That's a man-in-the-middle attack. While I'm not fond of them, chip cards will effectively remove the skimming problem (when it's fully adopted, anyway).
MITM attacks will always be an issue.
If they'd designed the protocol correctly, MITM wouldn't be an issue.
You're right that the chip solves the skimming problem, but the faulty implementation opened up an attack vector where a stolen card can be used without knowing the PIN.
Hopefully the chip & pin security problem is fixable without a total recall of all existing equipment and cards.
If he was really too fat to fly they never should have sold him a ticket.
And they'd better damn well have given him a full refund or a free transfer or it's fraud.
Either that, or they should never have sold me a ticket when I failed to mention I have a chronic aversion to sitting next to someone who overhangs their seat so far that I can't see my own lap.
And if they don't give me a full refund or transfer, then it's $RANDOM_LEGAL_TERM.
No, it's still around because people bought machines that were pre-installed with XP. Those same people haven't felt the need to spend money to upgrade their OS (or hardware). This is because their computer does what they need it to, and as far as they're concerned, works fine.
The majority of people buying new computers get the latest version of Windows as part of the deal without paying any extra. Whereas those that aren't buying new machines should not be forced to pay money for an upgrade that they don't need.
There's a difference between a counterfeit and just copying something.
Counterfeiting is generally bad, because even within China, people need to know if what they're buying is legit. I'm sure even the Chinese government doesn't want to buy a piece of equipment that is an inferior copy rebadged with the name and product ID of something reputable (eg. Cisco).
Whereas, copying an item so it's identical, but just rebadging it with your own name (eg. Siskow) is only an affront to the legalities of patents and copyright. At half the price, I'm sure the Chinese would be happy to buy your Siskow product.
On the one hand you have fraud (or at best a trademark violation), on the other you have patent/copyright infringement.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it's 'the end of world'. I was referring to the characterisations that seem popular in today's media where the effect is extreme. There are different degrees (and types) of autism that go from 'slightly eccentric' to 'sits all day in a corner drooling'.
The fear of causing a perceived defect by ignoring some advice will more than likely be visualised in the worst possible light. ie. Being the parent of the kid drooling in the corner - all because of something that supposedly could have been avoided.
Imagine how the mothers of the thalidomide children would have felt when they found out it was directly caused by a pill they took for a headache. No it's not the end of the world, but if you had some advance information, it's a condition that any parent would want to avoid.
(BTW I'm not saying that any of these were the parent's faults in any way. But I'm sure many of them would have felt like it was anyway, at least for a time.)
And I have to say I also have very little time for people who are intolerant of others with perceived neurological differences. Your little boy will turn out just fine.
My point is that due to the publishing of the original poorly reasoned (and in some parts fraudulent) 'study', there was media coverage that presented the information as if it was a foregone conclusion. Even though it would have been clearly identified as speculative by anyone qualified.
This in itself wouldn't have been so bad, except further 'awareness campaigns' continued to raise the hypothesis from the level of speculation to that of established theory.
There is nothing more scary to a parent than the possibility of something as debilitating as autism being inflicted on their child when they could have done something about it. It is much easier to ignore the less sensational complications of measels or mumps when for years very few people even had the disease (due entirely to the MMR vaccine). Compare that to constant coverage of autism.
This leads to an 'intuitive' leap to the idea that it's safer to avoid the MMR vaccine than risk autism. When in reality, the opposite is true.
It's an unfortunate consequence of the modern scientific establishment(s) that scientific conclusions are not presented objectively and get filtered through a political veil.
I'd like to see an effort to reverse this trend with informed technical journalists reporting on these things. I wonder what it would be like if there was a moderation system that showed the peer reviewer's line of reasoning, expertise, related articles and other useful cross reference data - all indexed and sortable by 'reputation numbers' and 'level of confidence'. Sort of like a Slashdot for the scientific community where the public shouldn't bother browsing at anything less than +10 Informative. All based on open standards and mandated sharing between universities and other research outfits.
