I don't exactly see Apple having made many friends by doing that, so it seems entirely consistent to be against another player who is heading down the same path. Hell, forget Apple, the term "tivoization" has been a perjorative for the deleterious effects of lockdown bootloaders since well before team Steve started shipping any devices with them. The position that they are a Bad Thing has been largely consistent across vendors since that time.
It's only "sensationalist" in the theoretical imaginary world where you focus purely on what the 'secure boot' sections of UEFI are capable of, and not at all on how the market can be expected to shake out...
Purely architecturally, the cryptographic mechanisms are vendor-agnostic. They could as easily be used to enforce the tyrannical rise of a BeOS monoculture! Except, of course, that there is zero likelihood of that ever happening....
In practice, it can reasonably be expected that OEMs will adopt the Windows 8 logo requirements(which will imply the secure boot UEFI is in place, and at least keyed to work with MS products) and that key distribution will be a somewhat...uneven afterthought.
The "just build it yourself" will be rather unhelpful, given that the motherboards you need will be churned out to support systems built to the same logo spec(more SKUs are expensive...), and you can really only build generic whitebox towers, not laptops or other more embedded systems.
SUEFI can be set to lock out everything but a given set of trusted hashes(which would indeed preclude any updates of the existing OS) or it can verify the signature of something against a set of trusted keys before loading it.
Outside of a few embedded applications, I'd assume that the latter would be the one that sees more general-purpose-computer use. OSes get patched and updated all the time; but so long as the vendor signs the update the way they signed version n-1, everything will just work...
At least in some models, there's an audio feed back to the sinister OnStar lair to play with, as well... You could splice virtually anything in instead of the in-vehicle mic.
OnStar has always been just short of the imaginary-cia-mind-control-chips in terms of potential privacy concerns. Now they've gone and updated their privacy policy to read, essentially, "We own you, sucker." it becomes only reasonable to suspect the actualization of those concerns.
It's not like some privacy policy was ever likely worth the shrinkwrap it was printed on; particularly if feds are sniffing around; but you pretty much have to assume the worst when somebody goes and publicly guts such a toothless instrument...
The real killer with the Atoms is the supporting chipset. Worst case were the ones based on desktop i945 chipsets. A couple of watts for the CPU, ten times that for the chipset, and all that for GMA950 graphics! The mobile i945 parts were a bit less thirsty, as was Nvidia's offering, albeit both more expensive. There were a few releases with the SCH instead, which cut the power budget significantly; but featured the nightmare world of suck that was the GMA500...
It might well be easier(and possibly even more efficient) to plug the object you don't want leaking data into a proper dual-conversion UPS, tweaked slightly to allow itself to discharge to a random level(somewhere between 50 and 90 percent, say) before starting a charge cycle.
I realize that that is how limited liability companies are in fact used(Ambrose Bierce: "Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."), my puzzlement is just with the fact that such usage persists in law...
There is a certain logic to limited liability ventures in situations where you need large numbers of (relatively) small investors with limited control over the venture in order to accomplish some end(and, back when establishing an LLC required an act of Parliament in the UK, and action of analogous gravity in the US, that was basically the situation in which such was done); but I don't understand the logic behind letting sole or very significant owners extract profits while being insulated from losses...
I understand that that is in fact the case(so much so that people seem to have gotten complacent and are now whining that their legally-separate-entities get taxed as legally separate entities, rather than being identical with their owners when the tax man comes; but separate when bankruptcy strikes...), I just can't fathom the level of illogic, or sheer corruption, that would allow such a strange construct to continue...
Hard to say whether VASCO were just fuckups in that deal, or whether the plan(that just wasn't executed in time) was to buy DigiNotar to gain their Dutch government contracts and position in lots of trusted CA lists, and then just migrate the whole damn shop to a new platform... The only really valuable bits of a generic CA are their position in the trust lists, any captive legacy customers, and the necessary private keys. A totally dysfunctional, but already operating, CA might actually be the cheapest way to get your hands on those, at which point you can just move the keys to your(hopefully not broken) system and carry on. That would be the sympathetic interpretation...
