If I were in a betting mood, I'd imagine that the largest risk would be implant degradation. Rare earth magnets, in their raw or thin-layer-of-nickel-plate forms, are not biocompatible or stable under implant conditions. If the protective coating(the firmer flavors of silicone elastomer seem to be popular; but I'm sure that there are others) is breached he'll have to get out the potato peeler and dig out a nasty lump of putrifying magnet corrosion products. Hardly fatal; but neither fun nor scar-free.
It didn't take too long for that to happen to the 'magnet in fingertip for 6th sense' guy, and I wouldn't be terribly optimistic here.
While Woz was certainly not the recipient of terribly fair treatment, I suspect that there is a second reason why he was removed from the picture comparatively early:
The success of the early Apple designs (the II particularly) rested in no small part on assorted deep-hack chip count and cost reduction measures, the sort of thing that Woz is reputed to be very good indeed at. It did lead to somewhat arcane and tightly interlinked designs; but this was back when reducing the chip count in your floppy drive was still Serious Savings or having Woz go up the mountain and descend bearing the design for ADB made your peripheral interconnects genuinely better than the other guy's. In Apple's later models, they just kept moving closer and closer to commodity circuits wrapped in nice industrial design and a friendly software layer.
Obviously, somebody still has to design their logic boards; but that hasn't really been Apple's competitive edge in ages. Jobs occupied a larger-than-life seat on the pantheon; but the members immediately behind him in public awareness and clout were the industrial design guru and the supply chain/manufacturing guy. Board-level engineering elegance appears to have been swamped by volume savings on commodity silicon some time ago.
The problem, in this case, isn't so much that he didn't have a CS degree; but that he said he did. When looking for somebody who is going to enjoy substantial power and a fair amount of discretion, choosing the guy who started lying to you before he even made it in the door for first-round interviews seems like a terrible plan.
I suspect that a willingness to lie(and the people skills to pull it off) have long been recognized as common credentials for executive positions(remember, he was some big guy at paypal(who presumably didn't detect him) and possibly some other gigs before that, before the current mess.
Honestly, that's the bit that I find most baffling and displeasing: I have the greatest respect for the rigor required to get a good CS degree; but I can also imagine why distant-from-the-code-mines management types might not be selected primarily on the basis of the depth of their technical skill in specific areas.
However, the apparent years-long success in floating around the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose world of executive compensation on the basis of a resume that contained bald, verifiably impossible, assertions, is pretty dire.
Whether high tech, as in your suggestion, or low tech, as in 'just a prominently visible label/bit of paper/nameplate somewhere inside, it is certainly a good idea to at least make it possible for a finder to have enough information to return it to you. If your devices are locked up tight, they won't be able to just fire up your phone and select 'mom' from the contacts list, as is customary.
The world isn't overflowing with valorous do-gooders; but you might get lucky(especially if it quickly becomes clear that all the devices in the bag are locked down good and hard, so whether you found it or 'found' it, you'll need a tame geek or a chop shop in order to get any value out of the contents for yourself).
An honest finder may not have the cability, or time, to engage in an epic manhunt; but would probably be happy to call up and figure out how to get it to some suitable place. A little sweetener doesn't hurt. Even a dishonest finder may realize, upon seeing the unwelcoming demands for unlock codes from every device, that the effective value of the gadgets just isn't all that great.
Authoritative sources in snappy suits tell us that only wearing a hoodie 'disrespects' investors.
Indulging in childish, unprofessional, and deeply ethically compromised behavior is a form of culturally accepted hospitality. In order to put institutional investors at ease, the board and upper level executives wish to reassure them that they can expect to be dealing with their peers, should they choose to invest in the Yahoo family...
I suspect that their American customers might still have a problem. Yeah, the 'Pirate Pay' guys are probably in a jurisdictional black hole; but one would think that hiring them to do something illegal would still make the chaps in Legal nervous. That is why I find the involvement of MS(and a couple of major movie studios mentioned in TFA) so curious.
I get the impression that WMDRM (in its ill-starred public appearance as 'playsforsure') was intended to be exactly the strategy you describe: a multiple-vendors-as-long-as-they-run-windows 'interoperable DRM' ecosystem of media sellers and DRM-blessed devices that would work with one another so long as the PC bringing them together was a Microsoft one...
