In solidarity with Katharine's plight, I've agreed to grant her a limited, nonexclusive, non-transferable right to the use of 'Apparatus and method for implementation of a dimensionally unique violin and play of the same' and ASCAP is offering a generous discount on the usual rate for public performance of the world's saddest song.
There have been some attempts to get medical staff and, where possible, vaccine manufacturing capacity sourced from 'non-western' areas to shut people up (if memory serves, Indonesia has provided a bunch). The trick, unfortunately, is twofold: One, for reasons I don't fully understand, antivaxers gonna antivax, so the goalposts move like they've got legs the world over, more or less regardless of what arguments they find themselves moving between. I have no idea why this is; but you can't reason somebody out of something they didn't reason themselves into, I suppose.
Secondly, when the CIA did their operation, they didn't send John 'Whitey' Smith, cornfed farmboy from Boise, to go around vaccinating Pakistani children. They did a bit of string-pulling and behind the scenes work and (while in retrospect it was remarked that there were certain organizational irregularities), the entire medical part of the project was done by local medical staff operating without any clue about the real objective of the vaccination drive, or even that there was an objective other than delivering a bunch of hep B vaccines.
I assume that the Pakistani medical establishment is a touch jumpier about any project that has an odd flavor to it these days; but the CIA-vaccination-conspiracy that actually did happen used local dupes, so local staff only go so far in assuaging concerns.
I hoped that the context of my being ashamed to mention it made it clear how much I didn't approve of putting infectious disease control in the line of fire.
I'd say, though, that you might be more accurate to say that it's a myopically clever plan, rather than a superficially clever one. Within the narrow, barely relevant, context of 'so, we need a DNA sample from a well guarded private compound in a country where most of the locals hate our guts and going through the official channels would mean somebody tipping off our suspect within hours, any ideas?' A fake vaccination program is among the better available answers.
In the broader context of the fact that there's never been a man alive nearly as dangerous as some second rate infectious diseases, it's about the dumbest answer imaginable. (Extra demerits awarded for hampering control of polio, which is right on the edge of being finally eradicated, and for doing so in a region where any remaining infections are atypically likely to spread via the more downmarket Hajj trips to assorted other areas where vaccination programs are nontrivial).
Somehow, none of this is terribly out of character for the CIA, unfortunately.
Given the epidemic of stupid parents that refuse to immunise children nowadays it should not be long till many of the old virus's and diseases rear their ugly heads again.
I wouldn't call this 'good' news; but polio is sufficiently unpleasant to send your basic chickenshit first world antivaxxer running screaming to the nearest vaccination location (for most childhood diseases for which vaccines are available, you aren't helping your odds by playing at anti-vax; the serious disease effects are still somewhat more common than the vaccine side effects; but polio is a genuinely nasty customer).
Thankfully it has no animal vectors (of any note in the wild, I'm sure you can buy a mouse model or something that is susceptible in the lab) so it mostly hangs out in areas so remote or underdeveloped that sheer logistical difficulty keeps vaccination efforts sporadic.
The one nasty anti-vax angle with polio is, I'm ashamed to say, pretty much our fault: The CIA came up with a clever ruse to do some DNA gathering under the guise of a vaccination program (one for hepatitis B), and the subsequent revelation of this fact has not done much to quell the 'zOMG vaccines are a western and/or zionist conspiracy against muslims!!!' rumor mongering present in certain areas.
But the 'conflict' only exists if Aereo is some sort of threat, rather than a service that rents would-be broadcast viewers who don't have antennas with adequate reception antennas with adequate reception. The broadcasters seem pissed off about that for some reason, my best guess being the must-carry cash (because why would they object to getting more viewers at no extra cost to them? They already pump out broadcast signals in the hope of being heard, so why wouldn't they want help?); but people whine like they are going to die about all sorts of modestly inconvenient things, so we need more than their crying as evidence that Aereo is actually dangerous to broadcasters.
Broadcast television got a pretty sweetheart deal: All of this spectrum is yours, just give us a little public interest news every day.
And that's why it's so easy to root for Aereo: Broadcast television got an absurdly sweet deal (one that, given the absolute shit that passes for 'news' they arguably aren't even honoring) on a very nice chunk of RF. Time for them to move.