It is especially ironic that they were using (pitifully weak) password authentication, when they are a wholly-owned subsidiary of a 2-factor authentication vendor...
I can only assume that having good authentication is hard, boring, and forces people to remember stuff, while getting to open the Big Serious Door and walk into your (probably sold by the vendor as "military grade") TEMPEST datacenter, with all the blinkenlights, involved no ongoing effort after the initial install and gave everyone involved the feeling of being big boys now...
What I find bewildering(if not exactly surprising) is that Diginotar can seek bankrupcy protection without VASCO being involved.
Diginotar can be expected to have basically zero income, and a bunch of expenses, in the near future; but (from VASCO's 2010 annual report)
"In January 2011, we acquired all of the intellectual property of DigiNotar Holding B.V. and its
subsidiaries and acquired 100% of the stock of DigiNotar B.V. and DigiNotar Notariaat B.V. (collectively,
“DigiNotar”), each a private company organized and existing in The Netherlands (collectively, “DigiNotar
Acquisition”). The acquisition expands the technological breadth of our product line by expanding our abilities to
offer PKI technology throughout the product line. We expect the acquisition will enhance our market position in
three areas; (1) as a trusted Internet service provider of PKI certificates, which we expect will improve our ability
to penetrate government markets (2) as a licensor of PKI-based products to customers for use in their
applications, which we believe will enhance our ability to compete in our traditional business and (3) as a
provider of our own PKI-secured applications, such as document signing, registration and storage solutions,
which we expect will expand opportunities for us on our services platform."
VASCO aren't just poor li'l small-cap investors here, they own Diginotar lock, stock, and barrel. While I don't doubt that Diginotar declaring bankrupcy and sucking in little or no of VASCO's assets is somehow legal, it seems kind of insane that you can own 100% of a company, its technology, and have plans to merge some of its tech with your existing offerings, and still be separate enough that you can just cut them loose and let them sink so long as VASCO appears to have a variety of assets and ongoing income sources, which they do.
I can understand at least the logic(if not necessarily the wisdom) of limited-liability-corporations as a vehicle for tiny stockholders to not take on outsized risks through holding miniscule slices of a large venture over which they have little or no control; but a 100% owned operational subsidiary over which you exercise organizational control, and whose technology you are (no longer) actively on track to integrated into your products? Any notion of financial separation seems like the thinnest of legal fictions.
Do we have any reason to believe that 'the incompetent' hadn't either already jumped ship, or structured things so that the possible collapse of the scheme would leave them to float gently down on their golden parachutes and on to the next victim?
Low-level incompetents(along with their competent; but low-level peers) tend to go down with the ship; but people with enough power to cause really systemic fuckups are often first to the lifeboats...
In Diginotar's case, the sheer scale of the fuckuppery suggests that it was not a case of "the newb kid on the network team forgot to disable telnet and the receptionist got social engineered..."; but of a company that, as an institution, either couldn't, or couldn't be bothered to, do anything properly.
I'll be interested to see how they handle the UI design. Architecturally, resolution and screen size independence aren't exactly trivial(especially if you are on a serious battery budget and can't just scream "THROW MORE FUCKING VECTORS AT IT!!!" any time you run into a scaling question); but, so long as the device's screen is accurately reporting its resolution, size, and DPI, it isn't a thicket of unsolved or fundamentally intractable problems.
The question of how to do a UI that scales to make efficient use of different screen sizes, though, is a bit trickier: the best UI for a teeny little screen almost certainly isn't suited to a larger one, or to a large, but low resolution, TV-style screen at a good distance from the user.
Are they just going to have a few hardcoded presets(phone, tablet, TV?) that use the same architectural foundation? Will it be a single 'windowing' mechanism that follows certain layout rules that result in different effects based on screen size and DPI?