Since that didn't end up working out so well, they seem to have gone the route of more overtly sucking up to the content guys. Whether this is because they just really don't want to see the Wintel platform get locked out of the fancy new blu-rays and so forth or whether they see themselves and Hollywood as having the same long-term architectural interest in building platforms that make paying for digital goods non-optional isn't clear to me.
Remind me again when performing DoS attacks against 3rd party servers became legal?
The assorted ISP-based 'filtering' stuff is obnoxious; but quite possibly legal under the 'we do whatever we want, cry about it' clause under which consumer ISPs customarily operate.
However, if the (rather vague) description provided by this startup outfit is to be believed they are spoofing bittorrent peers and sending some sort of specially crafted misinformation in order to bring communication between multiple 3rd-party systems to a halt. That certainly looks like a DoS attack, if probably a smarter-than-brute-force one. Even if there were actually some standard of proof being applied to determine that the target swarms are in fact 'infringing', vigilante justice is generally not all that legal. Without any such standard, this is a case of a couple of studios hiring some skeezy Russian outfit to perform denial of service attacks against who knows who in support of their bottom line.
I understand that the law isn't really supposed to apply to people who matter; but surely a felonies-for-hire business model presents some degree of risk to those who go shopping for their services, no?
Contemporary fitness-use heart rate monitors with some flavor of very low power wireless connection are pretty cheap. One of those, plus a suitably sized explosive device, will allow you to ensure that your briefcase stays with you at all times. Or else. If you are feeling polite, scale to ensure the destruction of the contents. If not, scale to ensure the destruction of the would-be new owner of the briefcase.
(In all seriousness, though, there really isn't too much that one can do to protect small luggage. There are a few mostly-obvious behavioral tips, don't put it down behind your chair where you can't see it, don't leave it in the cab, try to avoid using bags that have giant steal-me logos advertising the electronics within, etc. but that is about it. Your main focus should be on two things:
1. If the bag falls into the possession of somebody else, have you taken measure to ensure that they can't get data access? Hardware can be insured, and really isn't all that expensive in the grand scheme; but if somebody has both your data and the oh-so-conveniently-stored-locally credentials for your 'cloud backup' you have a problem...
2. Backups, do you have them? Bags get lost, bags get stolen, bags get crunched by luggage handlers. If you can't restore yourself to what you had in the bag if I were to hand you equivalent-or-newer models of the laptop, tablet, and phone and internet access, you aren't prepared. If you can, then you are.)
Arguably, in countries where the local country-code TLD isn't considered a deviant slumzone, the end user experience of a 'TLD' is already five characters long.
Architecturally '.co.uk' isn't a TLD, of course; but the intention is more or less identical to '.com'. Adoption does fall off pretty rapidly as you get into the dodgier waters away from.com and.org; but there seems to be a reasonably widespread assumption that country code TLDs can be chopped up into categories in a way that effectively makes a given entity's domain suffix five characters long, in a way that the classic three character TLDs are far less frequently divided.
Ironically, your proposal is actually horribly similar to this pointless-loads-of-arbitrary-TLDs nonsense, just in reverse order and with questionably useful ccTLDs prepended.
The 'domaintype' notion is the kicker. It isn't quite as broad as an arbitrary string; but it is very broad indeed, and would be the stuff of endless wrangling(and, since many sites do multiple things, would suffer from similar must-protect-trademark-on-all-possible-domains shenanigans). At some point, you have to give up and accept that(outside of a few, largely sterile, walled gardens that maintain order mostly by virtue of being a direct projection of a real-world organization, like.mil) URLs are either going to be largely meaningless or an unbelievably ungainly apparatus will have to be deployed to hammer out the possible categories of the internet and then force all the TLDs and subdomains into submission.
I'm skeptical of this fancy new domain(for basically the same reasons that I'm skeptical of SSL/TLS once you include the 'identity' problem); but 'EV' certs are a perfect example of how PKI, as presently implemented, does a ghastly job of doing what it is supposed to do. Plain, boring, certificates were originally supposed to be all authoritative and vetted and whatnot. That didn't survive price pressure and laziness, so now we have the new double-secret-verified certificates that make your browser turn green. I suspect that we'll soon have a third tier of genuinely-actually-100%-vetted-trust-us certificates that play soothing background music as well as turn the browser green, for a small additional fee.
