The Time article mentions that one of the major distributors over which the music industry has an "iron grip" is Tower Records. Tower Records went bankrupt in 2006, and all the US retail outlets were closed. They still have some online operations, and a few stores around the world use the name, but that's it.
That part of the article leads to a point few have mentioned. The RIAA and the MPAA used to deal almost entirely with distributors who were weaker than they were - record stores, often small ones, and movie theaters. That's no longer the case.
The remaining stores that sell CDs and DVDs do so as a sideline. There are DVDs in WalMart, Best Buy, Target, etc., but they're not a big fraction of the business. Online, the RIAA and MPAA have to deal with Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.
All of those companies are much bigger than any music industry player, and bigger than most of the film studios.
The new router is just the previous model with plug-in cards that can switch 3x as much data. It's even possible to upgrade existing CRS routers without a shutdown, changing out the cards one at a time. It's a nice upgrade if you have a need for a router that big, but not that revolutionary. The revolution happened years ago, when routers got big enough that video streaming on a large scale was possible.
This was all about "sensing". It didn't actually do anything to stop border crossers.
Multiple fences with a patrol road between them, plus a chain of towers to discourage people cutting the fence, might actually work. The sections with physical fences are doing their job now. There's solid fence from the Pacific Ocean to Yuma, AZ., which has pushed crossing attempts into Texas and the desert.
On the phishing front, it's useful to stop blaming the end user, and blame the site that hosted the phishing page.
For some time, I've encouraged taking a harder line on phishing-friendly sites, sites that host phishing pages. I had a paper on this at the 2008 MIT Spam Conference.
At SiteTruth, we take the position that one phishing page blacklists the whole second-level domain. Here's the current list of major domains being exploited by active phishing scams.
The free hosting sites and the "short URL" sites show up on the blacklist regularly. After much nagging and some press coverage, most of them are now very aggressive about kicking off phishing pages, and they don't stay on for long. The better ones now read PhishTank and the APWG blacklist automatically and kick off anything that shows up. Currently, Google is in the doghouse, because they've recently entered the "free hosting business" without adequate phishing defenses. See this abuse of Google Spreadsheets.
At the moment, "t35.com", a free hosting service, is the site most abused in this way, by a large margin. I've contacted their people. The problem is that they're being attacked by a program, and they're cleaning up by hand. Right now, they're hosting 545 known phishing pages. Nobody else is even in double digits. "piczo.com" (a social network/free hosting service for teenage girls) was the last big victim, but they're gradually getting the problem under control.
A Draconian blacklisting policy may seem harsh, but it encourages site operators of easily-exploited sites to be very aggressive about dealing with the problem. We're seeing more free hosting sites with a "click here if this is abuse" button on every page. The number of people who have to be educated to deal with the problem in this way is in the hundreds, not the hundreds of millions. So it's a solveable problem.
If you're going to blame the victim, this is the way to go at it.
It should be an international standard. All standard AC power systems offer a voltage around 220V, and the 50Hz/60Hz difference is routinely dealt with today.
The first US transcontinental railroad, with 1,700 miles of track, took only six years to build. Without heavy earthmoving equipment. There was only one power shovel on the whole project. The Trans-Siberian Railroad, from Moscow to Vladivostok,
took 18 years to build, opening in 1913. That was a much tougher job than what China is proposing. It's already possible to get from Beijing to Hamburg by rail. More than possible; it's a major freight route.
Oh, so this is the guy who designed that bloated markup language.
XML is just a simplified subset of SGML. XML-type stuff had been done in SGML for years, but mostly in government applications.
(SEC filings used SGML, for example.) For XML, the heavy thinking had all been done. It just needed a promoter for the subset. It's not like HTML, where the presentation was an issue and browsers had to be developed.
If we're going to have this, this "26 marker" stuff isn't good enough. Commercially available systems can do over a million markers per sample. "23andMe" uses those. There have been false matches with only 26 markers, but the modern systems that use tens of thousands shouldn't have that problem.
