WTF is this world coming to if someone can be "shamed and humiliated" because of what type of phone they have?
The need to define a hierarchy based on shame and humiliation(and if that fails, good, wholesome, violence) appears to be older than humanity, if research on our adorable monkey colleagues is anything to go by). The precise means are historically contingent and practically irrelevant, so long as something is available.
Can we agree that anybody who experiences "public shame and humiliation" about their cell phone should be reassigned to some ghastly corner of nowhere where they can feel 'public shame and humiliation' over how many goats they own? And, of course, anybody inflicting public shame and humiliation over cellphones should be reassigned to be one of the goats in said ghastly corner of the world?
The Ettus Research USRPs all appear to include FPGAs onboard, as does the Per Vices Phi device. I'm less familiar with the rather higher priced Serious Commercial Offerings; but it seems to be a pretty standard feature for allowing the user to do some amount of the heavy crunching before handing off to the CPU.
My (layman's) understanding is that that varies: Given that all real components have various limitations and finite performance, nobody sells a 'DC-to-daylight' frequency range in a single package, just not in the cards. Some SDR products are explicitly modular(see 'Daughterboards Table' tab), some, generally in exchange for lower cost, support a single slice of spectrum and hope that your area of interest falls inside it.
This is a lot more expensive. This is why $300 is cheap for an SDR; but $30 is expensive for a wifi dongle.
As for protocol switching, that may actually be easier than the relatively broad spectrum support side of things, given how many distinct protocols boil down to various uses and misuses of frequencies right around 2.4GHz. The hard part, for general-purpose interaction with wireless data standards(as opposed to prodding them with specially formed inputs) is that you might find yourself needing some serious punch to do all the crunching in pure software fast enough that the device you are talking to doesn't give up on you and time out. Of course, you may end up with a $300 BT dongle that consumes a core or two of a modern CPU running at full tilt; but it should work(just remember to whistle innocently about any patents that you definitely aren't violating by implementing the standard...) This is why full SDR designs have largely lost out in consumer products. It sure would be elegant if my cellphone had a universal RF communications module that adapted to my requirements at any given moment; but shoving in Wifi and Bluetooth courtesy of broadcom and cellular courtesy of Qualcomm costs two factors of ten less, so which one am I going to pick?
I don't know why DARPA would necessarily feel the need to contribute to work in an area that is already receiving attention(The guys at Ettus will sell you a competent little package for under $2k, sometimes rather far under, depending on the frequency ranges you want, which is hardly free; but isn't exactly "If you have to ask, you may be in the wrong store." money); but I'd imagine that whatever sub-unit of DARPA made the decision is the sub-unit where people who realize that 'obscurity' ain't gonna cut it as a security strategy in the future hang out.
While, yes, the US Intelligence Community certainly wet-dreams about a world of full spectrum dominance and Total Information Awareness, anyone who hasn't fully removed themselves from empiricism has to admit that that isn't really on the table. Especially for assorted hacker shenanigans, there are just too many parties who can drum up enough nerds to at least go after soft targets.
In such an environment, the US(as a country deeply dependent on complex electronic infrastructure) is probably better off if friendly security researchers have cheap toys to work with, at the risk that enemy ones will as well, rather than a situation where friendly security researchers find that the tools they need are expensive or illicit; but anybody doing work for even fairly cruddy little nation-states has what they need to pump out the zero-days.
the kiddies aren't going to be doing much research, email, collaboration, whatever without a network connection in any case.
Since when does mail require a continuous connection to the Internet? I thought the use case for a store-and-forward system like Internet mail was to download mail, go offline, read, reply, go online, and send everything in the outbox.
Architecturally, what you say is true(and, if the puffery is to be believed, also supported by something called 'offline gmail' on the Chromebook side). However, having seen the classroom scenario specifically from time to time, I'd be a trifle concerned about anything that didn't leave the client and make it at least to the local mailserver before the period ends...
Educational computers, and this goes double for shared ones, seem to have a hard life. If email is still waiting to be sent when the user leaves, it's a pretty decent bet that the machine will be allowed to run its battery down, or forcibly logged off by the next user, or(due to natural shuffling) not used by the first user again for several months. Unless the system has a local, system-level, MTA handling things for everyone anytime the system is powered on and connected(which seems to be rather rare), all the activity handled by a mail client for a given user only happens when they are logged in. Even if local data retention is perfect, that could easily leave data marooned for weeks unless manually tracked down.