The stuff before the '://' specifies the protocol. There is no "secure://" protocol, nor does this proposal involve any additions or changes to what currently counts as https, except for actually using them consistently.
They didn't even get near the level of price-comparison, unfortunately.
Given both vendor's likely flexibility on pricing in the face of large orders(small margins on my goods are better than selling nothing because you bought the other guy's stuff, and the marginal cost of a fancy router is substantially smaller than its sticker price), as well as the portion of the bill that was absorbed by miscellaneous options and config and integration and whatnot(which, given that those were handled by another contractor, not the vendor directly), it isn't immediately obvious that merely buying Cisco was a bad plan, or even that they could have escaped with their checkbooks from an arrangement built on commodity x86 gear.
Buying 5-10k routers for sites that could easily be covered by sub-1k routers, from the same vendor, is indicative of planning so deficient that merely switching vendors won't help you very much...
Worse, does he realize that students in 200-person schools now enjoy ten times as much router CPU time as the underprivileged students struggling in 2,000-person schools?
I'm pretty sure that Adobe doesn't have to plan security bugs... They just unlock the cages that they keep the Flash dev team in and let them use their keyboards for a few minutes.
It depends on whether they were killed by apathy or by arduinos...
The advent of the intertubes seems to have led to an incredible increase in the ease of sourcing parts and learning about designs(unless you need a part in-store, in which case maybe Radio Shack can stop pushing cell plans on you long enough to dig up a yellowed package of resistors from ~1985 and sell it to you for $5...) That must be a bit of a squeeze on the margins of bottom and top ends of the former demand for kit-built products.
If, on the other hand, people used to care a lot more, that would be an unfortunate sign.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were in a betting mood, I'd imagine that the largest risk would be implant degradation. Rare earth magnets, in their raw or thin-layer-of-nickel-plate forms, are not biocompatible or stable under implant conditions. If the protective coating(the firmer flavors of silicone elastomer seem to be popular; but I'm sure that there are others) is breached he'll have to get out the potato peeler and dig out a nasty lump of putrifying magnet corrosion products. Hardly fatal; but neither fun nor scar-free.
It didn't take too long for that to happen to the 'magnet in fingertip for 6th sense' guy, and I wouldn't be terribly optimistic here.
While Woz was certainly not the recipient of terribly fair treatment, I suspect that there is a second reason why he was removed from the picture comparatively early:
The success of the early Apple designs (the II particularly) rested in no small part on assorted deep-hack chip count and cost reduction measures, the sort of thing that Woz is reputed to be very good indeed at. It did lead to somewhat arcane and tightly interlinked designs; but this was back when reducing the chip count in your floppy drive was still Serious Savings or having Woz go up the mountain and descend bearing the design for ADB made your peripheral interconnects genuinely better than the other guy's. In Apple's later models, they just kept moving closer and closer to commodity circuits wrapped in nice industrial design and a friendly software layer.
Obviously, somebody still has to design their logic boards; but that hasn't really been Apple's competitive edge in ages. Jobs occupied a larger-than-life seat on the pantheon; but the members immediately behind him in public awareness and clout were the industrial design guru and the supply chain/manufacturing guy. Board-level engineering elegance appears to have been swamped by volume savings on commodity silicon some time ago.
The problem, in this case, isn't so much that he didn't have a CS degree; but that he said he did. When looking for somebody who is going to enjoy substantial power and a fair amount of discretion, choosing the guy who started lying to you before he even made it in the door for first-round interviews seems like a terrible plan.
I suspect that a willingness to lie(and the people skills to pull it off) have long been recognized as common credentials for executive positions(remember, he was some big guy at paypal(who presumably didn't detect him) and possibly some other gigs before that, before the current mess.
Honestly, that's the bit that I find most baffling and displeasing: I have the greatest respect for the rigor required to get a good CS degree; but I can also imagine why distant-from-the-code-mines management types might not be selected primarily on the basis of the depth of their technical skill in specific areas.
However, the apparent years-long success in floating around the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose world of executive compensation on the basis of a resume that contained bald, verifiably impossible, assertions, is pretty dire.