I'd say that Intel is playing pure weasel-words with their "expensive, closed, RISC" line...
Are most of the Big Serious Iron RISC/*NIXes available from only a single vendor, often one with rather predatory pricing philosophies? Yeah, arguably so.
However, x86-with-Serious-RISC-level-RAS-features isn't exactly a vibrant competitive market... It's pretty much Intel and, um, *crickets*...
The low end of x86 actually has a number of weirdo 3rd parties, in addition to the big two, the middle of the market is a duopoly, but a pretty feisty one; but x86 high enough to compete with the classical serious RISC stuff on its own ground(as opposed to on the grounds of architectural changes that favor big clusters of expendable servers) is basically a single-shop thing. AMD has some pretty decent x86 servers; but Intel is the one bringing the itanium RAS stuff down to their Xeons.
Arguably, the lower end of RISC is substantially more competitive than that of x86: there are some huge number of ARM licencees, a whole bunch of random MIPS stuff floating around, and so forth. Only the middle-performance area, which is an effective duopoly(VIA? right...), but a pretty cutthroat one, where most people find their price/performance sweet spot, really makes x86 look like a competitive market at all...
True; but if you are looking for survivors you want something that isn't also true of a slightly squished corpse that hasn't been exerting much sphincter control of late. Carbon dioxide isn't perfect(fires and microbial respiration also generate it); but there are reasons to choose it.
Incidentally, this makes inert gas inhalation a preferred suicide method among those without access to the harder anaesthetics: usually it involves helium, since you can get small tanks of that cheaply at party supply places, unlike nitrogen which is a welding/scientific/industrial thing(not controlled in any way; but fewer retail places, and many that might give you a funny look if you act like you don't know what you are doing there...)
Bag over head, open the tap to achieve continuous mild overpressure, and breath normally. You'll still be expelling carbon dioxide just fine, and breathing without hindrance, so no panic; but your oxygen saturation will plummet and it is lights out...
In point of fairness, it should be noted that the story linked is one of a feckless FDA failing to resist the pressure to approve based on outright falsified research conducted by the drug's manufacturer, and also contains a note that post-market reporting data are considered to be of very limited use in safety and efficacy research work...
Does it suggest that the FDA is regulatory-captured like nobody's business? Oh yes, yes it does. Does it make you want to run screaming from a brave new world of research conducted by the parties with the greatest financial stake in it? Quite arguably...
If you look at my comment, you'll note that I never denied the ability of the private sector to conduct clinical testing(indeed, at present, virtually all FDA-approval data are provided by the research commissioned by the would-be drug seller). My question was what mechanism would be faster or cheaper than a clinical trial in determining efficacy.
The whole point of clinical trials, and blinding in particular, is to provide statistically strong information on efficacy, without(to the degree possible) interference from confounding factors of expectation, self-selection, and such. The private sector can, and does, run those just fine(when they aren't excessively motivated to cheat). My question was not of that ability; but of the claim that there is a way better than that. Mere profitability is weakly correlated with efficacy, being tied rather to belief in efficacy, and statistical power requires time and samples size, no way around it...
While there is room for debate as to whether one needs a state entity to do safety and efficacy trials, you really lost me when you asserted that "the market" will determine efficacy more quickly and cheaply than a clinical trial...
The news isn't that. The news is that bacteria with some degree of antibiotic resistance are so common that they are showing up in a logical; but not closely linked to hospitals, livestock feedlots, or overmedicated humans, disease vector...
You can find bacteria pretty much wherever you want, and feces usually has its share of pathogens; but time was when you had to go actively hunting, and in the right places, to find antibiotic resistance at any significant level.
Slashdot Mirror
"Turnabout is fair play."
I don't exactly see Apple having made many friends by doing that, so it seems entirely consistent to be against another player who is heading down the same path. Hell, forget Apple, the term "tivoization" has been a perjorative for the deleterious effects of lockdown bootloaders since well before team Steve started shipping any devices with them. The position that they are a Bad Thing has been largely consistent across vendors since that time.