The situation is much less messy if devices have 'owners'(whether actual or just "laptop A is assigned to Peon A").
19,000 of them in a South Carolina school district.
I foresee a lot of downtime in the classroom each time there is a glitch in the the school's wifi or network.
That wouldn't surprise me; but any school system(or other enterprise setup) shoving 19,000 clients around is likely going to be toast if the network glitches in any case:
You can't trust a laptop hard drive even as far as you can throw it, so it is typical for the user's home or documents directory to be a mount from a fileserver. That certainly doesn't function any better for losing connectivity. Authentication is usually centralized, so if you can't talk to the domain controller(or OpenDirectory server, if this is one of those mac schools), only the IT guy and maybe some users who have logged in recently enough to have cached credentials can even log on... Plus, for most any use case that isn't straight typing(which these 'ChromeOS' things apparently do support in offline mode, the kiddies aren't going to be doing much research, email, collaboration, whatever without a network connection in any case.
I am a bit surprised that a school district would do this, given how many textbook vendors have some dreadful software tied to their paper product(either ghastly we-kidnapped-shareware-programmers-from-1998 win32 stuff, or 'Web based' material that only works with IE7 in compatibility mode, 3 adobe plugins, Java, and a sprinkling of holy wter) which the Chromebooks wouldn't work with; but I'd be overwhelmingly surprised if they were getting better uptime with whatever they had before. Probably worse, once you count the greater odds of hardware failure in a system with moving parts and an OS more likely to be toasted by software oddities.
Solid state amplifiers do degrade over time, faster if poorly cooled and/or driven harder than they are designed for. Two years seems like a pretty dreadful lifespan, even for cheap shit shoved into unventilated plastic boxes; but perhaps cost sensitivity has driven us to that...
What is especially jarring is seeing all the tablet-esque window management misfeatures at play even as it has never been cheaper to have a couple of big monitors on your desk. In particular, the behavior where 'full-screen' on one application causes all your other monitors to blank to a grey background can only be Apple's way of giving the finger to their remaining pro users...
The last sentence suggests that I should come up with a frothing political conspiracy theory; but I don't know which one I'm supposed to latch on to...
Are the jackbooted Obamunist gestapo making a last-ditch move to irradiate freedom loving Real Americans in order to ensure their demographic victory even in the event of electoral defeat? Or are the jackbooted Rethuglicans of the police state amping up the fear machine in order to increase the effectiveness of traditional 'democrats are weak on terror, especially ones that are secretly kenyan muslims' messages?
Ah, but Robots.txt doesn't allow you to have it both ways.
For, um, totally reasonable reasons that I don't feel obliged to articulate right now, I deserve both the exposure of being listed by Google and payment from Google for listing me!
Sure, I could tell my server nerd to make the changes necessary to stop my content from being 'stolen' in about 30 seconds; but that would deny me the exposure that is my natural right...
They'll see what happens when their visits drop. People can't be expected to remember every paper that there is and go to each individual site when attempting to find a specific story. This will only be to the papers' detriment.
I suspect that, just as everyone is above average and thinks that their children are atypically cute, all the newspapers harbor the dream that they will beat the odds and get to be a 'Portal' for all those precious consumer eyeballs, just like Yahoo or AOL sometime before the turn of the millennium, rather than bleeding subscribers or contributing a sentence or two of scrapings to people's search results...
don't forget the word usage: "Limit Ad Tracking..." it doesn't say anything about disabling, just limiting.
It isn't entirely clear to me if that is some sort of weasel wording about what that button deliberately doesn't do, or just an admission that there are a variety of other mechanisms, of varying degrees of subtlety and creativity, that advertising networks can and do use against you, for which the presence of the IDFA is irrelevant(ie. any app that is connected to a 3rd party login, most obviously, can be expected to own you whether or not it has a device ID to assist it).
So, "Apple got caught with its hand in the cookie jar" when it was discovered that people were using the UDID for things it was expressly *not* supposed to be used for.
Funny thing: When you make yourself the gatekeeper and final arbiter of all applications allowed to run on a device, you tend to be seen as responsible for any activity you let through, whether or not it contradicts some written policy, unless you can show that it was very cleverly hidden...
Given that Apple has to OK an app for it to go live(outside of dev or enterprise deployment), and can revoke it at any time, and Apple controls what system data apps have access to, they could have nuked UDID use hard far earlier than they did. But they didn't.
