Any company with the capacity to profitably mine the moon, or asteroids, isn't going to give a shit about the quaint laws of an individual nation state.
Unless its directors don't fancy living in a tiny habitube on an airless rock somewhere...
I'm not saying that taking advantage of this would be a good thing; as long as you keep idiots and/or the malicious from 'accidentally' re-entering giant ferrous payloads into population centers space mining seems like a win; but what your robots are able to do in the Kuiper belt won't mean jack if you are sitting in your mansion somewhere on earth and the local authorities send in the jackboots.
Now, if you can make space mining profitable; odds are excellent that you'll be able to find at least one, probably several, governments who are more than happy to make it legal for you. This seems much more likely. Defying nation-states by force is a bit of a sucker's game, suitable only for the desperate or for really, really, weak nation states. Simply engaging a few specialists with knowledge of their legislative process is way easier, unless the economic foundation of our industry rests in part on its illegality(eg. drug cartels).
If testing for toxicity, especially testing for the subtler stuff that doesn't just kill you outright at a fairly low LD50 but does worrisome things to neurological, endocrine, or other complex system development; gets cheaper, we might be forced to do more of it!
Just imagine the chilling effect of more predictive testing and less chance to deploy first and phase out kicking and screaming if you really, really, have to... This is a sad day for innovation and progress.
What are we going to do? The commies have clearly discovered a way to replicate our advanced 'unreliable an underperforming military contractor' technology and are now working on perfecting it! How can freedom survive this onslaught?
Fingerprints are pretty trivial to forge. Back in elementary school, we used to slack off by covering our fingertip, palm, etc. with Elmer's glue, letting it dry, and then peeling it off. Formed a surprisingly detailed 'negative' of the skin that it dried on. Since the glue was water based, you could then apply a layer of rubber cement to the 'negative' and get a sticky rubber 'positive' that you could wash the glue off.
Obviously, the point of the exercise was not to evade biometrics, it was just something more interesting than what we should be doing, doable with the supplies available; but making relatively precise molds and then fabricating thin patterned membranes that can be applied to mask an individual's real fingerprints isn't rocket surgery.
They still have some forensic value because of how many crimes are unplanned or poorly planned, and how careful you have to be to avoid slipping up; and because if you are being fingerprinted in custody your fake prints are going to have to withstand greater scrutiny; but for a biometric login, which usually happens under limited physical security and only tests against the sample you provide, not the hundreds you leave on every surface throughout the day, they are getting pretty tepid.
DNA is more challenging to fake, especially if they want enough to plausibly plant into what looks like a real biopsy or fluid sample; but has the same "faking is the easy part; not shedding some of the real thing is the hard part" limitations. Even if you sidestep the difficulty of synthesizing by assuming that the person being impersonated is your accomplice, best of luck to you not shedding some of your own DNA.
Given that a $4million unit cost, and availability of functioning models, makes it virtually impossible to piss away money as fast as you can with the F-35, I can't really argue with the notion that it 'gives it a run for its money'; but only if the expected use case is strafing hapless peasants with zero air force and maybe a technical with a couple of 20mm cannons for AA.
There's something a bit...chilling...about a procurement process so out of control that attempting to keep the cost and sophistication of hardware intended for beating down a force 75 years behind the times is a major political battle, and not even a winnable one.
Even if they had good reason to poke at this, or rewrite it from the ground up(because discoveryd was totally cooler and better than old-and-busted mdnsresponder, so why stop there?) what possible excuse is there for "This update breaks VPNs" to not be treated as an absolute showstopper? That's the sort of attitude that just doesn't cut it outside the realm of pitiful consumer crap.
It isn't exactly news, even if it's impolite to say so in as many words; that there are a lot of architectural similarities between the remote management tools used for IT admin work, the 'child safety' remote monitoring stuff; and good old fashioned spyware. The main difference is in who authorizes the deployment(and the license fees).
Now, we have a market where use of this software is mandated, which means that there is going to be a race to the bottom to put the cheapest-possible product that ticks the checkbox into service; because if the reason you are doing something is to say that you did something, why try harder?
And there we are, software that is basically spyware, because that's its job; but totally incompetent, since no handset vendor wants to pay extra for high quality shovelware. Basically a rehash of the various 'support/management' agents that US carriers were sneaking into their handset builds: also basically spyware, because that's implied by the job description; also not wildly competent, since that would cost more.