Here's the real paper. This gives a better idea of what they have in mind.
They're proposing this for mobile phones, not general-purpose computers. Specifically, they're thinking of phones where the software is entirely determined by the mobile carrier. So the carrier's server knows exactly what's supposed to be in the phone's memory. The problem is then to determine if, in fact, the contents of memory in the phone match the image back at the server, even if the phone has been corrupted.
That's a solveable problem, and their rather complex solution might actually work for that.
The "reliable external checking agent" is at the carrier's server farm, not within the phone. The key idea is that while malware might try to fake the appropriate responses to the checking agent, it can't do so within time limits imposed by the checking agent. This is because some cryptographic tricks make the faking job computationally expensive.
In the phone environment, if the carrier detects that the phone has been compromised, they can limit what the phone can talk to, since they control the channel. Worst case, they could just de-authorize the phone, which limits it to 911 calls and customer service calls. This is the default state of an unregistered phone.
It's not clear how useful this would be for phones which can download applications. The paper punts on this issue. On page 5, item 5, they write "[The verification policy] is beyond the scope of this paper."
I could see this as being very useful in military communication systems and in embedded systems, where you know what's supposed to be in the device and want to make sure the device at the other end of a link hasn't been compromised. It's a way to check whether a locked-down environment is still locked down.
In other words, it's not going to help in the Windows world.
The funny thing about the far right Jews is that most of the guys are in some form of learning program, so the women are often the primary breadwinners. This leads to the average Jewish woman on the far right having more education and job training than her husband.
In the US, that's true. In Israel, the ultra-orthodox have Government subsidies.. There are American Jews who think this is a disaster for Israel. "In Israel today, two-thirds of ultra-Orthodox men spend their days studying the Torah and Talmud and do not participate in the workforce. Their unemployment is subsidized by the state to the tune of about $1.3 billion a year. There is nothing inherent in ultra-Orthodox religious tenets that keeps believers from working: In countries such as Britain and the United States, ultra-Orthodox families do work because they know that they can't depend on outlays from the state. Israel must adopt similar rules if it wants a first-class economy."
Saudi Arabia has dug itself into a similar hole, with a huge number of state-subsidized religious figures, but they have oil money.
That position sounds so insane, that I thought that there must be more to it than that, but no, it really is that hypocritical.
That's the religious right. Doesn't matter which religion. The Islamic, Jewish, and Christian far right have much in common - ODing on prayer, oppressing women, having big families, keeping kids from learning too much about the real world, enforcing nutty rules, and demanding tax subsidies. They even have similar looking leaders - old guys with long beards wearing black.
There may be a relatively short window in which any civilization uses unencrypted radio.
Most modern forms of radio communication look like noise unless you know what to look for. Nobody uses big "carriers" any more.
In analog TV, 80% of the energy went into the video carrier, which was easy to detect but conveyed no information beyond "I'm here, and you can tune to this." That's history. I made this point to some SETI people about fifteen years ago, and now, with analog transmission much reduced, it's clear that looking for carriers is probably futile. If somebody within a few light years was putting out a big carrier, we'd have noticed by now.
Of course, the pessimistic view is that technological civilizations have a lifespan of maybe 100 to 300 years between first radio transmission and collapse due to resource exhaustion.
To everyone who says we owe the computer industry to NASA,
No, we don't. If anything, we owe the computer industry to the Census Bureau, the U.S. Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the National Security Agency. Those were the government agencies that really pushed computer technology. UNIVAC I, SAGE, the Atlas Guidance Computer, the early airborne computers, and all the early supercomputers were funded by those agencies, not NASA. The Apollo program was mostly off the shelf computer technology on the ground. The spaceborne computers were custom, but those were descendants of guidance hardware from early ICBMs.
NASA's main innovation in computing is generally considered to be NASTRAN, the first finite-element structural analysis program.
Once you see the detailed photos, it's clear how a kid might point at himself, looking for the Wii controls. On the gun/controller, there are the usual Wii buttons visible on top. On the real gun, of course, there's just the slide.
