"How did you know I wanted a medium rare filet? I haven't even ordered yet."
"It was easy sir. Our sewer system is routed through the kitchen where we perform mass spectometry on your waste matter. Out of your last 73.4 feces samples you've provided, we calculated an 89.27% preference for medium rare filets on Tuesday nights before 8PM, especially after you've had sex in the missionary position."
...The current [MacBook Pro] line forces users to pay for the Touch Bar on the higher end devices whether they want it or not...
Apple has always made its customers pay for high-end features that they did not want. Why do you think Apple's products are marketed more as a fashion statement than something that is useful? You can get more people to pay for unwanted features when they are "fashionable."
Just to clarify, every fucking vendor is now selling products riddled with bullshit features no one asked for in order to drive massive profits.
Apple is hardly the only one doing this crap now. They're merely the best at it.
As far as users being responsible for their own actions (or inactions), ignorance and stupidity are a recognized defense in the legal system we have today, which no longer recognizes common sense.
So you're suggesting we shouldn't push to fix that? Because I'm arguing that we should.
In the next 20 years, the dozen mega-corps of the world will buy and own all competition. They will ultimately destroy the concept of innovation, because any new idea will surely violate one of the 500,000+ patents they own, and even the accusation of patent infringement you won't be able to afford to defend against.
We no longer have a justice system. We only have a legal system, where the one with the most money wins. I'd recommend trying to get a 3rd political party recognized and respected. Your odds are probably better than trying to change the legal system.
When 267mph maglev is already in service in other countries?
Let's face it, there is no innovation in Hyperloop. It's just vaporware.
Elon didn't invent maglev technology, the electric car, or the solar panel. Apple didn't invent the portable music player either. These companies are known for innovating by taking designs to the next level. When it comes to high-speed transit, the innovative part would be delivering a product before the generation who needs to use it dies, and perhaps deliver a profitable design.
I think you've missed my point. Users are currently buying devices that ship insecure by default because they can not be secured. Read what I've written a few more times, put that 6th grade education to work, and realize that I am suggesting that manufacturers ultimately secure their shit, but that users be held responsible for their own poor decisions in the interim.
Perhaps you've also missed my point, which tends to clarify why we have insecure products. You want manufacturers to "secure their shit"? Well that would require an end user to know what they fuck they're doing, which they don't. There's another way of describing "insecure by default"; it's called idiot-proof. IoT breeds insecurity today because the majority of consumers are not as smart as the app-controlled light bulb they bought, which is also why manufacturers cannot afford to secure their shit and alienate their customer base and revenue.
As far as users being responsible for their own actions (or inactions), ignorance and stupidity are a recognized defense in the legal system we have today, which no longer recognizes common sense.
In a perfect world, it would be the win-win you describe, but we hardly have that.
The real laugh is that you think manufacturers have to make devices idiot-capable. If they stopped spending R&D money on that and, instead, spent that money on security, users would have to wise up and we'd get more secure devices. It'd be a win-win.
Your delusional if you think the masses actually care to learn about computer security, or implement good security. Never have. Never will.
And at the end of the day consumers will always build a bigger idiot, so manufacturers will continue to be forced to make hardware idiot-proof. Otherwise sales fall. Plain and simple.
The future of consumer computing is a device with a single button that enables a voice assistant that will understand anyone with a 6th-grade education.
Oh, wait. Nevermind. The future is already here. Now we just have to remove that "confusing" button.
Asking people to donate their time and efforts in lieu of pay is called a charity.
At the end of the day, your donated efforts will line someone's pocket. You're either cool with that or you're not, but enough of the Millennial-flavored marketing bullshit trying to label this as crowd-something simply because it involves more than one human.
I say make the user responsible. After a few get locked up for attacks perpetrated by their light bulbs, they'll wise up and stop buying insecure shit products.
For decades, I hoped that the average consumer would get smarter about computers and electronics to drive good secure design.
What we have instead is touch-screen app-driven systems that can be operated by a 3-year old who swipes right to login.