I think that that's a different method of getting the truth out of someone...And the CIA gets touchy when you step on their turf.
As for what he did, it could actually be something slightly interesting(possibly even beyond mere office politics); but my understanding is that the FBI really does get this worked up about polygraphs. It's a weird sort of article of faith: you must both believe that they are a useful, valid, empirical technique to detecting falsehoods(despite any evidence to the contrary); but also believe that(despite your belief in its robustness) its effectiveness is under existential threat whenever somebody 'tries to beat it'. So it's robust, effective, reliable; but only as long as nobody looks too closely.
Luckily, continued employment does not require reconciling those two positions; merely allowing them to coexist in a state of simple faith is sufficient.
Why is everyone making such a big fuss about this? In accordance with established appeals procedure we have already put out an RFP for a comically large wooden balance scale and duck. Once the bid is complete, the agent's weight will be compared with that of the duck and the truth will be established by incontrovertible scientific means. There is no need for alarm.
Plus, aren't all those customers now stuck with cars that are either not street legal(I know that pre-emissions-standards vehicles were grandfathered; but these aren't) or will absolutely suck once they get reflashed so that the 'clean' ECU parameters run all the time, rather than just during testing(I'm assuming that something about the test-mode parameters was lousy, or they would have had no incentive to try this little trick)?
That seems like the sort of thing that might make them justifiably unhappy, and in a way with a relatively large, and relatively easily quantified, dollar value attached.
It's too bad that 'piercing the veil' appears to be some kind of taboo in the US.
Unless Volkswagen has a wildly dysfunctional development process, on a scale that would doom most attempts at engineering, building, testing, and shipping ECU firmware with test detection and cheating algorithms isn't exactly something that a single bad actor could plausibly pull off on his own initiative.
Unless the situation is somehow far more innocent than reports so far suggest; there should be a decent number of people who had knowledge and/or direct involvement in this scheme; and at least in little people land, that's when the 'conspiracy' charges start popping out of the woodwork and stacking with the charges for whatever it is you actually did.
Some of those involved may have been powerless peons afraid of being fired; or involved in a suitably compartmentalized manner(eg. if some guy wrote the ECU parameters for the cheating behavior, under the belief that he was writing the ECU parameters for the vehicle); so not everyone who touched the project is necessarily guilty; but it is very hard to imagine that there aren't a number of blatantly guilty people involved here.
Unless there is some mitigating factor that none of the reports on this story have so far mentioned; Volkswagen seems to be 100% deserving of an absolutely brutal smackdown.
Building ECU code specifically to deliver 'correct' results under test; and totally different results elsewhere, is going to be difficult to explain as an 'accident'; and also the sort of thing that it'd be pretty tricky for a single rogue actor to pull off without the knowledge, and probably the cooperation, of others on the design team and in management.
I realize that it is considered unspeakably barbaric to pierce the corporate veil and cruelly touch the people who actually made the decisions; but under any non-corporate circumstance I'd have to imagine that the prosecution would have a stack of conspiracy charges so thick that it has to be delivered by two burly paralegals, in addition to charges related to the violations themselves; and all the possible civil litigation on the part of the misled customers.
Obviously, the overriding concern here is Mattel's desire to inaugurate an exciting new 'feature' without stirring up any bad PR, justified or otherwise. Focus-grouped banality and the occasional tactful evasion are to be expected.
More generally, my impression is that people are working on the strategy dictated by the fact that "you can't fix stupid; but you can discourage smart". Outside of some truly exceptional talents who are effectively impossible to discourage, you have a lot of competent-to-genuinely-talented people whose achievements will require sustained effort and application, which they are only likely to put in(especially if some other path of lesser resistance is available) under the belief that they can, in fact, do it.
Discouraging such people means wasting a lot of capability. Encouraging people who really aren't up to it, by contrast, may lead to some disappointment in weeder classes; but isn't particularly harmful unless they make it into management.
You would find me notably unsympathetic to the assorted nonsense about every person being a unique special flower; and nobody being dumb, just 'differently able'; but it is good if we can encourage people to fail at the actual limits of their ability, and avoid having them stagnate below those limits. If the price of that is feeding a few platitudes to people who will learn that we didn't really mean them, so it goes.