Tech companies as a whole value your privacy almost as much as a fat kid values vegetables.
It hardly shocks me; but I do find it a little surprising. Obviously, Apple doesn't give a fuck about you; but they make fantastic margins on their hardware and have been relatively successful in building online services that people will spend actual money(albeit generally in small chunks) for software and media through.
Google, their most dangerous competitor in the space(Amazon is worth a mention, for their good conversion rates and strongly integrated markets for physical goods as well; but their devices profitless and they seem largely content to skin Android because it is cheap, rather than actually trying to make Android a threat to iOS), is much more reliant on advertising, doesn't enjoy the same conversion rate on its apps and media services, and doesn't have terribly exciting hardware margins(on the hardware that it even makes, rather than just provides the OS for).
I would have thought that it would be a sensible move on Apple's part to play up the "Apple, the warm fuzzy company that doesn't track you like the cattle you are!" because they can afford not to; but Google probably can't(analogous to the way that Apple offers comparatively friendly and cheap-to-free in store basic techie services, while Best Buy gouges relentlessly, because Apple can afford to throw in the goodwill touches with their higher margin products while Best Buy probably doesn't make any money until you buy some cables or the Geek Squad gets you). Obviously, in Apple's ideal world they'd have it both ways; but sometimes it is worth leaving some money on the table if it forces your competitor to leave even more.
If you want to turn off device tracking using the IDFA on your iOS6 device, do the following:
1) Click on Settings.
2) Click on General to access the General Settings.
3) Click About
4) Scroll down and click on Advertising.
5) Set Limit Ad Tracking to "ON".
Default On. This seems like the mobile version of Do Not Track, and we all know how that is turning out.
Just to note, in case anybody mistakes this for good faith on Apple's part, that the "Settings" application also has a tab called 'Privacy', where you will notfind any mention of this new feature. Instead, it goes under 'General', for reasons that I'm certain aren't cynical in the slightest.
Yeah, that's what it's all about. Nobody's actually afraid of any real bombs going off anywhere. It's all an act so they can spy on your porn habits and find your drug stash.
The risk distribution of explosives incidents makes generalizations (while statistically possible) fairly useless.
There are high-risk demographics and applications: de-mining, certain flavors of perimeter security in areas with a fondness for truck bombs, the occasional booby trap hunt. People involved with such things tend to have an urgent and honest enthusiasm for explosives detection.
The K-9 units of a zillion dinky municipalities? Yeah, they spend an awful lot of time providing probable cause for traffic stops and hunting school lockers for joints.
That's the thing: For a comparatively small number of people, who are at high risk, the legitimate applications are most salient. For the people presently at little or no risk, there isn't much room for improvement and there is fairly obvious room for trouble.
Turned out, the dogs were responding to very subtle cues from their handlers, rather than their own senses. Which renders them completely inappropriate for law-enforcement use.
Just think of them as adorable furry machines for turning a supply of dog food and free-floating suspicion into 'probable cause' without any judicial hassle. It's a feature!
From the summary: " Potential attackers would, of course, first have to establish which games are installed on the target computer. "
Create a list of games by popularity, you're bound to find one of them somewhere. In other words, they may not be able to target a specific computer but the odds are good that they'd find many they could target. Even a specific computer, if you know anything about the owner, quite likely might have popular games x,y and z on it based the owner's preferences.....
Worse, unless there is absolutely no way to have the process fail silently, there isn't really much penalty attached to iterating your merry way through quite a long list of possibilities...
Even if a message of some kind does pop up, what's Joe User going to do under the flood of error windows all suddenly stealing focus?
FDA, for example, has entirely skipped on regulating "supplements". No matter their claims or effects, as long as they don't contain restricted substances.
Talk to Congress(ask for Tom Harkin(D-IA) and Orrin Hatch(R-UT) in particular. Harkin appears to be a True Believer and gets some nice campaign cash from Herbalife, Hatch? Well, let's just say that Utah has athing for 'supplements'.).
The "Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994’’ says that the FDA can't do jack about 'supplements', aside from some basic manufacturing standards stuff, unless they get enough adverse event reports to satisfy the burden of proof(on them) and do something about it.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF is this world coming to if someone can be "shamed and humiliated" because of what type of phone they have?
The need to define a hierarchy based on shame and humiliation(and if that fails, good, wholesome, violence) appears to be older than humanity, if research on our adorable monkey colleagues is anything to go by). The precise means are historically contingent and practically irrelevant, so long as something is available.