If 'broadcasting' over the internet is sufficiently lucrative that Aereo (a 3rd party that has to run a silly teeny-antenna farm for legal reasons) can make money, they can cut out the middleman and do that instead. But if they want to keep acting like a very nice chunk of the airwaves was just handed to them by god for their convenience, fuck 'em. I'll cheer Aereo every step of the way if they do, in fact, cause one or more of the broadcasters to follow through on their threat to take their ball and go cable only.
(That said, I'm not actually sure that I believe your argument: Yes, Aereo doesn't provide anything back to the content producers; but neither does putting an antenna on my roof. And yet, sending free signals laced with ads to people with antennas turns out to be a functioning business model. Aereo doesn't actually detract from that, indeed, they increase the number of viewers within range of the signal, at no additional cost to the broadcaster. If they do have a financial effect, it's purely on the assorted shakedowns that govern the 'Must-carry' rules on cable outfits, another absurdly sweetheart deal given to the broadcasters for, um, reasons. Or something.)
What surprises me is that TFA mentioned multiple cases of things like failure to validate SSL certs, use of unencrypted assets rendered by the app in ways that could be spoofed dangerously, and similar stuff that wouldn't have gotten past their web people; but apparently are A-OK because it isn't a web browser, it's an 'app' wrapped around the UIWebView class!
The other things they mention, assorted attacks or failures to mitigate against an attacker with priviledged access to the system, aren't good; but they are both less dangerous (at least to people running stock iOS) and more novel and platform-specific. The first class of bugs, though, should have been solved a decade or more ago when they started dabbling in this 'web' stuff.
So, are these banks' websites just as bad, or did they actually manage to re-implement something worse than just wrapping their site in a suitable stylesheet and calling that 'an app'? If the latter, how do they look themselves in the mirror every morning?
True, but I don't see how that is an argument against being informed about it. The quality of life we stand to lose for having suboptimal capacitors is trivial, even embarassing, compared to the potential gain in quality of life for some of the people at the other end. And my main point was, I think this labelling is a good idea because then at least we can't claim ignorance.
It's also (in the medium term) hopefully the case that the supply situation isn't static: It's not as though anyone has a problem with DRC-sourced minerals per se, they just have a problem with the endless, brutal, war and extremely crude (often heavily reliant on coerced labor) mineral extraction that finances it.
In the ideal case, buyers put enough pressure on bad-actor sellers that the economically rational thing to do becomes "stop paying an enormous price in blood and forgone human development for a deeply underdeveloped mining sector, sign the damn peace deal, and accept a smaller slice of a larger, safer, pie that will be available if the security situation allows neat stuff like 'infrastructure' and 'capital investments'". It's not as though the DRC doesn't want to sell minerals, or the world to buy them, we just want to shove the current equilibrium (which is hanging out at a particularly ghastly local minimum) toward a less awful situation.
The mining is never going to be 100% cost-free and idyllic, extraction industries are a bit rough on the environment and not exactly desk jobs; but there are countries that are built (in part) by their mineral wealth, and there are countries whose mineral wealth mostly goes to buy more guns to shoot each other with.
There's a bit of a difference between blood diamonds and blood capacitors. You don't actually need diamonds for anything. Industrial diamonds (which you actually use for useful purposes) are cheap and easy to get, since they're incredibly small (basically diamond dust). The larger ones have no practical uses; they're only used for jewelry. So if you want to avoid fueling tribal warlords, it's easy: you don't buy diamonds, and instead buy something else like cubic zirconia, Swarovski crystals, or other gemstones like sapphires, rubies, emeralds, etc. (many of which are now artificially-created anyway).
It's still fairly fucked up environmentally (as mining tends to be); but you can buy gem-grade diamonds from Canada (because the 'Kimberly Process' is sort of a farce, they have their own certification program) and Russia, Australia, and a few others have some deposits as well. If you are some kind of monster who isn't willing to tell your future wife "Your love is worth paying some poor kid to die for", you can buy those.
I don't know what the situation looks like for tantalum-from-non-totally-fucked-countries, though.
Why did this get modded down? Tactlessly phrased or not, this AC has pretty much expressed what most of us feel - Who gives the least damn about "conflict metals" vs the price of their new tablet?
As much as I'm deeply-not-outraged by AC, there is a distinction to be made: Everyone operates under what might be called 'moral myopia': things closer to them(either literally geographically closer, or socially/in-their-living-room-by-TV/etc.) affect them more, more distant things affect them less. This is just how humans are specced. Plus, if it didn't work that way, the utterly incomprehensible scale of continual human tragedy worldwide would probably reduce us to nonfuctional, catatonic shells.