Whether high tech, as in your suggestion, or low tech, as in 'just a prominently visible label/bit of paper/nameplate somewhere inside, it is certainly a good idea to at least make it possible for a finder to have enough information to return it to you. If your devices are locked up tight, they won't be able to just fire up your phone and select 'mom' from the contacts list, as is customary.
The world isn't overflowing with valorous do-gooders; but you might get lucky(especially if it quickly becomes clear that all the devices in the bag are locked down good and hard, so whether you found it or 'found' it, you'll need a tame geek or a chop shop in order to get any value out of the contents for yourself).
An honest finder may not have the cability, or time, to engage in an epic manhunt; but would probably be happy to call up and figure out how to get it to some suitable place. A little sweetener doesn't hurt. Even a dishonest finder may realize, upon seeing the unwelcoming demands for unlock codes from every device, that the effective value of the gadgets just isn't all that great.
Authoritative sources in snappy suits tell us that only wearing a hoodie 'disrespects' investors.
Indulging in childish, unprofessional, and deeply ethically compromised behavior is a form of culturally accepted hospitality. In order to put institutional investors at ease, the board and upper level executives wish to reassure them that they can expect to be dealing with their peers, should they choose to invest in the Yahoo family...
I suspect that their American customers might still have a problem. Yeah, the 'Pirate Pay' guys are probably in a jurisdictional black hole; but one would think that hiring them to do something illegal would still make the chaps in Legal nervous. That is why I find the involvement of MS(and a couple of major movie studios mentioned in TFA) so curious.
I thought using force to stop criminals was only the privilege of the police and similar state owned organizations.
I get this unpleasant impression that you also get to use force if you are a state-owning organization...
I get the impression that WMDRM (in its ill-starred public appearance as 'playsforsure') was intended to be exactly the strategy you describe: a multiple-vendors-as-long-as-they-run-windows 'interoperable DRM' ecosystem of media sellers and DRM-blessed devices that would work with one another so long as the PC bringing them together was a Microsoft one...
Since that didn't end up working out so well, they seem to have gone the route of more overtly sucking up to the content guys. Whether this is because they just really don't want to see the Wintel platform get locked out of the fancy new blu-rays and so forth or whether they see themselves and Hollywood as having the same long-term architectural interest in building platforms that make paying for digital goods non-optional isn't clear to me.
Remind me again when performing DoS attacks against 3rd party servers became legal?
The assorted ISP-based 'filtering' stuff is obnoxious; but quite possibly legal under the 'we do whatever we want, cry about it' clause under which consumer ISPs customarily operate.
However, if the (rather vague) description provided by this startup outfit is to be believed they are spoofing bittorrent peers and sending some sort of specially crafted misinformation in order to bring communication between multiple 3rd-party systems to a halt. That certainly looks like a DoS attack, if probably a smarter-than-brute-force one. Even if there were actually some standard of proof being applied to determine that the target swarms are in fact 'infringing', vigilante justice is generally not all that legal. Without any such standard, this is a case of a couple of studios hiring some skeezy Russian outfit to perform denial of service attacks against who knows who in support of their bottom line.
I understand that the law isn't really supposed to apply to people who matter; but surely a felonies-for-hire business model presents some degree of risk to those who go shopping for their services, no?
Contemporary fitness-use heart rate monitors with some flavor of very low power wireless connection are pretty cheap. One of those, plus a suitably sized explosive device, will allow you to ensure that your briefcase stays with you at all times. Or else. If you are feeling polite, scale to ensure the destruction of the contents. If not, scale to ensure the destruction of the would-be new owner of the briefcase.
(In all seriousness, though, there really isn't too much that one can do to protect small luggage. There are a few mostly-obvious behavioral tips, don't put it down behind your chair where you can't see it, don't leave it in the cab, try to avoid using bags that have giant steal-me logos advertising the electronics within, etc. but that is about it. Your main focus should be on two things:
1. If the bag falls into the possession of somebody else, have you taken measure to ensure that they can't get data access? Hardware can be insured, and really isn't all that expensive in the grand scheme; but if somebody has both your data and the oh-so-conveniently-stored-locally credentials for your 'cloud backup' you have a problem... 2. Backups, do you have them? Bags get lost, bags get stolen, bags get crunched by luggage handlers. If you can't restore yourself to what you had in the bag if I were to hand you equivalent-or-newer models of the laptop, tablet, and phone and internet access, you aren't prepared. If you can, then you are.)