Can we agree that anybody who experiences "public shame and humiliation" about their cell phone should be reassigned to some ghastly corner of nowhere where they can feel 'public shame and humiliation' over how many goats they own? And, of course, anybody inflicting public shame and humiliation over cellphones should be reassigned to be one of the goats in said ghastly corner of the world?
The Ettus Research USRPs all appear to include FPGAs onboard, as does the Per Vices Phi device. I'm less familiar with the rather higher priced Serious Commercial Offerings; but it seems to be a pretty standard feature for allowing the user to do some amount of the heavy crunching before handing off to the CPU.
My (layman's) understanding is that that varies: Given that all real components have various limitations and finite performance, nobody sells a 'DC-to-daylight' frequency range in a single package, just not in the cards. Some SDR products are explicitly modular(see 'Daughterboards Table' tab), some, generally in exchange for lower cost, support a single slice of spectrum and hope that your area of interest falls inside it.
This is a lot more expensive. This is why $300 is cheap for an SDR; but $30 is expensive for a wifi dongle.
As for protocol switching, that may actually be easier than the relatively broad spectrum support side of things, given how many distinct protocols boil down to various uses and misuses of frequencies right around 2.4GHz. The hard part, for general-purpose interaction with wireless data standards(as opposed to prodding them with specially formed inputs) is that you might find yourself needing some serious punch to do all the crunching in pure software fast enough that the device you are talking to doesn't give up on you and time out. Of course, you may end up with a $300 BT dongle that consumes a core or two of a modern CPU running at full tilt; but it should work(just remember to whistle innocently about any patents that you definitely aren't violating by implementing the standard...) This is why full SDR designs have largely lost out in consumer products. It sure would be elegant if my cellphone had a universal RF communications module that adapted to my requirements at any given moment; but shoving in Wifi and Bluetooth courtesy of broadcom and cellular courtesy of Qualcomm costs two factors of ten less, so which one am I going to pick?
I don't know why DARPA would necessarily feel the need to contribute to work in an area that is already receiving attention(The guys at Ettus will sell you a competent little package for under $2k, sometimes rather far under, depending on the frequency ranges you want, which is hardly free; but isn't exactly "If you have to ask, you may be in the wrong store." money); but I'd imagine that whatever sub-unit of DARPA made the decision is the sub-unit where people who realize that 'obscurity' ain't gonna cut it as a security strategy in the future hang out.
While, yes, the US Intelligence Community certainly wet-dreams about a world of full spectrum dominance and Total Information Awareness, anyone who hasn't fully removed themselves from empiricism has to admit that that isn't really on the table. Especially for assorted hacker shenanigans, there are just too many parties who can drum up enough nerds to at least go after soft targets.
In such an environment, the US(as a country deeply dependent on complex electronic infrastructure) is probably better off if friendly security researchers have cheap toys to work with, at the risk that enemy ones will as well, rather than a situation where friendly security researchers find that the tools they need are expensive or illicit; but anybody doing work for even fairly cruddy little nation-states has what they need to pump out the zero-days.
the kiddies aren't going to be doing much research, email, collaboration, whatever without a network connection in any case.
Since when does mail require a continuous connection to the Internet? I thought the use case for a store-and-forward system like Internet mail was to download mail, go offline, read, reply, go online, and send everything in the outbox.
Architecturally, what you say is true(and, if the puffery is to be believed, also supported by something called 'offline gmail' on the Chromebook side). However, having seen the classroom scenario specifically from time to time, I'd be a trifle concerned about anything that didn't leave the client and make it at least to the local mailserver before the period ends...
Educational computers, and this goes double for shared ones, seem to have a hard life. If email is still waiting to be sent when the user leaves, it's a pretty decent bet that the machine will be allowed to run its battery down, or forcibly logged off by the next user, or(due to natural shuffling) not used by the first user again for several months. Unless the system has a local, system-level, MTA handling things for everyone anytime the system is powered on and connected(which seems to be rather rare), all the activity handled by a mail client for a given user only happens when they are logged in. Even if local data retention is perfect, that could easily leave data marooned for weeks unless manually tracked down.
The situation is much less messy if devices have 'owners'(whether actual or just "laptop A is assigned to Peon A").
19,000 of them in a South Carolina school district.
I foresee a lot of downtime in the classroom each time there is a glitch in the the school's wifi or network.