The problem is that most people don't understand statistics, numerical significance or even the scientific method. This leads the unwashed masses to jump to conclusions that are based on anecdotal evidence, un-normalised data comparisons and non-causal correlations which sound quite reasonable on the surface.
When a study is properly performed and analysed to remove various biases and incorrect assumptions, it usually involves counter-intuitive statistical analyses.
Unfortunately, due to a lack of understanding of the scientific method, and despite the fact that a denouncement has been widely reported, many people will still be given media time to promote their ignorant contrarian claims.
When discussing high profile scientific studies like this one, I keep hearing people argue with reasoning like 'well that is just another point of view'. I intentionally used the word 'claims' and not 'view point' in the above paragraph. A view point implies that a contradictory, but valid alternative explanation exists. In the case of scientific study, a falsifiable hypothesis can be shown to be true or false. If it is deemed false it may still be correct in some of it's underlying elements. In that case it would be revised and a more accurate hypothesis developed.
Some people seem to think that if they personally don't understand the complex reasoning process behind a peer reviewed scientific conclusion, then they should feel free to jump to their own. Because of this, many kids have not been immunised over the last ten years, and now we are seeing the fall out of what happens when too many people decide against the recommendations of the medical establishment.
There is the argument to be made that viewing sexualized images of children reinforces urges to exploit actual children in those who have those urges already. The rest of us are turned off by these images, so the worst thing that can happen from the images alone is desensitization.
Unfortunately this argument is the proverbial 'slippery slope'. Where do we draw the line on what imagery purportedly encourages a crime? Shouldn't then this also apply to violence, theft, dangerous driving, infidelity, etc? Should it apply to idealistic plot elements that promote free thought and rebellion?
It's easy to point to and say that we should ban something that might cause an adverse problem just because it's 'better to be safe than sorry'. But, I strongly believe that no law should EVER go on the books that doesn't stem from solid evidential reasoning. Witch hunt inducing catch cries like 'think of the children' are the bane of a just society.
Note that none of above implies things like film classifications are bad in any way. Actually, IMO violence should be weighted higher than sex when pushing a film classification from PG to M to R, etc.
Woz has stated that the problem is reproducible, so Toyota will quickly know if this is the problem. If so, they can fix it.
As another poster stated above, this is like restating a bug as a feature. It's still a bug, and needs to be fixed. Whether or not it was exacerbated by unexpected (but, not unusual) user interaction.
He already did call their customer service, but was clearly ignored. ie. no fix, no recall, no nothing.
It's not like he tried to directly call the CEO straight away.
His dealer, like pretty much every dealer out there, is probably just a sales outlet. If he's lucky, they'll forward the problem into some ticket tracking system, and then he can hope for the best that someone gets assigned the ticket. Meanwhile, he and every other Prius owner continues to drive around while Toyota stuffs around coming up with yet another excuse why this is 'user error'.
This is a serious PR nightmare. Not just because it was Woz, but because the problem has the potential to kill people. (And from some of those reports, looks like it might have already killed some.)
There was a guy who would give his paper to his friend to be mark up for fluency, grammatical and spelling errors. He'd then completely redraft it - by hand - before submitting it to the professor.
The guy had a thorough understanding of the topic at hand. So to make sure that his paper would always be well received, he made sure to minimise any extraneous distractions from the intended content.
As a dyslexic he definitely had an excuse. But, he'd always say that an excuse isn't going to help get his point across.
If you listen to the transcript, you can hear that he tried to push the brake many times, but just didn't do it hard enough. In the end he literally put both feet on the brake pedal and stood up in his seat. He did that while pulling as hard as he could on the hand brake. He said he tried earlier, but the car only slowed down a bit and then sped back up (I assume after the brake pads had heated up).
I'm sure the driver is well aware _now_ that he needed a huge amount of force to stop the car like that. But, he obviously had no idea at the time.