Given that a mostly-landlocked war in the relatively hostile environment of central Africa is about as far from most of us as anything can be (some locations are more distant as-the-crow-flies; but handy services like 'roads' and 'airports' and 'enough bars and hotels to attract foreign journalists' don't really exist, so the area barely even gets written about or filmed), it's entirely to be expected that what goes on there would have vanishingly low moral salience for us.
However, people who tediously go on about just how much they don't care, and how these supply chain policies are total regulatory bullshit, and so on, aren't psychologically distant from the situation. (They are in fact more engaged with it than those who know little and say less, or even some slactivist petition-signers). They actually don't give a fuck, and overtly support corporate supply chain convenience and incrementally cheaper gizmos made possible by a brutal slow-burn conflict substantially driven and financed by access to mineral resources in the area. That point of view is pretty fucked up.
(Now, one accusation that is probably valid is that Intel is being slightly sneaky here: Intel makes a comparatively small quantity (particularly by mass) of mostly-very-high-margin products. Their products do require a number of esoteric materials, and they probably could be making some greater amount of money if they just held their nose and went with the lowest bidder in all cases; but in terms of 'dollars in profit per gram of Tantalum used' Intel probably crushes almost everybody else, certainly the board-stuffers at Foxconn buying capacitors by the containerload to assemble boards, or the guys at Vishay making-it-up-in-volume actually manufacturing tantalum and tantalum-doped ceramic capacitors. Intel can probably afford to be pickier than many other players.)
Given that we've had 'imperfect' (read 'downright sucky') VR available to the public essentially without success for over a decade now, I'd say that they have reason to keep polishing.
Whether or not Oculus Rift will be the eventual winner, or whether somebody who polishes faster will get to it first, I have no idea; but shoddy VR implementations are pretty uncompelling except for 5 minutes of novelty use.
It seems like it really depends on (A)the threat model and (B) your tolerance for inconvenience.
A safe deposit box, say, won't last 10 seconds against The Man (unless you bank with the same Bespoke Swiss Wealth Management Entity whose gnomes have guarded your family's anonymous riches since the days when you were aristocracy); but is pretty much 100% bulletproof against hackers, malicious friends, and most other likely attackers with the possible exception of a malicious-but-once-trusted spouse. Plus, while it might be a bit of a hassle, especially if you face serious cognitive impairment, such an arrangement is well established enough, socially and legally, that regaining access to your box after an accident or something should be pretty doable.
Something like that would be too much of a hassle to routinely deposit updates to passwords you rotate frequently; but a good place for a long, hostile, master password for a password locker of some sort that you use day-to-day and store the passwords that actually get rotated in.
If the concern is The Man, of course, you could hardly do worse than that strategy. Depends on what you are worried about. If you aren't worried about the man, just putting it on paper in one of the institutions society has offered for secure storage for centuries now is the obvious strategy, and comes with the advantage that even 100% non-techies will be familiar with, and likely to be helpful with, such an arrangement. If you are worried about a warrant cutting through your security like a stray round through an innocent bystander, you'll need to get more creative, and hope that you have some social resources to employ.
Biometrics are always a terrible plan, of course (sure, your fingerprint will be fine after you get out of the burn ward, no problem...) and KISS is probably a good idea if your concern is the potential for unplanned mental degradation (whether pure memory, or cognition as well). The fancier you get, the worse your odds of remembering how your fancy plan to remember your passwords worked.
Is suckertude really determined by the eventual outcome, or by the quality of the evaluation of the action at the time it is taken?
As perhaps the clearest extreme example, buying lottery tickets is an activity well known to have a negative expected value. However, if suckertude is determined by outcome, out of all the people who buy a ticket in a given lottery, an identical action, one or two will be massively non-suckers, a modest number will be slightly non-suckers, and the rest will be suckers. Does it make sense for suckerdom to be allocated according to a statistical process totally unconnected to the participants' behavior (aside from their initial choice to participate)?
While such corporate scrip is almost invariably structured to feel more valuable than it in fact is (through a variety of expiration schemes, redemption limitations, odd allocation blocks that make getting worthwhile rewards require atypically heavy purchasing, limitations or outright restriction of transfer between customers, etc.) they really behave rather differently from currencies: They are directly pegged by the issuer to given values in a good or goods, and are frequently not transferable between 3rd parties, only 'earned' and 'redeemed' from the issuer.