As manufacturers have to make more devices idiot-capable, you expect users to "wise up"?
Responsible? That would obviously be whoever is making the products, selling them, and turning a profit on it, period.
Manufacturers understand one thing that you've failed to recognize; know your audience.
If you were to actually make an IoT product with security as the priority, and require consumers to configure and manage that security, it wouldn't sell. Manufacturers know this. That is why they have to make every product so stupidly simple it can be configured and controlled by a 3-year old child. Good security is often sacrificed because of this requirement.
Oversharing and devices riddled with data telemetry creating the security issue? I dare you to find enough consumers that care about that. (Hint: you won't.)
The true problem with IoT Security is the cause of insecurity, which is lazy, ignorant consumers who don't give a shit about security and never have. Period.
Data gathering, like self-driving cars, is mostly hype. Buyers of advertising hope it is valid, but I don't see evidence that the data produces cost effective profits for them. The data is dirty to the point of being nearly useless.
Additionally, you can be certain that their data about you, as an individual, is largely in error. Just as the Annual Credit Reports are full of errors, and the No Fly List is full of errors, they just can't assemble their data coherently yet. If ever. They assume, for instance that your IP address is only used by you. That is until they find you purchasing women's wear, infant and adult diapers and men's motorcycle boots. How can they parse that information into a statistically valid conclusion?
It's safe to say that we can easily confuse all but the most dedicated trackers. Most users do without even trying.
Based on your theory, I would expect any minute now the cost of a 30-second Superbowl ad to plummet by 90%, along with most of the demand for commercial advertising and internet ads.
Yes, we'll be able to shut down our ad blockers any day now, since most data is worthless...
Any one of those companies has enough money to buy an invasion of a small country (and win). Do you think the US government would send in our military to defend East Bumfuck from Facebook's private army? Not with Trump in charge.
There's a reason you don't bring a knife to a gunfight, so let's dispense with the asinine comparisons already with Facebook vs. the US Military/Government, which is not some "small country".
These companies enjoy many benefits and abuses of power as a United States corporation. It's probably best to not ever bite the hand that feeds them.
"Star Wars is still Star Wars, even without Princess Leia's bikini scene..."
Uh, if you filter out all nudity, profanity, and violence from Star Wars, you're cutting out a hell of a lot more than a "nude" bikini scene, especially with Jar Jar Binks being a violent attack on the senses.
I'm not exactly sure what the hell is the point with this kind of filtering. The average Fast and Furious movie would be filtered into 5 minutes of The Rock standing there flexing his eyebrows.
Sure. But if you're implying that Facebook is automatically digging into census records (or any other public records) then the question burning in my mind is why the hell is Facebook digging into public records in the first place???
Perhaps the more relevant question is why the hell you're even asking that question. Do you still not understand exactly what Facebook creates value from?
If you were a woodworker by trade, and someone offered you a football field of premium hardwood that's already chopped and ready for you to create products to sell, you're telling me you would sit back and question why you would not or should not take it?
That's so much porn you can't even possibly look at most of it.
And your excuse for saving years of old emails you'll never read again is what exactly?
If you wanted to test Amazon's "unlimited' storage, why not just randomly generate various files. You could probably have a computer make shitty modern art paintings much faster than you could curate a 1 petabyte porn collection, and you still get to test out how much you can store on Amazon's cloud storage service before they pull the plug. And when they invariably do, you won't lose your porn collection.
Hrm...random worthless bullshit vs. porn. No surprise which was deemed more entertaining. There's a reason porn has always been a predominant force online.
That activity became offensive only because they were caught selling it to a 3rd party.
I disagree. I think it became offensive when the app went out of its way to gather location information after the user specifically and intentionally disabled location information.
We would live in a world seething with wisdom and intelligence if people were actually offended about corporations fucking them over. Laziness, ignorance, and stupidity paint the reality we have instead.
Is there a legitimate reason an application should be able to access your wireless network's name and/or BSSID?