Obviously, now that the project has massively failed, nothing justifies it. Public or private, nobody ever wants to be stuck explaining or justifying a plan that went so badly that it delivered none of the benefits that it was supposed to. About the best possible justification is that the failure was not one that could reasonably have been predicted; and it gets worse from there.
The question, though, is whether the project was always folly(either in that its objectives weren't worth the price even if they had been fulfilled; or that its estimates of success were optimistic to the point of dishonesty, or some combination of the above); or whether the project was justified; but somebody screwed up project management pretty impressively and left us with an unjustifiable result.
I have no interest in defending this particular project, either in original concept or in execution, just in keeping certain important distinctions in mind. Public, private, personal, whatever; some plans are born stupid and attempting to execute them is a failure in itself. Some plans are risky; but have large potential upsides as well as large potential downsides, whether or not these are a good fit for you depends on your situation. Some plans are good, or at least adequate, and should be pretty uneventful; here implementation failures are the major villain.
Given that TFA provides a reasonably sparse account of what the plan was; and my interest in obscure UK infrastructure projects is limited, I'm not terribly interested in trying to track down whether or not this plan was dumb from the start; just noting that all failures look dumb in hindsight; but only some failures look dumb in foresight.
It certainly sounds like they fucked this project up pretty vigorously(if nothing else, even if it is amazingly difficult for some reason, failing to identify that ahead of time is bad); but there is one important aspect you fail to note:
The project's objective was to provide coverage to areas that private operators were not providing coverage to. Exactly what mixture of 'potential customers too poor'/'topography ensures lousy RF propagation'/'planning permission, rights of way, and fights with the neighbors will be a march through hell' caused private operators to ignore these areas is unknown, at least from this article; but for one reason or another providing cell coverage was an area of utter disinterest and/or inability for the private sector in these areas.
That's a pretty major distinction: walking in on something that the private sector is doing vigorously and competently and deciding that we need a Ministry of Whatever is folly. Coming into a situation that the private sector is unable or unwilling to address and doing something about it is what 'the public sector' is all about.
There is room for debate about what counts as 'unable or unwilling', and when we should do something vs. just let them suck it up; but 'do what the private sector won't or can't' is essentially the mission statement of even libertarian governments(they just interpret that as a pretty small number of things).
I admit that I'm not an advanced First Amendmentologist; but haven't speech acts (whether for highflown theoretical reasons or just in practice) tended to enjoy less protection as they get closer to being things that are criminalized for other reasons; that just happen to be done by means of speech in this particular instance?
If, say, I cash a bad check, that check is as much a speech act as the declaration of independence is(yes, both are actually writings; but bear with me); but I generally don't get to argue that I was just following the noble tradition of Thomas Paine and authoring an inflammatory but vital document. Nobody denies that I used written words to do it; but the act was just fraud.
Same goes for asking a hitman to whack somebody for me, doing a bit of extortion, or any other crime that incidentally requires some interpersonal communication; but is largely not about that.
In the case of genetics, the whole point of genes(when functioning within an organism, or packaged for injection as they are in a virus) is to be converted from 'speech' to some sort of biological effect.
Personally, I'm relatively unsympathetic to much of the opposition to 'designer babies' and the terrifying 'frankenfood' and whatnot; but it seems like a pretty easy argument that, for any genetic engineering actually intended to have results(you can synthesize gene sequences and do X-ray crystallography to your heart's content, as far as I'm concerned) the overwhelmingly obvious parallel is those speech acts that are more or less wholly just the convenient way to achieve a specific action(whether legal or not), not the political positions, expressions of opinion, commentary, satire, etc. that are generally protected.
Making a genetic change is essentially giving an order for some sort of protein synthesis(biologists, please don't kill me, horrible simplification there). It's far more convenient than synthesizing the proteins yourself and painstakingly injecting them into every cell in an organism, continually, which is why you do it that way; but it's a 'speech' act employed just because it's the best way to get certain direct consequences, not a mere expression.
I don't see why, say, genetically engineering a baby to express some protein would be more (or less) legal than giving verbal instructions to my assistant to inject a baby with the same protein; or why producing a smallpox stockpile by 'speaking' the appropriate DNA sequence and packaging it up would be legal; but achieving the same end by locating and de-icing a smallpox patient who froze into the permafrost(since that wouldn't be a speech act) would be illegal.