Currencies, by contrast, tend not to be pegged to much (and even if they are some gold-bug special, they are pegged to a less-printable thing valued mostly as a medium of exchange and storage, not to a good or service) and are explicitly intended for transfer between third parties, with the issuer using them for seignorage and taxation but otherwise just replacing physical bills and coins as they wear out.
So does this mean Intel is likely to fix things and stop being malware, or just business as usual and a increasing the need for ever faster processors to run ever bloated and invasive software?
Oh, it'll be better than business as usual... McAfee could always be removed by blowing away your OS, often not by anything less; but Intel has the full details on the SATA, USB, NIC, and CPU for their platform, and the capabilities of UEFI and AMT. They should be able to have McAfee baked so hard into your motherboard that you'll need a drill press to uninstall it!
I suppose that adds a cool, hip, sci-fi spin to the fact that we farmed out development to an outsourcing shop somewhere in ethniclashistan to save money...
An authentication system that combines the fun of 'intelligent' phone-tree voice recognition 'expert' systems with the assumption that biographical trivia are anything other than hilariously public.... Where do I sign up?
...presumably it is too expensive to do long term physical operations in the People's Republic of Kalifornia as well as favoring different orbital paths.
I wouldn't choose the state if I were siting a garment plant or a toxin smelter; but do you imagine that there is a particularly large cost delta for a corporation that can probably book just about anything in almost any state or several overseas offices if the tax accountant says to, running an operation involving a relatively small number of skilled specialists (presumably with fairly robust clearances, even if they are just screwdriver peons, given the secrecy surrounding the details of the project)?
Unless the DCI changes course, fast, the point will be largely moot. DCI 4K is higher resolution than 4k UHD; but 4k UHD hardware is available right now (with the cheap seats down to under $1000, and the 'walk into a Sony store and look rich and clueless' option still likely to set you back only ~$5k). DCI 4K gear is... niche. Not only is it almost entirely high end projectors designed for commercial movie theaters (and priced accordingly), the DCI writes their specs with all the paranoia, loathing, and pathological aversion to user friendliness that you'd expect from an organization composed of the big seven film studios writing a standard to 'protect' their precious content from being obtained in very, very, high quality digitized form once distributed to theaters. (If you thought that HDCP was a nuisance, check out Section 9. Who wouldn't want a projector where support for FIPS 140-2 level 3 is mandatory, and you can blank the embedded keys just by opening the case incorrectly? The spec also covers actual video-related stuff; but the section on DRM, logging, phoning home, and per-showing authorization was not written with customers in mind.)
It's a pity, because I'd like to see the format with more pixels win; but it would be quite a shock if DCI remains anything other than a morass of acronyms designed to keep movie theaters on a very, very, tight lease until their eventual bankruptcy. "This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit your screen." will live on for another generation...
It's also worth remembering (since the objective is to be more secure by the time you've finished) that the firmware of IP cameras is largely crap. Maybe I'm doing some Chinese OEM slave factory whose owner's savant cousin actually cares about the firmware a disservice; but you can't afford to assume that any networked camera, wireless or wired, is anything other than a nasty infection waiting to happen. We are talking 'firmware builds even worse than the ones on $20 routers, except much more enthusiastic about sending video of your house to the internet' here.
You probably will find that (unless you really love running coax), IP devices, some of them wireless, will end up being what you go with; but whatever you do, segregate that crap on its own network with no direct access to the wider world. Any offsite storage/monitoring/messaging goes through a properly configured computer only, not the devices directly.
The Seiki SE50UY04 shows up at less than a thousand pretty frequently.
The one major downside is that the cheapies almost certainly have neither Displayport nor HDMI 2.0 HDMI 1.4 will drive a 4k panel; but maxes out at something like 30Hz. Given that pre-canned 4k video is practically nonexistent (but would be the material that might have been shot at under 30FPS originally, and has plenty of detail in the original film if somebody feels like doing a good transfer), the only real use case is hooking it up to a computer, where the refresh rate will promptly unimpress you.
It won't flicker or anything, this isn't the CRT days; but 30FPS is Not Good.
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In solidarity with Katharine's plight, I've agreed to grant her a limited, nonexclusive, non-transferable right to the use of 'Apparatus and method for implementation of a dimensionally unique violin and play of the same' and ASCAP is offering a generous discount on the usual rate for public performance of the world's saddest song.
