If anything, the release of zOMG Resolution++!!! new TV formats(and the accompanying marketing push by people who sell TVs) will probably make things worse.
Cable bandwidth isn't infinite, and upgrading it costs money that could be given to shareholders and management. The combination of bitrate and cleverness of encode/decode algorithm isn't something easily encapsulated into a marketing pitch. Resolution is.
If the demand is for 'better' resolution, they can just crank up the compression and deliver in the same bandwidth. It won't actually look much better; but the marketing for it won't technically be lying...
But it is a relatively cheap way to 'fulfill' any rural telco obligations you happened to pick up from the FCC in exchange for lucrative spectrum concessions or whatever else it is you actually wanted...
Can we stop fretting about the fact that there isn't a hard link run to every last spot in the boonies and start fretting about why access is so damn slow, and so damn expensive, even in the parts of the US where the economics of deployment are most favorable?
It's interesting that there seems to be a fairly strong scientist/engineer divide on that. I wonder if doing intelligent design as a day job for a few years makes you start seeing it elsewhere, or if natural sciences and engineering start out with two different input populations...
Wouldn't the signed binary/config scenario you describe rely on a shared public key across all devices, with unique private keys per support contract or customer and the secret CA keys at the top? There are certainly ways to screw that up; but there shouldn't be any need to expose private keys on endpoints at all, and such an arrangement can and does work(SSL is fucked at an organizational level; but the math works just fine).
What possible reason would there be to have a shared private key among all devices? Even if there is some (weird, and probably not a good idea) requirement that it be identical across an entire user site, that should be part of a programming/keyfill process. If uniqueness is good, it should just generate a key on first boot...
Why? One can't talk or think without the teleprompter and other will quote the Old Testament.
Which is why it becomes important to determine(admittedly by way of various imperfect proxy measures) what their chosen science minions will do for them...
While it might be an interesting change of pace to elect a scientist rather than a lawyer or executive, that seems unlikely. However, even the personally-dimmest are going to end up making choices about the sort of 'expertise' they choose to cultivate around themselves, and we'll likely see a few differences in that advisory group.
A 'multiseat' setup(in the contemporary sense) takes advantage of the fact that putting a decent number of video outs on a single computer is cheaper than ever, and the number of USB HID and/or sound devices you can support is pretty large, and puts multiple independent monitor/keyboard/mouse users on a single host system.
I haven't had the... pleasure... of testing this myself; but I assume that non-X display scenarios, including virtual terminals, are painfully graceless under such a scheme. Certainly, all the multi-head systems I've used do something brutally ugly during the BIOS display, something slightly less ugly(generally at least mirroring) on GRUB, and don't actually start working properly until X is up and going.
Is there a reason that there 'almost has to be a markup'(beyond the costs of shipping)?
Australia's position relatively far from anywhere, and small population is never going to do your shipping costs any good, nor your economies of scale(so expecting to pay more to get the item at retail, immediately, seems logical, as does paying more and waiting longer to have it shipped in from somewhere else); but small population otherwise only kicks in if the Australian customer isn't willing to deal with EN_US or EN_GB localized products, or if Australia is foolish enough to bake its own weird TV broadcast standard or something of the sort...
If we want to talk US, the oh-so-terrifying-scourge of drugs-identical-to-their-us-counterparts-but-marked-'only for sale in Canada' is probably worth mentioning. Based on the amount of not-at-all-self-interested hysteria about the safety concerns surrounding these (much, much, cheaper) drugs, you'd think that Canadians were some kind of alien organism with a metabolism based on cryogenic sulfur compounds for which drugs had to be specially formulated...
This is why the Model M13 with Trackpoint is the truest of the true keyboards. Not only does it possess the innate superiority of its ultra-clicky brethren, it has a trackpoint that you can access without moving your hands from home row, just by moving your right index finger a centimeter or two from its resting position on 'j'...
I'm guessing that "The ingredients are a legally priviledged trade secret of Con Agra, Inc." is not an answer that will do much to diffuse even the most epistemologically shoddy senses of paranoia...