It's only "sensationalist" in the theoretical imaginary world where you focus purely on what the 'secure boot' sections of UEFI are capable of, and not at all on how the market can be expected to shake out...
Purely architecturally, the cryptographic mechanisms are vendor-agnostic. They could as easily be used to enforce the tyrannical rise of a BeOS monoculture! Except, of course, that there is zero likelihood of that ever happening....
In practice, it can reasonably be expected that OEMs will adopt the Windows 8 logo requirements(which will imply the secure boot UEFI is in place, and at least keyed to work with MS products) and that key distribution will be a somewhat...uneven afterthought.
The "just build it yourself" will be rather unhelpful, given that the motherboards you need will be churned out to support systems built to the same logo spec(more SKUs are expensive...), and you can really only build generic whitebox towers, not laptops or other more embedded systems.
SUEFI can be set to lock out everything but a given set of trusted hashes(which would indeed preclude any updates of the existing OS) or it can verify the signature of something against a set of trusted keys before loading it.
Outside of a few embedded applications, I'd assume that the latter would be the one that sees more general-purpose-computer use. OSes get patched and updated all the time; but so long as the vendor signs the update the way they signed version n-1, everything will just work...
At least in some models, there's an audio feed back to the sinister OnStar lair to play with, as well... You could splice virtually anything in instead of the in-vehicle mic.
OnStar is just now raising privacy concerns?
OnStar has always been just short of the imaginary-cia-mind-control-chips in terms of potential privacy concerns. Now they've gone and updated their privacy policy to read, essentially, "We own you, sucker." it becomes only reasonable to suspect the actualization of those concerns.
It's not like some privacy policy was ever likely worth the shrinkwrap it was printed on; particularly if feds are sniffing around; but you pretty much have to assume the worst when somebody goes and publicly guts such a toothless instrument...
The real killer with the Atoms is the supporting chipset. Worst case were the ones based on desktop i945 chipsets. A couple of watts for the CPU, ten times that for the chipset, and all that for GMA950 graphics! The mobile i945 parts were a bit less thirsty, as was Nvidia's offering, albeit both more expensive. There were a few releases with the SCH instead, which cut the power budget significantly; but featured the nightmare world of suck that was the GMA500...
It might well be easier(and possibly even more efficient) to plug the object you don't want leaking data into a proper dual-conversion UPS, tweaked slightly to allow itself to discharge to a random level(somewhere between 50 and 90 percent, say) before starting a charge cycle.
I'm a "sidekick" core, not a "companion" core...
I realize that that is how limited liability companies are in fact used(Ambrose Bierce: "Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."), my puzzlement is just with the fact that such usage persists in law...
There is a certain logic to limited liability ventures in situations where you need large numbers of (relatively) small investors with limited control over the venture in order to accomplish some end(and, back when establishing an LLC required an act of Parliament in the UK, and action of analogous gravity in the US, that was basically the situation in which such was done); but I don't understand the logic behind letting sole or very significant owners extract profits while being insulated from losses...
I understand that that is in fact the case(so much so that people seem to have gotten complacent and are now whining that their legally-separate-entities get taxed as legally separate entities, rather than being identical with their owners when the tax man comes; but separate when bankruptcy strikes...), I just can't fathom the level of illogic, or sheer corruption, that would allow such a strange construct to continue...
Yup, that sure is a "magsafe" connector alright.
Oh, no, wait: it's a 30-pin iPod cable, which uses the same SMT jack that everybody complains about...
Hard to say whether VASCO were just fuckups in that deal, or whether the plan(that just wasn't executed in time) was to buy DigiNotar to gain their Dutch government contracts and position in lots of trusted CA lists, and then just migrate the whole damn shop to a new platform... The only really valuable bits of a generic CA are their position in the trust lists, any captive legacy customers, and the necessary private keys. A totally dysfunctional, but already operating, CA might actually be the cheapest way to get your hands on those, at which point you can just move the keys to your(hopefully not broken) system and carry on. That would be the sympathetic interpretation...
