Pay one time for the Office suite of software? Nope. Now there's Office 365, your apps served to you in exchange for a monthly perpetual fee.
Pay for a DVD and own it forever? Nope, there's a monthly Netflix charge now. Buy and own CDs? Nope, pay a monthly online music streaming service. And yeah, I get the whole "but I have access to so much more". That argument falls flat when you realize you're being forced to pay for 50 channels of content you want and 500,000 channels of bullshit you don't. Oh, and don't forget the fact that content providers continue to fracture off, so you'll pay multiple vendors to get those 50 channels you want. HBO, Disney, Hulu, UFC, Netflix...the content fracturing will continue because they're winning. You continue to pay more and more because it's "cheap". The Death by 1,000 Cuts tactic will win every time because people fall for it.
Your devices will get dumber, and the cloud will get larger and larger, which you will pay forever to access the services you want. Stop paying? No more access. It's that fucking simple, and if you can't see the painfully obvious patterns regarding ownership and greed being rather addicted to proven revenue streams, I don't know what more to say other than wake up. The disaster is not functionality. The disaster is the $500/month shakedown you'll pay to the service mafia to sustain a "normal" lifestyle in the future. The Always Connected PC is just the next cut out of 1,000.
The main utility of such a pill + phone app would be to let everyone else around me know when I'm about to fart. I will know anyway.
The marketing of mass amounts of telemetry has reeked of bullshit for years now. This is just another crappy data metric to put a price tag on. And yes, it will sell.
Also, it would make excuses like "It wasn't me!" completely moot.
Perhaps that's the entire point. We'll be able to pinpoint who farted in a crowd with precise accuracy using a combination of Bluetooth, WiFi, and GPS triangulation. Just when we've started to conquer harassment, someone pulls a new way to do it out of their ass.
Cars: even after most cars are electric there will still be the petrol heads who like to drive their own classic car. Car companies are honestly probably making more money off people today then they would by renting cars. It's my opinion that spending too much on cars is the single biggest financial mistake people make, it's crazy how much people waste on cars. There will always be a market for people who want to drive their own cars.
Yes, there will be a market. And that market will be dwindled down to the millionaires who can afford the mandatory insurance for their "classic" gas-powered cars. This will go on for a little while, until autonomous car makers start statistically destroying the notion of allowing a dangerous meatsack to control a vehicle on public roadways (remember we humans kill thousands of other humans driving these death traps around all day), along with the environmentalists screaming about pollution. As autonomous EV solutions become the pinnacle of health and safety, human drivers failing to safely control and maintain their own death traps will become too large of a liability to ignore.
Software: Open source software is the counterweight. Microsoft Windows has gotten a lot better in the last decade and I strongly credit Apple and Linux for that change. Companies won't innovate unless they have to and because Microsoft slowed down too much they lost the lead.
When one vendor proves a revenue model works among the masses, the rest follow suit. This is why SaaS will eventually consume the market that dominates right now. Watch and see. Even if open-sourced solutions were proven cheaper and more reliable, it's not the default option, and consumers are incredibly lazy, which is why open-source won't stand a chance until it IS the default option. Laziness alone creates massive revenue for those who command the default status, and those who currently hold that status wield great power to stay there.
Phones: I own my phone and subscribe to a prepaid monthly plan. It's about three years old and I don't think it will last another year. I honestly wish Microsoft was still pushing their phone because I do have faith that they would keep their OS up to date (unlike android) and they wouldn't intentionally slow down the phone to promote people buying phones (I'm not actually convinced that Apple did that for that reason)
Your desire for a Windows phone tends to confirm that you are the 1%, swimming upstream against the masses who continue to push vendors to make hardware for fashions sake, with a replacement schedule as volatile. I tend to agree with you and the notion of hardware lasting much longer, but our opinion does not matter. We are drowned out and irrelevant against the millions of people who simply do not care They don't care how much it costs. They don't care how little a model has changed from the one made just one year prior. They don't care about how long it will last. They care about rose gold color options.