There have been some attempts to get medical staff and, where possible, vaccine manufacturing capacity sourced from 'non-western' areas to shut people up (if memory serves, Indonesia has provided a bunch). The trick, unfortunately, is twofold: One, for reasons I don't fully understand, antivaxers gonna antivax, so the goalposts move like they've got legs the world over, more or less regardless of what arguments they find themselves moving between. I have no idea why this is; but you can't reason somebody out of something they didn't reason themselves into, I suppose.
Secondly, when the CIA did their operation, they didn't send John 'Whitey' Smith, cornfed farmboy from Boise, to go around vaccinating Pakistani children. They did a bit of string-pulling and behind the scenes work and (while in retrospect it was remarked that there were certain organizational irregularities), the entire medical part of the project was done by local medical staff operating without any clue about the real objective of the vaccination drive, or even that there was an objective other than delivering a bunch of hep B vaccines.
I assume that the Pakistani medical establishment is a touch jumpier about any project that has an odd flavor to it these days; but the CIA-vaccination-conspiracy that actually did happen used local dupes, so local staff only go so far in assuaging concerns.
I hoped that the context of my being ashamed to mention it made it clear how much I didn't approve of putting infectious disease control in the line of fire.
I'd say, though, that you might be more accurate to say that it's a myopically clever plan, rather than a superficially clever one. Within the narrow, barely relevant, context of 'so, we need a DNA sample from a well guarded private compound in a country where most of the locals hate our guts and going through the official channels would mean somebody tipping off our suspect within hours, any ideas?' A fake vaccination program is among the better available answers.
In the broader context of the fact that there's never been a man alive nearly as dangerous as some second rate infectious diseases, it's about the dumbest answer imaginable. (Extra demerits awarded for hampering control of polio, which is right on the edge of being finally eradicated, and for doing so in a region where any remaining infections are atypically likely to spread via the more downmarket Hajj trips to assorted other areas where vaccination programs are nontrivial).
Somehow, none of this is terribly out of character for the CIA, unfortunately.
Given the epidemic of stupid parents that refuse to immunise children nowadays it should not be long till many of the old virus's and diseases rear their ugly heads again.
I wouldn't call this 'good' news; but polio is sufficiently unpleasant to send your basic chickenshit first world antivaxxer running screaming to the nearest vaccination location (for most childhood diseases for which vaccines are available, you aren't helping your odds by playing at anti-vax; the serious disease effects are still somewhat more common than the vaccine side effects; but polio is a genuinely nasty customer).
Thankfully it has no animal vectors (of any note in the wild, I'm sure you can buy a mouse model or something that is susceptible in the lab) so it mostly hangs out in areas so remote or underdeveloped that sheer logistical difficulty keeps vaccination efforts sporadic.
The one nasty anti-vax angle with polio is, I'm ashamed to say, pretty much our fault: The CIA came up with a clever ruse to do some DNA gathering under the guise of a vaccination program (one for hepatitis B), and the subsequent revelation of this fact has not done much to quell the 'zOMG vaccines are a western and/or zionist conspiracy against muslims!!!' rumor mongering present in certain areas.
But the 'conflict' only exists if Aereo is some sort of threat, rather than a service that rents would-be broadcast viewers who don't have antennas with adequate reception antennas with adequate reception. The broadcasters seem pissed off about that for some reason, my best guess being the must-carry cash (because why would they object to getting more viewers at no extra cost to them? They already pump out broadcast signals in the hope of being heard, so why wouldn't they want help?); but people whine like they are going to die about all sorts of modestly inconvenient things, so we need more than their crying as evidence that Aereo is actually dangerous to broadcasters.
Broadcast television got a pretty sweetheart deal: All of this spectrum is yours, just give us a little public interest news every day.
And that's why it's so easy to root for Aereo: Broadcast television got an absurdly sweet deal (one that, given the absolute shit that passes for 'news' they arguably aren't even honoring) on a very nice chunk of RF. Time for them to move.
If 'broadcasting' over the internet is sufficiently lucrative that Aereo (a 3rd party that has to run a silly teeny-antenna farm for legal reasons) can make money, they can cut out the middleman and do that instead. But if they want to keep acting like a very nice chunk of the airwaves was just handed to them by god for their convenience, fuck 'em. I'll cheer Aereo every step of the way if they do, in fact, cause one or more of the broadcasters to follow through on their threat to take their ball and go cable only.