I wish to emphasize that none of this means that I'm against genetic engineering, including some of the stuff usually deemed 'controversial'; I just find the idea that you'd be able to do more things legally because DNA is speech, man! seems severely weak, at best. Some of it will be legal because there is no cogent reason for banning it, some of it will be banned for one reason or another; but I'm not seeing the 'speech' argument here.
"Dear Consumers, please enjoy the advertised capabilities of our product; and be sure to consider them when making a comparison with our competitors; but don't expect any sort of support for this exhortation if it might cost us money. Thanks, Sony."
Just because advertisers have always been depraved abhuman shitweasels, why should we tolerate them being so now?
If anything, the fact that a given sector has always been rotten seems like a better argument for extirpating it than for putting up with it.
Incidentally, if you want to play with some, they can be made at home more easily than one would expect: Getting a nice big one, as in the video you link to, and getting reliable results, is tricky without a proper glassworking apparatus; but you can make small ones with a basic hardware store blowtorch and some cheap 'lampworking' glass rods(not borosilicate, that has a higher melting point and deals with thermal stress better, typically a virtue but not for this application); I don't have a specific recommended vendor but 'lampwork rod' should bring up numerous options.
You pretty much just blowtorch the end of the rod until it melts and drips into a bucket of water. In my tests, either my technique or my materials sucked enough that I couldn't get above ~10% success rate; but a pound or so of lampwork rod is cheap, so it didn't matter too much. And it is weird to interact with a piece of glass that you can't break with a sledgehammer; but which tears itself apart in the blink of an eye if you snip its tail. Wear your damn safety goggles; but good clean fun.
I don't know how reconstructable these things will be(I wouldn't underestimate patience, or machine vision, when reassembling lots of broken bits; but if the destruction of the circuit disrupts floating gates or other such delicate structures used for semiconductor data storage there may be nothing to read even if you rebuild the entire thing); but I'd be very curious to see how they propose to safeguard the circuitry that is used to initiate destruction.
The demo involved resistive heating sufficient to mechanically stress the glass into failure. That sounds exactly like the sort of mechanism where attacking the chip's supply of power(either undervolting it, putting it on a tightly limited constant-current supply, or both) might allow you to keep the chip's logic functions operational; but keep the heater from being able to destroy the glass. Depending on the sensitivity of the circuit layer, one could also slowly and evenly heat the entire package, to increase the power required to induce enough localized thermal expansion to cause catastrophic cracking.
It reminds me of the old fight between satellite and cable 'conditional access' system manufacturers and pirates: you had the really early conditional access cards with separate contacts for the higher voltages needed to reprogram the EEPROM; so people covered those with tape to make the cards read only. Then they moved to onboard charge pumps, and people moved to sabotaging those without damaging the read circuitry. And so forth.
This seems like a similar situation. I don't doubt the ability of stressed glass to shatter violently(semi-related; but fun, "Prince Rupert Drops" are a great demonstration of this); but if you want to turn that into a security mechanism, you need to protect the glass-shatterer componenents, and the sensors that trigger them, from sabotage or deception for the mechanism to be useful in practice. It is an advance over a normal silicon wafer with a small explosive charge, and probably a lot more legal for consumer goods; but you still need to know when to shatter the glass, and make sure that the attacker can't remove your ability to do so without triggering the failsafe.
That's the sort of problem that, while very true, is exactly where some additional competence, access to proper tools, etc. really separates the professional from the hobbyist. The glass backs might be a lost cause(if memory serves, I think even Apple has to shape them before the final toughening process; because trying to do so afterwards either does nothing or destroys the glass); but you can make more room in a phone if you can fabricate a replacement back that is slightly larger in the appropriate places.
For most purposes(especially with company-issue gear) just disabling it in software is probably good enough; but if you are running an operation where you insist that isn't true; why would you trust my 'cover' or 'paint' to not be an IR bandpass material. So far as humans are concerned it is opaque; but a silicon sensor will just lose a bit of sensitivity. Not wildly plausible; but CYA is a powerful force in some areas.
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Any company with the capacity to profitably mine the moon, or asteroids, isn't going to give a shit about the quaint laws of an individual nation state.