Voting with your wallet always works, it's just to what degree does it work?
If you threw Microsoft a million dollars of your own money, think they would bring the Windows Phone back? I'd say that defines the degree in which common sense solutions stand a chance against the fashionista masses.
My advice: save on what you can and invest in these companies so that when they make money, you make money.
Of course. It might be slightly irritating to support the companies that create the anti-product, but I know when an investment is wise.
If a password weren't considered important for an admin level user, they simply wouldn't ask for one.
Chances are the authentication GUI prompt is more meant to prevent nefarious processes from automatically executing when an admin is logged in (similar to seeing UAC prompts on Windows, even when running as local admin), which that CAPTCHA-esque interrupt is still important. This merely discovered that when logged in as an administrator, the authentication input is irrelevant.
Would you consider a sudoer being able to issue privileged commands without doing sudo to be "not a big deal?"
A sudoer is not really a proper analogy, as that is a normal account you've granted rights to perform escalation. This feature (now with an identified bug) is more akin to being logged in as root and being blocked from running a high-level process until some level of additional end-user input is performed.
Let them have secret courts, but only secret for x years. Give them 1, 50 year secret warrant _application_ a year, 4, 20 year, 10, 10 year the rest 5 year.
And what do you think they would do with the "one" 50-year secret warrant? The same damn thing they do passing laws in Congress; shove 50 pounds worth of illegal/immoral shit in a 5-pound bag of legislation and pass it. No one will be alive to answer for their actions 50 years from now when it's declassified. Hell, it wouldn't even matter then. If the government themselves stood up tomorrow and confirmed that the conspiracies surrounding JFKs death were all true, no one would give a shit. Citizens don't care anymore. That is what allows abuse to thrive as much as it does today.
90% of people who spend the money to pay for an iPhone wouldn't dream of DIY. Their rather ignorant and/or lazy mentality towards hardware and software maintenance is the main reason they love the idiot-proof products Apple makes.
If you're a stupid consumer, then you reap what you sow. It's the consumer's fault. It didn't take much for me to be an informed consumer on the topic 10-15 minutes tops. Since when did consumers become entitled to being idiots and require merchants to think for them? That's not only absurd but if you let the merchant think for you, a fool and his money are soon parted. Basically, what's being said here is people get to complain about other people taking advantage of them because they're stupid, ignorant or uninformed. Maybe they should move back in their parents' basement because obviously the real world is just too much for them.
While I mostly agree with your assessment here, we also need to understand and remember that DIY on technical components often requires not only competence, but patience, which is become more and more rare in the world of instant gratification. Most people have little patience to learn something someone else knows how to do. If they're forced to learn something, it better be quick and easy (hence Apple UI). You can argue that as ignorance, stupidity, laziness, or someone merely wanting to make good use of their time. One thing is certain as an end-result; there are a lot of trained people employed in support positions today.
As far as fools parted with their money, billions are made every year selling hardware that is more fashion than function. A lot of people were parted from common sense long ago.
The Always Connected PC is just another toll of the death knell of ownership.
You will pay per-use for autonomous cars owned by corporations, because owning cars will be deemed illegal, lobbied by Corporate Greed.
You will lease all software, because a one-time cost does not satisfy Corporate Greed, who wants you to pay per month forever.
You already lease cell phones. Damn things don't last more than 2-3 years. If they do last longer, then support for them dies prematurely. Either way, you're paying for new hardware as often as Corporate Greed demands.
This is our future. Unfortunately, the mindless masses don't give a shit enough to change the way we're headed. Vote with your wallet is dead.
The question being, which scenario would lead the user to buy a new phone faster:
There is no reason to buy a new phone based on the battery wearing out if you're happy with the phone you have. Anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant. It costs $15 for a new battery. You can them on Amazon. Either you need to install it (there are tons of tutorials on youtube) or have someone else do it. It doesn't cost much and is WAY cheaper than buying a new phone.
