Unfortunately, while this does preclude the lowest form of hackers, the ones with firmware-level access can still do their thing...
The most famous example are those fuckers at U3. In order to allow the delight of having an autorunning launcher pop up and annoy you every time you pop a flash drive in, they produced a little firmware modification that causes the flash drive to show up as a composite device containing one flash drive, and one CD-ROM. Since autoplay is generally still enabled on CDs, the CD contained the payload that executed the launcher.
They, as a commercial venture, weren't truly bent on malware-style evil; but they provide a good example of how it could be done.
The mass-produced ones used in advertising(I once got one from a fucking Credit. Card. Company. encouraging me to plug in an untrusted device, which then activated the run box and sent me to a free godaddy.com hosted page, presumably unique to that specific ad-campaign, so they could track its efficiency, that then redirected me to their actual page. I couldn't believe it. Incidentally, if you are using any online features of "ZYNC from American Express®", I'd stop immediately, cancel your account, and then firebomb them...) are quite polished. small PCB, 4 USB contacts on one side, epoxy blob, a couple of passives, and a teeny ROM chip(presumably for customization, per customer) on the other. Whole circuit, plus plastic housing, fits inside a USB connector. Very cute.
If anybody fancies some DIY mayhem, a Teensy is cheap, dead-easy to use, and comes with a set of library extensions to the arduino programming environment that allow it to emulate a USB tty, a USB HID keyboard+USB HID mouse(why, yes, Virginia, that does mean that it could, simply by guessing mouse-clicks in a pattern that would hit the "OK" button before the "deny" button, execute a command and then accept the UAC prompt entirely automatically...), a USB MIDI device, if one is feeling more artistic, or a USB keyboard + USB MSC presentation of an attached SD card, perfect for a little of the old exfiltration... It also has the usual digital and analog I/O pins that you'd expect of an atMega dev board, so clever little tricks like only having its evil side come out when a magnet is held near the reed switch hidden inside the bugged mouse, using an onboard mic or other sensors to make sure that the computer's user isn't in the vicinity before doing something evil are all possible. Fun toy.
Eh, USB isn't dangerous enough to bother nuking the warranty on your hardware. Any recent corporate IT-box will let you disable USB ports(sometimes even selectively) in the BIOS, and it isn't rocket science to order the OS to ignore some or all USB device classes.
The main problem(outside of environments where "Security" is taken seriously enough that IT has carte blanche to do whatever they deem necessary) is that USB mass storage devices are So. Damn. Useful. In my Admin-hat capacity, I could disable access to USB mass storage devices for everybody in about ten minutes. I would then have just about enough time to slip out and start drinking heavily before the lynch mob assembled...
As for shorting them, USB ports are supposed to gracefully detect overcurrent conditions and modest voltage excursions and cut power to the port rather than die horribly. How well they will actually do so is very much a "your mileage may vary" matter. Some, if a damaged cable or device shorts them, will pop up a polite message, disable the port briefly, and then be ready for another try as soon as the fault clears. Some need a reboot, and I'm sure that some blow a tiny SMT fuse or just burn a trace...
Don't worry, we aren't actually prudes, just really hypocritical about it. We prefer the fiction that broadcast TV is 'family friendly'("Next up on the Fear and Violence channel: 'Photogenic white girl missing, could your family be the next one torn apart ?' and 'Terrifying health hazards of foods and chemicals not manufactured by our sponsors'"); but the good stuff is waiting right behind the counter...
With a tendency toward "less". Graphite is pretty conductive, fairly cheap, and has some useful mechanical properties(albeit often when mixed with other materials); but is a bit more resistive than most metals. Silver, by contrast, while more expensive, is among the most conductive materials commonly available(discounting oddities that are superconductive at atypical temperatures, or materials that have unusual properties in films a few atoms thick, and so on).
If you don't need a particularly conductive trace, a pencil will work just fine. You can even add impromptu carbon-film resistors, if you don't need high thermal dissipation or terribly precise tolerances; but if you want something as close to indistinguishable from the trace that is supposed to be there, silver is a better bet.
Arguably, this technology will actually help in selecting the best bar: Any bar for which facial recognition camera data are not available receives bonus points.