Unless its directors don't fancy living in a tiny habitube on an airless rock somewhere...
I'm not saying that taking advantage of this would be a good thing; as long as you keep idiots and/or the malicious from 'accidentally' re-entering giant ferrous payloads into population centers space mining seems like a win; but what your robots are able to do in the Kuiper belt won't mean jack if you are sitting in your mansion somewhere on earth and the local authorities send in the jackboots.
Now, if you can make space mining profitable; odds are excellent that you'll be able to find at least one, probably several, governments who are more than happy to make it legal for you. This seems much more likely. Defying nation-states by force is a bit of a sucker's game, suitable only for the desperate or for really, really, weak nation states. Simply engaging a few specialists with knowledge of their legislative process is way easier, unless the economic foundation of our industry rests in part on its illegality(eg. drug cartels).
If testing for toxicity, especially testing for the subtler stuff that doesn't just kill you outright at a fairly low LD50 but does worrisome things to neurological, endocrine, or other complex system development; gets cheaper, we might be forced to do more of it!
Just imagine the chilling effect of more predictive testing and less chance to deploy first and phase out kicking and screaming if you really, really, have to... This is a sad day for innovation and progress.
What are we going to do? The commies have clearly discovered a way to replicate our advanced 'unreliable an underperforming military contractor' technology and are now working on perfecting it! How can freedom survive this onslaught?
Fingerprints are pretty trivial to forge. Back in elementary school, we used to slack off by covering our fingertip, palm, etc. with Elmer's glue, letting it dry, and then peeling it off. Formed a surprisingly detailed 'negative' of the skin that it dried on. Since the glue was water based, you could then apply a layer of rubber cement to the 'negative' and get a sticky rubber 'positive' that you could wash the glue off.
Obviously, the point of the exercise was not to evade biometrics, it was just something more interesting than what we should be doing, doable with the supplies available; but making relatively precise molds and then fabricating thin patterned membranes that can be applied to mask an individual's real fingerprints isn't rocket surgery.
They still have some forensic value because of how many crimes are unplanned or poorly planned, and how careful you have to be to avoid slipping up; and because if you are being fingerprinted in custody your fake prints are going to have to withstand greater scrutiny; but for a biometric login, which usually happens under limited physical security and only tests against the sample you provide, not the hundreds you leave on every surface throughout the day, they are getting pretty tepid.
DNA is more challenging to fake, especially if they want enough to plausibly plant into what looks like a real biopsy or fluid sample; but has the same "faking is the easy part; not shedding some of the real thing is the hard part" limitations. Even if you sidestep the difficulty of synthesizing by assuming that the person being impersonated is your accomplice, best of luck to you not shedding some of your own DNA.
I demand that we vigorously close the barn door by implementing a robust biometric authentication infrastructure to prevent this from happening again!
Given that a $4million unit cost, and availability of functioning models, makes it virtually impossible to piss away money as fast as you can with the F-35, I can't really argue with the notion that it 'gives it a run for its money'; but only if the expected use case is strafing hapless peasants with zero air force and maybe a technical with a couple of 20mm cannons for AA.
There's something a bit...chilling...about a procurement process so out of control that attempting to keep the cost and sophistication of hardware intended for beating down a force 75 years behind the times is a major political battle, and not even a winnable one.
Even if they had good reason to poke at this, or rewrite it from the ground up(because discoveryd was totally cooler and better than old-and-busted mdnsresponder, so why stop there?) what possible excuse is there for "This update breaks VPNs" to not be treated as an absolute showstopper? That's the sort of attitude that just doesn't cut it outside the realm of pitiful consumer crap.
It isn't exactly news, even if it's impolite to say so in as many words; that there are a lot of architectural similarities between the remote management tools used for IT admin work, the 'child safety' remote monitoring stuff; and good old fashioned spyware. The main difference is in who authorizes the deployment(and the license fees).
Now, we have a market where use of this software is mandated, which means that there is going to be a race to the bottom to put the cheapest-possible product that ticks the checkbox into service; because if the reason you are doing something is to say that you did something, why try harder?
And there we are, software that is basically spyware, because that's its job; but totally incompetent, since no handset vendor wants to pay extra for high quality shovelware. Basically a rehash of the various 'support/management' agents that US carriers were sneaking into their handset builds: also basically spyware, because that's implied by the job description; also not wildly competent, since that would cost more.