The cops don't try those 'box you in' kind of slow down manoeuvres if the risk of crashing multiple vehicles is high. They just cleared the road as best they could and hoped he would stop before he ended up driving into trees in the forest.
The supposition of operator error would be fair enough if both Ford Australia and the cops weren't also trying to get him to do everything possible. Obviously if he'd just jumped on the brakes like a madman at the beginning it would have worked.
But, none of that explains why the car was 'stuck on cruise control' in the first place. It shouldn't have happened.
They told him to do that, but the lever wouldn't move upwards and he couldn't press the button. Possibly a double fault, who knows, but he did try to get it into neutral.
I don't have one of those cars and I drive manuals so I have no experience here. Just restating what I've read and heard from the news coverage of that case.
describes a problem with a Ford Territory getting stuck with the cruise control actively trying to keep the vehicle at 100km/hr.
A couple of things to answer the 'this guy was idiot, I'm so clever it wouldn't have happened to me' crowd:
1. He couldn't turn off the ignition as the car won't let you do that if the car is moving.
2. He couldn't shift to neutral because the car wouldn't let him push the shift release button. (It was an automatic, so no clutch pedal.)
3. Pushing the brake wasn't helping enough to stop the car. (In the end it worked, but he had to jump on it with both feet all his adrenaline fuelled strength while pulling as hard as he could on the handbrake.)
4. The accelerator pedal only worked to speed him up, It wasn't a pedal 'sticking to the mat' issue, as the car was holding itself exactly to the speed of the cruise control.
5. The car was going too fast to just ram into a barrier or tree, etc.
6. The guy called Ford Australia (on his mobile phone), who couldn't help him and put him on hold. So then he called the police who, to their credit, cleared the road ahead and kept him calm enough to eventually get the car to stop. The total ordeal lasted 50 minutes.
7. The recording of the police call was released and played on the news and it was pretty obvious that both the guy and the police were doing everything to get the car to stop. This was not a situation where a quick two second phone call to a know-it-all Slashdotter would have solved the problem.
Anyway, I can't believe this news didn't make Slashdot when it happened a couple of months ago, as it contains considerably more information than the usual fare on this topic.
According to TFA they already have a law on the books that requires a witness to report violent assaults to anyone under 15yo. This is an amendment to that law to make it compulsory to report violent crimes against anyone of any age.
The idea is to scare people into not being caught watching (or cheering on) instead of reporting the crime.
This is mostly attributable to teenagers and others within an insular peer group. If something like that gang rape happened within visible range of 20 random adults, then I'd find it hard to believe that at least half of them wouldn't have tried to call the cops.
You're implying that someone wants a feature that isn't there already. Well you can always point them to an app if one is available, and if not, then you could write one for them.
If they're asking for something more complicated, but still within the realm of hardware capability, then you can always jailbreak it first.
If they're asking for something that isn't possible due to hardware limitations, then they either have to learn to live without it, or buy a product that does what they want.
Honestly, if you want a laptop, buy a laptop. If you want a simple viewing device that runs large screen versions of iPhone apps, then the iPad looks like just the thing.
Even if it was used as a single function device it would still be useful. This device could sit:
Next to your laptop showing your current todo list or calender.
On a music stand, automatically scrolling through a musical score as you play.
In the bathroom so you can turd and surf.
In the kitchen displaying recipes and keeping tabs on how long things have been in the oven.
Bolted to the reception desk displaying product information.
In the workshop as a quick reference guide.
Bolted to a counter for remote product and price display at point of sale.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a man-in-the-middle attack. While I'm not fond of them, chip cards will effectively remove the skimming problem (when it's fully adopted, anyway).
MITM attacks will always be an issue.
If they'd designed the protocol correctly, MITM wouldn't be an issue.
You're right that the chip solves the skimming problem, but the faulty implementation opened up an attack vector where a stolen card can be used without knowing the PIN.
Hopefully the chip & pin security problem is fixable without a total recall of all existing equipment and cards.