90% of people who spend the money to pay for an iPhone wouldn't dream of DIY. Their rather ignorant and/or lazy mentality towards hardware and software maintenance is the main reason they love the idiot-proof products Apple makes.
The other 10% might take a chance on buying a questionable $15 battery from the global leader of Chinese knock-offs, hoping they're not the next victim of 3rd degree lithium-ion burns, but when you've got to spend another $50 on specialized tools to crack open the case and do the work, it's cheaper to just take it to Apple and have them do it, even at the standard price.
And unless you're beating the shit out of your battery, you probably only have to do a battery replacement once during your 2-year phone mortgage, and when your contract is up, you will buy the new model. After all, the iPhone is a fashion statement too, and no fanboi is caught dead with an old model.
Parent post is kind of right.
Want to make a difference?
Go out of your way to use open source software. At home convert everything you have to open source software. At work just do it without even asking, just choose open source tech to base your stuff on (do I even have to say "as much as possible where it won't break things"??).
Microsoft, Intel, WD, Oracle etc. will start to get the message when their fat contracts stop getting renewed because real people who work in the tech industry are choosing vendors that screw them less badly or choose open source solutions instead.
Did anyone else notice how M$ all-a-sudden got real cozy and friendly with open source stuff in the past couple years? Yeah, they noticed that everyone was using Linux on their servers and that you can barely find even a single page of documentation for $LatestCoolFramework written for Windows rather than for *nix. When was the last time you heard everyone get excited about some ASP.NET thing or IIS or anything besides anger and annoyance at M$ and Windows 10? They tried to push their crappy little store and got a yawn or outright derision and hatred from people "who know how to use computers"; these are the same people that write the code and set up the servers and they remember the asshole moves that Oracle and M$ and Intel et al have made in the past. Microsoft noticed how they were the uncool jerks that all the programmers couldn't wait to get rid of... oh, and tralala see guys we're opening up the C# license stuff and absorbing Mono and implementing a Linux subsystem for Windows and here's this, like, totally cool text editor VisualStudio Code! See, guys and girls, we're like totally rad and cool now...
They'll worry. Oh, they'll worry. Just put the pressure on... but do we even care if they reform? We can't trust that they won't go back to their abusive ways if their bottom line starts to recover.
Strike abusive software companies at the neck: use open source software.
Major vendors know your opinion represents less than 1% of their current customer base. Open-source takes far more effort than walking into [big-box store], buying crap off the shelf, and plugging it in. Laziness about technology coupled with an I-don't-give-a-shit-about-privacy mentality has been a vendors wet dream for many years now. That won't change no matter how many vulnerabilities you throw at the ignorant masses.
And no one will get "the message" because you're never going to convince your CxOs that open-source solutions are worth abandoning tried and true vendors they've entrusted for decades, so don't think for a minute the corporate world will adopt this mentality any better than the consumer world.
Would open-source likely be better? Yes, it would. So would the average consumer adopting common sense when it comes to privacy and security. Good luck with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Comparing it to hiring a hitman is actually the best analogy I've seen in all this mess.
If you hire a hitman, you are guilty of the murder. So is the hitman. You are BOTH guilty. In the same vein, both the *spits* prankster AND the officer who fired the killing shot are guilty.
No, this is not a good analogy. Swatting was recognized as a prank before this incident. And intent matters. With the amount of people texting while driving, there's gonna be a lot of murderers out there if we start changing the mentality towards the definition of murder.
It would also be one hell of a which hunt to get rid of all the celebrity murderers too.
"Prankster"? That doesn't even begin to describe the act of getting armed police to think a life-or-death situation is going on, and that the perpetrators are your target. Even the best police occasionally make mistakes, and anyone who sets someone else up to be at the receiving end of a situation where deadly force is authorized has a reasonable chance of getting his target killed.