That wouldn't surprise me; but any school system(or other enterprise setup) shoving 19,000 clients around is likely going to be toast if the network glitches in any case:
You can't trust a laptop hard drive even as far as you can throw it, so it is typical for the user's home or documents directory to be a mount from a fileserver. That certainly doesn't function any better for losing connectivity. Authentication is usually centralized, so if you can't talk to the domain controller(or OpenDirectory server, if this is one of those mac schools), only the IT guy and maybe some users who have logged in recently enough to have cached credentials can even log on... Plus, for most any use case that isn't straight typing(which these 'ChromeOS' things apparently do support in offline mode, the kiddies aren't going to be doing much research, email, collaboration, whatever without a network connection in any case.
I am a bit surprised that a school district would do this, given how many textbook vendors have some dreadful software tied to their paper product(either ghastly we-kidnapped-shareware-programmers-from-1998 win32 stuff, or 'Web based' material that only works with IE7 in compatibility mode, 3 adobe plugins, Java, and a sprinkling of holy wter) which the Chromebooks wouldn't work with; but I'd be overwhelmingly surprised if they were getting better uptime with whatever they had before. Probably worse, once you count the greater odds of hardware failure in a system with moving parts and an OS more likely to be toasted by software oddities.
Solid state amplifiers do degrade over time, faster if poorly cooled and/or driven harder than they are designed for. Two years seems like a pretty dreadful lifespan, even for cheap shit shoved into unventilated plastic boxes; but perhaps cost sensitivity has driven us to that...
What is especially jarring is seeing all the tablet-esque window management misfeatures at play even as it has never been cheaper to have a couple of big monitors on your desk. In particular, the behavior where 'full-screen' on one application causes all your other monitors to blank to a grey background can only be Apple's way of giving the finger to their remaining pro users...
The two have gotten a lot closer looking of late; but that's because they've been iPadding the hell out of what used to be an endurable desktop OS...
...and I didn't have to read a disclaimer from Apple stating "Will not run OSX applications"...
I had to crush the hopes and dreams of more than a few who didn't successfully draw that inference...
Also, that was called 'iPad' rather than "OSX AR on Apple iPad"...
The last sentence suggests that I should come up with a frothing political conspiracy theory; but I don't know which one I'm supposed to latch on to...
Are the jackbooted Obamunist gestapo making a last-ditch move to irradiate freedom loving Real Americans in order to ensure their demographic victory even in the event of electoral defeat? Or are the jackbooted Rethuglicans of the police state amping up the fear machine in order to increase the effectiveness of traditional 'democrats are weak on terror, especially ones that are secretly kenyan muslims' messages?
Help me out here, Slashdot!
Ah, but Robots.txt doesn't allow you to have it both ways.
For, um, totally reasonable reasons that I don't feel obliged to articulate right now, I deserve both the exposure of being listed by Google and payment from Google for listing me!
Sure, I could tell my server nerd to make the changes necessary to stop my content from being 'stolen' in about 30 seconds; but that would deny me the exposure that is my natural right...
They'll see what happens when their visits drop. People can't be expected to remember every paper that there is and go to each individual site when attempting to find a specific story. This will only be to the papers' detriment.
I suspect that, just as everyone is above average and thinks that their children are atypically cute, all the newspapers harbor the dream that they will beat the odds and get to be a 'Portal' for all those precious consumer eyeballs, just like Yahoo or AOL sometime before the turn of the millennium, rather than bleeding subscribers or contributing a sentence or two of scrapings to people's search results...
don't forget the word usage: "Limit Ad Tracking..." it doesn't say anything about disabling, just limiting.
It isn't entirely clear to me if that is some sort of weasel wording about what that button deliberately doesn't do, or just an admission that there are a variety of other mechanisms, of varying degrees of subtlety and creativity, that advertising networks can and do use against you, for which the presence of the IDFA is irrelevant(ie. any app that is connected to a 3rd party login, most obviously, can be expected to own you whether or not it has a device ID to assist it).
So, "Apple got caught with its hand in the cookie jar" when it was discovered that people were using the UDID for things it was expressly *not* supposed to be used for.
Funny thing: When you make yourself the gatekeeper and final arbiter of all applications allowed to run on a device, you tend to be seen as responsible for any activity you let through, whether or not it contradicts some written policy, unless you can show that it was very cleverly hidden...
Given that Apple has to OK an app for it to go live(outside of dev or enterprise deployment), and can revoke it at any time, and Apple controls what system data apps have access to, they could have nuked UDID use hard far earlier than they did. But they didn't.