Act 1: FDA-or-somebody: "Umm, ADM, your 'xeno-bites' brand genetically engineered cowroach burgers have absolutely no track record of safety testing..."
ADM: "Shut up, four-eyes, and go kill jobs somewhere else. We'll let the consumer decide what they feel comfortable eating."
FDA-or-somebody: "Um, ok."
Act 2: California: "Hey, the consumers want to know what ingredients are in food, so that they can exercise free choice and let the market decide between "Ammoniabeef, Piney-Fresh" and "Soylent X"!"
ADM-or-somebody "Shut up, bureaucratic busybody, all our products are safe and legal and the consumers would just worry their little heads about it if we were to tell them. In fact, tell that dirty hippie down the street that he isn't allowed to use the phrases 'GMO free', 'less than.01% zergling by weight', or 'minimally teratogenic' in advertisements!"
This basic back-and-forth is what annoys me so much about this brand of spat: When the regulators show up, health and safety regulations based on research are treated as a bunch of ivory-tower paternalism. When the customers show up demanding the data that they actually need to make their own choices(since they are justifiably somewhat doubtful that benevolent regulators have their backs on this one), they get a paternalistic rebuff and assurance that the previously neutered regulators are totally all over this one...
There are arguments enough against having it merely one way or the other; but handing the customer the shit end of both worlds is just plain crass.
I'm not sure exactly how a telecom would achieve a natural monopoly if the state didn't enforce the creation of easements. In fact, I'm not sure how we'd get electricity, sewer, or water connections either... But that's beside the point! The free market fixes all!!!
There is actually some interesting literature on the subject... We all know about the 'tragedy of the commons', where non-ownership creates a strong incentive for everybody to unsustainably over-consume whatever resource is in question, eventually destroying its value for everyone. There is also, it is theorized, a 'tragedy of the anti-commons' effect:
If you are trying to build something like a utility network, or a complex product, there are potentially hundreds or thousands of property-holders who can either veto or significantly delay/alter the project. In the case of a utility network, any one landowner refusal can force a re-route and even a few might make the project unviable. In the case of a complex product, there may be dozens or hundreds of patents at issue. Trouble is, (in addition to transaction costs), each person who could nuke the project has an incentive to make me pay a bit extra, lest they nuke the project. If too many people do that, the cost of buying them off becomes greater than the expected value of the project, and everybody gets nothing. However, even if they decide to rationally team up and extract the highest price I am willing to pay, thus making the most possible money, the sellers are essentially in a cartel arrangement(which is unstable; because any one member of the cartel could earn more by backstabbing the others; but if much defection occurs the whole cartel is worse off, including the traitors).
I suspect that this is why some variant of eminent domain is usually tolerated in most legally functional jurisidictions, and why the other-than-legal techniques for "encouraging" people to sell can get so very, very, ugly in the less legalistic areas of the world.
In the context of this article, it's probably worth noting that(even if the iPhone feature described works exactly as advertised) it is aimed at mitigating a completely different class of attack.
Disk encryption setups aim to protect a lost or stolen device, in the physical custody of the attacker, from revealing whatever information is on the disk. They have no effect when the device is on and operating under the user's credentials(transparency is considered a feature).
This attack in China is an attack on a live system, using the credentials of the user(or higher) to perform malicious operations as them. Even if the disk were encrypted in a suitably robust way, it'd be happily handing over whatever this bug asked for.
Certainly, local/municipal governments have generally done a fine job of worsening a bad situation; but the last mile is where things get hairy with or without their help...
There are really a couple of problems:
Dealing with large numbers of small property holders who can each veto or delay/reroute your project is a very ugly business indeed, which is why utility operators usually get in bed with relevant government power in the first place, obtaining access to all the easements in one chunk, and letting the government make it so, is very much easier. This opens an obvious weak point for the incumbent to establish regulatory capture(along with the local's legitimate desire to not be being trenched out at all times).
Second, even with the easements and all in place, building out a complex last-mile network of relatively narrow links is expensive. I don't have the invoice in front of me; but when we get fiber run for our network(distributed between a dozen-ish buildings across a town), running anything between point A and poing B is wildly expensive, having them throw 20 fiber runs instead of 1 into the same tube costs peanuts by comparison.