Speaking of being rather dismissive, an "occasional mistake" ended a mans life. I hope that the hype surrounding the concept of swatting doesn't bury the fact that a family deserves some answers for that fuck-up. Society has grown tired of finding the "occasional" happening perhaps more than necessary.
The caller was the murderer and the police were his weapon, just as if he had hired a hit man.
OK, enough with the ignorance already. Every US military leader would not take kindly to being labeled a mass murderer, and they certainly have engaged vast armies of "weapons" authorized to use deadly force. Also intent matters, which is exactly why he's being charged with involuntary manslaughter and not murder.
To be clear, I'm not defending his actions one bit, and punishment should be served. That's not an excuse to escape reasoned thought and common sense.
It's still obviously much more the police's fault than his. They straight up murdered someone without even giving him time to react. A judgement was made based on incomplete information and a person was executed. Police being willing to murder someone over mere suspicions is the real issue. This idiot prankster should be punished but the murder of this man is a symptom of the way police are trained/operate. Now, they are trying to displace responsibility and clean their hands. In the end, the prankster didn't pull the trigger and there is no reasonable world in which one should expect to be killed by police over a prank phone call.
Absolutely agree. Putting the spotlight 100% on the prankster is creating the perfect storm in which to simply bury the actions of SWAT behind the hype of a swatting story. I sure as hell hope not, as the family DESERVES a fair investigation of ALL parties involved. The prankster certainly had a part in this and earned his punishment, but he wasn't the one who pulled the trigger and ended an innocent mans life.
"97% of all bitcoins are held by 4% of addresses"
Oh, so concentration of wealth is a stability concern with cryptocurrencies? Warren Buffet is one of the top eight people who hold as much wealth as the bottom half of the human population. Didn't seem to stop him from becoming a billionaire, which is a level of wealth concentration that serves nothing more than Bigger Dick syndrome.
All of this doesn't really matter anyway. Obscene Greed will continue to drive automation and AI to replace the concept of human employment. The justification of higher education will erode. UBI will become the worlds most popular form of income, which will create the global welfare state. Probably won't take long before unrest sets in, and the concept of Eat The Rich comes to fruition.
Unless we find a cure for the disease of greed, we won't have to worry about the crypto-toys used in the economy game.
"...This is really about seeing how a basic unconditional income affects the employment of unemployed people."
A dozen countries have decades of statistics from millions of welfare recipients.
You could have found that answer a hell of a lot cheaper than $24 million.
If I were to describe the "personality" of a self driving car, imagine a super chilled-out Mr. Rodgers paitent type, but he's also double-dosed on adderall and hyper alert for pedestrians, got 9 hours of sleep last night, good blood sugar, and his cell phone is on silent, locked in the trunk. And he has an IQ of 175 and can see in all directions and does not blink, and has a third eye that can see through shrubs and around cars.
You conveniently forgot to describe just how much that personality changes when it's hacked.
THAT is the larger concern here. My computer getting hacked probably has a 0.00001% of threatening my life. A 3,500-pound block of steel traveling at 80MPH can become a weapon of mass destruction. DDoS has a whole new meaning when that steering wheel/gas pedal/brake pedal autonomous control network is under the control of an evil mind.
The only way they put these things on the road is with blanket complete liability protects from the GOV saying they are not responsible for anything bad that happens.
Cite?
Google has stated that it will take liability for cars using its self-driving systems. Several other companies working on them have said the same.
You know what that liability will look like? It'll be a 74-page EULA that will change without notice or consent, and will come with more loopholes than a sweater knitted by a one-armed gorilla.
Let's see who takes full responsibility after an autonomous control network gets hacked, resulting in a mass steering wheel/gas pedal/brake pedal attack that kills thousands. Oh, that'll never happen? If you believe that, I have a unbreakable secure messaging app to sell you...