I think that that's a different method of getting the truth out of someone...And the CIA gets touchy when you step on their turf.
As for what he did, it could actually be something slightly interesting(possibly even beyond mere office politics); but my understanding is that the FBI really does get this worked up about polygraphs. It's a weird sort of article of faith: you must both believe that they are a useful, valid, empirical technique to detecting falsehoods(despite any evidence to the contrary); but also believe that(despite your belief in its robustness) its effectiveness is under existential threat whenever somebody 'tries to beat it'. So it's robust, effective, reliable; but only as long as nobody looks too closely.
Luckily, continued employment does not require reconciling those two positions; merely allowing them to coexist in a state of simple faith is sufficient.
Why is everyone making such a big fuss about this? In accordance with established appeals procedure we have already put out an RFP for a comically large wooden balance scale and duck. Once the bid is complete, the agent's weight will be compared with that of the duck and the truth will be established by incontrovertible scientific means. There is no need for alarm.
Plus, aren't all those customers now stuck with cars that are either not street legal(I know that pre-emissions-standards vehicles were grandfathered; but these aren't) or will absolutely suck once they get reflashed so that the 'clean' ECU parameters run all the time, rather than just during testing(I'm assuming that something about the test-mode parameters was lousy, or they would have had no incentive to try this little trick)?
That seems like the sort of thing that might make them justifiably unhappy, and in a way with a relatively large, and relatively easily quantified, dollar value attached.
It's too bad that 'piercing the veil' appears to be some kind of taboo in the US.
Unless Volkswagen has a wildly dysfunctional development process, on a scale that would doom most attempts at engineering, building, testing, and shipping ECU firmware with test detection and cheating algorithms isn't exactly something that a single bad actor could plausibly pull off on his own initiative.
Unless the situation is somehow far more innocent than reports so far suggest; there should be a decent number of people who had knowledge and/or direct involvement in this scheme; and at least in little people land, that's when the 'conspiracy' charges start popping out of the woodwork and stacking with the charges for whatever it is you actually did.
Some of those involved may have been powerless peons afraid of being fired; or involved in a suitably compartmentalized manner(eg. if some guy wrote the ECU parameters for the cheating behavior, under the belief that he was writing the ECU parameters for the vehicle); so not everyone who touched the project is necessarily guilty; but it is very hard to imagine that there aren't a number of blatantly guilty people involved here.
Unless there is some mitigating factor that none of the reports on this story have so far mentioned; Volkswagen seems to be 100% deserving of an absolutely brutal smackdown.
Building ECU code specifically to deliver 'correct' results under test; and totally different results elsewhere, is going to be difficult to explain as an 'accident'; and also the sort of thing that it'd be pretty tricky for a single rogue actor to pull off without the knowledge, and probably the cooperation, of others on the design team and in management.
I realize that it is considered unspeakably barbaric to pierce the corporate veil and cruelly touch the people who actually made the decisions; but under any non-corporate circumstance I'd have to imagine that the prosecution would have a stack of conspiracy charges so thick that it has to be delivered by two burly paralegals, in addition to charges related to the violations themselves; and all the possible civil litigation on the part of the misled customers.
I, for one, certainly can't imagine why having data might be useful when attempting to make decisions about what to do....
Obviously, the overriding concern here is Mattel's desire to inaugurate an exciting new 'feature' without stirring up any bad PR, justified or otherwise. Focus-grouped banality and the occasional tactful evasion are to be expected.
More generally, my impression is that people are working on the strategy dictated by the fact that "you can't fix stupid; but you can discourage smart". Outside of some truly exceptional talents who are effectively impossible to discourage, you have a lot of competent-to-genuinely-talented people whose achievements will require sustained effort and application, which they are only likely to put in(especially if some other path of lesser resistance is available) under the belief that they can, in fact, do it.
Discouraging such people means wasting a lot of capability. Encouraging people who really aren't up to it, by contrast, may lead to some disappointment in weeder classes; but isn't particularly harmful unless they make it into management.
You would find me notably unsympathetic to the assorted nonsense about every person being a unique special flower; and nobody being dumb, just 'differently able'; but it is good if we can encourage people to fail at the actual limits of their ability, and avoid having them stagnate below those limits. If the price of that is feeding a few platitudes to people who will learn that we didn't really mean them, so it goes.