(That said, I'm not actually sure that I believe your argument: Yes, Aereo doesn't provide anything back to the content producers; but neither does putting an antenna on my roof. And yet, sending free signals laced with ads to people with antennas turns out to be a functioning business model. Aereo doesn't actually detract from that, indeed, they increase the number of viewers within range of the signal, at no additional cost to the broadcaster. If they do have a financial effect, it's purely on the assorted shakedowns that govern the 'Must-carry' rules on cable outfits, another absurdly sweetheart deal given to the broadcasters for, um, reasons. Or something.)
What surprises me is that TFA mentioned multiple cases of things like failure to validate SSL certs, use of unencrypted assets rendered by the app in ways that could be spoofed dangerously, and similar stuff that wouldn't have gotten past their web people; but apparently are A-OK because it isn't a web browser, it's an 'app' wrapped around the UIWebView class!
The other things they mention, assorted attacks or failures to mitigate against an attacker with priviledged access to the system, aren't good; but they are both less dangerous (at least to people running stock iOS) and more novel and platform-specific. The first class of bugs, though, should have been solved a decade or more ago when they started dabbling in this 'web' stuff.
So, are these banks' websites just as bad, or did they actually manage to re-implement something worse than just wrapping their site in a suitable stylesheet and calling that 'an app'? If the latter, how do they look themselves in the mirror every morning?
True, but I don't see how that is an argument against being informed about it. The quality of life we stand to lose for having suboptimal capacitors is trivial, even embarassing, compared to the potential gain in quality of life for some of the people at the other end. And my main point was, I think this labelling is a good idea because then at least we can't claim ignorance.
It's also (in the medium term) hopefully the case that the supply situation isn't static: It's not as though anyone has a problem with DRC-sourced minerals per se, they just have a problem with the endless, brutal, war and extremely crude (often heavily reliant on coerced labor) mineral extraction that finances it.
In the ideal case, buyers put enough pressure on bad-actor sellers that the economically rational thing to do becomes "stop paying an enormous price in blood and forgone human development for a deeply underdeveloped mining sector, sign the damn peace deal, and accept a smaller slice of a larger, safer, pie that will be available if the security situation allows neat stuff like 'infrastructure' and 'capital investments'". It's not as though the DRC doesn't want to sell minerals, or the world to buy them, we just want to shove the current equilibrium (which is hanging out at a particularly ghastly local minimum) toward a less awful situation.
The mining is never going to be 100% cost-free and idyllic, extraction industries are a bit rough on the environment and not exactly desk jobs; but there are countries that are built (in part) by their mineral wealth, and there are countries whose mineral wealth mostly goes to buy more guns to shoot each other with.
There's a bit of a difference between blood diamonds and blood capacitors. You don't actually need diamonds for anything. Industrial diamonds (which you actually use for useful purposes) are cheap and easy to get, since they're incredibly small (basically diamond dust). The larger ones have no practical uses; they're only used for jewelry. So if you want to avoid fueling tribal warlords, it's easy: you don't buy diamonds, and instead buy something else like cubic zirconia, Swarovski crystals, or other gemstones like sapphires, rubies, emeralds, etc. (many of which are now artificially-created anyway).
It's still fairly fucked up environmentally (as mining tends to be); but you can buy gem-grade diamonds from Canada (because the 'Kimberly Process' is sort of a farce, they have their own certification program) and Russia, Australia, and a few others have some deposits as well. If you are some kind of monster who isn't willing to tell your future wife "Your love is worth paying some poor kid to die for", you can buy those.
I don't know what the situation looks like for tantalum-from-non-totally-fucked-countries, though.
Why did this get modded down? Tactlessly phrased or not, this AC has pretty much expressed what most of us feel - Who gives the least damn about "conflict metals" vs the price of their new tablet?
As much as I'm deeply-not-outraged by AC, there is a distinction to be made: Everyone operates under what might be called 'moral myopia': things closer to them(either literally geographically closer, or socially/in-their-living-room-by-TV/etc.) affect them more, more distant things affect them less. This is just how humans are specced. Plus, if it didn't work that way, the utterly incomprehensible scale of continual human tragedy worldwide would probably reduce us to nonfuctional, catatonic shells.