It is especially ironic that they were using (pitifully weak) password authentication, when they are a wholly-owned subsidiary of a 2-factor authentication vendor...
I can only assume that having good authentication is hard, boring, and forces people to remember stuff, while getting to open the Big Serious Door and walk into your (probably sold by the vendor as "military grade") TEMPEST datacenter, with all the blinkenlights, involved no ongoing effort after the initial install and gave everyone involved the feeling of being big boys now...
What I find bewildering(if not exactly surprising) is that Diginotar can seek bankrupcy protection without VASCO being involved.
Diginotar can be expected to have basically zero income, and a bunch of expenses, in the near future; but (from VASCO's 2010 annual report)
"In January 2011, we acquired all of the intellectual property of DigiNotar Holding B.V. and its subsidiaries and acquired 100% of the stock of DigiNotar B.V. and DigiNotar Notariaat B.V. (collectively, “DigiNotar”), each a private company organized and existing in The Netherlands (collectively, “DigiNotar Acquisition”). The acquisition expands the technological breadth of our product line by expanding our abilities to offer PKI technology throughout the product line. We expect the acquisition will enhance our market position in three areas; (1) as a trusted Internet service provider of PKI certificates, which we expect will improve our ability to penetrate government markets (2) as a licensor of PKI-based products to customers for use in their applications, which we believe will enhance our ability to compete in our traditional business and (3) as a provider of our own PKI-secured applications, such as document signing, registration and storage solutions, which we expect will expand opportunities for us on our services platform."
VASCO aren't just poor li'l small-cap investors here, they own Diginotar lock, stock, and barrel. While I don't doubt that Diginotar declaring bankrupcy and sucking in little or no of VASCO's assets is somehow legal, it seems kind of insane that you can own 100% of a company, its technology, and have plans to merge some of its tech with your existing offerings, and still be separate enough that you can just cut them loose and let them sink so long as VASCO appears to have a variety of assets and ongoing income sources, which they do.
I can understand at least the logic(if not necessarily the wisdom) of limited-liability-corporations as a vehicle for tiny stockholders to not take on outsized risks through holding miniscule slices of a large venture over which they have little or no control; but a 100% owned operational subsidiary over which you exercise organizational control, and whose technology you are (no longer) actively on track to integrated into your products? Any notion of financial separation seems like the thinnest of legal fictions.
Do we have any reason to believe that 'the incompetent' hadn't either already jumped ship, or structured things so that the possible collapse of the scheme would leave them to float gently down on their golden parachutes and on to the next victim?
Low-level incompetents(along with their competent; but low-level peers) tend to go down with the ship; but people with enough power to cause really systemic fuckups are often first to the lifeboats...
In Diginotar's case, the sheer scale of the fuckuppery suggests that it was not a case of "the newb kid on the network team forgot to disable telnet and the receptionist got social engineered..."; but of a company that, as an institution, either couldn't, or couldn't be bothered to, do anything properly.
I'll be interested to see how they handle the UI design. Architecturally, resolution and screen size independence aren't exactly trivial(especially if you are on a serious battery budget and can't just scream "THROW MORE FUCKING VECTORS AT IT!!!" any time you run into a scaling question); but, so long as the device's screen is accurately reporting its resolution, size, and DPI, it isn't a thicket of unsolved or fundamentally intractable problems.
The question of how to do a UI that scales to make efficient use of different screen sizes, though, is a bit trickier: the best UI for a teeny little screen almost certainly isn't suited to a larger one, or to a large, but low resolution, TV-style screen at a good distance from the user.
Are they just going to have a few hardcoded presets(phone, tablet, TV?) that use the same architectural foundation? Will it be a single 'windowing' mechanism that follows certain layout rules that result in different effects based on screen size and DPI?