There's a lot going on. Since electricity deregulation, the power distribution companies don't own much generation capacity. They
buy power from generating companies. So there's a market system and contracts in place. The contracts are now more long-term; the "auction every half hour" scheme California had for a few years is out of favor. Now, the planning horizon is about one day.
There's a whole series of PJM online courses, and if you go through some of the basic ones, you'll be able to talk about electric power intelligently.
Always one for a free night time invite into the SFMOMA, sfboy lined up with the rest of the VC bottom feeders and various webtrash last Wednesday evening to try his hand at the new phenomenon sweeping the city called "Let the Dot Coms Pay for Your Drinks". Inadequate staff with bad planning only worked to our advantage as CM slipped past the guestlist list like a bad desktop application business plan past an overzealous venture capitalist. Once inside sfboy experienced the largest spread of food yet to feed the frothing crowds shoved uncomfortably into a small room. Picture fields of ahi, buckets of fresh smoked salmon, oysters galore, cheese from every udder imaginable, sushi, dumplings, and chocolates, oh my! Add several ornate ice sculptures with internal martinis luges and you've got a real crowd pleaser! Hear, Hear, my stomach cries for Mediaplex! Take me in nightly, feed me completely, shower me with your VC cash!
Inside the museum itself child labor laws were overlooked at several dozen grommets flipped, spun and generally amused the masses with what appeared to be an orphanage filled with circus rats in training. I promptly notified the proper authorities.
Sfboy relunctantly admits that he has no idea what Mediaplex pretends to posses as a business model but he wishes them well in their attempts to create a virtual circus accompanied by a fine buffet.
Party Bill: $100,000
Clowns: 100
Professional Clowns: 25
Bars: 4
Party size: 650
Like all Cisco high-end routers, it runs QNX Neutrino. The version used in these routers has a 12KB (not MB) microkernel.
Almost all the packet handling is in FPGAs, but the supervision, error handling, etc. are in Cisco applications running on QNX Neutrino.
My guess is that the government doesn't publish the statistics because
No, it's an institutional bias at the FBI that dates back to J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports hugely underestimate white collar crime. Violent crime is tallied based on police reports, regardless of whether anyone is arrested. White collar crime is tallied based on arrests. Scams with large numbers of victims who didn't lose much each don't get tallied at all.
In dollar volume, white collar fraud dwarfs all other categories. Losses from the Madoff scam, or the Enron scam, were each greater than an entire century or so of physical bank robberies.
Robbery is a dying industry, anyway. Breaking into houses is almost obsolete. What's worth stealing? Nobody has silver any more. Used consumer electronics has zero to negative value. Any TV worth stealing is too big to lift. Used furniture is nearly worthless. Few people keep much cash around. Auto theft is at a 20-year low - between OnStar and LoJack, stealing cars as a career doesn't work for long.
Very soon? More like since 2005 or so. OnStar is $19 to $30 per month. It's tied in to the vehicle's systems: "We automatically run hundreds of diagnostic and maintenance checks on your vehicle's key operating systems and deliver a summary report right to your inbox every month." And, of course, they can stop your car remotely.
With the Chevy Volt, OnStar will allow remote phone access to some car functions.
This seems to happen too frequently. Usually in Nature. Someone comes up with some bit of progress in materials science, and it's hailed as the biggest breakthrough since the transistor. Then it's never heard about again.
This particular gimmick is kind of cute, but a general-purpose power supply it's not. They coated carbon nanotubes with RDX, which is a fast explosive, and got a big voltage spike out when they set it off. It's a one-shot device. This might have some weapon application, but it's hard to think of other uses.
Ageia's innovation wasn't their technology. It was their business model. Havok gets a fixed fee per title. Ageia's "physics chip" got revenue for each graphics card. Both Havok and Mathengine had serious revenue problems as standalone companies.
The original investors did not do well. Both were eventually acquired. The basic problem is that game middleware isn't a good business.