We regularly see complaints from developers that Apple won't give them broad enough access to user data. However, on the face of it, this seems to be a case where an API can get access to data it has no good reason to need access to.
The semi-legitimized reason was to gather location data to tailor the app and provide you with local weather info.
That activity became offensive only because they were caught selling it to a 3rd party.
What I fail to understand is why the hell they didn't just program the app to ask for GPS access. Plenty of other apps do, and consumers happily hand that shit out all day long.
Oh, my TV is three hundred dollars more expensive than yours! That must mean it's better. Somehow.
It's astounding how many people engage in this reasoning. Pretty much the entirety of business history has amply shown that more expensive does not automatically mean better, and sometimes means worse.
It is impossible to judge quality by the price tag.
Apple has over 200 billion reasons to judge quality by the price tag. Just exactly how many more do you require?
I like my electronic toys. Have a lot of fun playing with them, but why all this integration? Why have televisions, something that should be nothing but a passive interface for signals to be made visible with, get turned into weird hybrids that have operating systems, computer parts, and memory?
Is it a matter of people not understanding what they're getting anymore? Is it a matter of perceived value? Oh, my TV is three hundred dollars more expensive than yours! That must mean it's better. Somehow.
I learned long ago you should just stop fucking asking why.
Trust me on this. If you do start asking, you stand a very high risk of frying your common sense circuit.
Growing meat cells, has a real problem with pathogens and corporate greed. A whole food like algae is safer in corporate hands, it tends to die real fast or look after itself in relatively clean environments. Grow meat, vulnerable meat without, an immune system and that means a whole host of chemicals to keep it alive, pretty much a whole range of antibiotics, to keep the meat from being infected, anti-biotics they will in turn be fed to us, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., basically "opposing life", so side affects with loads of corporate PR and lawyer denials are the expected results. Poor people meat, rather than the highest quality food and poor people meat because of the necessary chemicals to keep the franken meat alive and corporate greed driven stupidity always looking for short cuts, this quarters profits and people will last eating it for at least a year.
Note also, algae based and everyone with the right basic equipment can grow it (fish tank in the kitchen, feed the fish and they produce fertiliser), fake meat and only corporate industrial facilities can grow it. Total corporate control over food, obey or starve, another part of the corporate take over. Corporate cash less society, obey or be denied access to anything else. Corporate government, obey or die. The investors, basically the whose who of control freaks, only they know, only their insane levels of greed makes them smart, the billions of the rest of us know fuck all, as far as their egos are concerned (we are just not insanely greedy like them).
An algae steak, grown in clean salt water with reduced chemical input apart from chemicals the algae uses to grow far preferable to fake meat soaking in anti-biotics, hmm, I can just taste those anti-biotic side affects,"opposing life", so tasty (I'll bet none of those "opposing life" chemicals will cause cancer when you eat it every day, just ask the companies lawyers growing or the investors who never eat it).
How ironic your assumptions about future designs describe all of the fucking problems you're already eating today...
I read that story as well. It may well have an internal cache that is constantly refreshed but it certainly isn't transmitting anything outside my local network until you ask it something.
Oh, so you mean it transmits its cached recordings under the guise of triggered keywords to not raise suspicion that it's an always-listening device?
"Claiming this is about GPS coordinates is like if they were caught stealing debit cards and they issued a denial that they never stole anyone's cash."
The EULA was written by a lawyer...and for some reason people were not expecting a response like this?
Give me a fucking break. Corporations tell half-truths using legal doublespeak to fool the ignorant masses all the time. What else is new.
Slashdot Mirror
"How did you know I wanted a medium rare filet? I haven't even ordered yet."
"It was easy sir. Our sewer system is routed through the kitchen where we perform mass spectometry on your waste matter. Out of your last 73.4 feces samples you've provided, we calculated an 89.27% preference for medium rare filets on Tuesday nights before 8PM, especially after you've had sex in the missionary position."