Obviously, now that the project has massively failed, nothing justifies it. Public or private, nobody ever wants to be stuck explaining or justifying a plan that went so badly that it delivered none of the benefits that it was supposed to. About the best possible justification is that the failure was not one that could reasonably have been predicted; and it gets worse from there.
The question, though, is whether the project was always folly(either in that its objectives weren't worth the price even if they had been fulfilled; or that its estimates of success were optimistic to the point of dishonesty, or some combination of the above); or whether the project was justified; but somebody screwed up project management pretty impressively and left us with an unjustifiable result.
I have no interest in defending this particular project, either in original concept or in execution, just in keeping certain important distinctions in mind. Public, private, personal, whatever; some plans are born stupid and attempting to execute them is a failure in itself. Some plans are risky; but have large potential upsides as well as large potential downsides, whether or not these are a good fit for you depends on your situation. Some plans are good, or at least adequate, and should be pretty uneventful; here implementation failures are the major villain.
Given that TFA provides a reasonably sparse account of what the plan was; and my interest in obscure UK infrastructure projects is limited, I'm not terribly interested in trying to track down whether or not this plan was dumb from the start; just noting that all failures look dumb in hindsight; but only some failures look dumb in foresight.
It certainly sounds like they fucked this project up pretty vigorously(if nothing else, even if it is amazingly difficult for some reason, failing to identify that ahead of time is bad); but there is one important aspect you fail to note: The project's objective was to provide coverage to areas that private operators were not providing coverage to. Exactly what mixture of 'potential customers too poor'/'topography ensures lousy RF propagation'/'planning permission, rights of way, and fights with the neighbors will be a march through hell' caused private operators to ignore these areas is unknown, at least from this article; but for one reason or another providing cell coverage was an area of utter disinterest and/or inability for the private sector in these areas.
That's a pretty major distinction: walking in on something that the private sector is doing vigorously and competently and deciding that we need a Ministry of Whatever is folly. Coming into a situation that the private sector is unable or unwilling to address and doing something about it is what 'the public sector' is all about.
There is room for debate about what counts as 'unable or unwilling', and when we should do something vs. just let them suck it up; but 'do what the private sector won't or can't' is essentially the mission statement of even libertarian governments(they just interpret that as a pretty small number of things).
I admit that I'm not an advanced First Amendmentologist; but haven't speech acts (whether for highflown theoretical reasons or just in practice) tended to enjoy less protection as they get closer to being things that are criminalized for other reasons; that just happen to be done by means of speech in this particular instance?
If, say, I cash a bad check, that check is as much a speech act as the declaration of independence is(yes, both are actually writings; but bear with me); but I generally don't get to argue that I was just following the noble tradition of Thomas Paine and authoring an inflammatory but vital document. Nobody denies that I used written words to do it; but the act was just fraud.
Same goes for asking a hitman to whack somebody for me, doing a bit of extortion, or any other crime that incidentally requires some interpersonal communication; but is largely not about that.
In the case of genetics, the whole point of genes(when functioning within an organism, or packaged for injection as they are in a virus) is to be converted from 'speech' to some sort of biological effect.
Personally, I'm relatively unsympathetic to much of the opposition to 'designer babies' and the terrifying 'frankenfood' and whatnot; but it seems like a pretty easy argument that, for any genetic engineering actually intended to have results(you can synthesize gene sequences and do X-ray crystallography to your heart's content, as far as I'm concerned) the overwhelmingly obvious parallel is those speech acts that are more or less wholly just the convenient way to achieve a specific action(whether legal or not), not the political positions, expressions of opinion, commentary, satire, etc. that are generally protected.
Making a genetic change is essentially giving an order for some sort of protein synthesis(biologists, please don't kill me, horrible simplification there). It's far more convenient than synthesizing the proteins yourself and painstakingly injecting them into every cell in an organism, continually, which is why you do it that way; but it's a 'speech' act employed just because it's the best way to get certain direct consequences, not a mere expression.