J. Edgar Hoover would like a few words with you about how we really did things in the 'good' old days...
Arguably, in countries where the local country-code TLD isn't considered a deviant slumzone, the end user experience of a 'TLD' is already five characters long.
.com and .org; but there seems to be a reasonably widespread assumption that country code TLDs can be chopped up into categories in a way that effectively makes a given entity's domain suffix five characters long, in a way that the classic three character TLDs are far less frequently divided.
Architecturally '.co.uk' isn't a TLD, of course; but the intention is more or less identical to '.com'. Adoption does fall off pretty rapidly as you get into the dodgier waters away from
Ironically, your proposal is actually horribly similar to this pointless-loads-of-arbitrary-TLDs nonsense, just in reverse order and with questionably useful ccTLDs prepended.
.mil) URLs are either going to be largely meaningless or an unbelievably ungainly apparatus will have to be deployed to hammer out the possible categories of the internet and then force all the TLDs and subdomains into submission.
The 'domaintype' notion is the kicker. It isn't quite as broad as an arbitrary string; but it is very broad indeed, and would be the stuff of endless wrangling(and, since many sites do multiple things, would suffer from similar must-protect-trademark-on-all-possible-domains shenanigans). At some point, you have to give up and accept that(outside of a few, largely sterile, walled gardens that maintain order mostly by virtue of being a direct projection of a real-world organization, like
I'm skeptical of this fancy new domain(for basically the same reasons that I'm skeptical of SSL/TLS once you include the 'identity' problem); but 'EV' certs are a perfect example of how PKI, as presently implemented, does a ghastly job of doing what it is supposed to do. Plain, boring, certificates were originally supposed to be all authoritative and vetted and whatnot. That didn't survive price pressure and laziness, so now we have the new double-secret-verified certificates that make your browser turn green. I suspect that we'll soon have a third tier of genuinely-actually-100%-vetted-trust-us certificates that play soothing background music as well as turn the browser green, for a small additional fee.
The stuff before the '://' specifies the protocol. There is no "secure://" protocol, nor does this proposal involve any additions or changes to what currently counts as https, except for actually using them consistently.
Surely you can't suggest that listening to nerds should be a legal obligation!
They didn't even get near the level of price-comparison, unfortunately.
Given both vendor's likely flexibility on pricing in the face of large orders(small margins on my goods are better than selling nothing because you bought the other guy's stuff, and the marginal cost of a fancy router is substantially smaller than its sticker price), as well as the portion of the bill that was absorbed by miscellaneous options and config and integration and whatnot(which, given that those were handled by another contractor, not the vendor directly), it isn't immediately obvious that merely buying Cisco was a bad plan, or even that they could have escaped with their checkbooks from an arrangement built on commodity x86 gear.
Buying 5-10k routers for sites that could easily be covered by sub-1k routers, from the same vendor, is indicative of planning so deficient that merely switching vendors won't help you very much...
Worse, does he realize that students in 200-person schools now enjoy ten times as much router CPU time as the underprivileged students struggling in 2,000-person schools?
Rather like those cultureless losers who never invented anything, the greeks...
I'm pretty sure that Adobe doesn't have to plan security bugs... They just unlock the cages that they keep the Flash dev team in and let them use their keyboards for a few minutes.
But blathering about case studies is easy and social science has numbers in it!
He should be a gorilla warfare expert in no time!
I'm pretty sure that you aren't allowed to waterboard chimps these days. The IRBs just get touchy.
It depends on whether they were killed by apathy or by arduinos...
The advent of the intertubes seems to have led to an incredible increase in the ease of sourcing parts and learning about designs(unless you need a part in-store, in which case maybe Radio Shack can stop pushing cell plans on you long enough to dig up a yellowed package of resistors from ~1985 and sell it to you for $5...) That must be a bit of a squeeze on the margins of bottom and top ends of the former demand for kit-built products.
If, on the other hand, people used to care a lot more, that would be an unfortunate sign.