I'd recommend trying to sound less angry, it's dangerously close to being ironic under the circumstances. You might also wish to reconsider the conclusion you drew from my narrowly worded assertion:
When you 'prime' somebody with a violent video game stimulus, in the sense of 'prime' that they use in the psych studies that provide us valuable insights about how undergrads who want $10 for beer think, you can observe an uptick, in the short term, of appearances of violence themes in free-play exercises, violence-related words in partial world completion tests, and the like. That is a quite narrow claim: other priming stimuli have much the same effect in their respective directions, and such studies don't tend to have much in the way of longer-term follow up, or even try to.
This does not imply(and nowhere did I state) that violence in video games has any causal link to violent behavior, outside of the specific priming effect for violence-related terms and imagery shortly after the fact. And, given the population-level studies that consistently demonstrate a lack of appalling depravity, such a link seems rather unlikely to me.
I would ask if you ought to be off teabagging corpses in Halo while shouting into the headset; but your adeptness at leaping to conclusions suggests that a platformer may be more your style...
I wonder if Germany is any better equipped to hold the line on that sort of thing because the insipid "it can't happen here" line of argument can be trivially and empirically refuted, and doesn't need to be argued on hypothetical grounds? Accusing somebody of using 'Stasi tactics' is considered nearly Godwin-caliber hyperbole stateside...
It is certainly true that a good many Sims players were quick to discover all the various tricks for making their little virtual dolls miserable and/or killing them, just as most games of SimCity inolved building a city big enough to be worth sending an earthquake through... People even managed to derive amusement from abuse and neglect of Tamaguchi, and those things were about as engaging as an LCD watch. Human nature will out, certainly, it just doesn't seem to hurt the sale of 'casual' and more or less nonviolent games.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of the theory of 'obscenity' as somehow being a nebulously different and unprotected class of activity.
However, speaking empirically about what the court actually does, and what people stand for it doing, things that were invented from whole cloth sufficiently long ago are called "precedent" and taken seriously, and asserting in some vaguely plausible way that a work satisfies the Miller test is, in fact, a successful way to exempt something from First Amendment protections.
I don't like that aspect of reality; but I would argue that it is a reasonably accurate picture of how matters actually work.
That's an absurdly bad patent, and I'm pretty sure that even I have seen assorted prior art. On the plus side, it might help to stem the tide of people tacking 'social' onto every bloody warmed-over.bomb concept in an attempt to sell it to VCs...
Given the close overlap(in both personnel and required skillset) between marketing and campaigning, I'd say that the odds of seeing anything else aren't quite zero, if some idealistic one-termer feels like walking into a bullet; but the odds of passing anything else are nil.
Those are indeed some(not 'the', which carries an exclusive sense) of the problems.
The difference is that, however incompetently, merchants, credit-card processors, etc. are essentially your allies without any legal pressure. They want everybody to have an easy, comfortable, time buying shit online. They don't necessarily care enough or actually manage to transform caring into not sucking; but your interests and theirs are basically aligned.
By contrast, the desire not to be relentlessly tracked, monetized, and bombarded with ads and junk mail all the bloody time is a situation where your interests and the interests of the marketers come into direct conflict. Since the marketers are comparatively few, and comparatively disliked; but have a strong technological advantage, it is logical for the many; but technologically weak, enemies of the of the marketers to attempt to protect themselves by other means.
You don't bother to pass laws that simply affirm interests that are already aligned. You pass laws in order to bring dangerously non-aligned interests into line.
I suspect that, if we can get something that appears to be quite strong; but has critical loopholes, going at the federal level, corporations will be absolutely all over it in order to preclude the possibility that some state might actually grow a spine and pass a real one...
This is why "The Sims" almost bankrupted EA before they wised up and released "The Sims: Noire." and why Nintendogs had to be rebooted as "Michael Vick's Nintendogs: First Blood" right?
Given that, until comparatively recently, the population-level western standard of living often didn't include enough dwelling space to necessarily separate the humans from the livestock, much less the existing children from the production of siblings, 'protecting' children from sexual material would have been pretty tricky(though, at the same time, willingness to use fairly coercive means to attempt to control sexual behavior was quite high)...