...The current [MacBook Pro] line forces users to pay for the Touch Bar on the higher end devices whether they want it or not...
Apple has always made its customers pay for high-end features that they did not want. Why do you think Apple's products are marketed more as a fashion statement than something that is useful? You can get more people to pay for unwanted features when they are "fashionable."
Just to clarify, every fucking vendor is now selling products riddled with bullshit features no one asked for in order to drive massive profits.
Apple is hardly the only one doing this crap now. They're merely the best at it.
As far as users being responsible for their own actions (or inactions), ignorance and stupidity are a recognized defense in the legal system we have today, which no longer recognizes common sense.
So you're suggesting we shouldn't push to fix that? Because I'm arguing that we should.
In the next 20 years, the dozen mega-corps of the world will buy and own all competition. They will ultimately destroy the concept of innovation, because any new idea will surely violate one of the 500,000+ patents they own, and even the accusation of patent infringement you won't be able to afford to defend against.
We no longer have a justice system. We only have a legal system, where the one with the most money wins. I'd recommend trying to get a 3rd political party recognized and respected. Your odds are probably better than trying to change the legal system.
When 267mph maglev is already in service in other countries?
Let's face it, there is no innovation in Hyperloop. It's just vaporware.
Elon didn't invent maglev technology, the electric car, or the solar panel. Apple didn't invent the portable music player either. These companies are known for innovating by taking designs to the next level. When it comes to high-speed transit, the innovative part would be delivering a product before the generation who needs to use it dies, and perhaps deliver a profitable design.
Because no company is corrupt enough...
Holy shit thanks for the laugh. I needed that today.
Oh and welcome to planet Earth. Someone will be along shorty to introduce you to this concept we call "Politics."
I think you've missed my point. Users are currently buying devices that ship insecure by default because they can not be secured. Read what I've written a few more times, put that 6th grade education to work, and realize that I am suggesting that manufacturers ultimately secure their shit, but that users be held responsible for their own poor decisions in the interim.
Perhaps you've also missed my point, which tends to clarify why we have insecure products. You want manufacturers to "secure their shit"? Well that would require an end user to know what they fuck they're doing, which they don't. There's another way of describing "insecure by default"; it's called idiot-proof. IoT breeds insecurity today because the majority of consumers are not as smart as the app-controlled light bulb they bought, which is also why manufacturers cannot afford to secure their shit and alienate their customer base and revenue.
As far as users being responsible for their own actions (or inactions), ignorance and stupidity are a recognized defense in the legal system we have today, which no longer recognizes common sense.
In a perfect world, it would be the win-win you describe, but we hardly have that.
The real laugh is that you think manufacturers have to make devices idiot-capable. If they stopped spending R&D money on that and, instead, spent that money on security, users would have to wise up and we'd get more secure devices. It'd be a win-win.
Your delusional if you think the masses actually care to learn about computer security, or implement good security. Never have. Never will.
And at the end of the day consumers will always build a bigger idiot, so manufacturers will continue to be forced to make hardware idiot-proof. Otherwise sales fall. Plain and simple.
The future of consumer computing is a device with a single button that enables a voice assistant that will understand anyone with a 6th-grade education.
Oh, wait. Nevermind. The future is already here. Now we just have to remove that "confusing" button.
Asking people to donate their time and efforts in lieu of pay is called a charity.
At the end of the day, your donated efforts will line someone's pocket. You're either cool with that or you're not, but enough of the Millennial-flavored marketing bullshit trying to label this as crowd-something simply because it involves more than one human.
I say make the user responsible. After a few get locked up for attacks perpetrated by their light bulbs, they'll wise up and stop buying insecure shit products.
For decades, I hoped that the average consumer would get smarter about computers and electronics to drive good secure design.
What we have instead is touch-screen app-driven systems that can be operated by a 3-year old who swipes right to login.
As manufacturers have to make more devices idiot-capable, you expect users to "wise up"?
That's a fucking laugh.