Physics in the GPU is mostly useful for visual effects like water, snow, fire, explosions, etc., where the motion doesn't feed back into the game engine. Ragdolls and vehicles are usually still done in the main CPUs.
Some time back, when USB chargers started to appear at airports, I warned that this might happen. A public charging port is such an attractive attack vector.
Of course, the real problem is Windows's "autorun". It was a truly awful idea to have Windows run any executable that appears on any removable device or medium. That went in (in Windows 95, I think) when CDs were only manufactured by major vendors, before home CD writers or USB storage devices. So it probably seemed "safe" at the time.
This isn't right. You can see in section 7.3 of the spec that the hub sends an HTTP POST to each client (subscriber) for each update; there's no polling.
You're right. Which implies that the subscriber has to have a web server. Somebody will probably try a "web server in the browser" thing for browser-type subscribers.
Machines where software can alter the CPU voltages and clock speeds for "overclocking" purposes may be especially vulnerable to this attack. "Advanced power management" may also offer an attack vector.
Also worry about Intel's Nehalem architecture, where there's a small CPU dedicated to power, clock, and thermal management. Access to that allows detailed control over power.
Enjoy pop-up blocking while you can
on
Window Pain
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It's convenient that you can block ads in web browsers. That may be on the way out.
You can't block ads on the iPad. One of the "advantages" being touted to advertisers for the closed ecosystems of the various "ereaders" and "pads" is that they can have unblockable, unskippable ads. There hasn't been much about this in the popular press yet, but it's being of great interest in the advertising community, where more "control over the user experience", and less control by the user, is desired.
You can already see a trend in this direction, with Flash-based video players which insert unskippable ads.
Slashdot Mirror
The Time article mentions that one of the major distributors over which the music industry has an "iron grip" is Tower Records. Tower Records went bankrupt in 2006, and all the US retail outlets were closed. They still have some online operations, and a few stores around the world use the name, but that's it.
That part of the article leads to a point few have mentioned. The RIAA and the MPAA used to deal almost entirely with distributors who were weaker than they were - record stores, often small ones, and movie theaters. That's no longer the case. The remaining stores that sell CDs and DVDs do so as a sideline. There are DVDs in WalMart, Best Buy, Target, etc., but they're not a big fraction of the business. Online, the RIAA and MPAA have to deal with Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. All of those companies are much bigger than any music industry player, and bigger than most of the film studios.
The new router is just the previous model with plug-in cards that can switch 3x as much data. It's even possible to upgrade existing CRS routers without a shutdown, changing out the cards one at a time. It's a nice upgrade if you have a need for a router that big, but not that revolutionary. The revolution happened years ago, when routers got big enough that video streaming on a large scale was possible.
This was all about "sensing". It didn't actually do anything to stop border crossers.
Multiple fences with a patrol road between them, plus a chain of towers to discourage people cutting the fence, might actually work. The sections with physical fences are doing their job now. There's solid fence from the Pacific Ocean to Yuma, AZ., which has pushed crossing attempts into Texas and the desert.
On the phishing front, it's useful to stop blaming the end user, and blame the site that hosted the phishing page.
For some time, I've encouraged taking a harder line on phishing-friendly sites, sites that host phishing pages. I had a paper on this at the 2008 MIT Spam Conference. At SiteTruth, we take the position that one phishing page blacklists the whole second-level domain. Here's the current list of major domains being exploited by active phishing scams.
The free hosting sites and the "short URL" sites show up on the blacklist regularly. After much nagging and some press coverage, most of them are now very aggressive about kicking off phishing pages, and they don't stay on for long. The better ones now read PhishTank and the APWG blacklist automatically and kick off anything that shows up. Currently, Google is in the doghouse, because they've recently entered the "free hosting business" without adequate phishing defenses. See this abuse of Google Spreadsheets.