Given that a mostly-landlocked war in the relatively hostile environment of central Africa is about as far from most of us as anything can be (some locations are more distant as-the-crow-flies; but handy services like 'roads' and 'airports' and 'enough bars and hotels to attract foreign journalists' don't really exist, so the area barely even gets written about or filmed), it's entirely to be expected that what goes on there would have vanishingly low moral salience for us.
However, people who tediously go on about just how much they don't care, and how these supply chain policies are total regulatory bullshit, and so on, aren't psychologically distant from the situation. (They are in fact more engaged with it than those who know little and say less, or even some slactivist petition-signers). They actually don't give a fuck, and overtly support corporate supply chain convenience and incrementally cheaper gizmos made possible by a brutal slow-burn conflict substantially driven and financed by access to mineral resources in the area. That point of view is pretty fucked up.
(Now, one accusation that is probably valid is that Intel is being slightly sneaky here: Intel makes a comparatively small quantity (particularly by mass) of mostly-very-high-margin products. Their products do require a number of esoteric materials, and they probably could be making some greater amount of money if they just held their nose and went with the lowest bidder in all cases; but in terms of 'dollars in profit per gram of Tantalum used' Intel probably crushes almost everybody else, certainly the board-stuffers at Foxconn buying capacitors by the containerload to assemble boards, or the guys at Vishay making-it-up-in-volume actually manufacturing tantalum and tantalum-doped ceramic capacitors. Intel can probably afford to be pickier than many other players.)
Who would have thought that immunity from consequences would lead to carelessness?
Given that we've had 'imperfect' (read 'downright sucky') VR available to the public essentially without success for over a decade now, I'd say that they have reason to keep polishing.
Whether or not Oculus Rift will be the eventual winner, or whether somebody who polishes faster will get to it first, I have no idea; but shoddy VR implementations are pretty uncompelling except for 5 minutes of novelty use.
It seems like it really depends on (A)the threat model and (B) your tolerance for inconvenience.
A safe deposit box, say, won't last 10 seconds against The Man (unless you bank with the same Bespoke Swiss Wealth Management Entity whose gnomes have guarded your family's anonymous riches since the days when you were aristocracy); but is pretty much 100% bulletproof against hackers, malicious friends, and most other likely attackers with the possible exception of a malicious-but-once-trusted spouse. Plus, while it might be a bit of a hassle, especially if you face serious cognitive impairment, such an arrangement is well established enough, socially and legally, that regaining access to your box after an accident or something should be pretty doable.
Something like that would be too much of a hassle to routinely deposit updates to passwords you rotate frequently; but a good place for a long, hostile, master password for a password locker of some sort that you use day-to-day and store the passwords that actually get rotated in.
If the concern is The Man, of course, you could hardly do worse than that strategy. Depends on what you are worried about. If you aren't worried about the man, just putting it on paper in one of the institutions society has offered for secure storage for centuries now is the obvious strategy, and comes with the advantage that even 100% non-techies will be familiar with, and likely to be helpful with, such an arrangement. If you are worried about a warrant cutting through your security like a stray round through an innocent bystander, you'll need to get more creative, and hope that you have some social resources to employ.
Biometrics are always a terrible plan, of course (sure, your fingerprint will be fine after you get out of the burn ward, no problem...) and KISS is probably a good idea if your concern is the potential for unplanned mental degradation (whether pure memory, or cognition as well). The fancier you get, the worse your odds of remembering how your fancy plan to remember your passwords worked.
I've heard people use the word 'incentivizing'. However, those people were econ majors who probably rape puppies and whose mothers do not love them.
Is suckertude really determined by the eventual outcome, or by the quality of the evaluation of the action at the time it is taken?
As perhaps the clearest extreme example, buying lottery tickets is an activity well known to have a negative expected value. However, if suckertude is determined by outcome, out of all the people who buy a ticket in a given lottery, an identical action, one or two will be massively non-suckers, a modest number will be slightly non-suckers, and the rest will be suckers. Does it make sense for suckerdom to be allocated according to a statistical process totally unconnected to the participants' behavior (aside from their initial choice to participate)?
While such corporate scrip is almost invariably structured to feel more valuable than it in fact is (through a variety of expiration schemes, redemption limitations, odd allocation blocks that make getting worthwhile rewards require atypically heavy purchasing, limitations or outright restriction of transfer between customers, etc.) they really behave rather differently from currencies: They are directly pegged by the issuer to given values in a good or goods, and are frequently not transferable between 3rd parties, only 'earned' and 'redeemed' from the issuer.