Unfortunately, to receive the $10 credit, you have to have the NFC chip implanted either in the forehead or the back of the hand....
I'd say that Intel is playing pure weasel-words with their "expensive, closed, RISC" line...
Are most of the Big Serious Iron RISC/*NIXes available from only a single vendor, often one with rather predatory pricing philosophies? Yeah, arguably so.
However, x86-with-Serious-RISC-level-RAS-features isn't exactly a vibrant competitive market... It's pretty much Intel and, um, *crickets*...
The low end of x86 actually has a number of weirdo 3rd parties, in addition to the big two, the middle of the market is a duopoly, but a pretty feisty one; but x86 high enough to compete with the classical serious RISC stuff on its own ground(as opposed to on the grounds of architectural changes that favor big clusters of expendable servers) is basically a single-shop thing. AMD has some pretty decent x86 servers; but Intel is the one bringing the itanium RAS stuff down to their Xeons.
Arguably, the lower end of RISC is substantially more competitive than that of x86: there are some huge number of ARM licencees, a whole bunch of random MIPS stuff floating around, and so forth. Only the middle-performance area, which is an effective duopoly(VIA? right...), but a pretty cutthroat one, where most people find their price/performance sweet spot, really makes x86 look like a competitive market at all...
True; but if you are looking for survivors you want something that isn't also true of a slightly squished corpse that hasn't been exerting much sphincter control of late. Carbon dioxide isn't perfect(fires and microbial respiration also generate it); but there are reasons to choose it.
Incidentally, this makes inert gas inhalation a preferred suicide method among those without access to the harder anaesthetics: usually it involves helium, since you can get small tanks of that cheaply at party supply places, unlike nitrogen which is a welding/scientific/industrial thing(not controlled in any way; but fewer retail places, and many that might give you a funny look if you act like you don't know what you are doing there...)
Bag over head, open the tap to achieve continuous mild overpressure, and breath normally. You'll still be expelling carbon dioxide just fine, and breathing without hindrance, so no panic; but your oxygen saturation will plummet and it is lights out...
In point of fairness, it should be noted that the story linked is one of a feckless FDA failing to resist the pressure to approve based on outright falsified research conducted by the drug's manufacturer, and also contains a note that post-market reporting data are considered to be of very limited use in safety and efficacy research work...
Does it suggest that the FDA is regulatory-captured like nobody's business? Oh yes, yes it does. Does it make you want to run screaming from a brave new world of research conducted by the parties with the greatest financial stake in it? Quite arguably...
If you look at my comment, you'll note that I never denied the ability of the private sector to conduct clinical testing(indeed, at present, virtually all FDA-approval data are provided by the research commissioned by the would-be drug seller). My question was what mechanism would be faster or cheaper than a clinical trial in determining efficacy.
The whole point of clinical trials, and blinding in particular, is to provide statistically strong information on efficacy, without(to the degree possible) interference from confounding factors of expectation, self-selection, and such. The private sector can, and does, run those just fine(when they aren't excessively motivated to cheat). My question was not of that ability; but of the claim that there is a way better than that. Mere profitability is weakly correlated with efficacy, being tied rather to belief in efficacy, and statistical power requires time and samples size, no way around it...
While there is room for debate as to whether one needs a state entity to do safety and efficacy trials, you really lost me when you asserted that "the market" will determine efficacy more quickly and cheaply than a clinical trial...
How, pray tell, will that happen?
The news isn't that. The news is that bacteria with some degree of antibiotic resistance are so common that they are showing up in a logical; but not closely linked to hospitals, livestock feedlots, or overmedicated humans, disease vector...
You can find bacteria pretty much wherever you want, and feces usually has its share of pathogens; but time was when you had to go actively hunting, and in the right places, to find antibiotic resistance at any significant level.
Do you know of any countries where the "academic elite" are the go-to chaps for changing public policy?