At the moment, "t35.com", a free hosting service, is the site most abused in this way, by a large margin. I've contacted their people. The problem is that they're being attacked by a program, and they're cleaning up by hand. Right now, they're hosting 545 known phishing pages. Nobody else is even in double digits. "piczo.com" (a social network/free hosting service for teenage girls) was the last big victim, but they're gradually getting the problem under control.
A Draconian blacklisting policy may seem harsh, but it encourages site operators of easily-exploited sites to be very aggressive about dealing with the problem. We're seeing more free hosting sites with a "click here if this is abuse" button on every page. The number of people who have to be educated to deal with the problem in this way is in the hundreds, not the hundreds of millions. So it's a solveable problem.
If you're going to blame the victim, this is the way to go at it.
It should be an international standard. All standard AC power systems offer a voltage around 220V, and the 50Hz/60Hz difference is routinely dealt with today.
The first US transcontinental railroad, with 1,700 miles of track, took only six years to build. Without heavy earthmoving equipment. There was only one power shovel on the whole project. The Trans-Siberian Railroad, from Moscow to Vladivostok, took 18 years to build, opening in 1913. That was a much tougher job than what China is proposing. It's already possible to get from Beijing to Hamburg by rail. More than possible; it's a major freight route.
Oh, so this is the guy who designed that bloated markup language.
XML is just a simplified subset of SGML. XML-type stuff had been done in SGML for years, but mostly in government applications. (SEC filings used SGML, for example.) For XML, the heavy thinking had all been done. It just needed a promoter for the subset. It's not like HTML, where the presentation was an issue and browsers had to be developed.
If we're going to have this, this "26 marker" stuff isn't good enough. Commercially available systems can do over a million markers per sample. "23andMe" uses those. There have been false matches with only 26 markers, but the modern systems that use tens of thousands shouldn't have that problem.
Here's the real paper. This gives a better idea of what they have in mind.
They're proposing this for mobile phones, not general-purpose computers. Specifically, they're thinking of phones where the software is entirely determined by the mobile carrier. So the carrier's server knows exactly what's supposed to be in the phone's memory. The problem is then to determine if, in fact, the contents of memory in the phone match the image back at the server, even if the phone has been corrupted.
That's a solveable problem, and their rather complex solution might actually work for that. The "reliable external checking agent" is at the carrier's server farm, not within the phone. The key idea is that while malware might try to fake the appropriate responses to the checking agent, it can't do so within time limits imposed by the checking agent. This is because some cryptographic tricks make the faking job computationally expensive.
In the phone environment, if the carrier detects that the phone has been compromised, they can limit what the phone can talk to, since they control the channel. Worst case, they could just de-authorize the phone, which limits it to 911 calls and customer service calls. This is the default state of an unregistered phone.
It's not clear how useful this would be for phones which can download applications. The paper punts on this issue. On page 5, item 5, they write "[The verification policy] is beyond the scope of this paper."
I could see this as being very useful in military communication systems and in embedded systems, where you know what's supposed to be in the device and want to make sure the device at the other end of a link hasn't been compromised. It's a way to check whether a locked-down environment is still locked down.
In other words, it's not going to help in the Windows world.
The funny thing about the far right Jews is that most of the guys are in some form of learning program, so the women are often the primary breadwinners. This leads to the average Jewish woman on the far right having more education and job training than her husband.
In the US, that's true. In Israel, the ultra-orthodox have Government subsidies.. There are American Jews who think this is a disaster for Israel. "In Israel today, two-thirds of ultra-Orthodox men spend their days studying the Torah and Talmud and do not participate in the workforce. Their unemployment is subsidized by the state to the tune of about $1.3 billion a year. There is nothing inherent in ultra-Orthodox religious tenets that keeps believers from working: In countries such as Britain and the United States, ultra-Orthodox families do work because they know that they can't depend on outlays from the state. Israel must adopt similar rules if it wants a first-class economy."
Saudi Arabia has dug itself into a similar hole, with a huge number of state-subsidized religious figures, but they have oil money.
That position sounds so insane, that I thought that there must be more to it than that, but no, it really is that hypocritical.