Responsible? That would obviously be whoever is making the products, selling them, and turning a profit on it, period.
Manufacturers understand one thing that you've failed to recognize; know your audience.
If you were to actually make an IoT product with security as the priority, and require consumers to configure and manage that security, it wouldn't sell. Manufacturers know this. That is why they have to make every product so stupidly simple it can be configured and controlled by a 3-year old child. Good security is often sacrificed because of this requirement.
Oversharing and devices riddled with data telemetry creating the security issue? I dare you to find enough consumers that care about that. (Hint: you won't.)
The true problem with IoT Security is the cause of insecurity, which is lazy, ignorant consumers who don't give a shit about security and never have. Period.
Data gathering, like self-driving cars, is mostly hype. Buyers of advertising hope it is valid, but I don't see evidence that the data produces cost effective profits for them. The data is dirty to the point of being nearly useless.
Additionally, you can be certain that their data about you, as an individual, is largely in error. Just as the Annual Credit Reports are full of errors, and the No Fly List is full of errors, they just can't assemble their data coherently yet. If ever. They assume, for instance that your IP address is only used by you. That is until they find you purchasing women's wear, infant and adult diapers and men's motorcycle boots. How can they parse that information into a statistically valid conclusion?
It's safe to say that we can easily confuse all but the most dedicated trackers. Most users do without even trying.
Based on your theory, I would expect any minute now the cost of a 30-second Superbowl ad to plummet by 90%, along with most of the demand for commercial advertising and internet ads.
Yes, we'll be able to shut down our ad blockers any day now, since most data is worthless...
Any one of those companies has enough money to buy an invasion of a small country (and win). Do you think the US government would send in our military to defend East Bumfuck from Facebook's private army? Not with Trump in charge.
There's a reason you don't bring a knife to a gunfight, so let's dispense with the asinine comparisons already with Facebook vs. the US Military/Government, which is not some "small country".
These companies enjoy many benefits and abuses of power as a United States corporation. It's probably best to not ever bite the hand that feeds them.
"Star Wars is still Star Wars, even without Princess Leia's bikini scene..."
Uh, if you filter out all nudity, profanity, and violence from Star Wars, you're cutting out a hell of a lot more than a "nude" bikini scene, especially with Jar Jar Binks being a violent attack on the senses.
I'm not exactly sure what the hell is the point with this kind of filtering. The average Fast and Furious movie would be filtered into 5 minutes of The Rock standing there flexing his eyebrows.
Sure. But if you're implying that Facebook is automatically digging into census records (or any other public records) then the question burning in my mind is why the hell is Facebook digging into public records in the first place???
Perhaps the more relevant question is why the hell you're even asking that question. Do you still not understand exactly what Facebook creates value from?
If you were a woodworker by trade, and someone offered you a football field of premium hardwood that's already chopped and ready for you to create products to sell, you're telling me you would sit back and question why you would not or should not take it?
Exactly.
That's so much porn you can't even possibly look at most of it.
And your excuse for saving years of old emails you'll never read again is what exactly?
If you wanted to test Amazon's "unlimited' storage, why not just randomly generate various files. You could probably have a computer make shitty modern art paintings much faster than you could curate a 1 petabyte porn collection, and you still get to test out how much you can store on Amazon's cloud storage service before they pull the plug. And when they invariably do, you won't lose your porn collection.
Hrm...random worthless bullshit vs. porn. No surprise which was deemed more entertaining. There's a reason porn has always been a predominant force online.
You mean the company that sold phones that wouldn't work if you held them normally?
When the competitors design tries to set the user on fire, it tends to define "quality" real fucking quick.
That activity became offensive only because they were caught selling it to a 3rd party.
I disagree. I think it became offensive when the app went out of its way to gather location information after the user specifically and intentionally disabled location information.
We would live in a world seething with wisdom and intelligence if people were actually offended about corporations fucking them over. Laziness, ignorance, and stupidity paint the reality we have instead.