Just replace them once the next generation of processors comes out and you will be able to get back to the previous processing level. Problem solved.
When a fix ultimately generates more revenue for those who fucked up, expect them to fuck up bigger and faster in the future.
The Board of Directors will not have it any other way.
PLEASE folks.....vote for this subscription BS with you wallets.
Don't buy in....
So far, I'm not going with Adobe's rental model, for example. I can do just fine with the CS6 suite for example I bought....and there are now competitors for many of those tools (Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, OnOne....etc)......
Don't give into this bullshit of renting your software....vote with your wallet, keep it closed.
I wish there were enough people that agreed with this stance to make a real difference, and change the course we're on.
Unfortunately, you represent a mere fraction of consumer mentality out there, so SaaS infections will continue and be inevitable.
Read his comments with a huge grain of salt. Either he is so ignorant of crypto that he thinks that raising the number of iterations is genius rather than normal practice, or he is intentionally making outlandish statements that are calculated to sway public opinion. It seems obvious that it's the latter, and it will probably work.
Speaking of public opinion, if I were in Tim Cooks position, I would hold a YouTube live stream and call this FBI agent out personally.
Let the FBI stand up there and rant and rave about how unbreakable Apple security is. Let the FBI bitch and moan about hacking attempts on Apple hardware being very difficult.
Then Tim will stand up and ask one simple question; "Why is it hard for hackers to break into your encryption?"
The FBI will provide an obvious answer, to which Tim will reply in front of the world watching, "Thank you for confirming why the fuck Apple takes security seriously." *drops mic*
Because as an employer in the medical field who needs competent people, I will pick someone who came from a rigorous college, instead of an untested malpractice lawsuit waiting to happen.
That "rigorous" college cares more about getting more and more revenue in the door than ensuring the quality of the product being sold or the end-result is good. They're not students anymore. They're customers, and removing testing standards is just one way of catering to as many of them as you can. Everyone is welcome; just bring your wallet.
As a parent, I will send my child to a school that uses objective requirements for admission and grading, because life isn't fair, and only the competitive survive.
Given what TFS stated, good luck with that. Education standards are dropping lower than the attention span of a GenY/Z'er. You know, to ensure they maintain a good customer base.
Unless they are one of the top tier where their reputations depend on their alumnis having glittering careers, many colleges just want to have many students - as the fees will pay the bills. So accepting anyone who's father can afford to pay or who can raise a student loan is good: more students.
When students become catered to like customers, it tends to make you wonder what the fuck they're really selling, and why anyone would pay that much for it.
Maybe this is just me, but government/intelligence agencies repeating so many times the message "Apple is the most secure" makes me thing: they already have an pre-cracked encryption and are trying to enforce this devices between his "enemies".
When cases and prosecutions start moving forward instead of phones sitting around in evidence lockers waiting to be cracked to find the evidence they need, you'll probably have a good idea where their capabilities lie.
I cannot believe we actually hire allegedly educated individuals to work in the FBI who can't fucking grasp the concept that Apple didn't make good security because of the FBI. Apple made good security because of the actual evil in the world, and to protect their customers.
Wonder how the FBI would feel if we turned around and started asking them the same damn thing about their encryption. How dare they make it very difficult to brute-force. Of all the nerve...
The Always Connected PC is just another toll of the death knell of ownership.
Over exaggerating much? How is the idea of something being on, available and connected anything to do with ownership? Currently my desktop PC at home is and Always Connected PC. It's always on, and always connected.
Is it such a disaster to get the same level of functionality on my laptop? Does not having to whip out my phone and enable the mobile hotspot suddenly mean that someone else owns my stuff?
Get a grip.
The Adobe Design suite of tools used to be a fairly expensive product that you paid a one-time license for. Now, it's a subscription model. You just pay monthly. Forever.