Aside from the question of how effective the law (almost certainly wouldn't) have been in terms of changing minors' access to the games it applied to(see the complete absence of minors with access to cigarettes, under-21s with access to booze, and people generally with access to schedule 1 drugs...) there seem to be two 'schools' of result, depending on how researchers approach the question:
In individual-scale studies, people often demonstrate that subjects primed with violent video games are somewhat more likely to act-out violent behaviors, answer ambiguous prompts with the more, rather than less, violent possibility, etc.
In population-scale statistical work, of the 'epidemiological' style, the results usually seem to be that video games, presumably by providing an extremely easy and attractive(and generally quite cheap, too) timesink for the idle and troublesome youngish males who handle most of society's grunt-level violence, appear to reduce the levels of violence sufficiently intense to show up in crime statistics.
"Why does the court treat violent images and sexual images so differently?"
To call it the 'court's' double standard seems rather unfair. The justices specifically noted that it was rather odd how American tastes in media, past and present, were highly permissive of violence, even for fairly young children; but much less permissive of sexual material. However, in keeping with their job description, they couldn't really do much about that. 'Miller-test obscenity', while pretty unsatisfactory in a number of respects, is one of the few ways to successfully exempt something from First Amendment protections. For reasons having to do with American culture in the past, continuing into the present, that one doesn't mention violence.
Perhaps more importantly, the court argued that the law was attempting to enforce an (unconstitutional) double standard by imposing special restrictions on violent media that happened to be video games, restrictions that were not imposed on violence in other media: had the law flipped out at violence per se, as people often do about sexual content, regardless of medium(except for stuff old enough to have a gloss of cultural respectability, which is why 120 Days of Sodom is on the shelves and Playboy behind the counter, wrapped in plastic...), it would have at least had a shot at getting some Miller-esque test carved out for it. Since it specifically targeted video games, it was quite arguably an attempt to legally silence one specific class of speakers, rather than a specific perfidious topic(which might not have necessarily succeeded; but would have had a better chance...)
The court, for the most part, was just repeating back to us an observation on our own standards.
(but obvious that does not mean you need a new OS, if the old one is still patched).
I would rather strongly suspect that this will be the bigger factor in customer ire, or lack thereof. Given that SPARC gear has never been cheap, systems of that vintage still in operation were, presumably, purchased because there was some important task to be done that was done best on Solaris and/or SPARC. If that was a matter of performance, an upgrade to some newer hardware is likely in the cards. If it was a matter of specific application compatibility, they are unlikely to be switching OS versions until the present one loses support.
If 10 is supported for a nice long time, people likely won't care much. If they find that both their existing hardware and their existing software are being ditched, they will be Less. Happy.
While I certainly don't think that they do, the idea might actually be less absurd than one imagines...
A substantial slice of contemporary games are massive, hard-to-duplicate collections of art assets, sound, script(both the story kind and the in-game-logic kind) sitting on top of an engine licensed from one of the relatively modest number of companies that either specialize in such(eg. Gamebryo) or develop games and also license out their in house engines(ID, Unreal).
With a touch of weaselly, but quite likely legal, 'mere aggregation' separation between content and engine, many games could probably be separated into a proprietary lump, containing the all the art, sound, cinematics, scripts, etc. without which there would be no game, but which would not count as being linked to the OSS portion for licensing purposes.
This would, of course, be contrary to the interests of those outfits that license game engines, and I don't see anybody seriously taking up the charge so long as licensing costs remain reasonably low; but one can easily enough imagine a situation where commonly used chunks of game engine are OSS licenced, as a sort of de-facto consortium arrangement(just as the various sellers of servers and expensive software that runs on servers but needs an OS use Linux); but the game-specific asset blobs remain proprietary and commercially sold, thus changing the actual monetary flows of the game industry not all that much.
Probably nothing. It would affect only warrantless, covert, monitoring by the cops/feds. Overt monitoring that you totally voluntarily agreed to in order to get your driver's license and/or vehicle registration, on the other hand, would be Just Peachy-Keen(tm).
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Unfortunately, while this does preclude the lowest form of hackers, the ones with firmware-level access can still do their thing...