Currencies, by contrast, tend not to be pegged to much (and even if they are some gold-bug special, they are pegged to a less-printable thing valued mostly as a medium of exchange and storage, not to a good or service) and are explicitly intended for transfer between third parties, with the issuer using them for seignorage and taxation but otherwise just replacing physical bills and coins as they wear out.
So does this mean Intel is likely to fix things and stop being malware, or just business as usual and a increasing the need for ever faster processors to run ever bloated and invasive software?
Oh, it'll be better than business as usual... McAfee could always be removed by blowing away your OS, often not by anything less; but Intel has the full details on the SATA, USB, NIC, and CPU for their platform, and the capabilities of UEFI and AMT. They should be able to have McAfee baked so hard into your motherboard that you'll need a drill press to uninstall it!
I suppose that adds a cool, hip, sci-fi spin to the fact that we farmed out development to an outsourcing shop somewhere in ethniclashistan to save money...
An authentication system that combines the fun of 'intelligent' phone-tree voice recognition 'expert' systems with the assumption that biographical trivia are anything other than hilariously public.... Where do I sign up?
...presumably it is too expensive to do long term physical operations in the People's Republic of Kalifornia as well as favoring different orbital paths.
I wouldn't choose the state if I were siting a garment plant or a toxin smelter; but do you imagine that there is a particularly large cost delta for a corporation that can probably book just about anything in almost any state or several overseas offices if the tax accountant says to, running an operation involving a relatively small number of skilled specialists (presumably with fairly robust clearances, even if they are just screwdriver peons, given the secrecy surrounding the details of the project)?
Why can't we just demilitarize NASA. The military already has their own Space Command, so why do they have to fuck with NASA as well?
Why do dogs piss on trees? Or XBL kiddies teabag corpses in Halo?
Because winning just isn't as much fun if you don't mark your territory.
Unless the DCI changes course, fast, the point will be largely moot. DCI 4K is higher resolution than 4k UHD; but 4k UHD hardware is available right now (with the cheap seats down to under $1000, and the 'walk into a Sony store and look rich and clueless' option still likely to set you back only ~$5k). DCI 4K gear is... niche. Not only is it almost entirely high end projectors designed for commercial movie theaters (and priced accordingly), the DCI writes their specs with all the paranoia, loathing, and pathological aversion to user friendliness that you'd expect from an organization composed of the big seven film studios writing a standard to 'protect' their precious content from being obtained in very, very, high quality digitized form once distributed to theaters. (If you thought that HDCP was a nuisance, check out Section 9. Who wouldn't want a projector where support for FIPS 140-2 level 3 is mandatory, and you can blank the embedded keys just by opening the case incorrectly? The spec also covers actual video-related stuff; but the section on DRM, logging, phoning home, and per-showing authorization was not written with customers in mind.)
It's a pity, because I'd like to see the format with more pixels win; but it would be quite a shock if DCI remains anything other than a morass of acronyms designed to keep movie theaters on a very, very, tight lease until their eventual bankruptcy. "This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit your screen." will live on for another generation...
It's also worth remembering (since the objective is to be more secure by the time you've finished) that the firmware of IP cameras is largely crap. Maybe I'm doing some Chinese OEM slave factory whose owner's savant cousin actually cares about the firmware a disservice; but you can't afford to assume that any networked camera, wireless or wired, is anything other than a nasty infection waiting to happen. We are talking 'firmware builds even worse than the ones on $20 routers, except much more enthusiastic about sending video of your house to the internet' here.
You probably will find that (unless you really love running coax), IP devices, some of them wireless, will end up being what you go with; but whatever you do, segregate that crap on its own network with no direct access to the wider world. Any offsite storage/monitoring/messaging goes through a properly configured computer only, not the devices directly.
The Seiki SE50UY04 shows up at less than a thousand pretty frequently.
The one major downside is that the cheapies almost certainly have neither Displayport nor HDMI 2.0 HDMI 1.4 will drive a 4k panel; but maxes out at something like 30Hz. Given that pre-canned 4k video is practically nonexistent (but would be the material that might have been shot at under 30FPS originally, and has plenty of detail in the original film if somebody feels like doing a good transfer), the only real use case is hooking it up to a computer, where the refresh rate will promptly unimpress you.
It won't flicker or anything, this isn't the CRT days; but 30FPS is Not Good.