Is there a legitimate reason an application should be able to access your wireless network's name and/or BSSID?
We regularly see complaints from developers that Apple won't give them broad enough access to user data. However, on the face of it, this seems to be a case where an API can get access to data it has no good reason to need access to.
The semi-legitimized reason was to gather location data to tailor the app and provide you with local weather info.
That activity became offensive only because they were caught selling it to a 3rd party.
What I fail to understand is why the hell they didn't just program the app to ask for GPS access. Plenty of other apps do, and consumers happily hand that shit out all day long.
Until these companies get a huge financial penalty for doing this they won't care.
Any amount you think you had to define "huge" is still a fucking joke. Try again.
Nope. They're still laughing. Try again.
Oh, my TV is three hundred dollars more expensive than yours! That must mean it's better. Somehow.
It's astounding how many people engage in this reasoning. Pretty much the entirety of business history has amply shown that more expensive does not automatically mean better, and sometimes means worse.
It is impossible to judge quality by the price tag.
Apple has over 200 billion reasons to judge quality by the price tag. Just exactly how many more do you require?
I like my electronic toys. Have a lot of fun playing with them, but why all this integration? Why have televisions, something that should be nothing but a passive interface for signals to be made visible with, get turned into weird hybrids that have operating systems, computer parts, and memory?
Is it a matter of people not understanding what they're getting anymore? Is it a matter of perceived value? Oh, my TV is three hundred dollars more expensive than yours! That must mean it's better. Somehow.
I learned long ago you should just stop fucking asking why.
Trust me on this. If you do start asking, you stand a very high risk of frying your common sense circuit.
Growing meat cells, has a real problem with pathogens and corporate greed. A whole food like algae is safer in corporate hands, it tends to die real fast or look after itself in relatively clean environments. Grow meat, vulnerable meat without, an immune system and that means a whole host of chemicals to keep it alive, pretty much a whole range of antibiotics, to keep the meat from being infected, anti-biotics they will in turn be fed to us, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., basically "opposing life", so side affects with loads of corporate PR and lawyer denials are the expected results. Poor people meat, rather than the highest quality food and poor people meat because of the necessary chemicals to keep the franken meat alive and corporate greed driven stupidity always looking for short cuts, this quarters profits and people will last eating it for at least a year.
Note also, algae based and everyone with the right basic equipment can grow it (fish tank in the kitchen, feed the fish and they produce fertiliser), fake meat and only corporate industrial facilities can grow it. Total corporate control over food, obey or starve, another part of the corporate take over. Corporate cash less society, obey or be denied access to anything else. Corporate government, obey or die. The investors, basically the whose who of control freaks, only they know, only their insane levels of greed makes them smart, the billions of the rest of us know fuck all, as far as their egos are concerned (we are just not insanely greedy like them).
An algae steak, grown in clean salt water with reduced chemical input apart from chemicals the algae uses to grow far preferable to fake meat soaking in anti-biotics, hmm, I can just taste those anti-biotic side affects,"opposing life", so tasty (I'll bet none of those "opposing life" chemicals will cause cancer when you eat it every day, just ask the companies lawyers growing or the investors who never eat it).
How ironic your assumptions about future designs describe all of the fucking problems you're already eating today...
I read that story as well. It may well have an internal cache that is constantly refreshed but it certainly isn't transmitting anything outside my local network until you ask it something.
Oh, so you mean it transmits its cached recordings under the guise of triggered keywords to not raise suspicion that it's an always-listening device?
Yup, nothing to see here at all...move along...
"Claiming this is about GPS coordinates is like if they were caught stealing debit cards and they issued a denial that they never stole anyone's cash."
The EULA was written by a lawyer...and for some reason people were not expecting a response like this?
Give me a fucking break. Corporations tell half-truths using legal doublespeak to fool the ignorant masses all the time. What else is new.
In-home surveillance, via always-listening products, is now a "hotly-contested space".
And to think curtains and door locks are still a thing these days for the ignorant masses...