I don't see why, say, genetically engineering a baby to express some protein would be more (or less) legal than giving verbal instructions to my assistant to inject a baby with the same protein; or why producing a smallpox stockpile by 'speaking' the appropriate DNA sequence and packaging it up would be legal; but achieving the same end by locating and de-icing a smallpox patient who froze into the permafrost(since that wouldn't be a speech act) would be illegal.
I wish to emphasize that none of this means that I'm against genetic engineering, including some of the stuff usually deemed 'controversial'; I just find the idea that you'd be able to do more things legally because DNA is speech, man! seems severely weak, at best. Some of it will be legal because there is no cogent reason for banning it, some of it will be banned for one reason or another; but I'm not seeing the 'speech' argument here.
"Dear Consumers, please enjoy the advertised capabilities of our product; and be sure to consider them when making a comparison with our competitors; but don't expect any sort of support for this exhortation if it might cost us money. Thanks, Sony."
Just because advertisers have always been depraved abhuman shitweasels, why should we tolerate them being so now? If anything, the fact that a given sector has always been rotten seems like a better argument for extirpating it than for putting up with it.
Incidentally, if you want to play with some, they can be made at home more easily than one would expect: Getting a nice big one, as in the video you link to, and getting reliable results, is tricky without a proper glassworking apparatus; but you can make small ones with a basic hardware store blowtorch and some cheap 'lampworking' glass rods(not borosilicate, that has a higher melting point and deals with thermal stress better, typically a virtue but not for this application); I don't have a specific recommended vendor but 'lampwork rod' should bring up numerous options.
You pretty much just blowtorch the end of the rod until it melts and drips into a bucket of water. In my tests, either my technique or my materials sucked enough that I couldn't get above ~10% success rate; but a pound or so of lampwork rod is cheap, so it didn't matter too much. And it is weird to interact with a piece of glass that you can't break with a sledgehammer; but which tears itself apart in the blink of an eye if you snip its tail. Wear your damn safety goggles; but good clean fun.
I don't know how reconstructable these things will be(I wouldn't underestimate patience, or machine vision, when reassembling lots of broken bits; but if the destruction of the circuit disrupts floating gates or other such delicate structures used for semiconductor data storage there may be nothing to read even if you rebuild the entire thing); but I'd be very curious to see how they propose to safeguard the circuitry that is used to initiate destruction.
The demo involved resistive heating sufficient to mechanically stress the glass into failure. That sounds exactly like the sort of mechanism where attacking the chip's supply of power(either undervolting it, putting it on a tightly limited constant-current supply, or both) might allow you to keep the chip's logic functions operational; but keep the heater from being able to destroy the glass. Depending on the sensitivity of the circuit layer, one could also slowly and evenly heat the entire package, to increase the power required to induce enough localized thermal expansion to cause catastrophic cracking.
It reminds me of the old fight between satellite and cable 'conditional access' system manufacturers and pirates: you had the really early conditional access cards with separate contacts for the higher voltages needed to reprogram the EEPROM; so people covered those with tape to make the cards read only. Then they moved to onboard charge pumps, and people moved to sabotaging those without damaging the read circuitry. And so forth.
This seems like a similar situation. I don't doubt the ability of stressed glass to shatter violently(semi-related; but fun, "Prince Rupert Drops" are a great demonstration of this); but if you want to turn that into a security mechanism, you need to protect the glass-shatterer componenents, and the sensors that trigger them, from sabotage or deception for the mechanism to be useful in practice. It is an advance over a normal silicon wafer with a small explosive charge, and probably a lot more legal for consumer goods; but you still need to know when to shatter the glass, and make sure that the attacker can't remove your ability to do so without triggering the failsafe.
Coming soon to a toner cartridge near you?
That's the sort of problem that, while very true, is exactly where some additional competence, access to proper tools, etc. really separates the professional from the hobbyist. The glass backs might be a lost cause(if memory serves, I think even Apple has to shape them before the final toughening process; because trying to do so afterwards either does nothing or destroys the glass); but you can make more room in a phone if you can fabricate a replacement back that is slightly larger in the appropriate places.
For most purposes(especially with company-issue gear) just disabling it in software is probably good enough; but if you are running an operation where you insist that isn't true; why would you trust my 'cover' or 'paint' to not be an IR bandpass material. So far as humans are concerned it is opaque; but a silicon sensor will just lose a bit of sensitivity. Not wildly plausible; but CYA is a powerful force in some areas.