The most famous example are those fuckers at U3. In order to allow the delight of having an autorunning launcher pop up and annoy you every time you pop a flash drive in, they produced a little firmware modification that causes the flash drive to show up as a composite device containing one flash drive, and one CD-ROM. Since autoplay is generally still enabled on CDs, the CD contained the payload that executed the launcher.
They, as a commercial venture, weren't truly bent on malware-style evil; but they provide a good example of how it could be done.
The mass-produced ones used in advertising(I once got one from a fucking Credit. Card. Company. encouraging me to plug in an untrusted device, which then activated the run box and sent me to a free godaddy.com hosted page, presumably unique to that specific ad-campaign, so they could track its efficiency, that then redirected me to their actual page. I couldn't believe it. Incidentally, if you are using any online features of "ZYNC from American Express®", I'd stop immediately, cancel your account, and then firebomb them...) are quite polished. small PCB, 4 USB contacts on one side, epoxy blob, a couple of passives, and a teeny ROM chip(presumably for customization, per customer) on the other. Whole circuit, plus plastic housing, fits inside a USB connector. Very cute.
If anybody fancies some DIY mayhem, a Teensy is cheap, dead-easy to use, and comes with a set of library extensions to the arduino programming environment that allow it to emulate a USB tty, a USB HID keyboard+USB HID mouse(why, yes, Virginia, that does mean that it could, simply by guessing mouse-clicks in a pattern that would hit the "OK" button before the "deny" button, execute a command and then accept the UAC prompt entirely automatically...), a USB MIDI device, if one is feeling more artistic, or a USB keyboard + USB MSC presentation of an attached SD card, perfect for a little of the old exfiltration... It also has the usual digital and analog I/O pins that you'd expect of an atMega dev board, so clever little tricks like only having its evil side come out when a magnet is held near the reed switch hidden inside the bugged mouse, using an onboard mic or other sensors to make sure that the computer's user isn't in the vicinity before doing something evil are all possible. Fun toy.
You can do it on Windows as well, if you fancy; but How would the poor users survive without the wonders of U3???(Incidentally, I fucking hate U3...)
Eh, USB isn't dangerous enough to bother nuking the warranty on your hardware. Any recent corporate IT-box will let you disable USB ports(sometimes even selectively) in the BIOS, and it isn't rocket science to order the OS to ignore some or all USB device classes.
The main problem(outside of environments where "Security" is taken seriously enough that IT has carte blanche to do whatever they deem necessary) is that USB mass storage devices are So. Damn. Useful. In my Admin-hat capacity, I could disable access to USB mass storage devices for everybody in about ten minutes. I would then have just about enough time to slip out and start drinking heavily before the lynch mob assembled...
As for shorting them, USB ports are supposed to gracefully detect overcurrent conditions and modest voltage excursions and cut power to the port rather than die horribly. How well they will actually do so is very much a "your mileage may vary" matter. Some, if a damaged cable or device shorts them, will pop up a polite message, disable the port briefly, and then be ready for another try as soon as the fault clears. Some need a reboot, and I'm sure that some blow a tiny SMT fuse or just burn a trace...
Don't worry, we aren't actually prudes, just really hypocritical about it. We prefer the fiction that broadcast TV is 'family friendly'("Next up on the Fear and Violence channel: 'Photogenic white girl missing, could your family be the next one torn apart ?' and 'Terrifying health hazards of foods and chemicals not manufactured by our sponsors'"); but the good stuff is waiting right behind the counter...
With a tendency toward "less". Graphite is pretty conductive, fairly cheap, and has some useful mechanical properties(albeit often when mixed with other materials); but is a bit more resistive than most metals. Silver, by contrast, while more expensive, is among the most conductive materials commonly available(discounting oddities that are superconductive at atypical temperatures, or materials that have unusual properties in films a few atoms thick, and so on).
If you don't need a particularly conductive trace, a pencil will work just fine. You can even add impromptu carbon-film resistors, if you don't need high thermal dissipation or terribly precise tolerances; but if you want something as close to indistinguishable from the trace that is supposed to be there, silver is a better bet.
Arguably, this technology will actually help in selecting the best bar: Any bar for which facial recognition camera data are not available receives bonus points.
I don't really think of blame as being a limited resource...