That's not them online, that's their Perl script logging in at 8pm to deliver the email they wrote just before they left the office at 5pm.
A tried and true way of appearing dedicated is to send a few emails timestamped late into the evening.
Who modded this Funny? This should be modded +5 Insightful.
Or just charge by weight.
If he was really too fat to fly they never should have sold him a ticket.
And they'd better damn well have given him a full refund or a free transfer or it's fraud.
Either that, or they should never have sold me a ticket when I failed to mention I have a chronic aversion to sitting next to someone who overhangs their seat so far that I can't see my own lap.
And if they don't give me a full refund or transfer, then it's $RANDOM_LEGAL_TERM.
That's because everyone's playing games on the Windows machines.
No, it's still around because people bought machines that were pre-installed with XP. Those same people haven't felt the need to spend money to upgrade their OS (or hardware). This is because their computer does what they need it to, and as far as they're concerned, works fine.
The majority of people buying new computers get the latest version of Windows as part of the deal without paying any extra. Whereas those that aren't buying new machines should not be forced to pay money for an upgrade that they don't need.
To the AC's credit, his idea would definitely end up in an 'outing just for for her'.
Extra kudos if the array elements are hot swappable.
Happy Thanksgiving!
There's a difference between a counterfeit and just copying something.
Counterfeiting is generally bad, because even within China, people need to know if what they're buying is legit. I'm sure even the Chinese government doesn't want to buy a piece of equipment that is an inferior copy rebadged with the name and product ID of something reputable (eg. Cisco).
Whereas, copying an item so it's identical, but just rebadging it with your own name (eg. Siskow) is only an affront to the legalities of patents and copyright. At half the price, I'm sure the Chinese would be happy to buy your Siskow product.
On the one hand you have fraud (or at best a trademark violation), on the other you have patent/copyright infringement.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it's 'the end of world'. I was referring to the characterisations that seem popular in today's media where the effect is extreme. There are different degrees (and types) of autism that go from 'slightly eccentric' to 'sits all day in a corner drooling'.
The fear of causing a perceived defect by ignoring some advice will more than likely be visualised in the worst possible light. ie. Being the parent of the kid drooling in the corner - all because of something that supposedly could have been avoided.
Imagine how the mothers of the thalidomide children would have felt when they found out it was directly caused by a pill they took for a headache. No it's not the end of the world, but if you had some advance information, it's a condition that any parent would want to avoid.
(BTW I'm not saying that any of these were the parent's faults in any way. But I'm sure many of them would have felt like it was anyway, at least for a time.)
And I have to say I also have very little time for people who are intolerant of others with perceived neurological differences. Your little boy will turn out just fine.
I completely agree.
My point is that due to the publishing of the original poorly reasoned (and in some parts fraudulent) 'study', there was media coverage that presented the information as if it was a foregone conclusion. Even though it would have been clearly identified as speculative by anyone qualified.
This in itself wouldn't have been so bad, except further 'awareness campaigns' continued to raise the hypothesis from the level of speculation to that of established theory.
There is nothing more scary to a parent than the possibility of something as debilitating as autism being inflicted on their child when they could have done something about it. It is much easier to ignore the less sensational complications of measels or mumps when for years very few people even had the disease (due entirely to the MMR vaccine). Compare that to constant coverage of autism.
This leads to an 'intuitive' leap to the idea that it's safer to avoid the MMR vaccine than risk autism. When in reality, the opposite is true.
It's an unfortunate consequence of the modern scientific establishment(s) that scientific conclusions are not presented objectively and get filtered through a political veil.
I'd like to see an effort to reverse this trend with informed technical journalists reporting on these things. I wonder what it would be like if there was a moderation system that showed the peer reviewer's line of reasoning, expertise, related articles and other useful cross reference data - all indexed and sortable by 'reputation numbers' and 'level of confidence'. Sort of like a Slashdot for the scientific community where the public shouldn't bother browsing at anything less than +10 Informative. All based on open standards and mandated sharing between universities and other research outfits.