Third, unless the incumbent is at the ragged end of how far they can milk their existing cables, the low marginal cost of providing faster service(and/or add-ons like VoIP) in an area where you alread provide service makes it comparatively easy for an incumbent to defend their position on price long enough to drive weaker competitors away. If the incumbent has operating income from other regions, and/or a war chest, to fall back on, the process is even easier.
Its almost as if you'd want a system that only ran signed code...
And only ran signed code that was verifiably resistant to unexpected or undesired behavior in the face of maliciously crafted input...
Just plain installing and running a malicious binary certainly is a handy; but the world is rotten with bad things being done, entirely with unintended features provided by officially installed legitimate programs that have taken a bite of malicious input...
Given how little customization there is during a typical phone's OS install process(during the image build process, yes, the image install process, not so much), "just reflash it" actually counts as fairly noob-friendly, if somewhat tedious, advice.
Unless the bootloader is shot, or the vendor has a hostile or nonexistent reflash process, it's pretty much just a matter of waiting while a nontrivial chunk of the phone's flash gets overwritten...
Apple is quite lucky that that nobody ever weaponized anything back in the good old days of Jailbreakme... In-browser TIFF exploit leading to full root access just by loading a web page.
Google, of course, is similarly lucky that nobody bothered to do anything wacky during the "yeah, everything you type gets silently dumped to a root shell, why do you ask?" period in early android...
Punchline is, the state of 'mobile' security(really, security in general) is pretty fucking dire, and the current frenzy to tie as many payment systems as possible to mobile phones is complete insanity, except from the perspective of the bottom lines of the respective payment processors, naturally.
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If anything, the release of zOMG Resolution++!!! new TV formats(and the accompanying marketing push by people who sell TVs) will probably make things worse.
Cable bandwidth isn't infinite, and upgrading it costs money that could be given to shareholders and management. The combination of bitrate and cleverness of encode/decode algorithm isn't something easily encapsulated into a marketing pitch. Resolution is.
If the demand is for 'better' resolution, they can just crank up the compression and deliver in the same bandwidth. It won't actually look much better; but the marketing for it won't technically be lying...
But it is a relatively cheap way to 'fulfill' any rural telco obligations you happened to pick up from the FCC in exchange for lucrative spectrum concessions or whatever else it is you actually wanted...
Can we stop fretting about the fact that there isn't a hard link run to every last spot in the boonies and start fretting about why access is so damn slow, and so damn expensive, even in the parts of the US where the economics of deployment are most favorable?
The actor didn't do that great of a job, either -- he's the one who started the massive rise in the national debt, after all.
Given how heavily venerated he is without factual reference to his actual achievements, I'd say he did a damn good job. As an actor.
It's interesting that there seems to be a fairly strong scientist/engineer divide on that. I wonder if doing intelligent design as a day job for a few years makes you start seeing it elsewhere, or if natural sciences and engineering start out with two different input populations...
Wouldn't the signed binary/config scenario you describe rely on a shared public key across all devices, with unique private keys per support contract or customer and the secret CA keys at the top? There are certainly ways to screw that up; but there shouldn't be any need to expose private keys on endpoints at all, and such an arrangement can and does work(SSL is fucked at an organizational level; but the math works just fine).
Are you saying that Snow Mexicans are behind this threat?
As opposed to the open and well-vetted protocols and systems employed by iMessage and Facetime?
And all that from a German company.
Well, to be fair, the alloy chosen, the temper, and tooling tolerances, on the shared private key were damn beautiful...
What possible reason would there be to have a shared private key among all devices? Even if there is some (weird, and probably not a good idea) requirement that it be identical across an entire user site, that should be part of a programming/keyfill process. If uniqueness is good, it should just generate a key on first boot...
Why? One can't talk or think without the teleprompter and other will quote the Old Testament.
Which is why it becomes important to determine(admittedly by way of various imperfect proxy measures) what their chosen science minions will do for them...
While it might be an interesting change of pace to elect a scientist rather than a lawyer or executive, that seems unlikely. However, even the personally-dimmest are going to end up making choices about the sort of 'expertise' they choose to cultivate around themselves, and we'll likely see a few differences in that advisory group.