Tech companies as a whole value your privacy almost as much as a fat kid values vegetables.
It hardly shocks me; but I do find it a little surprising. Obviously, Apple doesn't give a fuck about you; but they make fantastic margins on their hardware and have been relatively successful in building online services that people will spend actual money(albeit generally in small chunks) for software and media through.
Google, their most dangerous competitor in the space(Amazon is worth a mention, for their good conversion rates and strongly integrated markets for physical goods as well; but their devices profitless and they seem largely content to skin Android because it is cheap, rather than actually trying to make Android a threat to iOS), is much more reliant on advertising, doesn't enjoy the same conversion rate on its apps and media services, and doesn't have terribly exciting hardware margins(on the hardware that it even makes, rather than just provides the OS for).
I would have thought that it would be a sensible move on Apple's part to play up the "Apple, the warm fuzzy company that doesn't track you like the cattle you are!" because they can afford not to; but Google probably can't(analogous to the way that Apple offers comparatively friendly and cheap-to-free in store basic techie services, while Best Buy gouges relentlessly, because Apple can afford to throw in the goodwill touches with their higher margin products while Best Buy probably doesn't make any money until you buy some cables or the Geek Squad gets you). Obviously, in Apple's ideal world they'd have it both ways; but sometimes it is worth leaving some money on the table if it forces your competitor to leave even more.
If you want to turn off device tracking using the IDFA on your iOS6 device, do the following:
1) Click on Settings.
2) Click on General to access the General Settings.
3) Click About
4) Scroll down and click on Advertising.
5) Set Limit Ad Tracking to "ON".
Default On. This seems like the mobile version of Do Not Track, and we all know how that is turning out.
Just to note, in case anybody mistakes this for good faith on Apple's part, that the "Settings" application also has a tab called 'Privacy', where you will notfind any mention of this new feature. Instead, it goes under 'General', for reasons that I'm certain aren't cynical in the slightest.
Diebold spun off their voting machine division a while back, they might be up for a new project...
But can they be trained to steal iPads at checkpoints?
Yeah, that's what it's all about. Nobody's actually afraid of any real bombs going off anywhere.
It's all an act so they can spy on your porn habits and find your drug stash.
The risk distribution of explosives incidents makes generalizations (while statistically possible) fairly useless.
There are high-risk demographics and applications: de-mining, certain flavors of perimeter security in areas with a fondness for truck bombs, the occasional booby trap hunt. People involved with such things tend to have an urgent and honest enthusiasm for explosives detection.
The K-9 units of a zillion dinky municipalities? Yeah, they spend an awful lot of time providing probable cause for traffic stops and hunting school lockers for joints.
That's the thing: For a comparatively small number of people, who are at high risk, the legitimate applications are most salient. For the people presently at little or no risk, there isn't much room for improvement and there is fairly obvious room for trouble.
Turned out, the dogs were responding to very subtle cues from their handlers, rather than their own senses. Which renders them completely inappropriate for law-enforcement use.
Just think of them as adorable furry machines for turning a supply of dog food and free-floating suspicion into 'probable cause' without any judicial hassle. It's a feature!
From the summary:
" Potential attackers would, of course, first have to establish which games are installed on the target computer. "
Create a list of games by popularity, you're bound to find one of them somewhere. In other words, they may not be able to target a specific computer but the odds are good that they'd find many they could target. Even a specific computer, if you know anything about the owner, quite likely might have popular games x,y and z on it based the owner's preferences.....
Worse, unless there is absolutely no way to have the process fail silently, there isn't really much penalty attached to iterating your merry way through quite a long list of possibilities...
Even if a message of some kind does pop up, what's Joe User going to do under the flood of error windows all suddenly stealing focus?
FDA, for example, has entirely skipped on regulating "supplements". No matter their claims or effects, as long as they don't contain restricted substances.
Talk to Congress(ask for Tom Harkin(D-IA) and Orrin Hatch(R-UT) in particular. Harkin appears to be a True Believer and gets some nice campaign cash from Herbalife, Hatch? Well, let's just say that Utah has a thing for 'supplements'.).
The "Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994’’ says that the FDA can't do jack about 'supplements', aside from some basic manufacturing standards stuff, unless they get enough adverse event reports to satisfy the burden of proof(on them) and do something about it.
You'll also die if you don't use Facebook; but such is life.