You used to be able to buy a cell phone at a reasonable price, and then sign up for service. Now smartphones are so expensive that you take out a 2-year loan on them, paying for the hardware with the service. Because smartphones barely last past that agreement, you now hold a perpetual lease for phone hardware. You just pay that cost forever now. It's just "normal" now for everyone to lease a phone. Wonder how long it will take for that "normal" mentality to bleed over into car ownership? Probably not long. Peer pressure still works at all ages.
Pay one time for the Office suite of software? Nope. Now there's Office 365, your apps served to you in exchange for a monthly perpetual fee.
Pay for a DVD and own it forever? Nope, there's a monthly Netflix charge now. Buy and own CDs? Nope, pay a monthly online music streaming service. And yeah, I get the whole "but I have access to so much more". That argument falls flat when you realize you're being forced to pay for 50 channels of content you want and 500,000 channels of bullshit you don't. Oh, and don't forget the fact that content providers continue to fracture off, so you'll pay multiple vendors to get those 50 channels you want. HBO, Disney, Hulu, UFC, Netflix...the content fracturing will continue because they're winning. You continue to pay more and more because it's "cheap". The Death by 1,000 Cuts tactic will win every time because people fall for it.
Your devices will get dumber, and the cloud will get larger and larger, which you will pay forever to access the services you want. Stop paying? No more access. It's that fucking simple, and if you can't see the painfully obvious patterns regarding ownership and greed being rather addicted to proven revenue streams, I don't know what more to say other than wake up. The disaster is not functionality. The disaster is the $500/month shakedown you'll pay to the service mafia to sustain a "normal" lifestyle in the future. The Always Connected PC is just the next cut out of 1,000.
The main utility of such a pill + phone app would be to let everyone else around me know when I'm about to fart. I will know anyway.
The marketing of mass amounts of telemetry has reeked of bullshit for years now. This is just another crappy data metric to put a price tag on. And yes, it will sell.
Also, it would make excuses like "It wasn't me!" completely moot.
Perhaps that's the entire point. We'll be able to pinpoint who farted in a crowd with precise accuracy using a combination of Bluetooth, WiFi, and GPS triangulation. Just when we've started to conquer harassment, someone pulls a new way to do it out of their ass.
We're Creating a Perfect Storm of Unprecedented Global Warming
Well the kids these days do like their avocado hummus...
You're optimistic but none of this will happen.
Cars: even after most cars are electric there will still be the petrol heads who like to drive their own classic car. Car companies are honestly probably making more money off people today then they would by renting cars. It's my opinion that spending too much on cars is the single biggest financial mistake people make, it's crazy how much people waste on cars. There will always be a market for people who want to drive their own cars.
Yes, there will be a market. And that market will be dwindled down to the millionaires who can afford the mandatory insurance for their "classic" gas-powered cars. This will go on for a little while, until autonomous car makers start statistically destroying the notion of allowing a dangerous meatsack to control a vehicle on public roadways (remember we humans kill thousands of other humans driving these death traps around all day), along with the environmentalists screaming about pollution. As autonomous EV solutions become the pinnacle of health and safety, human drivers failing to safely control and maintain their own death traps will become too large of a liability to ignore.
Software: Open source software is the counterweight. Microsoft Windows has gotten a lot better in the last decade and I strongly credit Apple and Linux for that change. Companies won't innovate unless they have to and because Microsoft slowed down too much they lost the lead.
When one vendor proves a revenue model works among the masses, the rest follow suit. This is why SaaS will eventually consume the market that dominates right now. Watch and see. Even if open-sourced solutions were proven cheaper and more reliable, it's not the default option, and consumers are incredibly lazy, which is why open-source won't stand a chance until it IS the default option. Laziness alone creates massive revenue for those who command the default status, and those who currently hold that status wield great power to stay there.