That's the religious right. Doesn't matter which religion. The Islamic, Jewish, and Christian far right have much in common - ODing on prayer, oppressing women, having big families, keeping kids from learning too much about the real world, enforcing nutty rules, and demanding tax subsidies. They even have similar looking leaders - old guys with long beards wearing black.
There may be a relatively short window in which any civilization uses unencrypted radio.
Most modern forms of radio communication look like noise unless you know what to look for. Nobody uses big "carriers" any more. In analog TV, 80% of the energy went into the video carrier, which was easy to detect but conveyed no information beyond "I'm here, and you can tune to this." That's history. I made this point to some SETI people about fifteen years ago, and now, with analog transmission much reduced, it's clear that looking for carriers is probably futile. If somebody within a few light years was putting out a big carrier, we'd have noticed by now.
Of course, the pessimistic view is that technological civilizations have a lifespan of maybe 100 to 300 years between first radio transmission and collapse due to resource exhaustion.
To everyone who says we owe the computer industry to NASA,
No, we don't. If anything, we owe the computer industry to the Census Bureau, the U.S. Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the National Security Agency. Those were the government agencies that really pushed computer technology. UNIVAC I, SAGE, the Atlas Guidance Computer, the early airborne computers, and all the early supercomputers were funded by those agencies, not NASA. The Apollo program was mostly off the shelf computer technology on the ground. The spaceborne computers were custom, but those were descendants of guidance hardware from early ICBMs.
NASA's main innovation in computing is generally considered to be NASTRAN, the first finite-element structural analysis program.
Here's the Semi Auto Pistol Hand Gun Adapter for Wii Remote. It's not even a controller; it's just a case that fits over the standard controller. From some angles it looks very real.
Once you see the detailed photos, it's clear how a kid might point at himself, looking for the Wii controls. On the gun/controller, there are the usual Wii buttons visible on top. On the real gun, of course, there's just the slide.
This is the Slashdot-misunderstood version of the Wired dumbed-down version. Here's some of the more serious stuff.
Wind Operations Dispatching Training: This is the grid system operator's view of wind power.
There's a lot going on. Since electricity deregulation, the power distribution companies don't own much generation capacity. They buy power from generating companies. So there's a market system and contracts in place. The contracts are now more long-term; the "auction every half hour" scheme California had for a few years is out of favor. Now, the planning horizon is about one day.
There's a whole series of PJM online courses, and if you go through some of the basic ones, you'll be able to talk about electric power intelligently.
For those of you who weren't there, see SFgirl, the web site for dot-com party girls.
Here's the dot-com party list for one week, ten years ago.
Typical party review: Mediaplex.com
Always one for a free night time invite into the SFMOMA, sfboy lined up with the rest of the VC bottom feeders and various webtrash last Wednesday evening to try his hand at the new phenomenon sweeping the city called "Let the Dot Coms Pay for Your Drinks". Inadequate staff with bad planning only worked to our advantage as CM slipped past the guestlist list like a bad desktop application business plan past an overzealous venture capitalist. Once inside sfboy experienced the largest spread of food yet to feed the frothing crowds shoved uncomfortably into a small room. Picture fields of ahi, buckets of fresh smoked salmon, oysters galore, cheese from every udder imaginable, sushi, dumplings, and chocolates, oh my! Add several ornate ice sculptures with internal martinis luges and you've got a real crowd pleaser! Hear, Hear, my stomach cries for Mediaplex! Take me in nightly, feed me completely, shower me with your VC cash!
Inside the museum itself child labor laws were overlooked at several dozen grommets flipped, spun and generally amused the masses with what appeared to be an orphanage filled with circus rats in training. I promptly notified the proper authorities.
Sfboy relunctantly admits that he has no idea what Mediaplex pretends to posses as a business model but he wishes them well in their attempts to create a virtual circus accompanied by a fine buffet.