A 'multiseat' setup(in the contemporary sense) takes advantage of the fact that putting a decent number of video outs on a single computer is cheaper than ever, and the number of USB HID and/or sound devices you can support is pretty large, and puts multiple independent monitor/keyboard/mouse users on a single host system.
I haven't had the... pleasure... of testing this myself; but I assume that non-X display scenarios, including virtual terminals, are painfully graceless under such a scheme. Certainly, all the multi-head systems I've used do something brutally ugly during the BIOS display, something slightly less ugly(generally at least mirroring) on GRUB, and don't actually start working properly until X is up and going.
Is there a reason that there 'almost has to be a markup'(beyond the costs of shipping)?
Australia's position relatively far from anywhere, and small population is never going to do your shipping costs any good, nor your economies of scale(so expecting to pay more to get the item at retail, immediately, seems logical, as does paying more and waiting longer to have it shipped in from somewhere else); but small population otherwise only kicks in if the Australian customer isn't willing to deal with EN_US or EN_GB localized products, or if Australia is foolish enough to bake its own weird TV broadcast standard or something of the sort...
If we want to talk US, the oh-so-terrifying-scourge of drugs-identical-to-their-us-counterparts-but-marked-'only for sale in Canada' is probably worth mentioning. Based on the amount of not-at-all-self-interested hysteria about the safety concerns surrounding these (much, much, cheaper) drugs, you'd think that Canadians were some kind of alien organism with a metabolism based on cryogenic sulfur compounds for which drugs had to be specially formulated...
Worldwide scrounging for the cheapest labor, juciest tax breaks, and laxest regulations for them, region coding and 'grey market' for you.
Low friction international capital markets for them, border and immigrations controls for you.
See, 'free trade' is awesome!
This is why the Model M13 with Trackpoint is the truest of the true keyboards. Not only does it possess the innate superiority of its ultra-clicky brethren, it has a trackpoint that you can access without moving your hands from home row, just by moving your right index finger a centimeter or two from its resting position on 'j'...
I'm guessing that "The ingredients are a legally priviledged trade secret of Con Agra, Inc." is not an answer that will do much to diffuse even the most epistemologically shoddy senses of paranoia...
Act 1: FDA-or-somebody: "Umm, ADM, your 'xeno-bites' brand genetically engineered cowroach burgers have absolutely no track record of safety testing..."
ADM: "Shut up, four-eyes, and go kill jobs somewhere else. We'll let the consumer decide what they feel comfortable eating."
FDA-or-somebody: "Um, ok."
Act 2: California: "Hey, the consumers want to know what ingredients are in food, so that they can exercise free choice and let the market decide between "Ammoniabeef, Piney-Fresh" and "Soylent X"!"
ADM-or-somebody "Shut up, bureaucratic busybody, all our products are safe and legal and the consumers would just worry their little heads about it if we were to tell them. In fact, tell that dirty hippie down the street that he isn't allowed to use the phrases 'GMO free', 'less than .01% zergling by weight', or 'minimally teratogenic' in advertisements!"
This basic back-and-forth is what annoys me so much about this brand of spat: When the regulators show up, health and safety regulations based on research are treated as a bunch of ivory-tower paternalism. When the customers show up demanding the data that they actually need to make their own choices(since they are justifiably somewhat doubtful that benevolent regulators have their backs on this one), they get a paternalistic rebuff and assurance that the previously neutered regulators are totally all over this one...
There are arguments enough against having it merely one way or the other; but handing the customer the shit end of both worlds is just plain crass.
I'm not sure exactly how a telecom would achieve a natural monopoly if the state didn't enforce the creation of easements. In fact, I'm not sure how we'd get electricity, sewer, or water connections either... But that's beside the point! The free market fixes all!!!