Phones: I own my phone and subscribe to a prepaid monthly plan. It's about three years old and I don't think it will last another year. I honestly wish Microsoft was still pushing their phone because I do have faith that they would keep their OS up to date (unlike android) and they wouldn't intentionally slow down the phone to promote people buying phones (I'm not actually convinced that Apple did that for that reason)
Your desire for a Windows phone tends to confirm that you are the 1%, swimming upstream against the masses who continue to push vendors to make hardware for fashions sake, with a replacement schedule as volatile. I tend to agree with you and the notion of hardware lasting much longer, but our opinion does not matter. We are drowned out and irrelevant against the millions of people who simply do not care They don't care how much it costs. They don't care how little a model has changed from the one made just one year prior. They don't care about how long it will last. They care about rose gold color options.
Voting with your wallet always works, it's just to what degree does it work?
If you threw Microsoft a million dollars of your own money, think they would bring the Windows Phone back? I'd say that defines the degree in which common sense solutions stand a chance against the fashionista masses.
My advice: save on what you can and invest in these companies so that when they make money, you make money.
Of course. It might be slightly irritating to support the companies that create the anti-product, but I know when an investment is wise.
If a password weren't considered important for an admin level user, they simply wouldn't ask for one.
Chances are the authentication GUI prompt is more meant to prevent nefarious processes from automatically executing when an admin is logged in (similar to seeing UAC prompts on Windows, even when running as local admin), which that CAPTCHA-esque interrupt is still important. This merely discovered that when logged in as an administrator, the authentication input is irrelevant.
Would you consider a sudoer being able to issue privileged commands without doing sudo to be "not a big deal?"
A sudoer is not really a proper analogy, as that is a normal account you've granted rights to perform escalation. This feature (now with an identified bug) is more akin to being logged in as root and being blocked from running a high-level process until some level of additional end-user input is performed.
Is there anybody on earth who could be trusted with the encryption keys? As soon as two or more people know a “secret”, then it is no longer a secret.
When you say encryption "keys", remember we're actually talking about decryption master keys.
Two people sharing a secret is one thing. Backdoors to circumvent encryption that millions of people use is another matter entirely.
Let them have secret courts, but only secret for x years. Give them 1, 50 year secret warrant _application_ a year, 4, 20 year, 10, 10 year the rest 5 year.
And what do you think they would do with the "one" 50-year secret warrant? The same damn thing they do passing laws in Congress; shove 50 pounds worth of illegal/immoral shit in a 5-pound bag of legislation and pass it. No one will be alive to answer for their actions 50 years from now when it's declassified. Hell, it wouldn't even matter then. If the government themselves stood up tomorrow and confirmed that the conspiracies surrounding JFKs death were all true, no one would give a shit. Citizens don't care anymore. That is what allows abuse to thrive as much as it does today.
90% of people who spend the money to pay for an iPhone wouldn't dream of DIY. Their rather ignorant and/or lazy mentality towards hardware and software maintenance is the main reason they love the idiot-proof products Apple makes.
If you're a stupid consumer, then you reap what you sow. It's the consumer's fault. It didn't take much for me to be an informed consumer on the topic 10-15 minutes tops. Since when did consumers become entitled to being idiots and require merchants to think for them? That's not only absurd but if you let the merchant think for you, a fool and his money are soon parted. Basically, what's being said here is people get to complain about other people taking advantage of them because they're stupid, ignorant or uninformed. Maybe they should move back in their parents' basement because obviously the real world is just too much for them.
While I mostly agree with your assessment here, we also need to understand and remember that DIY on technical components often requires not only competence, but patience, which is become more and more rare in the world of instant gratification. Most people have little patience to learn something someone else knows how to do. If they're forced to learn something, it better be quick and easy (hence Apple UI). You can argue that as ignorance, stupidity, laziness, or someone merely wanting to make good use of their time. One thing is certain as an end-result; there are a lot of trained people employed in support positions today.
As far as fools parted with their money, billions are made every year selling hardware that is more fashion than function. A lot of people were parted from common sense long ago.