I suppose I can always dream.
The problem is that most people don't understand statistics, numerical significance or even the scientific method. This leads the unwashed masses to jump to conclusions that are based on anecdotal evidence, un-normalised data comparisons and non-causal correlations which sound quite reasonable on the surface.
When a study is properly performed and analysed to remove various biases and incorrect assumptions, it usually involves counter-intuitive statistical analyses.
Unfortunately, due to a lack of understanding of the scientific method, and despite the fact that a denouncement has been widely reported, many people will still be given media time to promote their ignorant contrarian claims.
When discussing high profile scientific studies like this one, I keep hearing people argue with reasoning like 'well that is just another point of view'. I intentionally used the word 'claims' and not 'view point' in the above paragraph. A view point implies that a contradictory, but valid alternative explanation exists. In the case of scientific study, a falsifiable hypothesis can be shown to be true or false. If it is deemed false it may still be correct in some of it's underlying elements. In that case it would be revised and a more accurate hypothesis developed.
Some people seem to think that if they personally don't understand the complex reasoning process behind a peer reviewed scientific conclusion, then they should feel free to jump to their own. Because of this, many kids have not been immunised over the last ten years, and now we are seeing the fall out of what happens when too many people decide against the recommendations of the medical establishment.
There is the argument to be made that viewing sexualized images of children reinforces urges to exploit actual children in those who have those urges already. The rest of us are turned off by these images, so the worst thing that can happen from the images alone is desensitization.
Unfortunately this argument is the proverbial 'slippery slope'. Where do we draw the line on what imagery purportedly encourages a crime? Shouldn't then this also apply to violence, theft, dangerous driving, infidelity, etc? Should it apply to idealistic plot elements that promote free thought and rebellion?
It's easy to point to and say that we should ban something that might cause an adverse problem just because it's 'better to be safe than sorry'. But, I strongly believe that no law should EVER go on the books that doesn't stem from solid evidential reasoning. Witch hunt inducing catch cries like 'think of the children' are the bane of a just society.
Note that none of above implies things like film classifications are bad in any way. Actually, IMO violence should be weighted higher than sex when pushing a film classification from PG to M to R, etc.
Woz has stated that the problem is reproducible, so Toyota will quickly know if this is the problem. If so, they can fix it.
As another poster stated above, this is like restating a bug as a feature. It's still a bug, and needs to be fixed. Whether or not it was exacerbated by unexpected (but, not unusual) user interaction.
He already did call their customer service, but was clearly ignored. ie. no fix, no recall, no nothing.
It's not like he tried to directly call the CEO straight away.
His dealer, like pretty much every dealer out there, is probably just a sales outlet. If he's lucky, they'll forward the problem into some ticket tracking system, and then he can hope for the best that someone gets assigned the ticket. Meanwhile, he and every other Prius owner continues to drive around while Toyota stuffs around coming up with yet another excuse why this is 'user error'.
This is a serious PR nightmare. Not just because it was Woz, but because the problem has the potential to kill people. (And from some of those reports, looks like it might have already killed some.)
Either that or they'd rather carry around a Portable Hole.
I had a related experience going through college.
There was a guy who would give his paper to his friend to be mark up for fluency, grammatical and spelling errors. He'd then completely redraft it - by hand - before submitting it to the professor.
The guy had a thorough understanding of the topic at hand. So to make sure that his paper would always be well received, he made sure to minimise any extraneous distractions from the intended content.
As a dyslexic he definitely had an excuse. But, he'd always say that an excuse isn't going to help get his point across.
Yeah, whatever, Explorer, Territory, brake, break.
If you listen to the transcript, you can hear that he tried to push the brake many times, but just didn't do it hard enough. In the end he literally put both feet on the brake pedal and stood up in his seat. He did that while pulling as hard as he could on the hand brake. He said he tried earlier, but the car only slowed down a bit and then sped back up (I assume after the brake pads had heated up).