I'd recommend trying to sound less angry, it's dangerously close to being ironic under the circumstances. You might also wish to reconsider the conclusion you drew from my narrowly worded assertion:
When you 'prime' somebody with a violent video game stimulus, in the sense of 'prime' that they use in the psych studies that provide us valuable insights about how undergrads who want $10 for beer think, you can observe an uptick, in the short term, of appearances of violence themes in free-play exercises, violence-related words in partial world completion tests, and the like. That is a quite narrow claim: other priming stimuli have much the same effect in their respective directions, and such studies don't tend to have much in the way of longer-term follow up, or even try to.
This does not imply(and nowhere did I state) that violence in video games has any causal link to violent behavior, outside of the specific priming effect for violence-related terms and imagery shortly after the fact. And, given the population-level studies that consistently demonstrate a lack of appalling depravity, such a link seems rather unlikely to me.
I would ask if you ought to be off teabagging corpses in Halo while shouting into the headset; but your adeptness at leaping to conclusions suggests that a platformer may be more your style...
I wonder if Germany is any better equipped to hold the line on that sort of thing because the insipid "it can't happen here" line of argument can be trivially and empirically refuted, and doesn't need to be argued on hypothetical grounds? Accusing somebody of using 'Stasi tactics' is considered nearly Godwin-caliber hyperbole stateside...
It is certainly true that a good many Sims players were quick to discover all the various tricks for making their little virtual dolls miserable and/or killing them, just as most games of SimCity inolved building a city big enough to be worth sending an earthquake through... People even managed to derive amusement from abuse and neglect of Tamaguchi, and those things were about as engaging as an LCD watch. Human nature will out, certainly, it just doesn't seem to hurt the sale of 'casual' and more or less nonviolent games.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of the theory of 'obscenity' as somehow being a nebulously different and unprotected class of activity.
However, speaking empirically about what the court actually does, and what people stand for it doing, things that were invented from whole cloth sufficiently long ago are called "precedent" and taken seriously, and asserting in some vaguely plausible way that a work satisfies the Miller test is, in fact, a successful way to exempt something from First Amendment protections.
I don't like that aspect of reality; but I would argue that it is a reasonably accurate picture of how matters actually work.
That's an absurdly bad patent, and I'm pretty sure that even I have seen assorted prior art. On the plus side, it might help to stem the tide of people tacking 'social' onto every bloody warmed-over .bomb concept in an attempt to sell it to VCs...
Given the close overlap(in both personnel and required skillset) between marketing and campaigning, I'd say that the odds of seeing anything else aren't quite zero, if some idealistic one-termer feels like walking into a bullet; but the odds of passing anything else are nil.
We could get totally crazy and trying 'opt-in' rather than 'opt-out'...
Those are indeed some(not 'the', which carries an exclusive sense) of the problems.
The difference is that, however incompetently, merchants, credit-card processors, etc. are essentially your allies without any legal pressure. They want everybody to have an easy, comfortable, time buying shit online. They don't necessarily care enough or actually manage to transform caring into not sucking; but your interests and theirs are basically aligned.
By contrast, the desire not to be relentlessly tracked, monetized, and bombarded with ads and junk mail all the bloody time is a situation where your interests and the interests of the marketers come into direct conflict. Since the marketers are comparatively few, and comparatively disliked; but have a strong technological advantage, it is logical for the many; but technologically weak, enemies of the of the marketers to attempt to protect themselves by other means.
You don't bother to pass laws that simply affirm interests that are already aligned. You pass laws in order to bring dangerously non-aligned interests into line.
I suspect that, if we can get something that appears to be quite strong; but has critical loopholes, going at the federal level, corporations will be absolutely all over it in order to preclude the possibility that some state might actually grow a spine and pass a real one...
Did you know that Osama Bin Laden also wanted to be on the 'Do Not Track' list?
Much(highly personalized) love,
-American Advertising Federation
This is why "The Sims" almost bankrupted EA before they wised up and released "The Sims: Noire." and why Nintendogs had to be rebooted as "Michael Vick's Nintendogs: First Blood" right?