The Always Connected PC is just another toll of the death knell of ownership.
You will pay per-use for autonomous cars owned by corporations, because owning cars will be deemed illegal, lobbied by Corporate Greed.
You will lease all software, because a one-time cost does not satisfy Corporate Greed, who wants you to pay per month forever.
You already lease cell phones. Damn things don't last more than 2-3 years. If they do last longer, then support for them dies prematurely. Either way, you're paying for new hardware as often as Corporate Greed demands.
This is our future. Unfortunately, the mindless masses don't give a shit enough to change the way we're headed. Vote with your wallet is dead.
The question being, which scenario would lead the user to buy a new phone faster:
There is no reason to buy a new phone based on the battery wearing out if you're happy with the phone you have. Anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant. It costs $15 for a new battery. You can them on Amazon. Either you need to install it (there are tons of tutorials on youtube) or have someone else do it. It doesn't cost much and is WAY cheaper than buying a new phone.
90% of people who spend the money to pay for an iPhone wouldn't dream of DIY. Their rather ignorant and/or lazy mentality towards hardware and software maintenance is the main reason they love the idiot-proof products Apple makes.
The other 10% might take a chance on buying a questionable $15 battery from the global leader of Chinese knock-offs, hoping they're not the next victim of 3rd degree lithium-ion burns, but when you've got to spend another $50 on specialized tools to crack open the case and do the work, it's cheaper to just take it to Apple and have them do it, even at the standard price.
And unless you're beating the shit out of your battery, you probably only have to do a battery replacement once during your 2-year phone mortgage, and when your contract is up, you will buy the new model. After all, the iPhone is a fashion statement too, and no fanboi is caught dead with an old model.
Parent post is kind of right. Want to make a difference? Go out of your way to use open source software. At home convert everything you have to open source software. At work just do it without even asking, just choose open source tech to base your stuff on (do I even have to say "as much as possible where it won't break things"??). Microsoft, Intel, WD, Oracle etc. will start to get the message when their fat contracts stop getting renewed because real people who work in the tech industry are choosing vendors that screw them less badly or choose open source solutions instead. Did anyone else notice how M$ all-a-sudden got real cozy and friendly with open source stuff in the past couple years? Yeah, they noticed that everyone was using Linux on their servers and that you can barely find even a single page of documentation for $LatestCoolFramework written for Windows rather than for *nix. When was the last time you heard everyone get excited about some ASP.NET thing or IIS or anything besides anger and annoyance at M$ and Windows 10? They tried to push their crappy little store and got a yawn or outright derision and hatred from people "who know how to use computers"; these are the same people that write the code and set up the servers and they remember the asshole moves that Oracle and M$ and Intel et al have made in the past. Microsoft noticed how they were the uncool jerks that all the programmers couldn't wait to get rid of... oh, and tralala see guys we're opening up the C# license stuff and absorbing Mono and implementing a Linux subsystem for Windows and here's this, like, totally cool text editor VisualStudio Code! See, guys and girls, we're like totally rad and cool now... They'll worry. Oh, they'll worry. Just put the pressure on... but do we even care if they reform? We can't trust that they won't go back to their abusive ways if their bottom line starts to recover. Strike abusive software companies at the neck: use open source software.
Major vendors know your opinion represents less than 1% of their current customer base. Open-source takes far more effort than walking into [big-box store], buying crap off the shelf, and plugging it in. Laziness about technology coupled with an I-don't-give-a-shit-about-privacy mentality has been a vendors wet dream for many years now. That won't change no matter how many vulnerabilities you throw at the ignorant masses.
And no one will get "the message" because you're never going to convince your CxOs that open-source solutions are worth abandoning tried and true vendors they've entrusted for decades, so don't think for a minute the corporate world will adopt this mentality any better than the consumer world.
Would open-source likely be better? Yes, it would. So would the average consumer adopting common sense when it comes to privacy and security. Good luck with that.