Party Bill: $100,000
Clowns: 100
Professional Clowns: 25
Bars: 4
Party size: 650
Like all Cisco high-end routers, it runs QNX Neutrino. The version used in these routers has a 12KB (not MB) microkernel. Almost all the packet handling is in FPGAs, but the supervision, error handling, etc. are in Cisco applications running on QNX Neutrino.
My guess is that the government doesn't publish the statistics because
No, it's an institutional bias at the FBI that dates back to J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports hugely underestimate white collar crime. Violent crime is tallied based on police reports, regardless of whether anyone is arrested. White collar crime is tallied based on arrests. Scams with large numbers of victims who didn't lose much each don't get tallied at all.
In dollar volume, white collar fraud dwarfs all other categories. Losses from the Madoff scam, or the Enron scam, were each greater than an entire century or so of physical bank robberies.
Robbery is a dying industry, anyway. Breaking into houses is almost obsolete. What's worth stealing? Nobody has silver any more. Used consumer electronics has zero to negative value. Any TV worth stealing is too big to lift. Used furniture is nearly worthless. Few people keep much cash around. Auto theft is at a 20-year low - between OnStar and LoJack, stealing cars as a career doesn't work for long.
Very soon our cars will be connected devices
Very soon? More like since 2005 or so. OnStar is $19 to $30 per month. It's tied in to the vehicle's systems: "We automatically run hundreds of diagnostic and maintenance checks on your vehicle's key operating systems and deliver a summary report right to your inbox every month." And, of course, they can stop your car remotely.
With the Chevy Volt, OnStar will allow remote phone access to some car functions.
More hype from the materials-science people.
This seems to happen too frequently. Usually in Nature. Someone comes up with some bit of progress in materials science, and it's hailed as the biggest breakthrough since the transistor. Then it's never heard about again.
This particular gimmick is kind of cute, but a general-purpose power supply it's not. They coated carbon nanotubes with RDX, which is a fast explosive, and got a big voltage spike out when they set it off. It's a one-shot device. This might have some weapon application, but it's hard to think of other uses.
Ageia's innovation wasn't their technology. It was their business model. Havok gets a fixed fee per title. Ageia's "physics chip" got revenue for each graphics card. Both Havok and Mathengine had serious revenue problems as standalone companies. The original investors did not do well. Both were eventually acquired. The basic problem is that game middleware isn't a good business.
Physics in the GPU is mostly useful for visual effects like water, snow, fire, explosions, etc., where the motion doesn't feed back into the game engine. Ragdolls and vehicles are usually still done in the main CPUs.
Some time back, when USB chargers started to appear at airports, I warned that this might happen. A public charging port is such an attractive attack vector.
Of course, the real problem is Windows's "autorun". It was a truly awful idea to have Windows run any executable that appears on any removable device or medium. That went in (in Windows 95, I think) when CDs were only manufactured by major vendors, before home CD writers or USB storage devices. So it probably seemed "safe" at the time.
Worse was making it very difficult to turn autorun off.
This isn't right. You can see in section 7.3 of the spec that the hub sends an HTTP POST to each client (subscriber) for each update; there's no polling.
You're right. Which implies that the subscriber has to have a web server. Somebody will probably try a "web server in the browser" thing for browser-type subscribers.
To some extent, they've re-invented Usenet.
Machines where software can alter the CPU voltages and clock speeds for "overclocking" purposes may be especially vulnerable to this attack. "Advanced power management" may also offer an attack vector.
Also worry about Intel's Nehalem architecture, where there's a small CPU dedicated to power, clock, and thermal management. Access to that allows detailed control over power.
It's convenient that you can block ads in web browsers. That may be on the way out.
You can't block ads on the iPad. One of the "advantages" being touted to advertisers for the closed ecosystems of the various "ereaders" and "pads" is that they can have unblockable, unskippable ads. There hasn't been much about this in the popular press yet, but it's being of great interest in the advertising community, where more "control over the user experience", and less control by the user, is desired.
You can already see a trend in this direction, with Flash-based video players which insert unskippable ads.