Given that, until comparatively recently, the population-level western standard of living often didn't include enough dwelling space to necessarily separate the humans from the livestock, much less the existing children from the production of siblings, 'protecting' children from sexual material would have been pretty tricky(though, at the same time, willingness to use fairly coercive means to attempt to control sexual behavior was quite high)...
Aside from the question of how effective the law (almost certainly wouldn't) have been in terms of changing minors' access to the games it applied to(see the complete absence of minors with access to cigarettes, under-21s with access to booze, and people generally with access to schedule 1 drugs...) there seem to be two 'schools' of result, depending on how researchers approach the question:
In individual-scale studies, people often demonstrate that subjects primed with violent video games are somewhat more likely to act-out violent behaviors, answer ambiguous prompts with the more, rather than less, violent possibility, etc.
In population-scale statistical work, of the 'epidemiological' style, the results usually seem to be that video games, presumably by providing an extremely easy and attractive(and generally quite cheap, too) timesink for the idle and troublesome youngish males who handle most of society's grunt-level violence, appear to reduce the levels of violence sufficiently intense to show up in crime statistics.
"Why does the court treat violent images and sexual images so differently?"
To call it the 'court's' double standard seems rather unfair. The justices specifically noted that it was rather odd how American tastes in media, past and present, were highly permissive of violence, even for fairly young children; but much less permissive of sexual material. However, in keeping with their job description, they couldn't really do much about that. 'Miller-test obscenity', while pretty unsatisfactory in a number of respects, is one of the few ways to successfully exempt something from First Amendment protections. For reasons having to do with American culture in the past, continuing into the present, that one doesn't mention violence.
Perhaps more importantly, the court argued that the law was attempting to enforce an (unconstitutional) double standard by imposing special restrictions on violent media that happened to be video games, restrictions that were not imposed on violence in other media: had the law flipped out at violence per se, as people often do about sexual content, regardless of medium(except for stuff old enough to have a gloss of cultural respectability, which is why 120 Days of Sodom is on the shelves and Playboy behind the counter, wrapped in plastic...), it would have at least had a shot at getting some Miller-esque test carved out for it. Since it specifically targeted video games, it was quite arguably an attempt to legally silence one specific class of speakers, rather than a specific perfidious topic(which might not have necessarily succeeded; but would have had a better chance...)
The court, for the most part, was just repeating back to us an observation on our own standards.
(but obvious that does not mean you need a new OS, if the old one is still patched).
I would rather strongly suspect that this will be the bigger factor in customer ire, or lack thereof. Given that SPARC gear has never been cheap, systems of that vintage still in operation were, presumably, purchased because there was some important task to be done that was done best on Solaris and/or SPARC. If that was a matter of performance, an upgrade to some newer hardware is likely in the cards. If it was a matter of specific application compatibility, they are unlikely to be switching OS versions until the present one loses support.
If 10 is supported for a nice long time, people likely won't care much. If they find that both their existing hardware and their existing software are being ditched, they will be Less. Happy.
While I certainly don't think that they do, the idea might actually be less absurd than one imagines...
A substantial slice of contemporary games are massive, hard-to-duplicate collections of art assets, sound, script(both the story kind and the in-game-logic kind) sitting on top of an engine licensed from one of the relatively modest number of companies that either specialize in such(eg. Gamebryo) or develop games and also license out their in house engines(ID, Unreal).
With a touch of weaselly, but quite likely legal, 'mere aggregation' separation between content and engine, many games could probably be separated into a proprietary lump, containing the all the art, sound, cinematics, scripts, etc. without which there would be no game, but which would not count as being linked to the OSS portion for licensing purposes.
This would, of course, be contrary to the interests of those outfits that license game engines, and I don't see anybody seriously taking up the charge so long as licensing costs remain reasonably low; but one can easily enough imagine a situation where commonly used chunks of game engine are OSS licenced, as a sort of de-facto consortium arrangement(just as the various sellers of servers and expensive software that runs on servers but needs an OS use Linux); but the game-specific asset blobs remain proprietary and commercially sold, thus changing the actual monetary flows of the game industry not all that much.
Probably nothing. It would affect only warrantless, covert, monitoring by the cops/feds. Overt monitoring that you totally voluntarily agreed to in order to get your driver's license and/or vehicle registration, on the other hand, would be Just Peachy-Keen(tm).