I'm sure the driver is well aware _now_ that he needed a huge amount of force to stop the car like that. But, he obviously had no idea at the time.
The cops don't try those 'box you in' kind of slow down manoeuvres if the risk of crashing multiple vehicles is high. They just cleared the road as best they could and hoped he would stop before he ended up driving into trees in the forest.
The supposition of operator error would be fair enough if both Ford Australia and the cops weren't also trying to get him to do everything possible. Obviously if he'd just jumped on the brakes like a madman at the beginning it would have worked.
But, none of that explains why the car was 'stuck on cruise control' in the first place. It shouldn't have happened.
They told him to do that, but the lever wouldn't move upwards and he couldn't press the button. Possibly a double fault, who knows, but he did try to get it into neutral.
I don't have one of those cars and I drive manuals so I have no experience here. Just restating what I've read and heard from the news coverage of that case.
Here's another link. This one contains some of the actual conversation between the police and the driver (sorry about the Flash and advertisement before the actual story):
http://www.smh.com.au/national/cruise-control-terror-for-freeway-driver-20091215-ktxn.html
This article (happened in Australia - linked related articles contain more information): http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/16/2773868.htm
describes a problem with a Ford Territory getting stuck with the cruise control actively trying to keep the vehicle at 100km/hr.
A couple of things to answer the 'this guy was idiot, I'm so clever it wouldn't have happened to me' crowd:
1. He couldn't turn off the ignition as the car won't let you do that if the car is moving.
2. He couldn't shift to neutral because the car wouldn't let him push the shift release button. (It was an automatic, so no clutch pedal.)
3. Pushing the brake wasn't helping enough to stop the car. (In the end it worked, but he had to jump on it with both feet all his adrenaline fuelled strength while pulling as hard as he could on the handbrake.)
4. The accelerator pedal only worked to speed him up, It wasn't a pedal 'sticking to the mat' issue, as the car was holding itself exactly to the speed of the cruise control.
5. The car was going too fast to just ram into a barrier or tree, etc.
6. The guy called Ford Australia (on his mobile phone), who couldn't help him and put him on hold. So then he called the police who, to their credit, cleared the road ahead and kept him calm enough to eventually get the car to stop. The total ordeal lasted 50 minutes.
7. The recording of the police call was released and played on the news and it was pretty obvious that both the guy and the police were doing everything to get the car to stop. This was not a situation where a quick two second phone call to a know-it-all Slashdotter would have solved the problem.
Anyway, I can't believe this news didn't make Slashdot when it happened a couple of months ago, as it contains considerably more information than the usual fare on this topic.
According to TFA they already have a law on the books that requires a witness to report violent assaults to anyone under 15yo. This is an amendment to that law to make it compulsory to report violent crimes against anyone of any age.
The idea is to scare people into not being caught watching (or cheering on) instead of reporting the crime.
This is mostly attributable to teenagers and others within an insular peer group. If something like that gang rape happened within visible range of 20 random adults, then I'd find it hard to believe that at least half of them wouldn't have tried to call the cops.
You're implying that someone wants a feature that isn't there already. Well you can always point them to an app if one is available, and if not, then you could write one for them.
If they're asking for something more complicated, but still within the realm of hardware capability, then you can always jailbreak it first.
If they're asking for something that isn't possible due to hardware limitations, then they either have to learn to live without it, or buy a product that does what they want.
Honestly, if you want a laptop, buy a laptop. If you want a simple viewing device that runs large screen versions of iPhone apps, then the iPad looks like just the thing.
Even if it was used as a single function device it would still be useful. This device could sit:
Next to your laptop showing your current todo list or calender.
On a music stand, automatically scrolling through a musical score as you play.
In the bathroom so you can turd and surf.
In the kitchen displaying recipes and keeping tabs on how long things have been in the oven.
Bolted to the reception desk displaying product information.
In the workshop as a quick reference guide.
Bolted to a counter for remote product and price display at point of sale.
etc.