There is actually some interesting literature on the subject... We all know about the 'tragedy of the commons', where non-ownership creates a strong incentive for everybody to unsustainably over-consume whatever resource is in question, eventually destroying its value for everyone. There is also, it is theorized, a 'tragedy of the anti-commons' effect:
If you are trying to build something like a utility network, or a complex product, there are potentially hundreds or thousands of property-holders who can either veto or significantly delay/alter the project. In the case of a utility network, any one landowner refusal can force a re-route and even a few might make the project unviable. In the case of a complex product, there may be dozens or hundreds of patents at issue. Trouble is, (in addition to transaction costs), each person who could nuke the project has an incentive to make me pay a bit extra, lest they nuke the project. If too many people do that, the cost of buying them off becomes greater than the expected value of the project, and everybody gets nothing. However, even if they decide to rationally team up and extract the highest price I am willing to pay, thus making the most possible money, the sellers are essentially in a cartel arrangement(which is unstable; because any one member of the cartel could earn more by backstabbing the others; but if much defection occurs the whole cartel is worse off, including the traitors).
I suspect that this is why some variant of eminent domain is usually tolerated in most legally functional jurisidictions, and why the other-than-legal techniques for "encouraging" people to sell can get so very, very, ugly in the less legalistic areas of the world.
In the context of this article, it's probably worth noting that(even if the iPhone feature described works exactly as advertised) it is aimed at mitigating a completely different class of attack.
Disk encryption setups aim to protect a lost or stolen device, in the physical custody of the attacker, from revealing whatever information is on the disk. They have no effect when the device is on and operating under the user's credentials(transparency is considered a feature).
This attack in China is an attack on a live system, using the credentials of the user(or higher) to perform malicious operations as them. Even if the disk were encrypted in a suitably robust way, it'd be happily handing over whatever this bug asked for.
Certainly, local/municipal governments have generally done a fine job of worsening a bad situation; but the last mile is where things get hairy with or without their help...
There are really a couple of problems:
Dealing with large numbers of small property holders who can each veto or delay/reroute your project is a very ugly business indeed, which is why utility operators usually get in bed with relevant government power in the first place, obtaining access to all the easements in one chunk, and letting the government make it so, is very much easier. This opens an obvious weak point for the incumbent to establish regulatory capture(along with the local's legitimate desire to not be being trenched out at all times).
Second, even with the easements and all in place, building out a complex last-mile network of relatively narrow links is expensive. I don't have the invoice in front of me; but when we get fiber run for our network(distributed between a dozen-ish buildings across a town), running anything between point A and poing B is wildly expensive, having them throw 20 fiber runs instead of 1 into the same tube costs peanuts by comparison.
Third, unless the incumbent is at the ragged end of how far they can milk their existing cables, the low marginal cost of providing faster service(and/or add-ons like VoIP) in an area where you alread provide service makes it comparatively easy for an incumbent to defend their position on price long enough to drive weaker competitors away. If the incumbent has operating income from other regions, and/or a war chest, to fall back on, the process is even easier.
Its almost as if you'd want a system that only ran signed code...
And only ran signed code that was verifiably resistant to unexpected or undesired behavior in the face of maliciously crafted input...
Just plain installing and running a malicious binary certainly is a handy; but the world is rotten with bad things being done, entirely with unintended features provided by officially installed legitimate programs that have taken a bite of malicious input...
Were you asleep the day they discussed 'natural monopoly' in EC101?
Given how little customization there is during a typical phone's OS install process(during the image build process, yes, the image install process, not so much), "just reflash it" actually counts as fairly noob-friendly, if somewhat tedious, advice.
Unless the bootloader is shot, or the vendor has a hostile or nonexistent reflash process, it's pretty much just a matter of waiting while a nontrivial chunk of the phone's flash gets overwritten...
Apple is quite lucky that that nobody ever weaponized anything back in the good old days of Jailbreakme... In-browser TIFF exploit leading to full root access just by loading a web page.
Google, of course, is similarly lucky that nobody bothered to do anything wacky during the "yeah, everything you type gets silently dumped to a root shell, why do you ask?" period in early android...
Punchline is, the state of 'mobile' security(really, security in general) is pretty fucking dire, and the current frenzy to tie as many payment systems as possible to mobile phones is complete insanity, except from the perspective of the bottom lines of the respective payment processors, naturally.